Tag Archives: Technology

Handoff for iTunes | iMore

I’d love to be able to start a playlist on my Mac and then walk away, pick up my iPhone, swipe, and keep right on listening.

So true. I (and Rene) have been saying this for a few years at least. This is the dream, and it’s sooooo close with Handoff, just not for iTunes.

> Why I want to see Handoff for iTunes in iOS 10 so ludicrously much | iMore

Is group chat making you sweat?

10. Chat reminds you that you’re behind. Group chat feels like you’re chasing something all day long. What’s worse, group chat often causes “return anxiety” — a feeling of dread when you’re away for a while and you come back to dozens (hundreds?) of unread lines. Are you supposed to read each one? If you don’t, you might miss something important. So you read up or skip out at your own risk. All the while you’re trying to piece together interleaving conversations that may refer to other things you haven’t seen yet. And just when you’re caught up, you’re behind again. It’s like your working two jobs — the work you’re supposed to do, and the work of catching up on what you missed that probably didn’t matter (but you won’t know until you read back).

I write a lot about communication. It’s something that is very important to me. There are a lot of good points about chatting in large groups of people (like in Slack). I totally agree with the points raised, but I think chat apps like Slack are doing well to actually cut down on noise in group chat, because not everything has to be sent to every person, but there’s still a lot of transparency in what messages are being sent where.

Slack also offers 1 on 1 chat, and ad-hoc small groups for chat, so it’s the best of all worlds when you want to communicate with a team or group of people.

> Is group chat making you sweat? — Signal v. Noise — Medium

Post a proper linked Instagram photo to Twitter, like a Gentleman

When you used to post Instagram photos to Twitter, it would automatically expand the photo in Twitter, to show your beautiful shot in all its glory. However, when Twitter launched its own photo sharing natively, it started blocking the auto-expanding of photos from Instagram, so pictures looked ugly as heck when shared from Instagram to Twitter. Here’s what I mean:

Sharing images the regular way (like I did above) leaves this text-based tweet, leaving users to guess what the picture is of, because neither Instagram nor Twitter wants to cede ground on letting users of both platforms see pictures from the others’ social network.

However, I’ve come up with a fix, and it involves a great service called IFTTT. If you’re not using it already, do yourself a favour and go sign up. Once you’ve done that, all you have to do is go to this link, and you’ll be able to post directly from Instagram to Twitter, with a full resolution version of the photo, while still maintaining a link back to Instagram in case people want to go check out your other photos. That looks like this:

As you can see, that’s way better, but you still get the link back to Instagram.

PS. If you’re using this recipe from IFTTT, you shouldn’t select the native Twitter sharing when posting in Instagram, or you’ll end up with a double post, one with the image, and one without. And nobody wants that.

Post a proper linked Instagram photo to Twitter, like a gentleman. by robattrell – IFTTT