Linked List: June 15, 2022

Wednesday, 15 June 2022

‘The World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox’ 

Speaking of ADA winner Andy Allen and (Not Boring) Habits:

How’d we do it? Rather than hide the screws, I’d like to pull our app apart and show you how the pieces come together. Let me strip off the sugarcoating and share a little secret about habit tracker apps: they’re little more than a glorified checkbox. The interaction is simple: every day you open the app and hit the checkbox to record a completed habit. [...]

In trying to get a particularly tricky habit to stick, I tried dozens of apps and nothing worked for me. Recording an action felt like yet another chore. None could approach the most basic satisfaction of simply crossing out an item on a list.

Could you design a simple action that felt as satisfying and infuse it with as much symbolism? Were we about to redesign the checkbox?

I think you know where this is headed.

I can’t say enough good things about the Not Boring suite of apps — both what they’re trying to do and how well they accomplish those goals. All fashion is cyclical, and the return of depth of texture to UI design is inevitable. The Not Boring suite is trailblazing one particularly opinionated path forward.

There’s a Privacy Angle on Apple’s Decision to Finance Apple Pay Later on Its Own 

Buried at the end of The Financial Times’s report on Apple Pay Later last week (syndicated here at Ars Technica):

Apple said its decision to go it alone was in part taken to avoid sharing personal data with third parties. The company will not charge fees for late payments, in line with Klarna and Affirm, but will restrict access to further short-term credit.

Makes me wonder what Klarna and Affirm et al. are doing with customer data for BNPL purchases. From a Fast Company story on BNPL companies last month:

Until now, the dominant narrative explaining BNPL’s success is that consumers — particularly, younger ones — are hungry for financing options that are less predatory than credit cards with their 15% average APR. But there is more to the story. Due to privacy changes, most notably the tracking restrictions that Apple made available to iPhone users in April 2021, retailers have not been able to target customers through platforms like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as they had before. Nor can they definitively attribute an e-commerce sale to a digital ad. BNPL companies, thanks to their increasingly robust apps and email lists, can solve both those problems. Moreover, they have an advantage over social media and digital advertising in understanding consumers’ credit, and, by extension, their buying power. Even as they undercut credit cards, BNPL companies are, by design, amplifying consumer spending. Consumers can still get a fair deal with BNPL products, provided they stay within their budgets and pay on time. But they should understand who BNPL companies are actually working for.

Spoiler: the retailers.

In its early days, in the mid-2010s, BNPL had a relatively simple job. By offering to break a purchase into monthly payments at the point of sale, BNPL could reduce cart abandonment, a common problem for larger-ticket items, especially those being sold by startup brands such as Casper Sleep and Peloton. Leading BNPL players claim that they can increase checkout conversion rates by 20% to 30%. “We are in the business of bringing [merchants] new customers, increasing their cart size, increasing their conversion at point of sale,” Affirm cofounder and CEO Max Levchin said last year.

Apple Pay Later appears to simply be in the business of allowing users to split purchases into multiple payments, interest-free, with complete privacy.

On Stage Manager Requiring an M1 iPad 

Michael Tsai has his usual wide-ranging roundup of links on the controversy surrounding Apple’s decision to limit Stage Manager support to M1 iPads (2021 iPad Pros and this year’s 5th-generation iPad Air):

As a result, Stage Manager requires an M1 iPad. I honestly don’t understand his argument. I don’t think it’s that pre-M1 iPads couldn’t support virtual memory, since even the A12Z in the DTK did. That processor also had great performance running more simultaneous apps than iPadOS supports. Stage Manager is also supported on older Macs with Intel processors — and older graphics — that are less capable than recent-but-not-M1 iPads.

The controversy surrounding this boils down to people thinking Apple is doing this to get people who own older iPads to buy new ones just to get Stage Manager. I can’t prove it, but that doesn’t pass the sniff test to me. That’s just not how Apple rolls. But, clearly, this is the single most controversial news from last week.

Then he talks about needing fast flash storage for the virtual memory, which only the M1 iPads have, but PowerPC Macs were using spinning hard drives for virtual memory 20 years ago. Surely those were much slower.

Virtual memory on Macs back in the spinning hard drive era was ridiculously slow. In today’s world, when you see the spinning beachball cursor, it usually means some app on your Mac is wedged and needs to be force quit. 20 years ago, we’d see the spinning beachball cursor all the time and you just needed to wait for the system to catch up and return control to you. A lot of the time that was because of virtual memory swap with spinning hard disks.

He also says that Stage Manager is a “total experience that involves external display connectivity.” Why is an external display a requirement when most M1 iPad users don’t even use one?

Given the uproar surrounding this M1 requirement for Stage Manager, I wonder if Apple will reconsider over the summer, and perhaps do something like support Stage Manager on more iPads, but only on the built-in display, and make external display support the part that requires an M1 iPad.

But I can see what Apple is thinking by drawing a hard line with M1 iPads: they want to deliver Stage Manager for iPad without a slew of asterisks regarding which aspects of it work on which devices. As it stands with developer beta 1, an iPad either supports all of Stage Manager (including support for driving up to 6K external displays, and up to 8 apps), or none of it.

2022 Apple Design Awards 

Happy to (once again) see a bunch of apps I either use regularly or am very familiar with win this year:

  • Halide Mark II, for “Visuals and Graphics”.
  • (Not Boring) Habits, from Andy Works, for “Delight and Fun”. They were finalists last year for (Not Boring) Weather.
  • Procreate, for “Inclusivity” (Procreate added some terrific features to help users with motor impairments draw smooth lines).
  • Slopes, Curtis Herbert’s app for skiing and snowboarding enthusiasts, for “Interaction”. Slopes, to me, epitomizes the philosophy of focusing on a niche and doing it as well as possible.

One sour taste from this year’s winners: not one of them is a Mac app.

The Yankees Figure Out a Pitcher Is Tipping His Pitches – a Breakdown 

What a great breakdown from Jomboy. These games within the game are why I love baseball.