Curious to see all the new interaction paradigms people come up with now that we have something physical that can sense degrees of freedom.
A dumb one off the top of my head:
When reading a book with both screens open, have the outer display show the cover of the book, and closing and opening the screens together causes a page turn. (Unfortunately also a great way to rapidly wear out the hinge mechanism.)
There are some amusing apps which read the MacBook's lid angle sensor. I remember one of them played a creaking noise through the speakers when you open or close it... Somehow I doubt App Store review will let that in for the Duo, but we can always hope.
Considering how many comments I regularly see on Hacker News from people who still love their M1 MacBooks, I’d say that’s not a particularly strong maxim.
The AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, HomePod, MacBook Neo, and AirTag are also all devices that have had well-received (if not always breakout) 1st-gen releases.
Yeah although my M4 is more powerful I somehow don't perceive it much and it's so heavy and gets hot. My aging M1 is still snappy for most workloads, the battery holds well, it's light. Only thing I resent is the stupid touch bar instead of proper F keys.
But I'd say it's the exception. In general it's better to wait for later generation.
The M1 Macs were a bit different because Apple had already been designing their own CPUs for years, and the machine designs themselves were almost identical to previous iterations with Intel CPUs. The only thing they needed to get right was the software, which they did (and which could have been updated after the fact if they didn’t).
Personally I find passports slightly too large to comfortably fit in my pants pocket, and a passport is definitely thinner than this phone. Whenever I travel and have to have my passport in my pants pocket I’m always a bit uncomfortable about it, I usually prefer to keep it in my backpack or somewhere else. If you’re carrying this in a purse then it sounds great. The passport aspect ratio is pretty awesome on phones, I tried one shaped like this at a Chinese phone store last year and enjoyed it. But shoving a $2000 device the size of a thick passport into my pocket on a daily basis feels like a bad idea.
You hold your passport a few times a year, for maybe a few minutes. Probably less than 1 hour total per year. Many people will 5x that usage-time in just a day.
They briefly showed the Duo opened partway like a laptop, and even had a keyboard displayed on the lower portion. Maybe it would be kind of like a smaller GPD Mini but with touchscreen instead of physical keys.
It will save people a lot of time because they don't have to go to the Apple store, they can use their own passport to discover that the phone is still too big in a different dimension to use with one hand.
They are so unwieldy that the US has a passport card because the passport is too big for frequent travellers. I also will complain about how my passport's ID page is the second, not the first page, so you open the passport, and then always have to flip to the second page (unless you use a tiny bit of tape).
The passport card is almost exclusively for people who go back and forth to Canada and want to keep it in their wallet. Nobody is complaining about the size of a passport.
The passport card is only used for land and sea entries, it's not a full replacement for the passport (would be nice if it was) and never has been. It does work as a federally issued ID if you need one.
I've recently been watching these dev logs for an update to the Bodycam FPS game and was impressed by the attention to detail with building out core systems.
(The game is trying to portrait a very realistic combat environment, so if you're sensitive to that you may want to skip.)
Smaller recent side projects:
(1) Backchannel (https://github.com/twalichiewicz/Backchannel) -- A userscript that adds Hacker News, Bluesky, Reddit, & other's discussions into a single blended discussion thread to any site you visit. I've added lots of features (including a new blended homepage) since the original post, nI've been working on turning it into a working example of Webmentions & Web Annotations.
Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49090607
(2) Typing Tennis (https://typingtennis.com) -- Tennis, but typing. You type two words: one to reposition yourself and another to return a hit. Playable against CPUs or friends, as well as a daily challenge mode.
Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695492
I started working towards this goal in the latest release: you can now add Reddit as a source, so now when you visit a URL it will check across all subreddits where it's been posted and give you a blended discussion made up from everyone's comments.
I've made quite a few improvements from the original version over the past few days, but unfortunately the OG version I released didn't specify the @updateURL or @downloadURL so you may not automatically get updated if you installed when I first posted this.
I've been working towards building out functionality close to what you're describing. As a first feature, I added annotations where the script looks for HN comments quoting parts of the article and adds a highlighter effect. It lets you instantly see what parts of the text people are actually interested in. It's still a rough beta, but I'm actively working toward that exact vision.
A dumb one off the top of my head:
When reading a book with both screens open, have the outer display show the cover of the book, and closing and opening the screens together causes a page turn. (Unfortunately also a great way to rapidly wear out the hinge mechanism.)
reply