A couple of things about the iPadOS.

To me, this is the most exciting consumer announcement at WWDC today.

Everything, from better copy/paste (that terrible tap UI be damned), to the new Apple ID based app sign-in (it’s been a long time coming), to the fact that you see footnotes on the iPadOS page for the first time at about 70% down the page (when they mention speed improvements, which are already a sore spot for Apple), tells me that Apple has finally accepted that the iPad is not just a ‘bigger iOS device’ but a thing in itself.

Some of the ideas they’re throwing at us are reminiscent of OS X jiggery-pokery (like Today widgets, and App Expose and app spaces), while others, like Apple Arcade (gaming subscription service; akin to Amazon FreeTime Unlimited) seem like good improvements that Apple needs to keep their services business growing.

Apple’s long road to merging Mac and iPad app development is on the cusp of breaking out, and their continuity and handoff features are getting better and better.

The best part was the range of iPads that this new OS supports, which is a good job, well done, Apple.

I realized recently, that we use our iPads horizontally almost exclusively, and Apple should ideally twist the Apple logo in the back by ninety degrees. Perhaps this software change is the first step to embracing this new mentality.

The Original iPad mini and Apple’s fluid vision

It is meaningless, unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one-quarter of the present size. Apple’s done extensive user-testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them.

Source: A Look Back at the Original iPad mini – MacStories

It seems like Steve Jobs and Apple understood that you can’t place things too close inside the screen, but forgot that you can’t place the screen and the edge too close either, because it’ll cause hours of headaches by unwanted swipes, taps, and hard presses. The Apple of today thinks bezels are bad and it is wrong. Steve Jobs might have said the above, but he’s also the one constantly touting that they made their devices thinner, which reduces battery life and also the ‘holdability’ of mobile devices.

(Proof of the holdability issue – When was the last time you held your iPhone 7 or above naked, without a case, and felt confident that you’ll not drop it? It’s been months for me and when I did it last night, it felt alien. It seems Apple has outsourced the job of holdability to the cases that we inevitably put on our sold-a-kidney-for devices.)

I love my original iPad Mini and still use it. It’s a very well built device. The iPads of today make me feel like Apple just wants to make the jump to touch ‘computers’ instead of trying to keep the iPad what it is – a touchscreen tablet that feels different than anything else on the market.

The difference between a touch computer and a touch tablet? The former, you keep on your desk and work on using a keyboard (think Surface). The latter, your kids hold while they’re watching YouTube videos on in the car.

But this gives Apple a great new diversification strategy – do you want an iPad to work or an iPad to play?

Till now, they’ve kept these two together. But maybe, bowing to market forces, they’ll break these two use cases apart and give us two iPads that do very different things. That’ll require Apple to stop treating the iPad like it’s just the overgrown brother of the iPhone. Let’s see if they do that.

p.s. With iOS 12, if Apple is truly committed to making software releases that don’t completely destroy older devices, that’s also relevant to corporate uses. Companies don’t keep updating everyone’s hardware every two years ‘because the software got old’. So if Apple wants an iPad on every office desk (as they should), they really need to get their software updates game right, which they seem to be on a path to.

p.p.s I was going to call the title “Apple’s faltering vision” (because clickbait!) but Apple’s vision is rather fluid. If they see a market segment responding well, they go after that, instead of doubling down on losing segments like some other companies do.

Security vs Usability

I’ve come to a point where I do **not** update apps, plugins, software in general. I know that’s a regressive approach to safety, but safety can’t keep trumping usability all the time.

Source: My comment on Stephen’s Notebook

Every few days, I have a conversation about security vs usability somewhere. With my iPad Mini, I blindly trusted Apple to do the right thing and they’ve screwed me over. It’s a beloved device, destroyed completely by iOS 9.

So I’ve basically given up on this bullshit harp that companies sing of ‘security’ to shove software updates down our throats. Sometimes it’s their stupidity, and sometimes it’s just them being sinister. The new Microsoft is the old Microsoft. The benevolent Apple is an insidious Apple. Don’t get me started on Facebook, twitter, and Google. Gmail is just the latest casualty of our overzealous overlords.

Yes, security is a big problem. Yes, it needs constant vigilance. But just like national defense budgets, one key phrase doesn’t allow organizations to completely railroad people’s expectations, asks, hopes, and in this case, UX.

If you’re concerned that by not updating software, you’re living on the edge, restrict the things you do on that device, while keeping other devices that are completely updated and secured. Use only frequently updated third party browsers instead of the default options. Read up on the latest security scares on the Internet and just be aware of the situations you can get into. But most importantly – back up. Make frequent backups of things you care about. I don’t care if it’s as much as letting iCloud run its course every night, and Google Photos siphoning off your pics. Just do it so that if you brick your device, or get hacked, you’re not set back a hundred years.

99% of security is just keeping your eyes open.

No updates please

I was an avid software updater. I would read the updates list, hit the update button and see the download happen. I enjoyed doing this manually because it’s a fun process to acknowledge all the work someone has put into this update that I’m downloading. In that sense, websites are no fun – they change suddenly and have no changelist to describe what all has changed and what new features are available.

But then I got bitten. First, on my iPad Mini (Series 1). iOS 9 slowed everything to a crawl. I still have use for the iPad, but it’s limited to two apps – Scrivener and Kindle. Everything else is basically unusable. I don’t even browse the web on it. It’s just easier to bring out my iPhone 7 Plus for that.

Then, went my Macbook Pro. The main reason is under-use. When I’m developing something, I’ll update the packages, update Xcode, get the latest and greatest of iTunes. But when I’m browsing or reading on it, Safari suffices. Chrome is a crybaby on OSX, so I dumped it and never looked back. Perhaps the lack of Chrome Sync is what drove my usage down? Not sure. All I know is that my Mac cries for updates and I deny it. I don’t even know what version of OS I have. It’s a pain to find out and keep track. I don’t have Siri on it. APFS, you ask? Not gonna do it.

Finally, the iPhone. Oh, the iPhone. I still enjoyed downloading and updating apps on it for the longest time. It’s the most used device I have (and I have the Apple Watch strapped to my wrist most of the day. It’s just not used in the same way). I have truly enjoyed watching app updates change the way I use my iPhone and what I keep on my main home screen.

Then, the inevitable happened. I got bitten. The app update didn’t mention that Terminology 3 was going to change one of the main features of the app – opening on the search view. I thought the cries of a thousand users would make the developer reconsider. I don’t even know where that debate went.

Then, I updated an app I was just trying and the developer put an ad at the beginning of the app, destroying the experience completely. I gave my first ever App Store review – a 1 star with a few choice bad words. I calmed down after a day and updated the 1 to 4 stars. But I made the developer notice. I made sure they understood that not mentioning the ads in the app update is the reason why they got the bad review. They changed the update text to include mention of the ads.

I don’t mind change. I’d just like to have it mentioned to me. Today, browsing the app updates page, I saw that Delta Dental had updated their app. I opened the details and all it said was “bug fixes”. There’s more effort made to inform users of what’s changing in SnapChat than what’s changing in an insurance company’s app. There’s technology for you.

Twitter changed. Instagram changed. Facebook changed. I see more ads and more crap ‘features’ in these apps that anyone around me. Maybe they’ve labelled me guinea pig?

One day, I updated Google Search’s app. There was a time I used it as my main search app. The app team had added Cards to the app. The feature destroyed the app. It had slowed down to a crawl, it was not even loading the cards properly and wouldn’t let me jump right into a search. Google eventually fixed the cards and made the thing faster, but the app’s main focus is still ‘showing information’ instead of letting me ‘search for information’. My main ‘search’ now happens through Safari – it’s got adblocking, it’s got session retention (Google Search app is crap for that), and it’s just nicer to use.

I’d like to remember what exactly it was that broke the camel’s back, but there’s just a very long list to look through. One day, I was just not updating apps with the same zeal and the same frequency. I realized that the release notes were a joke, and features were going to keep changing at whatever terrible pace the developers decided was right. I’m a developer, I know that it’s very easy to decide to change something (and very difficult to implement it). So I respect the devs who put hours into these updates. But I’m just not going to update apps (and OS versions) as frequently as they come out with them.

Since the last few days, we’ve been talking about iOS 11. My wife has been asking me to backup her phone and update it. She’s never been this excited about an OS update. But I couldn’t be farther away from it. I’m not excited about HEIF/HEVC. I’m not interested in iOS 11 ‘degrading’ my phone. I’m not even excited about all the bugs they’ll eventually iron out with a point release in a month or two.

But, I’ve readied my phone for it. I’ve deleted about thirteen thousand photos from my phone, primarily because I was tired of keeping them around (is it true that less storage used translated to better battery life?). I’ve taken a backup or two. Maybe I’ll update my phone today. Maybe I’ll update my wife’s phone first and see how that goes.

But app updates? No, thank you.

Well, what about the jailbreak?

iOS8 is here today and as I always do before an iOS update, it’s time to audit my jailbreak. Of late, I’ve grown distant from the jailbreak idea as such. I still have a jailbroken iPhone 4S and iPad Mini 1, but there’s barely much happening there.

RAM? What’s that?

The first problem with my jailbreak is that it’s on a device that’s now, well, old. The iPhone 4S has 512 MB of RAM and as much as Apple fanboys will tell you that you don’t need RAM because Apple has a) tight integration with their hardware or b) amazing tricks up their sleeves that put apps to ‘sleep’ as soon as you minimize them, the truth is that if you jailbreak, you need RAM. Continue reading →

On Google Reader

Ever since the Google Reader news of day before, I’ve noticed a marked increase in traffic to my blog posts regarding Fever as an alternative RSS reader. In fact, I’ve seen my previous record for views in a day of 495 was broken yesterday with 539 views. I’d like to comment on a few things while I have your attention.

First of all, yes, Google Reader was a free service and yes Fever is not. You pay $30 upfront and if you’re not able to get free Appfog hosting, you end up paying about $4-6 per month for hosting it on a fairly cheap host like NearlyFreeSpeech. Why is it variable? Because Fever’s hosting costs you based on how many feeds you want to add to it (my Fever MySQL database is 200 MB at the moment). But even though Fever is a paid solution, I’d still make the case for it. Continue reading →

DotDotDot.me: Instapaper finally has a replacement

All those of you who still remember reading paper based books, think about one thing – did you ever keep a separate notebook to make notes about your comments on certain sections of the book or to mark sections you really liked? Wasn’t it just better to just mark the sections in the book itself, wasn’t that more convenient and when you’d pick it up again, you’d remember the context? Similarly, in the digital world of web pages and ebooks, what’s better, keeping a separate service that you use to mark web pages you liked or to keep a single service where you can save the web pages, your comments and bookmarks and even be able to search through it all?

— Continue reading →

The Decreasing Value of Physical Goods

Today, most of us are spending so much time online and on our smart devices that I feel that the value of physical items in our lives has decreased a lot. A few days ago, a friend took me to a store in the 29th street mall. It was a toy store that opened just for the holidays and on that day, everything in the store was 50% off. Needless to say, most of the store was empty, toys and funny calendars having been bought by people taking advantage of the sale. I bought a nice glass chess set on the cheap and then had a chat with the store owner. Apparently, this was a seasonal store that was closing today. She told me that about eleven hundred such stores open across the country during the holiday season and this one was closing that day. Everything that was left today was going back to the factories. I looked around the store for a while. Most of the good stuff that I’d seen in the shop a few days ago was already gone, but a lot of really interesting games and toys were still there.

Continue reading →

Copy-Paste: The saga of the inferior clone

I love reading two blogs – EggFreckles and Marco.org. Both these blogs talk about technology but are highly personal, reflecting the blogger’s perspective on topics.

Yesterday, I read a recent Marco Arment post talking about his latest offering – The Magazine. The Magazine is a high quality biweekly that has the unique distinction of being an iOS only app. Notice how I’ve used the words magazine, app and biweekly in the same sentence. That’s because this new service, like everything Marco touches, has created a new space for itself. It’s not just a print magazine being published on the web/mobiles *also*. It’s not just an app that has articles, that’s a job for the Kindle or the Instapaper apps. It’s not just a news stream or a ragtag collection of articles from all over the web. Continue reading →

Google Chrome for iOS – A great big benefit

Google launched their Chrome browser for iOS (iPhone and iPad) yesterday. Within minutes of the launch, the Internet was full of news of how laggy and useless the browser was because of the many restrictions on third party browsers by Apple. One blogger even went on to show with HTML5 rendering tests that Chrome was twice as slow as mobile Safari.

Great, so you found bugs in an app that’s just been released. I found a feature. I was doing some research last night about WordPress. I left the tabs open in my laptop’s Chrome browser and slept off. Today, while standing at the bus stop waiting for transportation, I whipped out my iPhone and opened Chrome. Under the “Other devices” section, I quickly found the tab that is open on my computer and continued my research. Simple as that.

I know that the browser has its faults but not because of something Google did. In fact, Google fulfilled a long running request – to bring the Chrome browser to iOS. It is Apple’s heavy restrictions that do not allow Chrome to function so well.

After Apple’s shifting away from Google Maps in iOS 6, there’s not much goodwill left in the companies *in my opinion* (in case you’re about to refute, I know Google pays millions to Apple to be the default search in Safari). I say Google et al should sue Apple for monopoly over the iOS browser as Netscape vs Microsoft was.