There has been a lot of rumbling lately about Twitter. While there’s a lot to like about the service (it remains my favorite and nearly exclusive social media outlet), Twitter has also become a playground for some pretty abusive and vile people. Charlie Warzel at BuzzFeed did a an impressive bit of reporting tracking the history of abuse of Twitter users and the company’s general failure to address the problem since the beginning. While I had known about some of the recent problems, I didn’t realize that this stems back to 2008. I recommend reading the entire article. It’s quite informative but also a bit disheartening.

Twitter responded that portions of the story are untrue but they don’t explain what those portion are or provide any further clarification. Having watched friends (primarily female) go through the Twitter meat grinder, I think the BuzzFeed story gets things generally right.

My one bit of feedback is that I don’t buy Twitter’s claim that they’re worried about lawsuits. Most people on the Internet have the ability to kick somebody off their website or service if they feel like they are behaving badly. If you don’t believe me, read the terms of service of every website on the Internet.

I think the reason why Twitter has been ignoring this problem is because they want everyone to use Twitter, even the jackasses. Maybe it’s time they grew up and started cracking down on this. If not, the rest of us will start voting with our feet.

I wanted a little escape tonight so I went in the App store and purchased the Dr. Who colouring book. It took about 30 seconds to realize that purchase was a mistake. It isn’t a coloring book at all. Instead, you get a picture and a series of colors. You then tap in a white space and it fills in with the selected color … perfectly … every time. Without the actual act of drawing, I don’t get the expected therapy.

If you’re looking for a coloring book app (and if you have an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil I recommend you at least try), give Pigment a try. It gets iPad coloring right.

Because I can’t help myself, I was early to the game with the iOS 10 betas this year. As a nerd, I find it generally fun to be at the bleeding edge technology. When something goes wrong, I don’t blame Apple because it is, after all, a beta. Most things that break in beta get fixed before the final product ships. 

As such, I usually don’t worry too much about problems in beta. I am, however, concerned about the “Save to iCloud” dialog box in iOS 10. Here is a screenshot.

In iOS 9, the Save to iCloud dialog box was a little buggy but generally worked. It had a search bar and a way to navigate through your folders. Starting with iOS 10 beta 1 we got the above Save to iCloud dialog box. They’ve removed the search function and instead made it a very long scrolling list of folders. There’s no way to collapse the folders and no way to jump to a specific destination. Instead, every time you want to save something to iCloud, you need to scroll through a seemingly endless list until you find the folder you want. In that process, you need to be very careful. If you scroll too fast and the iPad mistakes your swipe for a touch, iOS 10 saves the file to whatever folder you happen to touch. As I discovered, it’s not always easy to figure out exactly where things end up. With every new iOS 10 beta I go back to this thinking it will have improved. So far it hasn’t.

This new Save to iCloud dialog box is unusable for someone that has more than a few iCloud-based folders. When this arrived, I was in the midst of a two-month experiment running most of my cloud-based files off of iCloud. There were good parts and bad parts but it was workable. This dialog box put the brakes on the whole experiment. At first, I thought it was simply a placeholder until they made something better. But now they are up to the fifth beta and there still has been no change with this dialog box. I’m starting to get worried that this is what they intend to ship.

Does anyone at Apple use more than 100 folders on their iCloud drive? If they do, this has to be a pain point for them. I know we still have a month or so before iOS 10 ships and I really hope that I end up looking like Chicken Little with this post but if Apple does not improve the Save to iCloud dialog box before iOS 10 ships, it’s going to be difficult to use iCloud with any significant number of folders.

Apple’s Fall Lineup I expect we’ll see a lot from Apple in the next few months. If history is any indicator, we’ll get new iPhones next month but that’s not all. The MacBook Pro is long overdue and rumored to be coming out by the end of the year and yesterday AppleInsider broke a story about the Apple Watch 2 by the end of the year with GPS, a barometer, and better water-proofing.

If there will be one missing product from the “new and improved” category, I’d guess it is the iPad. The iPad Pros are still pretty new and I’d not be surprised to see any new iPads pushed to Spring 2017. Also, did you notice how the iPod has completely dropped out of the narrative when talking about new Apple products?

Either way, if you’re looking to upgrade some of your Apple hardware, the next few months could get expensive.

Shameless.