Jacob Andersen Posts

Tomorrow the tech press descends on Cupertino to report on the next iPhones, probably the next Apple Watch, and possibly some services and a Tile-like tracking beacon.

I’ll be watching, but almost certainly, I won’t be buying the new phone. And I don’t really feel like I’m missing out.

I have an iPhone 6s, that I bought when they were new. It still works flawlessly. I had the battery changed when that was cheap last year, but it was preventative. At the time my current battery was still fine.
The only thing I’d really like from the new phones is the better camera, and I could really do without the bigger size.

Now don’t get me wrong, the iPhones are still improving tremendously year-over-year. The camera-team (although perhaps not industry-leading at this point) is still bringing the goods every year. It’s just, that a lot of the advancements are in software, and because Apple is generally pretty good with supporting semi-old hardware, I still get the benefits. Largely because Apple’s chip-team is working some real magic with the A-series chips, the headroom is such, that I don’t really feel constrained by my old phone.

I have an iPhone from 2015, a Retina MacBook Pro from 2014 and an Apple Watch from 2016 (Series 1). All of them are running happily on the newest software, and providing me with both utility and enjoyment on a daily basis. The Watch could be faster, but it’s not so slow as to be truly annoying. My workload is high, in terms of time spent, but low in terms of computing power required.

It’s worth considering that longevity, if you’re not a demanding user, when thinking about the price of new Apple Hardware (or a Windows laptop, if you can find a good one). Android Phones can be great, but most won’t be updatable for as long as an iPhone (although maybe the Pixels will?)

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A computer show set in 1983, welcomes tech luminaries from 2015.

It’s a funny idea, that should be fundamentally unworkable, but somehow it works amazingly well. In no small part thanks to the amazing production design by Sandwich Video and amazing work by the actors/hosts.

Source: Computer Show

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I forgot to link this back in march, which was sad because I couldn’t stop listening to it.

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“Don’t shove your personal life in my face” seems to be the last refuge for bigots who know, that they don’t really get to decide if other people can be gay (or trans or maybe just punk or whatever seems to be over the line for them)

It seems reasonable right? They’re not telling people to stop being gay or anything. After all, it’s 2015 and we’re better than that now. All they are asking is please respect their right to live in a world where they don’t ever have to think about things they don’t really like. Totally reasonable.

Except that it makes your life and your feelings everyone else’s responsibility.

The reason I got to think about this is, that I saw a clip from last year, where Anderson Cooper calls out a TV host because she disliked seeing Michael Sam kiss his boyfriend on TV.

If you scrub to around 1:00 you’ll see host Amy Kushnir (the one in the white and black dress) make a face. It’s the kind of face you make when you are disgusted by something. And that disgust is obviously why she doesn’t want to have to deal with it by having it “shoved in her face”.

But the only way we make those disgust faces disappear whenever someone is confronted with a gay couple, either in reality or on TV is by making sure that people GET USED TO IT. So I’m afraid “in your face” is exactly where you need two men kissing. No one is arguing that anyone should be forced to watch anyone else have sex, but a reasonable amount of public display of affection is completely normal and accepted in most western cultures, and as such, it’s something you’re going to have to deal with, and it’s something that your children are going to have to deal with as well.

If it falls to others to censor your children’s world, then all of a sudden it’s not just on TV you ask people to please keep their relationship secret. Next its on the street because you’re walking there with your child, who is somehow afraid of gay people, and next its when the child of a gay couple attends your child’s school. I’m sorry, but those people in the street, and that child in your child’s school needs you to get used to people being gay, and having the same rights as anyone else. Not just legally, but in practice as well.

It’s cool that the right to live a regular life as a gay man or woman, is continuing to be more and more accepted politically. But it’s by normalizing it in the media, on the street and everywhere else, that it becomes universally accepted socially as well.

Just like I am free to kiss my wife anywhere I want, so is Michael Sam free to kiss his boyfriend. And honestly, it’s to the TV-stations credit, that they showed him celebrating the good news with his boyfriend, and that they didn’t make a huge deal out of it, which they very easily could have, given the amount of attention there were around Michael Sam coming out at the time.

Obviously, this is a long road. Social change is slow. There are still people that would rather not see mixed race couples, and obviously racism, though sometimes more covert than in the past, is still rampant. Luckily though, we’re already on this road going at a good clip. There are just a few more people, that need completely normal behaviour shoved in their faces.

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Quicksilver 1.0 came out (finally). I’m not sure it’s as fast as it once was, but it seems completely usable.

I made a small screencast showing how to compose an entire email in Quicksilver, including subject and body.

For future self-reference, I should probably think about what to say before recording.

You can download Quicksilver at qsapp.com.

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John Siracusa semi-famously doesn’t have an iPhone. The contract is too expensive for the use he suspects he’ll get out of it.

I, less famously, don’t have an iPhone either. Although I could get one with a monthly contract of about $ 15 (90 DKK). The cellphone market in Denmark seems much different than in the USA. Typically you’ll pay full price, or close to it, for the phone, but the contracts will typically be cheaper.

This is all fairly new. Just a few years ago all the carriers offered substantial subsidies and relatively expensive plans. However, by law a cellphone contract can only be binding for 6 months, so recouping the subsidy either meant very expensive plans, or retaining costumers beyond the reach of their contractual chains.

Businesses like certainty, and while someone who stays because he’s happy may be more valuable than someone who’s locked in place by a contract, the latter is something you can bank on.

So, what about that iPhone?

Well, it costs a lot. To buy an iPhone outright in Denmark costs 5000 DKK, which is about $ 880. That’s for a 16 gigabyte model. That’s a lot of money for a phone. I have an iPod Touch, which has worked well for me, but the truth is, I’m tired of carrying my five year old Nokia 6220 Classic next to my iPod Touch. Besides, my second generation iPod Touch is becoming a little frayed around the edges.

For five years, I’ve considered the iPhone, always knowing I’d succumb eventually. For 4 of those years I’ve felt the blossoming of the mobile app market and the location independence a modern smart phone affords its owner pass me by. The combination of crap Nokia “smart phone” and iPod Touch gave me some measure of the same thing, but anything network related has to be handled by the Nokia, and there’s no way to tether that to the iPod.

What about Android you nitwit?

For most of these last five years, I’ve considered an Android phone. But at first, Android phones sucked. Then they sucked a little less, and by the time Ice Cream Sandwich came around, they were pretty decent. But the general app quality lagged behind iOS. It seems to do so even to this day. And while Android Jelly Bean has much to recommend it, even above iOS, the app quality problem seems to be improving much more slowly.

Also… Well, let me talk about my other devices a little. I have a 2010 MacBook Pro, an iPad and the aforementioned iPod Touch. I use Pages occasionally, both on my iPad and on the Mac. I listen to podcasts on the iPod AND very frequently on the Mac as well. I need those two to stay in sync. (which is why I don’t use Downcast, Instacast or anything else like that). On top of that – whenever I’m not listening to podcasts, I’m most likely listening to an audiobook. Also, I’ve bought quite a few apps for iOS over the years, and although that may be a sunk cost fallacy, I’m still reluctant to leave the iOS eco system having already spent quite a bit on apps.

Android will not cater well to my needs. The Audiobook experience on Android is atrocious. I’ve looked and looked for a good app, but everything I’ve found sucks. Audible’s own app is actually quite decent, but I get my audiobooks from other sources as well.

Besides, the good Android phones are not actually cheap, and most are comically large monstrosities trying to move in on the Nexus 7.

And as much as I dislike Apple’s products, I dislike everything else even more.

I’m probably going to buy an iPhone very soon

Like I wrote, my iPod Touch is beginning to show its age, and as it turns out, so is my old Nokia Phone. I’m not going to buy a crap phone and a new iPod Touch. That would approach the price of an iPhone anyway. I’m not going to live without a phone (obviously) or my podcast/audiobook/reading machine (even more obviously at this point). So I think I’ll finally be joining the rest of the world as a modern smartphone owner. Honestly, I’m amazed I’ve held out this long. It feels like I’m just catching up to 2010 now, when some people are going the other way.

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Back in september, when Apple unveiled the iPhone 5, the new iPod Nano, the new iPod Touch and the EarPods, they made sort of a big deal of how they measured hundreds of ears to come up with the shape of the EarPods.
The idea, presumably, was that this allowed them to create a shape that would fit a large portion of human ears.

This scared me somewhat. I’m one of those seemingly rare people, who found the previous apple earbuds extremely comfortable. In fact, after having tried dozens of other earbuds and in ear headphones, I settled on the Apple earbuds. They never sounded that great, but since I listen to podcasts and audiobooks way more than I do music, they were wholly sufficient for my needs.

So I was worried. Would the funky shape of the EarPods sit comfortably in my ears?

It instantly made sense to me, that directing the sound more directly into the ear canal would be better – but what if my ear canals weren’t in the same place as “hundreds of ears”? As reviews came in – most people found them to be an improvement, while some absolutely hated them.

Well, today I tried the earpods, and once again, Apple seems to have made them for my ears specifically. I’ve already worn them for a couple of hours in complete comfort, and don’t have any plans to remove them for the next couple. There is absolutely no discomfort. The sound seems to be greatly improved as well, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s mostly because the sound is directed into my ear canals more efficiently.

The EarPods are very easy to get into the ears, because they’re slippery and yet they don’t fall out even if I shake my head quite vigorously. Now I’ve seen some videos to suggest, that some people have a very different experience with retaining the Pods in the ears, but for me, the fit is close to perfect.

Something that has not traditionally been awesome about Apple headphones is the durability. Without fail, they have failed on me yearly for about 4 years now. Each time  I got a replacement with no problem, so that’s good, but they really shouldn’t break that often.

My feeling is, that the EarPods will have equally lackluster durability, but they do seem to have a little more in the way of stress relief on the wires. The same kind of stress relief that I have instantly ruined on all my previous Apple earbuds.

The sound quality of the EarPods is definitely very good for the price range, but there are others that are good as well, and obviously some are a lot better. If you can tolerate the in-ear style, they are most often the superior choice for sound quality.

However. If you’d like to spend $29, and the EarPods fit your ears well. Then I can highly recommend them. The in-line remote seems a lot nicer as well.

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We use Sitecore where I work. It’s a pretty good CMS, and our site is big enough and complex enough, that something like Squarespace or WordPress would instantly break down. Not necessarily break down technically, but conceptually, the hierarchy we have would break down in a simple CMS.

But why does the individual page builder have to be so god damn awful? It’s modular, so if you know exactly what you want (within the rigid confines of the system), it’s relatively simple to plug some content in to the predefined modules. Widgets (spots in the Sitecore parlance) can easily be used on several pages, and be updated centrally. It’s all very good for such a huge site (probably thousands of individual pages, though I don’t know for sure). It’s just incredibly cumbersome, ugly, and uninspiring. And you have almost no concept of how the page you’re making actually looks.

To be honest. WordPress is not that much better. It’s a lot better looking. Almost ridiculously better. The content editor is quite good (and very easy to replace if you disagree) and the full screen mode makes it very easy to get rid of the distractions. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is enough to make WordPress great for actual writing. But constructing a new page is still cumbersome and hard for the visually creative.

Squarespace

The poster child for this is Squarespace. The page builder in Squarespace 6 is second to none, when it comes to creating a page, while actually getting af pretty good idea of the result. For a creatively minded person, it is a lot easier to feel inspired by Squarespace’s approach with different kinds of blocks, that can be moved around freely.

The templates seem less flexible, or at least less easy to heavily modify, than in Squarespace 5. However, once your overall site design is in place, the pages are incredibly easy to work with, and the page builder is very visual.

I find it a LOT easier to write copy, when I can get a feel for the context. It makes the final site feel more cohesive because the writing is written with a clear idea of where it needed to go.

This is all pretty much irrelevant for writing articles and blog posts, but for most other kinds of pages, I think it makes a real difference to many people.

I think it’s the same way some people feel about writing a letter in Microsoft Word vs. doing it in Text Edit on the Mac or Windows Notepad (or Writeroom, BBEdit, Writemonkey, or any other plain text editor). Some people need the context of the “page” to feel like they’re writing a letter.

In that context, I’ll take the plain text, but I do get the appeal of word processors for stuff that will eventually end up on paper. Writing in the context the text will be used can be a lot easier sometimes.

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Tomorrow, Hustler’s article for avoiding regular porn.

The internet is full of productivity tips and techniques, more accurately known as productivity porn. It’s like McDonalds trying to sell you healthy food.

via Lifehacker: Avoid the Trap of “Productivity Porn”.

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From the announcement on the Sparrow website: (edit: now gone)

… we’ll be busy with new projects at Google, we do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.

Best case scenario: We’re about to get an awesome native Gmail client for OS X and iOS.
More likely – We’ll get  a decent iOS app, and the desktop app will never be heard from again.
The sad fate of Tweetie may be coloring my outlook, but I think this has zero percent chance of being a good thing for the users of Sparrow.

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