Category: Uncategorized

Update: Looks like iSH won their appeal after getting a call from Apple and will not be removing their app. This is great news, but I wonder if this was only because they went public with this.
 

From iSH Blog:

On Monday, October 26th, just four days after we launched iSH on the App Store, we received a call from Apple informing us that they had found our app noncompliant with section 2.5.2 of the App Store Review Guidelines and that they would remove the app from sale if we did not submit a satisfactory update within two weeks. Despite our best efforts, we do not believe we will be able to bring iSH into compliance by tomorrow, the conclusion of this 14 day period, and we expect iSH to no longer be available to download from the App Store after that time. We are working our hardest to get iSH back on the App Store as soon as possible and hope for your understanding and support as we navigate our next steps in this process.

Thanks for using iSH!
Theodore Dubois, Saagar Jha & Martin Persson

There is a much more in-depth explanation as to why the app is being removed and their disputes if you want to read more.

The reason for the removal seems like Apple is grasping at straws. It’s a Linux stack, of course you can use some outside items. Even if this was a ridiculously popular app there would be so few people using this for nefarious purposes, if any, that Apple really has nothing to worry about.

Apple has made some controversial decisions about what apps they allow over this year, but this one seems different. Instead of Apple telling Microsoft or Google they can’t have their gaming platforms on the App Store without giving Apple a cut, the removal of iSH seems like an outlier. The app was free, Linux is open source, and it’s a command line tool.

Turns out I’m not the only one upset.

Marco Arment:

iOS power users are so devoted, and so desperate for a proper terminal environment, that they made this incredible x86-emulator app with an entire Linux stack inside of it.

Instead of celebrating the skill and dedication of their most enthusiastic customers, Apple is killing it.
iOS apps are so rigidly and securely kept inside of their own containers that this literally can’t do any harm.

It’s an open-source tool for power users and enthusiasts that harms nobody and gives people a feature that Apple will never offer.

And they’re killing it.

Thankfully, iSH is working to keep this app alive in alternate ways.

Does this mean I can’t use iSH anymore?

No, not at all. However, it will mean that you will no longer be able to get iSH from the App Store, which is something which we would still like to be able to provide. The App Store remains the easiest and most popular method of software distribution on iOS, and we’re working hard to save iSH’s listing because we think the app should have a permanent spot there for users who prefer this method of distribution.

Removal of iSH’s listing on the App Store should not affect your use of iSH if you download the app before it is removed. We have not received any compliance messages from Apple regarding our TestFlight beta, so we plan to continue offering prerelease versions of iSH there for up to 10,000 beta testers.

Precompiled builds of iSH (distributed as IPA files) will remain available on GitHub for installation through AltStore and for jailbroken users. Advanced users are welcome to build iSH themselves—it’s free and open source and always will be!

Apple hasn’t just removed iSH. They have also removed a-shell. I suspect more shoes will drop for hard working app developers creating scripting apps.

Mike Peterson writing for AppleInsider:

When Major League Baseball needed to solve the problem of silent stadiums during the COVID-19 pandemic, the league looked to the iPad. To provide simulated crowd noises during the 2020 season, MLB used 30 iPads — one for each team — that were loaded with crowd reactions. But, as Sports Illustrated points out, getting the sound right is harder than it seems. “You’re a conductor of sorts. You’re controlling a symphony,” said Amelia Schimmel, Oakland A’s ballpark entertainment executive producer.

My favorite tidbit with this is just how much thought into the details were. Baseball isn’t always fun to watch, but reading about things like this behind the scenes is a joy.

As I see more and more people writing newsletters instead of blogs I have been spending more time thinking about blogging vs. newsletters. I recently answered some questions that Matt Birchler asked regarding newsletters and blogging. Here is what I had to say originally in quotes, as well as my newly added comments underneath.

1. What about writing in a newsletter is more enjoyable than writing for a blog?

I haven’t had as a consistent writing and posting schedule in the several years of blogging than I have with Tablet Habit. It’s made me a better writer and has made me happier.

If we dig down deeper with this, it isn’t the newsletter that did this. It is by simply making the time to write consistently. I was happy to have written something regularly. When I’m not actively posting stuff I get in a slump, which then negatively affects my mental health.

2. Are newsletter audiences more engaged than blog subscribers?

I would say I get more responses in my newsletter than I ever got with my blog. I think email is making it more personable for readers.

This still rings true for the most part, but also think that the added engagement is simply because Substack has built in commenting whereas my blogs never did. I would be bombarded by spam in my comments. But thanks to Jetpack I’m able to thwart spammers and allow for comments on my blog as well. I even have Markdown support turned on.

3. As a reader, do you prefer reading in your email app to an RSS app (or just the web in general)?

I read lots of newsletters and RSS feeds. It’s about 50/50 for me and I don’t have a preference.

4. Do you not miss things like link posts and “going viral” which are much harder, if impossible to do with emails?

Link posts for me were great but I used them as cop-outs. Instead of sitting down and fleshing out ideas, I just link post something and consider it a day.

For link posts, I do miss sharing things I found interesting from time to time, but it was indeed a crutch for me sometimes. In the future, I plan to still do link posts but I will have more original content to even things out.

As for going viral, after seeing Matt go viral on his site (more on this below), I am not afraid to admit that I was jealous. Don’t get me wrong I am thrilled for him and I think he deserves it; but I wish more of the things that I wrote got traction. I instead require people to sign up via email to read my content because I chose a newsletter over a blog.

5. Is it easier to get people to sign up for a paid subscription compared to the web?

I got a number of paid subscribers when I launched and I have been posting for free (with billing paused) for several months as I get my footing with this.

I will say that I never tracked my readers on my blog very closely, whereas I often find myself habitually checking the stats on my newsletter in hopes that it grows spontaneously. When I see that it hasn’t I get a micro dose of disappointment. Do this enough times in a day and you can dampen even the happiest of times.

Gatekeeping and Hurdles

After sharing those thoughts with Matt about newsletters, he had a fantastic article blow up online. The Loop linked to it, then John Gruber linked to it, and finally Hacker News linked to it. It was genuinely cool to see one of my internet friends gain more exposure for their work. With that excitement, jealousy and dread also came. Those emotions came after realizing that I may never get linked and shared like that with my newsletter. All because of hurdles and gatekeeping.

If you aren’t entirely sure what I mean by that here are the definitions of both of those words and my interpretation of each in the context of an online newsletter.

Gatekeeping: “the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.”

In other words, you have to sign up for a newsletter to gain access to the content.

Hurdle: “an obstacle or difficulty.”

While signing up is a hurdle, I am mainly talking about having to opt-in after signing up and possibly creating an account to sign up in the first place.

The Steps to Read a Newsletter

If you have a newsletter, here are the steps involved for someone to be able to read it:

1. Find a newsletter that you want to subscribe to.

You might find this on social media, a friend might mention it, or you might stumble upon it somewhere. There’s no easy way to search for newsletters except for Google.

2. Find out where to go to sign up.

I have honestly had trouble with this before. Sometimes it is a Substack website that you have to navigate to and sign up. Other times it is a custom website that doesn’t have a signup form available front and center. So, you have to do much more digging to sign up.

3. Sign up for the newsletter by typing in your email and then authenticating it in your email app.

Not only to you have to opt-in on the website, but you have to prove you actually want this by tapping a link. I understand that it is needed to avoid spammers and scrapers but honestly the user suffers from this most.

4. Wait.

You don’t always get the latest post sent to you once you sign up, sometimes you have to wait for the next newsletter to be sent to you in order to consume the new content. Depending on how frequent that is you may be waiting long enough to forget all about the newsletter and once it hits your inbox you find it annoying and intrusive.

How does this compare to getting access to a blog’s entire content library? Well, here are the steps for that.

1. Go to the website or RSS feed.

That is literally it. That is all you have to do to get access to an entire library of posts on a blog.

Personally. I think that having these hurdles and gatekeeping in place has hindered my growth and made things more difficult for people to find and read what I have to say. I also am not a fan in having gates and hurdles up for my work in general. As I think about this more and more I realize that making a newsletter with the sole purpose to write and share with others has some serious downsides.

That being said, I did have a paid tier on Substack for a bit and people did indeed spend their hard-earned money to get this newsletter I created. Shortly after launching I decided to pause all billing because I wanted to have Tablet Habit be free for some time before more people spent money on my content. I wanted to earn that money first. I have since been posting regularly on the Substack for free for the past 3 months.

My personal belief is that some of the most consistent and the best writing I have ever done is in these newsletter posts. These past 3 months has given me the most consistent happiness in my work than I could ask for.

Even so, I feel that I no longer want to make money with my writing and instead want this to be a creative outlet for me. I don’t want this to be a job, I want this to be a hobby. I am a creative person and I need a creative outlet. When I am not able to have a creative outlet I feel empty and hollow. I think about what I can do that offers me a creative outlet, I try to find a way to make something happen so that I can write, podcast, or create in any kind of way.

In fact, the reason that I made Tablet Habit was because Christopher Lawley and I mutually decided to take an indefinite hiatus from our our podcast A Slab of Glass. For those asking, we don’t have plans to return to it but we are still very much friends and have been helping each other with our respective projects. Some of Chris’ best work has been his most recent stuff, so please check his channel out if you haven’t already.

The Future of Tablet Habit

Beginning November 15th Tablet Habit will be moving on from Substack and returning to TabletHabit.com. You can go there today and see all the posts that I created over the last 3 months, including this one. I plan to have a tandem 2 weeks with both Substack and the blog as a transition period. There is an RSS feed for Tablet Habit you can subscribe to as well.

I still plan to be just as consistent as I have been with the Tablet Habit Newsletter on the website, and I intend to continue to be for the foreseeable future, but I miss things like link-posting and possibly being linked on other websites. Having a newsletter made me a better writer, but I want to be a better publisher and move back to blogging.

I no longer want to be driven by stats and subscriptions, I just want to write about what I want and hope it brings some kind of joy to others. I love the open web and I miss being an active part of it. Something about having all of my work accessible for free makes me less anxious and more driven to share more.

For those of you that are paying subscribers, I want to say thank you for being with me the last few months. It means the worldto me you decided to support me. If you would like a refund I sadly do not have the ability of doing this, but you can contact support@substack.com and get with them. Please know that this decision hasn’t been made without your consideration. I do not want to continue taking your money for content that I intend to be completely free and open. I have given over 3 months to this because of those who paid on launch day.

As for people that prefer newsletters, I realize that you may want to read your content via email. If you want to do that I suggest services like Feed2Mail or Blogtrottr. Maybe there is an even better option out there but I don’t actively seek to have RSS feeds sent to me via email.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who was a reader of Tablet Habit as a newsletter and I hope you will continue to read on TabletHabit.com.

I have spoken about the app Drafts before, and one pain point I have had with it was organizing my actions. For me, it always felt like what was out of sight was out of mind for me. I would often forget what actions I had in Drafts because they were divided into different groups depending on the type of work I do.

Originally, I thought that I needed to have different groups for different aspects of my life. For instance, I would have a “quick action” group that would have actions line sending texts to people I frequently message, create an email draft with the note I created in Drafts, and other quick things to send out what I just wrote. I would also have a “writing” group. In there I had actions like copy as Rich Text, and Fix Empty Links to help my writing workflows. I had several other groups as well that I found over the years to play around with, but now they have been collecting dust and adding to my digital clutter. On paper this idea of grouping actions seemed to be fine, but in practice I often found myself sticking to just one group of actions regardless of what mode I was in.

One common thing that people say about Drafts is that it allows you to focus less on where your text is going and instead focus on what you want to write. I totally get that, but for me I have the same issue with my Drafts actions. To fix this problem I decided to create one list of actions and use spacers.

One thing that helped me make this decision to move all of my actions into one space was mind-mapping everything out. I created a node for each action I wanted to keep in Drafts. From there I originally was going to divide them out into different groups, but after taking stock on the 20 actions I had I decided against that. I don’t need to divide 20 actions into several groups. If I had significantly more actions, I might have considered it.

Plus, the added benefit of having everything in one group is that I will be constantly reminded of the different things I can do with Drafts. When I was going through all the different actions I had in the numerous groups I found and created over the years I rediscovered so many cool things I can do with Drafts. For instance, I love the action to put in today’s date. As someone that has to create notes with today’s date in them for my day job this comes in handy way more than you might think. I honestly had no idea I had this action in Drafts but now that I have everything in one central action hub I do now.

I may decide later to group out my actions once more, but for now I am happy with the singular action group I have in place.

 

I haven’t had my hands on the new iPad Air, and I don’t plan to. However, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been consuming all the reviews out there. To no one’s surprise I have watched Christopher Lawley’s review. He managed to get a review unit from Apple, and he has done his due diligence with this 21-minute review. Here’s a few quick thoughts I have on what Christopher had to say.

Video Editing

I was very shocked to hear that the iPad Air could handle LumaFusion without any hiccups. I thought this would be the tell between the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. Apparently, the new A14 chip has some serious kick in its performance. Sure the screen is smaller than the 12.9″ Pro but that isn’t a big deal to me as I have edited video on the 11″ iPad Pro without issue. Clearly Apple is wanting to make their mid-tier iPads to still be able to do the high-end tasks like video editing without issue.

No 5G

I am surprised that the iPad Air cellular is not 5G supported. It was such a huge selling point for the iPhone 12 and yet an iPad they release concurrently doesn’t offer that. My best guess is that the first iPad to get 5G support will be the next iteration of the iPad Pro and will be a Pro-only selling point for a short while until Apple decides 5G is no longer “Pro” and deserves to be on all of their iOS and iPadOS devices. My rough guess is by 2022 all of their devices will be 5G supported. Hell, with Apple Silicon I wouldn’t be overly shocked to see a new Mac offer 5G as well.

Bring Back Whimsey

This wasn’t in the video, but I really wish Apple would allow Pro models to get more color options. Silver, Black, and Gold just aren’t fun like the Sky Blue, Green, and Rose Gold the iPad Air comes in. Sure the iPhone 11 Pro had a green and this year the iPhone 12 Pro comes in Pacific Blue but honestly, I feel they are exceptions to the rule rather than being standard options. I want Apple to stop punishing Pro users into bland color options and allow some whimsey in the higher-end models.

The Worry I Have with the Air

The new iPad Air is now strongly considered to be the best iPad for most people. I plan to go into the iPad lineup and share my thoughts on that soon, but for this post I will just say that the iPad Air is indeed where the majority of people wanting an iPad should go to.

Here’s my big concern: the iPad Air and the iPad Pro 11″ are more similar than they are different.

They both offer the same accessories, support the 2nd generation Apple Pencil, have the same size body, nearly identical screen size, and more. The chipset does have some differences in core count for both CPU and GPU but the look, feel, and overall performance are so similar that I worry that the iPad Pro 11″ will be phased out due to redundancy. As someone that doesn’t want a 12.9″ iPad Pro but wants the power of the iPad Pro I worry I will be one of the few people to fall between the cracks down the line.

Don’t get me wrong, if I had to get the iPad Air over the iPad Pro 11″ I would survive, but I wouldn’t be completely happy with it. Honestly, if I had to choose between the iPad Air or the 12.9″ iPad Pro it would be a tough call for me. I love the size of the 11″ body but I think that the power the 12.9″ offers would make me gravitate to that. That said, there is the price difference to account for.

If we were to remove the iPad Pro 11” from the lineup today I could get and iPad Air 256gb for $749 whereas an iPad Pro 12.9” at 256gb is $1099. The price difference is so huge between these two models that I could get the iPad Air, Apple Pencil, and the Smart Folio keyboard case for $1120. Add just north of a hundred bucks to that and I could get the Magic Keyboard instead of the Folio for $1247.

Thankfully, we aren’t at this point yet in the lineup. There is an 11″ iPad Pro still available for purchase, but I am left worried that I will later be stuck between a less powerful iPad at the perfect size or a well-performing iPad Pro that is too cumbersome. Time will tell once the next line of the iPad Pros comes out.

To me, I think that the iPad Air offers the most bang for your buck than any iPad has offered in a long time. So, when people ask me what iPad they should get you better bet that I will say the iPad Air 9 time out of 10.