“Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up”

Matthew Panzarino on TechCrunch about Apple’s new effort around its Maps app:

“Apple is flipping on the power of having millions of iPhones passively and actively improving their mapping data in real time.”

“…In short: traffic, real-time road conditions, road systems, new construction and changes in pedestrian walkways are about to get a lot better in Apple Maps.”

It’s a nice, in-depth look at the effort.

IMO, they need to let users report on-road items—like police—as Waze does. That’s the reason that Waze users are so loyal. A timely article on the Verge says that Google Maps may be getting exactly that feature soon.

I stick with Waze in part because it has motorcycle-specific routes, which are different than routes for cars. I’d love to see other types of routes, such as towing/RV routes. Additionally, being able to tell Maps that you’re an electric car with a sticker or have a FastTrak Flex and can use the HOV/Express Lane, is important.

“Harleys sold in the US will still be built in the US”

This is a theme that we’re seeing over and over: so much of what is happening in the country is actually against traditional Republican ideals. Why are so many conservatives willing to support Trump, when he’s clearly not really one of them?

“This is the opposite of the Republican platform of small government. It’s the commander in chief going after a company because it made a tough decision.”

New Photo Functionality

I just rolled out the first version of native photo hosting for this site. If you don’t care about nerdy details on the implementation, just click the links in the text below to look at some posts with photos that are now taking advantage of the new functionality.

I’m using Shrine to upload and create multiple sizes of photos. I did an initial stab at this before Active Storage came out, and at first blush, it’s still the more mature, fully‐featured solution. I’m storing photos locally, since it’s my server and has plenty of space, but Shrine can also handle storing photos on Amazon S3 and other cloud providers. For now, local works well.

I generally write posts in Markdown, and added a rudimentary post pre‐processor that looks for custom image tags in my posts and then creates a srcset attribute on my img tags that are rendered. The srcset contains all the available resolutions, and enables modern browsers to download the appropriate version for the display in question. The bottom line is that Retina displays will get the higher resolution images when they’re available, so pictures should look great on those displays. I’ve gone back and updated some recent posts with images. See if you can tell the difference. (I can!) Update: There was a small bug that was preventing the pics from displaying at the correct width; it’s been fixed.

Next up: making photos in posts link to a photo detail page.

I can’t have a post about this functionality without including a picture in it, so here’s one I shot of Ainsley while goofing around the other morning. (Note to self: I’m overdue to report on the new camera gear….)

Ainsley

“Trump Threatens Harley-Davidson With Taxes as Motorcycle Production Shifts Overseas”

It’s not often that I agree with Ben Sasse, but:

“And Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican who is a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, defended Harley’s patriotism and condemned Mr. Trump’s trade policies as bad economics.”

“‘This will go over like a Vespa at Sturgis,’ Mr. Sasse said. ‘The problem isn’t that Harley is unpatriotic—it’s that tariffs are stupid.’”