My Experience with iOS 6 Maps

People have been piling onto Apple lately over the whole Maps debacle, but I wanted to give it some more time on my own before I came to any conclusions. After taking a trip out-of-state and relying entirely on Apple Maps throughout, this is what I've come up with in terms of odd behaviors:​

• At one point, when I asked for directions from my current location to a restaurant, it displayed the green pin for "Current Location" in an entirely different place from my actual location, marked by the little blue dot.
• Siri likes to give weird directions, even going so far as telling us to make a u-turn further down the street when we're already pulling into the parking lot of our destination.
• You can't scroll around map during turn-by-turn, like you can in Waze. You have to tap the screen for the controls to appear, tap the "Overview" button, scroll as needed, then tap "Resume" when finished scrolling. I'm very much a visual person, and I like being able to see the different turns that may be ahead of me, so I have a better idea what lane to be in after each turn.
• When approaching a toll zone on the turnpike, it kept ordering me to "stay to the left" even when I was supposed to temporarily exit so I could pay the toll. Obviated by common sense of course, much like many of these other issues, but I could see this getting some people into trouble.
• I had to submit an error to Apple because our hotel was entirely missing. It simply could not find it by name or display it on the map, although I could type in the address and that worked.

Overall, I think that Apple Maps is a good experience, albeit with the quirks that one might expect from a new service that absolutely depends on user input. The map data is obviously not going to be at the same level as Google Maps for a while, but with hundreds of millions of possible corrections being submitted to Apple all the time, people will eventually get over their initial hatred of the service.​

​I love the new vector graphics, they're much cleaner than Google's old map tiles. The turn-by-turn stuff is well-designed too, and when it works, there's no smoother experience in my opinion. Just wait until the data is there to back up the beauty on the surface, and Google will finally have a competitor in the mobile maps space to contend with. At least one worth talking about, that is.

Useful Spotify Tip

My wife and I share a Spotify account. Most of the time we have no problem with this setup, unless we're both trying to stream at the same time. Typically it goes like this:

• ​I'm streaming music at work on my desktop machine.
• She's at home or running errands, and decides to stream some music on her iPhone.
• My Spotify suddenly ​stops playing without warning, and if I open the window to see what's going on, I see a message at the top stating that my account is being used elsewhere.
• I can start playing my music again to wrestle control back, which will cut off her streaming, but there's a chance she's playing something that helps calm our son down when he starts throwing a fit in his car seat (yes, he somehow already has music preferences at 9 months of age) and it just feels mean besides. She didn't know I was in the middle of listening to anything, which is probably by design since Spotify likely doesn't want people sharing like this.

The solution to all of this? Offline mode.​

​On my work PC, I have certain playlists toggled to be available offline, which tells Spotify to download local copies of tracks within (or added to) those playlists. Whenever I'm listening to something and my wife takes control of the account, I can simply switch to Offline Mode and continue listening without any conflicts between devices.

Presumably, the same would be true of having her mark certain playlists as available offline from her iPhone, but her phone is currently full of photos and cannot download tracks from Spotify so we haven't had a chance to test it yet.​

Without offline mode, we would probably just pay for two different accounts, but instead we're able to save $10/mo and life is good. Give it a shot!​

'Character'

Cap Watkins makes some great points about company character and how it influences users to continue using products (or even come back to them after being burned).

“I was [...] thinking a bit about why companies like Yahoo! and MySpace feel irredeemable to people. So irredeemable that in our minds no amount of talent, rebranding, redesigning or corporate restructuring could make a difference. Personally, I like underdogs, but even I can’t shake the idea that certain companies are doomed regardless of how many times they change course.”

​I'm one of those people who deleted my Myspace profile a long time ago, never to return. Their horrid user experience (remember all those terrible Myspace "theme" sites?), combined with the same type of bottom-of-the-barrel users that have infested places like Youtube nowadays, was a huge turnoff after a while.

I honestly don't care what Myspace has done to make the site better since I left. I have no reason to, since everyone I know is on Facebook or Twitter, and I had such a bad experience with it years ago that I'm almost a little surprised that it's even still around.

As for Flickr (also mentioned in the above piece), I'm not one of the people who used it during its heyday. However, I do think that the service still has so much life and potential left in it, if only Yahoo would give it a chance to shine. I personally consider it to be Yahoo's flagship product, even if they don't. There are a lot of people who are heavily invested in the Flickr ecosystem, and there are even people who have met on Flickr and gotten married later.

With an existing hardcore userbase like that, Flickr could definitely make a turnaround in ways that Myspace never will again. Yahoo's company character in the last several years has caused people to label them as doomed, but I believe there is still a spark of hope for them. Especially with Marissa Mayer at the helm.

Anyway, go read the rest of Cap's post, it's great stuff.

Autographer, the Wearable Camera

​I've been hearing a lot about this interesting new camera called Autographer that will be released in November.

The idea is that it's a camera you wear on a lanyard around your neck, and it automatically shoots about 2,000 photos a day while you go about your daily activities. According to their website, these will be the best possible images from that day.

“Its world leading technology includes a custom 136° eye view lens, an ultra small GPS unit and 5 in-built sensors.
These sensors are fused by a sophisticated algorithm to tell the camera exactly the right moments to take photos.”

​This seems neat for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it frees the user up from worrying about capturing a shot of an event. They can simply live the experience and have it recorded for them automatically. Secondly, this camera could potentially capture things that the person may not notice themselves. I've found no mention anywhere on their site or elsewhere about the quietness of the camera. Hopefully it's not making loud clicky noises all day long.

I think that the future is going to be full of methods like this for recording people's entire lives automatically, whether it will truly be useful for us or not. This is just the beginning. It might even sound creepy to an adult today, but the kids growing up with this stuff will more and more often see this as a normal activity.

Today, it's a camera on a lanyard. Tomorrow? Cameras built into eyeglasses or maybe even shirt buttons.​

A "Review" of Felix for App.net

I'm not an App.net (ADN) user. I've definitely considered becoming one, considering Twitter's behavior lately, but I'm still having trouble justifying the $50.​

​With that said, I've been hearing a lot about a new iOS client for ADN called Felix that just released today, and I thought this would be a good excuse to analyze some of the app's design from the perspective of someone who has no idea what using ADN is like.

Let's take it screenshot-by-screenshot.​

This is what I assume is the main screen in Felix, basically equivalent to a Twitter timeline. Initial reactions:

• The font choices are okay I guess, nothing special. Not sure I care for the cream-colored background. The actual ADN website has a textured gray background and white posts. If I were making a mobile client of that site, I'd probably stick with their color choices to make it seem more integrated.
• Something about having drop shadows under every avatar irks me a little.
• ​I can guess that the first two icons on the toolbar at the bottom are equivalent to 'Timeline' and 'Mentions' but I have no idea what the other three are for. The middle icon is highlighted blue in every screenshot, no matter what part of the app you're in, so perhaps it's a 'Compose' button. The globe icon might be a mobilized form of the public global feed, which is fine I guess but they could've used a better icon. The last icon looks like a speedometer which makes no sense to me.
• Each post has several actions that can be performed. The arrow button is probably a 'reply to this post'​ feature, but what is the speech bubble for? Maybe that's really the reply button and the arrow button is used for sharing a given post? The recycle icon is likely a 'retweet' equivalent, and the star icon is obviously an 'add to favorites' function.
• Seems weird and cluttered, having all of those icons inside every single post. Would be better to go the Tweetie route by swiping a post left or right and seeing the actions behind it, or the Tweetbot method of tapping a post and having a tray of options slide out below it.

I guess this is where the speedometer icon takes you. It's obviously a details screen for a specific post in this screenshot, but what happens if you're looking at your timeline and tap that icon? What does it do then? On its own this is a confusing icon choice.​

The 'compose' screen. The auto-complete hashtag bar in the middle is reminiscent of Tweetbot to me. The top toolbar is a bit weird.

• The 'x' button is probably meant to cancel the post, but I can't tell what the drawer icon next to it is for.  Perhaps an upload button of some kind, but what would anybody be uploading aside from photos, which the camera button is clearly for?
• The paper airplane is probably the 'publish' button but it's an odd choice over just having a button that says 'Post' or something. Maybe I'm weird, but it just looks like a "Send to Sparrow.app" button to me.
• The character count should probably be moved down to the middle bar (on the right-hand side of course, so as not to interfere with the hashtag auto-complete).

Don't have much to say about this one. The star button at the top right is interesting, can you favorite entire conversations on ADN? The colors of the posts (the blue being your own posts and the green being people you follow?) are similar enough that they're hard to differentiate​, to my eyes.

Ohhhhhh, I get it. The speedometer icon means 'dashboard'. Clever. I notice that there's an option to see your starred conversations, so I guess I was correct about that last screenshot. I would say that on this screen, it's okay to have a drop shadow under your avatar since it's meant to stand out. Still doesn't make sense on the timeline, though.​

Overall, this seems like a nice app, but there are some weird UI conventions going on. Obviously, this is v1.0 so it should only improve from here, and maybe if the developer reads this post they can understand what a new user might think when they first look at the app.

Either way, it's a fun thought exercise. I recommend that other app developers do this for apps they know nothing about too, so they can put themselves in the shoes of their own first-time users.

If you're on App.net and would like to try Felix out for yourself, it's $5 on the App Store and works with both iPhone and iPad.​

Review: 'Drafts' for iOS

Ever have an idea that suddenly popped into your head that was so good you needed to jot it down, but by the time you get a chance to write, you've forgotten what it was? Or do you have an idea that isn't yet ready for the big time and needs to be refined first? You need an app like Drafts.

​Drafts is designed to help you get your ideas out of your head into text form in the quickest way possible. When you open the app, it promptly greets you with a blank white canvas and a keyboard. No searching for previous notes, no need to add a title first, no distractions. Once you open the app, you simply start typing.

After you've finished typing, you can tap the '+' icon on the center toolbar and save it for later, or you can tap the 'Share' icon on the right side and export it to many different places, including Evernote, Tweetbot, SMS, Facebook, Reminders, Dropbox, ​Omnifocus, Sparrow, Agenda Calendar, and a lot more.

Drafts supports ​Markdown as well, if you're into that sort of thing. I've personally been using it as a tool for practicing Markdown on the go, since it includes options to preview the HTML output of your Markdown or send it elsewhere for use.

​If you would like to go back and see all of your previous drafts, just tap the 'paper' icon on the tool bar and the keyboard will slide down, revealing the drafts list underneath. There's no organizational structure that I'm aware of (like folders or tags), but if you need to find any specific thing you can just use the search feature (obviously, it's the magnifying glass icon on the toolbar).

​Drafts has become extremely useful for me, because I often have an idea spring to mind that I forget by the time I can get it into text form. I could just open Evernote and create a new note there, but Drafts feels so much more direct and I don't feel like I'm going to forget anything by the time it opens because it only takes a second or two.

With Evernote, I have to wait for the notes list to finish syncing, then tap the 'New Note' button, then tap in the body area to start typing. Those extra seconds really do matter, especially when you're doing those same things every single time you open the app. Plus, with Evernote, I'm tempted to properly tag and title each note when I'm done, but with Drafts I don't feel that compulsion. In this case, simple really is better.

There are plenty of other features in Drafts that I haven't even talked about here. For such a simple app, it's pretty powerful, and I highly recommend it. The iPhone version is $2 and the iPad version is $3.

'Apple Maps: The FAQ'

Great post by Kontra about the 'Mapsgate' thing. Don't want to spoil any of it here so just go read it.

Lightning and the Fight Against Change

By now, pretty much everyone knows about the new Lightning connector being used in the iPhone 5. As with any Apple announcement, reactions from most people (I wanted to use "customers" here, but apparently people who have no interest in the iPhone 5 feel the need to speak up about this too) have fallen into two extremes:

"Ah, this makes total sense. Of course Apple would do this, because it helps them create a much thinner phone, and they can do away with that lousy old thing."

and​

​"I CAN'T BELIEVE APPLE WOULD FUCK US LIKE THIS, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH ALL OF  MY ACCESSORIES NOW?!"

​The latter reaction is both amusing and fascinating. This kind of thing seems to be a repeating cycle, although the average consumer seems to forget it. They forget that, years ago, Apple gave up the Firewire connector for the iPod (more specifically, the 3rd generation) and switched over to the 30pin connector we've been using for nearly a decade now. It was only a matter of time before Apple would move on to something else.

​Meanwhile, many of Apple's competitors have been using their own proprietary cables and switching them up even more often. Just look at Samsung, for example:

These cables were all released in the time frame that Apple kept the 30pin connector in use. And this image doesn't even show all of them. Making Apple out to be the bad guy here is just ridiculous.

The other thing people are forgetting is that gadget cables are slowly becoming a thing of the past. Apple's AirPlay feature bypasses the need to connect your iOS ​device to anything else; you just tap a button on the screen and it works wirelessly. Even without AirPlay, everyday technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth are being implemented in interesting ways:

• Sonos wireless music system
• Pay With Square​
• Bluetooth connectivity in cars​
• WiFi syncing with iTunes​
• Over-the-air iOS updates​
• iCloud backups​
• Apps/books/podcasts can be downloaded directly to the device, no sync even necessary.

While not universal yet, wireless charging is also becoming more and more popular. Put all of this stuff together, and you have a device that rarely needs to be plugged into anything. Never before has an iOS device been so capable of being entirely independent.

As for the old accessories that ​everyone keeps howling about, I think there are still few reasons to complain. For one thing, at least Apple even created a Lightning > 30pin adapter for people to use, even if it's essentially an expensive piece of plastic. They could have done nothing of the sort and left customers to dry.

Which brings me to my next point. Nobody is being forced to upgrade to the iPhone 5, or any other Lightning-compatible device Apple is sure to release in the near future.​ You don't HAVE to buy this thing. Keep your iPhone 4S or whatever it is you have, and be happy that it works the way you need it to. It's certainly not Apple's problem that you bought all of these accessories that require the 30pin connector anyway.

​My guess is that this whole thing will blow over relatively quickly. Even the most ardent complainers will likely be on a Lightning-compatible device in the next year or two, and even then they probably won't use the cable all that much.

'Customer Service'

Harry Marks comments on the deluge of people that have been complaining that AT&T has stopped letting ​their iPhone customers upgrade early:

“Whining because you’re not allowed to pay the same price for the new shiny as those who’ve been using 3G Ses and 4s for the last two years is exactly what’s wrong with our over-indulged, entitled society. Not everyone is special. Not everybody gets a trophy.”

​Couldn't agree more.

It's already weird that people feel this absurd need to have the latest and greatest thing, year after year. There's no need to act like an entitled brat on top of that.

iOS Annoyances

I jumped the gun a little early and un-jailbroke my phone. I've been running stock iOS 5.1.1 for about 8 days now. I didn't have any special reason to do this early, other than that I'd like to try out the OTA update process whenever iOS 6 drops.​

​Since then, I've noticed a definite speed increase in regards to typical usage. Apps seem to load faster, the lockscreen rarely hangs, and keyboard taps feel more responsive. I've even noticed a marked increase in battery life, which is great.

But it's not all a bed of roses. I'm remembering exactly why I jailbroke in the first place, and I put together a list of things about iOS that irritate me or could use some added functionality. I would hope that someone at Apple reads this and passes it along, but I'm just some guy without a lot of clout so there's no reason to expect such a thing. Anyway, here we go:

Notification Center

• ​On the lockscreen, you can't mark items as 'Read' or even delete the alerts. All you can do is swipe right on a particular alert and it will unlock the phone and take you to that app.
• You can delete the alerts from the pull-down Notification Center menu once you're logged into the phone, but even that can't be done on an individual basis; you have to tap the 'X' icon for an entire group of notifications (i.e. all SMS messages, or all emails, or all Facebook notifications, etc) and then tap the 'Clear' button that appears in order to make the notifications disappear. And doing so still doesn't mark the items as read within those apps, so you still have to open them afterward.
• Let's say I've already read a series of emails on my desktop machine. These emails are now marked as 'Read' on the desktop AND within the iPhone email client as they should be, and yet when I sign into my phone​, I still get a bunch of different alerts at the top of the screen about stuff I've already read. Pointless.
• There should be easier access to certain toggles at all times, for things like wifi, airplane mode, volume, brightness, bluetooth, etc.​
• ​The top-screen notifications are simply too big, and they interfere with usability. If I need to tap something at the top of an app screen, I either have to wait for the notification to go away, or I can pull down the Notification Center menu a little bit and then flick it back up to dismiss the notification.

The fixes: LockInfo, NCSettings, and ​SmallBanners.

Email/SMS/Contacts

• There is still no 'Quick Reply' or 'Quick Compose' functionality within iOS for things like SMS or email.
• I'd like to have photos next to entries in the Contacts list.​

The fixes: biteSMS​ and Cyntact.

​Homescreen

• ​There's still no way to get rid of the Newsstand icon or hide it within a folder, since it is treated like a folder itself.
• Perhaps they could allow us to have folders within folders. That would fix the issue above, and also allow gamers that have a ton of games to keep a single folder of Games with various folders inside for the different genres (RPG, Card, Racing, etc).
• Folders are simply too limiting by only allowing 12 apps at a time. ​I want functionality where folders are like mini-homescreens, each with the ability to contain multiple pages of apps.
• I wish I could have 5 icons on the dock. With only 4, there's not a lot to visually differentiate the dock from the rest of the homescreen. Also, I would bet that people are more likely to have 5 apps they use all the time and not just 4 (at least, that's true in my case). The OCD part of me also likes having one of the icons on the dock centered, which acts as my most-used icon. It's kinda like how some apps have a center button on their bottom toolbar where the main functionality exists (i.e. the 'Take Photo' button in Instagram, the 'Create Note' button in Evernote, etc).
• The​ multitask tray is pretty limited, and really only useful for switching between the last 2 (maybe 3) apps, or accessing media controls sometimes. A better option might be something like Multifl0w, which treats apps kind of like Safari tabs that you can browse between, maybe even with the added effect of having live previews of whatever the backgrounded apps are doing. Even if the multitask tray stayed the same as it is right now, it would also be nice if I could swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access it instead of double-clicking the home button. I feel like my home button will be worn down much quicker because of this thing.
• The multitask tray also cannot be used in landscape. If you're looking at something in landscape and open the tray, it forces you to switch to portrait.​
• I'd like to be able to move multiple icons on the homescreen at the same time.​

The fixes: NoNewsIsGoodNews, Folder Enhancer, Five Icon Dock, Multifl0w, Zephyr, Switcherland, and MultiIconMover.

​Other

• ​I wish I could have different sound profiles for everything. For example, it would be nice to have my ringtone and my SMS tone at different volume levels, because some of my ringtones are quieter than others and I need to turn them up to a level that can sometimes make my SMS tone unbearably loud. Also, different apps should have different volumes from one another. When I switch from Instacast (where I usually have to turn the volume up to hear people speak), to Spotify, the music can be crazy loud at first.
• Game Center is still an abomination of design. It's not the skeuomorphism; the thing is just garish​ in general. It should look more like Xbox Live's interface or something.

I'm not aware of fixes for either of these things yet.

​Overall, I'm still happy to be using iOS, and there are still some cool things built-in, but without these particular additions it just feels like a good OS and not a great one.

'Comments Suck'

Cap Watkins discusses why he thinks Branch is a better tool for discussion than blog comments.

“Internet comments have long been a source of pain for popular web sites. On one hand, the ability to participate with a story gives readers a closer connection with the site and probably drives a bit of returning traffic. On the other hand, comment sections are wretched hives of scum and villainy. ”

I've disabled comments on Unretrofied since the very beginning exactly for this reason. If someone feels the need to comment on something I've said here, they can feel free to let me know via a blog post of their own, or they can contact me through Twitter and email, but I'm not letting this place become cluttered with stupid arguments and vile opinions. Even if that means shutting out the nice, thoughtful people too.

I'm not about to start adding Branch links on all of my posts as an alternative to having comments, as Watkins suggests in his post, but I think it's an intriguing proposition.

Can We Please Stop Complaining About Skeuomorphism?

Ah, skeuomorphism. Ye most hated of all design practices, ever since that Sam Biddle piece came out nearly a year ago. Before then, nary a whisper was heard about the practice. But ever since then, the number of blog posts full of derision have piled up into the stratosphere, and there seems to be no sign of stopping.

Take this one from today, for example:

“The issue is two-fold: first, that traditional visual metaphors no longer translate to modern users; and second, that excessive digital imitation of real-world objects creates confusion among users.”

Forget that this same site published a piece only a few months ago that asked people to please move on. Most of the negative pieces written on the subject have been variations on this theme of user confusion and lack of "pixel authenticity." The subject has been ground into a fine dust by now. There's even a Tumblr dedicated to finding instances of it.

We get it. You can stop with the hate-pieces now. Everyone knows you're a designer that would never think of creating such a thing in your products. That's fine. Please shut up about it. There are other things in the world of technology and design that are actually worth paying attention to, and this seems like more of a fad than anything to be truly worried or upset about.

Web Annoyances

If you're doing any of this stuff on your website, you're doing it wrong:​

1. ​As I scroll down an article, and about halfway down, a box appears in the lower-right corner, trying to recommend other things to me that I'm not interested in. All you did was distract me from reading.
2. The little 'Feedback' button that appears on the left-hand side of lots of websites these days. How many people are really using that thing to leave feedback to you? All I see it doing is getting in the way of other stuff on the site, so thanks for that.​
3. Adding extra content to the clipboard when the user copies text from the site. "Discover more content here! [link]" Not cool.
4. A smaller margin for your actual content than what's being used for advertisements.​
5. Navigation toolbars that wait until you've scrolled down a little, then whiz down to wherever you stop at. Haha! How quirky and cute and not annoying at all!
6. ​Infinitely-scrolling pages that keep adding more content as I scroll, when I'm just trying to reach the navigational links at the bottom of the page.
7. If I go to your site from my phone, and it pops up a "CHECK OUT OUR IPHONE APP!" ad that I have to get rid of before reaching the site itself, that's an immediate sign that whatever I was about to read is worthless and I close the page immediately.
8. ​More than two share buttons (preferably none, though).
9. "Slideshows" that are really just 9 different pages that each have a meager description of the photo, just so you can get more pageviews.​
10. ​Such bad adherence to basic web standards that even Instapaper and Evernote can't parse your awful website into something legible.

There, I feel better.​

It's Time to Simplify

[Editor's warning: this post is going to be 'first-world problems' as hell. I acknowledge this and will understand if you lose interest after the first paragra- hey, where'd everyone go?]

I like keeping things simple in my personal life. I wouldn't necessarily call myself a minimalist, but I don't like complications, either. So why is my digital life so cluttered?

Let me explain, service by service:

Evernote

In Evernote, I've got ​nearly 2,500 notes, all of which have been tagged and sorted into folders. Most of them have been assigned 3 or more tags because I'm apparently OCD about keeping this stuff organized, despite the fact that Evernote has an amazing search feature that could probably bypass the need for tags. Besides that, I've got nearly 250 different tags that I'm using, which is utterly ridiculous.

Some of this stuff is important for me to keep, or at least fits the ideal use-case for Evernote (such as receipts, recipes, medical records, product instructions, travel ideas/notes, etc), but I would say that the majority of these notes instead fit this description: "a cool thing I saw on the internet once and decided to use Evernote to bookmark it, even though I may never read it again."

​Google Reader

​I'm subscribed to over 50 RSS feeds, mostly tech and design blogs. To some of my fellow internet geeks, I bet this isn't even a figure worth batting an eye over, but I'm sure it's still more than anyone really needs to keep up with on a daily basis. And this is after I've already cut out a bunch of feeds, too. 

Twitter

​Currently following 96 people. I can refresh my feed once every 15min and have several new tweets to read, some of which link out to other content on the internet. It feels like I have to constantly be checking Twitter to keep up with everything. I plan on doing a purge soon, but I hate dropping people who actually do post good content now and then. It's just all the boring stuff in between that adds up too fast (which I'm certainly guilty of, myself).

Instapaper

​This is a problem shared by many, I'm sure. I've simply got way too much stuff backlogged in my Instapaper account. Enough that I've different folders set up for different types of things saved there. Ideally, I would have few enough things to catch up on that I would never even need the folder system. The even dumber thing is, I still read other articles out there on the internet, and books out here in the real world, while stuff sits in my Instapaper account months after I've saved it. What is wrong with me?

​Youtube

Didn't expect this one, did you? Well, my organizational OCD doesn't stop at Evernote, people.​ Any video saved to my Favorites on Youtube also gets filed into a playlist based on what type of video it is. Why do I need to do this? I don't know. What I do know is that I've spent far too much time sorting videos after watching them. It's just sad, really. Don't get me started on my 'Watch Later' list either.

​Spotify

You can probably guess on this one. I have way too many playlists (and playlist folders) that I spend too much time on organizing.

Dropbox

​This one is at least a little bit understandable, I hope. I use my Dropbox as a replacement for the 'My Documents' folder on every computer I use. I keep files, photos, videos, backups, and other stuff arranged into folders as needed. Since I actually access the stuff in Dropbox all the time, it makes more sense to keep this stuff in order so I can actually find something when I need it without having to run a search or do guesswork.

Gmail

Actually, I'm pretty lucky on this one. I don't receive all that much email from real people; it's mostly notifications from different places (like Facebook, Twitter, etc), receipt verifications from purchase​s I've made, or newsletters I'm subscribed to. But I have a feeling that if people started emailing me more, I would want to start using Gmail's label system a lot.

Amazon

I've got different Wish Lists for different types of crap I want to buy later. Surely this isn't healthy.​

Instacast

At any given time, there are probably 5-10 podcasts that I'm "behind" on, each of which being about an hour long. New episodes are released about as fast I can listen to them, unless I wanted to set aside an entire day to catch up on everything.

—

I'm sure I could keep going, but you get the idea.​ I obviously have a serious problem with wanting to keep every little thing in my life organized. I don't follow any sort of "Getting Things Done" methodology, but I've apparently decided to make up a dozen different workflows in unnecessary places. Entirely too much time in my life has been eaten up by doing all of this. It's got to stop or I will go crazy (har-har, you're already crazy (wait, now you're talking to yourself​ (oh god please stop))).

What I probably need is a big red button that I can push that resets everything back to "Inbox Zero" so I can rebuild a better, simpler digital life this time around.

Read & Trust Magazine

​I talked about the Read & Trust Newsletter recently. It's been a fantastic resource for great writing about a variety of subjects, but today they announced that they're doing away with the newsletter and are instead converting it to a magazine format.

​Current subscribers need not worry, though. They're still featuring the same writers and subject matter as before, but the new format is much more polished. Instead of a weekly email, you'll get a beautifully designed PDF edition every month, which will have 5 articles collected from that month's group of writers.

A sample quote from ​the September issue:

“This is part of my reason for travel to these places in the first place and I feel a certain sense of duty to do so. I travel not just to see the sights or take a vacation in a place far different from mine — such gains are short term and often fleeting. Instead, it is also to borrow and learn ways of doing things that I otherwise would not have been exposed to.”

— Patrick Rhone, "Cultural Exchange"

The only downside is that if you're already a subscriber, you need to re-subscribe to the new format, but even that's an easy process and the price is the same $5/month anyway.​ If you're on the fence, I still highly recommend becoming a subscriber. You won't regret it.

​Read & Trust Blog | Goodbye & Hello

'The Mythical Instagram High Ground'

Great post from 'clearzero' on the Verge forums:

“If I have resorted to asking you what camera you are using we have both lost. Instagram is not your enemy or an enemy to photography. It is just a tool. If it helps someone express a unique vision or experience we should all embrace it. It is not a threat to my many years of experience or yours. If it were, we are likely not the outstanding photographers we think we are.”

'Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee'

Lately, I've really been enjoying Jerry Seinfeld's self-produced series, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee.​

It's exactly what the title implies: Seinfeld calls up one of his comedian friends and asks them to have coffee, then he picks them up in a classic car on the way there. What follows is good conversation, interspersed with beautiful shots of coffee being poured or espresso being brewed while jazz plays in the background. It's coffee porn at its finest, and I love it.

I recommend watching every episode, but especially the one with Alec Baldwin, if only for this statement he made to Seinfeld:

“Your life has been one unbroken boulevard of green lights, hasn’t it?”

Only complaint I have is that I haven't found a way to subscribe to the damn thing yet. Get with the times, Jerry!​

Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee

Rethinking a Jailbroken iPhone

As I tweeted yesterday, I've been considering just having a stock iPhone experience rather than jailbreaking anymore. I was mostly kidding about the 'OldManism' thing, but perhaps this really is a sign that I'm getting older and have lost patience with the tinkering aspect of owning a smartphone.

Life as a jailbreaker

I've been jailbreaking my iPhone for as long as I've owned one. I started on the iPhone 3G back in 2008, ​and continued doing so once I upgraded to the iPhone 4S earlier this year. I've spent quite a few hours scouring the internet—forget searching within Cydia, it's not at all designed for discovery—trying to find great stuff I could try out.

I was pretty big on themes at first. I probably used all the big ones at some point, but eventually settled on switching between Glasklart and Illumine every now and then. Once I discovered how to make Glasklart icons for apps that hadn't been added into the theme's repository​ yet, I spent far too much time doing so because I liked having a uniform experience.

I've also grown accustomed to certain conveniences:

• biteSMS allows me to compose or reply to text messages from anywhere, even the lockscreen.
• The lockscreen itself started out as basically a clock and wallpaper, and Apple has made it a bit more useful with iOS 5's Notification Center, but I can still do even more with it if I want, using something like LockInfo.
• I always have easy access to toggles for wifi, volume, brightness, airplane mode, and more, using NCSettings (which replaced the beloved SBSettings on my iPhone a while back).
• With SmallBanners, the top-screen notification banners used in iOS are smaller and less obtrusive.
• With Folder Enhancer, I can put​ app folders inside of other folders on the homescreen. My folders are no longer limited to 12 apps, but instead are paginated much like the homescreen, and I can have as many pages as I want.
• Cyntact alters my Contacts list to show peoples' photos next to their names. Why this isn't default functionality is beyond me.
• NoNewsIsGoodNews hides that stupid NewsStand icon that I'll never use.
• DataDeposit lets me save all data from any given app into a folder within my Dropbox account, where I can restore from later if needed.​
• CallBar prevents an incoming call from overtaking your entire screen, and instead relegates it to a nicer notification bar at the top that you can swipe to answer.​

​​I could go on, but hopefully you get the idea. There are truly some great things available to jailbreakers*, and I'm hesitant to give it all up.

*I'd like to note that I'm not one of those people who jailbreaks in order to pirate apps. Those kinds of repositories have never touched my phone, and they never will. In fact, there are several apps I've purchased from Cydia, and if I stay jailbroken, I have a few more that I'm willing to buy. I don't mind supporting good development, whether it's happening on the App Store or in Cydia.

​There's always a catch

Unfortunately, jailbreaking has its downsides too. Near the end of my iPhone 3G's life, it would often take incredible amounts of time to accomplish simple tasks like opening the camera app (which actually made me nearly miss some good shots of my son in the weeks after his birth). I didn't mind too much at the time, because that's just what I was used to.

It wasn't until I upgraded to the 4S that I realized how stupidly slow my phone had been. And due to the timing of my upgrade, my phone was running a version of iOS that hadn't been jailbroken quite yet, so I actually was running a stock phone for a little while. Once that jailbreak was publicly released though, I figured that this speedier phone should be able to handle it much better than the old one had. I was right, and soon I was back to my old-but-improved setup.

The problem is, some of the same old issues are still bugging me constantly.

To explain, over the last few years I've developed a habit of avoiding any iOS releases that didn't seem important enough to mess with. Each time I updated iOS, I would go through this whole rigmarole of manually backing up all my more personal stuff (like photos and contacts), deleting certain packages from Cydia that interfere with iPhone restores (which I don't believe is a problem anymore, thankfully), trying to save my SHSH blob in case I wanted to downgrade to the older version of iOS later, restoring the phone, installing the new iOS, re-jailbreaking, putting all my favorite apps back on the phone, and setting everything back up from scratch.

Why did I put myself through all that? Well, there's nothing quite like starting with a clean slate. Everything just seems to run better that way (although I admit this could be a placebo effect).

An unfortunate side effect of all this is, while I'm avoiding iOS upgrades, app developers of course continue to push out releases that sometimes break compatibility with my version of iOS. I have several apps that no longer support iOS 5.0.1 (my current version) and I simply cannot update them until the phone itself has been updated to 5.1.1 first (or iOS 6, when it releases this fall).​

Another irritant lately has been that, as time goes on, my phone gets worse and worse about hanging on to login data for certain apps. I haven't done anything different with the phone lately, yet certain apps like Facebook, Tweetbot, and Reeder keep asking me to login when they never did before. Tweetbot specifically has a problem with losing other internal settings too, like which 'Read Later' client​ I want to use.

​Apple's email app has been degrading lately, too. Sometimes I'll open it, only to find a bunch of emails on the list being shown with the 'unread' badge, even though LockInfo shows that I only have one unread email. Besides that, all emails on the list are showing as not having any content. Like so:

The only way of fixing this email thing, along with the apps that are losing random settings, is to do a hard-reboot of the phone. I've gone from hardly ever having to do that, to doing it once or twice a day. Annoying.​

Where am I going with all this? Well, I think that when iOS 6 drops, I'm​ probably just going to do one more fresh restore and then keep it that way. I'm getting to the point where dealing with this shit is more irritating than not having all of those conveniences.

This is where someone might ask, "why don't you just get an Android phone?" I've had an iPhone for so long that I've become pretty entrenched in their ecosystem. I've spent a not-so-small amount of money on App Store apps, and I'm not just going to throw all that away. Plus, I plan on getting other Apple products someday, like an iMac and an iPad. Why wouldn't I just keep using the phone that works best within that framework?

After iOS 6 launches, I'll gather some thoughts and post what I think about the experience.​

Samsung and "Innovation"

“Sometimes it’s just best to keep your mouth shut, or remain vague. Two things Samsung should have copied from Apple.”

— Ben Brooks

​I've got to agree with Ben on this one. Over the last few days, I've been reading both sides of the arguments following the Apple v. Samsung verdict. Basically, the Apple fans loved it, while everyone else thought that this would only stifle innovation in the marketplace in the years to come, because Apple's patent portfolio just got the thumbs-up from the U.S. government.

While I can see why the latter group is concerned, I don't see this as bad for the typical consumer. Samsung's problem is that they were too blatant about ​ripping off Apple's designs, not that Apple is too litigious for their own good. Since the verdict was handed out, Samsung has done a lot of talking about how consumers want more innovation in the marketplace, but "innovating" is hell of a lot different than "copying another company's ideas wholesale and selling them as your own." 

We don't need more iPad clones on the market. Even Microsoft (of all companies) has developed a radically different UI with Windows Mobile 8, and even have some interesting new ideas like the keyboard cover.​ There's nothing stopping Samsung from creating something just as unique, they just need to put the actual work into it this time.

​Update: Garrett Murray is exactly on-point about this too.

'Working From Home'

Yesterday I subscribed to the Read & Trust newsletter. These are people I already read or have thought about checking out anyway, so why not, right?

As a thank-you for signing up, they gave me some links covering their recent topic, 'Working From Home.' Four pieces written by four people, sharing their experiences and lessons learned while working from home. I've often thought about what it would be like to work from home, whether it's by starting a business or taking up some kind of freelance job, so I enjoy reading these types of honest pieces that lay out what it's really like.

"There will come a day when a construction crew sets up shop outside your window, or the power goes out, your modem takes a dirt nap or your kids want you to "parent" them."

-Dave Caolo

After reading all of these pieces, I noticed a few recurring bits of advice that I intend to keep in mind if I ever decide to take on such a venture:

Stick to a work schedule - Even if it's just 7am to 3pm. Stick to it. Don't let your work spill over too much into your personal life, and vice versa. It's too easy to get distracted at home, and you'll never get any work done.

Dress up for work even if you're not leaving the house all day - This helps you practice a routine and just makes you feel more professional in general.

Determine what your work space is, and stick to it - Don't let people unnecessarily intrude on this space, just as if you were working in an office. Don't completely ignore your family, but set boundaries.

Take breaks - After setting all these boundaries, it's easy to get so caught up in your work that you forget to step away for a few minutes. Go outside. Breathe.

All seems like good advice to me. I would recommend signing up for the newsletter and reading the rest of these stories and more. It's only $5/month and well worth it.