iphone

Scotland Decides: iPhone 6 or 6 Plus?

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Yes, yes, Scotland’s vote over whether to stay in the UK is overwhelming me, it’s occupied me a lot lately and quite a bit for 18 months or so. But a schism in the UK and the potential loss to the union of one of the finest nations in the in the world, that happens every day.

Plus I’m not Scottish nor am I in Scotland so I can’t actually do anything.

Whereas having two iPhone models to pick from, that’s new. Plus if I think very hard about it, I can make a decision and do something about that.

Look, I have nothing to add to the Scotland debate yet I can’t let this moment pass without acknowledging how important is. How important it is in every way but also how important it is to me.

Wait, I do think this one thing that I’ve not heard in the debates. The UK’s sudden promises of new powers and extra autonomy for Scotland sounds to me exactly like a bloke saying “I’ll be better, things will be different now”. You know that’s never true and I’m afraid neither is what’s being said about new powers: if Scotland decides to stay in the UK, that’s a done deal, we’ll get back to you about those new powers. Right. Sure.

Already you think I’m pro Scotland leaving.

And I don’t know.

My automatic, natural, default position is that we are all better off together. It kills me, though, that “better together” is the line for the No side that wants Scotland to stay in the union. It kills me because while I don’t generally think about being English, there are things in that campaign that make me wish I weren’t.

Being in England, it’s only very recently that I’ve got to see much detail about the debate. (I think that’s very bad, I think that’s made it sound like we’ve had a week talking about it instead of all these months. But at least it’s a big thing on the news now.)

I hope I’m wrong, then, but of the bits I’ve managed to hear over the whole campaign, everything from the No side has seemed to be patronising, fearmongering and – I’m struggling to remember a specific thing here so let me throw in the word allegedly – allegedly just an out and out lie.

That’s not something to make you proud.

That is something to make you want to run away.

But wanting to run away is an emotional response: if I were able to vote in this and I did so based on how furious the No campaign makes me feel, would that be right? We can’t know what will happen if Scotland leaves – or if we can, neither side has been very convincingly informative – so it’s hard to be coldly logical or analytical. I’m not sure that I would entirely want to be coldly logical or analytical: this isn’t a maths problem.

It’s not like, for instance, a 4.7in iPhone screen versus a 5.5in one. That’s a toughie.

Appy anniversary

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This week is the sixth anniversary of the original App Store: the iPhone app store that is now responsible for how I spend a significant portion of every working day. Before then, apps were known as applications and not really that well known at all, not per se. Your mother didn’t ask you what an application was. Mine has asked me what an app is.

Mind you, before then, phones were known for being phones. And for being hard to use. I remember trying to read the manual in a theatre: I had a small production on and guests were coming, I needed to have the phone on but muted. Never worked it out.

Now it’s preposterously easy to do with an iPhone but actually calls must be the least thing I use it for. Because I run my life through the apps on it. The iPhone came with apps – the Phone is an app, but there was also an email one, music, calendar – and there are ones from that set that I have used every day since 2007 when I got my first iPhone. Right this minute my phone’s front screen has 20 very, very well-worn apps of which 10 are Apple’s.

That’s more than I expected. Look at the other 10, though:

OmniFocus – my beloved To Do manager
Fantastical 2 – my newly beloved calendar
Pocket – for reading saved articles from the web
Drafts – for jotting down text and then deciding what to do with it, whether to send a text or save to Evernote
Evernote – speak of the devil
Reeder 2 – for reading a lot, I mean a lot, of news every day
Wordpress – for doing some twiddles with this site
HulloMail – a replacement for iPhone voicemail since I’m on 3 that doesn’t support this naturally
LocalScope – for finding restaurants, companies, ATMs, bookshops, anything nearby
1Password – all my passwords and logins at a tap
AwesomeClock – my bedside clock
Concise Oxford English Dictionary (with audio) – what the words mean and how to pronounce them

There probably hasn’t been an hour of daylight in six years that I haven’t used one or more of those.

But.

Six years.

It’s a long time.

I wanted to know what the first was.

The first app I ever bought.

If you want to do this, the quickest way is to open iTunes on your Mac or PC, go to the App Store and check Purchased. You can’t tell a date from that, unfortunately, but the apps are stored in order. If you have more patience and a steady hand, you can get approximately the right date by going through your Accounts section and slogging, slogging, slogging back through the listings there. Very slow, very long. And the date is the invoice date, not the download one. So it can be the same day, it can be the day after. But as near as you will ever be able to determine, that’s when you got each app. Including your first.

My first ever app was… actually, it was two, I bought two at the same time and can’t tell which was first. But the two were NYTimes – Breaking National & World News and Yulan Mahjong Solitaire. I bough them on 11 July 2008, so that’s six years ago today, and together they cost me £2.99. I’ve just checked and the New York Times one is free, Yulan Mahjong is now £1.19.

They’re both fine but neither lasted on my home screen and I know this for certain because of this. This is what my iPhone home screen has looked like for the last six years.

The music there is “Last Week” from Green Wing’s soundtrack by Trellis.

There is one advantage to slogging, slogging, slogging through your iTunes Store account: you get to find out when you bought everything.

So I can tell you that the first book I ever bought through Apple’s iBooks Store was a free copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. The first one I paid for appears to be some psychology thing called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman. I bought those both on 28 May 2010 and have only read the Austen. The first paid-for iBook I bought and read – and loved, incidentally – is Mapping the Edge by Sarah Dunant, bought on 29 May 2010.

The first TV episode was the free pilot to Damages: never watched it. The first paid one was The Mighty Boosh’s The Nightmare of Milky Joe, which I’d stumbled across on TV and it silenced the room, we all got so engrossed. I bought that on 2 March 2008 and I must go watch it again.

Films came to the iTunes Store before TV but my first wasn’t until 7 June 2008 and The Paper Chase. It cost me £6.99 and I’ve not watched it. I’m feeling bad about all this now. But the second film, the first paid for and also watched, was Searching for Bobby Fischer, aka Innocent Moves aka the subject of this blog by Ken Armstrong.

And all this buying from the iTunes stores started with music. On 15 June 2004, I spent £3.16 buying In Between Days by The Cure, Always the Last to Know and Be My Downfall by Del Amitri, and Jokerman by Bob Dylan. The first album, two days later, was Greatest Radio Hits by Bruce Hornsby.

None of which has had the impact that the apps I’ve bought this way did, but all part of this peculiar sea change that saw me move away from CDs, move to phones that work, move to actually the life and the career that I have right now. I like telling you that my working life would not be recognisable to me if all this hadn’t happened but I don’t like wondering what I’d have ended up doing.