This short, strange hiatus

I haven’t updated this blog in a month, and the truth is that there isn’t any particular reason as to why. I have indeed been feeling low-spirited and uninspired lately, but this lack of inspiration has felt different than other times in the past.

Often, what happened with my past (tech) writer’s blocks was that, while recognising there was some inspiring subject to talk about, I was simply stuck, unable to find a worthwhile connection to what I felt I was supposed to talk about. These days, at the risk of oversimplifying this, the lack of inspiration felt more like the tech world’s fault than a possible omission on my part. If that makes any sense.

What should we talk about? Let me check my feeds, see what others are talking about.

That Siri is still pretty much a dumb assistant even after 9 years? Tell me something new.

Podcasts, whether free or paid, or Spotify-exclusive, and the like? Eh. I won’t go as far as saying they’re all a waste of time. It would be a lie. But my advice is that you should think carefully about how much of your listening time you’re willing to invest. In a recent chat with a friend, as we touched the subject, he told me, You know, I do listen to a few podcasts, but the odd thing is that I always end up retaining very little of what was discussed, of what occurred. And not because I was distracted, as I actively listen to them. Some are just meant as entertainment, so I guess it’s okay if I just enjoy them in the here and now. But others… I don’t know, it feels their impact should last longer than it does. I absolutely understand what he means. I noticed the same before deciding to unsubscribe from everything and only listen to the occasional episode here and there. This retaining problem is also why I can’t for the life of me enjoy an audiobook. It’s a much more fleeting experience than reading the written page. But I guess this depends on the way each one of us is wired, and your mileage may definitely vary.

What else, then? The iPad? No, please, let’s skip this eagerly and completely. It’s a religious topic by now, and talking about it as objectively as possible is tricky. Not because it’s impossible, but because it’s a loaded debate. It’s like you’re supposed to take a side (pro iPad or against it), and even when you clearly aren’t, or your views are nuanced, someone out there will always believe that, deep down, you really really are an iPad fan or an iPad hater. Well, I am neither. But judging from the feedback I receive privately, I am officially an enemy of the iPad Cult.

Well, how about the Mac? It’s a subject that increasingly fills me with unease. While Apple has convinced me that, at least as far as hardware is concerned, they still care about it, I remain concerned about the general direction Mac OS is going. Buggier, unnecessarily strict, less flexible, and with an increasingly locked-down app ecosystem, with Apple as the gatekeeper, granting entry only to registered developers and their apps, which must be notarised. “Security reasons, y’see?”

By the way, I keep receiving feedback about Mac OS 10.15 Catalina via email. It’s still not good. After more than 200 emails, the negative experiences still make up for more than 95% of the messages. I’ve also recently realised just how disruptive the T2 chip-Catalina combo can be.

Augmented reality? Virtual reality? I wish I could find something interesting to say. If gaming ends up being the only meaningful implementation of VR, I’ll actually be fine with it. While an excellent game like Half-Life: Alyx is alone still not enough to convince me to get a VR headset, if more titles with this level of quality and immersion start appearing, I may change my mind, who knows. On the other hand, AR still feels the kind of endeavour that keeps burning resources and has little to show for it, at least for now. Apple’s insistence on it makes me think two things:

They’ve come up with a really useful and innovative way to implement it, and they’re working hard to ship their idea.

Instead of coming up with an innovative solution to try to solve a real problem regular people have with technology, Apple is trying to find some kind of original idea in the AR field that others may have overlooked or dismissed, and they’re working hard to simply be the first at it, and hope the public can be subsequently convinced that it is indeed a cool idea.

For the record, I still haven’t made up my mind. One day I think it’s scenario 1, one day I think it’s scenario 2. Which means there’s probably a third scenario I haven’t thought about. Which is okay, as I’m pretty much indifferent to this whole AR business anyway.

Unusual things I’ve been doing these past days

Due to a surprisingly busy (but not entirely unwelcome) work schedule, I’ve had little time to tinker with my assorted collection of computers and devices, and little time to devote to experiments. But a couple of things are nonetheless worth mentioning:

1. Being a Windows user

For the past eight days or so, I’ve been using my iMac booted into Windows 10 in the Boot Camp installation I managed to perform on an external SSD. It’s been two years now since I decided to familiarise again with Windows after many many years, so the fact that this recent experience was not unpleasant or riddled with friction didn’t surprise me.

It was nonetheless striking to think that, hey, in case of a massive Mac OS platform catastrophe, I could manage the switch to Windows. Would it be ideal? Not fully. Would I love it? Not completely. But it could definitely be a bearable-to-pleasant arrangement. The truth is, this 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac makes for a very nice hardware environment for Windows. The thin icons and system font are more readable, and certain UI details can be appreciated much more on a sharp display with rich colours. But more importantly, there are places where this Windows installation feels much faster and more responsive than Mac OS. Sure, Windows is installed on an external SSD and Mac OS on the internal spinning hard drive; and sure, I have more services and programs that load at boot on Mac OS, while on Windows I’ve enabled only OneDrive for now; as a consequence, in everyday use, Mac OS uses more RAM than Windows.

Still, the overall feeling when using the iMac under Windows is that it’s a faster computer with a user interface that often displays zero lag when doing what one would consider basic tasks, like opening apps, updating windows, reacting to user input, etc. Not that Mac OS is awfully sluggish in comparison, but when I’m in Mac OS certain basic operations seem to take just that tiny bit more that it becomes noticeable. Finder windows that take several seconds before showing their contents. Apps that sometimes take an unusually long time before launching, as if the system were retrieving them from the dark, unfathomable depths of a networked volume instead of the internal drive. Spotlight search that sometimes gives you the feeling it’s waking up from some kind of slumber, instead of being ‘always ready’, and so on.

Again, I realise this is not an entirely fair comparison. I will soon move my Mac OS installation from the internal hard drive to an external Thunderbolt 3 SSD, and then I’ll be able to compare the two systems on a more similar ground. But for now, this is what I have and how it feels like.

Anyway, while I’m certainly not switching to Windows, it’s reassuring to know that, should the need arise, I could still function and be productive using a system that doesn’t feel alien or constantly in your way[1].

Last but not least, the fact that now I can play Windows-only triple‑A games that were previously unavailable to me as a Mac user, is rather exhilarating. Just before the Coronavirus lockdown was in effect, I was about to purchase Dishonored (a game I’ve wanted to experience for years) for my PlayStation 3. I was able to take advantage of a discount and purchase the PC version online, which runs very very smoothly on my iMac.

2. Back to a smaller phone and display

The second ‘why not’ experiment I carried out these days has been going back to experiencing smaller smartphone displays. For about two weeks, I’ve used an iPhone 4S as daily driver, and it has been an interesting ride.

Like with my Windows experience detailed above, while using the iPhone 4S as my main phone, I’ve had the same feeling over and over, i.e. I could still make this work if my iPhone 8 left me stranded for some reason. Of course in this case there would be real limitations, but they would involve more app availability and functionality rather than physical display size. In other words, if in theory I wanted to go back to using an iPhone 4S permanently, the main problem wouldn’t be the smaller display, but the fact that this phone can’t be updated past iOS 9. And if you, like me, want the smoothest iOS experience on an iPhone 4S, you’ll want to downgrade it to iOS 8.4.1 — which further restricts app availability.

And in fact the purpose behind my little experiment hasn’t been to see if I can go back to using iOS 8 instead of iOS 12 or 13, but to see if — in the age of smartphones with huge displays — I can go back to using a smaller phone with a (gasp) 3.5‑inch display.

The short answer is yes. The long answer: there are trade-offs, of course, and they’re all the obvious ones. If you watch a lot of videos, if you’re a heavy Instagram consumer, if you do a lot of photo editing on the device, a small display like this will definitely feel cramped. For other uses, it’s more a matter of habit than true discomfort. For example, while the idea of going from, say, a 5.5‑inch display to a 3.5‑inch display makes you think that reading text is going to be harder, it’s really not that big of a deal, especially in the case of an iPhone 4S, which sports a retina display. You’ll have to scroll more, sure, but on the flipside you’ll have in your hand a device which is so much more comfortable to hold that you can do practically everything with just one hand.

And for me, for my hands, comfort is important when handling a smartphone. When I look at certain apps on the bigger iPhone 8, and see that what you essentially get in their interface is more white space rather than more information, then the advantage of the bigger display becomes less significant.

In the end, it all boils down to visual comfort versus operational comfort. Text, information, controls look nicer on a bigger device; interacting with them feels nicer on a smaller device. Oh, and app design definitely makes a difference. Whether you like Spotify’s UI or not, it scales well on a 3.5‑inch display:

Watching YouTube videos, as I said, is obviously better on a bigger display. Funnily enough, however, when browsing videos inside the YouTube app, the amount of information you see at a time is essentially the same; here you can see two comparable screenshots taken from my iPhone 4S and iPhone 8.

As for editing photos, the well-designed interfaces of apps like Snapseed and Pixelmator made the process surprisingly easier than expected.

Snapseed’s main interface

Pixelmator’s interface

To conclude, I’m aware that it was easier for me to make this ‘back to small screen’ experiment also because this is a period of reduced mobility and so forth. And I’m also aware that for many people reverting to a display that’s almost half the size of what they’re currently using sounds like madness. But what I absolutely confirmed while using my iPhone 4S these days is that a smaller display is far from being ‘unusable’. On the 4S I’ve done email, web browsing[2], read RSS feeds and articles saved on Instapaper, used Google Maps, listened to music, used Twitter; and I even took and edited photos, watched videos, checked my friends’ photos on Instagram. All in a smartphone that fits the palm of my hand, can be operated in total comfort, and disappears in my jeans pocket.

1. The only notable exception is character/keyboard support. On Mac OS, I am accustomed to just type certain key combinations to get diacritics or other commonly used typographic symbols (curly quotes, en dashes, em dashes, etc.). On Windows, these key combinations are simply not present. You have to either look for certain characters and symbols using the Character Map app, or you have to remember the good old ALT+ASCII code combinations (e.g. ALT-0151 to type an em dash). This terribly slows me down as I’m typing. I can add keyboard layouts and switch to them as needed to get additional diacritics and symbols when I’m writing in Italian or Spanish, but the hardware keyboard remains the same, with British layout, and I don’t always remember which key to press to get à, è, ì, ò, ù, á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ, and the like. ↩︎

2. I know what you’re thinking: how on earth can you browse today’s web on a 3.5‑inch display!? It sometimes had its challenges, like privacy- or cookie policy banners that completely took over the entire visible area. And ads are absolutely disruptive on a small display. I was lucky enough to download the Brave browser for iOS as soon as it was launched, and its first versions supported iOS 8 and 9, so that’s the browser I’ve been using the most these days on the iPhone 4S. Without it, I must say my web experience wouldn’t have been this tolerable overall. ↩︎