JB

9to5 Mac in reference to “courage” from the September Apple event:

It’s likely a reference to a comment by Steve Jobs when he was asked to explain another controversial omission of an established standard: the lack of support for Flash in the iPhone and iPad …

The video of Jobs makes a good point, and comes across better than Schiller did.

Another keynote came and went yesterday, and there was nothing I could do after it was over. I couldn’t order the new iPhone 7, or upgrade my current iPhone to iOS 10. I couldn’t buy the new Apple Watch, and even the new iWork collaborative editing features are in new versions “coming soon”. When I tried to download the new Mario game, the App Store let me know I’d be notified when it was available. After everything was announced yesterday, today I’m wondering what the point of having the event when they did was.

There was once a time when you could download new apps or operating systems as soon as the keynote was over. I specifically remember Steve saying more than once “… and it’s available today”. For the past few years we haven’t been getting that. At best the new features are coming in a couple of weeks, or at worst at some undefined time, presumably so far in the future that they can’t nail down a specific date.

It’s good to ship products when they are ready and not at an arbitrary keynote date, but Apple used to be better at coordinating those times to all coincide. By not having anything available on day one, Apple misses out on the consumer excitement it generates by having these events in the first place. At least, I’m not as excited today as I was yesterday. After they keynote was over if I had the ability to order a new Series Two Apple Watch, I almost certainly would have. After giving it a day to think it over, now I’m not as convinced that I need one. I’ll probably wait for the first few reviews to come in and see how much of an upgrade it is.

Perhaps this is another sign of Apple’s confidence and maturity as a massive global corporation. It’s possible that the internal workings of scheduling all the moving parts is impossible to line up correctly. It used to be we only had the one platform and one operating system, the Mac and OS X.¹ Now we have the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple TV; macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, as well as iCloud to tie everything together, and the multiple services Apple provides. Now add the complexities of global shipping and coordinating their retail stores around the world, and I can start to make out why it might not all line up the same as it used to.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that the event came and went, and after it was over there was nothing I could do but read about what’s coming.

iPhone 7

I upgrade every two years on the “S” cycle, so on the off years, like this one, I get a glimpse of what’s coming when I do decide to upgrade. Overall the new iPhone seems like a great upgrade. I think they’ve taken appropriate steps to mitigate the uproar over removing the headphone jack by both including an adapter and setting a reasonable price for replacements. I’ve got at least another year with my current iPhone 6S, so by the time I’m ready to upgrade the story won’t be a story anymore.

More concerning is removing the physical home button and replacing it with a 3D Touch area. This is one of those things that I really hope works well, but since I haven’t been impressed with 3D Touch on the 6S, I’m skeptical of how well it’ll work for the most-used button on the phone. How fast will it respond to double-clicking for the app switcher? The exiting 3D Touch app switcher, where you press on the side of the phone is terrible, I never know if I’m about to damage my phone or what amount of pressure to apply. I find it unreliable enough that I don’t use it. Again, hopefully by the 7S model this will be resolved. Better camera, better color, faster CPU, all good things.

AirPods

I already lost them in the couch. Then another pair went through the wash. I’ll probably not be getting these.

Apple Watch Series 2

I wear a fitbit most days, but I run with my phone strapped to my arm, tracking my runs with the Nike+ Run Club app. When the Apple Watch was first announced being able to run without my phone was the first thing that came to mind, but the hardware wasn’t ready yet. The Watch didn’t have the ability to accurately track distance without GPS, so it still needed to be paired with the phone, which defeated the purpose for what I wanted it for. Now that GPS has finally been added I’m seriously thinking about getting one to replace my fitbit as a personal fitness coach and tracker, but I’m going to want to hear how it works for a few other people first.

That the watch is waterproof now is nice, but not a big deal for me. Sometimes I run in the rain, and not having to worry about my phone getting wet would be nice, but I haven’t swam for a few years. I suppose if I ever start training for a triathlon it’ll come in handy.

I use Nike’s apps, and have for about 1640 miles, but that Nike-branded Apple Watch was just plain ugly. No way I’m putting down any money for that band. The pure white Nike band looks acceptable, but still not as nice as the black sport band.

Assorted Nuts

The enhancements to iWork would have been more interesting to me a few years ago when I was in grad school. I had to write a few collaborative papers, and the only way to do it at the time was Google Docs, but I would have much rather worked in Pages. Of course, I still probably would have had to use Google Docs because the other students I worked with weren’t on Macs.

The Mario game looks like fun, I’ll buy it when it comes out, but what I’m really looking forward to is a proper Zelda adventure. We’ll see how far Nintendo’s commitment to iOS goes.

I could have done without Tim Cook singing, but the skit was fine. Better than previous attempts have been.

I quipped on Twitter that Phil Schiller reminded me of the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz when he started talking about courage. It does take some amount of courage to “push the human race forward”, and if Apple has to do it one port at a time, then I’m on board for the ride. I just think they could have found a better way to come across, a better way to convey their reasoning and the purpose behind the change. I’m not going to miss the port, as long as I’ve got headphones I’m fine, but I use either a bluetooth speaker or the built in speakers more often than the headphones, especially now that I’m not driving to work every day and listening to podcasts in the car.

Yesterday’s announcements were about what was expected, Mario being the notable exception. There was not a lot for me, personally, to get excited about. I’m in the market for a new Mac, so I’m hoping for a refresh next month. Then maybe I’ll get excited.

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We will make Vesper for iOS, Vesper for Mac, and Vesper’s JavaScript sync service open source on my personal GitHub account. This code will also be provided as historical artifacts: they’re not intended as active projects. They’re also not intended as examples of how to write apps these days.

I applaud the team’s decisions to open source the Vesper code base, especially the syncing component that Brent put so much work into. Perhaps, like the ill-fated Letters.app, Vesper’s demise will give way to new applications that may fare better.

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I don’t know how the executives at Mylan sleep at night.

I do. On gigantic mattresses stuffed with money. This is why the Libertarian ideal of a society free from government interference won’t work. The corporation will take ever advantage they legally can to gain as much profit as possible.

Link

On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.

Incredible work by Scott Anderson at the New York Times. Take a day or two and read the entire thing. For those of us living in peace and prosperity, where the biggest problem we have to face is paying an extra dollar for a cappuccino, we need to remember that evil is always waiting at the gates. There are always those who would throw the world into chaos. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

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Being an athlete is simple – all you have to do is strive.

I enjoyed this set of videos from Strava.

Link

And yet, the Americans were . . . wow. They were amazing. What else could you say? Part of the pleasure was appreciating the team’s depth. Yes, Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast in history—she was even before she won her first Olympic gold last night—but she has astonishingly talented teammates. Laurie Hernandez doesn’t just look like she was drawn by a cartoonist; every leap seemed accompanied by a thought bubble filled with exclamation points. Aly Raisman tumbled with a regal quality that was absent even four years ago, when she won gold in the floor exercise. She seemed to stick her landings by fiat.

Dominating.

She’s focussing on the two-hundred-metre freestyle to qualify for the Olympics, but she admitted a soft spot for the butterfly. “It’s really hard,” she said. “This is why I love it.”

An amazing and inspirational story. It is far too easy to forget the human stories of the refugee crisis stemming from the Syrian civil war. These are real people with lives and dreams that were thrown into disarray when their country was torn apart.

I started writing this post talking about how I was using DEVONthink, and, as often happens when you write things down, I started thinking critically about how I interacted with the application. I took a folder full of screenshots, walked through some usage scenarios, and checked and double-checked what I was actually doing with the application. Then I exported everything to the Finder.

As of right now, I’m not using DEVONthink. I’ve gone back and forth over this for literally years. I get enthralled with the idea of building this perfect database, where every bit of information I need is at my fingertips, organized and indexed exactly as I want it. Then after a week or two of day to day use I realize that I’ve duplicated everything that I do with the Finder and a handful of other apps in DEVONthink, and decide to simplify.

One of the best things about DEVONthink is that it doesn’t modify your data, it simply organizes it and adds a layer of intelligence to help you manage it. The main selling point is it’s integrated “AI”, a parsing engine that looks for similarities between documents and can present you with connections between topics you may have missed. In this way, DEVONthink is more of an intelligent research assistant than a document management application like the Finder. Unfortunately, over the past several years of going back and forth, using it and not using it, I’ve never found a practical use for the AI.

I wrote earlier this week about how if you want to remember something you should write it down. Personally, I’ve found that I’m not good at this. I’m far more likely to find a way to record information using my Mac of iPhone than I am a notebook, simply because I’ve always got one of the two with me. I am however making a deliberate effort to give myself time to think clearly, stepping away from the computer and staring out the window for a while.

Computers excel at storing and searching information. Humans excel at making abstract connections between disparate bits of information. The best AI in the world can’t help me if I either don’t trust it, or if I don’t understand the connections it’s trying to make. My own brain is far better at making connections if I only give it the materials it needs. In other words, if I actually read and make notes on the information I’m saving. Using several “anything buckets” over the years I developed a bad habit of saving things after skimming through their contents, thinking that I would have it if I ever needed it. In practice though, instead of searching my own personal archive, I would almost always just search DuckDuckGo or Google again. My perfect database becomes a crypt of partially read web archives.

My entire job is managing information. What commands to type in where to get the desired result. Which buttons to click and what code to push to enable my team to get their work done. Every day the Internet is building and rebuilding itself, and my team does their part to help make information available. I even went to grad school for Human Computer Interaction, and learned only that the best way to manage information is “whatever works for you”. Sure enough, what worked for me in grad school was to have a top level folder named “ISU”, and a sub-folder underneath for every class I was in, and then a folder under each class for each assignment, as well as a folder for the videos of all the lectures. The organization was simple and easy to understand.

Again, when I looked through my DEVONthink system, I found that I had recreated everything that the Finder did. I had a database for each major topic or area of life, and folders and subfolders that further refined the topic till I reached the files. For example, my “Research” database contained an “Operating Systems” folder, that contained folders for “Linux”, “BSD”, “OS X”, and “Windows”. My Linux folder contained a folder named “Shared Internals”, and underneath that a folder named “Kernel”. Inside the Kernel folder were documents pertaining to the internals of the Linux kernel.

While I’ve read most of the documents in my database, too many of them I’ve only skimmed. What would be much more useful is a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten can be thought of as a Wiki with short articles. The point being that while I’ve been spending a lot of time organizing files, what I really want out of my computer is knowledge.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m still working through all of this. I haven’t found the one true way to organize your data that I can recommend to everyone. What I learned in school still stands, how you organize your data remains up to you. Whatever works best for you is what you should do.

I think it’s good to have original source material on hand, but that source material is only useful if the information it contains is extracted and incorporated into a personal knowledge base. This has been my mistake for too long, to think that simply by saving and skimming over original source material I can increase my knowledge and effectiveness. Tools like Evernote and DEVONthink encourage this kind of digital hoarding by making it easy to save data, but the truth is that there is still no substitute for doing the hard work required to learn. You have to read, reflect, think it through, and write it down. Maybe on paper, maybe not, but without the intermediary step of synthesizing the information you’ve collected into your own personal system, it’s just more junk that needs to be cleaned up.

If you really want to remember something, write it down. By hand.

There is a growing body of knowledge that shows the benefits of writing things down, and how handwriting is better for learning than typing on a keyboard. It’s unfortunate that these studies come after years of schools pushing to get a computer in the hands of every student, moving quickly to replace pen and paper with bits and bytes.

A 2014 article in the New York Times draws a connection between increased brain activity and handwriting.

When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex.

By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect.

Another article in Science Daily from 2011 reports similar results in a separate study:

Mangen refers to an experiment involving two groups of adults, in which the participants were assigned the task of having to learn to write in an unknown alphabet, consisting of approximately twenty letters. One group was taught to write by hand, while the other was using a keyboard. Three and six weeks into the experiment, the participants’ recollection of these letters, as well as their rapidity in distinguishing right and reversed letters, were tested. Those who had learned the letters by handwriting came out best in all tests. Furthermore, fMRI brain scans indicated an activation of the Broca’s area within this group. Among those who had learned by typing on keyboards, there was little or no activation of this area.

This article in Psychology Today references several studies, focusing mainly on the benefits of cursive writing.

Much of the benefit of handwriting in general comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of drawing letters. In one Indiana University study, researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and “adult-like” than in those who had simply looked at letters. The brain’s “reading circuit” of linked regions that are activated during reading was activated during hand writing, but not during typing.

One of the focuses of my writing here is about the appropriate use of technology to enhance our lives. There are so many things that a computer can do, it’s difficult to know where to draw the line on what we should do. Can we give kids computers and have them type notes in class instead of writing them down? Sure. Should we? It’s looking like the increasingly obvious answer from the scientific community is no. Just because it’s faster doesn’t mean it’s more efficient.

There continues to be no shortcut to deep learning. To know a subject, you must study it closely. To learn math, you must practice, especially the fundamentals. The best way to take notes during a lecture is by hand, forcing yourself to synthesize the information you are absorbing into a compressed form that captures the essential ideas, pushing your mind to concentrate intently. Then, at night, when it’s time to study the information further, transcribe the notes into your computer, rewording and exploring the topic as you go. Maybe even speak your notes out loud to yourself, engaging more of your senses.

My favorite quote I’ve read in the past few days is from the Science Daily article, where associate professor Anne Mangen says:

“Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us. We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects – be it a book, a keyboard or a pen – to perform certain tasks,”

We don’t fully understand the effect widespread use of computers from an early age is going to have on us. It’s important not to lose sight of the real world as we continue to explore the virtual one we’ve created.