Really great keyboard, but I don't agree with the decision to replace San Fransisco with Roboto. The weight and position of the type is off on the keys, and it makes the keyboard feel less native than it should.
They've made the conscious decision to use their Material design and Roboto in all their iOS apps. This is funny because in their Android UI documents they stress that you should stick with the OS style. But, they do exactly the opposite on iOS. It's one of the reasons why I use the Google apps as little as possible.
I doubt I'll use this keyboard. I have an iPhone 5 so screen space is limited and I don't want to waste it on a big Google logo in my keyboard. Plus, I can't see that I'll have much use for it.
Good news for you. John Gruber reviewed Gboard and one of his complaints in regard to the UI stylings was that "they should have gone the whole way and used San Francisco for the typeface, too."
To which Rajan Patel replied:
>"@daringfireball ..[we should go all the way w/ design]..
I use YouTube daily on my iPhone with Red and it is incredibly feature dense and useful and because of good search pretty quick too. It does seem crowded but I have difficulty imagining a better solution and really like the App.
It's disappointing that desalinization has taken precedent over recycling water. There have been many developments in this area –including the one Bill Gates has been supporting [1] – yet despite being the more cost effective option, people can't get over the idea of drinking water that was poop.
Singapore has been recycling sewage into potable water for some time now. Although the majority is used in industrial applications requiring very pure water (e.g wafer fabs), some is added to the tap water:
NEWater is mainly used for industrial and air-con cooling purposes at wafer fabrication plants, industrial estates and commercial buildings. The biggest users of NEWater are wafer fabrication plants which require water quality that is even more stringent than water for drinking. NEWater is delivered to industrial customers via a dedicated pipe network.
During dry periods, NEWater is added to our reservoirs to blend with raw water. The raw water from the reservoir then goes through treatment at the waterworks before it is supplied to consumers as tap water. [1]
I'm in Northern California. My lawn is dead. I can get over it. Run the purple pipe into the aquifer already like Santa Ana does.
"When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap."
I'm a bit anxious about sewage to drinking water efforts.
While I'm fairly confident that we can eliminate most live pathogenic organisms from sewage with enough work, excreted toxins, hormones, and undigested pharmaceuticals are another matter. Diluting those through a watershed serves a real purpose that sewage treatment facilities are not up to replicating.
it's always an issue of volume flow and membrane effectivenes with these things. many things 'work' that don't work to resupply the population on a daily basis.
Nanoporous graphene is pretty awesome stuff. The numbers are up in the range of 4 litres per square centimetre per hour per megapascal. Or more practically, just a one centimetre by one centimetre "hole" at the bottom of a 100m tall "tank" (it can actually just be a pipe, the key is the water depth not the reservoir capacity) would produce 4 litres per hour powered by nothing but gravity. Of course there's the requisite effort of approximately 100N of work per litre to lift it up that hundred meters, but being otherwise passive is a good illustration of how much more efficient these materials are.
Yes I know I'm ignoring things like biofilm buildup, particulate settling, etc. I'm mainly trying to illustrate the "basic work" required to get drinking water from sea water using the latest technology. Most existing reverse osmosis membranes are only capable of 1 litre per square centimetre per megapascal per DAY. That's not even a remotely practical rate without mechanically applied pressures, and since we're now dealing with hydraulic pressures... a lot more engineering and maintenance.
Thank you, was going to mention the flow rate vs current reverse osmosis tech.
I am still wondering about the efficiency in terms of filtering toxins. Water molecules are smaller than most other molecules but I am not sure if some toxins would still be able to get through the holes in the graphene? Things like heavy metals
Interestingly, growing up, I thought a second set of pipes for "non-potable" or reclaimed water was standard. Where I grew up in Florida, every lawn was watered with reclaimed water. According to their website[1], Florida is currently reusing 660 million gallons of water per day. Really makes me wonder why states that are in apparent perpetual drought condition haven't adopted similar techniques.
Non-potable is the industry term for "non-human drinkable".
And yes, the cost of that would be huge, not just in cities. In the UK the decision the victorians made to not have separate sewage and rain water drainage systems still has a knock-on today and costs a vast amount in water treatment, but the cost of separating rain runoff and sewage is still seen as prohibitive.
edit:
However, on a small local-scale grey water systems can do a lot of good, both for re-use but also rain water capture and re-use would help with flood prevention. If houses captured rainwater for use for lawn watering and other appropriate uses, this is something that could be done without great expense.
Be careful of the law of unintended consequences. Rainwater capture will be fine so long as only a minority do it (how small I don't know) or only a fraction is captured but if everyone does it then it will change the economics of water supply and give people incentives to use the captured water for other than lawn watering. For instance they might use it for flushing toilets or even bathing. the problem that then happens is that the local water table will fall because it is not getting the water that it used to because that water is now flushed into the sewage system.
I'm not arguing against the idea, especially as it is typically implemented in the UK where a house will generally only have about 500 litres of storage, but scaling it up and making it a requirement could cause some interesting problems.
It's unlikely that a given residential area is drawing water from the area directly beneath it, or that its water supply is fed by residential run-off. That's not going to be clean water that you'd want to drink. Most residential water comes from resovoirs fed by mostly unpopulated catchment areas which are often 10s or 100s of miles away. Also bare in mind that around 50% of rainwater evaporates or ends up in the ocean, so there's plenty to go around.
I thought that the idea of rainwater capture was to prevent the water from going to "waste" as runoff. That is, the water that hits the roof of your house ends up in a torrent in the downspouts, which runs into the streets and the sewer system. Whereas the water that hits your yard has more of a chance to sink into the water table.
I believe most gray-water systems are internal to individual buildings.
For example, a house would fitted with a storage tank for shower water, which is then used for flushing the toilet, or even watering a yard. The toilet water is sent to city sewer system.
Water based toilets and watered lawns aren't used in places with shortage of drinking water. (Except in places with high inequality where an upper class can afford to use water in toilet but lower class can't afford to drink it)
"The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense."
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
>> "Overall I think they have two things up on everyone else: design and playlists. On Spotify and Rdio finding good playlists is difficult. Spotify has been getting better at this but it isn't great yet. Beats seems to have spent a lot of time crafting A LOT of really great playlists and they seem to be where I'm spending most of my time. The human curation thing seems to have worked."
Totally agree. Beats has taken the best of both of Rdio and Spotify, and along with the human curation, built a pretty solid product.
The web interface leaves a lot to be desired at this point, but looking forward to seeing what they come up with here.
Totally agree, the website is lacking compared with the app. I guess launching solid apps on three separate platforms in the same week meant dedicating fewer engineers to the website, hopefully it'll improve quickly. I do most of my listening on my laptop and having to listen on my phone is quite annoying as I'm using it for dev purposes all day.
I've been giving it a run through this morning. Haven't gotten too far in, but I'd already say Spotify and Rdio have some serious competition on their hands.
The curation is where this service really excels, also the UI is pretty tight.
I've heard bad things about the headphones, so never tried them.
Really great to see this finally available, not only for the streaming service, but because at this point Google seems to be the only one dealing with music lockers the right way.
I've been using Google Music as a backup of my library for quite some time, but recently have found using it as my primary player much more convenient that loading iTunes and dealing with iTunes Match, which IMO, is broken. (there is a side story her about moving countries, but that's for another time).
Would love to see a Rdio/Spotify-esque native application as well, but that might be asking a little too much.
EDIT: The lack of a online/offline music toggle is really disappointing.
If you’ve not read it, I recommend Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books
And I just listened to this episode of Hidden Brain the other day which has a similar theme. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-best-years-of-your-life/