1. What technology is the front end built with? What about the back end?
2. What is the API specification?
3. Can you deliver it SAAS hosted in AWS? Which regions?
4. How do you delegate auth access to our Azure AD identity management servers – via SAML or OIDC?

We want to see modern technical and development architectures and pipelines which match the ones we are ourselves transitioning to. Automated testing and deployment. All that stuff.

Too many products in the airlines operation space use ancient technology and are nothing more than just a skin over a database. Even apps that get pitched to us which are “brand new”. I don’t really have much time for sales teams that don’t seem to understand REST/json API principles (verbs! wtf) or think database IDs are reliable business keys to flight data. This is just basic ten year old architecture now; I’m impressed by cutting edge stuff, not basic mobile apps built on spring web jQuery and bootstrap and a half hearted XML query interface that ignores the event driven nature of the underlying business processes. And if you’re going to use XML use a damned accepted aviation standard like AIDX, AIXM, FIXM, WXXM etc.

Applications of this nature are very resistant to modern requirements – in which we need to deliver the functionality anywhere, any time; we need the data (ALL the data) available in real time to any other system we care to send or receive the data; we don’t want to burden workers with ten different interfaces they have to use for each part of their job; and, here’s the kicker, we already have our own API in operation – we want your product to cooperate with it with minimal fuss.

We want also to directly talk to your product owners, your product architects, and your product developers. Direct access. Not mediated via “delivery teams” and project managers who dissappear after you deliver the product and mail the invoice. We also would like a rapid and reliable turnaround of new feature requests which are fairly priced. If we are buying product we don’t like paying time and materials to develop new product features. We want to see regular product update schedules in your roadmap. Monthly at least; and which continue for the entire product lifetime.

In other words: welcome to the modern world of software product architecture.

The curious thing I see with the feature is how its structured to the “productivity” apps being default exceptions to the blocks it puts on using apps “out of hours”. In other words, it’s structured to prevent “social” use and allow “work” use.

We all know by now that for many people who work in office environments the way that modern mobile technology has allowed the proliferation of what was once the working life, which had to remain in the office once you departed it, to bleed into home life. I get all sorts of emails, meeting requests, and team chat messages all generated well after reasonable office hours. Sometimes, even at 3am, I will get a triumphant message about the solution to some problem, on which someone has stayed up working all night. Of course my phone is on “do not disturb”, so I won’t usually see these until I get up in the morning, but, still, it can’t be healthy to work nearly 24 hours a day.

I think screen time needs to be more fine-grained. Instead of just banning “social media” after 2300, (or whatever time you set), you should be able to configure different “windows” of time in which different apps are acceptable or unacceptable. It need to be configurable, lets say into the old union sawhorse: eight hours work, eight hours play, eight hours rest.

Eight hours work: only allow the “productivity” apps.

Eight hours play: ban the “productivity” apps, allow the social media and entertainment apps.

Eight hours rest: important phone calls and texts only.

Well, that’s my suggestion as to how Apple should improve the implementation of the feature in future iOS updates.

Much of the negative commentary on the film can be equally applied to THE ORIGINAL FILM. The original film shamelessly stole from Kurosawa who was stealing from Hollywood Westerns (which in turn stole back from Kurosawa)! And all those French tosspots in Cahiers du Cinema in the 50s who gushed about Howard Hawkes, Nicholas Ray, and John Ford’s Westerns did so not because they thought they were trying to make middle-brow bourgeois “art”, but because they knew they weren’t, that it was made by master craftsmen working inside a “factory” system aimed toward mass entertainment. They realised The Western was about constructing myth, American myth. All of these things apply to a film like Star Wars. I don’t want to elevate Star Wars to the level of The Searchers, but the original was mythic in scope, and it was a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the Western. All this petit-bourgeois harumphing about it’s lack of “sophistication”, as if should be a two hour snorefest like 90% of “art” cinema is, both misses the point of the film (and what the French theorists wrote about American film 50 years ago), and put on display their own middle-brow prejudices.