I nearly included “but no mention of Oni” in my last post about Marathon. Lo and behold, there’s a history of Oni as well.

Oni was a great game: amazing physics and combat, with a solid story. The promo shots (which never materialized into an actual game) as well as the Oni 2 scenes are fascinating. While some of the background textures in the levels always looked stark, the game still looks great in these videos.

Most interesting is that the console version was a bomb. It was a great Mac game, but it never took hold on the nascent Xbox… whereas Halo, well… That’s a different story.

I played a lot of Oni on the Mac. These people seem to like it, too.

Demon: The Untold Story of Bungie’s Forgotten Franchise

This is a great history of Bungie, the Mac game developer that brought us Marathon (and eventually published, in a sad turnaround, Halo for Xbox). I wasn’t familiar with the story of Bungie trying to sell itself to Apple after getting an offer from Microsoft. It’s hard to imagine a sale to Apple turning things around for the Mac as a gaming company, but it was the killer app for Xbox. In any event, I spent a lot of time playing Marathons 1 through 3 in college and thereafter.

Bungie’s Forgotten Decade

“A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces His Own Mortality” in the *Atlantic*:

In one scene, Fingarette listens to a string quartet that was once meaningful to his late wife. He hasn’t heard the piece since her death seven years earlier—“her absence is a presence,” he says in the film—and becomes overwhelmed with grief.

I worked in an art museum in college, and one of the exhibits was by Françoise Gilot. My grandfather came to visit me there and I showed him the exhibit. One of her pieces was titled “In the Absence of the Beloved,” and it expressed her feelings of loss of her windowed husband, Jonas Salk. The piece featured the likeness of a couple walking, viewed from behind, with a stark black rectangle covering the male figure. I gave a sophomoric tour of the exhibit and when I described the theme of “Absence” to my grandfather, widowed then for only over a year, uttered with an unmistakable, palpable “Oh.” He grokked what Gilot was trying to get at.

Link

I finally finished Taffy Akner’s Fleischman is in Trouble after starting it on vacation this summer. Some reviews:

NPR:

The great trick of Fleishman Is in Trouble is that it cons the reader into siding with Toby. Brodesser-Akner demonstrates how women get suckered into acquiescing to misogyny by suckering both narrator and reader — and then showing us what she’s done. When I saw her trick, I was floored.

Wapo:

But, she suggests, when you’re stuck, tightfisted, inside your own story — unable to imagine that how you experience others is really how you experience yourself — the most unknowable person may be you, after all.

Vox:

That’s the Taffy Brodesser-Akner trick, the thing that makes her profiles so clear-eyed and important, the thing that lifts her divorce novel head and shoulders above so many others in its genre: She is always willing to extend her empathy to people we are trained to believe are not worthy of our consideration. She is always willing to treat them as real people.

Fleischman does pull quite a trick: after establishing Toby as a sympathetic character, the narrator starts to sour on him a bit. And then we come to sympathize, quite surprisingly, with the ostensible source of Toby’s distress–his ex-wife, Rachel.

I had no idea that The Clone Wars was aired out of order.

STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS CHRONOLOGICAL EPISODE ORDER

NY *Times*:

This week, Seattle Public Schools ramped up its effort even further, telling families that schools would turn away any remaining students who were not compliant.

At a time when states and school districts are exploring strategies to increase vaccination rates and avoid outbreaks, the tactics in Seattle appear to be paying off in a region with plenty of vaccine skepticism. The number of students with incomplete or noncompliant records — once around 7,000 — has dropped steadily to just a few hundred on Wednesday, the deadline for students to show their vaccination paperwork.

New Jersey is likewise trying to curb the rise in number of persons claiming exemptions for their children.

After a Measles Scare, Seattle Cracks Down on Vaccine Compliance – The New York Times

John Voorhees, writing for MacStories, about the transformative power of iPadOS’s version of Safari on the device’s utility:

With the release of iPadOS 13, Safari took a big step forward as a ‘desktop-class’ browser with a wide variety of enhancements that collectively eliminate a long list of complaints leveled against the app in the past. Safari’s ability to dynamically adjust the viewport to fit the iPad’s screen, enhanced support for pointer events, hardware-accelerated scrolling of frames and other regions of a webpage, along with other under-the-hood changes add up to a genuinely new browsing experience that has made work in sophisticated web apps like Mailchimp a viable option for the first time.

…

Web apps are a substantial part of most people’s workflows these days… I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of MacStories readers gave up on using certain web apps in Safari on an iPad long ago and haven’t gone back. If that sounds like you, I encourage you to give Safari another shot.

Like Voorhees, I too prefer an app over a website when available–and not just on iPad. I spent much of today scheduling in OmniOutliner instead of Sheets, and I use applications like MailMate and OmniFocus instead of Gmail webmail and tasks. Google’s G Suite apps are an example, however, of how the applications are poorly implemented compared to the browser. But iPadOS’s version of Safari elevated the iPad from occasional sidekick to my main computer with one update.

Desktop-Class Safari for iPad: A Hands-On Look at the Difference the iPadOS Update Makes to Apple’s Browser – MacStories

Speaking of Readdle, MacWord takes a quick look at Spark, their email app:

Customizable toolbar actions, contact avatars, and a sleek new look with support for Dark Mode add up to a winning update for Spark, which remains one of the best free alternatives to Apple Mail.

Another great feature is Spark’s ability to round trip PDFs sent as attachments. You can sign or annotate a PDF quickly and return it to the sender; this requires PDF Expert, however.

Spark for iOS review: Free app delivers superior mobile email experience

I have been a happy and loyal Fantastical user for many years, most notably on iOS. When it was first released, Fantastical’s use of natural language support was a huge time saver when inputting appointments, as opposed to the multi-modal, picker-intensive default calendar application. Especially on the phone, I love Fantastical’s list view, as well as its introduction, prior to iOS, of a dark mode.

Fantastical’s monthly calendar view on iPad, however, left me wanting more. It is no secret to anyone that calendars, whether hanging on your fridge or serving as a blotter on your desk, are typically presented in a monthly view. This is not an artifact of a bygone era; people benefit from seeing a big picture when planning. Digital calendars are superior to their paper forebears in being able to present more focused day and week views, but a spatial, monthly view is still a crucial feature of any calendar.

Fantastical’s presentation on iPad looks sharp, but it doesn’t work. You can see a month at a time, but the only data afforded you in this view is whether there are events on your calendar for a day or not, indicated by a dot specifically colored to match the calendar to which the event is associated. You have to look at a side bar to see the event specifics for each day. This, to my mind, is cognitively inefficient. And of that resource, there’s only so much to go around.

Month View

Readdle’s Calendars 5, by contrast, presents a more familiar, if less stylish, monthly view that shows the actual content of your events and appointments. On iPad, this makes sense; a 12.9″ Pro is as large as that of a MacBook Adorable; in a device that is ostensibly a laptop replacement, you want to be able to see the month laid out before you. Along the bottom of the screen, Calendars presents a row with each of the months of the year; you can quickly scrub from month to month without swiping horizontally–but that gesture works, too.

Month View (Calendars 5)

Month View (Apple’s Calendar)

Week and Day View

Calendars also has Day, Week, and Year views. Day view provides a list of your appointments and events for the day, with a horizontal line through the current time. A list view occupies the left 40% of the screen, which allows you to see today’s obligations with greater detail, as well as scroll through past and future events. Along the bottom of the screen is a horizontal strip of–you guessed it–dates, allowing you to scrub (or tap) from day to day. Week view presents columns for each day of the week, with events stacked up along horizontally aligned hour-long intervals. The horizontal controls show you the date range corresponding to the next and previous weeks, which is a useful bit of data.

One note about week view: you can configure the start day of each week (the default is today–the current day-which I found confusing). I conceive of a week starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday, so the far left column, in a week view, should be Sunday, and the far right should be Saturday. Always.

Making the Most of Both Planes

Calendars allows you to use a menu, arranged horizontally, along the bottom of each view–day, week, month, and year–to advance to the next logical block of time. For example, in month view, Calendars presents a row with each of the months of the year; you can quickly move from month to month without swiping horizontally–but that works, too. In Day view, you can likewise scrub ahead using the menu, or swipe on the screen. And so with Month and Year views.

Tasks

For those users who don’t need a fully featured task manger like OmniFocus or Things, Calendars offers a task management feature akin to Apple’s own Reminders. Like Things, Calendars offers an Inbox for unfiled tasks, a Today collection for starred tasks, and upcoming and completed collections; you can star a task and it will show on the Today collection. Starring an item makes it appear on the date in Calendar view as well. Like Reminders and Things, Calendars supports lists to separate tasks by projects. There’s no means by which to tag or otherwise group tasks by context, so Getting Things Done adherents would likely pass on Calendars’ version of task management. For more casual users, however, it’s a nice addition.

Tasks (Calendars 5)

Things (left) and Calendars 5 (right)

What about iPhone?

Calendars is a universal app, so you can run it on both iPad and iPhone. The very thing that I like about Calendars on iPad–its use of the larger screen–is what I dislike on the phone version. Day and list views are separate on the iPhone; list view looks similar to its analog as part of day view on iPad, but its use of otherwise nonfunctional chrome lessens information density. Fantastical, by contrast, shows a tighter list.

In week view, Calendars aligns the days of the week vertically, with appointments running left to right. In this view, long event titles are line-wrapped, irrespective of the conventions of print. This is hard to read. Rotating even a large phone, such as the iPhone 11 Pro Max, yields a more standard, horizontally oriented calendar; however, the use of vertical space is such that you can’t see very much of your week at a glance.

In month view, truncated event titles look poor on the smaller screen, so while you might be able to tell when you have appointments, you never get a full view. In a sense, it’s a worse experience than what makes Fantastical’s display silly on iPad: where Fantastical fails to make use of the iPad’s screen real estate, Calendars is too ambitious on the small screen.

This is not unlike the disparate approaches Apple has taken to the two iOS-based versions of Calendar that comes installed on every iPhone or iPad. On iPad, day, week, and month views offer significantly different and information-rich displays of your calendar data. On the phone, you have information-rich list and day views, no week view, and a useless month view. This last mode gives you no more information than a blank paper calendar.

Touch Controls Only

For as much as Calendars takes advantage of the iPad’s screen size, it ignores the robust keyboard support Apple has baked into the OS. Holding down the command key in Calendars reveals that there are, in fact, no keyboard shortcuts. Commands–1 through 3, for example, should work as they do in Apple’s own Calendars, toggling the user between views. Similarly, Command-N should create a new event or task, depending upon which mode you’re using.

Natural Language

The innovation that Calendars (and Fanstastical) brought to iOS and the Mac was natural language input. Instead of typing an event title, and then tapping into a modal box with a date and time picker, users could type “Brakes with Patrick at noon on Wednesday” and the app would interpret what you meant. Calendars presents an entry field that shows you all of the information you are trying to get the software to parse, so that you can be sure that it records your intended entry. Fantastical and Calendar both do this, but Fantastical uses a more visual representation, zooming to the spatial location on a virtual calendar. Apple’s application doesn’t interpret your input on iOS or iPad OS (although it does on the Mac).

Misc

Calendars 5 is free to use unless you don’t use iOS’s system-level support for email and calendar accounts. It offers in-app purchases for multiple calendar support as well as a subscription to a number of calendars you might be interested in.

My frustrations with Fantastical on iPad led me to look again at Readdle’s Calendars; I had used it before and am an enthusiastic Spark user on the Mac and iOS. I was immediately pleased with the information-rich weekly and monthly displays missing from Fantastical, and the horizontal controls that allow you to scrub between each mode’s relevant units of time are delightful. It’s a great iPad calendar client, expanding upon the simple yet functional execution of Apple’s own iPad app. Although it tries to solve the problem of information density on the smaller screen, Readdle’s Calendars 5 doesn’t transfer its utility to iPhone.

In the end, I’d recommend Calendars 5 on iPad, and Fantastical on the Mac and iPhone.

Calendars 5

Ben Rhodes, writing for the Atlantic, on Donald Trump’s dangerous motivation behind his recent action in Iran:

Barack Obama did achieve a deal good enough to prevent his successor from having to go to war with Iran. But now, despite all that work, a de facto state of war exists between the United States and Iran. To keep his promise to kill an achievement of Obama’s, Donald Trump has been willing to break his promise to get us out of wars in the Middle East. In doing so, he has tragically proven Obama right: The choice all along was between the Iran Deal or an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program and some form of war.

Instead of governance, we’re getting rampant egomania.

An Extraordinarily Dangerous Moment