Shawn King wrote about the painful death of BlackBerry:
The reasons why BlackBerry failed staying as the coolest communication devices aren’t exclusive to them. When one of the biggest phone companies plummets to oblivion, it’s worth analyzing.
Check out the embedded video.
Bryner is among the many high school students around the country who completed Advanced Placement tests online last week but were unable to submit them at the end. The culprit: image formats.
A screenshot of the AP testing portal informing a student that they weren’t able to submit their responses. Screenshot: College Board For the uninitiated: AP exams require longform answers. Students can either type their response or upload a photo of handwritten work. Students who choose the latter option can do so as a JPG, JPEG, or PNG format according to the College Board’s coronavirus FAQ.
But the testing portal doesn’t support the default format on iOS devices and some newer Android phones, HEIC files. HEIC files are smaller than JPEGs and other formats, thus allowing you to store a lot more photos on an iPhone. Basically, only Apple (and, more recently, Samsung) use the HEIC format — most other websites and platforms don’t support it. Even popular Silicon Valley-based services, such as Slack, don’t treat HEICs the same way as standard JPEGs.
If they had tried testing it with the most commonly used devices they would have noticed this bug instead of only discovering it after rollout.
BakingPixel is now on Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages! Since this is now a static site, you should see a massive boost in performance.
We’ve also used this opportunity to refresh the design. The old design we created with WordPress has been around for 7 years, with some minor tweaks over the years. This is the first major facelift and, like our other sites that we reworked, we have added auto dark mode support.
Thank you for your support all these years and we look forward to putting more content out here!
Fiddling with the home screen on iOS is just awful. Whenever I sit down and try to clean it up — deleting apps I don’t use, moving apps into some semblance of order — it drives me insane. The 1984 Finder was awesome for rearranging icons, right on day one. Yet we’re 13 years into iOS and rearranging apps is still terrible, because the whole thing is based on a home screen design where there’s just one screen and no third-party apps. The concept worked fine when all you could do was rearrange 12 built-in apps on a single screen. It feels like a prank trying to use it today.
Having an option to select multiple apps and delete them all at once like photos would be really useful. Granted we won’t use it all the time but it will reduce so much friction.
Also, look at how we get to choose how what apps we want in the Dock on the Mac. What if we choose what we want on the home screen, let those we don’t want organise themselves based on category into folders, and we just search for them via Spotlight? Or just ask Siri to launch the app.
The Next Web: France orders social media platforms to remove extremist content in 1 hour or pay a fine.
France just passed a new law forcing major social media platforms requiring social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to remove sensitive content related to pedophilia and terrorism within just one hour of notification.
This new order also states that these platforms need to remove hateful content promoting racism, sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and aggravated insults within 24 hours of notification.
Having seen hate speech run amok on social media of late, this is a much needed move.
It doesn’t work very well in iOS 13, either. Many times, I’ll type the exact text that appears in the app, and it won’t find it. So I mostly just scroll and read. A long time ago, I reverse-engineered the transcript file format for EagleFiler, so that’s how I search older messages. Unlike in Messages, the matches are highlighted, and you can select the text.
When I need to find something in my iMessages I just grab my iPhone. And let’s not forget that this option has only become viable since iOS13, before which it was just as bad on there as well.
That’s what I do as well. Search works so much better on the iPhone. Keying in the same text generally gives me no results on the Mac and what I’m looking for on the iPhone.
In comparison, It’s so easy to search in Telegram and WeChat on macOS.