HN user
While the stones are usually roped off from up close viewing still loom large because of their cultural impact, the area around them is beautiful. The Heritage org. has brought up huge tracts of land around them to protect it and restore it to the way it "was". You get to wander around most of those vast fields freely, among ancient mounds. On a nice summer's day, it really is one of the most peaceful and beautiful things to do.
Tab styling across the board is terrible. I'm struggling to read inactive tab labels in Terminal.
I've used and loved macs for decades. This is the first time (maybe the second, if you count early Apple Music) that I've thought they've lost their way.
Your point about not tackling the hardest challenges is well made. However the benefit of needing to appeal to the political Centre (a factor of compulsory voting) is that Australia also avoids the crazy swings and debilitating division of left and right that other nations can face.
It’s not, though.
It might be uneven in different markets, but they’ve been working very hard at improving the content and UX and in a number of markets it’s a viable and very strong competitor to Google Maps.
It will sometimes feel the lack of Google Business Listings, but the driving/walking/biking/transport/streetview experience is uniformly great where they’re released optimised versions of their maps — in my case Australia.
This and music control are the uniques cases where Siri Just Works for me. “Add toothpaste to my shopping list” no fluff no nonsense replies, just “I added that to the shopping list” - and it’s on my phone’s Reminders in that list.
I wonder how well they’ve optimised Siri for a just few specific use cases like this, because nothing else seems to reliably work on it.
‘For real’ is definitely an Australian-ism (pretty old fashioned, usually inflected up as an incredulous question ‘fa REAL?’, but I’ve not really heard ‘For real life’. Could be a kid thing.
Very much dependent on the country. Where they have rolled out their “new” maps based on their own mapping (and not licensing a mix of others like TomTom), they are much much better than people think.
https://www.apple.com/au/newsroom/2021/12/apple-rolls-out-al...
In Australia, I rarely go for Google Maps anymore. Apple Maps search and driving UI is cleaner, the LookAround streetview equivalent is great, and spoken directions are more natural. Google Maps still has the edge in business location data though - like finding “a barber nearby”. As more people use it, it’s clear Apple Maps is catching up there too.
But when I was in southern Europe, which I guess haven’t been upgraded yet, I found they’re a long way behind Google Maps in terms of routing, detail map data, and updates to business locations.
They did not use an OS from Blackberry / RIM.
Vertu emerged from Nokia when they were at their peak - Frank Nuovo was the key designer there, and it was one of his projects.
From memory the original versions (Vertu Signature, Vertu Ascent, … ) used one of the Nokia feature-phone OSs as the base - maybe Series 30 or Series 40? - or they might have used one of the Symbian OS’es (Series 60).
They definitely used a Symbian OS in subsequent Vertu devices, before switching to Android later on.
They were incredibly well made devices, but ridiculous.
Source: I worked at Nokia for a while in a non-engineering role. I spent some time with a Vertu Ascent, and had access to the Vertu stores in Asia.
Australia has a generally highly-regarded and affordable health care system (public and private).
They were installed as useful & beautiful features in the Qantas First Class lounge at Sydney International Airport, and are much loved:
https://theluxurytraveller.com/2019/03/review-qantas-first-c...
While both AppleCard and AppleID were involved in the story, the situation wasn’t exactly that.
Apple issued this statement in response: “We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience we may have caused for this customer. The issue in question involved a restriction on the customer’s Apple ID that disabled App Store and iTunes purchases and subscription services, excluding iCloud. Apple provided an instant credit for the purchase of a new MacBook Pro, and as part of that agreement, the customer was to return their current unit to us. No matter what payment method was used, the ability to transact on the associated Apple ID was disabled because Apple could not collect funds. This is entirely unrelated to Apple Card.”
https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated...
*Vietnam not landlocked; but in the middle of a very populous region
The ability to limit spread by controlling your border has been a factor, and that’s certainly easier for island nations.
But it’s not the only factor: well-managed healthcare systems, clear government policy and action, and public support for controls are also important.
e.g.
- Vietnam: landlocked, populous, excellent internal response: just over 1000 cases and 35 deaths; approx. 60 active cases currently
- UK + Ireland: quite frankly a bit of a mess
Australia.
After a (relatively) small second wave spike in one of the states (Victoria) which is now under control, there are very few cases of community transmission.
It’s the result of a combination of: controlled island borders, unpopular but effective internal hard borders between some states, mandatory managed hotel quarantine for inbound passengers, well-executed contact tracing by health departments, broad access to PCR testing now returning results usually within 12-24 hours, and a population that’s been surprising willing to “take one for the team” and go into lockdowns and wear masks when needed.
Australian here: It’s not a given that the other hotel residents are going to get sick.
The quarantine residents are bussed in directly from customs / border control and isolated to separate parts of the hotel.
Their rooms are locked down (they don’t get the key), they don’t get in room cleaning (they can get their laundry and fresh supplies dropped off / picked up in a controlled way from outside the room periodically), and they get room service delivered / picked up outside the room. Staff have/are being trained in performing those duties.
All paid for by the government, too. It’s not ideal for anyone, but for the community at large it’s the best possible policy given how many new infections were coming from inbound travellers.
It also works well for the hotels which have very high vacancy rates due to lack of tourists.
It’s bad. I’ve lived in Sydney 21 years and there’s been nothing like this before. We were on the harbour this summer afternoon staring directly at the sun at 5pm - it was a barely visible red dot in the smoke haze - and ash was raining down on us.
The current drought is so tough on December 10 Sydney starts Level 2 water restrictions for all residents and businesses.
There’s an increasing sense among my friends of all political persuasions that we’re heading into this future faster than anyone anticipated - and that our government is asleep at the wheel.
my experience with Slack technical folk (on some tricky auth bugs and other issues we've hit over the years) has been excellent. They're fast, knowledgeable, never pass the buck, and communicative. If it's the PMs doing this, they're letting down an otherwise great team.
Sounds a bit like what Apple are doing with the Siri face on watchOS. It surfaces what it believes are relevant tiles/cards in a timeline based on your interests, appointments, interactions, current location, and daily activities.
OneDrive and OneDrive for Business (which is really the Sharepoint thing) really has turned out to be good. We’ve been using it for about 3 years now in our small business which is mostly a Mac + Office365 + Azure AD shop.
We have a mix of iOS and Android, and some physical and virtual Windows 10 PCs.
The macOS sync client is generally very fast and keeps out of the way. It gets tripped up occasionally, but no more so than any other. It was really clunky when we first started using it for Sharepoint, but they seem to be iterating fast these days and we see very few issues at all.
For Sharepoint365 the sync client means our people just treat it as our “cloud network drive” with selective folder sync options (we don’t use any of the other Sharepoint stuff).
If you’re an Office365 shop, the integration is incredibly nice. I can start work on a Word doc on a PC and save it in OneDrive or Sharepoint365, and then on my iPad open Word and the document is sitting right there as the last file I worked on in the File>Open screen, with a “Go to where you left off” marker when the file is open.
We tried Box and liked it initially, but it became hard to justify it in the face of easy functionality and pricing from Office365+OneDrive. iCloud isn’t flexible enough for most of our business use cases. DropBox performance was always an issue and we didn’t want to saddle our dev laptops with that performance hit.
Microsoft blog: “The new iCloud for Windows app introduces a new iCloud Drive experience for Windows 10 users powered by the same Windows technology that also powers OneDrive’s Files On-Demand feature, enabling users to be more productive offline on mobile devices and quickly share files on iOS.”
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/06/11/apple...