Tag: Apple

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Here’s one of those weird things I notice occasionally

As I’ve mentioned, this whole driver’s license and ID thing in your phone fascinates me.

In August it was announced the California would “Soon” be joining the ranks of digital ID capable states. 

What didn’t get a whole lot of play was that Ohio brought the functionality online a few weeks earlier. 3-4 days ago Hawaii enabled the functionality with little fanfare at all.

So as of this writing, there are six states whose ID’s can be stored and presented via Apple Wallet.

Looking at the digital representations of the IDs is kind of neat.

It might be that the digital licenses are better looking than the documents they’re intended to represent.

I stumbled across Hawaii being in the list, completely by accident and then wondered how that happened.

There have been no IOS updates over the past few days, so the addition of any of these IDs appears to be independent of the base OS.

This leads me to think there’s some kind of switch that can be turned on without a full update. Which begs the question, just how connected is my phone to Apple?

They talk about privacy and security but if something like this can be enabled transparently I wonder what else can be enabled… Or disabled behind the scenes without the phone or OS mentioning that there’d been a change.

This also suggests that California’s addition to the participating states could be done independently of an IOS update too.

Previously, I thought that states were added to the “Allowed” list via “Point” updates to the IOS and they’d require the user to allow the download and installation of an IOS update.

Yet clearly that is not the case.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I suppose in reality nothing has changed. Apple still has control over the device just as they always have, the difference now is that I’m perhaps a bit more aware of their technological leash.

There’s another thing that I found interesting.

With the exception of Ohio. Every single one of these states, has something in common. They’re all deep Blue States politically.

Even Arizona, though I know there are people who’d vehemently disagree, is a Blue State these days.

California, a deep Blue State will soon be added to the list.

I don’t think it’s anything other than an oddity, a coincidence if you will. But it makes me wonder.

According to Apple and several news articles I’ve been able to dig up, there are other states looking into allowing digital ID’s.

In 2022 Apple said there were six states that would soon allow digital licenses. These States were;

Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, & Utah.

To date none of these states have proceeded with the project. Kentucky for example says “Soon” but has been saying that since 2022. The other states either say in the future or are non committal about it.

With the exception of Connecticut, these states are all Red States.

So I’m wondering if the difference is a matter of political, or religious leaning. Might it be conservatives worried about the intrusiveness of technology on every aspect of our lives, or do these Red States know or suspect something I’m missing.

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Isn’t that an Interesting Trend?

Over the past couple of days I’ve had something going on with my back. So I’ve been sitting in a straight backed chair or lying on the floor.

This has given me time to be both frustrated and happily doing some reading about upcoming computer stuff.

This led me to investigating various applications for my phone, iPad, and Computer. Some of the new apps look interesting, and some of the older recommended apps might be useful even if I have to pay for them.

Before I load, much less buy an app I look at the reviews. Usually on the Apple App Store the best reviews are presented first. It’s the date you have to pay attention to. That best review might actually be 2 years old.

I’ve found that if I sort the reviews by date an interesting bit of information is often revealed.

Many of the apps show a reduction in the number of stars in the reviews and growing customer dissatisfaction. Which is kind of useful, and also very strange. You’d expect the applications to improve over time.

Sure there might be some glitches and transient discontent when new features are added or when the OS changes. But you’d expect those issues to be really minimal. What I’m seeing instead is very consistent death spirals. It’s like a version of an app stumbles and the app never recovers.

Over time, the comments and ratings get worse and worse until no-one is rating or complaining. So the question is, has the app stopped selling? Are people simply not rating it anymore? Or some combination of both?

When I find an app that has no new ratings for a year or more I tend to pass.

What surprises me, is how many apps fit the criteria for me to pass.

Oh, I’ll check other sources too. If I’ve got my eye on something I’ll check other reviews from publications where the journalist is paid to walk through the application as long as they’re not getting any kickbacks for a good review I’ll tend to trust their evaluation.

I wonder why application quality seems to be dropping. I also am glad to find out that it’s not just me that’s seeing it. I know I’m critical and wonder sometimes if I’m too critical.

In this case perhaps I’m not. If other people are walking away from poorly constructed subscription models where the “Benefit” of regular updates degrades rather then improves an application then I’m right there with everyone else.

All this being said, I don’t have a lot of apps on my phone and when something no longer serves me, It’s gone. There’s a journaling app that I’ve been subscribed to for several years. I like it because it’s available on all my devices.

The Apple Journaling app is really very nice, but it’s only available on my phone and I don’t like typing on my phones keyboard. I’d hoped that Apple would bring the app to iPad and then I’d use the iPad keyboard. Had they done that, I’d have cancelled the subscription to the other journaling apps and figured out how to move my journal entries to the Apple native app.

Apple didn’t, but they have extended continuity to a point where I can interact with my phone using my Mac screen and keyboard. Essentially opening a terminal to my phone. This means that I can move all the journal entries into the Apple’s Journalling app on my phone without having to be limited to the little tiny screen and keyboard.

If this works like it appears it will, then I’ll cancel the subscription to the journaling app and move happily on without spending money I don’t need to.

In this case it’s not that the journaling app I pay for had degraded, it’s that it has become redundant. Day One is still quite nice and it’s syncing across devices is well done.

I suppose I was looking at the apps because with the new Apple operating systems being released in the next few months. I was investigating to see what subscriptions I could get rid of and then trying to determine if I wanted to get rid of those subscriptions.

Fantastical for example, is super nice. It unifies todo, and calendar, into a single application. IOS and Mac at one time did this but someone decided that these functions needed to be divided into two apps that both had to be open, in order to go about my day.

Fantastical stepped in and corrected what was clearly a screw up on Apple’s part. With the upcoming OS releases, they are reunifying ToDos and Calendar and Fantastical’s days may be limited on my systems. Honestly Fantastical’s subscription model is pricy. While I like the application itself, I’d prefer to have only one and the Apple Calendar / todo list would serve my needs jut fine.

Fantastical would still be relevant for all the folks who want their work calendar and personal calendars displayed on their all their devices correctly.

I suppose at heart I’m a computer minimalist.

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Just a little Techno-Bitching!

Artificial intelligence robot 0427211.Some of you may be aware that Apple has, over the past few iterations of their IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS, been adding more active predictive text input.

Essentially the various Operating Systems try to guess what you’re about to type based on your usual word choices and learned sentence structures. This can be really cool, and helpful, except when it isn’t.

There are two problems as I see it. The first is that if you’re trying to improve your writing, the automated choices presented tend to make you lazy because it’s easier to choose what’s shown than fight the system. Oh, and the system does tend to get in your face if you change your vocabulary and / or sentence construction.

The second problem is that the embedded dictionaries in these operating systems have gotten sloppy.

For example: If I misspell the word sueing the OS changes the word to seeing, instead of changing the misspelled sueing to suing.

Download Free Oxford English Dictionary.The example above is a fairly common mistake that the internal dictionaries should easily recognize and correct in English. (I recognize that there are other languages in these operating systems and those languages have different rules.)

I however am speaking and writing in English so that’s my personal baseline. In English, there are many instances where the ‘e’ is dropped when adding the ‘ing’, but sometimes that rule doesn’t apply. It’s in those times when the automatic dictionary can be mind bogglingly helpful, or an annoying hinderance.

This is common throughout all the platforms.

It would be easy to dismiss this as nothing, until you stumble over it again and again. If you write a blog, or you’re writing a manuscript it gets annoying fast. We all get bumble fingered if we’re typing fast in a moment of inspiration or if we’re tired and just trying to slog our way to the end of the project or our day.

At these times, when we’re not at our best, the autocorrect systems should be helping us instead of muddying our thoughts by selecting incorrect words based on God only knows what kind of algorithm. 

Microsoft Word induces its own decidedly annoying version of this, with its internal dictionary. I have literally become so confused typing a word in Word that I’ve pulled out a paper dictionary to find the correct spelling. Turns out, the word I was misspelling wasn’t that far off. All I’d done is typed an ‘I’ instead of an ‘e’ and had swapped the ‘I’ position in the word. It should have been the 8th character and I put it in the 9th position.

Word not only couldn’t comprehend what I’d done, Word couldn’t present me with any alternative spelling at all.

Since I know that sometimes I’ll use an ‘I” instead of an ‘e’ I tried both. Word stubbornly refused to show me possible alternative spellings, opting to steadfastly highlight the word as misspelled. 

Even when I erased the word and typed it letter by letter from the dictionary into the document, Word highlighted the now correct word as incorrect, after a few moments Word decided to remove the little red squiggle.

Ahem! 

It’s times like these that I speak harshly to my computer because it’s adding to my confusion seemingly on purpose.

I shouldn’t speak harshly to my computer, I should be yelling at Microsoft! It’s their 1 gigabyte bloated program that can’t seem to get out of its own way.

I remember when Word existed on a single floppy disk and worked pretty reliably. Now, I find that I don’t enjoy working with it as much as I once did. These days, it’s slow and ponderous and while I have a very fast computer, Word sucks up a lot of resources.

I’m tending toward lighter faster programs for text processing and only using Word when absolutely necessary.

I suppose the bottom line here is I expect better.

The next version of IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS is likely to add some kind of AI component running on the devices.

I am not looking forward to this ‘Improvement’. It seems to me, if these software behemoths can’t do simple things like providing useful dictionaries perhaps installing AI software on our devices isn’t a great idea.