Weekender #112: You Should Ghost Ghosted

• Birb watch: Handsome and Matey Mynah’s offspring are still hanging out in my driveway. They’ve taken to resting under the cars in the garage and sometimes out front by the dragonfruit plant. Matey has been consistently flying after them and chasing them around the driveway. Handsome has stopped trying to feed them but refrains from chasing them at all.

• A follow-up to the Messages app crashes that I’ve been experiencing on my Apple Watch: according to user jwcounts on the MacRumors forum, this issue is fixed in watchOS 9.5 dev beta 4! I hope they release this update soon. I’ve had to disable messages notifications on my Apple watch for now.

This week’s Link List

Design

• Stack Diary has created an excellent web accessibility reference for creating inclusive websites. The step-by-step guide includes helpful tips and explanations for why accessibility is important for each area.

• Smashing Magazine’s target sizes cheatsheet shows how big interactive elements should be as well as guidelines for sizing icons, links, and buttons for navigation.

• Cloud Four has a great demo showing the math behind nesting rounded corners. This is something I’ve paid attention to while doing designs using vector paths but will need to pay attention to in CSS as well.

• Fixel Font is a unique grotesque variable typeface from MacPaw in two styles; text and display.

Mastodon

• Eugen Rochko detailed the new onboarding experience for Mastodon, which he hopes will make signing up for the service easier. When a new user signs up, the default server will be mastodon.social, removing the need to choose a server.

Software and hardware

• I’ve long given up on Google Authenticator because it didn’t have a way to sync any of the saved two-factor accounts, which invariably led to users losing their 2FA data when swapping phones. They finally came to their senses and added account syncing but neglected to add end-to-end encryption, so one step forward, two steps back.

Miscellaneous

• The Layoff Runbook is something that I hope I never have to use. It’s a check list of items to keep track of as well as things to do if you’re being laid off.

• Google announced that they’re rolling out passkeys, a passwordless way to sign in to a Google account. It’s currently only available for personal Google accounts and not for Google Workspace accounts for businesses or schools.

  • The Verge has a guide on how to use passkeys to sign into a Google account.

  • Jeff Johnson blogged about not wanting passkeys to be locked into big tech companies and feared that they would have control over any passkey. Rick Mondello, the manager of the Authentication Experience team at Apple, responded:

  Passkeys will be importable and exportable, cross-device, and across passkey managers. They aren’t at this time, but they will be. It’s something that’s being defined and designed.

• Audra and I were excited to watch the AppleTV+ action-comedy film Ghosted, starring Ana de Armas and Chris Evans this weekend.

  • My excitement quickly faded during the first 15 minutes of the movie. It felt like it was shot out of sequence with really horribly written dialog. I should have trusted my gut and stopped watching this disaster, but I kept telling myself that it was going to get better… it had to! Nope. It didn’t.

  • While I enjoyed Evans and de Armas in the first Knives Out film, it felt like they had almost zero chemistry in this one. De Armas had so many action scenes that simply fell flat because of the way they were presented. It’s almost as if they didn’t know how to film, direct, or edit action scenes! Theres a scene where de Armas’s character drives a bus being chased by the bad guys. Because of the way it was shot and edited, the scene lacked any feeling of tension or suspense. The jokes and gags that would be usually be used in between the action scenes to break the tension all fell flat for me because I didn’t feel like the characters were in any danger.

  • It was all very disappointing. Even the high profile cameos couldn’t make up for this disaster of a movie. You probably should ghost Ghosted.

• The busy week had me daydreaming about the sound of the late 80’s jazz scene. Apple Music popped up Joe Sample’sSpellbound from 1989. Featuring all the usual studio cats of the time, it’s a mix of smooth grooves with a bunch of catchy vocal tracks courtesy of Al Jarreau (Somehow Our Love Survives) and Michael Franks (Leading Me Back to You). If you like the sound of late 80s smooth jazz, give it a try! Listen on Apple Music.