Riccardo Mori

The culture of backup

December 22, 2011

First of all, I have a confession to make: for three months I haven’t been doing what I’ve often preached, backups. I have a backup of vital information and documents stored in the cloud, but I’ve been living dangerously for three months or so without a Time Machine backup of my main machine. The old external drive I used for that died around last September, so I went and bought a new one (1 TB, with FireWire 800) planning to split it in two partitions: one, to make a ‘snapshot’ of my Snow Leopard system when I would upgrade to Lion, so that I would be able to boot from it in case of problems with the new cat or for running the occasional application with PPC code. The other, larger, partition would be used for Time Machine backups.

Then I got knee-deep in work and started postponing the backup… until the other day. Every time you have to begin from scratch with Time Machine (and with any other backup program/system) is a bit of a drag because the Mac has to copy all data to the backup drive. And since internal hard drives keep getting bigger, there’s an increasing amount of data to be copied, the majority of which are tiny files, and as any of you will surely have experienced, it takes longer to copy 50,000 2KB files than two 50MB files. Anyway, I was ‘lucky’ enough to only have 1,632,008 files for roughly 180GB of data, and when Time Machine started the process I was told by a little window in the Finder that it would take 5 hours. Since I wanted the Mac to be idle during the process, I started the backup just before going to bed, certain that the morning after all would be fine.

Not so. I had left only three applications running the night before: the Finder, System Preferences and Safari. When I sat again before my Mac, everything except Safari was non-responsive (you Alt-Tab to that application and the cursor becomes a beach ball) and the Time Machine backup was hanging at 86GB copied (still almost 100GB to go). There was no activity from the external drive, so it was clear that the backup wouldn’t go anywhere from there. I had no other choice than to force-reset the Mac, wipe the partial backup and try the process once again, this time while keeping an eye on it. The frustrating thing being, of course, that I couldn’t do any work on the MacBook Pro (luckily there is an abundance of Macs in my studio, so I took the occasion to do some catching up of my RSS feeds on the Power Mac G4 Cube).

After a short while, even this second backup attempt hanged. Perhaps it had something to do with Spotlight, deciding to reindex my whole world while Time Machine was trying to back it up. So: rinse and repeat. Third time’s the charm and finally, finally, 24 hours after the first attempt, I had a successful Time Machine backup. And this over FireWire 800. I don’t even want to imagine doing it on a Time Capsule, wirelessly. Now I’m pretty sure that my next hardware upgrade will involve a Thunderbolt-everywhere kind of policy.

Backing up is right. And wrong.

What happened with my unfortunate Time Machine session is probably an extreme case (or not, you’ll tell me), but while I was babysitting the second and third attempts, half-wasting my time (because I wasn’t completely idle, yet I couldn’t help checking up on the backup process from time to time), I kept thinking about today’s backup culture. And getting angry.

The backup is something sensible and advisable to do on a practical level. There are important data (both personal and work-related) that you simply cannot afford to lose, so what do you do? You duplicate them on another drive, or even on another different medium. This isn’t a new strategy in the computing world, it’s basically as old as computer themselves. I remember visiting the data processing centre of the company my mother used to work for. It was 1986, I think, and they had these huge tape units whirring, constantly backing up essential information. At that time I was beginning to get acquainted with the backup process, and when I started working with Macs in 1989–1990, the agency I was collaborating with had most of its data on Bernoulli cartridges.

The philosophy was simple: you back data up so you end up with at least one more copy and you store it on a supposedly more reliable medium. At the time I remember backing stuff up from floppies to hard drives, and from hard drives to Bernoulli cartridges (or, later, SyQuest cartridges and other magneto-optical media).

And today… we do the same. For the same reasons. Not much has really changed in decades. Today’s storage media may be physically slimmer and hold tens of thousands of times the data a hard drive could hold in the 1980s, but the question of reliability still stands. We distrusts storage media no more no less than 30 years ago. And to protect the integrity of our data we still resort to old practices. In the end, the copying as an act of preservation is a centuries-old practice. But instead of working towards more reliable solutions to store our information (now I’m back in the computing context), we’ve just been perfecting the copy strategy. Which, as I said before, is good and all in practice, but on a theoretical, philosophical level it’s starting to feel wrong to me. It’s like with cars. Today we have wonderful cars: great design, great performance, great optimisation, and surely a 2011 car is safer, better, faster, more comfortable than a 1911 car. Yet what makes it move is basically the same stuff. A 2011 car without petrol is as fast and useful as a 1911 car.

When I see concept videos about future interfaces, when I hear people constantly referring to a multi-touch interaction as it appeared on Minority Report, I’m actually more interested in storage solutions. What really fascinated me in Minority Report were those glass discs people used as a storage medium: they looked so visually pleasing and so reliable. That is something I’d love to be using in ten years or so. We should not, in 2011, be worrying about copying our stuff, redundantly, in many different places to store it securely. I know that it’s easy to do, that devices are cheap, that it can be a fully automated process without the user even noticing, etc. But I think it should be something even more hassle-free. Of course I’m not expecting eternal lifetime from devices, but at least something much more durable. Like audio CDs one bought in 1988 and still play on a 2011 CD player. I’m sure that when you bought them you didn’t think “Oh now I have to do a backup because something might break down in a month and they might lose data in the process”. I just want the same thing for the data I have on my Macs. Enough with this ‘everything’s disposable’ culture. Our personal information simply deserves better, more reliable storage options.

Left behind

December 8, 2011

by Riccardo Mori

Software

I won’t argue with Matt Gemmell: his arguments in favour of supporting only the latest version of iOS are strong and quite understandable if you put yourself in the developers’ shoes for a moment. I’m not a developer myself, but I have enough knowledge to understand what they have to put up with, especially in a fast, ever-updating environment such as iOS.

At the end of his article, Gemmell adds a couple of replies he received via Twitter, which wants to address. In responding to Justin Miller (who tweeted: So you’re saying tens of millions of people should literally throw away their 2+ year old iDevices every year?), Gemmell writes:

At no point did I mention anything about throwing away iOS devices, or that you should be buying new ones every couple of years […].

[…] I didn’t say that, and nor would I — not least because it’s not what I believe. What I did say was that, as a developer, I don’t think you need to support iOS versions other than the current one and maybe the previous one (and by extension, devices that can run those versions). Keep your old devices, running old OS versions and apps, or do whatever you want with them — you just can’t reasonably expect them to be supported once it becomes unduly onerous to do so, with diminishing returns for the effort.

I still have a first-gen iPod touch here, and a couple of iPhone 3Gs. The iPod played the music for Lauren to walk down the aisle to at our wedding last month. My dad uses one of the 3Gs, and my little sister sometimes borrows the other one. They’re still alive and serving a purpose — but I don’t expect your new app to support them.

I don’t expect that either, but what happened to my wife a few months ago is nonetheless understandably frustrating. I described it at length, along with some personal observations, in a previous article — The point of no return. If you don’t want to go back and read it, here’s the relevant part:

My wife Carmen owns a 16 GB, first-generation iPod touch, and as you know it can’t be updated to iOS 4; the maximum firmware version supported is iOS 3.1.3.

The other day something quite annoying happened for the second time. There was an update available for one of the apps she has purchased and installed on her iPod. Along with other app updates, she downloaded it in iTunes. Then, as soon as she connected her iPod, iTunes performed the usual synchronisation process. When it was all over, she disconnected the iPod and went to use that app, which refused to open. After some attempts, we both figured out that the problem was that with the latest update, said app dropped support for iOS 3.x. Having now iOS 4 as a minimum requirement, it obviously can’t work on her iPod anymore.

That app cost her 3.99 Euros, but what really annoys me isn’t just a matter of money. I simply think there’s something wrong with this process.

Since then, that same thing happened with other three apps, and eventually she started using her iPod touch — which is still a perfectly working device — less and less often. This flaw in the update process has created a sense of mistrust and unreliability. And it’s not a fault of iOS developers, mind you, I’m not saying that.

After these unfortunate incidents we stopped investigating the problem. Now she has just given up on apps updates — even non-disruptive updates for applications that still support iOS 3.x. I believe the fault is in iTunes, because attempting to update an app that drops support for iOS 3.x from the device itself returns an error and prevents that potentially disruptive update from happening.

Whatever the culprit, what’s really disappointing is that, when an incident like this happens, there’s no way to retrieve or restore the previous working version of the app, at least to my knowledge. The ideal solution would be inserting a sort of smart download process in iTunes where iTunes detects which iOS device is making the request and serves the appropriate version of the app. In other words, behind the scenes, iTunes would keep the most updated version of an app and the latest version that worked, say, under iOS 3.1.3, so that customers still owning iOS devices now made obsolete could still enjoy a functioning app, being able to restore it in case something goes wrong.

What I use: The essentials

December 3, 2011

by Riccardo Mori

Software

As you grow to be an expert Mac user, you start to rely on a series of handy little utilities, some of them being so useful they really become a fully integrated part of your workflow and user experience. These are usually the first third-party software you install when you’re configuring a new Mac or a second machine. Here is a brief list of utilities I can’t do without, in no particular order of importance. As you will see, most of them are free, but I strongly suggest donating to the developers if you find their app useful.

TextExpander

Price: $34.95

What does it do? — “TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customised abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images.” (product description)

Why do I use it? — For my translation work it’s not uncommon to have to enter the same words or even phrases more than once. With TextExpander I can associate a word, expression, even whole links to an easy-to-memorise keystroke: this saves a lot of time while typing, not to mention the increased spelling accuracy. I have shortcuts for all Apple products with tricky spelling, such as “iPhone”, “iPad”, “iPod touch”, “iTunes”, “iMovie”, etc. When I’m translating tech manuals or tutorials, these words are repeated a lot in the text, and when you have to write iTunes fifty times, sometimes you slip and write “itunes” or “Itunes” or “ITunes”. I have TextExpander autocomplete to iTunes every time I start typing “itu” and voilà, always the correct spelling. This is just a tiny example of the different ways you can use TextExpander. I can’t recommend it enough. $35 well spent indeed.

Dropbox

Price: Free (Basic account)

What does it do? — Dropbox’s sync service is quite well-known by now, but here goes the product description taken from its website: “Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. This means that any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Dropbox also makes it super easy to share with others, whether you’re a student or professional, parent or grandparent.”

Why do I use it? — I’ve been a Dropbox user since the early days. Now you can find many competing cloud services on the Web (some of them offering more space with a free account), but I still prefer Dropbox’s approach. I only have a free 2 GB Dropbox account, but it’s enough for me because I don’t use it for backing up all my files. Rather, I use my Dropbox folder to store essential documents and the most recent projects, so that I can sync them with all my Macs and always have them ready whatever Mac I have with me when I’m on the move. I’ve never had a problem and in a couple of occasions Dropbox even saved the day: since every time you save changes on a file Dropbox saves a version and stores a history of the actions you carried out with the file, I managed to restore a series of accidentally deleted files more than once.

f.lux

Price: Free

What does it do? — “f.lux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. […] f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you’re in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again. Tell f.lux what kind of lighting you have, and where you live. Then forget about it. F.lux will do the rest, automatically.” (product description)

Why do I use it? — Simply put: I use it regularly because it’s been saving my eyes. I wear glasses. I’m shortsighted and astigmatic. I usually stay up late at night in front of my Mac, and since I mostly read and write, I stare at a lot of white pages with black text. Before discovering f.lux, I usually went to bed with very tired eyes. Sometimes I was forced to take long pauses because I simply couldn’t look at the screen continuously. Sometimes I had to give up work completely and go to bed even if I wasn’t really tired, all because my eyes were teary and burning from all that staring and I was also developing a headache. f.lux has made things dramatically better. If you care about your eyes, do yourself a favour and download it. It runs on Mac OS X (with a version for PPC Macs), Windows and Linux.

Hazel

Price: $21.95

What does it do? — From the application website: “Hazel watches whatever folders you tell it to, automatically organizing your files according to the rules you create. It features a rule interface similar to that of Apple Mail so you should feel right at home. Have Hazel move files around based on name, date, type, what site/email address it came from (Safari and Mail only) and much more. Automatically put your music in your Music folder, movies in Movies. Keep your downloads off the desktop and put them where they are supposed to be.”

Why do I use it? — Hazel has many other features than what’s explained in the bit I just quoted. I use it because it does what it does efficiently and reliably. I mainly use it to keep my Downloads folder tidy. It’s my stealthy sorting office. I have created rules to send downloaded files in different folders according to their extension: ZIPs go in a folder, DMGs in another, PDFs in another, you get the idea. The beauty of Hazel is that once configured properly, it basically disappears, working behind the scenes. No Dock icon, no menubar icon, just a preference pane. Another piece of software that’s worth every penny. Highly recommended.

MenuMeters

Price: Free

What does it do? — From the application website: “MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X. […] The CPU Meter can display system load both as a total percentage, or broken out as user and system time. It can also graph user and system load and display the load as a “thermometer”. […] The Disk Activity Meter displays disk activity to local disks on the system. […] It is hotplug aware, and will show activity on FireWire and USB disks as they are mounted. The Disk Meter menu shows volume space details for local drives […]. The Memory Meter can display current memory usage as either a pie chart, thermometer, history graph, or as used/free totals. The Memory Meter menu shows a breakdown of current memory usage and VM statistics. The Memory Meter can optionally display a paging indicator light. The Net Meter can display network throughput as arrows, bytes per second, and/or as a graph. […] The Net Meter menu shows current interfaces and their status. Interface information is gathered from the SystemConfiguration framework and thus is Mac OS X network location aware.”

Why do I use it? — I discovered MenuMeters when Mac OS X 10.4 was the latest version of OS X and I’ve been using it ever since. There are probably more sophisticated monitoring tools out there, but I’ve never had the urge to look for something else when MenuMeters does its job pretty well. I’m not one of those control freaks who need to monitor all the information a tool such MenuMeters can provide, all the time. I use MenuMeters mostly for monitoring the network status. It’s the best, most immediate indicator of problems with my network connection and it gives me reliable information on upload/download speeds. It’s probably the first piece of third party software I install after a clean installation on a newly acquired Mac that’s capable of running Mac OS X.

Choosy

Price: $12

What does it do? — The developer explains it better than I could: “Say you get emailed a link to a great website, you want to open the link but you may not always want to use the same browser. That’s where Choosy comes in: It can prompt you to select a browser or choose a browser for you, all based on your settings. It’s highly customisable and easy to use. You can tell which browser you want to use and which ones to ignore, you can customise what it does in different situations, you can customise the appearance and you can even set up advanced behaviour rules to do very specific things in very specific circumstances.”

Why do I use it? — Those who know me well, know that I like to try many different browsers, and I reached a point where I was using a dozen of them. Sometimes I wanted a link not to open in Safari (which has always been the default browser on my Macs), and I was getting tired of opening the link in Safari, copying it and pasting it in another browser I was testing (or right-clicking the link, copying/pasting it, etc.). Choosy has addressed my needs in this matter with surgical precision. Even now that I use fewer browsers (Safari, Chrome, Stainless and Camino — sometimes Opera, but nothing more), Choosy is still quite useful. For instance, when I suspect that a link will bring me to a website with Flash content, I tell Choosy to open the link in Chrome (I’ve removed the Flash plugin from my Macs, leaving only the built-in plugin in Chrome). I make a very basic use of Choosy, but I’m really satisfied with it. If you use more than one browser on a regular basis, I suggest you give it a try.

Notational Velocity

Price: Free

What does it do? — “Notational Velocity is an application that stores and retrieves notes.” This is how its website introduces it, but there’s so much more behind its apparent simplicity: real simplicity. Among its unique characteristics: instant incremental search, all content encrypted automatically, auto saving (way before it was such a hyped feature in Lion), native synchronisation with Simplenote, or via files in Dropbox with PlainText, Elements, iA Writer, and other iOS apps.

Why do I use it? — Short answer: it’s my digital synchronised scrapbook and keeps all my notes everywhere I go, no matter what device I’m using at the moment. Long answer: Synchronised writing.

The Unarchiver

Price: Free

What does it do? — From the application website: “The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for ‘Archive Utility.app’, the built-in archive unpacker program on Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than Archive Utility, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems.”

Why do I use it? — Simply because it’s an excellent tool. Let me go out on a limb here and say it’s the best tool of its kind. Another utility I’ve been using for a long time, it has opened any compressed archive I’ve thrown at it, even in outdated formats such as Compact Pro, DiskDoubler and ARJ. It has opened SIT archives when even StuffIt Expander (or Deluxe) failed. It has opened ZIP archives even when Mac OS X’s Archive Utility told me they were ‘probably corrupted’. Same with RAR files. Just download and install it, use it as your default unarchiving application, you won’t regret it. And donate to the developer.

TidBITS Opinion: Let’s Stop with the Siri Baiting

December 1, 2011

by Riccardo Mori

Handpicked

Source: TidBITS Opinion: Let’s Stop with the Siri Baiting

Adam Engst:

This is actually a serious issue in one respect, since it shows just how important technology has become in shaping our impressions of the world around us. And that in turn points to how essential it is that we continue to scrutinize how well search-related technologies work and remain aware of those technologies’ inescapable limitations. Just as you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, you shouldn’t believe everything Siri tells you.

[…]

So can we stop pretending that Siri is anything more than ELIZA’s chatterbot daughter? Siri can be useful, and is a whole lot of fun to demo, but it’s unreasonable to read anything more — certainly not Apple corporate policy — into Siri’s successes, failures, and little asides. Heck, we can’t even get Apple PR to say what Apple policy is most of the time. At least Siri always responds to our questions.

Siamo tutti bravi

November 30, 2011

by Riccardo Mori

Mele e appunti

Sto notando sempre più di frequente sul Web una tendenza che non mi piace per niente: quella della critica facile, veloce, a buon mercato e, se possibile, condensata in una frase. Non mi riferisco al breve sfogo occasionale diretto a questa o quella applicazione perché l’arrivo di una nuova funzione (o l’eliminazione di una vecchia) ci frustra, ci guasta il flusso di lavoro, ci scompagina abitudini fossilizzate. E non mi riferisco nemmeno all’attacco alla persona quando si dovrebbe invece rispondere a quel che la persona afferma, al suo pensiero, alla sua analisi (anche questo mi infastidisce grandemente, ma temo sia ormai una battaglia persa).

Mi riferisco al liquidare il lavoro altrui in quattro parole, in un commento magari condito con quel pizzico di acidità per fare il figurone con la propria cerchia di conoscenze (online e offline). È ancor più irritante quando la critica è rivolta a un prodotto che nemmeno si è provato, o che si è provato per un intervallo di tempo assurdamente breve. Intendiamoci: capita di imbattersi in quell’applicazione, servizio, dispositivo che sappiamo da subito non ci sarà utile. Purtroppo, dalla preferenza personale al sentenziare che l’oggetto in questione è inutile, sarà un flop, è progettato da schifo, il passo è sempre più breve. Ultimamente pare che sul Web tutti diventano ingegneri, designer, progettisti, tipografi, sviluppatori e — soprattutto — punti di riferimento del buon gusto dall’oggi al domani, nel giro di un post o di un tweet. Mi stupisco che non si viva già in un mondo migliore, vista la quantità di gente così in gamba nel giudicare in un istante quel che è buono e ciò che va scartato.

Che ha stimolato la scrittura di questo mio intervento è stata la lettura di un articolo nel blog di Shifty Jelly una piccolissima impresa di sviluppatori iOS e Android australiani. Nell’articolo, intitolato Voi siete dei milionari, vero? (You Guys Are Millionaires, Right?), gli sviluppatori raccontano molto apertamente di quanto sia dura la realtà quotidiana di chi decide di fare lo sviluppatore indipendente, spiegando che in un ambiente così competitivo come l’attuale piattaforma mobile in realtà gli sviluppatori che incassano guadagni strepitosi sono pochi. Se ve la cavate con l’inglese, leggetevi tutto l’articolo. I due frammenti che mi interessa estrapolare sono questi:

A ogni prodotto che creiamo dedichiamo tantissimo lavoro (e ci mettiamo tante delle nostre energie). A volte troviamo persone che lo deridono, o che lo considerano indegno di attenzione dopo averlo utilizzato per 13,2 secondi. Poi ci dicono di non prendercela, di non considerarlo un fatto personale. Facile a dirsi. Quando si investono sei mesi della propria vita, giorno e notte, nella creazione di un prodotto, col cavolo che non si prendono sul personale i commenti altrui.

E, poco più sotto:

E lasciamo perdere le estenuanti discussioni che di tanto in tanto saltano fuori con le persone se debbano o meno acquistare un’applicazione da 1,99 dollari. La gente passa ore e ore a ponderare l’acquisto di un’applicazione da 2 dollari, passando in rassegna le varie recensioni, scrivendo un’email allo sviluppatore, controllando i vari forum online. La stessa gente che poi entra in una caffetteria in cui non è mai stata prima e ordina un caffè da 4 dollari. Dallo sviluppatore si aspettano supporto e aggiornamenti gratuiti illimitati. Dalla caffetteria non si aspettano niente se non un caffè mediocre.

Un altro caso recente è l’annuncio di Little Printer da parte di Berg, una società di consulenza di design che ha pensato di creare una microstampante wireless pensata per connettersi alla nuvola ed essere comandata da uno smartphone. L’idea è quella di utilizzarla per stamparsi dei piccoli promemoria, o una scelta di notizie, o passatempi, o qualsiasi altra micropubblicazione e portarsi queste informazioni in tasca. Quando la notizia ha cominciato a diffondersi, si è subito creato un chiacchiericcio sgradevole in Twitter e altrove, con interventi lapidari come “Inutile”, “Che idea stupida”, “Tornare alla carta, bella idiozia”, “Ma questi dove vivono?” e altri commenti sarcastici. Ovviamente senza nemmeno aver provato il prodotto. Tanto basta vedere un minuto del video di due minuti realizzato per presentare Little Printer per capire che è una boiata, no?

Beh, no. L’idea può non piacere. L’oggetto potrebbe essere l’ultima cosa a entrare in casa nostra. Per alcuni certamente non servirà a nulla. Diamogli ugualmente una possibilità. Rispettiamo il lavoro altrui. Dietro quella stampantina c’è il lavoro di persone che hanno investito tempo, denaro e si spera passione per cercare di produrre qualcosa di simpatico e originale.

In troppi blog leggo un atteggiamento di superiorità nell’appioppare critiche (e qui dico in generale, non della Little Printer in particolare), a volte pare perfino per il solo gusto di poter dire Ve l’avevo detto se alla fine un certo prodotto non ha successo.

Criticare va benissimo, per carità, ma che la critica sia informata, ponderata, costruttiva. Lo sprezzo concentrato in quattro parole, a mio avviso, dice molto più del critico di turno che non del prodotto criticato.

Chiudo con un piccolo aneddoto: ho di recente acquistato Portal 2 dopo essere stato positivamente (e inaspettatamente) colpito dal primo Portal. Ho trovato questo sequel per molti versi più godibile e coinvolgente del primo episodio. Tuttavia l’altro giorno ho raggiunto un punto del gioco in cui mi sono un po’ arenato in una situazione che pareva irrisolvibile, e nell’universo di Portal, in cui si procede per stanze dove occorre ingegnarsi per trovare un modo per raggiungere l’uscita, una tale situazione di stallo rendeva tutta l’esperienza decisamente frustrante. Poi ne sono uscito, ma con la sensazione che il gioco si era fatto più lungo del dovuto, tanto più che mi è scappato il tweet di sfogo, dove dicevo più o meno così: “Se il primo Portal mi è apparso più corto di quel che avrebbe dovuto essere, Portal 2 mi sembra molto più lungo di quel che dovrebbe essere”. Fare queste valutazioni di impulso è molto facile, così come è facile mettersi a fare il game designer da poltrona e pontificare Io avrei fatto così, avrei eliminato questo e inserito quest’altro, ecc.

Ultimato il gioco, ho deciso di acquistare anche The Final Hours of Portal 2, una sorta di libro elettronico interattivo che, nello stile dei contenuti extra dei film in DVD e Blu-Ray, spiega i retroscena e racconta del lavoro dei programmatori e designer di Valve, delle difficoltà che hanno incontrato nell’ideazione di una storia e di una dinamica di gioco che potessero reggere il successo del predecessore e diventare a sua volta un successo ancora maggiore. Leggere questi dettagli e ascoltare i commenti audio inseriti come extra nel gioco, in cui gli sviluppatori spiegano come hanno affrontato i vari ostacoli e risolto problematiche all’apparenza insignificanti, è stato illuminante. Ritengo che questa pratica dell’illustrare il processo di realizzazione di un prodotto sia davvero ottima e utile. Troppo spesso infatti si critica qualcosa senza avere la benché minima idea di come si è arrivati a costruire quel qualcosa. E, dall’altra parte, le persone che costruiscono per davvero devono tenere sempre in considerazione questo tipo di critiche facili e taglienti e creare prodotti che passino il test della ‘prima impressione’. Una cosa che, nell’era della gratificazione istantanea, si fa sempre più complessa.