Linked List: September 20, 2022

Tuesday, 20 September 2022

The Talk Show: ‘Fluent Cupertinoese’ 

Nilay Patel returns to the show to talk about Apple’s “Far Out” event, the iPhones 14, and The Verge’s redesign.

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Tweaked Battery Percentage Display in Status Bar in iOS 16.1 Beta 2 

Federico Viticci has some screenshots showing the tweaked battery-with-digital-percentage display in 16.1 beta 2. In 16.0, you could either have the remaining charge displayed graphically, as a “meter” within the battery icon, or digitally, as a numeric percentage. What people want, though, is what 16.1 beta 2 does: both at the same time.

(You be you, of course, but I do not display the remaining battery charge as a numeric value on my iPhone. I find it stressful. A general idea of the remaining battery life, as provided by the graphical meter alone, is all I need or want when looking at the status bar. If I really want to see the precise charge, I just pull down for Control Center. Try keeping the numeric percentage off — you don’t need the stress.)

ForecastAdvisor 

ForecastAdvisor:

ForecastAdvisor will show you the accuracy of the major weather forecasters, including Accuweather, AerisWeather, Foreca, the National Weather Service, Open Weathermap, The Weather Channel, Weather Underground, Wetter, World Weather Online, and Weather News. We also provide links to your city’s weather forecast from all the other weather forecasters, so you can compare for yourself.

The overall accuracy percent is computed from the one- to three-day out accuracy percentages for high temperature, low temperature, icon forecast precipitation (both rain and snow), and text forecast precipitation (both rain and snow). Temperature accuracy is the percentage of forecasts within three degrees. Precipitation accuracy is the percentage of correct forecasts. The forecasts are collected in the evening each day.

One knock against the aforelinked new weather app Mercury Weather — it uses OpenWeather for its forecast data, and OpenWeather is meh at best for accuracy. ForecastAdvisor will let you plug in any zip code and give you historical data for forecast accuracy by service. Neat idea.

Mercury Weather 1.0 

Delightful new weather app for iPhone and Apple Watch. If you, like me, miss the infographic-based layout of the late great Weather Line, I dare say you must check out Mercury Weather. Great presentation, and I’m particularly digging the dearth of settings. No need to dick around trying to choose from a dozen themes or layouts. Mercury is opinionated — its creators (Kai Dombrowski and Malin Sundberg of Triple Glazed Studios) have decided how it should look, and they’ve knocked it out of the park.

Free to try, with a Premium subscription to unlock widgets, the WatchOS app, historical data, and more. $2/month or $10/year — cheap!

(My one and only complaint is that they also offer a $35 lifetime unlock for Premium. I want great apps like Mercury to thrive for a decade or longer. I subscribed to Mercury on the annual plan, and I’ll be happy to spend more over the years if it helps the app succeed long-term. I give a thumbs-down to any “lifetime” subscription that costs less than 10× the annual plan, and even then I’m skeptical.)

The Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business 

Tom Persky, owner of FloppyDisk.com, in an interview with Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar for AIGA’s Eye on Design:

In the beginning, I figured we would do floppy disks, but never CDs. Eventually, we got into CDs and I said we’d never do DVDs. A couple of years went by and I started duplicating DVDs. Now I’m also duplicating USB drives. You can see from this conversation that I’m not exactly a person with great vision. I just follow what our customers want us to do. When people ask me: “Why are you into floppy disks today?” the answer is: “Because I forgot to get out of the business.” Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I’d already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I’d just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn’t try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.

Ross Young Expects Dynamic Island to Expand to All iPhone 15 Models 

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

In a tweet, Young said he expects the Dynamic Island to be available on the standard iPhone 15 models next year. However, he still does not expect the standard iPhone 15 models to be equipped with an LTPO display, suggesting that the devices will continue to lack ProMotion support and an always-on display option like Pro models have.

Young is juiced in to the display supply chain, so maybe my speculation that Dynamic Island would remain exclusive to devices with ProMotion displays is off — and thus my idea that the Dynamic Island might remain iPhone Pro exclusive for a few years.