Andrew Orr

Writing for Quartz, Nir Eyal opines on the reason why Apple made Screen Time on iOS 12, as well as Google’s Digital Health platform. Mr. Eyal studied the psychological techniques that companies use to get people hooked, and he wrote a book too. He says that Apple and Google don’t want you to get addicted, but instead form a healthy relationship with your devices.

As they often do with successful apps built on their platforms, Apple and Google took note of what consumers wanted and decided to incorporate these features as standard…They also went beyond what app makers can do by adding features only the operating system makers can offer, like batch notifications to reduce the frequency of intraday interruptions and the ability to put the phone in “shush” mode by flipping it over.

With few exceptions, when a product harms people, consumers tend to use it less often or find better alternatives. The feature fight between these two tech rivals benefits everyone. The move to help users create healthy habits with their devices is an example of competition making products better.

Writing for Techcrunch, Callum Booth talks about a device called Runvi. It’s on Kickstarter right now, consisting of two insoles, and it wants to be your AI-powered running coach by analyzing the way you move. These AI shoes are connected by something called the Core, which is a part of the insole you can remove. This acts as the brain, and powers the sensors, as well as logging and storing data before sending it to your phone.

There are other running products out there – the Lumo Run or Arion, which is another insole tracker, for example – but Runvi, on the surface at least, appears to be superior. It has more sensors, is cheaper than Arion, and is more self-contained, as it doesn’t need anything hooking over your shoe.

It’s vital to remember this is just on paper though. While the idea and set-up looks promising, we’ll have to wait until we have the physical copies in our hands, or, you know, in our shoes, before we can see how it works in reality. Until then, I’m quietly hopeful I won’t hurt my knee any more.

In another good article by FastCoDesign, Jesus Diaz writes how Apple’s research group developed some of the most highly influential tech of the century. For example, a feature coming in macOS Mojave called Stacks automatically categorizes your files on the desktop. But Stacks isn’t a new technology, and evolved out of concepts that ATG worked on.

The ATG was founded in 1986 by Larry Tesler, a computer scientist who had previously worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center–aka PARC, the birthplace of the graphic user interface–before moving to Apple. The group’s mission was to create breakthrough technologies that didn’t need to be products.

Though they were introduced onstage at WWDC as “Stacks,” they were once known as “Piles.” It extended the desktop metaphor even further by allowing users to organize their files in stacks of papers, images, or videos, leaving folders for more permanent archival purposes–just like real life.

President Trump has effectively started a trade war with China—as well as other countries—by imposing tariffs on metal imports from Europe, Canada, and Mexico. These countries are fighting the U.S. trade war, with China focusing on American-made goods like beef, poultry, tobacco, and cars.

Tim Cook worries that Apple could be collateral damage. Last month he visited the White House to warn the president that Apple’s position in China could be threatened by tough measures coming out of the U.S. The New York Times notes:

In a trade and technology showdown between the United States and China, Apple and Mr. Cook have a lot to lose. With 41 stores and hundreds of millions of iPhones sold in the country, there is arguably no American company in China as successful, as high-profile and with as big a target on its back.

FastCoDesign shared an interesting visual tool that shows what your city looked like up to 750 million years ago. It’s called Ancient Earth. You enter your address, click on the menu to pick the age, then it instantly shows how the land mass looked.

Earth was a completely different planet 240 million years ago. Back then we had Pangea, a mashup of a supercontinent formed by older continental units and surrounded by water. Then, around 175 million years ago, magma pushed this landmass’s tectonic plates in different directions, slowly forming the continents we know today.

Fun fact: Mar-a-Lago has always been a swamp–and L.A. traffic has always been crap. True story, folks.

512Pixels has a good article wherein the author shares thoughts on Dark Mode in macOS Mojave. As always, Apple puts great thought into its designs, and Dark Mode isn’t just a simple color inversion. At WWDC, Apple introduced guidelines for Dark Mode:

• Dark interfaces are cool.
• Dark interfaces are not just inverted.
• Dark Mode is content-focused.

The result is a darkly beautiful operating system that gives a fresh Mac experience.

As we’ve seen, this is far from a mere inversion of the default Appearance. Apple has gone through and fine-tuned the smallest details to make this work.

For example, the window shadows are different between the Light and Dark Appearance. In Dark Mode, they are a little crisper and slightly more opaque, complete with an inner stroke around the edges of windows to help them appear more defined.