MacRumors reports that Apple bought Dark Sky. This has to be great news for the developers. I remember finally springing for the app after hearing good things about it; we were on a family vacation in Ocean City, NJ, and sitting in the car parked a few blocks from their famous boardwalk while rain poured down in buckets.

We were just about to head back to the beach house we were staying at when I opened the App Store and purchased Dark Sky. It reported that the rain would stop in something precise, like seven minutes.

And it did, indeed, stop raining. We waited and clambered out of the car, and enjoyed a great afternoon, as they say, on the boards.

Ryan Cristoffel, writing for MacStories:

Rather than simply copying the Mac’s own cursor implementation, Apple has designed something new for iPadOS. Beyond the simple aesthetic change of the cursor being a circle on iPad rather than a pointer, iPadOS’ cursor also adapts to different types of content: when hovering over an app icon on the Home screen, the cursor doesn’t actually sit above the icon, rather it merges with the icon such that the visual circle disappears, and your movement of the cursor is reflected in the icon itself moving around. Similarly, in the case of certain other UI elements the cursor merges with those elements while hovering over them.

Apple Releases iOS and iPadOS 13.4 with iPad Cursor Support and Keyboard Improvements, iCloud Drive Shared Folders, and More

Following up on my post about Tomas Pueyo’s “The Hammer and the Dance,” here’s more on the measures that separate successful suppression from what we’re doing here in the United States:

What really turned the tide in Wuhan was a shift after Feb. 2 to a more aggressive and systematic quarantine regime whereby suspected or mild cases—and even healthy close contacts of confirmed cases—were sent to makeshift hospitals and temporary quarantine centers.

The tactics required turning hundreds of hotels, schools and other places into quarantine centers, as well as building two new hospitals and creating 14 temporary ones in public buildings. It also underscored the importance of coronavirus testing capacity, which local authorities say was expanded from 200 tests a day in late January to 7,000 daily by mid-February.

The West Is Misinterpreting Wuhan’s Coronavirus Progress—and Drawing the Wrong Lessons

Jason Snell on iPadOS 13.4’s cursor implementation:

Apple didn’t just copy Mac cursor support and paste it into iPadOS with version 13.4. This is a careful, considered set of additions that rethink what a cursor should look like. And apparently it should look like an adorable round sticky color-changing blob.

The Assistive Touch feature was a mere preview. It took a new device and ten more years to rev the cursor. And it’s so very welcome.

In praise of the iPadOS 13.4 cursor

I use OmniFocus every day, throughout each day.I use the Today perspective to see what calendar events and task need my attention each morning. I liberally chuck bits into my inbox for later processing. I review weekly.

But OmniOutliner is a bit different. It’s not built for near-instant input. It’s a powerful application whose features can be overlooked. In my use, it competes most directly with spreadsheet applications, but there are some valid reasons to prefer it over, say, Google Sheets. This year, I found one of my favorite use cases for OmniOutliner.

“Managing phases” is a fairly fancy description for what this OmniOutliner document accomplishes for me, but it provides an elegant solution. The specifics of its purpose is to help me track where I am in observing staff members (mostly teachers). New Jersey adopted a law requiring that school districts complete observations using specific, purpose-built tools.

What’s more, I like using OmniOutliner so much I find it a treat to update my progress.

Short or Long	Preconference	Observation	Post-Conference
Short	not required	20 minutes minimum	required
Long	required	40 minutes minimum	required

Table 1: Anatomy of an Observation

So an observation is not truly binary (done or not done), but rather moves through a series of smaller actions towards completion. For example, with a short observation, the classroom observation itself is one of three things: unscheduled, scheduled, or completed. Similarly, the post-conference–meet with the staff member–is either unscheduled, scheduled, or completed.

OmniFocus can be an effective tool for managing observations, especially because due dates and timelines are associated with some of the tasks. I found the vertically oriented nature of projects, however, not useful for seeing a larger view of where I am in the process. OmniOutliner’s filters, however, and I think a visual will help here, are the perfect tool.

In OmniOutliner, I created a document with seven (7) columns:

Done(checkbox)	Teacher Name	School	Long or Short	PreConference	Observation	Post-Conference
✓	Jane Doe	High School	Long	completed	completed	completed
	John Doe	Middle School	Long	scheduled	scheduled	unscheduled

Table 2: Observation Phases

Figure 1: All Observations

A long list of observations in varied states of completion is not terribly useful. But by harnessing the power of OmniOutliner’s filters, I am able to see precisely what I need to see to move the whole endeavor ahead, increment by increment–and no more. This is the true power of OmniOutliner in this application.

One useful filter is to show me what observations I have at each school. This cuts my view down from around 50 projects¹ to a dozen or fewer. For reasons of efficiency, I will try to plan as much as I can while I am in one building, observing teachers period by period, for example, and then likewise conducting post conferences during their preparatory (or “prep”) period.

Figure 2: Observations at VMS

Another filter will show me how many actual classroom observations I have to complete that would be considered “short,” meaning I can just show up and not necessarily stay for the full period (although often I will). These I can schedule back-to-back, or I can schedule a bunch in one day because they are shorter. Finally, because timelines are involved, I will often filter my observations by post-conferences remaining; once I’ve completed an observation, a timeline begins and I have a certain number of days to complete the follow-up meeting. Filtering by observations that have been completed–but where the post-conference has not been even scheduled–helps me focus and keep me in compliance with the timelines. There are more filters that I use regularly, but you get the idea.

Figure 3: Short Observations

Of course, obscuring observations that I’ve already completed when planning is unquestionably useful. To this end, I created one that only shows lines with an unchecked status box.

Figure 4: Observations Remaining

OmniOutliner lives on all of my devices: my Mac, which I usually keep in the office, my iPad, which is what a carry with me when I leave the office, my phone, my Mac at home… the application is everywhere I need it to be. And with Omni’s move to support iCloud in addition to OmniPresence, it’s in the file system where I want it to be.

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¹ A project in David Allen’s Getting Things Done is anything that requires more than one action to complete. A teacher observation is, by that definition, a project; to wit: schedule observation, observe teacher, schedule post-conference, complete post conference, wait for signature, email secretary re completion.

Note: I used a fake name generator for the sake of confidentiality.

What Trump did not say is the problem, argues David Frum in *The Atlantic*:

He offered no guidance or policy on how to prevent the spread of the disease inside the United States. Should your town cancel its St. Patrick’s Day parade? What about theatrical productions and sporting events? Classes at schools and colleges? Nothing.

He offered no explanation of what went wrong with the U.S. testing system, nor any assurance of when testing would become more widely available. His own previous promises of testing for anyone who needs it have been exploded as false. So what is true? Nothing.

And on the one thing he did say?

There was one something in the speech: a ban on travel from Europe, but not the United Kingdom. It’s a classic Trump formulation. It seeks to protect America by erecting a wall against the world, without thinking very hard how or whether the wall can work. The disease is already here. The numbers only look low because of our prior failure to provide adequate testing.

The Worst Outcome