Linked List: July 26, 2021

Monday, 26 July 2021

Not Kidding About Those Blue Bubbles 

Mirin Fader, in an excerpt from her new book, Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA MVP:

Knight searches for the right words. “I don’t want to sound negative,” he says. Knight explains some of Kidd’s methods, such as how Kidd would embarrass the culprit of an error by making everyone but that person run sprints for his mistake. “He just had his way of getting his point across,” Knight says.

Little things were made to be a big deal: At one point center Thon Maker didn’t have an iPhone, messing up the team’s blue-bubble iPhone group chat. Kidd was upset about it and made the team run because Kidd felt that Maker not getting an iPhone was an example of the team not being united.

So now we know there’s a basketball court inside Apple’s walled garden.

The History of Regular Expressions 

Buzz Andersen, in a guest post for Why Is This Interesting:

Eventually, a Russian artist and Twitter user named Gregory Khodyrev realized what was going on: someone at Russia’s state Internet censor, Roscomnadzor, had attempted to block the Internet domain “t.co” (used by Twitter’s URL shortener), but had instead managed to cut off access to any domain containing the text pattern “t.co.” This meant that sites such as “microsoft.com,” “reddit.com,” and even Russia’s own state media outlet “rt.com” were rendered suddenly inaccessible.

Readers with a modicum of technical knowledge may already have an inkling of what likely happened here: some hapless censor, attempting to curb Twitter’s political influence, installed a URL pattern matching rule on Russia’s national firewall that turned out to have been just a tad overzealous. The rule in question was almost certainly expressed using a notoriously abstruse notation called a “regular expression.”

TextSniper 

OCR was a big part of WWDC last month, with the new Live Text feature. But a few of my friends turned me on to a Mac utility called TextSniper that’s offered instant OCR for any text on your screen for a while now. Very convenient, very accurate. I used it last week to turn this screenshot — written by a Facebook user attempting to obfuscate many of the words with extra spaces — into text to include in this post, and TextSniper got it exactly right, weird spelling and spacing included. $10 in the App Store.

Chrome Home — Abandoned Redesign of Mobile Chrome Circa 2016, With Goals Similar to Those of Mobile Safari 15 

Chris Lee, on Twitter:

I’ve been fascinated to watch the reaction to Safari in iOS 15 because in 2016-2017, I worked on a similar redesign for mobile Chrome that we never launched. Finally decided to tell a bit of that story here.

His story:

I created the original concept and pitch for Chrome Home in 2016. It was based off two insights:

  1. Phones were growing in size, and we had opportunity to innovate in creating a gestural, spatial interface that would still be usable with one hand.

  2. Mobile Chrome was also growing in features — but because its minimalist interface kept everything behind a “three dot” menu, these features were underutilized and hard to access.

The idea caught traction internally, eventually becoming a Chrome org priority. […]

We heard a mixture of reactions. The feature gained a cult following among the tech community, but for many mainstream users, the change felt disorienting. Chrome serves billions of users around the globe with varying tech literacy. Over the course of many iterations, I became increasingly convinced that launching Chrome Home would not serve all our users well.

So just as I strongly as I had pitched the original concept, I advocated for us to stop the launch — which took not a small amount of debate.

Really curious to see what the next betas of Safari look like on iOS and iPadOS. I spent all weekend with my spare phone running iOS 15 b3 and the new Safari design is not growing on me, at all.

Toyota, Behind on Electric Cars, Lobbies Against Higher Fuel-Efficiency Standards 

Hiroko Tabuchi, reporting for The New York Times:

Last month, Chris Reynolds, a senior executive who oversees government affairs for the company, traveled to Washington for closed-door meetings with congressional staff members and outlined Toyota’s opposition to an aggressive transition to all-electric cars. He argued that gas-electric hybrids like the Prius and hydrogen-powered cars should play a bigger role, according to four people familiar with the talks.

Behind that position is a business quandary: Even as other automakers have embraced electric cars, Toyota bet its future on the development of hydrogen fuel cells — a costlier technology that has fallen far behind electric batteries — with greater use of hybrids in the near term. That means a rapid shift from gasoline to electric on the roads could be devastating for the company’s market share and bottom line.

This sounds like a once-great company that has lost its way. The real Toyota would lead the way to the future.