Post Processing: Getting Meetings Right, iPhone 12 mini Sales, and Android Studio

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A Lamp Post
Emerging from the conference room, a colleague put two fingers to her temple and mimicked shooting herself. The humor was clear; the meeting ran too long and little was accomplished.

Meetings are a rich source of humor, pain, and to a lesser degree, nap time. I wrote The Mandatory "Optional" Meeting back in 2006, but it referenced a meeting that took place in the mid-1980s. It's safe to say that bad meetings have plagued us at least since the corporation was invented, and likely before that.

Now, in 2021, as the pandemic subsides and employees return to the office, the subject of meetings has returned to the fore. The New York Times recently published two articles about them: Meetings. Why? and Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There's No Evidence of It.

Yet, despite the awareness that most meetings are unnecessary and poorly run, efforts to improve them mostly fail. The cynic in me suspects there remains, while not a majority, a sufficiently large and stubborn mass of people who like meetings just the way they are.

Back in December, I declared my love for the iPhone 12 mini, but evidently, I'm in the minority. Despite good reviews, sales of the iPhone 12 mini accounted for only 5% of Apple's iPhone lineup, partly because it shared the spotlight with the iPhone SE, an older, lower priced, but similarly small model. The good news is that Apple will be making an iPhone 13 mini, according to Macworld UK. If you're the type of person who appreciates the Miata or the MINI Cooper, razors with fewer than five blades, skinny jeans, or if you are a developer, vim, then give the iPhone mini a second look.

And finally, a bit of (old) news for the developer. Android Studio 4.11 introduced two features I really like:

1. the device simulator normally was displayed outside the IDE, which works best if you have two monitors. Now it can also be displayed within the IDE, which works well when you have a single monitor.

2. the editor has key mappings for vim (yay!). 





 








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