Rahul Gaitonde

As we saw in the last post, there’s been much written about the iPad’s convoluted multi-pane interaction system as of iOS13. Here is some of it:

Michael Tsai’s extensive roundup of blog posts and tweets about the subject.

Rene Ritchie’s idea mocked up (YouTube video). Essentially pinch-and-drag a full-screen app to one side to snap it into place, revealing a mini-home-screen to the side, from where you could pick a second app. (How could one use this technique to pick a slide-over app once both apps are visible?)

This tweet from Steve Troughton-Smith about how Windows 8.1 implemented multi-pane apps. It’s worth noting what a difference the presence of a persistent taskbar (and start button) made. And that given enough screen width, you could have an arbitrary number of horizontally snapped windows.

Finally, this three-year-old post from Federico Viticci on the idea of a ‘shelf’ to hold a set of app icons and the ability to reveal it and drag and snap apps in place. This was before iOS 11 and the current multi-pane system. iOS 10 had the limited ability to add a second app from a hidden tray to the right of the screen, first introduced in iOS 9.

There’s been a ton of press about the 10th anniversary of the iPad announcement. Most of the Apple blogosphere has been about its current unrealised potential.

I have owned iPad from 2012 (iPad 3, 9.7″ iPad Pro, 2018 12.9″ iPad Pro) and have used them extensively at work and home. The iPad has been my most-used machine for years now.

Apple nailed the form factor, the size, the weight distribution – right from the start. It feels like it was made to be propped up to, watch Netflix. But it feels equally at home in your hands, browsing and reading as Steve did in the Le Corbusier chair on stage. And it is just as natural a digital slate placed face-up on a desk to write and draw on.

And there is an incredible variety of software made for the iPad. Procreate for art, Pixelmator for image manipulation, Notability for illustrations and note-taking, Mindnode for mind mapping, Reeder for RSS feeds, Fantastical for calendaring, the entirety of the Omni Group’s products like OmniFocus, and so many many more. 

Much of the criticism is about the iPad not being enough like a regular computer – for example, lack of support for pointing devices and for an escape key, for more keyboard shortcuts, for a file app that more resembles the Mac OS Finder. But I don’t want the iPad to resemble a laptop. Arguably it’s least appealing when it’s propped up in laptop mode. 

Touch is a totally different way to interact with information, and more software should embrace it. The iPad already has support for deep drag and drop, for window manipulation. Pinch, swipe and twist have been around from the start, as has software support for the accelerometer and gyroscope. The Apple Pencil has pressure and tilt sensitivity and now a double-tap gesture, and iOS supports markup throughout the system. Let’s make more software that embraces these primitives.

The iPad is absolutely a personal computer. It is also the archetype for computers of the next decade, maybe two. Let’s start building software for the future.

Some interesting points I ended up reading when the EU Parliament passed a resolution calling on the European Commission to pass a law for a common charging standard in Europe for devices, making it essentially a USB-C versus Lightning debate:

This Quora answer points out one key difference in the two standards:

Contact springs [for Lightning] are in the socket, not the cable, a design the USB people abandoned with the Micro-B connector. So when the springs wear out — and they will — you need to fix or replace your iPhone… 

[USB-C is an] Industry standard with a specified 10,000 cycle plug-unplug life. Contact springs in the cable, not the socket. When the srings wear out — and they will — change cables. Cheap.

But USB-C is a whole thing by itself.USB Type C ports can support many interfaces in addition to USB: Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, MHL, and HDMI. But it’s not always clear what cables support what capabilities: against an image of a single Apple USB-C cable, the article asks the following question: 

… can you tell what kind of USB Type C cable is shown? What USB speeds does it support? Does it support Thunderbolt? What is the maximum current it can carry? 

The answer:

not full-featured, USB 2.0, does not support Thunderbolt, and 5 Amperes.

The USB-C standard supports up to 100W power delivery, and using a cable to transfer higher-than-rated power can damage the cable and the device.

Marco Arment describes this in painstaking detail, including

Some cables don’t support USB-C PD at all, and most don’t support laptop wattages. Apple’s cable supports USB-C PD charging at high wattages… unless you bought the earlier version that doesn’t. Most standalone batteries sold to date don’t support USB-C PD — there are only a handful on the market so far, and most of them can’t charge a laptop at full speed, unless it’s the 12-inch MacBook.

You can use USB-C PD to fast-charge an iPhone 8 or iPad Pro with a USB-C to Lightning cable. But it doesn’t work with every USB-PD battery or charger, or every USB-C to Lightning cable, or every iPad Pro.

This comment on Hacker News:

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic.

You don’t need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don’t need an app or data – your brain is a wonderful data processing machine.

Don’t be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea, or an electrical current tries to find ground.

If you don’t fix a system, few will. Most people are reactive to it and try to live with it as background noise.

Fixing/improving a system often requires deep understanding of it. An action here will cause a response there. People often document it, but few will do a proper design.

If you don’t control a system, it will control you. You don’t have to change its fundamentals, just move out of the way of harm.

Neatness/order is a way to understand a system. All systems tend to fall to disorder. Disorder is not always a bad thing. Order is very expensive, and only serves as better documentation to those who do not understand it. Very often, excessive order is a symptom of someone who does not understand or control it.

This custom CSS to re-skin Gmail in the browser shows why the open web and open standards like CSS are important to innovation. It’s impossible to change the Gmail app on iOS/Android, but the website? It’s a playground.

Also: Greasemonkey.

A recent move by New York State to ban businesses from accepting only digital payment methods reminded me of this article from a few years ago, which made the argument that digital payment methods are essentially privatised money:

‘Cash’ is the name given to our system of physical tokens that are manually passed on to complete transactions. This first mode of money is public. We might call it ‘state money’. Indeed, we experience cash like a public utility that is ‘just there’. Like other public utilities, it might feel grungy and unsexy – with inefficiencies and avenues for corruption – but it is in principle open-access.

In contrast, digital payment methods run

… off an infrastructure collectively controlled by profit-seeking commercial banks and a host of private payment intermediaries – like Visa and Mastercard – that work with them. The data inscriptions in your bank account are not state money. Rather, your bank account records private promises issued to you by your bank, promising you access to state money should you wish. Having ‘£500’ in your Barclays account actually means ‘Barclays PLC promises you access to £500’. The ATM network is the main way by which you convert these private bank promises – ‘deposits’ – into the state cash that has been promised to you. The digital payments system, on the other hand, is a way to transfer – or reassign – those bank promises between ourselves.

In the US, where cashless means primarily credit cards, it’s been argued that “…it’s incredibly discriminatory not to accept cash because some people can’t get credit”. In India, anyone with a bank account can technically pay with UPI, but it does require an iPhone/Android phone. One can also pay via a debit card, but setting and managing a PIN can be hard for people to do. Of course the NPCI, which runs UPI, is a consortium of banks, but it’s sufficiently quasi-governmental to qualify as a national payments mechanism.

But as the Aeon article describes, privatising money, or having private entities mediate transactions, means a third party entity makes a cut of every transaction for providing this convenience: whether your bank or a payments network. It’s why the Indian government has mandated zero ‘merchant discount rates’ on RuPay cards to use them.

The problem of course with making RuPay and UPI free for customers and merchants is that last-mile payment providers still bear the costs of providing payments infrastructure. The Payments Council of India, a payments industry body, compared the move to scrap merchant payments to ‘nationalizing the payments industry’.

While I’d say access to payments, and now digital payments, should be a civic right, I think we’re going to have to find a way to make offering and accepting digital payments near-zero-cost for those who are new to digital payments while maintaining incentives for the payments industry to expand and innovate.

Astrosat-2: space telescope 

Aditya-L1, 2020: observe the Sun’s corona, photosphere and chromosphere 

Gaganyaan, 2021: foundation of Indian Human Spaceflight Programme; 3 astronauts in 400km orbit, 7 days

Shukrayaan, 2023: explore Venus’ atmosphere, to get to within 500km of the surface

Mangalyaan-2, 2024: second Mars orbiter (may have lander)

Chandrayaan-3, 2024: ISRO+JAXA, orbiter+lander

This article that starts out about silence but is about much more:

For decades, scientists had known that the brain’s “background” activity consumed the lion’s share of its energy. Difficult tasks like pattern recognition or arithmetic, in fact, only increased the brain’s energy consumption by a few percent

In 2001, Raichle and his colleagues published a seminal paper that defined a “default mode” of brain function—situated in the prefrontal cortex, active in cognitive actions—implying a “resting” brain is perpetually active, gathering and evaluating information. Focused attention, in fact, curtails this scanning activity.

Follow-up research has shown the default mode is also enlisted in self-reflection… the brain’s default mode network “is observed most closely during the psychological task of reflecting on one’s personalities and characteristics (self-reflection), rather than during self-recognition, thinking of the self-concept, or thinking about self-esteem, for example.” During this time when the brain rests quietly, wrote Moran and colleagues, our brains integrate external and internal information into “a conscious workspace.”

I find that practising everyday mindfulness – going about one’s daily activities while simply observing them – is difficult to do for more than a few moments at a time but surprisingly powerful. It immediately puts yourself at the periphery of what’s happening instead of at the center, and as a result details open up in routines, people, things you deal with everyday. It’s magical even if you lose it in seconds, and it leaves me feeling much calmer and less excitable for several minutes after. This article helped explain how.