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Weekend Read: Don’t Use Beta Software

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BETA stands for Doesn’t Work, Will Break, Might Delete Everything. It’s become a more familiar term since Google labelled Gmail as a beta for years and Apple did the same with Siri. It’s familiar enough a term that people don’t understand it and that’s more than just a shame when it means you can end up losing your work.

The current iOS 9 and OS X betas from Apple are causing problems. The beta for watchOS 2.0 which drives Apple Watches is apparently driving those watches back to Apple as they become useless.

You can and I do think Apple shouldn’t have put out software in this state but that is what beta software is. When you’re first making an application, you clobber together bits and pieces until it sort of, kinda, a bit looks like one day it may work. That’s an alpha release and it’s where you see if the thing has any point and it’s the place you think, do you know, it’d be much better in yellow. Or blue. Purple and orange with spots.

Eventually you reach a point where someone says enough. You can’t change the colour any more. It’s time to get this out into the hands of people to try it.

That’s a beta. It’s software of a set colour being put out to be tried. It will break. It cannot fail but to break. The issue is over how badly. If you’re a developer, the intended audience for a beta, these crashing failures are just your day to day life. They are why there is a beta. A bit breaks, you fix it, next day you move on.

If you’re a user, it’s different. You’re using your computer or your phone to ring people up or to compute, you can’t afford to have a problem. Hence the warnings every software company gives you about how you shouldn’t try this beta on your main or primary computing device and how you should have a backup. It’s a warning to us but it’s not. It’s really a note to future litigators that the company did warn people.

Few folk pay attention to that warning and today that means some people are having to return their watches to Apple.

It’s bad and worse than it should’ve been, worse than it would’ve been if Apple hadn’t made this beta public. But betas are there to be tested and for the problems to be found. There is no better way of testing software that will be relied on by millions of people than to try it with millions. Hence the public beta and for all the problems current ones are causing people, we’re seeing more of it and we’re going to see still more.

It’s important to beta test. You just haven’t signed on to be the one who gets problems so don’t be the one who installs and runs this pre-release stuff.

By the way, alpha releases are followed by beta releases but betas are not followed by gammas. The one after a beta is known as the GM or Gold Master, it’s the version of the software that is ready to ship. It used to be that software was sold on shiny discs so the Gold Master would be sent to the pressing plant. Funny how terms continue long after what they describe is gone.

Recommended: Citymapper comes to Birmingham

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You can recommend something and mean it yet only later realise that you really, really mean it. Usually that’s just because you liked something and you came to like it more. But in this case, I intellectually knew that Citymapper is a very good app for finding bus, train and walking routes – in London. Also New York. Lots of places.

Just not Birmingham where I live. When you launch Citymapper and you’re in a city it doesn’t cover, it tells you. It also says, listen, maybe we will get to your place some day. Let us know that you want it and we’ll see. No promises, but.

I pressed the button adding my vote for Birmingham and I pressed it thinking I’d never hear another word. Did that and went on to test it all out the next time I was in London. It’s very good and I recommended it thoroughly before putting it away and never giving it another thought.

Until this week when the company emailed to say Birmingham is now covered.

So now I’m trying it out everywhere and for everything and I think it’s great. Go read my original praising review on MacNN.com and then go get the app.

That’s of course especially if it covers your city – and the quickest way to find out is download it and try – but also if it covers cities you ever go to.

Plus, it’s free.

Don’t snipe at your boss, swipe instead

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Oh, come on, can we not just get a drink and talk about this? Apparently not. Instead, you can now just swipe right on an app called Niko Niko if you’re not happy. Equally you can swipe left if you’re chipper. Swipe down to use a touch-and-drag happiness meter and seriously, for god’s sake, SAY SOMETHING ALOUD.

I’m into technology and even I’m twitching at this idea of turning office teamwork into something like Community’s Meow Meow Beenz. If you can bear it more than I can, take a read of Fast Company’s article.

Something to put off: safely defer emails

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Right now, this minute, I have one email in my inbox and it is killing me. I’m going to bet money that you have a lot more than one, maybe thousands more, and if it isn’t maiming you then that’s only because you’re ignoring it. This is a big deal and it is a big sapping not just of your productivity but of your will to live.

There are ways to deal with this and as you can guess from that one single bloody message in my inbox, I’m using some of these ways. There is one that I am not, have not and until lately haven’t even thought about: deferring emails. Say an email comes in and you don’t want to deal with it now. You can have it vanish and come back tomorrow.

That’s just putting things off, that can’t be right, it can’t be useful but some people live and swear by it, including David Sparks who was as cynical as I still am:

I made fun of deferring email when I first heard of it. It seemed dishonest and gimmicky. However when I tried it out, I quickly became a believer. There’s a lot of email that can stand be putting off for a little bit of time but isn’t worth the extra work and baggage that come with adding it to your OmniFocus or other task manager database. In that case, deferring email really works.

When you’ve got a good email deferment system in place, you get used to seeing an empty inbox so when something shows up, you take it seriously. Simply leaving emails in your inbox (or for that matter any other email box box) results in you getting used to having a bunch of unanswered email and, in my case, malaise and despair. I’m much happier putting an email off for two days and getting it out of my sight than having to see it there every time I open my mail client. Maybe this is just psychology, but it works.

Deferred Email – David Sparks, MacSparky (8 July 2015)

He uses a service called SaneBox but there are others, some of which will take action on your mailbox for you. There are ones I’ve just learnt of, for instance, that will grab all the emails you get from nominated people and bunch them together into one digest at the end of the day. I’m extremely wary of that because it means you’re giving a company complete access to your emails. All of your emails. If you’re thinking that’s a shrug, it’s only email, it’s not like you’re giving them your bank account passwords, answer me this: how does your bank handle your forgetting your password? It emails you a replacement. Stopped you shrugging, doesn’t it?

Nonetheless, if you know and trust a service that does this digest stuff then I can see the advantages. And I am slowly becoming persuaded by SaneBox and the like. Read the full piece by David Sparks for more general information about what these things do and how they help plus some very specific detail of how he uses them.

BBC Micro – 2015

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From this, which I grew up with:
1280px-BBC_Micro_left

To this:

I’m interested in how my reaction to this schools education project now is exactly the same as it was back with the original BBC Micro. Or rather exactly the reverse: today I think nope, couldn’t write on it, not interested – and back then it was the best computer for writing, I’m having that. I so vividly, physically remember typing on those keyboards.

Christmas, Black Friday, now Prime Day

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On 15 July, Amazon is introducing Prime Day: one single day in which you can get “more deals than Black Friday” – but only if you are an Amazon Prime member. Which makes this urgent: today, 8 July, you can join up to Amazon Prime for £20 off.

So that’s an annual fee of £59 instead of £79 – just for the first year, it’ll be full price again next time – and if you want that, you have until 23:59 tonight, UK time.

What Prime always gets you is free postage on most things, one-day delivery a lot of the time, plus more recently access to online films and TV. What it gets you on Prime Day is like a beefed up version of its daily deals. On 15 July 2015, you’ll get seven major deals where you’ll “save on thousands of items” plus regular “lightning deals” every ten minutes.

I like how my Mac or maybe my fingers started to write that as “lightening” deals as the aim here is lighten your bank account as much as possible. Sorry, the aim is to celebrate Amazon’s 20th anniversary, that’s what it is.

And in the States to counter how Walmart is reportedly going to offer a competitor to Amazon Prime.

If you want to sign up or check out what few details of the special offers are yet known, head on over to Amazon UK.

Did they really call it Microsoft Tossup?

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It just sounds like the punchline to some joke. But Tossup is real and if you give a toss what it’s about, it’s for getting together with all your friends for lunch because it saves all that tedious chatting and enjoying time with those pals while you work out where to go. Be more efficient with your socialising! Give a Tossup!

The morning routines of writers

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There’s a website called My Morning Routine and it collects people’s accounts of how they start their typical working days. For some reason I can’t quite put my finger on yet tickles me, the site includes more writers than any other profession. Maybe everyone else is getting on with their day instead of writing about it.

But I took a stroll through the collection and found this pull quote from writer Amber Rae. I’ve not heard of her before and I was drawn to her section only by the description that she is a ‘fire starter’. I’m glad I looked now because her account is headed by this, which I do very much recognise:

For many years, my morning routine was a result of how other people expected me to show up. I was overwhelmed and off-center because I was ignoring the messages my body was sending me.
My Morning Routine – Amber Rae, My Morning Routine (25 March 2015)

Read the full piece of hers plus, currently 58 other writers and more ordinary people.

The polarising new MacBook keyboard

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This is a very specific kind of Blank Screen post: it’s ostensibly about one product that, statistically speaking, you are unlikely to have and, also statistically speaking, you are unlikely to ever get. I’m really selling this to you, aren’t I? Okay, try this: it’s to do with keyboards, which we all spend a lot of time with and which you, admit it, have strong opinions about.

Okay, it’s just me. But I’ve been pulling 16-hour days at the keyboard lately, the feel of these things is hugely important and the potential risk to my wrists is gigantically important to me. Then Apple’s gone and brought out a new keyboard, a new type of keyboard and, seriously, when Apple does something, the rest of the industry mocks it while working furiously to copy it.

(Are you on a notebook computer now? See the way the keyboard is toward the back and you’ve got palmrests at the front around a trackpad? That was Apple’s idea and there is now notebook you can buy that does not do exactly this.)

So a new design of keyboard is likely to appear in other machines, from Apple and others, now that it’s out there. And Apple made such a fuss of it at the launch that I was suspicious: the company doth protest too much and all that. Then people started getting the new MacBook that has this keyboard and they hated it.

Well, some hated, most people thought they would put up with it. The travel is shallow, the distance you have to press the keys before they register is tiny. The keys are also wider but it’s chiefly the travel and how that feels that is making people unhappy.

Except me.

I went in to an Apple Store specifically to try out the keyboard and I actually liked it.

But that was a few minutes. Now here’s a fella who’s spent eight weeks typing on it:

Apple’s new MacBook uses a new keyboard mechanism. The keys are larger and the throw [aka travel] is less, and so when people try it out for just a minute ot two in the Apple store, it may feel strange, different and even undesirable.

I’ve spent eight weeks with my new MacBook now, and one of things I like about it the most is the keyboard. Just like the single USB-C port, past experience doesn’t prepare or guide one for using this keyboard because it’s so different from what Apple has delivered in the past.

Eight Weeks With the MacBook Keyboard: Total Love – The Mac Observer

Read the full piece for a more informed view than I can give you. But then take away that if this keyboard does come to all computers, it’s fine.