Posts in apple

This is somewhat of an open letter that I don’t usually write, but we really need to sit down and talk with Apple about account management UX. I am generally a pretty happy Apple user - the iPhone and the Watch are great. However, there is one lingering problem that seems to elude the user experience teams, related to subscription management. In 2020, when more and more services are moving towards a subscription model (Apple Arcade included - that is now a separate tab in the App Store), managing those in one place seems like a key part of customer experience, and Apple is uniquely positioned to address this problem.

I use a MacBook as a daily driver, and over the course of the past four years, I’ve built an understanding of what I really want to have on the machine to make myself efficient. Coincidentally, I’ve been asked by a couple of friends for recommendations of tools they should have on their macOS-based laptops - this blog post is an answer to that question. An Oprah’s Favorites version for Mac apps.

Recently I’ve been reading a tech site on my iOS device when a new tab opened and went into the background - something I’ve seen before caused by rogue ads that are fetched via normal means (e.g. embedded in a legit page), so my next steps were not unusual - go to the tab and close it. Here is what I faced: Once the tab opened, I instantly recognized it as one of those tech support scams.

I never considered myself to be someone who was that big into wearables, mainly because I always used my phone for everything. Want to send an email? Use the phone. Check the time? Use the phone. So when the Microsoft Band 2 came out, I quickly took advantage of an offer to get it. Start of a habit The life with the Band was somewhat shortlived (and today you can no longer buy it outside eBay and Amazon) but what I realized is that I got into the habit of “gamifying” my active life.

Curiosity got the best of me about a year ago when Pokemon Go came out, so I had to dig up ways to inspect traffic from iOS on a Mac. Since then, time has passed and today I decided to do it again, but couldn’t find a decent guide on how to do that (clearly I was missing some steps), so once I figured out what goes where, I thought I would do a write-up for posterity, and so that I can re-use it later.