Category Archives: Observations

I love the iPad mini.

When it was released, I got an iPad mini for the office for testing. I brought it home, put all my stuff on it to give it a proper test drive, and promptly decided it wasn’t for me. I liked my bigger iPad with its Retina display. I felt that Apple was being disingenuous with its promises of “iPad, concentrated” – it felt more like “iPad, crushed” to me. Sure, it was small and light, but honestly, there were too many trade-offs for my liking. I dismissed it, wiped the mini, put it in the testing pool at work and went on with my life.

Then something else happened. I didn’t go back to my larger iPad. I watched it, evening after evening, sitting on the TV console, fully-charged, ready to perform at a moment’s notice, but I never picked it up. I used the hell out of my phone, because the iPhone 5 is amazing, as we all know. But I didn’t feel like picking up that iPad. Every time I did, it felt so heavy. Like a really pretty manhole cover. Rene and I did a podcast in which he extolled the virtues of the mini, while I defended (theoretically, as it turned out) the need to have a bigger, nicer screen and a little more performance for the kinds of creative apps I was using.

Then it occurred to me: I wasn’t actually creating anything anymore on my iPad. It was, as I said, sitting. I watched and listened as my friends on the internet sang its praises, selling their large iPads, saying things like “it’s the best mobile device I’ve ever used”. I started to feel crazy, like I missed something… had I been too quick to dismiss the device? No, I know what I like, and my gut is usually right about things like this. Then I asked the people in my daily life who had them. Every single person said the same thing: it’s the best iPad they’d ever used.

With this gnawing at me, I couldn’t take it anymore. Deeply conflicted and doubting my own judgment, I ordered one, a white (HUGE departure from my lineage of black) 32gb Verizon mini. I sat back, suddenly relaxed that the decision was made. A weight had been lifted. If I truly didn’t like it, I could always send it back. I was ready to give it another shot.

Then it took two full weeks to arrive.

Agony. Having made the decision, I was ready to begin my new experiment. But I couldn’t. I had to wait and watch as a seemingly prehistoric process unfolded in front of me. I’m so used to Amazon Prime shipping speeds, watching as my mini was manufactured for a week and then stagnating as it trudged around the world was excruciating. It sat in a UPS facility in Kentucky for almost three full days. Doing nothing. I’ve had a 60" HDTV delivered to me from Amazon in less than 24 hours. This was torture. I casually wandered into the Apple store at the mall while my wife and I were shopping, in the hopes that they’d have a model I could grab that would at least be close to what I ordered. I was prepared to be flexible; sure, I would take a black 64gb LTE model. No problem. But nothing. Wi-fi only, everywhere I went. The cellular models were either the hottest sellers, or seriously undermanufactured.

When it finally arrived, I opened it and wept. Not really, but I was so happy to be done refreshing a shipment tracking page, I could have. I got to setting it up, put all my stuff in place, and configured it just so. Paired it with my Logitech Ultrathin (which looks positively gargantuan next to it now). Attached the Smart Cover I ordered while I waited for it to arrive. Began using it, picking it up, making it a part of my routine.

Verdict? I’m a jackass. I learned some things about myself and what I actually value. All the lip service I’d paid the larger display was truly worthless in the end, because I wasn’t even looking at it. The mini? I can’t put it down. It’s so light, I take it from room to room. I’d never done that with the larger iPad. I read more, I play games more, I bang out email, journal entries and draft posts more, simply because it’s there and ready. Everyone said it takes a few days to get used to everything being compressed a little, and it’s true. It’s been a week, though, and I couldn’t imagine going back. I stopped seeing the pixels about two days in, which was about 47.8 hours longer than I’d given it the first time. If only I’d not been so shortsighted.

The lesson for me is not about buying more crap and filling my life with more screens. It’s about not making snap judgments anymore. I find as I get older that I think I’ve got things pretty wired; that I know myself and what I think I like. The truth of the matter is that I’m woefully inflexible in my own mind sometimes, despite my ability to adjust to things in my real life (I just had a kid, trust me, I’m getting pretty awesome at “adjustment”). I have to learn to put aside my preconceived notions about things, and explore my options, because I’ll never know what I’m missing out on if I don’t.

Seems like a grandiose conclusion to draw over a gadget, but the epiphanies that matter the most to us don’t always come down on a bolt of lightning.

App.net | Twitter

The hidden potential of App.net.

I’ve thought a lot about App.net in the past few months, as many of us have I imagine. What started as discontent with the obnoxious corporate machinations that Twitter’s begun to execute spawned a movement to start something different and user-focused as opposed to focused on marketing. I won’t go into the details, because it’s well-documented in about a million other places, but suffice to say, the project got funded, we got an alpha web app and App.net quickly became a geeky subset of Twitter users both curious to try something new and disenchanted with the current state of things elsewhere.

The launch of Netbot kicked the service into high gear for a while and it saw a huge spike in traffic and activity, proving a point many have made, namely that in today’s tech world, to the user, the application is the service. App.net CEO Dalton Caldwell has even said himself that the ‘out of the box’ experience for new users isn’t terrific, and while they’re working to improve that, apps are paving the way and bringing people into the fold. And we watched as Netbot’s influence stabilized and we’ve seen overall ADN conversations trickle off in our feeds. People went back to Twitter, because the conversation keeps happening there due to a massively entrenched network effect that’s undeniable.

Lots has been said about the potential of ADN, and how it really needs to do something special to continue to grow. It won’t beat Twitter at its own game (admittedly, that’s been stated as not a real targeted objective anyway), but it’s got to do… something.

I’m starting to believe all of what we’ve seen is merely prelude to something more. I’ve been bullish on the service since making the decision to back it and I’ve watched it with great interest. I finally got around to listening to the official ADN podcast a few days ago too, and it’s basically Dalton talking about the API development and answering questions from users. The thing is, in hearing him talk about their progress and plans, I’ve started to realize something – two things, actually.

  1. The Twitter-like feed tool we currently see as “App.net” is but one face – the starting point – of a much larger idea
  2. It’s not just about making that tool better – the long play is to build an extensible communication platform not just for Twitter use cases, but for a myriad other outlets

I’d considered other ways in which the service might become valuable, but I’ll admit, I kept coming up short until I heard him talk about their plans. I thought about how it might be used as an external comment platform for blogs, linking threads and conversations back to a post via the service. I could see that being kind of cool, and I think it would definitely (given the price to enter the service) at least preliminarily solve a part of the “commenting problem”. Users willing to pony up some money to be part of a service like this might be less compelled to be dicks on people’s blogs. It’s a long shot, but you can see where I’m headed.

Listening to the podcasts, though, something else became very clear. The private messaging API is going to be the catalyst behind this entire thing. Dalton described how their focus on releasing a capable first iteration of this aspect of the service took great importance as they worked this past few months. He mentioned the concept of the “internet of things” – all the interconnected devices that are filling our lives with notifications and (in some cases) noise. He talked about the immense success platforms like BlackBerry Messenger and WhatsApp have had in the mobile space, and pointed out that no matter how large public messaging is, private messages (SMS and the like) outweigh it by orders of magnitude. He also reinforced the fact that ADN is not rushing to do much of anything – they’ve created a sustainable business model for the time being, focused on user features, and their goal is to continue developing the service, strengthening the hooks to outside applications and enabling developers to create new and interesting things by delivering working code examples with updates to the API.

Most importantly, he mentioned that with his previous company imeem, the final face of the service was drastically different than its first one. As with any software, the users will in large and small ways influence the ongoing development, and discover use cases that the devs hadn’t even considered. This is the core piece that as a market, we’re unable to see yet. We see a Twitter competitor, and one that feels like it’s faltering as Twitter continues to swell its userbase. We see something that we want to succeed, but we’re not seeing the endgame yet. I’m mentally reinvested in the entire idea after listening to him on the podcasts – not because he’s compelling users to foment revolution – but because he’s seeing past the market perception of what the service is supposed to be. It’s only been five months since the blog post that kicked this off, and four since funding. I don’t know many web services that declared victory in any capacity in that timeframe, and it’s worth keeping that in mind.

I highly recommend checking out the podcast if you’re even marginally interested in this at all. It’s changed my thinking; you may discover the same.

Thoughts? App.net | Twitter

Un-simplified, and happy.

I recently talked about my intentions to simplify my workflows by using the default Apple apps on iOS and the Mac (Notes, Reminders, etc.) as replacements for the many apps I like to jump between. My goal was to see if by just letting go of my need to tinker with the connective tissue between parts of my workflows I could improve both my base anxiety level (derived not from fear, but from a constant feeling of “could I be doing this more effectively?”) and my ability to focus more on the “work” and less on the “flow” overall. I stuck with it for several weeks, and the results are in.

It’s… not for me.

The short version: between heavy-handed interfaces and iCloud flakiness, I gave up because I felt that I was neither gaining relief from the productivity improvement demons nor was I focused on my work. Instead, I was waiting for the other iCloud shoe to drop (data loss) and talking myself into the idea that this was good enough for me, when the truth of the matter was that it really isn’t.

I’ve been reliant on Dropbox for so long I can’t even remember or imagine a world without it. Many apps take great advantage of the APIs Dropbox has in place to both sync settings and data with moderate to high levels of success based on the app and its implementation. There are two reasons I feel better about this path:

  1. Dropbox exists in a tangible way on multiple computers I own as well as in the cloud
  2. Flexibility between interfaces

The first one is easy. I don’t trust iCloud fully yet. Every time I saw three copies of a single note appear in the Notes app or a reminder re-add itself to a list after completion, I added a tiny tick mark to the wall in my mind. Which is not to say that Dropbox sync services are without folly; certainly they can and do fail from time to time, however I always have the opportunity to throw my data into another app and test the waters elsewhere. I can easily see my data in Dropbox, which is important not primarily for sync settings, but for things like my plain text notes, which might be transitory and not long-term in nature as I’d discovered, but important to see and preserve as I saw reason to take the information down and capture it. Seeing duplicate notes appear was the flip side to the coin where notes suddenly vanish, and I’m not comfortable with that.

Second: Apple’s UI choices are polarizing if nothing else. There are many choices I enjoy and find delightful, and many at which I continually level disgust and contempt. With the relief provided by giving up my tinkering ways to Apple’s choices comes a compromise I’m unwilling to make right now – I’m stuck looking at yellow paper that formats plain text in obnoxious ways and parchment lists that while functional, are hardly the optimal way to organize (in my mind, at least) the tasks and efforts I need to complete. By using apps that plug into Dropbox, I’m afforded a variety of ways to look at the exact same data. Sometimes I need that variety, and it comes at the price of my inability to sometimes stop myself from exploring other apps and interfaces. I look at these screens entirely too much each day to be unhappy with what’s staring back at me. I can work at leaving well enough alone with regard to fiddly bits, but I can’t work at liking a UI I simply don’t.

The fundamental truth I learned about myself, which I mentioned in the first sentence of that other post is that I am a tinkerer. I like to try different things, break stuff, put it back together, and start from scratch. It’s something I can’t really turn off entirely, nor do I want to. It’s a curiosity I’ve had since I was a kid, and I hope my daughter expresses the same interest in exploration, whether it’s with software or any other interest she’s passionate about. I try new apps and add layers of complexity because I need to. It’s an evolving little puzzle I do with myself, like a game of Jenga in reverse. Occasionally I find something rock solid and leave it working, but there’s always something else to move on to, some new thing to play with, some new web service to leverage to make the mental machine run a little more smoothly. Understanding this about myself means I don’t feel guilty anymore about trying a million different ways to do a simple thing because I can rest a little easier knowing I’ve ruled out the ways I didn’t know before.

So, back to plain text, back to Dropbox, like a favorite pair of jeans. Sometimes you buy new jeans, sometimes you wear a suit, and sometimes the jeans sit in your drawer for a few weeks. But they’re there, and you know it, and it makes you happy.

Simplified, part 2.

I’ve been a huge fan of Squarespace for a long time, since I started using the service in May of 2009. Coming from a self-managed WordPress install, it was like a breath of fresh air, in which things were well-designed and easy to understand. You could add complexity piece by piece in sensible ways (if you wanted to) but mostly it was great for writing and posting quickly and attractively. The mobile apps were a nice encapsulation of the experience and allowed you to do the basic things you’d want to on the go.

I eagerly awaited the release of v6 this year after hearing so much about the beta as people used it and said how amazingly new it all was. How could the service possibly top itself? What wizardry awaited in this new release? The launch came, and I immediately migrated my entire site to the new service.

That was my first mistake. I soon realized that none of the categories I’d created over the past few years appeared in my composition windows when I was posting. Which meant that I needed to either re-create each manually, or I had a much bigger service issue that I couldn’t possibly fix. I contacted support and spoke to a variety of different, eager-to-help representatives, but the issue went unfixed for several weeks, during which I was afraid to add content to the site, not knowing how it might affect things. It finally did get resolved, though, so I can say thanks for that.

In that same span of time, I realized that the iOS apps upon which I relied for quick posts from my iPhone and iPad were slowly becoming hobbled. I could not edit posts I’d created in the new system on iOS because of the limitations of the way the apps handled them. I wasn’t doing anything nutty; I post entirely text, with the very occasional image (almost never). Over a few weeks, I wasn’t able to even post new entries to the site at all. Two days ago, I noticed that all the buttons in the iPad app compose window do exactly nothing now. Which left me with a post in the app that I couldn’t save as a draft or publish.

I stuck with a service that I’ve used for years, because I loved the flexibility. Which recently was whittled away to literally nothing. The iOS apps are now broken beyond belief. One would assume the company would be hard at work on restoring compatibility. But instead, it released a new branded note-taking app… because that’s what its users need more. I know notes are so hot right now, but it would really be better to have the entire service work as advertised. Even on the web, I’ve experienced slowdown, hangs, and complete failure as I try to do even the most basic things.

I finally tired of waiting for something to happen, so yesterday I migrated the site to a hosted WordPress install. I paid for ad removal and a custom URL. At least WP’s iOS apps do something (namely, work properly). The theme I chose is simple and pleasant, and I’m able to continue writing when I want to (infrequently) but when I post, it goes somewhere. I’m getting serious about dropping things from my life that don’t work for me or make things more difficult than they need to be. Sadly, one of my favorite web tools became one of those weights that needed to be dropped. I’m not beyond sweeping the leg when I need to.

No mercy, sensei.

Let’s talk about the future.

As a kid (ok, a nerdy kid), I had dreams of an incredible future that my VIC-20 couldn’t even begin to predict. I watched science fiction films and fantasized about all of the amazing ways that technology would transform the landscape of our lives. As I grew older, and some of those dreams took shape, my excitement and passion for tech increased as I watched developments come to pass that previously only lived inside my fevered geek-kid dreams. It goes without saying that if you showed a current generation mobile phone to yourself as a 12-year old, your head probably would have just exploded on the spot.

Which is why I’m a little troubled by the way Google is positioning itself and its products as the future of our technology. Not for the reasons the internet would ordinarily attribute to a proclamation like this (cult member status of a competing platform’s movement), but rather because at its core, I’m not sure that Google is being honest with itself, and with us.

Take Google Glass, a piece of wearable technology that looks like it was left behind by a time traveler. The geek kid inside me looks at that and says ‘Wow! I can’t believe I’m going to be able to have an always-on HUD for my actual life!’ because that’s just the way I’m conditioned to respond to products like this. The pragmatic adult inside me looks and says ‘Ok, good, but let’s see how the platform around this develops before we get excited’ because that’s how my grown-up brain thinks. But the fact remains that it’s a cool and interesting piece of tech, and I remain curious about it.

Look at Google Now, a recent addition to the Android OS with Jelly Bean. The main idea behind Google Now is that by plugging into Google services with your phone, your location, your likes and dislikes, your habits, patterns, and intentions will slowly be absorbed and presented back to you in a meaningful context, with relevance. Amazing, right? Imagine most of the friction involved in gathering in-the-moment information on your smartphone removed – you look at it, and it seemingly already knows what you want. Sports, weather, restaurants around you, everything that matters to you right now as you’re looking at the phone. It’s a very cool idea and one that paints a better picture of our machines working for us, as opposed to with us, or in some cases against us (let’s just say it took a while for Siri to actually grow into her promises of information at my fingertips the way I wanted it).

Great ideas, executed and advanced by what was and is one of the greatest engineering companies on the planet. No one would assert that Google can’t bring the future to us, given how it’s shaped the web and redefined how we interact with it. My problem is this:

Google is bringing the future to us so it can monetize every single thing we do in our lives, online or offline.

Google is not a pure engineering company, rather, Google is a company that engineers great products (and they are great) in order to advance a larger, singular objective: the collection of user-provided data to better serve advertising interests. It’s not a company that sells products to people; were that the case, this entire thing would look and feel very different to me. We know how Google makes money. It’s not a secret. As I watch Google release more impressive and robust mobile products with comments like “there’s no margin, it just basically gets (sold) through” the picture only gets clearer. It’s not making money on hardware. It’s not making money on software, as it’s traditionally kept software products free to most if not all users. The money comes from us, and all the information we give it. The money comes from tailoring ads to match what it thinks we want. Which at its core is itself a great idea, but leads to a lot of other questions.

But before this gets tin-foily, let me refocus: if you’re cool with Google knowing a lot about you, that’s fine. For the most part, I don’t even care myself. I’m not super paranoid about this kind of stuff, although I do tend to approach it with a more skeptical eye. What I don’t like and can’t agree with is the notion, as presented by the company, that it’s changing the landscape of consumer technology and the way we interact with one another for any noble reason. It’s not doing this to join all the peoples of the world together in blissful online harmony. It’s not doing this so that we can experience amazing new things and drive humanity to new heights. It’s doing this because (first and foremost) it’s made of geeks and geeks like to build cool things (and other geeks want to use them), but those things take money to build and sustain, and the way it makes its money always seems to take a backseat to the wow factor. And that’s what troubles me. It’s not the advancement of technology for the love of the art and science of human discovery – it’s cool technology, but it leaves a lot of questions in my mind about motivation and method.

And listen – all of this could just be fired-up rhetoric in a few years anyway, when Google announces complete data transparency and personal information is regarded with the sanctity some of us feel it should be. I’m not holding my breath for that particular outcome, but to be fair, Google’s always been first to say that we should be able to get our data in and out of a system when we want it, and its guiding corporate goal is to stay away from the Dark Side of the Force. All I’m saying is, think about the subtext of all the things you see coming to market and the messages you’re receiving along with them. Ask yourself: is this the future you’ve always dreamed about or is itthe future brought to you by [ADVERTISER NAME HERE™]?