DEV Community: Zack Apiratitham

WWDC 2021 Wish List

Zack Apiratitham — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:36:22 +0000

It's becoming such a cliché now during this pandemic when we say that time is a weird concept. But the other day I was in for a rude awakening when I found out that it's almost June. I say this every year but this year really did fly by. On the bright side, we all know what this means: it's WWDC time! To keep on the tradition, here is my wish list for this year:

16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon

We all know it's unlike Apple to announce new hardware during their big event for new software, but I think this is the right crowd to announce this for. As previously mentioned, my current 2017 MacBook Pro is starting to make me feel like I could use an upgrade. And with how well-received the M1 chip has been, I have never been more eager to see the larger MacBook Pro get a refresh. The rumors this time around have started to really pick up with a couple of recent reports saying that there is a new 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon coming very soon with "a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices" as well as the HDMI port and the SD card slot. If these all turned out to be true, this would be the best MacBook Pro update in recent memory. It also would be an unprecedented backtracking from Apple. We just saw a similar thing happened with the new Siri Remote dubbed "The Apology Remote". So I think we stand a good chance of getting "The Apology MacBook Pro" at WWDC which would make a lot of people very, very happy.

Affordable External Display

I already said this last year, and I'm going to say it again: Apple needs a less expensive external display in their product line-up. The five-thousand-dollar Pro Display XDR is an amazing feat of engineering, but at that price nobody can justify that unless you are a media production company. We sorely need an Apple-branded display that is aimed more for the mass market. Think the 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display. They cannot honestly expect us to use the M1 iPad Pro (with Thunderbolt 3, no less) or these new Apple Silicon Macs with this insanely expensive monitor. Apple knows that the MacBook Pro is very popular among developers — no doubt among those in attendance at WWDC — and they connect their laptops to one or more external displays, myself included. I have been holding off on replacing my monitors in hope for a new Apple monitor for years. I am still using these two ugly mismatched 24-inch 1080p ASUS monitors (one of them being a hand-me-down) from my college days as my setup.

Again, here is all I'm asking: take out that 5K 27-inch panel in the discontinued iMac Pro (or the one you're putting in the new 27-inch Apple Silicon iMac), put it in an external display chassis, maybe add some bells and whistles like a webcam, USB-C ports, fancy speakers, etc., slap a $1,300-1,500 price tag on it (knowing Apple), and take my money.

Catch Up iPadOS with the Hardware

The iPad Pros are such powerful devices, and now with the M1 chip in them, they're as powerful as the brand-new iMac. iPadOS, on the other hand, needs a lot of work to catch up with the incredible hardware it's running on. I am really hoping that this year will be the year we see some significant improvements to iPadOS to unlock the device's potential. As a developer, I would absolutely love to be able to do some sort of software development on it. The multitasking model on it also needs some rethinking/refinements to make it easier to use and manage. I have been eyeing these new M1 iPad Pros ever since they were announced in April but am still holding out on them to see what they do with iPadOS 15.

Home Screen Widgets

The popularity of iOS 14's widgets surprised a lot of people, even Apple themselves. Knowing this, I'm fairly certain that Apple will iterate more on this feature in the upcoming iOS 15. My wish for that is for them to be more interactive as right now the only possible action is launching the app (or launch the app to perform actions in it). These widgets would be vastly more useful if we were able to use them to do things like checking to-do items off or controlling media playback right from the home screen. They could also go a step further and do away with the left-to-right top-to-bottom grid for the home screen and let us place items wherever we want on there.

HomeKit

I've recently added more smart devices to the Home app and found some of the controls and automations lacking. For example, the camera automation includes options to turn the camera on or off based on the location of the members of the household. But there is currently no way to do that based on time of day. This would be really useful as I would like my indoor cameras to record when I'm at home but only during the time when I would be asleep to keep an eye on the house at night. Also the HomeKit Secure Video only saves recorded clips at 1080p and I think there should be an option for us to store them at full resolution. Sharing the Home with household members could also use improvements as I found things like notifications and access to settings to be real flaky.

Shortcuts

While Apple made some good additions to Shortcuts in iOS 14, there is still a lot to be desired. Location-based automations need to run automatically without requiring user input. Right now by requiring confirmation, they fail at the very thing they're supposed to do. These automations need to also stop popping up as notifications every time they run, cluttering up Notification Center. Please just make it an option to turn these off.

Memories Management in Photos

I love the Memories feature that resurfaces old photos grouped based on people, places, or events into nicely curated collections. And putting this as widgets on my home screen makes it all even more delightful. However, I wish there were more controls built into this such as changing cover photo for each Memory or hiding Memories based on people, time periods, or places. I also wish they would add more inclusive holiday Memories to the mix like Chinese New Year or Diwali as the ones I've ever seen are only for days like Christmas or Independence Day.

Screen Time for tvOS

We already have Screen Time for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, so adding this to tvOS is a no-brainer. I spend a lot of time on my Apple TV so I would really like to see some data here. I'm not sure what's taking them so long, it seems like it shouldn't be that hard to implement. I've been waiting for this since 2019 so I really hope this year is the year.

My Top 5 Books of 2020

Zack Apiratitham — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 20:51:29 +0000

If there was one good thing that came out of the horror of 2020 for me, it's that my reading habit got more solidified. Given that we can no longer go out to restaurants, sitting down to read a book after dinner has become a must-do daily routine. Even though I didn't read as many books as I'd like with all the time available, this year I tried to read more widely by selecting novels and non-fiction topics I hadn't usually chosen. Trying to be a more critical reader, I also started taking better notes and highlights, and spending more time thinking about the ideas presented to me. The following are 5 books that made my 2020 top list.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Like a lot of people this year, I was prompted to inquire more into racism in the US and to be better informed when it comes to these racial issues. Dr. Kendi argues that we cannot just simply be "not racist" as inaction against racism equates to helping perpetuate racism itself, and therefore we must actively be anti-racist to dismantle it. As a foreigner who spent a better part of my adolescent years in the US, his take on assimilation and "Americanization" as being inherently racist ideas hit me on a personal level and made me question my past actions in trying to fit in.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma pushed me to check this one out. Before reading this, I had already been ardently against the shady practices tech giants like Google and Facebook put in place to make billions with our behavioral data, but this book opened my eyes to so much more. It is a deeply troubling but incredibly important book for our time and goes way beyond the issue of privacy. There is no doubt that these companies — especially Facebook — are in no small part responsible for the spread of anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, the rise of extremism, and the overall political discourse in recent years. We are living in a dystopian world where these companies know so much more about us than we realize and effectively have the means to control us. It is not a light read but it covers a lot of ground, exploring virtually every facet of what these surveillance capitalists are doing to our society, how they're undermining democracy, and what it could mean for the future.

Dune by Frank Herbert

This one has been on my list for a long while, and earlier in the year I finally picked it up in preparation for the film adaptation that has since been delayed. I have not read that many sci-fi novels, so I figured if I were to change that I definitely have to read Dune. It became clear to me not long into the book that Star Wars was heavily inspired by Dune: The desert planet, dew gatherers on Arrakis vs moisture farmers on Tatooine, Bene Gesserit's Voice vs the Jedi mind tricks, to name just a few. I don't think I need to say much more about this book as we all know how original and highly-regarded it is.

Letters from an Astrophysicist by Neil deGrasse Tyson

This is a collection of his responses to people who wrote to him. His perspectives, ways of thinking, and outlook on the importance of science and reason deeply resonate with me. I have a long list of quotes from this book so I'll let his words speak for themselves:

Once you confess to not knowing what you are looking at¹, no logical line of reasoning allows you to then declare that you know what you are looking at. [...] To go from “We don’t know” to “It must be God” is another example of an argument from ignorance.

[...]

True science literacy is less about what you know and more about how your brain is wired for asking questions.

[...]

But one must always recognize the difference between knowing that something is true, knowing that something is not true, and not knowing one way or another. It’s the not knowing part that leaves singular events susceptible to inventive accounts (especially from conspiracy theorists) of what may have happened.

[...]

The world is no stranger to religious warfare—with abject slaughter of countless innocents in the name of one god or another. So [the] supposition that one needs God to behave or to give meaning to life—while it may be true for many people—is certainly not a pre-requisite to a fulfilling, law-abiding life.

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon

This book chronicles the decades-long fight to get the New Horizons mission off the ground against all odds, and I must say that I did not expect it to be such a thrilling read. Truly almost a missed opportunity for generations to come, the mission was a race against time as Pluto traveled further away from the sun and, had they waited too long, would cause the atmosphere to dissipate, preventing any kind of atmospheric study from being conducted. It is also an amazing underdog story as the team at the Applied Physics Laboratory competed against the more experienced Jet Propulsion Laboratory to get their mission selected with such tight budgetary constraints and all the red tapes. The second half of the book went over fascinating insights and science behind the eventual fly-by in all of its glorious details. The story gave me such admiration for these men and women doing the remarkable work of advancing humanity's scientific knowledge.

What I'm Looking Forward to in 2021

A Promised Land by Barack Obama. This is what I am currently reading and will be into 2021. I was too young (and too far away) to pay much attention to US politics during the 2008 election or his first presidential term, so it's been such an insightful read so far.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. I have been waiting for Bill to write a book for a long time now so I am eagerly looking forward to this one.
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. As an avid Green brothers fan and a Nerdfighter, this is a must-read for me
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini. I loved the Inheritance Cycle and have been looking forward to this for years. Despite that, I had no idea this came out earlier this year! Definitely will be the next novel I read.

In answering a question about a UFO sighting, reminding us what the "U" stands for. ↩︎