Fall Detection Works

Well I always wondered how well the Apple Watch Fall Detection feature worked, but I didn’t necessarily plan to test it out myself. Apple tweaked the algorithms in WatchOS last year to better sense falls resulting from cycling accidents, and they definitely work: Riding to a meeting on Tuesday I swerved to avoid speeding drivers, hit a raised kerb at the wrong angle, and launched myself over the handlebars. Thankfully I landed on the pavement and not in traffic, but I bounced hard, and my bike landed on top of me.

When I got up I noticed my Watch was making a loud noise and tapping for my attention. “It looks like you’ve taken a hard fall. Are you OK?” was the onscreen message, and I had to tap “I’m OK” to cancel the alarm. Of course if I hadn’t then the Watch would have presumably placed a call to emergency services and sent my GPS location. I’m glad that wasn’t necessary (though I’m still pretty bruised up a few days later), and I’m also glad for the considerate motorist who stopped her car to check on me.

So yeah, Fall Detection works, but I’m hoping I won’t need it again anytime soon.

Post-Pandemic Computing

So I wrote about how the iPad took over as my primary computing platform, up until 2020 and the first UK COVID lockdown. Let’s follow up a bit.

Obviously 2020 changed lots of things for pretty much everybody, and I was hugely fortunate in that none of my close family or friends was seriously harmed by the virus and its immediate consequences. The inconveniences of lockdown and semi-isolation pale in comparison to the real human costs that so many have endured, but nevertheless significantly altered my relationship to work, my routines, and ultimately the workflows and processes that make up my days.

Initially, as my regular teaching and meetings all moved online, I used my iPad Pro (an older 10.5” second-generation model that was then still my daily driver) for Teams, Zoom, and FaceTime meeting, but quickly came up against the limitations of both the platform (limited screen space and the oft-critiqued multitasking UI of iPadOS), and of the poorly-implemented client software (looking at you in particular Microsoft Teams) that makes managing multiple spaces and large meetings inconvenient. I’d sometimes have to use my iPhone and iPad side-by-side to look something up and maintain visibility of a chat space or call, and so the retina MacBook Pro began to make more sense again. It wasn’t long until I’d cleaned out the cruft from the old machine, reinstalled (a non-beta version of) MacOS, and set it up with the software I needed to at least get through the day in a slightly less chaotic fashion.

As remote consultancy work ramped up during 2020, and I was spending more time in collaborative design workspaces, the Mac got stretched even further. If you’ve spent any amount of time using browser-based technologies like Figma you’ll know what a resource hog they can be, inefficient with application memory and unforgiving of non-desktop browsers. Figma doesn’t even pretend to support the iPad with a native app, and third party ones are just running a fairly flaky browser-based experience anyway. It’s also pretty expansive in how it uses the display, so even a (13”) notebook gets pokey. Try hosting a Teams call, driving a shared Figma demo, and taking notes at the same time and you’ll see what I mean.

Enter Apple Silicon. I knew—as much as any non-insider did—that this was coming, and was already interested. Anything that could bring some of Apple’s ARM-based advantages to the Mac was going to be welcome. The MBP fans were being driven to helicopter-levels of noise by Teams (thanks again Microsoft), and battery life was down to almost nothing. The 2020 Intel MacBook Air that my daughter had ordered for university wasn’t much better to be honest (though faster, much prettier, and not falling apart).

When the M1 MacBook Air was announced it took me all of 10 minutes to get my order in, and while I was waiting for it to arrive I shopped around for an external display, eventually deciding that I might as well try the biggest I could reasonably imagine that worked at Mac-like resolution. (In practice it turned out to be a bit too large for me, but more on that another time.)

The difference the M1 MacBook Air made to my day-to-day work can’t be overstated. From a noisy, hot, battery-chugging slowcoach, to perhaps the fastest Mac I’d ever used for general purposes with an all-day battery life, fanless operation, and Thunderbolt ports. With a big display and external keyboard and trackpad attached I could store the MacBook vertically behind the monitor and never feel like I was on anything less than a speedy desktop Mac.

And the iPad? During lockdown and the occasional period of self-isolation I had very few opportunities to take it out, and little cause to use it for heavy lifting tasks, so it became much more of a sofa and breakfast table machine, sometimes useful for keeping secondary tasks off my desktop or taking something to a (very) occasional meeting.

There’s more to come in this story of course, but the Mac is now once again very much at the centre of my working life. Stay tuned for how the iPad started to adapt itself to other opportunities as the world began to open up again, and how I’m preparing to use the Mac for even more as the next year progresses.

My Most Delightful iPad

A postscript: While I still have more iPads than is reasonable, the one I use most is a 5th generation iPad Mini, bought second-hand (and perfect) last year from CeX here in the UK. The reason I use it so much? This baby here. Sadly the Brydge keyboard for iPad Mini seems to be end-of-life, and there’s no sign of one for the new Mini. If they decided to make that I’d trade up in a heartbeat.

While I had an iPad Mini when they first launched, the combination of a faster processor, the tiny size, and the near-perfect Brydge keyboard make this a phenomenal machine for email, writing, reading, presenting, and web browsing on-the-go. It fits perfectly on a cafe table alongside an espresso or a small beer, and now goes everywhere with me.

Back to The Mac

While I write this post on my smallest, most delightful iPad, I’m driven to reflect on how over the last couple of years the Mac has taken it’s old place again as a primary computing platform for me, and to catalogue a few of the reasons for that.

Between 1999 and 2011 I’d hardly ever be without a portable Mac. Beginning with the wonderful PowerBook G3 “Lombard” and it’s delicious mix of old (SCSI port!) and new (dual USB) I’d hauled various PowerBooks (and later MacBooks) halfway around the world. Fearing to leave a laptop in a hotel safe I’d usually keep it with me the whole time, whether working or not, and writing many, many blog posts from bars in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok.

By the time the iPad launched in 2010 I was using the first-generation MacBook Air for its extreme portability, and letting a 27” iMac take up the heavier lifting at home. The Air’s obvious limitations—a slow Intel processor, low-capacity storage, and a high price—were all bearable in order to reduce the weight of my daily carry, especially when travelling with a DSLR and a few lenses in tow. I’d begun to optimise my workflows for the less-powerful mobile computer, and in certain cases to move them to the home iMac entirely.

It quite quickly became clear that I could be almost as productive on the iPad as I could on the original MacBook Air, and gain another massive leap forward in reducing the size of my on-the-go technology. The all-day battery life of the iPad, along with instant wake-up and the lighter weight of iOS were, again, big wins that easily offset the need to slim-down and rethink workflows.

In the years that followed, as subsequent iPads gained performance, display, and portability improvements, and as software developed to extend the iPad’s functionality (mainly third-party, but also some meaningful updates for iCloud, Notes, Keynote, and Safari), I found myself needing the Mac less and less. I would head to my desk (and maybe a workplace iMac) when I needed to do the occasional bit of design or heavy spreadsheet work, or to prepare a long presentation, but even these things started to migrate to my iPad. Hardware keyboard support meant I could carry an Apple Magic Keyboard alongside my iPad in a small bag and regain screen real estate from the software keyboard; a Lightning to HDMI adapter (and a VGA one, just in case) made my work-supplied retina MacBook Pro redundant for day-to-day teaching, and I started making even long international trips with only the iPad.

This is essentially where I was at the beginning of 2020: iPad for all my main work; iPhone for quick email triage, messaging, and notes; ageing home iMac retired and waiting for old files to be archived; and the very occasional need to boot the MacBook Pro to deliver some design files to a printing company in person. And then everything started to change.

How the pandemic, the subsequent change in my working practices, and Apple’s renewed focus on the Mac flipped all this around will be the focus of my next post here. Stay tuned.

And You Are

Well, I did a podcast thing with Greg Morris, and some of you may even have listened to it already—if not I highly recommend you add his fortnightly show to your listening software of choice. It’s just five shows in and I’m already looking forward to each one and the eclectic range of guests he’s talking to.

It was a delight to be asked and even more fun recording the show. Amongst his many other talents, Greg is a great host and the breadth of his interests makes it easy to talk about pretty much anything: We managed to cover Apple, UX, Design, Education, collecting things, the early days of the web, and a few other things.

Coincidentally, I’ve been surprised recently by the number of people who’ve quizzed me enthusiastically about those years in the 1990s when I was one of a group of people evangelising the emerging online spaces, and helping to connect artists, enterprises, and regular folk to the Internet. Perhaps it’s just a case of enough time having passed for another generation to get curious about how we got to this always-connected world with computers in our ears and on our wrists. I might write some more about this soon.

Hello, again

Well that was quite the hiatus. Suffice to say I’ve been busy doing other things, while Futurilla sat here as a kind of reminder that I used to write online a lot more frequently, and not only though Twitter.

So I’m back here and cleaning out the dust, now that Futurilla is open for business again. Let’s see if this thing still goes.

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Didn't Exist. →

Shocking.

Experts say what is even more dangerous, is the fact that any such battles between tech companies and the UK government will take place in private. Any warrants issued to a company to decrypt users’ data will come with a gagging order, forbidding the firm from discussing it. "There wouldn’t be any public debate about it," Harmit Kambo, campaigns director at Privacy International, tells The Verge. "Apple vs. the FBI just wouldn’t happen in the UK." The first we might know of a battle over encryption could be a company simply withdrawing its services from the UK. "The invisibility of it is the biggest trick they’ve pulled," says Kambo. "It’s sad that the Snowden revelations backfired so spectacularly here. Rather than rolling back powers, they’ve been used to legitimize these practices."

It was the Audiences That Were Better

Great interview with master director and screenwriter Paul Schrader over at Little White Lies, including this gem:

People talk about the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It wasn’t that the films were better or the filmmakers were better, it was the audiences that were better. It was a time of social stress and audiences turned to artists for answers. What do you think about women’s rights? What do you think about the war? The moment that a society turns to artists for answers, great art will emerge. It’s just that simple. It just happens. Back then, movies were at the centre of the cultural conversation. Bonnie and Clyde was smack in the centre, so was The Godfather. Now today, a great number of younger people, my children for example, do not think that movies are important. When audiences don’t think movies are important, it’s very hard to make important movies. That’s the difference.

I had the great fortune and pleasure to have a few drinks with Mr. Schrader a few years ago, after a screening of his magnificent Mishima. If you ever get the chance to listen to his stories around the making of that film, or Taxi Driver, take it. Trust me, you won't regret it.

Time Travelling Giallo

One of the many delights of co-organising the Cine Excess Conference and Festival last week was the opportunity to present Luciano Onetti's remarkable film Francesca. Here's the full version of the intro I wrote for the programme:

Luciano Onetti's second feature film, an Argentinian-made love letter to gialli is a sumptuous visual facsimile that might have fallen through time from 1970s Italy. 
 
Aficionados of the genre will find much to commend Francesca to them: A series of grisly murders committed by a mysterious leather-gloved killer; hard-bitten detectives piecing together the victims' connections to a fifteen-year old case of a missing child (the titular Francesca); flashback sequences that raise as many questions as they answer; The Gates of Hell invoked by Dante's Divine Comedy; coins placed on the eyes of the dead, eyes traumatised, the eye of the camera, the glassy eyes of dolls that bear witness to the unfolding violence. 
 
The production details too are convincing evocations of the film's lineage: The cinematography, the editing, the astonishingly faithful score, the performances (and the oft-times shaky dubbing into Italian), the vibrant colour grading (reds in particular bleed vividly into blue-green tinted shots, prefiguring the bloody ends of those somehow seemingly connected to Francesca's disappearance). 
 
The set-dressing and costuming is especially note-worthy, transporting us into Francesca's circle of hell—and into Onetti's near-perfect recreation of the cinema that inspires it.

Highly recommended. (Francesca trailer on Vimeo)

My First Apple HomeKit Experiments

I've been intending, on and off for the last year or so, to start experimenting with some smart home accessories—things like lights, heating controllers, and power sockets that can be controlled from the iPhone, or can respond to changes in the environment or your location. For one reason or another though I've held off, mostly because the systems just didn't seem ready for prime time and because of the expense in setting up things that then would probably make everyone else in the house hate my guts. 

With the impending launch of iOS 10 though, and the included Home app to act as a friendly front-end to the existing HomeKit architecture, I thought I'd dip a toe in the water, and lighting seemed like a good place to start.

Philips seem to have been fairly committed to their Hue lighting system—it's been updated to support HomeKit, and a wider range of bulbs has brought down the cost of entry—so I spent a week on eBay looking for deals. I eventually found a brand new set of white-ambience bulbs, a second-generation controller, and a dimmer switch for about a third of what it might have cost me in the shops, and snapped it up.

I was expecting to find it to be hard to set up and unreliable, but I've been really pleasantly surprised. From what I read Philips still leads the market in terms of ease-of-use, and I've had few major problems: One dimmer switch dropped off the network and was only fixed by removing the battery, and a bulb stubbornly refused to be recognised until I entered its serial number into the app. Other than that, it's been pretty good.

I'm still not sure that I'd recommend them for most people: My beta iOS 10 Home app doesn't appear to play with the regular tvOS for example, and there are still pain points in getting the Hue app itself to respond to fluctuating network conditions. I still can't see an easy way of setting the lights to do what I want them to do in my absence.  

Nevertheless it's fair to say I'm hooked on the concept. I've now got five individual Hue lamps in my house , controlled by two seperate dimmers (one for downstairs, and one for my bedroom). I love being able to change the colour temperature of most of them (I've not yet splashed out on actual colour-change bulbs at twice the price), and turning them off from my iPhone lock screen is hugely satisfying. Even Siri works when I can remember what I called the lights. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens as the Home app develops, and more devices support HomeKit.

Headphone Jack Apocalypse

With the Apple event invites out for September 7, we're a mere 9 days away from the collective mainstream tech press losing its marbles over the now-all-but-confirmed iPhone update and the widely anticipated loss of the 3.5mm headphone jack. We can safely prepare for a minor meltdown among the usual suspects, who jump on every other move that Apple makes to proclaim that the company has gone too far, and that all sensible people will finally jump ship.

Of course the world won't really end—all of those existing 3.5mm ports and headphones won't suddenly disappear, disabled by a software update or secretly buried in the Nevada desert for future documentarians to dig up. Those who buy the next iPhone and who don't already have wireless headphones will either (a) use the headphones that come in the box (whether they're wired into the Lightning port or bluetooth—and I expect it'll be the former) or (b) use an adaptor (cheap, if not in-the-box) until they get new wireless headphones. 

There'll be some minor irritation of course, but it'll be hard in a year's time to find anyone who's actually dumped the iPhone because of the loss of a legacy port. Most Android phone manufacturers will trumpet their phones still having it, until they all dump it too, spurred on by the continuing growth path of wireless over wired headphones.

Expect too, to hear lots about the extra quality that the new iPhone bring to audio across Lightning/wireless. 

Full disclosure: I own, and love, a fairly decent set of wired earbuds. If the next version of these doesn't support Bluetooth I'll be looking for something good that does anyway. I'm already slightly annoyed that I can't walk around the house without my iPhone plugged into them. 

 

Brain Scan of a Dead Salmon

But when you divide the brain into bitty bits and make millions of calculations according to a bunch of inferences, there are abundant opportunities for error, particularly when you are relying on software to do much of the work. This was made glaringly apparent back in 2009, when a graduate student conducted an fM.R.I. scan of a dead salmon and found neural activity in its brain when it was shown photographs of humans in social situations. Again, it was a salmon. And it was dead.

Fascinating, and a cautionary tale for anyone who deals in the interpretation of data.

Why Disney Infinity was Cancelled →

This certainly seems to have surprised everyone, but Rob Keyes has the background to the announcement over at Screen Rant:

When Disney Infinity first debuted in Q3 2013 the supply didn’t meet demand and production could barely keep up to maintain appropriate inventory levels at retail, so by the time Disney Infinity 2.0 came around – based entirely on Marvel – they over-produced big time. The problem was that the forecasts were way off, and using Hulk as an example, 2 million figures were produced with only 1 million being sold. That led to a drop in revenue reported in Disney’s financials.

Managing the complexities of supply and demand in the challenging toys-to-life category seems to have been a big factor, but it's made even more complex by what might have been Infinity's killer feature: The way it brought together different licenses, story worlds and characters in one game.

Despite Disney Infinity utilizing Disney-owned properties, there were a significant number of mind-boggling obstacles with licensing that caused all sorts of restrictions. In that respect, the business sort of killed its own business. Brands couldn’t exactly overlap with ease, so Marvel, Lucasfilm and other Disney IPs each presented their own squabbles. This is why story modes in the Playsets wouldn’t allow for characters from other brands to show up, or even with playsets themselves.

The Apple TV version of Infinity was effectively shelved a few months ago. For what it's worth, I'd given the playable "Battle of Yavin" demo a spin and enjoyed it, though when the full version launched I found it unplayable, with a control system that just left me frustrated and stuck. I'm a rubbish gamer, but my daughter had no better luck.

 

It's a pity too since the figurines are absolutely beautiful—with some of the most elegant renderings of Star Wars characters in particular that I've ever seen.

The Apple Watch Bands I've Been Waiting For. →

The leaked photo of the forthcoming Apple Watch bands from US luxury fashion brand Coach is low-res and blurry, but it clearly shows leather bands with shiny black metal hardware—perfect for the Space Black Apple Watch. It remains a mystery to me why Apple hasn't produced anything similar itself since, by all accounts, the Space Black finish has proved popular. Anyway, with a little luck I'll be able to get my hands on one of these before too long.

Tauba Auerbach's Incredible Pop-ups

Paper engineering is endlessly fascinating to me, and this is no exception. 

Working somewhere between conceptual art and graphic design, California-born artist Tauba Auerbach creates compositions that exist somewhere in the state between two and three dimensions. For a colossal book project, published in collaboration with New York-based independent bookstore Printed Matter and comprised of six die-cut paper sculptures that act as the book's pages, director Sam Fleischner caught the aural experience of leafing through the weighty tome in the above film.

I could watch this film all day. Take a look at more details over at the Printed Matter bookstore.

1.0 Sucks

Nice find by Clive Thompson from All the Time in the World: A Book of Hours (which looks like a fascinating read. Clive has the Amazon,com link— UK link here). 

As demand for the technology grew, many resisted electricities brilliant new glow. It was just too bright. It lent a “corpse-like quality” to those subjected to its glare, one Londoner argued, and it could make a crowd look “almost dangerous and garish.” Robert Louis Stevenson penned “A Plea for Gas Lamps” in 1878, hoping to dissuade London’s authorities from installing obnoxious electric streetlamps like those in Paris. “A new sort of urban star now shines at nightly,” he wrote, “horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

"I don’t know all the right ways to be a graphic designer"

Excellent Design Week interview with Jonathan Barnbrook. Full of real insight and vision.  

JB: “It sounds cliché but have the strength in your beliefs. Even if you’re not quite sure you’re right, have an opinion, because the world is full of designers who don’t have an opinion or who are too scared to express their opinion, or just want to do any work they can. I think the way to be successful and generate work is to have your own world point of view. You’re an artist after all. A creative person after all and if you can make that clear there’s a real reason for people to come to you.”

For my money Jonathan is the most important graphic designer working today, and yet another example of Bowie's impeccable taste in collaborators.

JB: “I’d like to do more music stuff but I’d also like to work outside of design. I’d loved to have been an architect or work on a large scale project.

I’d love to be involved at the start of a building project. I’ll probably never get the chance but I’d love to design a building.”

If I ever get to commission a building I'm giving him a call.  

A Dream for Europe

Powerful words.  

I dream of a Europe that takes care of the child, that rescues, like a brother, the poor and those who arrive looking for welcome, because they have nothing and ask for shelter. I dream of a Europe that listens and values the elderly and sick, so that they are not reduced to unproductive waste. I dream of a Europe, where being a migrant isn’t a crime, but the call for a higher commitment towards the dignity of the human being.

Boeing 737 to be Buried Underground →

Artist Roger Hiorns has ambitious plans for Birmingham in 2017, submerging a complete passenger aircraft seven metres under the surface of the city street. 

"My motive in burying the plane," says Hiorns "is to introduce a new territory to the world and to encourage the mind to be present in a new place, surreal and at odds with general accepted realities, this new object very literally tears through the established order and the established surfaces of our present reality.”

I make no apologies for loving this kind of thing.