Category: Articles

There have been a lot of arguments going around the web about why the original iPad mini is still being sold. The ‘zombie iPad’ they call it.

With Apple’s standard practice of not shafting iOS owners the year after they buy a device, it’s likely that iOS 9 will have to work on this iPad mini. And the problem, developers say, is that it is a bear to develop for such an old and slow device. The refrain seems to be that support for this iPad won’t be dropped until 2017 meaning we will have to endure, I don’t know what, until then.

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Some weeks back now, Tom Bihn asked if I would like to try out some of their new gear. I looked over the list and was immediately drawn to two items: Aeronaut 30, and the Travel Laundry Stuff Sack. Both seem to fill real needs in my travel bag setup (well, not if you ask my wife).

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In my recent Airmail review, I talked about how I needed to wait for official Yosemite apps to make the final call between Airmail and Mail.app. Well, I now have both and Airmail got a big 2.0 update in the process.

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First things first: I’m not a headphone guy. By that I mean I don’t listen to a ton of music, or a ton of podcasts — I typically just listen to the environment around me. I do, however, find myself wearing headphones a often, so I need to have a pair on hand, but they need to travel with me.

In the past I’ve followed Marco Arment’s recommendations, and I’ve liked them. But I’ve broken them all, or never carried them. What I really needed was some earbuds, and some that I liked because I use them so infrequently, why not like looking at them as they kick around the bottom of my bag?

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I often write with a lot of black and white language, and part of that is wording choices I deliberately make. Saying something looks like ‘shit’, that I ‘hate’ it, or that I ‘don’t like it’. Those word choices leave little room for doubt about my meaning, and in most cases I stand behind my choice in those words looking back at them now.

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A simple app isn’t simple by virtue of having fewer options, a simple app is simple because of usability. The fewer the options an app has, the more complicated it can actually become to use — I know that sounds counter intuitive, but allow me to explain.

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For a couple years now, these mediums have been gnawing at me. The newsletter, so humble and easy for people to get. And the magazine app, so trendy, stylish, but isolated. I personally don’t subscribe to many newsletters, and I don’t subscribe to any digital magazines. It’s odd, because I think these mediums have merits, and I want to publish on all of them, but they are so hidden compared to the humble blog that I am left perplexed by them.

With each medium there’s a limit to what can be said and often what is said cannot be updated, tweaked, or edited. WordPress has no such limits, I can post 60,000 words in one post and split that into pages, or just right two words. I can edit, tweak, and adjust everything.

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Many of us have had an iPhone 6 in our hands now for just under a week and many of us have already formed opinions on how good, or bad, decisions around the new phone designs are in practice. Yes, the camera bump is unnatural and annoying, but you rarely notice it. Yes it is bigger — too big for some (many?).

There’s been a lot going around about the size of these two new iPhone models. Charts showing where a generic white males thumb can and cannot reach (because all iPhone users are generic white males, right?). Talk about zoomed versus native, and chiding at those developers who did not scramble to update their apps for the new display resolutions.

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I used to spend an inordinate amount of time testing and writing about any new Apple operating system. This time was only slightly different in that I didn’t spend any time writing about iOS 8, but I did spent a lot of time testing it.

I decided to take a wait and see approach to decide what really need to be said after the surge of ‘reviews’ and ‘thought’ pieces on launch day. I haven’t read them all, but I read and skimmed enough that I think there are two aspects of iOS 8 that are being overlooked: the magic and the ‘about-damned-time’. I’ll tackle each separately, but know that they are very much related.

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You’ve likely seen Austin Mann’s epic iPhone 6 camera review, and likely you have seen many others post about it. This weekend my family and I went to the Washington State Fair and it was there that I was won over — the iPhone 6 camera is astounding.

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The larger iPhones bring two things to mind when I think about what changed: these are going to be great to use, but are going to be terrible to carry.

So I wondered why Apple might make this change. It occurs to me that designing a phone is hard when it comes to the need to carry the device, as the push and pull between carrying and using seems opposed. The two main things a phone must accomplish are:

1. Be easy to carry everywhere (since we very much carry our phones everywhere).
2. Be very easy to use (no matter what the use is, strictly a phone, or an iPhone).

The first is really easy to achieve: design small phones with few sharp angles and you are set. (Small both as footprint and volume.) The second item is also very easy to achieve: great software, fast hardware, and a great screen to do everything on and you are set.

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I watched the sporadic keynote for the iPhone 6, and I read a bit about it afterwards. The one thing that I didn’t really catch is that the new iPhones have a bump out where the camera resides. Apple fans have long chided Android for making thin phones with insane bump outs.

I had no clue until Garrett Murray, the Founder and Creative Director at Karbon, tweeted about it today (after I ordered mine).

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Apple designers/developers used to mock Android developers over how fragmented the displays sizes are, as comparatively Apple had very few screen sizes to work with: iPad, iPhone 3.5”, and iPhone 4”. Today, Apple added in two more screen sizes, but created a much bigger design challenge.

It’s early, and we don’t know much, but the one thing that worries me is the design overhead in designing for the iPhone with these new phone sizes. Prior to today it was easy: design for the 4” display, and let iOS trim the content section of the app for the smaller display. And this works fairly well because the width of the devices was/is the same.

But that changes today.

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You have probably read more than one thing I have written where I was a dick, either on purpose or incidentally. I likely wasn’t trying to be a dick at the outset, but yeah, I ended up being a dick. It could have been a review chastising an app solely for the color of their icon, or snark about Google tracking everything we do — it could have been just about anything.

Whatever the case, I have become well-known for being a dick. It’s ok, you can agree — I do.

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Over the long US holiday weekend several celebrities had their privacy violated and less than desirable photos were shared of them around the web. The mainstream media has made a spectacle out of it by either shaming the celebrities for daring to live their lives as they want, or Apple for doing something. ((Or perhaps, for the lack of doing something.))

The truth of the matter is far more complex, and we have yet to get the clearest picture. There are though a few things we can take away from this which I think are worth repeating.

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October of 2011, Forbes posted this juicy bit:

Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. “He said we were a feature, not a product,” says Houston.

I remember most people’s feelings on the matter being split, but I thought it was an astute point from Jobs.
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It’s late in the afternoon on a lovely and calm April 8th a Sunday in 2012. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and there were four people in my car — I was driving.

I remember exactly where I was.

I was turning right onto James, from Broadway, in Seattle. And I said it, as if I felt like I just pulled off some great heist as I mumbled under my breath: “So, that’s it?”
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Since I made the switch to OS X in 2004, I have found myself to be a very loyal Mail.app user. I was a regular reader, and huge fan, of Hawk Wings (now apparently offline) and through the things I learned there I tweaked Mail so that it worked correctly. It never was the fastest tool, or the most friendly, but I was always able to get the job done.

And then I installed the Yosemite developer preview and Mail.app was effectively broken for me. It crashed every time I tried to create a new email message ((Unless I used an AppleScript to create the message.)) , or tried to forward an email which contained an attachment. Brutal.

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