zerosleeps

Good post by Marcin Wichary at Unsung, riffing on a segment of The Talk Show.

This is one of the most baffling things about Apple software to me. For each application, or piece of an application, or component of their operating systems, why don’t they find one of their 150,000 employees who actually uses that piece of software every day, and give them ownership of it.

About a quarter of the stuff I do in my day job is implementing fixes and tweaks that I or one of my developer colleagues have found. Not stuff that our customers have reported. And that is because we own our output and are embarrassed by bugs of all sizes.

Software quality driven by pride. What’s wrong with that?

I received this piece of dystopian literature in my inbox today from a company that manages some of our toll roads here in Australia:

Our records indicate you have recently travelled through the Burnley Tunnel. If you have time, we’d really appreciate your feedback on the on-road experience of this trip.

…

Based on your recent trip, how likely are you to recommend travelling on the Burnley Tunnel to friends and family?

How likely am I to recommend a highway? That goes through a tunnel? To my friends and family?

Not very fucking likely, strangely enough.

Email is, and always has been, my preferred method of written communication for two reasons, both of which are topics of this post from Zachary Kai.

The first is it’s openness, stability, and ubiquity:

Social media platforms rise and fall like ancient empires sped up a thousand times. Yet email endures. Like the postal service or the printed book. Is it any coincidence these technologies remain my great loves? They share a quality I struggle to name. Perhaps it’s permanence in an ephemeral world. You can tuck a letter in a drawer, discovering it decades later. A book can outlive its author by centuries. One can archive, search, and treasure an email. They’re all vessels that honor my beloved words.

And in their longevity is their flexibility. You can read a book anywhere, anytime. You can send a letter to the farthest-flung corners of the earth imaginable. And you can email anyone.

The second is in it’s user interface:

You can choose to engage with it in human time, and so can the recipient: compose when you have something to say, respond when you have space to think.

This post by Tom Bedor has been doing the rounds over the last couple of weeks. It’s a proposition that you’d think would be common sense and part of basic human decency, but the fact that I’ve seen this post all over the place says something else.

Oh this is a magnificent new piece of software from Retina Studio.

Apple Photos is just about the only Apple supplied “application” that I regularly use on macOS and it’s… fine. Certainly no better than fine. Iris is exactly, precisely, what I’ve always wanted Apple Photos to be.

It took me 10 minutes of use to decide to move my photos from Photos to Iris. Yes Iris plays nicely with an existing Photos library, but nah I’ve actually moved everything out of Photos into the filesystem and into Iris exclusively.

The decision would only have taken 5 minutes but for this: I’ve got decades of titles attached to stuff in my Photos library, as in, captions/titles that I have manually typed in. I thought about it and I’ve almost never gotten any value from that effort, so sod it, titles/captions no more. Between dates, times, locations, face matching, and the delightful machine-learning-powered tagging that Iris does, I don’t need titles.

Some other charming features about Iris: it tells you what it’s doing. On first run it actually opens it’s little status window so you know what is going on. And if you wants to know more the documentation tells you. Imagine that! And the “Surprise Me!” menu option is so obvious and I frickin’ love it.

And it costs the price of two coffees. No subscription. I’d have paid 5 times that, no questions asked.

This is how software should be made.