Super Initial Impressions

Normally on Keynote Day I'm right there, but today was an exception. I have a perfectly nerdy excuse: SAN Installation. So I missed all of toady's Apple announcements. I've only skimmed the info on the new products, but I wanted to get down my very initial impressions.  

 Mac OS X Mavericks

The new  version of Mac OS X was announced today. The name is a little corny, but I have to admit it's catchy and it's already growing on me. Time will tell. 

Yes. I am excited about Finder Tabs.

Feature-wise, I audibly called out, "Finally!" multiple times while skimming the list. Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased as punch about a number of the new features — tags, tabs, books for Christ's sake, yes! — but really, what took you so long? Some of this stuff is great, but a little obvious and a bit of a reach. Makes it looks like Apple might be short on new ideas.

iOS 7

When Microsoft released its mobile OS a few years back I really liked the look of it: flat, simple, classy and downright minimalist. It was a terrific contrast to Apple's bouncy translucent eye candy. 

But now iOS 7 is taking a similar approach, and while the new look holds a certain appeal, I can't help feeling they borrowed the idea from Microsoft. I also worry they may have taken things a bit too far, with control screens that look more like software prototypes than actual working apps.

Does this button do anything?

Again, though, time will tell, and reading about a product is by no means the same as using it. 

MacBook Air 

Each iteration brings the Air one step closer to a product I can use. This release is no different, with solid — though hardly surprising — gains in performance.

The real story here, though, is the battery life. A very competent computer with battery life that rivals the iPad? Very cool!  

Mac Pro 

Most of today's announcements were hardly earth-shattering. But the Mac Pro is just that. 

When I first opened the page I said to myself, "Why is there a picture of a giant lens? Where's the computer?" Slowly it dawned on me: That is the computer. 

Is that the barrel of a gun? No, it's a Mac Pro.

From an industrial design standpoint, the new Mac Pro is a wonder. It's the sexiest thing Apple's released since the iPhone. It's straight up beautiful. But perhaps more important is the fact that it's geared towards professional computer users. Here you have an extremely beautiful, thoughtful, exciting product in a category most people had written off. Apple hasn't done something this exciting in this space for perhaps a decade. And I didn't think they ever would again. 

The new Mac Pro may prove me wrong.

I have yet to even look at the specs or talk to my pro user friends. But if the new Mac Pro is only a symbol, it could just be the sort of symbol pros need to take Apple seriously again. It's the first sign we've seen of Apple making something that at least looks amazing specifically for pros since Final Cut Pro X. We all know how that turned out. Or do we? 

Apple's stance on the pro market has been unclear over the past few years. The Mac Pro makes it a bit clearer. It remains to be seen what this machine's really all about. Does it have what it takes to win over pros? But it's heartening to see Apple making a real effort. Though only time will tell if it's enough. 

Either way, I can't wait to read all about it. Which is what I'll be doing for the rest of the night.

Happy Keynote, everyone! 

Digital Art Preservation

 Archival Paper is meant to last at least 100 years. With proper care it can last up to a thousand. But what if the way we made and looked at paper was constantly changing? What if, in ten years, the technology required to view your drawing was no longer available? That's the problem numerous institutions face when grappling with the question of how to preserve or restore digital artworks. With web-based art, for instance, you're lucky if the piece lasts a decade.

The New York Times takes a brief but fascinating look at this problem:

When Artworks Crash: Restorers Face Digital Test
Paintings fade; sculptures chip. Art restorers have long known how to repair those material flaws, so the experience of looking at a Vermeer or a Rodin remains basically unchanged over time. But when creativity is computerized, the art isn’t so easy to fix.

These are issues I've dealt with — and continue to deal with regularly — in my career as a systems administrator. And there are no easy answers. As technology matures there will certainly be casualties. How we deal with these issues is a vexing but fascinating problem to someone like me with feet in both the technological and art worlds.

Paying For It

I just read an article by a fellow SysAdmin and blogger about Google's tendency towards abandonware, the fact that Google's users are not its customers, and the fallout of all of this for him personally, particularly in light of the recent killing of the beloved Reader.​

Divesting In Google
And then, the thing I didn’t think would be killed was. Reader is the third Google product I depended on the most, and knew the most about me after Search, and Mail. But for Google that’s not enough. I was mad, but that’s just silly, so I’m not mad anymore. Like others are saying, it’s going to unleash a wave (pun intended) of new products in the Atom (and RSS if you must) parsing space. I’m looking forward to that.

But it is the stark reminder I needed again that I can’t depend on Google for anything that I want to keep around. I’m not sure you can depend on anyone’s technology/service or anything that’s not an open standard and that you run yourself, but still, I don’t want to run everything.

​This is a great take-apart on why you really shouldn't — and, believe me, you really shouldn't — entrust your world to Google. I never used Reader, but I've been skeptical of Google for a while, because the fact of the matter is, in the grand scheme of things, you the user, are not Google's top priority. The same thing goes for Facebook. And Twitter. And pretty much any other service you use online for free.

​And as I use online services more and more — even this blog is now completely hosted via an online service — I become increasingly aware of who the customer is. And I become more willing — and I think it's more important — to pay for those services. Paying means that I'm the customer. And being the customer comes with a certain import and cachet amongst decent companies, ostensibly because they value their customers' business.

Of course, this isn't always the case. But at least if a company treats you like shit you're free to contact them and complain. That's not true of Google. You're also free to use another company, and exercising that right directly takes money away from that crappy company. Being a customer gives you some degree of power and control. And when it comes to my data, that's extremely important.​

What surprised me most in my fellow blogger's post was this:​

So personally, I’m done. Google has lost my investment. I get my Mobile OS from Apple, my desktop OS from Apple (for now, and that’s as much Apple Hardware and Lightroom as anything). I’ll get my maps from Apple on mobile, and just as often as Google from Microsoft on the desktop. My work browser stays Chrome, my personal browser is back to Safari (for now). My feeds I control, for now from Fever, but I’ll write my own reader, starting with Sam Ruby’s Mars - or one of the twenty bajillion readers that will come out of the community or the market now. Opera Software/Fastmail gets my mail. My google spreadsheets get replaced with Numbers sync via iCloud. My bookmarks and notes are in Pinboard and Evernote (though Evernote makes me a little nervous long term as well). Google analytics for my personal sites, gone (I’ll replace it with Gaug.eswhen the time comes that I want analytics again).

Particularly that bit about mail.​ Opera Software/Fastmail gets my mail. Wow.

​I have nearly 18,000 Gmails.

My positive feelings regarding Gmail are pretty well-known. Right now Gmail in the browser is, for me, the best user experience going in email these days. It's also got a ton of features I rely on and it's extremely secure. But email is a big deal. I keep everything in email. Including the gargantuan history of my email. I've been depending upon Gmail for just over ten years now, and increasingly so. I now use it for all my email — work, personal, website, everything. It's just that good.

Still, that nagging voice in the back of my head just doesn't trust anything I get for free. So I've often wondered about paid email services.​ And this is really the first person I've known of to switch to one. I'd be really curious to hear how it works out for him. And, despite being a decade-long Gmail lover, I'd be pretty curious to try it out myself.

In any case, it's good to see someone — or maybe I should say, someone else — take the plunge.​ I think, for anyone who's more than a casual user of email, this should be a concept that's revisited from time to time. Email is a big deal. We store a huge amount of the details of our lives there. Having an email provider that's on my side is extremely appealing. It's also something that's certainly worth paying for.

Email Isn't Broken

And it isn't just for To Do lists, either.​ Here's my personal screed about email.

First of all, let's get a few things straight. 1) I already have pretty good systems in place for managing email but they could be better; I don't think email is particularly broken, it just needs better management tools; 2) I don't give two shits about getting to "Inbox Zero;" this is not the Nirvana it's portrayed as.

The Inbox Zero Myth

Much ado has been made about the concept of Inbox Zero. I believe this all derives from the Getting Things Done movement that was all the rage a few years ago and that has really set down roots in certain quarters. GTD never really made much sense to me at the time — it's just task management, which any reasonably adult and disciplined person should be able to handle on his own — and Inbox Zero doesn't either.

The idea behind Inbox Zero is that if you can get your Inbox down to zero, then you've probably addressed everything — or at least many of the things — you need to address in any given day, and you can then reclaim your own brain. And there's probably a good deal of truth to that if a lot of your job involves responding to email, which for many of us it actually does.

So applications have been developed that give you immediate ways of dealing with email such that it stays out of your Inbox. Mailbox is the latest such app. In Mailbox, when you get an email you are intended to act upon it immediately, either by responding or by filing the email into one of Mailbox's preset filers. Mailbox will then, at a later date that you can specify, remind you of any emails that still require action by returning them to your Inbox.

The problem I have with this method is that it doesn't help you get anything done. It just offloads tasks that can't be acted upon immediately into a folder. This isn't Getting Things Done, this is hiding the things you've chosen to skip or ignore, and rather than productivity, it's essentially procrastination.​ Where Inbox Zero is supposed to signify accomplishment, the Mailbox method simply provides that illusion.

Frankly, Inbox Zero just doesn't really matter much, especially if all you're doing is filing things rather than acting on them.​ What you're trying to manage with an app like Mailbox is action, behavior, and I don't think an app — or at least not apps like the ones I've seen — can really help you do that.

Where Mail Is Broken

The problem with thinking about Mail like a simple To Do list is that it belies the many things Email is actually very good at, in particular, the sending and receiving of Electronic Mail, which is still, even in this day and age, horrendously useful. ​It also ignores all the other things people have begun to use email for.

From where I sit, there are certainly numerous ways in which email — and specifically email clients — can be better.

Spam

Junk email is still a problem, and no one has really cracked that nut to my full satisfaction.​ Gmail does about as good a job as anyone, and sometimes even offers to unsubscribe to messages you mark. But I think we need more of this, even better tools for managing spam than simply marking things "Spam." Rules are great, but I'd love to see more sophisticated and dynamic rule-making tools that query me when I mark something as Spam. As it is now, I either rely on server-side spam filters, or I write rules and blacklists by hand. And that's kind of a drag. 

Bacn

Which leads us to bacn, spam's lonely, slightly more attractive forgotten cousin, that non-malicious advertising email that we all get but don't necessarily want to see or really know how to manage. Some folks have been trying to figure out how to deal with bacn, and the tools sound intriguing. I'm looking forward to trying them. But right now there is no standalone email client or service that I know of that offers built-in bacn management.

File Sharing

I realize that email is not the proper tool for sharing files, and yet people do it all the time. There have been some good attempts at making email clients with better large attachment handling through services like Dropbox, but there's still not what I'd call a good option here.

Identities and Authentication

We all have multiple online logins these days, and multiple email accounts. Authentication and identity are huge issues, the scope of which spread far beyond the world of email. Still, email clients could be much better about handling multiple accounts.

Saving Your Ass

How many times have you forgotten to include the attachment you meant to send? How many times have you forgotten to CC someone on a particular thread? Not too many email clients do much to prevent the sorts of common mistakes ​we all make all the time. Gmail does a pretty good job here, but this is still an area rife with opportunity for email client authors.

Etc.

There are even more areas in which email could be improved. ​This is just a handful of the many and varied ways we use this invaluable tool. Email clients that attempt to simplify what email can do are doomed.

Developers that seek to pigeonhole the email paradigm are going about it the wrong way. Email is extremely good at what it does; this is why it's been so successful as a product. Think about it: ​email has been around in much the same form for 20 years. There are few other tech products you can say this about. Indeed, I'd argue that its success is the reason it has the problems it has today. It's so good at what it does that people have begun using it for everything.

How to "Fix" Email

If you really want to make email ​work better, I believe you need not to make it different or simpler in functionality, but rather to make it better at dealing with its newfound complexity. Don't reenvision email as something else — that's already been done by everyone who uses email — but instead make a client that accounts for all the new uses we've found for email. Yes, it's now a To Do list, but it's also an FTP server, and a chat engine, and a scheduler, and a file manager, and a database. And it's still one of the most primary tools we use for peer-to-peer communication, we still use email for email.

Right now, for my money, Gmail in the browser is as good an email client as there is. It's fast and reliable, it works better than most for many of the aforementioned uses, and it even saves my ass from time to time. But it could be so, so much better at all the new little things we want to do with email. ​

I think whoever writes the client that deals best with all these eventualities simply and elegantly will have the winner.

The Spreadsheet Is The Game

​I think this is super cool:​

How an accountant created an entire RPG inside an Excel spreadsheet
Throughout a few months ending this past February, Cary Walkin created the perfect solution to this problem: an entire RPG made of a spreadsheet and many macros. The game, called Arena.Xlsm, is a turn-based RPG encompassed entirely in an Excel file. Users can download that and use it to progress through levels, collect items, and battle enemies and bosses with melee and ranged attacks as well as spells.

​​Which probably explains a lot about my childhood.