Linked List: June 3, 2016

Friday, 3 June 2016

My thanks to Quentin Zervaas for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Streaks, his excellent app for iPhone and Apple Watch. Streaks is a to-do list that helps you form good habits. The point is to motivate you to tackle the things you want to do: anything from daily exercise goals, learning a new language, taking your vitamins, or quitting smoking. Anything.

It’s a brilliant design, both visually and conceptually. I’ve tried a few apps like this over the years, and what kills most of them is friction. If it takes too many fiddly steps to mark off the things you do, you stop using the app. Streaks makes it incredibly simple to mark things done. For anything activity-related, you don’t have to do anything at all — it just tracks information from HealthKit (with your permission, of course) automatically. And in terms of the visual design, Streaks is both highly distinctive and very iOS-y — it doesn’t look like a stock iOS app, but it very much looks and feels like a good native iOS app. That’s a combination that takes a great eye to pull off.

And it is truly one of the best uses of Apple Watch I’ve seen in a third-party app. The complication is beautifully simple (and I’m happy to say, beautifully monochromatic, even on my beloved Utility watch face), the app launches fast (by Apple Watch standards), and then you just tap to mark something done and that’s it. One tap on the complication to launch the app, one more tap on the task/item.

I only accept sponsorships for products or services that I’m proud to support. But Streaks is so good that I want to go out of my way to draw attention to it. I’m not praising it with superlatives because it’s my sponsor; I’m doing so because it’s superlatively good. If you have any sort of interest in an app to help reinforce daily habits (or an interest in good UI design), go check it out.

Donald Trump Is Blatantly Racist — and the Media Is Too Scared to Call Him Out on It ★

German Lopez, writing for Vox:

As The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, Trump said he wants to disqualify the federal judge overseeing the Trump University case because of his “Mexican heritage” and membership in a Latino lawyers association:

Mr. Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the litigation given that he was “of Mexican heritage” and a member of a Latino lawyers’ association. Mr. Trump said the background of the judge, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, was relevant because of his campaign stance against illegal immigration and his pledge to seal the southern U.S. border. “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said.

This is pure racism. There’s no subtlety, no dog whistle, no coded language. […]

Maybe the media plays a role here. After all, instead of calling it like it is, CBS News, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times have called Trump’s comments about Curiel “racially charged” and “racially tinged,” the weasel words the media typically uses to describe racism. It makes one wonder: What would it take for them to finally call Trump or his remarks just plainly racist? If claiming a qualified, vetted judge shouldn’t be able to do his job because of his race and ethnicity isn’t racist, then what the hell is?

Yours truly, back in March, on “The R-Word”:

That phrase at the end — that we have “a culture in which some people believe that it’s worse to be called racist than to be racist” — is something I started noticing years ago. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it, and it explains much about our current discourse on racism.

What’s happened is that all but a small fringe of American society has agreed that “racism”, in the abstract, is deeply wrong. But there are many people who agree that “racism” is deeply wrong who themselves hold racist views. One way they square this cognitive dissonance is by redefining “racism” as applying only to grossly overt racism — using racial slurs, refusing to hire people of color, belonging to whites-only clubs, etc.

Tony Fadell Departs From Nest ★

Tony Fadell, today:

Today though, my news is bittersweet: I have decided that the time is right to “leave the Nest.” […]

Although this news may feel sudden to some, this transition has been in progress since late last year and while I won’t be present day to day at Nest, I’ll remain involved in my new capacity as an advisor to Alphabet and Larry Page. This will give me the time and flexibility to pursue new opportunities to create and disrupt other industries — and to support others who want to do the same — just as we’ve done at Nest. We should all be disrupters!

Larry Page three years ago, announcing Andy Rubin’s “decision” to step down as the head of Android:

Having exceeded even the crazy ambitious goals we dreamed of for Android — and with a really strong leadership team in place — Andy’s decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google. Andy, more moonshots please!

These Google guys sure love to use exclamation marks to express their enthusiasm for executives being shown the door.