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We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs. So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds.

I guess I’ll know it’s time to leave my favorite news reader when this format is adopted by Daring Fireball but not supported by NetNewsWire.

• Update: That didn’t take long.

So, yesterday I cleared off my desk and tried to work with nothing but my MacBook again. No standing desk, no external monitor. It looked great, but honestly, it felt terrible. I wound up hunched over the desk staring down at the screen. After an hour or so of this I decided, yet again, that this style of work is just not appropriate for me.

This leads me to a few interesting conclusions when considering what to buy for my next Mac. For one, I find a larger screen much easier to work with. The smaller screen is fine for when I’m loafing on the couch or traveling, but for day-to-day work it just makes getting things done harder. Secondly, the screen needs to be lifted to an ergonomically appropriate height. Photos online of beautiful desks with a single MacBook Adorable, a notebook, and a cup of coffee are nice, but I can’t see how anyone gets any serious work done on the computer in that environment. I always assume that whoever works that way doesn’t spend the majority of their day staring at the screen like I do.

So what’s next for me? I’ve been toying with the idea of only using an iPad Pro, and while I think I could work on it just fine, the overall experience would be ergonomically strenuous, and the workflows frustrating. The iPad shows promise, but until I can hook it up to an external keyboard, monitor, and touchpad, it’s not for me, not yet.

I love the look of the MacBook, but I just can’t work with it. I could leave it plugged into my external monitor all day, but there are a host of issues with that too. My monitor, a 24” Dell 4K, looks great, but it doesn’t have a built-in speaker or iSight camera like the old Apple Thunderbolt Display I was used to working with. The resolution is good for staring at text all day, but every time someone I work with wants to do a video conference or something similar I’ve got to either fish out my USB webcam or unplug the laptop. I could leave the laptop open to the side of the display, but I like having a single monitor to concentrate on.

Then there’s the wires. I’ve got a USB hub stashed in my desk drawer, which is plugged into a ScanSnap and a hard drive. The monitor needs power and a plug into the MacBook. The MacBook needs power. There’s too many wires.

Finally, since I have no speakers when the Mac is closed, I have an Amazon Basics bluetooth speaker on the shelf behind my desk. That works fine as long as I have sound being streamed to it. If I go for more then a few minutes without sound, the speaker turns off, which means I have to flip the switch on it to get it to pair again. Not ideal.

So, when considering my options for the next computer, I think there’s really only one choice considering my requirements.

• As few wires as possible
• Built-in iSight camera and speakers
• Large Retina screen
• Ergonomically correct for long periods of work

Sounds like an iMac to me.

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Amazon has officially unveiled its latest Echo product: a touchscreen device with built-in Alexa called the Echo Show. The device was extensively leaked this week, but is now available to preorder from Amazon for $229.99.

I’m interested in where this is going.

I came across a neat little command line tool via Rob Griffiths’ Robservatory this morning, a Ruby gem named iStats¹. Install is easy enough in Rob’s example, sudo gem install iStats, except that when you use sudo to install gems you are using the default macOS Ruby, and installing to system paths.

➜  ~ /usr/bin/gem environment                            RubyGems Environment:RUBYGEMS VERSION: 2.0.14.1RUBY VERSION: 2.0.0 (2015-12-16 patchlevel 648) [universal.x86_64-darwin16]INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0RUBY EXECUTABLE: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.0/usr/bin/rubyEXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: /usr/local/binRUBYGEMS PLATFORMS:    ruby    universal-darwin-16GEM PATHS:    /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0    /Users/jonathanbuys/.gem/ruby/2.0.0    /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.0/usr/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0GEM CONFIGURATION:    :update_sources => true    :verbose => true    :backtrace => false    :bulk_threshold => 1000REMOTE SOURCES:    https://rubygems.org/

While that might be fine, my personal preference is to keep the core system as close to default as possible. I once ran into an issue keeping Jekyll up to date, so now I use the excellent Homebrew to install an updated version of Ruby and keep the gems in /usr/local, which is entirely mine and safe to write to.

brew install ruby

Also, I make sure that /usr/local/bin is called before /usr/bin in my shells PATH variable.

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:~/Unix/bin/:$PATH

Now I can call gem install iStats and the gems will be installed safely, keeping my core system clean and my gems easily updatable.

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Indeed in this case, where unroll.me is owned by an analytics service, it appears that the entire purpose for the service is to get access to user email data for monetization. So apparently Unroll.me, with access to its user email accounts, collected their Lyft receipts, anonymized them, and sold them to Uber. I’m pretty sure people signing up for unroll.me don’t expect that to happen.

David reinforces a point that we have heard so often it’s become cliché, “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product”. Shortly after reading this post I saw a recommendation for Readdle’s free Spark mail client. I’ve given it a try in the past, but it didn’t suit me. After reading the privacy policy, I think I should probably go back in and properly delete my accounts. From what I can tell, Spark:

• Several analytics packages:

We use third party services, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and Amplitude, to collect and analyze how you use Spark. These services may collect information about you and your usage of Spark in accordance with their respective privacy policies.

• Uses my primary email address to send me spam:

We might use that email address to reach out to you periodically with information about features, updates, announcements or to request your feedback.

• Stores my email username and password on their servers:

Where OAuth is not supported we keep your account username and password on our secure servers.

• Downloads my email to their servers:

We then use the authorization provided to download your emails to our virtual servers and push to your device.

Readdle goes on to explain that they primarily use the email headers to send push notifications for new mail, that they do not sell your information to third parties, and that you can unsubscribe to emails at any time. Readdle makes some great apps, ones that I use quite a bit, but I wish they’d reconsider using server-side processing for Spark. If they worked out a way to do what they needed to do on-device, Spark would be a much more attractive option for my email.

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The advantage to using Linode is that since it’s a virtual server, rather than a VPN service, I’m completely in charge of the setup and configuration of the VPN server. Again, this isn’t foolproof, because my traffic is only encrypted between my Mac and the Linode server, meaning that if Linode decided it wanted to track my outbound traffic, then I’d be in much the same boat as before. (Essentially, Linode becomes my de facto ISP.) Given, however, that Linode’s main business is hosting, and that they have their own pretty strong privacy policy, I’m not particularly concerned on that point. But, again, that’s subject to the vagaries of business.

In reference to my previous post on the subject, this is the only method of using a VPN for privacy that I can recommend.

I’ve seen quite a few smart people recommend using a VPN service in the wake of the U.S. government’s decision to repeal privacy rules for ISPs. Unfortunately, I find this advice to be a bit misguided, or at least ill-informed. You can move your risk around, but in the end this comes down to an issue of trust, and avenues of recourse.

A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. It creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and a remote server, and then optionally routes all of your Internet traffic through that tunnel. The case for using one for security against your ISP is that if your traffic is encrypted, they can’t see what you are browsing to and your data becomes useless to them to sell. Once your traffic reaches the other side of the VPN, it’s aggregated with all of the service’s other customers. That’s fine, and mostly makes sense, but if you are going to use a VPN service it’s important to come to an honest conclusion about how much you trust the company.

If your VPN server is outside of the United States, you are effectively giving up any legal recourse against the provider, meaning they can do whatever they want with your data, regardless of what they advertise or what they tell their customers. A single gateway for all of your traffic has a tremendous amount of power. They can inject code into any (non-SSL encrypted) web page. They can read all of your email. They can see all of the URLs you visit. All of the power of your ISP, you are transferring to your VPN provider, but if you choose a company outside of the United States, you lose whatever protection or recourse you have now.

What the ISPs are doing is not right, but at least we know what they are doing. If you pick a fly-by-night VPN service and send them all your traffic, there’s no telling what they’ll do with that data. It doesn’t matter if they post good things on their website if you can’t verify their claims.

Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them.

For those of us who make their living on their Mac, this is fantastic news. I might never buy a Mac Pro¹, but I’ll still reap the benefits of Apple’s development and focus on Mac hardware and software. This is a message to the community that Apple hasn’t lost it’s mind; the Mac is still going strong.

What I will plan on buying is a new Apple display. My current Dell 4K display is ok, but after being spoiled by the Thunderbolt Display I had on my desk at the previous gig, this Dell feels like a big step back. No built in iSight camera, no built in speakers, too many wires, and that ugly Dell logo on the front. It’s a beautiful screen, and I need that for the number of hours I spend looking at text every day, but it’s all the rest of it, that overall Apple experience, that I’m missing.

I’ll be interested to hear what Marco has to say this evening on ATP. He has, at least to my mind, been the biggest skeptic and nay-sayer within the community when it comes to future prospects for the Mac. Of course, that’s nothing new. Mac enthusiasts have been hearing that their favorite computer is just about to die for literally decades. Yet here we are.

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Jack Kerouac spent the summer of 1956 manning a fire tower on Washington’s Desolation Peak, in the northern Cascades. He didn’t do much writing there, apparently, despite being alone with pencil and paper. But he stayed for 63 days. The views were good.

Maybe this is what I need to finish my NaNoWriMo project.

Spoiler: yes.

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Back to the headline. Could this be the future of the Mac? As iPhone processing power increases, could Apple create a hybrid desktop product driven by some future version of the A10 Fusion (the 64-bit system on a chip that drives the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus), a product that looks and acts like an iPhone, but that doubles as a desktop experience when you plug it into a dock, complete with large display, mouse, and keyboard?

I’ve been saying this is the future for years. This is the only direction that makes sense. Given enough computing power a phone will eventually be the only device we need.