iPad OS has been taking a beating recently (see here, and listen here, and here). There’s a joy to learning some of the gestures and developing some fluency with them (draw your inspiration from Matt Cassinelli), although, as critics have pointed out, the gestures are not discoverable.

Whatever concern this causes to power users and Apple watchers must, in my estimation, be tempered by the possibility that gestures are not inherently discoverable, but must be taught explicitly. A fact lost on such users is the degree to which keyboard shortcuts–visually discoverable by any user navigating an OS with a mouse–are often overlooked. I have had coworkers marvel at my speed in both Windows and Mac environments because of my fluency with basic key commands when such affordances where not new (think cut, copy, and paste).

Like users who prefer to drive with a mouse, you can use the iPad without understanding more esoteric gestures. I don’t want to do that, but there are “regular” users who find this approach perfectly serviceable.

This nicely sums up how I felt after watching Trump’s State of the Union address this week. The outright lies, emotional manipulations, and dashing the last vestiges of governmental decorum upon the rocks of his pomposity.

David Frum, Writing for The Atlantic:

The president crammed his speech with blatant and aggressive lies. The Trump administration is not committed to protecting patients with pre-existing conditions; it has repeatedly sought to end this protection and is in court right now trying again. The U.S.’s position as the world leader in oil and gas production is not thanks to any action of Trump’s; the country moved into first place in 2012. Trump has not presided over any kind of “comeback” of the economy, which grew faster in the three years before he took office than in the three years since. Manufacturing employment has not recovered under Trump; because of his trade wars, manufacturing employment has crashed on his watch. Trump’s untruthfulness is notorious, but it’s still a departure to lie and mislead so often and so brazenly before all the assembled Congress.

Trump Is Defiling His Office

Jordan Weissmann, writing for Slate:

Around the time Trump entered office, the CBO projected that the budget gap was on pace to hit $775 billion by this year, or 3.6 percent of the economy. Capitol Hill’s forecasters now think it will reach $1.015 trillion instead, equal to about 4.6 percent of GDP. That extra percentage point is what we should probably think of as the Trump bump. It’s a result of both the GOP’s 2017 tax bill (no, it did not pay for itself) and budget deals that have increased military as well as domestic expenditures.

You Should Be Absolutely Furious Over Donald Trump’s $1 Trillion Deficit

My first iPad was the 1,1 model, base spec. I added an Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard to the order and picked it up at Best Buy.

In truth, the limited RAM meant that Safari–it was really just a browsing and email device for me at the time, as it probably was for everyone else–crashed a lot. I was happy to replace it, but I wish I had it still just for the sake of posterity.