crash

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.

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.

Be cautious of using beta software – including Evernote

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While the marketing and commercial side of the Evernote company has just brought various goods and products to the UK, the software side has been making big steps. But I’d still wait before you download the latest beta of Evernote for Macintosh.

Well, I say that but I didn’t wait. I’m running that latest beta on my MacBook Pro and it isn’t working. I suspect that’s more to do with how my MacBook is squeaking along with only the tiniest amount of disk space. Dropbox has folded its arms at me, but Evernote keeps crashing.

So I’d like to caution you about trying it out: I have done the sensible thing and only put this new version on one of my machines. It’s only un-sensible because this is the machine I’m working from today.

I would also like to tell you what’s new about it but I have yet to get beyond the crashing so I have to settle for showing you Evernote’s own list:

Here’s a list of everything that’s new and improved in this release:

Speed

Sync is more than 3x faster. Users with lots of Shared Notebooks and Evernote Business users will see the biggest improvements.
New notes sync instantly so they’re immediately accessible on your other devices.
Share notes without waiting for a sync to complete.
Launch and quit times have been reduced dramatically.
New keyboard shortcuts have been added to jump to the note list for easy navigation (CMD + |) and you can now tab between the search field, the note list, current note title and note body.
Energy consumption when the app is idle and in-use has been significantly reduced.

New Features

Tables can now be re-sized, and have configurable background colors and border styles.
Images can be re-sized right in the note editor. Just click an image and drag the handle in the bottom right corner.
Search results are now ordered by relevance.
Faster notebook selector at the top of the note list remembers your recently used notebooks.
Redesigned checkboxes in the note editor are easier to click.
Evernote will now stay logged in by default.
Stability Improvements

You can see why I downloaded it. And why I am keen for it to start working. Get it here.

It’s not all sunshine when you use the Cloud

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We’re in that nebulous period where we keep hearing about the cloud and if we don’t understand what it is, we feel we should. Soon we won’t think about it at all and that ought to be a good thing. The less we have to piddle about making computers do what we want, the more we can spend time doing what we want and need to do.

Except.

Many years ago, I was in the office of a computer magazine when a power cut hit its network servers. Only the servers wherever they were, the magazine office and its PCs were unaffected. Or at least, they were unaffected by the power cut. They were supremely badly affected by the servers going down.

For this magazine ran all its applications from the server. Each PC had a tiny local hard disk and no applications at all. You started up your PC in the morning and it went on the network, got the applications, started working. It took forever. But during all this, you would go to the kitchen, get the tea and eventually start working. There were myriad advantages to the magazine in doing this but I suspect myriad really reduces to one: it made each individual PC cheaper.

Come the server powercut, then, everybody stopped working because everything stopped working. Except me. Yes, I was on a Mac, but I was reviewing some Apple notebook so I’d loaded the applications I needed. Even if the power had gone out in our office, I wouldn’t have noticed because I had battery power and I had all the software I needed to do my job.

On the plus side, I felt just a tiny bit smug and I also filed this away so that I could tell you about it twenty years later. This feels good.

On the minus side, everybody else got to go home.

We’re in a situation now where we are all relying on servers somewhere else. They’re now just servers somewhere else in the world and we call it all the cloud. The cloud is good. The cloud is very good.

Until it goes wrong and it does go wrong.

Adobe was in the spotlight recently when its Adobe CS cloud service, Creative Cloud, went offline for 48 hours, leaving users in the dark and preventing publication of the mobile edition of Britain’s Daily Mail. This was a disaster for the company and a much bigger disaster for thousands of Creative Cloud users trying to meet urgent deadlines — but in future failure in cloud services could damage the global economy.

Jonny Evans: Adobe CS and the dangerous cloud – Computer World via Macworld (5 June 2014)

Evans has some horror stories and a lot of statistic but he also has advice for us and for cloud service providers in his full piece. It boils down to this, though: rely on the cloud but don’t be dependent on it. There you go.