iphone

There are 21 posts tagged iphone (this is page 1 of 3).

Replaced the Apollo app on my phone with Instapaper

I’ve been addicted to Apollo for most of this year. The way people doomscroll Instagram and Twitter, I do Apollo. Mind you, it’s not Reddit, but Apollo, that I use. Reddit just happens to be the backend for this app in addicted to.

Therefore, now that Reddit has gone and killed off third party apps like Apollo, I’ve moved that app into a folder and replaced it with Instapaper. Since I’ve been spending so much time in Apollo, I’ve got a long of Read Later catching up to do.

I intend to move my RSS feed reader of choice – Fiery Feeds – to that spot at some point. I like catching up on what’s going on in my subscribed feeds.

But post-Apollo, I realized that much like on other addictive social networks, it’s the anticipation of what the next post will bring, that is the most addictive component. It’s not so much the emotions themselves that keep us hooked, but the rollercoaster of guessing what the next post will bring – will it be happy, sad, upsetting, or delightful? No matter how much I control my RSS feeds and my news apps, these will fundamentally still have that same “feature” – I can’t know what the next post will be about. I can only guess and that guessing game is addictive.

In contrast, Instapaper is largely under my control. I feed into it manually (except for a few automated emails that go into it – Airmail and LitHub). Therefore, I know what’s in it. The lack of anticipation is good.

It’s another form of slow living – trying to control what you consume on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. Perhaps it’ll be good for me.

Otherwise, I’ll jump back on the bandwagon on some social network. Just not Apollo.

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.

7 days with the Apple Watch

I was recently gifted the Apple Watch by my girlfriend and despite my initial apprehensions, I love having this device strapped to my wrist. I was test-driving the Pebble watch before this and I have an analog and a digital watch I alternated between before that. But the Apple Watch definitely has blown all of those out of the water.

As my brother Nipun once said –

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What Facebook needs to do next

Update: Facebook has done it! It has finally created a messenger standalone for the web. You can go here to check it out (here if that doesn’t let you login) or here to read about it (but why would you?). Cheers!

Facebook has changed a lot over the past few years. There have been acquisitions, newsfeed, design changes and rollbacks and a whole mess of things. Facebook obviously understands that the future is mobile (hence WhatsApp and Instagram) and that people are moving in all kinds of directions, towards private spaces (hence the separate Messages app) and public posts (hence hashtags and the searchability of your FB post that goes with those).

So what’s next? Well, today, I wanted to send a link to my brother. Since I’m on Windows right now and not on my Mac (I usually just iMessage links to him), I fired up Facebook and sent it to him in a message. Why? Because it’s convenient, because Facebook detects the OpenGraph information about the page and processes it to make a neat link+image combo and because we have many conversations on there anyways.

Why didn’t I send it to him as a directed Facebook post? I could have, but I didn’t care enough to make it public. Our Facebook activity is not our true selves but a reflection of what we want to portray to others, and this link didn’t necessarily fit into any paradigm of my public self. (In other words, it wasn’t epic. Publicly shared links must be epic.)

Why didn’t I send it to him in an email? Hush, don’t ask silly questions.

But then, I wanted to send him another link and another. So what did I do? I clicked on that miserably little link that takes me to Facebook’s dedicated messages page so that I could share links and have conversations in a larger space than that goofy little box that occupies the bottom right corner of my screen.

That’s when it hit me. Facebook has a beautiful Messages app on the iPhone. I’ve sung praises of it before. But there’s a curious lack of a well designed web interface for messages. The old and clunky interface that sits there now has been sitting untouched since a long time.

Now, you’d argue that another private space that I could have used was the Facebook Groups feature. It looks nice, it’s often updated and has the same look-and-feel as the rest of Facebook. But why would I create a group for just myself and my brother? There’s no need for that since /messages exists. The only thing needed is to build a nice looking private messages space that people would use.

I was really tempted, as I started writing this post, to build this webapp myself. Facebook’s API is open and easy to work with. I’m sure I could have found many plugins and libraries to make the task easier for me. But any such project can never be feature complete. I can build it and you can come, but you’ll never stay because of lack of features, because a single guy sitting with a laptop with a limited amount of time can only do so much.

So Facebook, here’s the next thing you need to do – make messenger.com what it really should be – a full-fledged webapp that’s as classy as any other public facing feature of Facebook. I hope to see it soon!

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?

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The guy in the rain

http://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/transportation/bike

Image Courtesy CU Boulder

About two years ago, when not one month had passed since I had entered the US, I once got a free bike from CU Boulder’s Bike Station. It’s a great service where any student or faculty member can rent a bike for forty-eight hours, for free. Since it was time to return it, I cycled up to the UMC, near which the bike station sits under a large tree. As I was returning the bike, it started to rain. Afraid for the newly bought iPhone in my pocket, I went into the shed and hid from the rain. Two guys were working at the station that day. The one on the inside showed me a Lenovo laptop that was basically everything proof – shock, water and temperature. It was given to the bike station specifically because it faces all the elements on nature all the time. Continue reading →