Translucent navigation bars are cool. The content that scrolls up off the visible area alters the look of the navigation bar. But they do introduce some complexity, and sometimes you just don’t need it, because your content doesn’t scroll. So let’s say you’ve got an app that has some content that does scroll, like a […]
Listening to a recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and Jason Snell were talking about advertising.  John’s talked about this before, about the mess that is web advertising these days, and Jason gave some great insider perspective, as a long-time MacWorld editor. Setting aside whether ads are good or bad, the web today […]
Now that Apple Music is out, and people are seeing how well the curation works, I’ve seen people ask about curation in the App Store. Seems to me Apple is already doing this, and has been for a long time Go look at the App Store.  What do you see?  Almost all of the iTunes […]
Apple Music is a big change. No matter what you used for music previously, Apple Music is different. It’s an exciting service, and it’s doing a great job of getting me back into music. But it’s also confusing. I’ve spent a lot of time with Apple Music lately, and I wanted to share some things […]
It’s important to do your homework, and pay attention to what your furnace installer is doing. That’s the takeaway from my recent furnace replacement and Nest installation. Here are some details that you may find helpful. My furnace died on a very cold day, so I called my local furnace repair company. They’re great; they’ve […]
I don’t live way out in the boonies somewhere; I’m 5 minutes from a Starbucks.  I have LTE at home.  But the best level of Internet services available where I live is DSL, 6mbps down, 800kbps up.  This means I can upload at about 80k/second. For all you kids with your DOCSIS or VDSL or […]
Since iOS and UIKit, Apple has produced three products with three new UI toolkits:  Apple TV, CarPlay, and WatchKit. In all three instances, the architecture they’ve chosen is one where the UI is essentially a runtime. There’s a reason that all Apple TV apps look the same, and that’s because the “app†just provides data […]
Apple timed the introduction of Apple Pay exactly right for the US market.  Retailers are just in the midst of a switch to NFC payments, and are making changes to their payment terminals. It’s hard to convince retailers it’s worth making a change, but they’ve been convinced that they need to change something by the […]
My two cents on David Owens’ take on Swift Experiences. In the section on Modern Syntax, David makes some points that could be valid in some contexts. The example that’s showing the modern syntax for sorting an array of strings *is* fraught with ambiguities and complexities.  But this is a shortcut syntax, intended to be […]
Hardware manufacturers shouldn’t be responsible for software. The problem is crystal clear. Your new TV has a computer in it, running some embedded OS and some software that came with it. If it’s a smart TV, it probably knows how to connect to the Internet and stream Netflix. And that’s great, until it stops working. […]