I recently re-watched The Force Awakens, and I found a couple of lines from Snoke very interesting.
At the 49-minute mark, he is addressing General Hux and Kylo Ren about allowing BB-8 to be returned to the Resistance.
I’m not going to quote the movie’s villain verbatim, but he basically complained that if the Resistance can locate “the last Jedi” then “the new Jedi will rise.”
I did a double-take. Did Snoke preview the entire sequel trilogy back in 2015?
The 2017 episode was named The Last Jedi, and the final episode of the saga is named The Rise of Skywalker.
Back before Episode VII, I remember reading that Kathleen Kennedy and JJ Abrams essentially laid out the story for the sequel trilogy early on. And when I read about the departures of creators who took too many creative liberties with Star Wars (Gareth Edwards, Colin Trevorrow, Lord and Miller), I think Rian Johnson might be getting a lot of undeserved flak over The Last Jedi. I suspect he wrote and directed the movie with careful oversight from Kennedy and Abrams. And I, personally, don’t think The Last Jedi was a bad movie, at all. Remember, not everyone liked The Empire Strikes Back when it was originally released.
Anyway, I don’t want to turn into a Star Wars apologist here, so I will just end this article here.
Jony Ive flourished under Steve Jobs’ leadership. In those days, Jobs was focused on simplicity, and Ive was masterful at creating it.
Some achievements were clearly great. Others arguable. A few were hamhanded.
There’s a saying that art can be whatever it wants, but design has to work.
The Misses
The mouse puck, the original iPod shuffle, and the Apple TV remote are exercises in forcing art to design.
Beauty Meets Stink
The mouse was an ergonomic disaster. The third generation iPod shuffle lacked buttons (yes, really). The Apple TV remote is the manifestation of a palindrome: Which way is up? (I always, always grab the thing incorrectly.)
In the pursuit to achieve thinness, Ive drove the effort to re-engineer the key mechanism on MacBook laptop keyboards. Thus, the traditional scissor key mechanism was eschewed, and the butterfly key was developed. This new invention reduced vertical space requirements from 1mm to 0.5mm. The butterfly keyboard has gone down in infamy as a true liability for Apple. The widespread reliability issues has spawned a multi-year warranty program to quickly replace failed keyboards for customers. One new MacBook hardware update was introduced and added to this warranty program on the same day. All to shave a half millimeter of MacBook thickness.
The Mad Pursuit of Hardware Thinness
Amazing that Scott Forstall lost his job for not apologizing for Apple Maps, but Jony Ive stayed completely under the radar on this one.
Painful But Good
Anytime he could, Jobs tried to advance the computing industry in many ways, and Ive realized many of those goals.
The iMac lost its floppy disc drives and then its CD-ROM/DVD drives. Apple lost these features first, and the industry eventually followed. Now that these things are gone, no one misses them.
These days, the pinch in convenience is the Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port. The evolution to this port is inevitable and comes closer to reality as each month goes by. Like before, Apple was the first mainstream hardware maker to unceremoniously dump all other ports for this new one. In a few years, no one will miss USB-A and the mini-USB, micro-USB, etc., ports and cables.
The Hits
Ive’s design skills were a vital part in Apple’s return to prominence. The industry-standard beige box was disrupted by colorful iMacs.
The iPod liberated our music from our immobile desktop computers with a revolutionary interface to access thousands of tunes in a device that literally fit in Jobs’ back pocket.
Inarguable Hits
And then there was iPhone.
A truly momentous device that revolutionized the awful mobile phone and personal info manager industry. It went on to conveniently bring communication technology to millions across the United States and billions around the world.
Removing apps from a Mac is very simple. You just move it to the Trash.
But what about all the supporting data and settings your computer uses with that app? Surprisingly, these little tidbits are usually left behind. And after a while, these little tidbits add up and can create performance or storage issues. And manually removing these small files requires rooting around in a set of very unintuitive folder structures that are actually hidden by default.
AppCleaner makes all this drudgery unnecessary.
Open AppCleaner. Open the Application folder in Finder. Then just drag and drop the app you want to remove onto the AppCleaner window.
AppCleaner will generate a report that includes the app and its supporting elements. Oftentimes, AppCleaner will not include the supporting elements that hold your custom personal settings. These elements would be beneficial if you were to install the app again later. If you don’t plan to install again, you can just check those remaining items to be included in the removal process.
Click Remove. Provide your Mac password if prompted. And you’re done, and it’s gone.
I’m getting rid of an outdated installation of Reeder
