The new banner (the area with an image between the two menu bars) is just a waste of space. The Flickr menu bars have grown to an unnecessary large size (wasting some more pixels in the process). Navigation itself is possibly more confusing than before, and what was accomplished with a single row of menu options once, now it’s scattered in four different places: Flickr bar top left corner, Flickr bar top right corner, User bar left, User bar right. When you point to your top right corner avatar, the mouse-over effect revealing the additional options is counter-intuitive. I don’t know you, but I end up clicking it all the time, landing in my Account’s settings page, while I was actually trying to access my Flickr Mail.

Presenting a photo at full size is nice, but now everything else — comments, conversations, and all the accessory information related to the photo — feels choked and drowned down at the bottom of the page, piled there like an afterthought. Perhaps someone thought that a photo sharing service should be all about the photos (this is the message I think the new visual redesign is trying to convey), but if you’ve been a Flickr user for at least one year, you’ll know that Flickr has never been just about the photos. I’ve been on Flickr since October 2005, and what I’ve always loved about it was the great balance between the ‘photo’ sphere and the ‘conversation’ sphere, on a conceptual level, and the great balance between visual design and functionality, on a usability level. Navigating Flickr, using Flickr, had increasingly become a fast, efficient, intuitive and overall pleasant experience. I can’t help but feel that this redesign is a significant step back.

Perhaps the most annoying change is the disappearance of layout preferences. Flickr never offered much flexibility in layout customisation, but before the redesign I could at least decide how to present my Flickr landing page. I could choose to show only a few photos (big thumbnails), or more photos (small thumbnails), with or without a sidebar with selected sets or collections. This way I could decide to have a specific group of photosets to appear along the last updated photos, so as to direct visitors towards the photosets I deemed most interesting or worth browsing first.

With the new redesign, even that bit of layout customisation freedom is gone, and users are forced to accept that their photos will appear as some sort of ‘photo wall’, and that all photosets are only visible separately by accessing the Sets page. I find this design decision to be rather disrespectful towards the user (or customer, given the large amount of paid accounts). They’re my photos — I would like to have a part, however small, in deciding how to present them.

Overall, past the extreme annoyance of having a lot of interface elements arbitrarily rearranged, much of the new design feels still half-baked to me, rushed, not thought through, like some sort of unfinished beta version. There are pages with a mix of new and old visual elements, there are little bugs here and there, the general navigation is slow (my Flickr landing page takes three times as long to fully load than before)… Speaking of bugs, here’s one I just noticed while writing this piece: if you have added some notes in the lower part of a photo, the new design cuts them:

These are simply some initial reactions on my part. Judging by the activity on the Flickr help forums, I’m definitely not alone in my dislike of this redesign, not to mention the new account structure and pricing, which is one of the most confusing I’ve encountered in recent times.

Again, this new look feels gratuitous and favouring eye candy over actual functionality. It feels like a change for change’s sake, not a change that brings improvements. As a recurring Pro (= paying) member since 2005, I’m really dissatisfied with the imposed changes (knowing Flickr’s attitude in similar past circumstances, in fact, I don’t expect they’re willing to reconsider and revert to the old layout, no matter how many users they manage to annoy) and when my Pro account expires next August, I’m not sure I’ll renew it. Ironically, creating a photoblog in Tumblr now looks like a cleaner, cooler option.

But there’s an observation I’d like to make regarding this passage:

We forget that physical objects are also just specific embodiments – or presentations – of their content and function. A paperback book and an ebook file are two embodiments of the text they each contain; the ebook isn’t descended from the paperback. They’re siblings, from different media spheres, one of which happens to have been invented more recently.

The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical. The publishing industry is choking itself to death with that assumption, despite readily available examples of innovative, digitally-native approaches.

[…] An iPad demonstrably is not a book, and doesn’t behave like one. Digital embodiments have their own unique strengths and weaknesses in comparison to physical ones, and metaphors from one world can only be stretched so far before breaking in the other. Usually, the seams appear quickly.

While I agree with the general concept, I think that the ebook/paper book example isn’t a particularly strong one. The structure of a book is rather simple: a cover and a bunch of pages bound together. Yes, it’s probably unnecessary to do a thorough digital emulation of a paper book, with page-turn animations, red ribbons as bookmarks and other elements such as gutters, visible corners, textblocks, etc. (That would indeed be a case of gratuitous skeuomorphism). But there’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, in maintaining pagination as a fundamental structural element in an ebook as it is in a paper book. When the book as collection of sheets (codex) replaced the scroll, the advantages were obvious: books were easier to handle and easier to read; information was easier to locate and it was easier to make references inside a text.

Today, given the computational power of smartphones and tablets, an ebook could theoretically be structured as an ancient scroll, a continuous flow of text, without numbered pages or other rigid paper book metaphors; an ebook reader (whether a physical device or a software application) could handle the search for information inside a text very easily: a search field, a pop-up index where you just tap on a chapter or section to jump there, and so on. But I contend that reading an ebook with an ‘infinite scroll’ interface is not as practical as reading a paginated ebook. It may be fine for reading articles, essays, short stories, but it certainly becomes tiring and awkward for novels, especially novels where a chapter may go on for a hundred pages’ worth of text.

Lukas Mathis explained this more eloquently in two articles published last November. In Scrolling vs. Pagination he writes:

[…] the kind of control scrolling gives to users seems completely meaningless in the context of the task the user is engaged in. She’s reading a book. It’s a mostly linear affair. Her main goal is to go through the text from beginning to end. The additional control isn’t helping with that goal, it’s just creating more work. […]

If I’m reading a novel, the experience I’m having should be the book’s story unfolding in my head, not my fingers scrolling the page every few seconds. In this case, good UX design means not interfering with the actual experience the user is having: the book’s story.

Pagination gets out of the way. Read a page. Push a button. Read the next page. Repeat. No needless interference with the actual text being read, no unnecessary interactions that could pull the reader out of the book’s world. (Of course, switching pages still interrupts the reading experience, but to a lesser degree than constant scrolling does.)

In More on Pagination, Mathis writes:

Look at iOS’s home screen. There are pages of apps. You jump between pages, you don’t scroll. Is the home screen’s pagination an artifact of paper book technology, or is it simply a better idea than having a home screen that can be scrolled? I’d argue that it’s a better idea.

This example also shows that a simple interaction model isn’t pagination’s only advantage. How do you find apps on your home screen? For many of the apps you use often, you probably find them by their position. Pagination allows you to organize things spatially.

This (typically) doesn’t apply to automatic pagination, where page breaks are chosen in a way that can’t be predicted by the author, but it does apply in many other situations. If you use iBooks author, you design individual pages that perfectly fit the iPad’s screen. This means that you can ensure that paragraphs that belong together are on the same page. You can make sure that illustrations and pictures are next to the text they belong to. And your users can identify things by their position: «look at the image at the bottom left of page 35!»

To summarise, Gemmell is right when he says that “The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical”, but at the same time I think that we shouldn’t dismiss all the elements of a physical medium when it comes to designing and building its digital counterpart. Structural elements of physical embodiments — such as pagination in a paper book — can still work quite well in a digital context.

Back to flat vs. skeuomorphic design

Back to the general debate, that an interface is drawn to suggest a two– or three-dimensional representation doesn’t really matter, in my opinion. As I’ve said previously, an interface design isn’t necessarily good and efficient because it’s minimal, and isn’t necessarily bad and gratuitous because it’s skeuomorphic. What a skeuomorphic UI design shouldn’t do is deceive the user. What a minimal UI design shouldn’t do is provide non-obvious methods of interaction.

As a corollary, I’ll add that what really matters in creating a good, usable application is coherence. Choose a model and/or æsthetics and stick with it all the way. There’s nothing inherently wrong in designing a calendar app that looks like a paper calendar or desk appointment diary, provided that the illusion is gracefully maintained everywhere and all visual expectations fulfilled. If minimalism and abstraction are the design principles of a similar app, make sure that all interactive elements are consistently apparent, and that the minimalism for minimalism’s sake doesn’t lead to an interface that’s too mystifying due to its lack of visual cues.

Every now and then I like to post photos of my ‘mobile office’ setup of the moment. Very often this setup includes one of my Newton MessagePads, and often enough, when people see I have a Newton with me, they’re curious to know why I keep carrying a 15-year-old device (20-year-old in the case of the Original Newton MessagePad). I’m talking about people who actually recognise the device. Sometimes — especially in person — I get asked what’s that thing I’m using that looks like an ebook reader but it has a colourful Apple logo on it and why is that and so on and so forth. I also get the occasional opinionated feedback: why use that old Newton when I’m also carrying an iPhone and a 9.7″ iPad.

The answer is quite simple, really. The Newton offers me a unique experience: writing naturally using a pen-like instrument, on the surface of a device which recognises and transforms my handwriting in typewritten text I can edit, copy, paste, and send to my Mac as a text file.

Today we are accustomed to technologies that give us instant gratification. In this regard, the Newton demands a bit more patience. Forget the jokes about the poor handwriting recognition: the later MessagePad models and version 2.x of the NewtonOS handle handwriting recognition much better than the first models. You have to practice a bit, there’s a stage of training and adaptation, where you help the device to understand your writing by correcting its mistakes, and where you sort of adjust your writing rhythm in a manner that the Newton can gracefully keep up with you, interpreting and transforming your words as you jot them down. Having patience at this stage is crucial. In my experience, you get to sacrifice a bit of instant gratification at the beginning, only to have a very satisfying reward later.

This means that now I can write a note on my Newton faster than I can type it on my iPhone or iPad. Also, if I’m in a hurry and I need to write down something quickly, I can tell the Newton not to recognise the handwriting on the fly — I can simply save the note ‘as is’ and go over it later.

The long battery life and the incredibly persistent storage are another two features that make my Newtons invaluable tools. I haven’t lost one bit of information since I started using my first MessagePad 2000 twelve years ago. These pieces of 1990s technology already got rid of the manual Save command well before the advent of iOS and other mobile operating systems. Whatever I input in the Newton, I know it won’t be lost (unless, of course, the device suffers some catastrophic failure), and if I need to do some extended word processing, I can always put down the stylus, connect the keyboard, and type away. But again, what really fascinates me and keeps me incredibly attached to my Newtons, is the experience of just writing down something as if I were using pen and paper, and see my writing recognised and neatly arranged in editable form.

There’s so much talking lately about how we live in the future, how ‘magical’ technology can feel today, and so on and so forth. I remember July 2001, that first weekend I spent learning the basics of my then-new Newton MessagePad 2000, and seeing my first handwritten notes and calendar entries digitised. Despite being already discontinued, I felt I was holding a powerful, futuristic device. Even today, at least in part, I still can’t consider it an obsolete piece of technology.

I defended Miller’s intentions and his desire to start a path of self-discovery. In the past, people left their urban environment and went to India and the Far East on trips of self-discovery (and I mean trips in every way). Miller’s journey is no different — a kind of modern equivalent of that, if you want.

Now he’s back, and he has summarised his year away from the Internet in a very interesting article. Sure, Miller’s considerations can be condensed as follows: leaving the Internet was great at first — more time to think, focus, read, write and give friends and relatives the attention they deserved; but after a while old (bad) habits resurfaced, things devolved into periods of inertia, and also came the realisation that the problem isn’t Internet per se, but lies within one’s self.

Therefore, some people (Miller included, perhaps) will consider this Internet-deprivation experiment a failure. I don’t think it’s been a failure. If this one-year sabbatical has brought Miller a better understanding of his self, then it’s been successful. Anyway, Miller’s summary has been a thought-provoking read, so here are some observations I’d like to add.

Back to where you've never been

There’s a detail that struck me when reading Miller’s piece. At one point, not far from the beginning, he writes:

I thought the internet might be an unnatural state for us humans, or at least for me. Maybe I was too ADD to handle it, or too impulsive to restrain my usage. I’d used the internet constantly since I was twelve, and as my livelihood since I was fourteen. I’d gone from paperboy, to web designer, to technology writer in under a decade. I didn’t know myself apart from a sense of ubiquitous connection and endless information.

Using the Internet constantly since the age of twelve means not having much memories of how things were before the Internet. What’s good about this is that Miller’s viewpoint isn’t much affected by nostalgia. You can’t really pine for what you don’t know. This, in a way, made Miller’s journey away from the Internet more ‘pure’ and also more challenging. For comparison, when I started using the Internet constantly I was 28. That makes a huge difference. If I were to do a similar Internet-deprivation experiment, it would be quite easy for me to switch back to my pre-Internet days. I could find and relive my good old routines in a few days. This is mainly because, having developed a life before the Internet, I’ve never really felt my online and offline dimensions as two inextricably intertwined components. As I wrote in my article Online, offline, and the ‘need’ to share:

I tend to see some kind of separation between the online and the offline because, well, I lived that moment when the online started creeping into my life. I lived that moment where the online started becoming an activity that separated me, in some ways, from my surroundings. I lived that moment in which logging in and ‘going online’ was somehow like going someplace else. And since I could spend (a lot of) time doing things in this ‘other place’, the experience was more addicting and detaching than, say, losing myself in a book (an ‘offline’ activity). While over the years and especially in these recent years I’ve come to accept this increasing interconnection between the online and the offline, while I’ve come to terms with the fact that technology has gone under our skin (figuratively for now, and maybe literally soon), for me the “disconnection from the smartphone and social media” is still a disconnection, and “the logic of social media” doesn’t follow me long after I log out.

So, if I disconnected from the Internet for a year, I’d simply remove the ‘online’ component, and it’d be easier for me because I always felt the ‘online’ component as something that has been added to, not implanted in (or grown within) my life.

That’s why I think Miller did a rather good job in finding his ‘offline space’, at least at first. And in my opinion, one of the reasons why things haven’t stayed great in Miller’s Internet-less life is precisely because his experience without Internet was somehow new, was something he never really experienced before as an adult. This has a significant impact when it comes to connect and socialise with other people. Or in this case, maintaining connections that have for the most part developed within the Internet era.

Out of sync

Miller writes:

But without the internet, it’s certainly harder to find people. It’s harder to make a phone call than to send an email. It’s easier to text, or SnapChat, or FaceTime, than drop by someone’s house. Not that these obstacles can’t be overcome. I did overcome them at first, but it didn’t last.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

I would stay at home for days at a time. My phone would die, and nobody could get ahold of me. At some point my parents would get fed up with wondering if I was alive, and send my sister over to my apartment to check on me. On the internet it was easy to assure people I was alive and sane, easy to collaborate with my coworkers, easy to be a relevant part of society.

So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a “Facebook friend,” but I can tell you that a “Facebook friend” is better than nothing.

My best long-distance friend, one I’d talked to weekly on the phone for years, moved to China this year and I haven’t spoken to him since. My best New York friend simply faded into his work, as I failed to keep up my end of our social plans.

I fell out of sync with the flow of life.

These observations perfectly exemplify the point of view of someone whose life, relationships and connections have all been developing in a meaningful way within the Internet era. It’s hard being disconnected when everyone else in your life is not. It’s hard having to communicate through ways — the phone call, the written letter, dropping by someone’s place — that are considered dated and quaint. Today, an unannounced visit (even among friends) is basically frowned upon, almost treated as an unauthorised intrusion. I fondly remember a time when it was considered a pleasant surprise.

The ‘finding people’ aspect Miller talks about is another thing where my experience and his experience significantly diverge. Having developed my strongest friendships mostly before the advent of the Internet, if I were to stay disconnected for a year, I wouldn’t encounter much friction in reverting to ‘older’ ways of (re)connecting with my best friends. We all used to chat a lot on the phone, and arrange meetings and outings via phone or text. If I could afford such an Internet-free sabbatical, I guess it would be beneficial to my personal relationships, because most of them actually started suffering when the Internet began pervading our lives. For someone in my position, all this talking about Internet that ‘connects’ people, all this babbling about the ‘power of social media’, is rather ridiculous. For someone in my position, apart from a good few exceptions, the ‘connections’ developed via the Internet can’t really compare with relationships developed and cultivated in person, in the ‘offline’ dimension.

In general, Internet has brought convenience, more than depth, to the way we connect with one another. That’s why, for me, a “Facebook friend” is not better than nothing. That’s why, for me, certain ways of being ‘connected’ via the Internet aren’t all that different from when people keep the TV or the radio on because “it keeps them company”.

Yes, when we put Internet aside, we also put aside its convenience: every road looks uphill, we see every small delay or obstacle as ‘friction’, and it’s hard to keep up when everyone drives a car and you’re the only one on foot. Perhaps Miller could have been more proactive in his attempts to keep in touch with people, but I also think that his friends and acquaintances — knowing his situation — could also have gone the extra mile more often. What I find especially sad in that “falling out of sync with the flow of life” is that we’re living in such dysfunctional times where people of Miller’s age (and younger) feel compelled to return to the Internet because, as Miller writes, “The Internet is where the people are”. Internet should be a part of the flow of life, sure, yet I’m feeling that Internet is progressively commandeering the flow of life. And while not everything Internet has brought with it is bad, I can’t help but feel saddened by where things are going.

Harry Marks, in his post Quality over Quantity:

It’s difficult to pull yourself away from the feeling that you need to be posting more and doing everything you can to keep numbers up, but when it comes right down to it, it’s all about who is paying attention to your work, not how many.

I stopped obsessing over visitor statistics shortly after the migration from the old Quillink Observer to this website+blog. I admit to having been a website stats addict up to 2011, and I admit that in the past I often associated quantity with relevance. And the feeling Marks talks about — I know that very well.

Of one thing I’m sure, though. Ever since I started writing online (2001) and maintaining a blog rather regularly (2005), visitor statistics never influenced the choice of content or the frequency I posted. There was a time when I genuinely thought that posting quick links to interesting stuff I find while browsing my feeds and the Web was a way to ‘keep the site fresh’ and maintain interest, but that didn’t improve or worsen the status quo. I’ve just been keeping my pace and following my rules — which are quite simple: to write and publish articles only when I have something to say; to favour longish, original pieces instead of quick link-posts with a line (or a word) of commentary; to let my followers on Twitter and App.net know when I’ve published a new article without insisting or shoving it down their throats, so to speak.

Over time, I’ve learnt to overcome my insecurities about ‘relevance’. I’ve learnt that there are people out there who value my opinion and who are willing to listen to what I have to say. I’ve learnt to appreciate that having ‘only’ 80 visits in a day is fine when one of those 80 gets in touch with me via Twitter, App.net or email to tell me that he or she has liked my article.

Meanwhile, what I’ve been doing with those visitor stats is to try to figure out a way to use them as behavioural indicators. One thing I’ve noticed is that readers can be a fickle bunch, no matter the quality one offers in a blog. In the past I’ve had some well-known and respected guys link to a few articles of mine that got their attention. The increase in traffic was substantial (and even if I don’t care much about numbers, I’d lie if I said that I didn’t feel good about the increased attention), but it pretty much reverted to its usual standards in a day or two. The image above sums this up pretty well.

While I still find a bit depressing that a lot of people, after discovering my blog in such a way, don’t stick around, my attitude has changed pretty much over time. Once I would have thought It’s my fault, I’m not interesting enough. Now my reaction is more like Hey, this is me, this is what I write about; I strive to provide good quality and well written pieces. You won’t return? Your loss. It’s not arrogance. I’ve been writing (in two languages) for so long I know what I’m capable of. And over time I’ve received enough appreciation to give me the additional boost to further strengthen my resolve to keep on writing, here and elsewhere.

It was late June 2009 when I opened that box. My first Intel Mac, a 15-inch MacBook Pro, with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, 256 MB of graphics memory, and a 320 GB hard drive. Considering that up until then my main machine had been a 12-inch PowerBook G4, with a 1 GHz processor, 1.25 GB of RAM, 32 MB of graphics memory, and a 40 GB hard drive, you can imagine how noticeable the improvement in performance and user experience was for me.

My line of work doesn’t require frequent equipment upgrades, thankfully, so I usually change my main Mac only when absolutely necessary. The downside is that when the time to upgrade comes, I have to choose a new model wisely, because it has to last for a few years, and that means choosing a machine with a certain degree of upgradability. In this regard, I must say that this MacBook Pro has turned out to be a great choice.

With hindsight, 2009 was a good vintage for MacBook Pros. This Mac is certainly better manufactured than the aluminium PowerBook G4s and MacBook Pros of the 2003–2007 era. The ‘precision aluminium unibody’ case is a remarkable improvement over the previous assembly design. Simply consider the fact that, to replace the internal hard drive, on my 12-inch PowerBook G4 I had to remove more than 40 tiny screws, while the count goes down to 14 on this MacBook Pro. But the unibody assembly is also a marvellous improvement because the MacBook Pro, after almost four years of intense use, basically still looks like new.

It took a while to get used to the keyboard (I still love the feel of the keyboard of the aluminium PowerBooks), but again, I had to recognise that the keyboard in the unibody MacBooks is simply better designed. For one, it’s easier to clean, and there’s virtually no place where dirt can accumulate. In this regard, a terrible spot in the previous aluminium PowerBooks and MacBook Pros was the space along the bottom row of keys, just above the trackpad/palm rest area.

Four years after: what's bad

Somehow it doesn’t seem fair to include the hard drive among the weaknesses of this MacBook Pro. Considering that in almost four years I’ve actually turned off the MacBook Pro probably less than 10 times; and considering that for the most part the MacBook Pro has been working 16–18 hours a day on average, I’d say it’s rather amazing that the stock hard drive has lasted this long.

Instead, the one truly disappointing element of this machine has to be the optical drive. At first it was just noisy (even noisier than the tray-loading CD/DVD drive of my clamshell iBooks), then, maybe after a year of light-to-moderate use, it became erratic and unreliable: sometimes it would refuse to read a CD-RW or DVD-R disc I had burnt a few days before; sometimes it managed to burn a DVD on the second or third attempt. After a month of not using it, one day it just stopped working. What a piece of crap, indeed.

…And what's good

Practically everything else. I don’t use the MacBook Pro for particularly CPU-intensive, demanding applications, but nonetheless I still use it for a bunch of different tasks, and I have at least a dozen applications open at all times. After four years (and unlike previous Macs) it doesn’t feel old or slow or sluggish. Sure, it helps to have upgraded the internal RAM to 8 GB (the maximum allowed by this machine); and of course the latest MacBook Pros and Airs are and feel faster, but my MacBook Pro still holds its ground when I return to it. When I decided to upgrade from my 12-inch PowerBook G4 after five years of continued use, one of the reasons was that Apple had left PowerPC Macs behind, but most of all it was because of the general performance — sadly, that poor PowerBook was showing its age. (Mind you, it’s still in use as a lightweight second option, and it’s still a great machine for Web browsing, email, light photo retouching and similar tasks, and it’s undoubtedly useful in case of emergency).

However, one truly outstanding feature of this MacBook Pro is the battery. On a full charge, it still lasts almost four hours, with medium screen brightness, and wireless (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) turned on. After four years, it’s really amazing, especially when I think of the generally mediocre battery performance of most of the PowerBooks I used before (all fine and dandy during the first year or so, then operating time and reliability rapidly decreasing).

Conclusion

I’m quite satisfied with this 15-inch mid-2009 MacBook Pro. It’s still a responsive machine, well manufactured, resilient and great looking. It still has a healthy battery performing surprisingly well and, apart from the mediocre quality of the optical drive, there’s really nothing to complain about this machine. I predict a few more years of use, since I intend to do one more upgrade to further extend its useful life: a dual SSD-HD internal configuration, with the SSD as the main unit, and the current 500 GB hard drive as secondary unit, replacing the useless optical drive (with the help of adapters such as this one). And whatever Mac I’ll purchase when it’s time to upgrade again, I’m positive this MacBook Pro will still be a fantastic second machine to have around.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m enough experienced to know that you can’t naïvely expect a hard drive to last for long, especially if it’s the internal hard drive of the machine you use most. Yet, despite your level of preparation, the death of a hard drive tends to catch you by surprise quite often.

In the last 20 years of dealing with hard drives, I’ve witnessed the most diverse demises. A hard drive usually dies rather quickly, but it generally has a way to warn you that its passing is getting alarmingly near: it starts emitting new noises or noise patterns that are different from the usual. This ‘acoustic’ approach has saved me in a couple of situations in the past, when I wasn’t as backup-savvy as I am now. By hearing different ticking patterns, I could predict the imminent failure and save 80–90% of my stuff in time.

I also witnessed extreme cases, like with the internal 40 GB hard drive of my 12″ PowerBook G4, where the drive degradation was so gradual it actually kept working for two months after manifesting strange (and at times frighteningly loud) mechanical noises. During that period, the PowerBook could boot fine and a lot of things were working well. There were no performance-related issues or applications that took a suspiciously long time to launch. But the upcoming death of the hard drive was evident, not only because of the noises. Disk Utility had deemed the disk ‘irreparable’ after aborting a verification process that had already taken 45 minutes. After half an hour of use, the PowerBook’s fan would rapidly reach full speed and the chassis would become extremely hot in the disk drive area. I was lucky I could save everything before having to replace the drive. At the time, money was quite tight, and that ‘slow death’ bought me some time to save enough for a replacement. (I can’t emphasise this enough: this is not common hard drive failure behaviour, so treat this anecdote as the exception, not the rule).

Two nights ago, the hard drive of my MacBook Pro did nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite, actually. It just died without warning. No strange noises, no unusual ticking patterns, not even an increase in noisiness (even quiet drives tend to get a bit noisier as they grow old and especially when their time’s about over). I periodically run Disk Utility on the main drive to check up on its health. Never a problem, not even the occasional mix-up in the drive’s logic structure. Nothing. I was watching a movie and suddenly the image froze, while the audio kept playing for a while. I thought there was something wrong with the video file, or that the player application was acting up, so I tried quitting it. No response. Force-quitting didn’t get me far, either. The Mac quickly became unresponsive, so I forced a reboot.

Grey screen. Apple logo. Spinning wheel. Minutes passed. Not good. Fans started, rapidly accelerating. Not good at all. Then a flow of text and command strings (like when you reboot your Mac in Verbose mode) appeared briefly. Then, a message in various languages warned that the computer would restart due to a problem. Definitely not good. At this point, the Mac entered a self-restart loop, trying to finish the boot process but never succeeding. After seven attempts, I turned it off. The drive was evidently gone. I felt more surprised than angry or worried. I stared at the powered-off MacBook Pro for a few moments: Did that just happen? Really? — I was asking myself.

A bit of luck

I keep various backups of my stuff, and despite not being the perfect tool, I’ve always given Time Machine a chance since day one. I keep Time Machine backups of my MacBook Pro, although I don’t keep the external Time Machine drive always on during the day. In other words, I don’t do hourly backups (also because I have CrashPlan always running in the background, keeping a tight backup schedule of my entire Home folder), but I turn the external drive on during the day, usually towards the end of the day, and do at least three or four backups.

Luckily, when disaster hit on Saturday night, I’ve had the Time Machine drive running for a few hours, and when the internal hard drive failed at 3:50 AM, the last useful Time Machine backup was completed at 3:43 AM. I thought, If the backup is fine, I can restore the system from Time Machine without losing practically anything.

The problem is that drive failures always catch you in a bad moment, and I needed to recover and have the Mac up and running again as soon as possible. Having a drive die on you on a Saturday night means waiting at least until Monday to do anything. So I started browsing online for a quick replacement. Again, since my current financial situation is not good, another constraint was the budget, so the replacement had to come quick and be cheap. Disappointingly, the online Apple Store doesn’t sell internal hard drives for Mac laptops, only a few expensive solutions for Mac Pros (at least here in Spain). I checked other good sources and found a few eligible candidates: not needing a huge internal disk (the one that failed was the stock 320 GB this MacBook Pro came with, and I still had 60 GB free) was another good thing, because today internal hard drives in the 320–500 GB range are in fact quite affordable. Yet, even for the best of options I would have to wait a few days for international shipping. Oh well, I can’t do much to speed things up anyway; — I thought — I’ll place the order on Sunday evening and hope for the best, meanwhile I can continue my work on my 12″ and 17″ PowerBook G4s.

Yesterday I went for a stroll with my wife in the city centre, to clear my mind and divert it from the paranoic trains of thought one inevitably has in these situations (“What if my backups are corrupted and I lose all those important documents and a year worth of photos?”, things like this). We visited the FNAC store just out of curiosity, though I clearly remembered from a previous visit that they didn’t sell internal hard drives — they mostly had desktop and portable external storage solutions. When I saw a box with a Seagate 500 GB 2.5″ internal hard drive on special offer, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had found an affordable solution that was also bigger than the drive it would replace. And I had found it in a store. On a Sunday. If all went well, I could be restoring everything in a matter of hours.

Keep calm and carry on

Yesterday night was devoted to replacing the hard drive and attempting to restore the entire system from the last Time Machine backup. I connected the external disk via FireWire 800 and crossed my fingers. When I booted the MacBook Pro I realised it couldn’t boot from the Recovery HD partition, because that was a blank new hard drive, but evidently there was one in the external Time Machine drive, because after a few instants, the OS X Utilities main interface was there on the screen. I selected Restore from Time Machine backup and prepared to wait a long long while as almost 200 GB worth of stuff had to be copied back in the internal hard drive. At around 9%, the recovery application aborted, citing unspecified errors. I was bummed. Since it was the most recent backup, the backup performed just 7 minutes before the previous drive died, I thought that maybe an error had occurred because some of the essential files in that backup had been corrupted. So I tried with the penultimate backup. An error, again. It was 4 AM, I was tired and a bit depressed, and decided to go to bed.

This morning, as I resumed the recovery operations, something occurred to me. I verified my suspicions and I was right: I had tried to restore a Mountain Lion backup using an older version of the OS X Utilities, the Lion version. Since Internet Recovery was out of the question (I tried rebooting with Cmd-Option-R a few times, but nothing happened), to have a working Mountain Lion Recovery HD partition I would need to install a fresh copy of Mountain Lion on the MacBook Pro, then reboot the MacBook Pro from that partition, and try the Restore from Time Machine backup option again. But I had no physical copy of OS X Mountain Lion. When I upgraded I forgot to create an installation disk for cases like this, mea culpa. Luckily I still had around the USB pendrive with a copy of the OS X Lion installer, so I installed Lion from the pendrive, connected to the Mac App Store, redownloaded Mountain Lion, upgraded, and finally rebooted in the correct, freshly-created Recovery HD partition. The process of restoring the entire system from the last Time Machine backup went smoothly, although the wait was long and suspenseful.

Considerations, in no particular order

– The Restore process is rather amazing. After the final reboot, I was presented with an almost identical snapshot of my system just minutes before the previous hard drive died. All the applications that were open before the disaster simply reopened, with the browsers restoring all open tabs, and other application reopening the last opened documents. I know it’s something that has to be expected from restoring a full backup, but I was amazed nonetheless.

– If you want to be up and running in no time, keep a bootable clone of your main system on an external hard drive, and update it at least once a week. Use great tools like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

– Create a bootable backup install disk of the latest OS X version. Believe me, it really comes in handy in situations like these. On the Web there are quite a few good articles explaining how to make such a disk (for Mountain Lion, see for example this one from Ars Technica, or this one from Macworld, just to name two of the most prominent sources). The process is straightforward, and you only have to invest in a small 8 GB USB pendrive.

– Checking the SMART state of the hard drive is of little use to predict impending failures. It has never worked for me, always reporting “Verified” or similar reassuring statuses even when performing diagnostics on patently bad drives. This time was no exception. Don’t rely on that. Try to develop a fine ear for your hard drive’s noises, establishing a baseline of normal noises and patterns during daily operations, and watching out for anything out of the ordinary (strange repeated ticking, unexpected whirring, and the like).

– Even if you don’t check your internal drive routinely, drop everything and do so the moment you notice something unusual happening on your Mac, e.g. unexpected slowdowns in system performance, applications becoming sluggish or non-responsive for no apparent reasons, applications that take an unusually long time to launch, etc. In my experience, the most telling visual sign of something odd involving the hard drive is the whole system becoming sluggish and registering any user action with noticeable delay (cursor movement included).

– Remember: hard drives die unexpectedly in most cases. (Solid State drives too, in case you’re wondering). It will happen when least you expect it. It will happen at an inconvenient time. You will be bothered. If you don’t have a backup of your stuff, you will also be panicking. Be prepared.

– Backup, backup, backup, of course. Maybe I was just lucky in trusting Time Machine, but if you really don’t want to invest energies in developing a backup strategy, at least buy an external drive and configure it as a Time Machine drive. It’s an easy, hassle-free and low-maintenance method. Even if you can’t restore your entire system from a Time Machine backup (for whatever reason or error), and you need to reinstall OS X, you will at least be able to recover some settings, documents and data from that backup using the Setup Assistant.

– Check which version of the OS X Utilities you’re using to restore your Time Machine backup. An older version won’t be able to restore a Time Machine backup of a newer OS X version. I was trying to restore a Mountain Lion backup using the recovery utilities created by Lion, and I kept getting errors. You can tell which version of the OS X Utilities you’re using by looking at the icon of the Reinstall OS X option.

– If you’re looking for good quality, step-by-step guides to replace your Mac’s hard drive (and much much more), keep iFixit’s online Guides in your bookmarks. Really an invaluable resource.

Low Fidelity — Revisiting an abandoned construction site

As you can read on the What is: Low Fidelity page, the idea for this novel is far from recent. It came to me in late 1995, while I was working on my first novel Richard Martyn. I had hit a creative dead end with that first novel (started in 1992 and finally completed in 1999), I was feeling a bit trapped in its themes (amnesia and its identity-related implications), and I badly needed fresh ideas.

Low Fidelity’s very first concept was extremely radical: since I was fed up with characters, dialogues, strong first-person points of view, and the like, I wanted Low Fidelity to be a novel about places and objects. The challenge was to write a story without characters. However, after a promising start, I soon realised that while such a story was definitely doable, it could not easily stand the sheer length of a whole novel. I stored all I had written up to that point, and planned to re-use it later, as a part of a bigger project or as a standalone short story.

Despite this false start, the mere process of working on something else that wasn’t Richard Martyn had the positive effect of reigniting my creativity, and on an evening in December 1995 while I was at the library trying to study for my Italian Literature exam, I started jotting down ideas and a possible plot involving a conspiracy related to culture, information propagation, and books. Since the beginning I had a rather clear idea of the main character, a skilled, seasoned ‘cultural investigator’.

As soon as the main plot lines began acquiring a bit of strength, I noticed that the project was rapidly growing into something more ambitious. The snowball effect, in retrospect, was obvious: every aspect of the plot begot questions, whose answers begot more questions. Things started getting less manageable as the world of the novel needed to be expanded and planned in more fine-grained detail. As I mention on the What is: Low Fidelity page, the novel quickly reached a sort of perennial work in progress status, with alternating periods of abandonment/inactivity and periods of resurgence and information-gathering. As my life got increasingly busy, I couldn’t find enough time and energy to devote to this project, but I would keep gathering information and ideas that now lie scattered throughout 16 different Moleskine-sized notebooks.

The actual story-writing has been a different matter. Since I couldn’t decide a proper structure, I started writing the story in self-contained scenes and fragments, to be rearranged chronologically at a later date. Also, I was writing in Italian at the time. Translation into English of both the narrative fragments and the collected bits of information related to the fictional setting began in late 2011, when I first attempted to revive the whole project.

Then Minigrooves happened, and it’s been a important step towards rediscovering my creative writing. As I wrote here last June:

Anyway, I experienced a serious creative block around 2002–2003. I’ve been recovering from this block roughly since 2010, when I started writing poetry again. As for short stories, my Minigrooves represent my most serious creative accomplishment in the last fifteen years, but most of all they represent the end of my creative drought. […] [I]magine my joy when I felt the wheels moving again at the start of this humble literary project.

The important creative realisation I’m referring to is that — believe it or not — my creativity has returned through discipline. I could have started Minigrooves by opening the website and publishing a new story whenever I wanted […] Instead, by self-imposing such a strict schedule, i.e. a new story each Monday and Thursday, I have noticed how the urgency has stimulated the flow of new ideas for new stories.

The extremely positive effect of the Minigrooves project on my creativity is what ultimately stimulated me towards rebooting Low Fidelity. It will be published in serialised form starting next month. Soon I will announce where and how you’ll be able to read it, so stay tuned if you’re interested.

I must say that the process of going back to an abandoned work (for projects of this scale I actually use the term ‘construction site’) has been quite exciting so far. Low Fidelity takes place in the near future (from 2070 to 2073) in a fictional megalopolis that constitutes the Metropolitan Isle of Arslan. Strictly speaking, the setting is post-apocalyptical, but this time the apocalypse doesn’t involve mass contamination, epidemics, aliens, zombies, or other natural or artificially-induced disasters. Rather, it’s mostly centered around technology, culture and society at large. The worldwide Internet collapse is one of the most momentous events occurring in a world where people’s lives are devastated by wholesale surveillance, loss of privacy, an unprecedented rate of cybercrimes happening at every level; in a world whose hyperconnected infrastructure reaches a breaking point and collapses under its own weight.

This collapse happens roughly 20 years before the events in the novel, and represents a ‘point of no return’ on many levels. In the words of Bert Kay, the protagonist, the world of Low Fidelity is “a place that’s trying to recover from a mass techno-overdose”. In the 20 years following the collapse of the Internet, this recovery has taken different directions in different parts of the world. There are places rebuilding the network infrastructure and keeping an optimistic outlook on technology, despite the constant fight against criminal hackers. While in other places — such as the Metropolitan Isle of Arslan — governments have taken a very different direction: to rekindle the relationship between humans and technology, it’s necessary to take one step back to take two steps forward. Hence the decision of reverting to a low-tech approach and bringing society to a ‘new old era’, banning all kind of portable electronic devices and computers from public use, and going back to low-tech forms of security.

What’s truly fascinating for me is to imagine how a world like that could be. This is why a project like Low Fidelity needs a lot of world-building information: it’s set against a background where a lot of significant events have happened, and everyone is dealing with the aftermath. I’m building a coherent, rich, detailed setting where the main story takes place. Arslan is a huge city with its particular geography, transportation system, its address scheme, its government and law… you get the picture. It’s a peculiar place, with its mixture of advanced technology and analogue aesthetics, its contradictions and their implications, and I hope the readers will be intrigued by its charm as much as I am while building it.

Crosslines — getting to know the world of Low Fidelity

You can find a good summary of what Crosslines originally was and what it has become at the What is: Crosslines page. As I write at the end of that section, Crosslines is now an online place which serves as introduction and ‘further reading’ of the world presented in Low Fidelity. It’s a sort of Chapter Zero, but since it cannot be described as being either a prologue or epilogue, I decided to use the term exologue, meaning ‘outside the narration’.

When Low Fidelity begins, Bert Kay, the protagonist, is about to close a very intricate case involving a mysterious terrorist organisation, but in the process uncovers a few things that will lead him to another, equally convoluted investigation, which is what constitutes the main story in Low Fidelity. In this context, consider Crosslines as if it were ‘bonus content’. You don’t need Crosslines to understand Low Fidelity, but it’s something that adds to the story and to the world of the novel, and it can help people get accustomed to the place where the events of Low Fidelity unfold.

Crosslines presents different scenes and fragments that largely take place before Low Fidelity. These scenes are useful to get familiar with many of the characters introduced in Low Fidelity, and we can also get a few glimpses of the kind of investigation Bert Kay is carrying out (I’m referring to the case he closes as Low Fidelity opens). I figured it can be an interesting way of providing all kinds of information and extra details about a certain world and the characters moving inside of it.

Crosslines moves at its own, independent pace. It went online a month ago, and I’ll keep adding scenes and fragments even after Low Fidelity officially starts and develops, and it will probably be updated even after Low Fidelity ends. It’s a sort of open channel to the world of Low Fidelity, and a playing ground where I can keep adding details and stuff about all things Low Fidelity, so to speak.

To sum up

Low Fidelity is a literary project that will be published in serialised form (i.e. in regular instalments) starting May 2013. More information will be provided here and over at the Crosslines website as the inauguration date approaches.

Crosslines is a companion to Low Fidelity which serves as introduction and ‘bonus content’ of the world of Low Fidelity. If Low Fidelity were a movie or a TV series, Crosslines would be its collection of extras (featurettes, mini-documentary, additional behind-the-scenes information, etc.). It has its own website and Twitter account so far, both providing narrative updates and the occasional ‘public service announcements’ related to the Low Fidelity project as a whole.

I hope you’ll enjoy both parts of this ambitious enterprise!

What started to interest me, though, was the subsequent debate around Mailbox, and after reading some positive reviews (Lex Friedman’s at Macworld, this one at Gadget Review, and Cody Fink’s at Macstories, just to name a few), I shrugged, thought Well, why not?, and installed Mailbox on my iPhone. If I have to criticise something, my usual course of action is to try it first-hand. After a little more than a week of use, I believe I can share some initial impressions.

Preamble

I manage email in a pretty straightforward way (for me at least). I have separate accounts to handle different types of incoming messages (personal, work-related, mailing lists, newsletters and promotional emails, notification messages from social networks/services, etc.). I generally do not accumulate enormous backlogs: work-related emails are always top-priority, then there are personal communications, then mailing lists, and then all the rest. I don’t follow the Inbox Zero school of thought, and as I sometimes say jokingly, that’s probably why I reach Inbox Zero that often. Humour aside, I think that it’s just experience. As I said previously, In the end it’s just a matter of setting up an effective filtering system. I devised this approach over a weekend years ago, and it hasn’t changed much since.

If you’re familiar with Mailbox and its underlying philosophy, you’ll be inclined to think that it’s probably not the best email client for someone who manages email the way that I do. And in fact the short answer is that no, it’s not the email client I’d put in my iPhone dock. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good email client.

The reservation system

Let me tell you: the experience of waiting in a virtual line before being able to set up the app was frustrating. When I signed up, on February 27, I had roughly 870,000 people before me. The wait lasted a whole month. I understand the reasons behind the reservation system: as the developers wrote on the Mailbox website, Mailbox checks email from the cloud in order to deliver it as fast as possible to the phone, support push notifications, and facilitate email snoozing. The IMAP protocol is nearly 30 years old and a part of reinventing the inbox is building a secure, modern API that’s better suited for mobile devices. In order to provide a robust, world-class email experience, we are filling reservations on a first-come, first-served basis.

The negative side-effect of this reservation system is that people are not exactly accustomed to waiting a few weeks before being able to use an iOS app. The App Store dynamics celebrate instant gratification. The waiting experience did put my patience to the test, and after fifteen days of wait, my interest in trying out Mailbox definitely waned. One thing I had to do was to simply stop thinking about it, so I buried the app in a folder and started checking the queue occasionally. When my Mailbox was finally available I was very close to delete the app for good.

The UI

Mailbox’s UI is designed around efficiency and minimalism (the good kind, the staying-out-of-the-way kind).

As you can see, just the list of messages, a Search field and five buttons, all with clear, unambiguous icons. I also like that it uses the iPhone’s status bar as its activity panel. Again, pleasantly out-of-the-way design.

Simplicity is also found in how you interact with the app. I usually dislike applications that heavily rely on gestures, because if gestures are not implemented thoughtfully, it’s easy to end up with obscure or accidental actions. For that matter I generally prefer buttons: either you tap a button or not. But Mailbox implements simple gestures, and with enough visual feedback that’s very hard to make mistakes (and even if you do make a mistake, every action is ‘undoable’). For example, at first I scratched my head to understand how to perform a ‘short swipe’ versus a ‘long swipe’ when handling messages, but in practice it’s far more intuitive: as soon as you put your finger on a message and slide it on the right, for instance, Mailbox shows you what happens in real time using colours and icons. First green and the ‘Archive’ icon, then red and the ‘Delete’ icon. Very difficult to select the wrong action.

Email management

As other reviewers pointed out, Mailbox’s method invites the user to take action on email messages as if they were tasks in a sort of to-do list. Here’s a new email message: what to do with it? With simple gestures, you can archive it, delete it or choose to deal with it later by ‘snoozing’ it. Gestures are spatial and you always know in which direction to swipe because the button layout is there to remind you: the ‘mailbox area’ is in the middle, left is ‘Later’ (I love how the icon for ‘Later’ can be seen as a clock but also as a ‘L’ inside a circle), right is ‘Archive’. The goal is to get to the end of the day having dealt with all incoming messages, in a way or another, and hopefully having reached Inbox Zero.

If you follow the Inbox Zero school of thought, I believe that Mailbox is the mobile email app you were waiting for. It’s simple, fast, efficient. But what happens if you don’t usually manage email that way? A little friction is what happens. Little, because it’s not an unsurmountable obstacle, but enough that it’s unlikely you’ll adopt Mailbox as the primary email client on your iPhone.

For example, since I manage email more traditionally, when I look at Mailbox’s Inbox view (the image above), I just see all my read messages, i.e. a list of messages I have already dealt with (their status is Read, which in my mind and in my management system is the equivalent of I’m done with it). But in Mailbox’s system, all those read messages are still messages you need to act on, they are like tasks you haven’t tackled yet. In fact, if you enter Mailbox’s Settings > App Badge Count and select Show inbox conversation count (which is selected by default), you’ll see the Mailbox app icon with a probably very high badge count (2,600 in my case) and you’ll think: But those can’t be unread messages/threads, I’ve already read them! It’s because Mailbox sees all those messages as ‘undone tasks’. To make that high count disappear you’ll have to deal with every single message.

And apparently Mailbox doesn’t allow handling messages in bulk (at least, I haven’t found a way, maybe I’m missing something), so if you set up a Gmail account which has thousands of emails in its Inbox folder, and if you want to deal with email the Mailbox way, I suggest you visit that Gmail account via the Web interface, select everything and choose Gmail’s Archive option. That way, the next time Mailbox syncs your account, everything will be archived and will ‘disappear’ from Mailbox’s inbox.

This is where I noticed the most friction when using Mailbox. I’m not used to ‘archiving’ messages in my various Gmail accounts, and I just leave everything in the Inbox. And I may be receiving a series of email notifications I want to deal with quickly by marking them all read. Due to Mailbox’s different approach, there isn’t any option to select multiple messages and mark them read, yet I find myself looking for it all the time. This aspect — for me at least — is a constant interference and slows down my email management. To be fair, it’s not Mailbox’s fault: the developer’s website is very clear about what to expect from the app, and the friction I experienced mainly stems from the collision between two different methods for managing emails. Still, a little bit of flexibility on Mailbox’s part would be appreciated.

Provisional conclusion

Some time ago, Mat Honan wrote this about Mailbox:

Sure, Mailbox makes getting to inbox zero easier. But after spending a few days with it, I’m not sure that it actually makes me faster or more productive at reading and responding to e-mail. It imposes a rigid system on me that doesn’t do everything I need it to, so I end up opening other e-mail apps anyway. That means I’m ultimately spending even more time than I already was on e-mail. I hate e-mail.

Mailbox will be great for some people. But it doesn’t reinvent email; it just automates a process that may not work for you.

Considering my experience with Mailbox, so far, I tend to agree with Honan. I don’t hate email, but I certainly don’t like to end up spending more time managing it, either. As I’ve said, Mailbox is a very nice app, and gets a lot of things right, especially in the user interface and interaction departments. Whether it’s going to be a great app for you largely depends on how ingrained your email management habits and methods are.

1. If you already have perfected an efficient, satisfactory system to deal with your email, and such system doesn’t involve the Inbox Zero philosophy, then I guess you’ll have a hard time getting used to Mailbox.
2. If your email management is rooted in a ‘Getting Things Done’/Inbox Zero approach, then using Mailbox will likely be delightful.
3. If you don’t have a specific method to manage email and your email situation is generally a mess, Mailbox could be an interesting tool to use, giving you a good way to start managing your email more efficiently.

I’m in situation No. 1, and I’m actually a happy user of Apple’s iOS Mail app, but I’ll definitely keep Mailbox around because I’m very interested in its future development, now that it has been acquired by Dropbox.

But that doesn’t mean that all Apple products, hardware and especially software, should just be accepted without criticism. I’m a long-time Apple user, and over the years I’ve been consolidating my workflow mostly around first-party software. (It makes sense when you think that on a daily basis I use a variety of Macs of rather different vintages, and with versions of Mac OS X spanning from 10.3.9 to 10.8.3). And I must say I’ve been feeling increasingly disappointed in the quality of certain pieces of Apple software. Just to make a quick example I have before my eyes right now: how can it be that an application like iBooks Author should lack a basic feature such as handling footnotes? Good grief, isn’t it an application for creating books!? But as I said, this is just a tiny example.

Cieplinski writes:

Apple has introduced some incredibly cool technology over the past several years that hasn’t come close to reaching its potential. FaceTime, Passbook, iBooks Author, iCloud—just to name a few—were all so promising when they were introduced. But most of them have failed to be completely successful, not because they aren’t great ideas, but because Apple isn’t doing a whole lot to either improve or evangelize them.

If the pattern used to be “release, then iterate, iterate, iterate,” it seems like Apple is not giving itself enough time for the “iterate” part of that process. It’s being pressured to move on to the next thing. And that leaves us with a lot of half-baked products and a ton of unrealized potential.

And this paragraph from his conclusion is where I agree most with him:

If Apple took the year and worked on half of its existing products rather than trying to introduce new ones, they’d be doing themselves and us a much bigger favor. If they spent the year fixing the unbelievably sloppy bugs that still exist in iOS and Mountain Lion (I’m talking boneheadedly simple things like drag and drop on the Mac), rather than bringing five new half-baked apps like Podcasts to the platform, our phones and our laptops would be better at surprising and delighting us.

There isn’t much talk about iOS 7 and Mac OS X 10.9 at the moment, and I’m seriously hoping it’s because Apple is doing with them what Cieplinski and I are wishing: taking a step back and fixing things. I don’t have particularly exotic wishes or feature requests for either operating system. I’m not craving for new eye-candy stuff in iOS or Mac OS X. I want both to be robust improvements over their respective previous versions. Unlike others, I don’t ask Apple to innovate all the time and at all costs. And let’s be frank here: the kind of ‘innovation’ some are really asking from Apple is the mindless feature creep that has always characterised the approach of other tech companies, not Apple’s philosophy.