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Tag: Apple

  • Week 16.23

    I usually look through my camera roll to recall events as I start writing these posts. It’s telling me nothing much happened this week.

    That’s not true; it’s just a lot of it was spent online. You might have noticed the excitement and fast pace of advancements in AI recently, and it seems I’m spending a correspondingly larger amount of time playing with, reading about, and discussing the impact of it on our work and lives. It’s enough to make one consider taking a gap quarter or year off work to focus on this stuff.

    One catalyst was a colleague being invited to do an interview on what it means for design, and so we had a conversation about the trends beforehand. Unsurprisingly, the media is still thinking about both design and AI simplistically: will image generation mean fewer jobs for illustrators and that sort of thing. I find it hard to be optimistic in the short-term, in that AI is lighting a fire under our asses and it’s going to cause a lot of pain. But the potential for us as a discipline to evolve under pressure into something greater is undeniable.

    It didn’t help that the next thing I saw was The AI Dilemma, a talk by the creators of the documentary, The Social Dilemma, wherein they say the problems unleashed on society by social media were just the prequel to what AI is on track to do if we don’t prepare. And let’s just admit we don’t have a great track record of preparing for things we know are going to hit us later. It’s about an hour long but I’d file it under essential viewing just for awareness of what’s building up.

    The above talk was given at The Center for Humane Technology, and coincidentally this was the week we finally got a look at what Humane, the secretive product company founded by a load of ex-Apple designers and engineers, has been building and teasing.

    I’ve been anticipating their debut for a long time and had a pretty good idea of the core concept from their leaked pitch deck and patents. Essentially, a device achieves AR by projecting a digital interface on the world around you the old-fashioned way, using rays of light pointed outwards, rather than on the inside of glasses. At some point along the way they started mentioning AI a lot, and it looks like the secret ingredient that turns a nothing-new wearable camera + laser projector into a real alternative to smartphones. In other words, an intelligent assistant that isn’t primarily screen based, so we can be less distracted from “real life”.

    It’s probably best to withhold judgment until we see more at some sort of unveiling event, with more demos, a name, a price, a positioning. But it’s worth remembering that when the iPhone came out, it was a phone good enough to replace whatever you were using at the time. Humane’s device is said to be standalone and not an accessory to be paired with a smartphone. It’s also shown taking calls. The bar for replacing your telephone is now much higher after some 16 years of iPhones.

    An intelligent assistant that let you do things quicker with less fiddling was always my hope for the Apple Watch from its very first version; that Siri would be the heart of the experience, and the UI wouldn’t be a mess of tiny app icons and widgets, but a flexible and dynamic stream of intelligently surfaced info and prompts. We all know Siri (as a catch-all brand/name for Apple AI) wasn’t up to the task at the time, but I keep hoping the day is right around the corner. Fingers crossed for the rumored watchOS revamp at WWDC this year.

    There’s now also a rumor that iOS 17 will add a new journaling app, and my expectations are already very high. They say it’ll be private, but tap into on-device data like Health and your contacts and calendars. That goes beyond what Day One does. I’m imagining the ultimate lifelogging app that automatically records where you go, who you met, what you did, how tired you were, what music you were listening to, and your personal reflections, all in one searchable place. I’ve tried a bunch of these before, like Moves and Momento, but nothing lasted. If Apple does do this, I may finally be able to ditch Foursquare/Swarm, which I still reluctantly use to have a record of where I’ve been. Its social network aspect is nice but not essential since hardly anyone else uses it now.

    I remember there was a Twitter-like app called Jaiku on Nokia smartphones over 15 years ago that had a feature where, using Bluetooth, it could tell if you met up with a fellow user, and post to your other friends about it. I was excited by it but had few friends and even fewer ones on Jaiku. Just like with AirTags and Find My, tapping into Apple’s giant user base could finally make this concept viable. As long as Apple isn’t trying to do a social network again.

    ===

    Oh right, back to AI. What have I been doing? Some of it was playing games with ChatGPT, essentially asking it to be a dungeon master using the following superprompt (which I did not create btw!):

    I want you to act like you are simulating a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). Subsequent commands should be interpreted as being sent to the MUD. The MUD should allow me to navigate the world, interact with the world, observe the world, and interact with both NPCs and (simulated) player characters. I should be able to pick up objects, use objects, carry an inventory, and also say arbitrary things to any other players. You should simulate the occasional player character coming through, as though this was a person connected online. There should be a goal and a purpose to the MUD. The storyline of the MUD should be affected by my actions but can also progress on its own in between commands. I can also type “.” if I just want the simulated MUD to progress further without without any actions. The MUD should offer a list of commands that can be viewed via ‘help’. Before we begin, please just acknowledge you understand the request and then I will send one more message describing the environment for the MUD (the context, plot, character I am playing, etc.) After that, please respond by simulating the spawn-in event in the MUD for the player.

    Try it! I even had success asking it (in a separate chat) to come up with novel scenarios for a SF text adventure game, which I then fed back into this prompt. I can’t emphasize enough how fun this is: you can take virtually any interesting, dramatic scenario and immediately play it out as an interactive story.

    Here’s an example where I played the role of a time traveler who has to stop a future AI from destroying humanity by going back in time to prevent the invention of certain things, starting with the Great Pyramid of Giza, which will purportedly become a power source for the AI.

    And here are a couple of new products made possible by GPT. There are so many, all asking for about $10/mo. Most won’t survive as this stuff becomes commoditized, but for the moment they are all amazing because these things weren’t possible before.

    • Tome: It’s a sort of PowerPoint that can create entire decks on its own from a short brief you give it. For example, ask for a sales deck and it’ll set up a working narrative arc over multiple slides, not filled with placeholder text and images mind you! But actually generate text and original pictures to fill every one of them. Of course, it will use common storytelling structures — the portfolio introduction I made as a test looked like 90% of the applications that we see, using very familiar language for describing one’s experience, design philosophy, values, skills. This is fine, of course. You can edit it, or use it for as long as “what went before” continues to have currency in this society. When quality is everywhere, quality becomes meaningless. Fire under buttocks.
    • Rationale AI: Describe a decision you’re trying to make, and it’ll tell you the pros and cons, or generate a SWOT analysis, or work out the causal chain of the path you’re on. For many people, this sort of reasoning is not hard to do, but perhaps it’s a game changer for those who can’t. For example, if you’re in an emotionally distressing situation and cool logic is evasive; it could help to show the bigger picture. I tested it with such a scenario and it gave some solid insights (be careful with advice from an AI, of course). But that this thing works at all is a marvel! “Should I become a full-time influencer?” is not a question a machine could have understood in the past, and certainly it could not have forecasted that failing down the road might put stress on your finances and lead to harmful self doubt and regret over quitting your job.
    • Summarize.tech: I found this by accident when someone shared a two-hour YouTube video essay in a group chat and everyone said “I ain’t got time for that”. I remarked that it sure would be great if an AI could watch that and write a tl;dr for us. And then I thought… surely that exists. And it does.

    ===

    It was also my birthday, and I saw John Wick 4 and ate a lot of Taiwanese hot pot. Also binged all of the new Netflix show, The Diplomat, and it was actually good. Life’s alright when that happens.

  • Week 14.23

    Ugh, the post-holiday period is the worst. I’ve struggled through the week, and it was only a short four-day work week because of the Easter/Good Friday holiday. I’m in the mood for another break now, and thankfully we have a week in Australia later this year to look forward to.

    I started off Monday with a client video call in which I got frustrated enough by my bad lighting situation (sitting in front of blinds — either too much light, too little, or visible horizontal shadows across my face) to finally do something about it. During my aimless ambles down the aisles of Japan’s electronic superstores, I saw many shelves dedicated to remote work equipment, presumably a big sales driver for them over Covid-19, and considered bringing a ring light home. I didn’t, but I found good looking ones on Shopee and ended up with a rectangular soft LED panel on a tabletop stand for just S$27! It does five color temperatures, but I’m sticking with Daylight, and overall it’s been an awesome purchase I should have made ages ago. And it arrived in 24 hours.

    No surprises, but I’ve taken far fewer photos since returning. I still open Hipstamatic regularly just to keep my streak going, and it’s forced me to try and snap something every day. That said, I wonder if this habit, and the product’s reboot, will last. As I was discussing with Michael, they needed to put some momentum behind the launch and sustain it with updates and quality posts in the global pool. But from how it looked in their updates, the founders were (also) on holiday in Japan on launch week? Perhaps they were there to boost some community events, but I looked at the Japan-only photo feed regularly and I was one of the most prolific posters. Not a great sign. They just released an update this weekend, at least, with a new Uji-inspired lens and film.

    A new fun thing to do with Midjourney emerged this week: a /describe command which takes a photo you upload and has the system describe it back to you in the form of Midjourney prompts, which you can then submit to generate a “broken telephone” remix of your original image.

    If you think computer vision/image recognition has gotten scarily good recently, you’d be right. AI is part of this chain somewhere, and look no further than this Memecam web app which blew my mind last night. Snap a photo of something, and it recognizes what the image contains, and uses GPT to create a joke and final meme, Impact font and all. It actually writes jokes about anything, instantly. That AI-generated Seinfeld stream could technically become good, viable (if not wholly original) comedy in the near future.

    ===

    Hey, two quick moments of consumer ecstasy I need to share!

    • We’ve got the HomePods in Singapore at long last. I don’t know what took Apple so long, but you can now officially buy them here, and the prices are slightly lower than I would have expected, at S$139 and S$429 for the mini and full-sized second-generation HomePods respectively. My Sonos speakers are now unplugged and we are a fully Siri-ed home. I’d previously bought two minis for the office and bedroom off the gray market, and those are now joined by two large ones in the living and dining areas. Reader, they sound glorious. It’s a rich, tangible, and emotionally satisfying experience for your favorite music. There was a point in time where Apple loved the word “magical” and used it liberally. Even for mundane things like keyboards that worked reliably. But these, these are kinda magical.
    • Nespresso launched a new kind of pod locally, one designed to approximate “filter-style” coffee, which in my mind is basically a pour over. They’ve been out for a few months in limited European markets, it seems, but still not widely available. They have a new design where you peel off a sticker to reveal an in-set dot grid which the liquid passes through — the foil is not punctured as a a result. You’re meant to press both the Lungo and Espresso buttons in sequence, resulting in a 150ml extraction, which they call a Gran Lungo. Lol. Anyway, it tastes pretty good. The longer cup is thinner and more delicate than if you used a regular pod to do an Americano or long black, with hardly any crema. This innovation allows for floral and fruity roasts to come through, if you like that sort of thing. I..I..I think it also results in more caffeine.
    • Boss coffee is now natively available in Singapore! Used to be you’d find imported cans in Don Don Donki (the local name for Don Quijote) and some other Japanese supermarkets, but it looks like Suntory is properly trying to bring “The No. 1 Ready To Drink Coffee Brand in Japan” to Singapore now. But I remain unconvinced these stubby plastic bottles and generic labels are the way. The little cans and their designs are iconic, and better for the environment since they can be recycled.
    Spotted in a 7-Eleven

    Last week I mentioned buying black tees from FamilyMart, and then got into a few brief discussions about fashion/luxury apparel this week, wherein I reflected that while I’m happy to pay high prices for technology and things crafted out of metal, I can’t feel that way about fabrics and leather. They wear down, so why not just embrace their replacement and buy cost-effective, expendable products from basic brands? Then the Twitter algorithm put a bit of trivia in front of me that the plain white tees worn by Carmy in The Bear got attention from viewers who wanted to buy them, and that they were actually pretty expensive ones made by Japanese brand, Whitesville.

    So… if you know me, you may know where this is going. Yup, this is the guy who loved PCs, hated Macs, and now has a house full of Apple products. To be clear, I wasn’t suddenly curious about the idea of buying ostentatious Veblen t-shirts with designer logos, just… better ones that would hold up longer and not look as cheap. So I now have an order of basic black tees coming in from Mr Porter that cost 5x what I normally pay for them. Gulp. I’ll work out if this actually makes sense and let you know.

    ===

    The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a fun trip in IMAX. We enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to finally playing Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (I have to look up these names every single time) on my Switch soon.

  • Bing Blogs #3: On the edges (of iPhones)

    I used to write my own iPhone content but now I can just brief an AI to do it! I asked for a funny explanation of why Apple keeps changing the design language and is rumored to be doing it yet again with the iPhone 15 series.

    The iPhone Design Flip-Flop: Why Apple Can’t Make Up Its Mind

    If you’re an iPhone fan, you might have noticed a curious pattern in Apple’s design choices over the years. The company seems to have a hard time deciding whether it likes rounded edges or straight edges for its flagship smartphone. Let’s take a look at how the iPhone has changed its shape since its debut in 2007 .

    The Original iPhone: Round and Proud

    The first iPhone was introduced by Steve Jobs as a combination of the iPod, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communicator. It featured a 3.5-inch screen, a multi-touch touchscreen display, microphone, headset controls and specs that the modern smartphone user takes for granted today. It also had a sleek design with rounded edges that made it comfortable to hold and easy to slip into your pocket.

    The iPhone 4: Straight Outta Cupertino

    In 2010, Apple unveiled the iPhone 4, which marked a radical departure from the previous models. The iPhone 4 had a flat glass front and back with an aluminum frame that created straight edges around the device. It also had a smaller 3.5-inch screen with higher resolution and introduced features like FaceTime video calling and Retina display. The iPhone 4 was praised for its elegant design and performance, but also criticized for its antenna issues that caused signal loss when held in certain ways.

    The iPhone 6: Back to Basics

    After four generations of straight-edged iPhones (including the iPhone 4S, 5 and 5S), Apple decided to go back to its roots with the iPhone 6 in 2014. The iPhone 6 had a larger 4.7-inch screen with curved edges that followed the contour of the device. It also had a thinner body and improved camera capabilities. The iPhone 6 was well-received by consumers who appreciated its bigger size and smoother design.

    The iPhone 12: Straight Up Stunning

    In 2020, Apple surprised everyone by bringing back the straight edges with the iPhone 12 series. The iPhone 12 had a flat glass front and back with an aluminum frame that created sharp edges around the device. It also had a larger 6.1-inch screen with higher resolution and introduced features like MagSafe wireless charging and Ceramic Shield protection. The iPhone 12 was hailed as one of the best iPhones ever made, combining beauty and power in one package.

    The Rumored iPhone 15: Round Again?

    Now, here’s where things get interesting. According to some leaks and rumors, Apple might be planning to switch back to rounded edges for its next-generation iPhones in late-2023 or early-2024. This would mean that Apple would once again abandon its straight-edged design after only three iterations (including the current iPhone-13 series). Why would Apple do this? What’s wrong with straight edges? Are they too edgy for Apple?

    Conclusion: What’s Next for Apple?

    It’s hard to say what motivates Apple’s design decisions when it comes to its iPhones. Maybe it’s just trying to keep things fresh and exciting for consumers who crave novelty and variety. Maybe it’s following market trends or responding to customer feedback. Maybe it’s just experimenting with different styles until it finds one that sticks.

    Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: Apple can’t seem to make up its mind about whether it likes rounded edges or straight edges for its iPhones. And as long as it keeps flip-flopping between them, we’ll keep buying them anyway.

    I then asked for a poem on the same subject and got this:

    Apple loves to make its iPhones sleek and smooth
    But can’t decide on how to shape their sides
    Sometimes they’re round, sometimes they’re straight like brooms
    And every year they change their minds and guides

    The customers are puzzled by this trend
    They wonder why they need a new design
    They think that Apple just wants them to spend
    More money on a phone that’s not refined

    But maybe Apple has a deeper plan
    To test the limits of aesthetics and art
    To see how far they can push the demand
    For beauty over function and be smart

    Or maybe they’re just bored and out of touch
    And don’t know how to make their phones too much

  • Week 1.23

    Creative Technologies’ founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo suddenly passed away at the age of 67 this week, which was pretty big news locally. The Verge explained the significance of his career as creator of the Sound Blaster line of PC audio cards which put Singapore on the consumer tech map in the 1980s.

    My first PC was their homegrown Cubic CT, basically an IBM-compatible XT 8086 system, with a CGA (Color Graphics Array: just four colors) graphics card, 5.25” floppy disk drive, and no hard drive. I’m pretty sure my dad drove down to Sim Lim Square or somewhere like that and picked it up in person. After a few years, we upgraded to a non-Creative made system based on the Intel 386SX chip (how that SX suffix haunted me, making me feel like I had an inferior machine! The DX was the model you wanted; the SX lacked the dedicated math co-processor, not that I ever really knew which programs made use of it).

    Neither of these first two computers had proper audio capabilities, just the awful default “PC speaker”, as it was called back then. You could only get beeps and boops. One needed a dedicated audio card like an Adlib or Roland or Sound Blaster to hear proper music or sound clips. So every PC game I played had awful crude calculator music you wanted to turn off, but when I went over to play at my cousin Bryan’s house (he had a 286 with EGA graphics — 16 colors! — and a Sound Blaster), those very same games would have synthesized orchestral instruments and realistic sound effects. I wanted a Sound Blaster more than anything and wouldn’t have one until we upgraded to a Pentium system much later.

    The best quality image I could find of my old MP3 player, from the PDF manual

    Years before I got my first iPod and switched over to a Macintosh, my first MP3 player was a Creative-made device. The year was probably 1999 or 2000. I was looking to move on from the MiniDisc players I’d been using for years, and these new devices let you carry tons more music around without a folder full of discs in your backpack (this was really a thing we did). The model I chose was a Creative MuVo, a nondescript white plastic square with a tiny LCD screen and a soft joystick nub for control. It played WMA files as well as MP3s, which was a deciding factor for me as you could stuff more music in at an equivalent quality using the WMA format at the time. That little guy kept me company through two long years of mind-numbing administrative work during my national service.

    Years later, after graduating and stumbling into my first proper full-time job, the very first task they gave me was writing video treatments for a Creative Technologies product demo DVD. Creative happened to be one of the agency’s longtime clients, and the viral video above was one of the things that happened under their watch before I joined. I remember my partner and I excitedly pitching a direction to our bosses only to be shot down and told to try again. Weeks later, after going out west to Creative’s offices and getting their feedback, it turned out we had gotten it right the first time. That was probably the end of my journey with the brand, although I was intrigued by their attempts to bring a new version of their X-Fi surround audio tech to market in recent years. I almost bought a pair of their headphones to try it, but now Apple’s spatial audio on AirPods has one-upped their approach by delivering a massive library of professionally mixed Dolby Atmos music instead of relying on fake surround processing on stereo tracks.

    His death is a sad loss and I wonder what the company will do from here. Looking back on the various products I’ve owned or tried over the years, they offered unquestionable technical merit, above average build quality, and always great value for money.

    ===

    • The new year got off to a gluttonous start with an impromptu visit to one of my favorite buffets, followed by Chinese hotpot, and then an all you can eat Korean BBQ (these were three consecutive days). Then I rested for a day before hitting Mexican cocktails and an izakaya with 1-liter highballs on Friday, and then rounding off the weekend with a burger from Blooie’s Roadhouse on Sunday.
    • Incidentally, that last meal was my first time at The Rail Mall, which most Singaporeans are probably familiar with, and which I used to pass on the bus daily during the aforementioned two years of national service but never stopped at. There were a few other interesting places we’ll probably be back for, like a craft beer taproom and an all you can eat wagyu yakiniku (so, like, probably tomorrow).
    • I got into the hottest beta program around: Ivory, the new Mastodon client from Tapbots. It builds on their work for Tweetbot, and it makes using Mastodon as a primary social media platform very enjoyable. I’ve checked Twitter a lot less this week as a result.
    • I finished my first playthrough of Citizen Sleeper on the Switch and will probably not be back for more until a little later. So many games! I’ve started on Arcade Spirits, a Western visual novel about working in a video game arcade. Not to be confused with Arcade Paradise which is a business sim that lets you run an arcade cum laundromat. If Spirits doesn’t pick up soon, I’ll probably abandon it for Kathy Rain or the Monkey Island sequel.
    • In need of a new book, I picked up Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs but it didn’t click. I cut my losses after about an hour.
    • King Princess’s Hold On Baby would probably have been my pick for Best Album of 2022, if I’d chosen an Album of the Year. I’ve played it through about four times this week and still can’t enough. As with quite a few things I really love, I kinda hated it at the start. I mean, I used to hate Macs and Korean food.
    • We did a deep clean of the fridge and freezer on Sunday. If you’re ever doing the same, Apple’s Cleaning The House playlist may help.

    Here’s some AI art I made this week:

  • Week 42.22

    We got a cat! Well, pretty close to it, more accurate to say that we have reserved a kitten from the breeder we were previously speaking with. The next few weeks will be spent buying essential equipment, clearing up some of the mess around the house that she might destroy, and then she should be with us by the end of the month.

    Appearance wise, she is what’s known as a seal bicolor ragdoll, white with brown markings on her face and tail. I’ve discovered that this combination combines the most popular and most common traits in these cats, so in gachapon terms we’ve pulled a three-star kitten. Although you wouldn’t know she was a kitten from looking at her; several people who’ve seen photos have remarked “oh, so you’re not getting a kitten?” They grow up to become large cats, with females possibly reaching 6 kg and beyond.

    We’re still thinking of a name (her dead name is Dewey) but already have a strong contender. In branding terms, this phase is what’s known as “writing the rationale after having found a name that sounds great but isn’t especially meaningful”. Aside: is it a bad idea to name your cat after a Microsoft product?

    ===

    Darkroom (a photo editor I’ve used since it came out for iPhone — it now works as a universal app on iPad and Mac too) released their new update supporting the sharing of filters/presets. Early users of the app will remember that you could always share filters via a QR code, but this feature was removed a few years back when they switched to a new architecture. The way it works now is the preset’s details get uploaded to their server, generating a link that you can share. Anyone who clicks the link can see how your preset looks applied against four standard photos, and install the preset in their copy of Darkroom with a single click.

    As someone who enjoys making presets in Darkroom, I’ve got a few that I would like to share with other users. I went through a phase of copying film looks from other apps like VSCO and RNI Films, as a sort of pastime, as I found it quite a soothing and mindless activity to switch back-and-forth between two photos and gradually nudge them closer together by adjusting sliders. Someone should make a game around that mechanic!

    I’ve posted a few on Twitter already, but have quite a few more that I’ll put soon — “better” ones that I’ve done on my own without referencing existing film stocks or looks. I even wrote about wanting to share a new preset last October!

    Darkroom presets shared so far:

    ===

    This week’s update was written via voice dictation on my Mac — with a few minor corrections. And that’s with a sore throat, stuffed nose, and raspy voice! As far as I can tell it’s not Covid, just this drawn-out flu that’s been getting quite a few people. On that note, Covid cases are once again rising here in Singapore due to the new XBB variant.

    I can’t wait to upgrade to Ventura, assuming that it will have the same voice dictation enhancements as iOS 16. I wonder if this post reads differently, stylistically, given that I am saying this out loud rather than typing it. Related to that, I am now reading the book Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch (oh my God I can’t believe dictating that name out loud worked — I await the day this happens for Asian names). It’s about how language has been changed by the Internet and Internet culture (one of the things that involves is not capitalizing the word Internet, but macOS has seemingly not been informed).

    What a good week it’s been for reading: I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s One Day All This Will Be Yours and went on to finish Blake Crouch’s Upgrade two days later. With this post-Seveneves sprint, I should be able to finish the year with a not-embarrassing 12 books or more.

    I recommend both books by the way, the former being an unusual and fun time travel/time war story, and the latter another one of Crouch’s written-for-film-rights thrillers (his earlier novel, Dark Matter, is in production for Apple TV+). It is better than the film Limitless, but nowhere as great as Ted Chiang’s (dictation failed here) short story Understand. As you may already have guessed, the story is about a man whose genetic make up gets altered, giving him new abilities.

  • Week 39.22

    I revisited some drawings I made awhile ago and deleted some, finished one, started doodling another. They’re pretty terrible but it keeps me feeling like I’m doing something on days where I’m objectively doing nothing else of value.

    ===

    Splatoon 3 has been my only game on the Switch this week. I’m getting better at it, but the short multiplayer matches are kinda unsatisfying. Over too soon, and with a team of four randoms playing together without the benefit of voice chat, you never get that feeling of great teamwork. I guess I’ll need to go out and make some new friends in real life and convince them to buy Switches and play with me. None of my current ones seem interested.

    Just on a whim, I installed Apex Legends Mobile and started playing it with my Backbone controller. It’s… not bad? But Battle Royale games simply take too long and there’s no simple deathmatch option, so I may be back to Call of Duty before too long now that I’ve got the shooter bug again.

    Netflix Games has a new title called Lucky Luna from Snowman, the makers of Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey. It’s kinda like Downwell + Celeste but casual and atmospheric rather than punishing and frustrating. I mention this because I played it a little while, but also we’ve been thinking about adopting a cat, and one named Luna popped up through a family contact around the same time, and I thought it was a nice coincidence (but not a sign).

    There’s a new Death Cab album called Asphalt Meadows which I bet no one saw coming? I heard it through on my commute and it did nothing for me. Formless songs that don’t seem to be about anything interesting. The new Blackpink album has also been played a few times, and it has a couple of strong songs but mostly feels way overproduced while also lazy in places (the annoying “whipitwhipitwhipit” lyric + nursery rhyme melody line in Shut Down).

    If you want more catchy songs that don’t try to say very much, the new Mura Masa album demon time is very good. Collaborator Channel Tres (who guests on the delightful track, hollaback bitch) also released a collection of musical NFTs with the lo-fi musician omgkirby this week on Opensea. I actually minted one, because what NFT slump??

    The new AirPods Pro have obviously been on my mind as a serial Apple product collector, and as more reviews keep coming out saying how much better they sound, the fight just keeps getting harder, my friends. But with any luck, I’ll be able to make it to Christmas without them. I mean, I’m typing this while listening to music out of my bloody iPad Pro’s speakers and still having a good time, so I should be able to do it.

    One of the things I aspire to, and that new AirPods Pro would help me achieve (of course), is to be a listener of podcasts. I just haven’t ever been able to turn this into a sustainable habit because when I have headphone time on the train or around the home, it’s music I want. But the news that Adnan Syed, the murder suspect subject of season 1 of the Serial podcast, was freed after his conviction was overturned brought my mind back to this goal. Someone told me the Serial team is going to cover the new developments.

    I tried to listen to their second season back in the day, about some army guy or whatever, and just couldn’t get into it. Maybe because the life and times of some army guy or whatever doesn’t appeal at all. After Jose told me Season 3 was about observations on the criminal justice system after spending time in one courthouse for a year, I decided to give that a go. Episode 1 was good listening: a case where the victim of a bar fight ended up the only person arrested and put on trial.

    ===

    On Sunday evening we went to see the Lee Kuan Yew musical now on at the Marina Bay Sands theater. It’s a simplistic reduction of an important man’s life, and there’s a lot to unpack. Why does this even exist, and in musical form? Alexander Hamilton had a couple hundred years to grow cold first; this first debuted in 2015, the same year LKY died. The poster bills it as “history, his story, our story”, but to what degree is it accurate? Is this really a historically sound account? Why does every actor sing in an affected British accent, even the ones who have exaggerated Singaporean accents when they’re speaking? Why are the songs so rough? Why is there literally only one woman in the cast of 21?

    But hey on the positive side, it’s a super impressive production in technical terms, all hybrid video projections and moving stage pieces! Most of the dramatic parts are entertaining and the music is performed by a live band. It’s surprisingly affordable (from $50) and made for a good night out. I also ran into my friend Xin who I haven’t seen in years!

  • Week 38.22: iPhone 14 Pro, Apple Watch Series 8, etc.

    My new iPhone 14 Pro arrived. This year’s Space Black is definitely the darkest shade of gray they’ve done in years. Fitting, because while Apple’s been calling their camera systems “pro” quality since the iPhone 11 Pro, it’s only with the ability to capture 48mp RAW files now that the label may finally be justified, and everyone knows a “pro” camera should be black and draw little attention to itself. Just look at Leica’s stealthy “-P” models without their red logo. So the 14 Pro looks the part, at least it did until I slapped a bright Succulent green case on it.

    I took it out to a concert the same day it arrived — after a few snafus during set up and migration; probably related to the bugs already addressed in iOS 16.01. Low light performance seems improved as promised, and if it’s dark enough to call for Night Mode, those shots are taken more quickly than they were before. However, I’ve noticed some gritty artifacts when using the 3x lens in low light, possibly due to moving objects across several frames being merged. Ideally these would look like motion blur, but they have gross sharp outlines and very digital-looking noise. This is new, and I hope it’s an issue that will be fixed in software.

    Main camera
    3x lens, unedited
    Main camera, unedited
    3x lens, lacking detail in low light, processed with VSCO KC25
    2x “zoom”, unedited

    48mp ProRAW files are not snappy to edit, and VSCO doesn’t seem to like them at all. Load any RAW file in the app and all the filters come out looking wrong. I’ve been bouncing between RAW Power, Darkroom, and Pixelmator Photo, unable to decide which makes processing files least painful. But should one shoot in 48mp at all? The post-shot cropping latitude you get is fantastic, but at up to 90MB a file, I’ll probably use it sparingly, on occasions where it’s better to just grab a quick shot and make decisions later. But for everyday use, I’ve set mine up to save 12mp ProRAW files, and will simply try to get the composition right from the start with the new 2x “zoom” mode if needed (essentially an in-camera 12mp crop into the 48mp image).

    Tyler Stalman and SuperSaf have good reviews of the cameras’ performance on their YouTube channels. I’m slightly annoyed by Stalman’s discovery that RAW files have a much more natural look than Apple’s default processing for JPEG/HEIF files. The amount of sharpening and clarity and HDR effect has been turned up with each passing year, and where iPhones were once known for taking true to life photos, they’re more social media-ready and Samsung-y today. And consequently these photos are not the neutral starting points for post-processing that they once were. On hindsight, it was inevitable. A lot of casual editing today is hitting an Auto-Enhance button or loading up an AI filter in Prequel, Meitu, or some app I haven’t heard of yet. Sitting down to process photos is now a “pro” thing, and pros presumably want to shoot and edit in RAW while they’re at it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    All in all, a nice upgrade to still photos this year. You get more separation and background blur in regular shots on the main camera because of the larger sensor. The new image processing engine also takes advantage of said larger sensor and gives impressive sharpness and detail when shooting in some specific instances. And the return of a 48mm 2x mode is very welcome, but then you don’t get the benefits of pixel binning in that mode so it’s a little worse for low light environments.

    A final word on cameras: the bump must not be allowed to grow any larger. As customers, we need to hold this line. It’s simply too much.

    Really nice fur detail on this closeup (full size, sorry)

    The Dynamic Island is very cool, but not something you really need to think about too often. Buyers expecting a fun new toy they can tap and fidget with a hundred times a day will be disappointed. For me, the notch was a non-issue; it just faded from notice in normal use. The Island is similarly invisible to me until it springs into use for some multitasking. At present, it’s only shown up when I was listening to music or doing some navigation in Apple Maps. The latter is especially nice (as a passenger), I can be texting with someone but still keep an eye on the next instruction, e.g. it shows an arrow saying to turn right in 2km. It’s an improvement that you get used to very quickly, and the animations are nowhere as distracting as critics wanted to believe. After a couple of days, it reveals itself to be the best kind of improvement: one you can simply take for granted while it quietly improves your life in the background.

    The third and final major feature in this year’s iPhone is its always-on display. No, the new A16 chip doesn’t make the Top 3 for me. The A15 in last year’s iPhone 13 Pro was still zippy as hell, and the improvements here are somewhat minor. It’s testament to the A15’s power that Apple can reuse it for this year’s basic iPhone 14 and most people are just like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

    The always-on display gave me battery anxiety. I’d turned on the new/old battery percentage indicator in iOS 16’s Settings and was convinced that my available power was dropping faster than usual for a new phone. But hiding the percentage was probably one of the best unpopular things that Apple did with the introduction of the iPhone X. Nobody needs to see that number drop. I turned it off and stopped worrying for the time being. If you want to give it a break, just turn your phone face down on your desk (this doesn’t work on glass tables, FYI).

    It’s certainly nice, but nowhere as necessary as an always-on display on a watch, because seeing the time and other info without overtly turning your wrist towards you is a real use case. Being able to glance over and see a weather update or the price of bitcoin without tapping my phone’s screen is alright. But maybe not 10% less battery life alright? I need my phone’s battery for playing games and calling cabs and other things my watch doesn’t have to worry about. Time will tell if it’s a keeper or a feature we all turn off and forget about.

    ===

    I also replaced my Series 4 watch with a new Series 8, but apart from the always-on display and non-degraded battery life, there’s not a lot here to write home about for someone who isn’t into the athletic life. It’s just the most refined and capable version of a four-year-old design, and I expect it to last me for quite awhile. The Apple Watch Ultra is simply not for me, and it would take a radical redesign of the regular watch line to make the Series 8 feel obsolete (note: foreshadowing).

    My last one was an Hermés model, and I’m really missing their classic analog watchface with the Cape Cod typeface (see below). There is simply nothing in the standard Apple Watch catalog of watchfaces that compares. If you want an elegant, full-screen analog face with attractive Arabic numerals and maybe just a date display, you’re shit out of luck.

    My old Hermés Series 4, grabbed from a video I made in 2018
    Series 8 with the California watchface, close but no cigar

    One interesting thing that’s new this year, but is actually available to all Apple Watches from Series 4 and up, is advanced sleep stage tracking in watchOS 9. I’ve been using the Autosleep app to do the same thing for the last couple of years, but it’s always been a bit of a faith/novelty thing: there was just no way of knowing how accurate it really was.

    Well, it seems Apple invested proper resources into their machine learning approach, which uses your motion and heart rate to probabilistically determine what state of sleep you’re in at any point in the night, and it comes very close to what high-end, specialized equipment with lots of sensors on your body can do. So Autosleep has been Sherlocked and deleted from my phone, and you don’t need any other apps to analyze your sleep quality; just look in Health.app.

    ===

    One “local” artist I came away from Friday night’s showcase concert quite impressed with was Dru Chen, who played a couple of songs featuring some funky guitar work and a lovely musicality reminiscent of His Purpleness. I have nothing against people inspired by Prince. Everyone should be. Dru’s debut album is on Apple Music, so I’ll be listening to it some over the next week.

    But for live music, it probably doesn’t get any better than this newly remastered 1985 show by Prince and The Revolution playing in Syracuse, now available in goddamn Dolby Atmos spatial audio. What an absolute treat to be transported right into the audience for this. I’ve only heard a few moments so far. It really calls for a fully charged pair of AirPods Max and a clear afternoon.

  • Week 37.22

    Big week for Splatoon enthusiasts: the new game finally dropped for the Nintendo Switch! But I’m… not actually a big Splatoon player. I just love the aesthetic and music and bonkers world it takes place in. I clocked about 10 hours in Splatoon 2, most of them losing to much better players, and it never became a habit.

    But that game came out five long years ago, and I wanted to see how Nintendo would squeeze the last dregs of performance out of their aging hardware with Splatoon 3. Initial reactions: loading times have been greatly improved and it kinda looks like a current-gen game, which I mean in the best way possible! It’s colorful and sharp and the action is very fluid — almost too fluid. I basically suck at this; there’s so much visual chaos with paint being thrown everywhere, plus your enemies can swim in the paint virtually invisibly. But I’m having fun anyway.

    ===

    Big week also for iPhone enthusiasts: what was expected to be just a camera-focused upgrade to the Pro model (that a strong enough person [not me] could shrug off and then go hibernate for another year), turned out to be a little more substantial. First up, I decided not to go with “Deep Purple”. It’s not really my favorite color + the “gray” model is called “Space Black” this year (it was actually “Graphite” last year), so I went with that. Apple usually reserves “Space Black” for things that are pretty much black, so I’m hopeful it’ll approach the iPhone 5’s yet-to-be-surpassed black and slate color scheme.

    The Dynamic Island is early adopter catnip; it changes the core everyday experience of interacting with an iPhone in the biggest way since the iPhone X introduced the Swipe Up Multitasking interaction model. How could you not want to play with that? Like everyone else who read the last-minute leaks that the new sensor cutouts would be visibly “joined with software” into one solid black area, I took that at face value: they don’t want a distracting dot and oval visible all the time, so they’d make it one solid black entity. I didn’t think about you could do something interesting by embracing that concept. The little announcement video that shows the island morphing to become a secondary Dock of sorts sold me instantly.

    Some people on Twitter think the animations are superfluous and will get annoying after the first few times, and while I agree, they’re kinda delightful and novel now and will probably be turned down over the next few years of iOS releases. Like most of iOS 7’s jarring and annoying changes!

    Oh, I also ordered a new watch from the Series 8 lineup. It’s one of the smallest hardware updates ever, with hardly anything new except a new temperature sensor and accelerometer, but I’ve been on my current model for four years and even having an always-on display is going to feel like a big upgrade.

    AirPods? I’m err… content with my current ones. Or at least content enough to not pay full price for improved noise cancelling. I can wait for the eventual price drop on Shopee maybe six months from now. Fortunately, the new Personalized Spatial Audio feature doesn’t actually require new AirPods. After upgrading to iOS 16, you’ll be able to scan your ears and use the personalized profile with older AirPods. I installed the iOS RC on my phone this weekend to try it out a few days early, and it’s definitely made a difference to the feeling of immersion with head tracking on.

    ===

    Kim got back from her work trip, and we got started on Season 2 of For All Mankind, which is such a good series I don’t recall why we put it off for so long. We also saw Nope, and while most people I know loved it, and I get what it’s doing and some of that was very much appreciated, I just couldn’t give it more than three stars on Letterboxd. It’s essentially a two-hour build up to a Jaws joke. With that, Jordan Peele’s batting average with me is 1/3. I was talking to a film buff about it, and was drawing comparisons to Shyamalan’s work: how he showed almost his whole hand with his first film, and then spent the next few struggling to break free of expectations and his own language, which was really a well-practiced, keen sense of cinematic tradition more than the Twists. He films the way Bumblebee talks in the Michael Bay films: in pastiche, homage, and remixes. Which I happen to Really Like, by the way. Nope is Peele’s Signs. There’s even a scene where a slow, freaky motion by an object you can’t quite make out sends a chill down your spine, just like the first time you see the thing in Signs. Anyway, the other guy thought I was talking about Peele, not Shyamalan, and agreed. So I guess there really is something in that comparison.

    ===

    In between meetings one afternoon, I found myself near where I keep my always-growing Monocle backlog (I subscribe but ever hardly read) and flipped through an issue from last year. I’m confident I’ll clear the pile soon. Whilst reading about Veja sneakers and the 10th anniversary of their Monocle 24 radio station, I realized it’s been awhile since I tuned in.

    And thus I discovered Enfance 80, an instant classic of a song from 2020 by the French electronic duo, Videoclub. I don’t exactly know what they’re saying, but it’s something nostalgic about childhood in the 80s, and by god does the sound nail that vibe (as remembered in the 2020s).

    The other song that I’ve had on heavy rotation this week is Paul McCartney’s The Kiss of Venus, both his original and Dominic Fike’s reworking of it. The base melody is super pretty, which Fike dials up with Beatle-esque organ parts, but it’s his addition of a funky new bass line and electric energy in the chorus that are pure bliss. And like all great songs, it ends far too soon.

    I also heard Santigold’s new album, Spirituals, once through and really liked it.

    Here’s one MidJourney artwork inspired by a song and a couple more I made this week.

    The Kiss of Venus, co-created with MidJourney