512 Pixels

The 512 Pixels Holiday Gift Guide for People Like Me

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It’s that time of year, so I’m happy to present my annual gift guide. If you have someone like me in your life, consider these suggestions:

Alexa, Where Did My $10 Billion Go?⇢

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Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company’s history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-com merce giant. That’s according to a report from Business Insider, which details “the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon’s larger hardware division.”

Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn’t really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the “Worldwide Digital” group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with “the vast majority” of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

Wooooof.

John Gruber:

What is (was?) Alexa about, strategically? I’ve often heard that the vague idea was that people would buy Alexa devices for obvious stuff (playing music, setting timers) but that eventually they’d starting using Alexa to buy stuff from Amazon — and thus wind up buying more stuff from Amazon than they would if they didn’t have an Alexa device in their house. That never made sense to me. Buying stuff via voice commands seems inherently uncertain — like buying a lottery ticket where you need some luck to actually get the product you think you told Alexa to buy. Even if it works, how is it any better than just shopping at Amazon on your phone, iPad, or computer? It seems worse to me, and no more convenient. How do you comparison shop via voice?

Kbase Article of the Week: Using iCal with Microsoft Entourage⇢

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Apple Support:

iCal and the calendar feature of Microsoft Entourage can be used together–as long as you have iCal 1.5 or later and Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later installed.

If you have earlier versions of iCal or Mac OS X, when you try to add an iCal invitation to an Entourage calendar, an alert box with an error message could appear; an Entourage invitation received with the Mac OS X Mail application could appear as plain text instead of as an attachment; or, when you try to import or add an .ics file from Entourage into iCal by double-clicking the file’s icon, an alert box might appear.

If you weren’t around in the Entourage days, you really missed something. I ran it for years in college (as my school handed out Exchange accounts to students), and it was the hub for so much of my digital life.

Sponsor: Unite 4 for macOS⇢

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Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.

Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:

  • A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client
  • A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
  • An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
  • A Google Meet app that works efficiently without using Chrome
  • A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window
  • A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop

The newly launched Unite 4.2 makes the experience even better, with built-in password management, fully-featured status bar apps, and much more.

512 Pixels readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/unite512 or when you use the promo code ‘512Pixels’ at checkout.

You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!

Kickstarter Progress Report: November 19

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I just packed and labeled the final orders for the Kickstarter! The last set of packages will be taken to the post office Monday morning. It feels great to have reached this point the weekend before Thanksgiving.

(To be fair, there are still 23 of you who have not filled out a shipping survey! If you log in to Kickstarter, you will find a direct message from me with your survey URL!)

I have loved seeing the notes from those of you who have already received yours in the mail. Keep sending them my way!

Alexa in Spaaaaace⇢

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Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing at The Verge:

Earlier this summer, on the day Artemis I was originally scheduled to launch, I spent an hour testing out the capabilities of this new deep space voice assistant down on the ground at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

While this was a demo model (they wouldn’t let me in the spacecraft — I asked), as far as I could tell, it was an exact replica of the one on Orion, even down to the lack of an internet connection.