Linked List: August 28, 2023

Monday, 28 August 2023

Daring Fireball Sponsorship Openings 

I can’t explain it, but while most of the remaining sponsorship weeks for the year are sold, three of the next four are open — including this very week. All months are good months, but September is a particularly busy month covering Apple, traditionally. So if you’ve got a product or service you’d like to promote to DF’s discerning audience, get in touch. And if you’re willing and able to jump on this very week’s opening, I’m sure we can work out a deal.

In related news, there are more openings than usual on the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show for the next quarter. Similar audience, of course, but a lower price. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Maybe we should sponsor Gruber’s podcast...” you should get in touch with my colleagues at Neat FM.

Inside the Apple Vision Pro Developer Labs 

Apple’s Developer News site has a nice interview with three indie developers who’ve visited the Vision Pro labs, including Michael Simmons from Flexibits and David “Underscore” Smith, of Widgetsmith fame:

For his part, Simmons saw Fantastical work right out of the box. He describes the labs as “a proving ground” for future explorations and a chance to push software beyond its current bounds. “A bordered screen can be limiting. Sure, you can scroll, or have multiple monitors, but generally speaking, you’re limited to the edges,” he says. “Experiencing spatial computing not only validated the designs we’d been thinking about — it helped us start thinking not just about left to right or up and down, but beyond borders at all.”

Simmons’s remarks echo my biggest takeaway from my demo experience: the lack of a “frame” encompassing windows.

And as not just CEO but the lead product designer (and the guy who “still comes up with all these crazy ideas”), he came away from the labs with a fresh batch of spatial thoughts. “Can people look at a whole week spatially? Can people compare their current day to the following week? If a day is less busy, can people make that day wider? And then, what if like you have the whole week wrap around you in 360 degrees?” he says. “I could probably — not kidding — talk for two hours about this.”

Two hours, you say? I know a guy.

Porsche Previews New CarPlay Interface 

Remember last year at WWDC, when Apple previewed the next generation of CarPlay, with support for screens that span the entire dashboard? Here’s a MotorTrend report on the 2024 Porsche Cayenne SUV. Slide 2 shows a CarPlay interface that I had first wrongly presumed spans the entire dashboard, but in fact does not.

Update 1: A few readers have chimed in to suggest this is not next-gen CarPlay 2, it’s just extended use of CarPlay 1. It’s definitely improved, but it is not the new stuff Apple previewed last June. My question: If this is not CarPlay 2, when, if ever, will we actually see a carmaker announce CarPlay 2 support? (Voice from the cheap seats: “When Apple makes their own car.”)

Update 2: Here’s a hands-on report by Jameson Dow for 9to5Mac from last month:

We got a chance to test out some of its features on a 2024 Cayenne, and it’s the first time we’ve felt an Apple-like experience from software made by a traditional automaker.

We’re still waiting for the next-gen CarPlay experience which Apple announced last year, which promises greater integration with vehicle functions than today’s version of CarPlay. In the meantime, though, Porsche has taken it upon itself to build its own app which offers the best of both worlds — a snappy, CarPlay-like user interface, along with control of some vehicle functions which were heretofore unavailable through Apple’s software.

So it might be the best CarPlay interface yet to ship in a car, but it’s not the next-gen CarPlay announced by Apple last year. It’s just CarPlay in the middle with other displays showing built-in stuff from Porsche based on PCM, their own in-house software platform.

Update 3: I’ve now received feedback from three different readers who’ve all said more or less the same thing: they paid extra for these extra screens in their Cayennes or Taycans, and the software experience on them is terrible. They regret paying for it. “A wasted useless screen” said one.

Kolide 

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security. On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed. Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.

With Kolide, when a user’s device — be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile — is out of compliance, Kolide reaches out to them with instructions on how to fix it. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.

Watch Kolide’s on-demand demo to learn more about how it enforces device compliance for companies with Okta.