When iOS 14 comes out, will there be a third party app that basically is Mail.app from iOS 12? I would make it myself if I had the time.

Hmm… I don’t think my MacBook has enough disk space for a new partition to install the macOS 11 Big Sur. Almost half my disk is full of “Other”, whatever that is. 😕

I got my way-too-expensive, but hopefully useful for a long, long while, reusable facemask from Tom Bihn delivered today. I feel a little silly buying it, considering we still have a stack of disposable facemasks left, and they started showing up in stores around here (finally) a couple weeks ago. That said, I feel like we will be wearing facemasks—at least sometimes—for a long, long time.

I have been coding quite a bit at night lately. The visible UI of my app rewrite is nearly complete, minus keyboard shortcuts and some of the settings. I am excited to get this update out of the door sometime later this year, because it has been in flight for far too long.

The best WWDC takeaway for me is that all of my hardware—even my 7-year-old MacBook Pro—is still going to be supported by the new OSes, so I don’t have to upgrade anything if I don’t want to.

I have tried to avoid most of the talk about the Apple vs. Hey kerfuffle about in-app purchasing rules. It does not affect me, and I have enough to worry about at the moment. Apple is really handling this situation incredibly badly, though. It’s astonishing to me, because this is the sort of thing that will make Congress consider them a monopoly and, maybe, drop the hammer on them. For the record, I do not think that Apple really is a monopoly, because it does not have sufficient market share, but I don’t think that will matter in the court of public opinion.

Both of my kids now are on iPads all the time, and I started to worry about them running into porn and malware online. Luckily, I found CloudFlare’s 1.1.1.1 for Families product. It makes blocking that stuff at the DNS level as easy as changing two settings values on my router. It’s free, which is a requirement for me, because I could roll my own service with a Raspberry Pi, but I would rather not have another thing in the house to support.

It’s certainly a hot day when I have to turn on my office air conditioner before noon. It’s loudly whirring now.

I’m working my “day job” now because time no longer has any meaning.

Re-opening is beginning now in my state. I don’t plan to go out any more than I have been for the past couple months, though. Let’s see what happens, first.

The recent buzz about ARM-based Macs maybe being announced at this year’s WWDC is pretty exciting. Maybe I will finally update my MacBook Pro when they appear.

🎵 I have been enjoying the Breaking Singer/Songwriter playlist on Apple Music quite a bit today.

Axios reports:

Contact tracing data from around the globe suggests that while there are instances of asymptomatic coronavirus patients transmitting the virus to others, they are not “a main driver” of new infections, World Health Organization officials said at a press conference Monday.

How can this be true, based on all of what we have observed so far? At least Axios adds some context to the statement and concludes: “The bottom line: These statements are a reminder of just how little we understand about this virus.”

I code in C# at work and in Swift in my home life. Each language has a default indentation style, different mostly on whether opening curly braces ("{") are placed at the end of a line or at the beginning of a line of their own. The former style is called the “K&R” style, though I know it only as “the one true brace style.” The other style is called the “Allman style,” though I have never heard it called any name in particular, and think of it, myself, as “C# style.”

I leave my IDE code formatting defaults alone, so I have coded using the “one true style” in Xcode for Swift, and have coded using the C# style in Visual Studio. Both styles seem to work equally as well, but overall I prefer the way that the C# style helps ensure that all the opening and closing braces will line up.

I have been thinking this week to try to change my Swift coding style to match my C# coding style, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I can’t imagine using the C# style for Swift coding, or the “one true style” for C# coding; it just wouldn’t look or feel right. I found out that a lot of this stylistic distinction is based, as so much is, on historical precedent: influential textbooks or famous programmers set the way, and the rest of us follow. Maybe I will break with convention on my next Swift project, but probably not.

Tonight I’m taking a trip down memory lane with 10,000 Maniacs.

“MTV Unplugged” was a huge hit from 1993, when I was a sophomore in high school. Back then, I listened to ”In My Tribe” and “Our Time In Eden” (my favorite 10,000 Maniacs record) back-to-back all the time.

Another live performance, from 1998, was just released a couple days ago, too.

I’m grilling and enjoy the day, which is a nice respite for me, because the last few days were kind of rough.

Wondering tonight…

What is an effective way to counter a bad-faith argument? Do you call out the other person for arguing in bad faith, or does that always backfire?

I can’t think of a NYC mayor more hapless than Bill DeBlasio. I don’t know enough about him or about NYC politics to understand why everything goes wrong for him, but I do think that people just don’t like him, which may even be unfair to him, like the stupid “controversy” in 2014 about how he ate his pizza with a fork.

The credit card companies have trained me very well to be really, really concerned about my credit score at all times. I check my credit score about once per week, even though it has always been in the “excellent” range and I have no real reason to check it. I have no reason to care about my credit score (I guess I am fortunate in that way) but I obsess about it nonetheless. It has been drilled into me that it is what responsible, ethical people do. I have internalized that logic as “it’s what people like me do.”

I think about China’s “social credit score” being implemented here in the United States somehow, what with the rise of authoritarianism and all, and marvel at how easy it would be to implement, and how much of it is already in place.

It’s day two of me learning new keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Excel (on Windows). There are so, so many. It’s almost embarrassing that I didn’t know them; I have been using Excel almost daily for about 20 years! 🤯

Cop Shows

This article by Constance Grady on Vox argues something I have been thinking a lot about this week: Our opinion of the police is heavily influenced by cop shows.

One of my favorite shows right now is Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s characters, while being funny, eccentric, and often immature, are all portrayed as valorous and extremely dedicated to their jobs and to justice in general. That is part of its appeal to me. I don’t see it as pro-cop propaganda, but it does work that way just a little bit, by presenting the world we wish was true, and allowing us to live in it for a while, as if it were true.

Maybe—and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here—but maybe Mark Zuckerberg isn’t nearly as smart as people give him credit for. 🤷🏼

I enjoyed episode 300 of Upgrade, which was part victory lap and part looking forward to the future. Upgrade is one of my personal top three tech podcasts (the others being Accidental Tech Podcast and This Week in Tech). My favorite part of Upgrade is the camaraderie between hosts Jason Snell and Myke Hurley. I enjoy the enthusiasm and energy they bring to the well-worn topic of Apple news every week.

Oh, so Microsoft Office does have a command palette! It’s accessible via Alt-Q. I knew that “Tell me what you want to do…” option was in the command ribbon for years, but I thought it was just a useless online help lookup tool. All of a sudden I feel like much more of a power user.

One of my personal projects this week is to train myself to use the Alt key-based keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Excel and Word a lot more often. I had forgotten that the entire command ribbon is keyboard accessible, and the implementation is actually pretty clever. I would prefer a command palette, though.