∞ Cities need more trees

Published under Mango Paper, Jul 31, 2024

On top of that it just looks better. I'm certain humans have genetic biophilia, which is why we love being in nature or taking walks in the forest. Having trees around us, teeming with birds and other life just feels good. Speaking of birds, trees increase the biodiversity of insects and other small critters in urban environments. It also gives birds a safe-haven from the deadliest hunter of all: the humble house cat.

I very much agree that cities just look better with trees. That's why I fell in love with Menlo Park the place I have been living for 9 years. It's a much greener city than most of other places in Bay Area.

∞ Screen Apnea: What Happens to Our Breath When We Type, Tap, Scroll

Published under Mango Paper, Jul 5, 2024

Manoush Zomorodi, Katie Monteleone, and Sanaz Meshkinpour from NPR's Body Electric podcast:

In 2007, former Microsoft executive Linda Stone noticed something strange happening every time she'd sit down to answer emails. She was holding her breath.

"I would inhale in anticipation, but I wouldn't exhale because so many emails would be streaming in," Stone told Manoush Zomorodi in an interview for NPR's Body Electric. "And this would go on for hours."

Stone wondered how common this was and set out to investigate using "kitchen table science," as she called it. She recruited dozens of friends and colleagues to sit at her computer answering emails while she monitored their pulse and heart rate variability. Of those participants, 80% had what Stone coined "email or screen apnea" — shallow or suspended breathing while working on a screen.

80% of people has screen apnea. That's a lot.

∞ PIN Analysis

Published under Mango Paper, Jul 4, 2024

Nick Berry had a terrific analysis on 3.4 million leaked PIN numbers:

Obviously, I don’t have access to a credit card PIN number database. Instead I’m going to use a proxy. I’m going to use data condensed from released/exposed/discovered password tables and security breaches.

I was able to find almost 3.4 million four digit passwords. Every single one of the of the 10,000 combinations of digits from 0000 through to 9999 were represented in the dataset.

Fascinating observation from the following heatmap:

... many people encapsulate dates in the format MMDD (such as birthdays …) for their PIN codes.

This clearly explains the lower left corner where, if you look at the heatmap, there is a huge contrast change at the height of around 30-31 (the number of days in a month), extending to 12 on the x-axis. (Thanks to zero79 for first pointing this out).

∞ Highlighting Journalism on Mastodon

Published under Mango Paper, Jul 3, 2024

From Eugen Rothko,

To reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism, we’re launching a new feature today. You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications. Writers often work with different publishers over the span of their careers, but Mastodon is the perfect platform to amass a loyal audience that you, as the author, truly own, and can take with you across the fediverse.

This is such great news. I love blogs and journalism, and I hope this can help authors to reach more audiences.

Technically it's simple to enable for your website:

We’ve decided to create a new kind of OpenGraph tag—the same kind of tags you have on your website to determine which thumbnail image will appear on the preview for the page when shared on Discord, iMessage, or Mastodon. It looks like this: <meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@Gargron@mastodon.social" />.

Of course I just added my fediverse:creator tag to mangoumbrella.com adopting this feature. It's allowlist only though. Let's find out when it's rolled out to Mango Umbrella or everywhere else.

∞ Jeremy on Trust

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 30, 2024

Jeremy Keith writes,

In their rush to cram in “AI” “features”, it seems to me that many companies don’t actually understand why people use their products.

Google is acting as though its greatest asset is its search engine. Same with Bing.

But their greatest asset is actually trust.

This is spot on.

When I need to search for good Asian restaurants in Bay Area, I don't trust Google nor Yelp. I open 小红书 (RED)'s search box by default. I trust it to have the results I need.

If I use a search engine I need to be able to trust that the filtering is good.

Small difference: it's not about the filtering. It's simply about the results. Not all results nowadays are indexed or even indexable by Google.

∞ Amazon Takes On Chinese Rivals Temu and Shein With Plans for New Discount Service

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 28, 2024

Tracy Qu and Sherry Qin write for WSJ:

Amazon.com plans to launch a service focused on shipping cheap fashion wear, household goods and other products directly from warehouses in China, as it faces growing competition from low-cost e-commerce platforms Temu and Shein.

In other words, Amazon to launch a Temu clone.

I have bought many things on Temu: cable organizers, painter's pyramids, craft papers, cute stickers, sanding blocks, shelf pins, a watering can, and many more. They are all expected quality for the price and I have no complaints.

∞ Juno 2.0

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 28, 2024

Christian Selig just released a jam packed update to the Juno for YouTube app:

Today I’m releasing Juno 2.0, which incorporates a ton of that community feedback, and truly brings the app to the next level through extensive improvements and new features. Using it over the last little while I have had so many moments where I catch myself smiling. Browsing and watching YouTube on visionOS through Juno is honestly just so fun, immersive, and downright futuristic, and I genuinely think the best way to watch your favorite videos.

This update also answers Google/YouTube's letter:

In April, YouTube announced it would be cracking down specifically on ad-blocking third-party apps, and weirdly, Juno got an email at the end of April from YouTube Legal that voiced some concerns. You can view the full contents of their email here: https://christianselig.com/juno-youtube-email-april-26-24.txt

Now that this update is out, hopefully this appeases Google, as they have also (as of a few days ago) filed a complaint with the App Store directly. I’ll obviously push back, as I believe Juno is just getting caught up in the crosshairs of Google’s targetting of apps that do have ad-blocking, and an app that fundamentally themes a website is nothing new, novel, or insidious.

I too don't see how Juno 1.0 violates YouTube's policy. Christian being so nice went out of the way to put extra work to appease Google, I sure hope Google isn't that stupid to shutdown Juno.

AI Drawing from Beginner to Proficient

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 19, 2024

Every time I go to a bookstore in China, I'd like to checkout the IT section. The books there simply bring me so many childhood memories.

This time, there is a new book next to the usual Photoshop tutorial books:
Stable Diffusion, AI Drawing from Beginner to Proficient.

The book market still moves fast.

∞ How Innovative Is China in Nuclear Power?

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 18, 2024

Stephen Ezell writes for ITIF:

Though China built upon a foreign base of technology, it has become the world’s leading proponent of nuclear energy. Chinese firms are well ahead of their Western peers, supported by a whole-of-government strategy that provides extensive financing and systemic coordination.

I grew up in the 90s next to China's first nuclear power plant Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant. I felt forever educated that Qinshan was one of the only two nuclear power plants in the country. It's certainly a different era now.

WWDC 2024

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 16, 2024

Even though I'm in a limbo state without a day job, between the kid not having school and international travel, I didn't spend much time on following WWDC 2024. Nevertheless, I followed my Mastodon timeline, watched some sessions, listened to some podcasts, and took some notes.

User features I love

You can now mirror your iPhone screen directly on your Mac

You can even interact with it. And notifications and sound on your phone will come to your Mac. This is going to be my favorite feature.

You can now pause Apple Watch rings

I have attempted closed ring streaks in the past, twice. Both of them ended with one day of unclosed ring, then followed by not caring about the rings any more. Apple has finally learned that the ability to pause your streak can actually get people move more, not to mention the days when you have injures or other health issues and it's actually unhealthy trying to meet your original goals.

Sessions I watched

Bring your app to Siri

If your app is in one of their support domlistSeperatorphoto app,listSeperatorse functionalities to Siri via Assistant Schemas. There will be ~100 actions and 12 domains (only 2 domains available now, and the rest coming later). I don't have such an app, so it doesn't seem relevant to me. This approach is such a brute force way of making Siri appears to be smarter. It works great if your app is a supported domain.

Bring your app’s core features to users with App Intents

This is mostly refresher session for what App Intents are. Luckily, I have been keeping up to date with App Intents in Mango Baby and my users do love the features that brought by the framework. The iOS 18's new Control Center controls are also based on App Intents, and I will need to support them.

Design App Intents for system experiences

• If you touch App Intents at all, which you should, this is a must watch session. It's also only 10 minutes long.
• "Anything your app does should be an App Intent."
• "In iOS 18, opening your app is now a common behavior to show people that the intent has made a change in the app."

What's new in App Intents

• New APIs to index app entities.
• Make entities transferable. Also see WWDC 22 Meet Transferable session.
• Special useful IntentFile.
• Entities can now have a URLRepresentation.
• New parameter type: UnionValue.

Bring your Live Activity to Apple Watch

• Existing iOS 18's Live Activity will appear on watchOS 11's smart stack.
• Alerting live activity update shows on the watch.
• You can customize the Live Activity for Apple Watch.
• If you also have a watch app, you can choose to launch the watch app when tapping the Live Activity.
• Local over-budget updates may not be processed immediately, but latest info will be shown when raising wrist.
• Start, End, and alerting updates are prioritized for Apple Watch.
• Adjust your view for Always On Display using isLuminanceRedueced Environment value.

Design Live Activities for Apple Watch

• watchOS 11 introduces suggested widgets on the smart stack.
• Widgets open automatically when raising wrist. (Question: what's the smart stack behavior on watch faces like Modular?)
• Widgets are interactive. Live Activity without a watch app expands to a full view when tapped.
• Widget should only show significant states based progress, action, and importance.
• Controls are best for live activities that need to be played, paused or resumed.
• Watch the WWDC 23 session Design Widgets for the Smart Stack on Apple Watch for additional design guidelines.
• Recommend using standard margins and text styles.

What's new in App Store Connect

• Submit featuring nominations for the editorial team to consider. Types include new content, app enhancements, and new apps.
• Callout: "There’s more to your app than the software people interact with. There are the values you live by and the story of how you create your app. These could be related to promoting inclusivity or accessibility. For callouts such as these, we have the Helpful Details input."
• New TestFlight invitation experience.
• Ability to set criteria, like OS version, for public invitations.
• Use custom product pages with deep links to highlight different features. Best for social channels, marketing campaigns, or Apple Search Ads.
• New promote your app feature to generate marketing assets for social media sharing.

What's new in SF Symbols 6

• New animation presets.
• Custom symbol components need to be re-exported and imported to make Magic Replace work.
• New feature in the SF Symbols app to annotate custom symbols for the new animations.

Meet the Translation API

• Simple translation overlay with system UI.
• Flexible translation API.
• On-device ML models need to be downloaded, but shared with all apps, including Apple's Translate app.
• If possible, use nil source language for auto detection.
• Use batch translation for translating multiple strings.
• Check LanguageAvailability for supported languages. Note that the list isn't huge.
• Use real device when developing.
• Batch translation should use the same source language. Use multiple batch requests to translation different languages. (Question: but often times I don't know the source language so in the end I have to use a single request to translate one string.)
• New SF Symbol for translate.

Demystify SwiftUI containers

• New APIs to build custom containers.
• New API ForEach(subviewOf:) iterates through resolved subviews.
• What's a subview? There are declared subviews and resolved subviews.
• Resolved subviews can be backed up by a ForEach producing a collection of resolved subviews, or a Group.
• EmptyView resolves to zero subviews. Conditional if resolves to subviews conditionally.
• New API Group(subviewsOf:) gives the collection, thus count, of the resolved subviews.
• New API ForEach(sectionOf:) iterates through each section for sections support.
• New "Container values" of resolved views can be accessed by their direct container, to support container-specific customization options, just like .listSeperator.

Podcasts

• ATP's WWDC 2024 recap episode.
• ATP's Interview with Holly Borla & Ben Cohen.
• Sharp Tech's WWDC 2024 (free) episode.
• Under the Radar's Interview with Serenity Caldwell & Kristin Oro.
• AppStories' Interviews with ADA and Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winners.

Other news

• A new Apple Developer Documentation home page was launched.

Other links

• Gui Rambo's tip on developing Control Center controls.
• Michael Tsai's Catalyst (Not) at WWDC 24.
• Louie Mantia's great tips on Dark Mode App Icons.
• Ryan Lintott's tip on using a non-symbol image for control widgets.

My action items

These are my immediate action items in preparation for my September launch.

• Support Control Center controls for all my apps.
• Adopt the zoom API in Mango Baby.
• App Intent: support get, create, edit, delete, and open each log.
• Make app intent entities indexed by spotlight, and make them transferable.
• Check out the new App Intent API in detail.
• Live Activity: check out what is Live Activity alerting update.
• Customize Mango Baby's Live Activity on Apple Watch.
• Submit App Store Featuring nominations.
• Use the new translation API in Mango 5Star, with UI inspired by the Meet the Translation API session.
• Accelerate the development of the Mango Baby watch app, and support the double tap gesture.
• Update Siri icon the Mango Baby.