Two Tech Geeks

News

  • Roger González Gutiérrez (via Michael Tsai): Microsoft is phoning home the content of your PowerPoint slides. […] Make a new slide with a title of your choice. Choose “Designer.” Look at your network traffic as you do. It makes sense: the tool is reading your text and suggesting designs/delivering stock photography. But this means that any data…

  • Stephen Hackett: “To access the complete set of Pantone Color Books, Pantone now requires customers to purchase a premium license through Pantone Connect and install a plug-in using Adobe Exchange.” As a creative that uses Pantone regularly, it is a slap on the face. Companies that use Pantone colours in the design, print, and production…

  • John Gruber: It’s Twitter that benefits from millions of users being able to feel certain that the “Stephen King” with 7 million followers on Twitter is really theStephen King. It’s Twitter that benefits from Nate Silver engaging with users and tweeting analysis. Popular tweeters aren’t getting paid to tweet. And now Elon Musk thinks they should…

  • John Voorhees: When Stage Manager is set up and running the way I want, it’s fantastic. The trouble is the ‘set up’ part. The feature is simply too laborious to set up, and some of its interactions are an over-caffeinated mess. Stage Manager feels awesome and tidies up the clutter on the desktop. As someone…

  • Peter Steinberger: The new Dropbox version for macOS Ventura is absolute garbage. fileproviderd is eating my CPU alive, files are no longer really on disk so QuickLook and some apps fail, etc. How did this ship, even as beta? I ditched Dropbox sometime back after having too many problems with it. I used OneDrive alongside…

  • Canalys: In Q3 2022, the global smartphone market recorded its third consecutive decline this year, dropping 9% year-on-year, marking the worst Q3 since 2014. The gloomy economic outlook has led consumers to delay purchasing electronic hardware and prioritize other essential spending. This will likely continue to dampen the smartphone market for the next six to…

  • Nick Heer: Sara Fischer, of Axios, is reporting today that Meta’s proprietary Instant Articles format will go away in April. This should not be a surprise — Instant Articles does nothing for Meta’s virtual reality efforts, Meta is cutting costs, and Google has been phasing out its commitment to its similar AMP format. Another one…

  • John Gruber: It’s no coincidence at all that WeChat is the only “everything app” anyone can cite, and it comes from China, an authoritarian regime. In practice, the concept really only makes sense there. It doesn’t benefit users that WeChat dominates all aspects of digital life — it benefits the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party. (And investors in…

  • Michael Tsai: Brave (via Tim Hardwick): Brave is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly. AMP harms users’ privacy, security and internet experience, and just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the Web.…

  • An open letter to Tim Cook about Final Cut Pro, signed by editors and post-production pros around the world by Scott Simmons – ProVideo Coalition: There is no doubt that Final Cut Pro has come a long way since it’s introduction many years ago. We’ve seen an architecture change with Libraries, multicam added, a new…