I know where you think this is going. You think I’m buttering you up before announcing that I’m raising the price of a Six Colors membership, which has been at $6 a month (or $60/year) since the very beginning.
I’m not.
Instead, we’re doing here what we did over at The Incomparable from the very beginning (and what my pal David Sparks did with his website recently), and adding multiple membership tiers.
The “More Colors” tier is $10 a month, and it includes these things (descriptions excised for space, but check here for full details):
Regular video reports and Q&As
A special section of the Six Colors Discord for More Colors members
Six Colors podcast live stream and bonus material
The third item posted after this announcement is shown in the screenshot below:
Now, I can’t say for sure what kind of content this is, because I can’t see it (or even who the author is!), but it looks like a blog post, which is not one of the perks mentioned as part of the $10 More Colors tier. Bonus posts are specifically a part of the now basic $6 a month tier. Except maybe not so much anymore? (I am subscribed to the $6 tier, which until today was also the only tier.)
My reaction was to ask myself a few questions:
Do I have more content to sift through that I can reasonably manage? Yes.
Do I need to pay for the privilege of reading a site that regularly exhorts me to pay even more? No.
And so, while I enjoy Jason Snell’s and Dan Moren’s site and have been a paying member for a while, I found it surprisingly easy to turn off auto-renew on my sub. As of September 12th, I’ll no longer be paying and will eventually probably remove the bookmark. It’s ironic that Snell specifically mentions David Sparks’ multi-tier membership approach, because it was when his site started getting riddled with PAY PAY PAY TO SEE SEE SEE that I opted to DELETE DELETE DELETE the bookmark.
I’m not saying what Six Colors is doing is wrong. I’m saying that I’m not fond of paying and then being presented with locked links saying PAY MOAR. It makes me feel like I’m being squeezed. If they need the money, good luck to them. But they won’t be getting any more from me.
It shouldn’t surprise me that in 2022 this is a news headline, but Google is now saying it will prioritize real reviews over clickbait, something you might have assumed they’d be doing all along. But apparently not!
Click the image to see the Verge story
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for my interweb searches for a few years now, and it’s fine. A lot of the results are still clickbait and garbage, but that’s because companies have spent years investing in gaming all search engines, it’s just Google still dominates search, so it has outsized influence.
One day, the elders will gather round to tell their grandkids how they would search (“What’s a search engine, Grandpa?”) for “best toaster” and get actual results comparing toasters, instead of thousands of pages of SEO-optimized garbage posing as information on toasters. And then the grandkids will go back to hunting mutant cows across the radioactive wastelands.
When logging into My Fitness Pal to record my food and exercise for the day, I see this under the section for food entries:
The idea that I’ve earned one whole extra calorie to burn as I see fit amuses me. I could make a list of things to do with that single, precious extra calorie:
Exhale
Blink my eyes once or maybe twice
Shift slightly in my chair
Think hard for several seconds
(After a minute or so, MFP synced with my watch and bumped the calorie burn up to something with four digits instead of one.)
To be accurate, the emoji are not actually 3D, they’re just shaded to give a 3D appearance. Microsoft recently made them open source via Github for anyone to use. And I want to use them (okay, maybe not all of them) because they’re just so adorable, odd or both.
Yes, it’s come to this. I mistype the word “humidity” so often, and I’m now talking about it so much, that I’m now using the Mac’s built-in text replacement tool to fix my persistent misspelling of the word:
I will always regret not taking that typing class in high school. With real typewriters and everything. I wonder if schools expect kids to start Grade 1 as advanced typists now. “Todd, you can’t take recess break until you hit at least 75 wpm!”
Current humidity is 55%
UPDATE: It’s not working! Apparently the text expander doesn’t work in Firefox or browsers or something. I am sad. And full of typos.
Here’s a comparison of the original photo of a jet flying overhead that I recently took with my Canon EOS M50 camera, and then a version of the photo after I tweaked the contrast and color a bit in Luminar AI:
The changes are pretty obvious:
The sky is no longer completely blasted out, allowing the mix of high cloud and blue to show
The blue of the aircraft underside has been boosted a bit, not to exaggerate it, but to make it look more as it actually appeared
The overall contrast of the jet was adjusted, to better bring out detail in the structure (when looking at a smaller version of the photo, it may simply look darker; the detail is best seen at full or near-full size)
Now, you could argue that the bright, overexposed sky of the original works because it puts the jet in stark contrast to it, effectively highlighting it more than my tweaked version. And I would agree–but it’s also a matter of preference. Overall, I like the tweaked version because to my eye it’s a better representation of what I saw, and does not try to misrepresent the object(s) depicted. For example, Luminar AI lets you add giraffes to the sky (yes, it really does), but I did not add any giraffes! Or hot air balloons, or bald eagles, or any of the other silly things you can put in to spice things up.
Tweaking photos is now something I find almost as enjoyable as the actual shooting of the photos themselves. Maybe I just have a need to fix things.
After referring to the possibly skeevy nature of the Microsoft Store app Inspire Writer, a fairly shameless Ulysses copycat, I noticed it had a 10-day trial, so I thought I’d download it and have a look. What could possibly go wrong?
The developer is Sunisoft, which describes itself thusly: “Established in 1999, Sunisoft is a developers tools software provider located in Zhu Hai, China. We are committed to providing more effective tools for software developers” (link). It apparently has fewer than 25 employees.
In terms of user interface, this is a straight-up copycat. You have the Library bar on the left, the list of sheets next to it, then the editor next to that. You can toggle these on/off the same way you can in Ulysses. You can export to multiple sources, including WordPress, which is how I’ve made this post (I’ll edit this if it turns out to not work, and I have to post the old-fashioned way in WordPress).
EDIT: While Inspire recognized all of my settings for my blog (categories, tags, etc.) it produced a simple error dialog every time I tried to export this post to WordPress:
There is an option to configure a proxy, but I have not successfully gotten that to work (yet), either. I'll update this post again if I do. Also, dumping in the straight markdown from Inspire into WordPress leaves a lot of clean-up to do. The rest of my look at Inspire continues below.
It supports markdown, of course, and you can set it to sync across devices, mimicking Ulysses’ seamless use of iCloud. You can also choose any font you have installed on Windows for the editor, unlike some markdown apps that restrict you to ones that are deemed most appropriate. Want to use Comic Sans? You can!
You know someone will do this.
But there are differences.
Missing features
While there is a Dark Mode you can toggle on, there is no support for themes or styles. You get Light and Dark modes, and that’s all. In this way, it feels closer to iA Writer.
Some shortcut keys are missing. For example, there is no shortcut for bringing up Preferences. Mac-first apps often use the Mac Preferences shortcut for their Windows versions, which would translate to CTRL-.
Clumsier or simpler features
Like Ulysses, Inspire Writer includes a word goal you can modify and invoke by hitting F5. Unlike Ulysses, there is no way to keep the goal open while writing, since its dialog takes control of the UI. You do get a ring icon in the top-right corner of the sheet in the Sheets view, which can be kept open. To its credit, the ring fills dynamically and changes from blue to green when you’ve hit your goal.
The documentation is obviously translated, but it’s never difficult to understand, so I don’t knock it too much for this.
Overall, it seems to do all the core things Ulysses does, just without the same degree of polish, and with some “extras” missing. It seems to work well otherwise, but it still feels like it hews a little too closely to Ulysses’ UI and would benefit from breaking free a bit and charting its own course. Ulysses is a fine program, but it’s not necessarily the definitive word on distraction-free writing apps.
I am unsure on what I will do when the trial ends. I really like the way it matches Ulysses’ use of indents, as it’s so helpful when writing fiction and most markdown editors simply don’t include this support or require you to at minimum add in an extra key for it (like hitting Tab), which eliminates the convenience of having indents in the first place.
Why do I care about indents so much, anyway, you may ask. Let me illustrate. Let’s say there is a scene where two characters are engaged in rapid-fire dialog, like this:
Bob tapped on the desk. “You see this desk here?” Jim nodded. “Yes. It’s very desk-like.” “It’s my desk.” “Says who?” “Says me.” “You and what army?” “The Swedish army!” “I’m pretty sure Sweden doesn’t have an army.” Bob sighed. “You need to see more of the world.” Jim folded his arms. “Yeah? How much more, smart guy?” “Twelve percent, minimum.”
Now, I was able to write that quickly (never mind the quality) because the indents happen automagically. In most text editors, I’d have to hit Enter twice after every line of dialog to get proper separation of paragraphs. I mean, I absolutely could do this, but having automatic indents is just easier. It’s the one concession to being Word-like that I approve of in a text editor.
All of this is to say, why is is that only a clone of Ulysses matches this feature among all the text editors I’ve tried. I was even hoping Obsidian would somehow have a community plugin that would mimic this, but I haven’t found one. It puzzles me, but maybe it’s a niche feature or considered “wrong” somehow.
Anyway, I will continue to tinker with Inspire Writer during the 10-day trial and render a verdict by the time it ends (curiously, it gives no indication of how much time is left, so I have no idea what will happen when the trial ends. Also, the app has only a single one-star rating on the Microsoft Store, and I’m really curious why).
Posting “online insults” will be punishable by up to a year in prison time in Japan starting Thursday, when a new law passed earlier this summer will go into effect.
People convicted of online insults can also be fined up to 300,000 yen (just over $2,200). Previously, the punishment was fewer than 30 days in prison and up to 10,000 yen ($75).
The law will be reexamined in three years to determine if it’s impacting freedom of expression — a concern raised by critics of the bill. Proponents said it was necessary to slow cyberbullying in the country
Cyberbullying is a real issue, of course. But I’m not a big fan of governments enacting sweeping, yet vague laws that punish people for online behavior. It also doesn’t get anywhere close to addressing what prompts the cyberbullying to begin with. And call me crazy, but in 2022 I am not keen on any allegedly democratic government giving itself this kind of power.
It ends, naturally, with this, which amuses me more than it should:
I’ve been mulling over the whole email thing myself, and my solution lately has been to approach it mercilessly. If I’m getting some kind of flyer that isn’t immediately relevant to me, I unsubscribe or block (blocking only when unsubscribing “mysteriously” fails). This alone has made things more manageable. But it does seem that email is stuck in this weird place, where the general internet is evolving (or devolving) and email mostly stays the same. I don’t have a solution to “fix” email, I’m just content to cut down on what comes into my inbox for now.
Ah, Apple Books. I remember when the iPad debuted in 2010 and along with it iBooks, because back then Apple named everything iSomething. Because there were no deals with Canadian publishers in place, the iBooks store in Canada was a virtual empty shelf. This is part of why I ended up buying most of my ebooks from Kobo, something I continue to do today.
But I wanted to give Apple a chance, so once actual books became available, I found one I wanted that was on sale (bonus) and purchased it: Redshirts, by John Scalzi. Now, part of the reason I bought Redshirts is because the publisher specifically sells it without DRM, meaning I could sideload it onto my Kobo ereader and not be stuck reading it only on my phone or iPad. But ho ho, it turns out Apple’s own DRM was still applied, thwarting my efforts and souring me on the experience. I did ultimately get a DRM-free version and read the book on a Kobo device. But it was the last ebook I purchased on Apple Books.
Until today.
BookBub noted that 3,000 Writing & Plot Prompts A-C was on sale for $0.99 from the usual places: Amazon, Kobo and Apple. At that price, it’s an easy impulse purchase because I love lists and some prompts might, er, prompt some writing.
But because it’s only $0.99 (not exactly a huge investment), I thought I’d be wacky and get it on Apple Books. I load up the Apple Books app on my Mac, go to the book’s store page, click the $0.99 button, enter my Apple ID credentials, watch the little spinny circle as the purchase is made, then…nothing. It actually navigates away from the page to a different part of the bookstore. I make my way back to the page with the book of prompts, and it is again showing the $0.99 button. I check my library in Apple Books. The book is not there.
Now, I think I saw something briefly flash on screen after the purchase began, but it disappeared in a blink and never came back. Dare I try the purchase again? Since I had money in my Apple Wallet anyway, I figured what the heck and clicked the $0.99 button again. It spun. I got prompted for my Apple ID credentials. I entered them. I then got another pop-up asking me if I was totally absolutely sure I wanted to buy this book and clicked affirmative. The $0.99 button then changed to a handy READ button because the purchase was now complete.
I don’t know why the second confirmation to buy comes up to begin with, or why it failed to stay up the first time I tried buying (I wasn’t leaning on the mouse or anything), all I know is that when I buy books from Kobo it just works every single time. My experience with Apple on buying books and something not going awry is now 0/2.
Here is my one-emoji review of Apple Books circa 2022:
I watched the livestream of the WWDC keynote this morning, which was once again an entirely prerecorded presentation. Hooray for multi-year pandemics.
The best part, by far, was the way they really leaned into providing meme-worthy moments with Craig Federgerhi.
At this point, Tim Cook could be replaced by a Tim Cook animatronic figure. He says the exact same stuff every time, the epitome of boring corporate boilerplate. You’re gonna love it (when he stops droning on).
And now the medium-warm takes:
Not surprising:
Re-designed MacBook Air. It’s got an M2 chip, it’s $200 more, but still ships with an 8 GB/256 GB ram/SSD combo. Four colors now instead of two, the wedge is gone, MagSafe is back and yes, the notch is there, too. I was not surprised to see they are keeping the M1 Air in the lineup (for now, at least). I predict the M1 version will continue to be the better-selling model, though some might bite on the M2 for one of the new colors. I think those will move people more than the better performance. A shame it still has the same crappy external monitor support.
Lock screen improvements for iOS. They’re nice, and continue Apple’s ever-timid move toward more customization.
No interactive widgets. I know some were hoping for these, but I was not expecting them. I think there’s a 50% chance they may show up for iOS 17.
iPad multitasking. Yes, it’s been improved, with “Stage Manager” that dumps open apps into a column on the left side of the screen, making it somewhat easier to switch between them. The bigger news is that you can now have multiple overlapping and resizable windows open, and there’s full external monitor support (if you have a compatible iPad).
Improved watch faces. These were due for a refresh.
Improved workout stats, another persistent rumor. They mentioned three for running, which is nice: Stride Length, Ground Contact Time and Vertical Oscillation. I’m still thinking about getting a Garmin watch, though.
The Mail app finally gets some updates after a hundred years. This was widely predicted.
Redesigned Settings app for the Mac. This wasn’t actually highlighted in the keynote, but was expected. It looks like a Macified version of the iOS Settings app, which will probably work better on the Mac, since the iOS version is a gigantic, disorganized mess.
Surprising:
Mac Ventura, not Mammoth. Pretty much everyone got this one wrong.
Keeping the 13″ MacBook Pro (with the old design, including the touch bar) and simply putting an M2 in it. With the redesigned Air, I fail to see who would buy the entry level Pro, but someone must, since Apple claims it’s their #2 best-selling laptop.
Dropping support for watchOS 9 for the Series 3…then continuing to sell the Series 3. Bad Apple.
Dropping support for the iPhone 7 with iOS 16. I thought this might get one more year.
Apple has baked in using an iPhone as a webcam into macOS. Less surprising: Belkin is making clips to hold the phone to the top of the Mac’s display.
Clock app on Mac. Kind of weird, but why not? Basically the version found on the iPhone.
Somewhat surprising:
Not a peep about AR/VR, realityOS or related hardware. I suspect, given the presentation ran a bit shorter than the last few WWDC keynotes, that a segment was cut when Apple realized the hardware needed more time in development.
No news on the updated Mac Pro or a replacement for the Intel Mac mini still in the line-up. I assume both are not ready yet, or are being held back for a dedicated Mac event in the fall.
Weather app for iPadOS! Hey, it was either this or a calculator. It looks like it’s on Mac, too, though it wasn’t specifically highlighted.
Revamped Home app. Some had predicted this, but I was skeptical, since nothing short of a complete rewrite would really fix the Home app–which is what Apple has done!
Overall, the keynote was pretty predictable, with the usual mix of features that look promising. I still don’t get the M2 MacBook Pro, though. Why redesign the Air and keep the Pro untouched? Do they only have enough people to work on one model at a time? 😛
