Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Breathtaking future from Adobe – er, and Microsoft?

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Is it bad that I look at this, want it and then when I see it’s Microsoft think twice? Microsoft tends to do feature lists really well, as in adding a lot of features to the list. It tends to demo well too. But then in real life the perfect demo crashes all the time. Or the features on the list don’t actually do what you thought they would (see the howls of WordPerfect users forced to switch to Word and learning that Microsoft literally – literally literally, not just very – could not do Reveal Codes). Or the features are just so hard to find that you wonder whether they’re really there or not.

So the Microsoft element of this makes me cautious. And I suppose it’s interesting that Adobe is getting into bed with Microsoft more: it makes you wonder if they’re really thinking of abandoning their power user base over on Apple gear.

But if you’ve ever used Photoshop, Illustrator or other main Adobe apps, this will impress you.

 

 

Watch Windows 95 on your watch

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Some people criticise this fella – you know it’s a fella – because he’s got Windows 95 running on his Android Wear watch but it crashes.

If you ask me, he’s just faithfully reproducing the Windows-for-the-D’oh experience. I do remember watching Windows 95 start up, in 1996 naturally, and wondering if this was really the future. And if there were perhaps another future I could switch to, please.

Making aluminium foil

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In this week’s newsletter I mentioned how I’d seen a film about the making of the foil I use for wrapping food. This is not that film. It’s far more irritating. But if you skip the entire first 90 seconds, you get a shallow tale about how this stuff is made.

The full story is (delete as applicable) fascinating or terrifying. But even this empty surface tale is enough to make think they really shouldn’t go to all this trouble, I’ll just eat out.

Apparently some football team did something or other

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I think it was football. Is Chelsea a football team or a goldfish? I’m sure it’s one or the other and I’m certain that what it or they do is massively important to them. But I was just watching Community on my iPad when TuneIn Radio popped up a notification telling me this breaking news that, frankly, I’ve already forgotten.

As notifications go, this was stylish enough and more importantly as notifications go, this one went. But in what algorithm did TuneIn Radio see I’d tuned in to the Today programme on Radio 4, heard that it was in the middle of its Thought for the Day, sigh and say aloud “at least it isn’t the sport” before switching it off, and conclude that I must want sport and/or goldfish news.

It’s bugging me now. Hang on.

No, I can’t get the notification back to check what it was about.

Maybe I’m just narked at being so interrupted by something so trivial – to me, anyway. I could blame TuneIn Radio for notifiying me when I hadn’t said I wanted to but, let’s be fair, maybe I allowed notifications back when I installed it a few years ago. That this is the first-ever is a little suspicious but it could be my fault, it could be finger trouble.

But I don’t think an app with such a broad use as TuneIn Radio should do this. It’s not like I’ve elected to install a Wimbledon Cricket app, then I would think it reasonable that it send notifications, especially if I’ve said okay. TuneIn Radio is a quick way of tuning in to pretty much any radio station anywhere in the world. It’s nicer on the iPad than BBC’s own iPlayer Radio, I use a fair bit.

I could’ve got the answer wrong if it asked me to allow notifications. But if it had ever asked whether I wanted sport or goldfish news, there is no question but that I would’ve said no.

So I’m narked that TuneIn does this.

Metadata or it didn’t happen

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Our car was filled to the brim, children and dogs and all. Halfway through the two-day trek to see family in Norway, my wife was at the wheel. I was fiddling around with my brand new iPhone, which truly seemed a magical product after years with Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. The large touchscreen, the integrated GPS, and the 3G data connection made the phone a window to the world where data and the physical finally coexisted and interacted in a way that felt right to me. It was also a window into the behaviors of other people accessing this world.

Someone—I do not know who—had used Gowalla to tag this little island in the middle of the lake as a point of interest, and so the island became interesting to me. The chance meeting with this island, which existed to me only as a data point, has remained in my mind for years. What did the existence of the island, not as a physical place in the middle of a lake in Northern Sweden, but as a digital place discovered on my phone, really mean?

What Happens to a Place When the Data About It Is Lost? – Finn Arne Jørgensen, The Atlantic (24 June 2014)

Well, it means this was surely written between 2007 and 2012 as that’s the lifespan of Gowalla. With that new iPhone reference too, you’re looking at 2007. But such is life, such is the way the web works, this is from The Atlantic which insists it was written this year.

So there are a couple of extra layers to this now. There’s the original point about mysterious points of interest on digital maps and the thought of who placed them there, why they did it and what the place means to them. But now there’s also what happened to this specific place and to all places that were marked on Gowalla and the answer seems to be that they have just gone. Vanished. (There’s a tiny bit about what was supposed to happen to the Gowalla data on Wikipedia. You can trust it about an online site.)

And there’s the business of when this was really written and posted. You may notice on The Blank Screen that every quote has its full first-publication date stated but there is an argument that you make your website seem fresher if you don’t.

I don’t agree with this. Certainly if your latest post is dated six months ago, you’re in trouble. But otherwise, I think you just cost readers some confusion. Most of the time I don’t care when something is written but there are moments when it becomes an issue. Such as here when we can just about place Finn Arne Jørgensen in his car in a certain point in time as well as a certain point in Norway.

Maybe he’s just a very slow writer. But he’s an interesting one. Take a look at the full piece.

Yes, I use technology a lot, but…

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I’m going to be circumspect here because I don’t want someone to know that I’m worrying about them quite this much. I’m certain sure they’ll be fine, I just worry because I wonder.

This is someone who does not use technology.

Now, that might be true of you too, except that of course if it is then hello, welcome to your first use of technology. There is no reason you should be in to this stuff, just as there is no reason in the world I should ever be interested in football.

Except that I guess that’s a lie. There is reason to use tech.

I don’t like that. If I told this person that there were reasons, they would all be about work. I run my business through my iPhone and iPad, I am not short of reasons why this stuff is great. But automatically putting it that way feels like automatically saying you should use it. It feels like saying you should forget what you like and don’t like, you should – you must – use technology. That’s not me, that’s not the way I want to be.

Listen, I have a friend who owns an Android phone.

I don’t phone her, but.

You can’t really urge someone to use this stuff by saying they have to. It’s like saying you must buy this computer instead of that because its backside cache is better. It might be true for all I know, but it’s no actual use to for making the decision. It’s no use to you at all.

This particular person does tend to use what I’d call Stone Age computers and I have the impression that doing anything on them is a chore. If that were me, I wouldn’t bother doing it and I think I’d soon conclude that anyone who did is a bit of a geek. Unless you like computers, you wouldn’t put yourself through this alchemy.

So I do get why she might not be drawn to technology. I do. I just think she sees it as something geeks use. I think she sees it all as a toy. That it’s happy for you if you want to play in your sandbox, that it’s not for her.

It is for her.

It is very for her.

She’s joining the legal profession: technology is made for her.

I imagine whatever firm she ends up with is perhaps likely to issue her with a phone but I know for certain sure that the firm she ends up with will be built on technology. She’ll have to use it, so she’ll have to learn it, and I think that makes all this a slog.

You just want to say that of course you wouldn’t miss that appointment change if you could read your emails on the way like all your rivals. You just want to say that Evernote would fix that problem. OmniFocus would completely remove that worry.

You want to say that your rivals will be the ones in court with the ability to find and cite page 112 before you’ve got the book out.

But you don’t. So instead you write a blog post about it and hope that by the end you’ve formed your thoughts into some kind of order, said William writing on his iPad and posting to the web via a WordPress app. Technology much? Doesn’t seem like it here, this seems straightforwardly, boringly obvious.

Ello me hearties

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Imagine Facebook without the ads. Twitter without the –

– actually, just a quick aside. Have you noticed how visually Twitter has changed? When it was spot at the bar, when I loved Twitter, it was all text, all the time. Now I look at the feed and it’s predominantly images. Feels like a very different service and I’ve now been so quickly and readily drawn back in to it.

Maybe that is why Ello is interesting.

I think this new social media platform sees itself as less a Twitter without ads and more a Facebook without them. Currently it’s very sparse and minimalist and apart from how I could do without all the writing being in Courier, I’m oddly warming to its cold white starkness.

I just don’t know what I’m doing. Right now you have to be invited and I haven’t figured out how or whether I can invite you. So I can’t say come on over, but I can say you should go take a look at its front page and see what you think.

Note that if you type in the URL, it’s “ello.co”. Watch that your browser doesn’t automatically complete that as .com since ello.com is something else altogether.

It’s something else.

When you are on Ello, look me up, would you? I’m on as williamgallagher