4 pandemic terms we’ll still be using years from now

When someone doesn’t respond to a text, are they ghosting, or are they just busy? It’s an age-old question. Wait, it’s not an age-old question! It’s a decade-old question that never existed before everyone had smartphones and they started text messaging!

And it’s one of many, modern-day existential problems that Apple is hoping to fix.

This week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference—its largest event of the year—the company shared dozens of new features coming to its platforms including iOS, macOS, and iPadOS. At first, they might appear to be a meaningless pile of iterative features. But in fact, you can group them together into four, distinct strategies for the future of interface. And in doing so, you can get an idea of where Apple is taking us next through its software.

As you may have guessed, one big idea is that Apple will finally let you mark yourself as away when people message you—letting you step away from the grind of digital communication without social guilt. To find out the other things Apple is up to, read my story here.

—Mark Wilson

wwdc

The 4 biggest UI trends shaping Apple’s future

Piece together dozens of new features Apple announced at WWDC, and you can spot four clear trends.

impact

Debunking the biggest myths about our ocean plastic problem

To clean up our oceans, we first need to understand what they’re actually filled with. And it’s different from what you might have heard.

wwdc

Apple’s newest frontier is audio—and at WWDC, it was everywhere

From FaceTime to AirPods, many of the features that Apple unveiled at its developers keynote relate to sound—and not just music.

[If the oil on the surface is burned, it] does get rid of the oil from the water, but then it turns a water pollution problem into an air pollution problem."

Seth Darling, Argonne National Laboratory senior scientist

work life

4 pandemic terms we’ll still be using years from now

Like in previous periods of instability, people made up new words and phrases to keep up with a rapidly changing situation.

co.design

Inside the Illuminarium, the $30 million spectacle that’s like walking into a film

Move over, Museum of Ice Cream: A former Esquire publisher, an Oscars set designer, and the filmmaker behind ‘Hamilton’ join forces on the edutainment of the future.

impact

6 ‘jugaad’ principles that could rebuild the post-COVID-19 U.S. economy

‘Jugaad’ is a Hindi word that means to improvise a solution with limited resources. It could be the basis of our economic recovery.

co.design

The secret to Lego’s enduring appeal

It’s a secret hiding in plain sight for anyone who has ever clicked Lego bricks together.

hit the ground running

Why your dream job probably doesn’t exist

On the latest episode of ‘Hit the Ground Running,’ we talk about the pressure to ‘live your best life,’ when most of us don’t even know what that looks like.

co.design

Ford Maverick is the all-in-one pickup truck you never knew you needed

Ford’s electric F150 is getting all the attention, but the affordable Maverick is the truck that might convert even the most diehard sedan drivers.

tech

Inside photo-sharing app Dispo’s second shot at being an Instagram killer

In February 2021, Dispo was the hot app defining a new generation of photo sharing. Then a scandal forced founder David Dobrik to step down.

NEWS

Who broke the internet this time? What you need to know

Huge swaths of the internet were inaccessible for users around the world on Tuesday after a major provider of cloud computing services experienced a disruption.

The outages affected a number of news sites, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Vox Media, and others, as well as large online platforms, such as Twitch, Pinterest, and Reddit.

In a series of status updates Tuesday, cloud services provider Fastly referred to a global disruption of its content delivery network, or CDN. It deployed a fix shortly after and websites started to slowly come back to life.

The scale of the disruption underscores the extent to which large portions of the internet rely on just a few companies that provide its infrastructure.

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4 pandemic terms we’ll still be using years from now

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