Web Excursions 2021-06-12
On Digital Gardening, Blogs, and Knowledge
The market responded to GTD with a huge variety of apps and systems and most of us have settled into something that works well enough.
Where I’ve found the most friction is in the information management that often drives task management, and I’m not alone.
Digital Gardens: Problem the First
Digital Gardening is a fun expression that means nothing to me
The problem now is with recalling the information and making connections between it all.
I like the idea of grooming my reference material but I can barely find time to do laundry.
I think one of my biggest problems is over-saving.
I’ve learned a few things about myself over the years and
I’ve decided to accept some of it rather than fight against it.
If I bookmark something to read-later I almost certainly will NOT read it later.
I’m bookmarking as aspiration.
I don’t read anything later. I read now or I don’t read it.3
Reference Integrity: Problem the Second
Text is being eaten by video and audio on the internet. It was inevitable.
Video and audio are often richer experiences with nuanced context that is much harder to achieve with text alone.
But it sucks to reference video and audio
PDFs are damn good: They are portable, relatively small, and I can annotate them. I need something similar for audio and video.
The Speed of Thought: Problem the Third
Over the past decade I’ve changed something substantial about how I capture information. I’ve gone from pure text to a wide mix of content in my notes.
It’s so much faster to grab a screen shot of something than it is to explain it with words. It’s also a lot faster to draw a diagram than it is to explain all of the possible connections between concepts.
My notes are now full of drawings, images, mindmaps, and flow diagrams. This makes it much easier to understand complex ideas but much harder to use a pure Markdown note system.
What's a Blog
I think I want to return to this old-fashioned concept of blogging for Macdrifter.
I want to worry less about “reviewing” things and more about leaving tasty breadcrumbs.
That’s not to say I don’t still enjoy writing fun reviews but they are very time consuming and not very re-usable.
Inspiration and Aspiration
There are blogs I really like that I probably wouldn’t recommend to most people I know. They are weirdly structured or oddly specific or the writing is hard to digest. Those writers are my kind of people.
Tweet Blogging: Dave Winer's http://scripting.com/
Work Log: Christian Tietze's https://christiantietze.de/
The Explainer: http://eclecticlight.co/;https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/
Opinions about Opinions:
https://pxlnv.com/blog/open-rates-mail-market-share/ [a bit of a link blog mixed with opinion pieces.]
Moved to Substack: https://popular.info/p/koch-and-switch [ strong opinions ]; https://ez.substack.com/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destroying [screeds]; https://boingboing.net/ [ostensibly a link-blog peppered with opinionated comments]
The Linkers: https://kottke.org/21/06/the-last-free-election-in-america;https://waxy.org/
ATP ep. 434
[Talking about that Craig Federighi thrown away the iPad on his hand after finishing the demo was a tribute to Prince]
What happened to Prince's guitar after 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps'? | The Current
On March 15, 2004, Prince was inducted to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame; at the end of the song, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Prince casually tosses his guitar, never to be seen again.
GroupActivities - Apple Developer
Create app-specific activities your users can share and experience together.
Implementation
This framework leverages the FaceTime infrastructure to synchronize your app’s activities and to invite other participants to join those activities.
When your app’s UI contains shareable activities, adopt the GroupActivity protocol in the objects you use to represent those activities.
When a group activity begins, use the GroupSession object to synchronize your app’s behavior with other participating devices.
end-to-end encryption on all session data
Apple doesn’t have the keys to decrypt this data.
Occasionally, Apple may ask a small number of users to help troubleshoot issues
which may incidentally result in Apple collecting some information related to content shared in your app.
Inviting Participants to Share an Activity
Separate activity types makes it easier to customize the experience for each activity.
your app must have the com.apple.developer.group-session entitlement
Activity instances provide descriptive information about a specific activity your app makes available to participants.
The activity instance might actually be an existing data type in your app.
For example, an activity instance for a movie-watching app might contain
the name of the movie,
a poster image, and
app-specific information about how to play the movie.
Joining and Managing a Shared Activity
When a participant accepts an invitation, the system:
Launches your app, as needed.
Creates a GroupSession object for the selected activity.
Delivers the session asynchronously to your app.
Perform any required validation of the activity and session before you present any UI for that activity.
If your app requires participants to pay for content, provide login credentials, download content, or perform other tasks, display UI for those tasks first.
A new GroupSession object doesn’t synchronize data with the group right away.
the object starts in the GroupSession.State.waiting state, and
you must explicitly call its join() method to let the system know that your app is ready to begin the associated activity.
Meet Group Activities - WWDC 2021 - Videos - Apple Developer
we built an entirely new playback-sync protocol with deep integration into the AVFoundation stack on the device.
That means someone hits play, and everyone in the group immediately starts playback at the same time.
Jump to a favorite scene and everyone else sees it too,
allowing people to experience moments together in perfect sync
The magic behind this playback synchronization means we won’t retransmit your media in any way.
Everyone will get your full-fidelity video because it’s playing right from your app and streaming from your servers as it always does.
With smart volume, when people speak up during playback, we’ll automatically duck the audio of the content and bring it back up when appropriate.
works with Picture in Picture