MacBook, defective by design banner

title:
Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.


descrip:

One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com

Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.

FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!
Back-up your data and, when you bike, always wear white.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links in green.

x

MarkUpDown is the best Markdown editor for professionals on Windows 10.

It includes two-pane live preview, in-app uploads to imgur for image hosting, and MultiMarkdown table support.

Features you won't find anywhere else include...

You've wasted more than $15 of your time looking for a great Markdown editor.

Stop looking. MarkUpDown is the app you're looking for.

Learn more or head over to the 'Store now!

Thursday, December 05, 2019

I've had an iPhone XR since essentially the release date, so I've been using it as my daily phone for over a year, upgrading from an iPhone SE.

This is enough time to realize that I really, truly, hate Face ID.

Maybe some day I'll screed on precisely why, but here's it in a nutshell: I just had a failed attempt to Face ID my leg. I'd used Siri a second before, and didn't close the screen while I carried it into the next room. It tried to Face ID maybe my face as I brought it down after reading Siri's response, then haptic'd again for another fail after I'd lowered it in my hand to beside my thigh.

This happened in my home.

It happens all the freaking time when I'm running too. Or when I'm driving and need the map to come back. Or when I'm walking around the house listening to podcasts or whatever and have had the phone open recently.

Face ID guesses it's time to ID me in all sorts of stupid situations where there's no face in sight. Argh.

And what happens when it fails because it tried to ID me when I didn't want it to? It makes me enter my passcode. My passcode is not a four digit number. I can't enter it safely when driving. I can't enter it easily when running. I hate entering it at home when the Face ID lock wasn't my fault.

(Let's not even get started with how many times Face ID doesn't realize it's me. That's at least once or twice a day, and sometimes more than five. And sometimes that locks the Face ID and I have to enter my passcode. 

And at some point I'm going to do a video of how it handles beards, aka the "ignore your chin" feature. I shaved a beard once and could unlock my iPhone by holding a scrunched towel over the bottom of my face.)

You know what I like? Touch ID. I like Touch ID because it only tries to ID me when I actively ask it to. It doesn't guess when I want to check my ID -- and guess wrong -- like Face ID.

I hope this iPhone SE 2 is a real thing, because I'll be one of the first in line to get an A13 chip with a Touch ID. The XR is nice, but the Face ID is infuriating.


Edit 13 Feb 2020: You know, I wonder how much of this is because I use the option not to require attention when using Face ID.

Of course the reason I don't require attention is because I often want to "no look" unlock my phone. Why I have to stop what I'm doing and stare intently at my phone to open it, I have no idea. It's painful. It's not easier than dropping my finger on the phone briefly, which I can do no matter what direction my gaze is pointed.

I hate Face ID. ;^) Ain't for me.

Labels: , , , , ,


posted by ruffin at 12/05/2019 10:36:00 AM
Thursday, February 11, 2010

AppleInsider | Hulu to make videos available on iPad without Flash - rumor:

'The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesnโ€™t support Flash, and all of Huluโ€™s videos currently run inside a Flash player,' states TechCrunch

'But that could change by the time the iPad launches in March. One rumor Iโ€™ve heard from an industry insider is that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market,' continues TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld.


If there's one thing Apple's figured out, it's how to leverage the 3-10% of folks that use Macs to push new standards over the tipping point. The iMac all but killed the PS/2-serial port mismash that came before it. USB was happening, but it wasn't until the iMac supported only USB (and at the same time merged the Apple peripheral market with WinPC) that USB became the dominant connection tech.

Compare to Apple and Firewire, for which Apple collected license fees for a while. Firewire didn't go nearly so well as USB because firewire was an add-on, not a go-for-broke replacement for USB. USB 2.0 became so much more dominant that Jobs himself was eating his Firewire a few years after its introduction. Honestly, to make Firewire work, Jobs probably should have killed USB and gone 100% Bluetooth for peripherals, but Bluetooth wasn't ready for the weight then, and it's not now.

Now, the iPad is killing Adobe. I'm not sure what Jobs has against Flash other than it's not something Apple controls. But he is killing it. HTML 5 video support in Firefox is a better solution, imo, than closed Flash plugins. It's, in a sense, a level less complicated. Once codec compression, speed, and resources are up, up, and down, respectively, to Flash levels, why not use HTML 5?

The iPad helps make that "why not" an easier question to answer. If I'm worried about paying licensing for encoding and having end users have the proper Flash plugin installed, now I have a good excuse (aka, "business plan") to develop an alternative: a new platform that only supports the alternative that helps me hedge my bets against Flash. I can develop for HTML 5, pull an id and Quake 3 (where they released a test version of their latest game on Mac first) with the iPad to help bug test a relatively stable platform, and be ready to roll things out if Adobe doesn't give me a sweater deal.

Reminds me a lot of AOL and Mozilla. At one point, AOL's licensing deal with Microsoft over using IE as the browser engine in AOL's client was coming due. AOL actually released a version of AOL based on Mozilla for the Mac, showing Microsoft that they didn't really need IE. MS no longer had AOL over a barrel, and a licensing deal was worked out. And b/c of this, in large part, we now have Firefox. AOL's bet played out perfectly for us, though perhaps not so well for them.

HTML 5 video is the same move all over again. s/Microsoft/Adobe. s/AOL/[Hulu|YouTube]

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,


posted by ruffin at 2/11/2010 10:28:00 AM

<< Older | Newer >>


Support freedom
All posts can be accessed here:


Just the last year o' posts:

URLs I want to remember:
* Atari 2600 programming on your Mac
* joel on software (tip pt)
* Professional links: resume, github, paltry StackOverflow * Regular Expression Introduction (copy)
* The hex editor whose name I forget
* JSONLint to pretty-ify JSON
* Using CommonDialog in VB 6 * Free zip utils
* git repo mapped drive setup * Regex Tester
* Read the bits about the zone * Find column in sql server db by name
* Giant ASCII Textifier in Stick Figures (in Ivrit) * Quick intro to Javascript
* Don't [over-]sweat "micro-optimization" * Parsing str's in VB6
* .ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); (src) * Break on a Lenovo T430: Fn+Alt+B
email if ya gotta, RSS if ya wanna RSS, (?_?), ยข, & ? if you're keypadless


Powered by Blogger etree.org Curmudgeon Gamer badge
The postings on this site are [usually] my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any employer, past or present, or other entity.