A step forward, in some direction

October 29, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

The only thing Steve Jobs was visibly not excited to present at a keynote was probably the Motorola ROKR phone. The man surely knew how to make his enthusiasm contagious every time he introduced a new Apple product. His keynotes were famously full of amazing, awesome, fantastic and other superlatives. He was a great salesman, and one of the main factors that made him such a great salesman was that he was genuinely enthusiastic and proud of the products. Often it felt as if he couldn’t wait to get back to his office and enjoy the hell out of that new iMac, or PowerBook, or MacBook Air, iPhone, iPad.

At yesterday’s ‘Hello Again’ Apple Special Event, conversely, Tim Cook sounded distracted, stumbled a couple of times while delivering his part of the speech, and his amazing and other superlatives felt like something read from a script. I didn’t like the event much because — and this is certainly a personal impression — there was an air of Guys, we promised there would be a Mac event, so let’s get on with it. Apart from a few sparks (Phil Schiller, always eager on stage and a competent presenter; Craig Federighi and his humour; Bradee Evans from Adobe, refreshingly witty and funny; Susan Prescott VP of Apps Product Marketing, effervescent as usual), there certainly wasn’t the same excitement we saw in September at the iPhone/iOS 10 event. Which is weird, in a way, because the MacBook Pro line has been finally redesigned after years. Yesterday was the time to be proud, to be excited.

Anyway.

As a technology observer and enthusiast, I like the new MacBook Pros a lot. I haven’t seen them in person yet, of course, but still, the design is yet another iteration towards Apple’s idea of notebook quintessence, and even in photos and watching Federighi using one on stage, these new MacBook Pros look even sturdier than the previous ones. The trackpad is generously spacious. The displays are better and brighter and have more colours. The new port configuration — four Thunderbolt 3 ports, one headphone jack — is bold in its removal of basically all legacy ports, and positively forward-looking. Thunderbolt 3 is fast and powerful — it provides 40Gb/s bandwidth and supports 10Gb/s USB 3.1 Gen 2 and DisplayPort 1.2. The new Touch Bar seems to be well thought-out overall, and less gimmicky than I thought it would be.

At the same time, I’m getting tired of this obsession with lighter/thinner at each design iteration. Professionals are more interested in sheer performance, in machines that can be upgraded and expanded down the road. Why can’t Apple leave the light & thin to the consumer line of notebooks, and offer pro notebooks that follow a more ‘function over form’ approach? What once was a clear distinction between ‘consumer’ and ‘pro’ machine, has now become something more like ‘regular’ versus ‘deluxe’ machines. Nowadays, a professional computer shouldn’t be constrained by a maximum of 16 GB of RAM. I know a few people who are barely comfortable with 32. Considering the non-trivial investment when you purchase one at its maximum tech specs, these MacBook Pros are supposed to last a few years. Good luck having only 16 GB of RAM in 2020 — or even a year from now, for that matter.

A few additional observations, in no particular order:

1. Admittedly, when I saw that the new MacBook Pros only have four USB-C-type Thunderbolt 3 ports, I felt annoyed and frustrated. The first thought was Oh dear, if I upgrade I’ll need an adapter for everything. Today, after rewatching a few bits of the event, I’m more open to Apple’s perspective here. As Schiller reminded on stage, this is the fastest, more versatile I/O configuration ever featured on a MacBook Pro. Any of the four ports can be used to charge the MacBook Pro, which is handy considering the twists and turns the power cable has to make in my office to reach the left side of my MacBook Pro. Further, any of the ports can be used to provide these connections:

Connections

It’s a flexible solution because if, for example, you have two ports in use as USB connections, and you need to attach an additional USB peripheral, now you can do so instead of being limited to just 2 physical USB ports and having to free one in order to connect the new peripheral.

2. On the other hand, if I purchase one of these new MacBook Pros, I will really have to purchase a bunch of different adapters if I want to maintain my current setup when I use the MacBook Pro in my home office. And since that involves having permanently connected an external monitor and an external USB keyboard, it means that my new MacBook Pro would already ‘lose’ two ports when in desktop configuration. Given that I usually also keep the Mac connected to the power, I would end up with just one free port. This in turn means that I should either look for some kind of powered USB‑C hub or a decent wireless keyboard. Additional costs I have to incur on top of the already expensive purchase a new MacBook Pro would represent (more on this later).

3. Speaking of ports, I firmly believe that leaving the MagSafe connector behind is a poor decision on Apple’s part. Having MagSafe and four Thunderbolt 3 ports would have been quite amazing. It’s true, now you can connect the power adapter to any port you want, but we’re suddenly thrown back to the era of non-magnetic power cable connections — which means: careful not to trip over it or get it tangled up with something and see your very expensive new MacBook Pro get dragged to the floor. This is a step back, pure and simple.

4. I had feared that the Touch Bar would be a gimmicky addition, introduced more to impress than to be truly useful, but after watching the various demos at the event, I really think it’s a smart and versatile feature. I especially like how not only does it change according to the app you’re using, but that it may provide different functionalities within the same app, even becoming a secondary controller/input device, as the various demos at the event demonstrated (I particularly liked the PhotoShop demo). That’s why I think it’s a pity the Touch Bar isn’t taller like a row of regular keys. It would be even more useful and comfortable to use.

The only concern I have regarding the Touch Bar is of a practical nature: its usefulness would be reduced when using the MacBook Pro in a desktop setup with an external display and an external keyboard. There are some who keep their MacBooks front and centre, then place the external display behind and in a raised position, so that it basically extends the Mac’s desktop vertically. With the new MacBook Pro, these people can take advantage of its larger trackpad and the Touch Bar. But I can’t use a laptop this way on my desk. I need to have the external display and keyboard/mouse in front of me, and to keep the MacBook Pro on my right and at an angle. Not to mention those who keep the MacBook Pro’s lid closed when used in desktop configuration.

Some have said that Apple should release a new Touch Bar-enabled Magic Keyboard; it would be an intriguing solution, but it makes me wonder. Such a keyboard would provide the Touch Bar functionality even to Macs that don’t come equipped with it. Now, the Touch Bar seems to be one of the distinctive, selling points of the new MacBook Pro line. Are we sure Apple wants to give other Macs (even older Macs) that unique feature that makes a new MacBook Pro so alluring?

(By the way, I think Apple should do just that, actually. The Touch Bar is a useful addition and enables additional gestures and shortcuts that ought to be available on all Macs, as a way to unify the user interface. I really hope we won’t have something resembling the fragmentation of 3D Touch on iOS devices, which is only available on some of them.)

5. The new MacBook Pro’s keyboard, while sharing the same butterfly mechanism as the 12-inch MacBook’s (which I hate wholeheartedly) appears slightly different. Since the MacBook Pro is thicker than the MacBook, it seems that the keys may have a bit more travel. That, if true, would make this keyboard way more tolerable for me. The new arrow keys layout, sadly, remains a harder pill to swallow. The old ‘Inverted T’ layout was so much better.

6. Along with the new 13 and 15-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pros, Apple has introduced a third MacBook Pro: a less powerful 13-inch model without Touch Bar (it has a standard keyboard with the row of function keys), with only two Thunderbolt 3 ports. I call it the NFNF model, where NFNF stands for Neither Fish Nor Flesh. It’s a weird addition that simultaneously makes and doesn’t make sense to me. On the one hand, it can be a solution for those who aren’t interested in the Touch Bar, don’t need the power of the high-end MacBook Pros, and want a slightly more affordable and up-to-date machine. On the other, the 13-inch MacBook Air is a good contender for those who want an even more affordable machine with more battery life, don’t mind the non-retina display, and want more ports (the 13-inch Air has MagSafe 2, two regular USB 3 ports, one regular Thunderbolt 2 port, an SDXC card slot, and a headphone port). 

Note also that once you start customising the non-Touch-Bar MacBook Pro, it rapidly gets expensive to a point that you just start considering the Touch Bar-equipped models. The way Schiller put up the comparison between this base MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air sounded like: Yeah, we’re still offering the Air, but why would you buy that lemon? This MacBook Pro is so much cooler. And where I live, my friend, it is also €600 more expensive than the base MacBook Air and €350 more expensive than the MacBook Air with the better storage option. Having a retina display is great and all, but those who choose the Air typically choose it because they’re on a rather tight budget.

7. Speaking of purchases and BTO customisations… These new MacBook Pros are arrestingly expensive, especially outside the USA. The base model, priced at $1,499, becomes €1,699 in my country. The configuration I’m most interested in — 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, but with a faster i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of SSD storage — would end up costing €2,799. This is both expensive and not cost-effective if you consider that the base 15-inch MacBook Pro already comes with an i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM, and costs €2,699. Sure, it has a 256 GB SSD, but I’ll take the bigger display — and a better graphics card — over storage anytime.

But again, look at those prices! Back in 2009, my 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo 15-inch MacBook Pro, with 4 GB RAM and a 320 GB hard drive, cost me about €1,680. Over time I bought a more spacious 500 GB hard drive (+€80), then I upgraded the RAM to 8 GB (+€65), and finally got an OWC Data Doubler with a 240 GB SSD (+€110). The investment has then been a total of about €1,935. A similar MacBook Pro with today’s technology would cost me €2,699. Or €2,939 if I want a 512 GB SSD. Or €3,419 if I want a 1 TB SSD. Much, much more for a machine that is not as internally expandable, and that consequently forces me to decide (and pay) all the upgrades upfront.

As a prospective customer, as you can imagine, these new MacBook Pros pose indeed a few dilemmas for me. I don’t upgrade Macs frequently so, to make my setup as much future-proof as possible, I should choose higher-specced models, which I cannot afford at the moment. At the same time, investing money in a lesser MacBook Pro (or even in the 13-inch MacBook Air) seems like a waste, a bad move. I mentioned the 13-inch Air because — if I stop and consider my essential needs — it’s a machine that could theoretically serve me well. But purchasing one now increasingly feels like throwing money at something that’s going to get old very fast. I have waited and waited to make an upgrade, the least I can do is invest in better Macs. Similarly, I could accept the compromise and get the entry-level (lots of air quotes here) MacBook Pro, but two Thunderbolt 3 ports and nothing else is simply not enough. I could even wait some more and see what happens when Apple decides to update the Mac desktop line. I just hope the Mac mini won’t be discontinued or stupidly crippled like it happened with the 2014 update. All in all, I’m a bit nostalgic for those times when the Mac laptop line was less crowded, had a clearer distinction spec-wise, more expandability after purchase, fewer configurations and clearer pricing tiers.

8. For all the talk about ‘courage’ when it came to dropping the headphone port in the iPhone 7, Apple seems more of a ‘coward’ when it comes to the Mac notebook line. It remains a mess of models, prices, options. Apple might see this as giving customers more choices overall, but I don’t understand why they’re keeping the previous retina MacBook Pros around. And, philosophically, I don’t understand the new MacBook Pro without Touch Bar. These look like decisions of a committee, where some executives say “We have to push forward, the Touch Bar is awesome!”, while others say “Yes, but what if people are not convinced? We should offer a ‘regular’ MacBook Pro too, just to be safe”. I hate to be the Steve would have done things differently kind of guy, but here’s what I think Steve would have done:

  • Drop the MacBook Air line entirely.
  • Drop the prices of the current MacBook, making it become the more affordable option. Or introducing a cheaper, base $999 MacBook, to the same effect.
  • Introduce the new 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pros with Touch Bar as the sole two new models. No Touch-Bar-less MacBook Pro.
  • Discontinue the previous retina MacBook Pro models.

Leaving us with a 12-inch MacBook, and 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pros. Just three models (each with BTO options, naturally). That’s it. You know, the classic no-nonsense, thinking-forward Steve Jobs.

On a final note, I very much agree with Joe Cieplinski’s piece Taking the Enthusiasm out of Tech. I felt a lot of negativity on Twitter before, during, and after the Special Event. Part of this negativity was unwarranted. I admit I, too, made the occasional snarky or sarcastic comment, but I always approach my livetweeting with a mostly playful spirit. Really, there’s a lot to like in these new MacBook Pros if we just keep our focus on the hardware itself, and I don’t think Apple has abandoned the Mac desktop line just because they didn’t redesign and refresh the entire Mac arsenal and presented an all-encompassing update yesterday. At the same time, and despite the enthusiastic remarks about the Mac made by Apple’s executives, Apple still feels somewhat unfocused and indecisive to me. Things weren’t always perfect when Steve Jobs was at the helm, and there was the occasional blunder for sure, but the feeling I had as a Mac user was to not worry because, no matter how things might have looked at first, there was a ‘man with a plan’ in the building. Now I feel trepidation more than sheer excitement before every Apple event.

I’m still with the Mac, unfashionably

October 18, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

I still love the Mac. Judging by the tech sites and blogs I usually read, I seem to be in the minority as of late. There are tech guys who have managed to mostly or exclusively use iOS for work and leisure, and seem awfully proud of it. I was not aware that there was a competition, though, and I’m not quite sure what they have ‘won’ — and what I have ‘lost’.

There are people who got a Mac only recently, just when iOS started getting real traction, and these folks evidently found iOS easier to deal with, they had no real computer preferences or habits deeply ingrained, and jumped on the iOS bandwagon because probably it was a better fit for whatever their workflow is, or because the touch interface has some subliminal ‘instant gratification’ factor that makes using Mac OS X appear ‘difficult’.

Then there are those — as I observed previously — who seem to put the Mac in a bad light just to reinforce how great a decision they have made in leaving it behind to go all-in with iOS. And then there are those long-time Mac users who both use iOS and Mac OS X proficiently, who are quite comfortable with both platforms, recognising each platform’s strengths and drawbacks, but still feel the need to write how, when travelling, their iOS device is essential, and the Mac is the ‘add-on’.

And then again there’s the inevitable commentary on how the Mac is neglected — sloppy software, eternally-awaited hardware updates on the horizon (hopefully, and hopefully they’re going to be significant, and hopefully Apple won’t screw things up after all this wait, etc.). The increasingly frequent remarks on how iOS is ‘the future’ — oh, the hardware is so portable and powerful, and the software… the software, well, it still has a few things it needs to get right… and the iPad, well, Apple should really issue a proper iPad-customised iOS to take advantage of all the ‘pro’ stuff you can do on an iPad Pro, but all in all it’s just so great and it’s the future so it must be better, etc. While the Mac, well, the Mac — haha — is the Cinderella of the household, it’s on its way out, it’s today’s Apple II to iOS’s Macintosh. It’s on borrowed time.

If you don’t know my writings, and where I come from, you may think at this point that I’m an iOS hater. Absolutely not. I’ve been using iOS devices since 2008 and currently, even though they aren’t the latest and greatest, I own an iPhone and an iPad, and use them a lot during the day. I enjoy iOS a lot. And I enjoy the Mac a lot. I’m not an iOS hater, but I am fed up with this recent silly trend of bashing the Mac, whether blatantly or subtly. I feel an air of ‘Mac OS versus iOS’ in the debate that I truly dislike. And I still don’t understand why, for some, there has to be a winner between the two. For some it seems that the Mac has now exhausted its possibilities, that it’s time for it to step aside and make way for iOS the whizz-kid. To some, using both platforms and taking advantage of their respective strengths seems unfathomable. The propaganda of the iOS-lovers doesn’t worry me because I’m afraid of what will happen to my preferred platform; it worries me because every now and then regular, non-geek people fall for it, try to go iOS-only too, and things don’t always turn out as anticipated.

(I’ve already talked about all this by the way, in less sarcastic and exasperated tones, when I wrote The Mac is just as compelling).

Apple, too, is worrying me. These delays in Mac hardware updates, which kind of delays are they? Are they the Wait and see what we’ve been working on all these months delays, or are they the Our focus is almost exclusively on our hottest products and the Mac is becoming a hobby delays? Or somewhere in between? The impression I have, as of late, is that Apple has really too much on its plate, and can’t keep up with everything. Take this oft-quoted bit from Steve Jobs: 

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

I may be wrong, but I don’t feel this still reflects Apple’s approach. There’s an air of more is more in what Apple is doing today. Instead of saying no to the hundred other good ideas, Apple’s attitude seems more like Eh, no need to be so hasty with that ‘No’ — let’s keep our options open. And when Apple actually says no to something (the headphone port in the iPhone 7), it feels both like saying no for the sake of saying no, and an unpopular choice.

Back to the Mac: I’m anxiously waiting for new Macs also because I think they may represent — now more than ever — how much Apple itself still believes in the Mac, how much the Mac still means to Apple. As for the software, if I may, it’s time to rethink that yearly update cycle. Having a mandatory new version of Mac OS X every year is not necessarily the best way to show you’re still caring, Apple. This self-imposed yearly update cycle makes less and less sense as time goes by. Mac OS X is a mature operating system and should be treated as such. The focus should be on making Mac OS X even more robust and reliable, so that Mac users can update to the next version with the same relative peace of mind as when a new iOS version comes out. Mac OS X updates should be more in tune with the hardware and its slower update cycle. 

Instead of thinking about new features to add every year to make OS X interesting (features which may end up breaking stuff that previously worked, which in turn becomes another problem to fix in subsequent minor updates), why not embrace the slower pace and take some time to fix what’s broken even if it’s not an exciting feature in and of itself? This of course doesn’t mean there’s no more room for innovation or new features in OS X, only that OS X doesn’t need to be handled like iOS. iOS has enough engineers and internal resources to get to the yearly update in good shape. OS X struggles in comparison. Then software quality suffers, and then of course people think it’s all about iOS and the Mac is the old, neglected platform that has little more to offer. Compare this with the long, steady flow of Mac OS X minor updates in the Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard era. Six years (2005–2011), only three major versions, those that are usually considered the most robust, by the way.

The Mac is still a relevant, versatile environment. It doesn’t deserve the bad light it’s been put into lately. I could have written this piece sitting (uncomfortably) in a coffee shop, on my iPad connected to my Apple Wireless Keyboard and propped up by the well-designed Incase Origami Workstation. I could have written it in iA Writer and then passed it to WordPress. But I would have felt quite limited by the 9.7‑inch screen, by the mixture of keyboard/touch interaction with the device and its apps. And since while writing it I would have needed to check on other things, like I’m doing now, on the iPad it would have been a constant switching from app to app (and thankfully since iOS 9 you can do that like on the Mac, by hitting Command-Tab). But I wrote it on my Mac, in MarsEdit, with a big editor window open and a rather big preview window set up side by side — all this on the external 24-inch display connected to the MacBook Pro, while having Twitter and Safari open on the main MacBook Pro display. And writing on a full-size keyboard. At my desk. In a comfortable position. What can I say? I have done previous tech survival experiments, but the Mac is still the only platform that doesn’t make me feel limited.

Coda

Am I bashing iOS in return? No. Again, read my previous The Mac is just as compelling, or at least the “Final observations” section. I’m as heavy an iOS user as I am a Mac user. Both platforms have their conveniences and uses. I can’t wait to be able to upgrade to a 12.9‑inch iPad Pro, as I’m sure I would be able to do more when out and about than what I’m doing now with my good old third-generation iPad. I also agree that iOS has now a series of desktop-class apps. I’m not disputing iOS’s value or importance. I’m simply annoyed by this The Mac is not relevant anymore attitude, which I find defeatist, questionable, and misguided. This idea that the Mac represents the past burdens you have to get rid of in order to achieve the iOS-only nirvana. That things have to be moving sequentially (progress is going from the Mac to iOS, is iOS ultimately replacing Mac OS) instead of in parallel (both Mac OS and iOS can evolve concurrently, and everyone’s happy). 

iOS-only is a choice, a particular setup that works, and works well, for some people; it’s not an achievement in the gaming sense of the term. These people are certainly tech-savvy users whose job — luckily for them — allows them to streamline their hardware setup to the point that a Mac (or any other traditional computer) isn’t needed anymore. But then some of these people make this assumption: Since I don’t need a computer anymore, and can work with just my iPhone and iPad, lots of other people can do the same, and we can all leave computers behind. Sorry, tech pundit, but we’re not there yet.

3 iOS apps I’m liking: AdBlock, Feed Hawk, Argent Film Simulation

October 5, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Software

AdBlock

iOS 9 saw the introduction of content blockers for Safari. They’re excellent at speeding up navigation, reducing websites’ clutter, and helping you save some battery life on your devices. At least, that’s what I’m told. I’ve never been able to take advantage of this feature because my devices, an iPhone 5 and iPad 3, have a 32-bit CPU architecture, and content blockers only work on 64-bit iOS devices. I’ve always found this limitation quite irritating because — as I often stated — this is the kind of feature that would be especially helpful on older devices. A lot of today’s websites are so littered with ads and all kinds of unrelated, superfluous content that loading them becomes unnecessarily cumbersome and resource- and battery-draining. On older devices the issue is exacerbated: my iPad 3, which is still a good performer overall, becomes very sluggish on certain ad-heavy websites. Swiping up and down while the site is still loading is sometimes a painful spectacle to behold — the browser struggles, and every now and then even freezes, until all content is loaded.

So I’ve been wondering whether there might be an app featuring some workaround that would allow even older 32-bit devices to block some content. Thanks to the ever-useful AppShopper, I found AdBlock, which appears to do just the trick. As explained in the FAQ of the app’s website:

AdBlock for iOS uses the VPN OnDemand feature. It installs a “dummy VPN” profile with a list of domains. The list of domains is controlled using the app. Every time some app tries to communicate with one of the blacklisted domains, it will automatically trigger a connection with the “dummy VPN” server (which is not a working VPN). This makes the connection impossible and results in ad being blocked in all kinds of apps.

One neat consequence of this is that AdBlock doesn’t block ads only inside browsers, but also in other apps that may display ads served over the Internet. On the flip side, if you navigate to a site serving ads through its own servers, AdBlock won’t work. (You may want to check out Weblock for that, from the same developer. See the difference between Weblock and AdBlock explained on this page.)

There is an important bit of information on the app’s website and App Store description:

Due to a confirmed bug in iOS 9.3 — 9.3.5, AdBlock can cause some websites to freeze when loading. Apple fixed the bug in iOS 10. Please update to iOS 10 to resolve this problem. Unfortunately this cannot be fixed with an app update (it’s a bug in iOS, not in AdBlock app).

I’ve been using AdBlock for a week now, and haven’t found any issues so far. Sites like iMore and Macworld load faster and ad-free, my iPad 3 feels more responsive, and the battery life improvement isn’t just marketing, it’s noticeable, at least in my experience. Once you enable AdBlock, you may notice that the progress bar in Safari doesn’t go from 0 to 100% — that’s because technically the website-with-ads isn’t fully loaded. Only the good stuff is loaded. At least, that’s what I’ve deduced.

AdBlock is $1.99 on the App Store

Feed Hawk

Until recently, there wasn’t a simple, direct way to add a website’s RSS feed to your RSS reader of choice if you wanted to subscribe. Feed Hawk by John Brayton of Golden Hill Software is the missing piece of the puzzle. The app description in the App Store really says everything you need to know: 

From within Safari, simply open a share sheet and tap Feed Hawk. Feed Hawk will find the feed for the site and subscribe to it. If the site has multiple feeds, Feed Hawk will allow you to specify the feeds to which you wish to subscribe. 

The Feed Hawk extension works inside most browsers including Safari, Safari View Controllers, Google Chrome, and Marcato.

It works with the following feed services: BazQux Reader, Feed Wrangler, Feedbin, FeedHQ, Fever (self-hosted), Inoreader, Minimal Reader, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, tt-rss (self-hosted).

The developer kindly reached out to me via email and offered me a code to try out Feed Hawk. If I’m talking about Feed Hawk here is not because I simply felt it was the polite thing to do. If I don’t like your app, you can send me all the codes (and sometimes even pre-packaged PR material) you want — you won’t get a mention from me. But Feed Hawk works as intended and does the job well, so I’m spreading the word. The feed service I primarily use is Feedly, which sadly is not supported, but I also have an account with Inoreader, so I tried Feed Hawk with that service and everything was fine. If you use iOS as your primary platform, you want as little friction as possible in your workflow. With Feed Hawk you can add a website to your feeds with a couple of taps. So purchase it already. It has a cool icon, too. 

Feed Hawk is $2.99 on the App Store

Argent Film Simulation

This is my most recent discovery, and you won’t believe what I did to find this app: I launched the App Store and initiated a search for “film simulation”. And things worked like they should. Argent Film Simulation was the top result, and got me intrigued. I searched for “film simulation” because I wanted to see if there was some kind of professional photo app that offered a wide array of faithful film renditions and a bit more versatility than the mostly automatic iPhone camera approach. 

The good news: Argent Film Simulation appears to be that app. The somewhat bad news: the user interface isn’t immediately intuitive, and can get busy. The good news again: the companion website explains the interface clearly and in detail. All it takes is a bit of patience — once you figure out the various controls, the app becomes more intuitive and rewards you with good photographic results. Let me say that again: if you want a photo app with cool filters for your Instagram-driven instant gratification, the App Store has plenty of those. You probably already have plenty of those. Argent Film Simulation is more aimed at the photo enthusiast (or professional) who likes to tinker with manual settings. It has a high degree of customisation and flexibility. Sure, you could leave everything set to automatic and then apply the film presets, but the fun comes when you experiment with different settings, while you’re shooting and afterwards.

The app is developed by Sean M. Puckett, who is a professional photographer (here’s a link to his website). What ultimately made me decide to purchase the app was this ‘Historical Note’ at the end of the app’s companion website:

This app is the result of ten years of development of a suite of analogue film simulation equations and techniques. They were originally created for a long defunct camera raw processing program called Bibble, and later ported to Lightroom. But always, the simulations were applied in post-processing.

With the advent of hand-held devices with adequate cameras and CPUs, it no longer makes sense to me as an artist to have a separate “photography” and “post-processing” phase. I should instead be able to just create a software camera that combines both steps in real-time, so I can just see in a viewfinder before I click the shutter what I will get when all the post-processing work is done. And that’s what Argent is.

No matter how frequently I’ll end up using Argent — I’m happy to support people like Sean. I like to see competence and this kind of approach in an app.

One last note: predictably, an app like this is rather resource-intensive. I don’t know on faster, more recent iPhones, but during my tinkering in Argent my iPhone 5 got a bit warm and battery life lost 2–3 percentage points. That didn’t particularly bother me. Your mileage may vary.

Argent Film Simulation is $1.99 on the App Store

12% of how many?

September 30, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

In this brief article from Business Insider called More people already want Apple AirPods than the Apple Watch the author writes:

12% of U.S. consumers surveyed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch say they intend to purchase AirPods, apparently on the strength of Apple’s marketing, given that few people have actually seen and tried them out.

This is a very bullish sign for Apple, says BAML. “12% of the US installed base could lead to up to an incremental $3bn in revenue,” writes [sic] the analysts. 

I was made aware of it via John Gruber, who comments:

Not 12 percent of iPhone owners. 12 percent of consumers. For a product that Apple has merely announced, but not yet even started advertising. That’s huge. It’s just a survey, so take it with a grain of salt […]

Actually, it’s “12 percent of U.S. consumers surveyed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch”. The survey report, as far as I know, can’t be accessed directly online. From what I gathered visiting the Bank of America Merrill Lynch website, you can access the research library through an iOS app, but you must be logged in as a client (correct me if I’m wrong). 

It would be nice to know how many U.S. consumers were surveyed. Two hundred? Two thousands? Two hundred thousands? Even if we consider a sample of two million consumers, 12 percent is 240,000 people. Not an insignificant number, but not something I’d call ‘huge’ either. To me, this piece of news and its statistics don’t make much sense if that 12 percent isn’t properly put in context. How many consumers were surveyed in the first place?

 

 

Edited to add: Good points made by Michael Rockwell and Luca Soldaini on Twitter. Rockwell says: “Also, what people say they plan on purchasing and what they actually purchase is usually very different.” Soldaini makes a similar remark and adds: “For example, I’d love to know how many knew the price of the AirPods before answering!”

iOS 10 on the iPhone 5

September 26, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Software

iPhone 5 lock screen iOS 10

I usually wait a while before installing a new version of Mac OS X or iOS on my devices, especially considering that my hardware isn’t the latest and greatest anymore. And in this specific instance there was the same kind of trepidation as when I updated my iPhone 4 to iOS 7, and my iPad 3 to iOS 9 in the past — Will this hardware be capable enough to keep up with the new features and performance requirements of the new iOS?

Judging from the feedback, many iPhone 4 and iPad 3 users, back then, clearly regretted updating their devices to the latest iOS version they could technically support. The performance change (whether perceived or measured with a chronograph) between iOS 6 and iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 felt disappointing, and many complained about the overall sluggishness of the device. But at least with regard to perceived performance, I also thought it was a matter of habits and the way one usually interacted with the iPhone. I’m not a ‘fast & furious’ user, and the slower transitions in iOS 7’s UI on my iPhone 4 didn’t really bother me. I didn’t regret updating: I felt that the benefits of iOS 7 outweighed the drawbacks. My iPhone 4 never really felt ‘unusable’ to me — as I wrote in my initial impressions three years ago, “Some animations and transitions are different from iOS 6, so I feel the experience as being different rather than disappointingly slower.”

I had more or less the same reaction when I updated my iPad 3 to iOS 9 last year. Apart from the occasional lag and stutter (especially in the virtual keyboard’s ability to keep up with my typing), I can’t say I’m disappointed with iOS 9 on my iPad. As an aside, the devices on which I’ve seen iOS 9 perform in a truly appalling way are the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4s, certainly because of their insufficient 512 MB of internal RAM. (The iPad 3 has 1 GB and the difference is noticeable). 

Back to the iPhone 5 and iOS 10, I was relieved after reading iOS 10 is a pleasant surprise for the iPhone 5 and 5C by Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica. Andrew had been critical of the overall performance of new iOS versions on the slowest supported hardware in the past, so when he concludes that:

For the first time in a while, I’m comfortable recommending the latest version of iOS for the oldest-supported iPhone without major caveats or qualifications. Yes, newer iPhones are faster and can do more things, but if you’re still using an iPhone 5 or 5C (or if you’ve handed your old one down to someone else in your circle of family and friends), iOS 10 will treat the hardware about the same as iOS 9 did — not bad, given that the iPhone 5 is four years old.

Any doubt I had about updating my iPhone 5 to iOS 10 quickly went away.

My experience so far

I installed iOS 10 on the iPhone 5 a week ago. I wanted to wait a few days before writing anything, because I needed to see if something unexpected turned up during extended use. So far, I really have nothing bad to report, and I agree with Cunningham’s assessment overall. Here are a few stray observations anyway:

  • I don’t know why I expected long installation times. In truth, I found it took less to update my iPhone 5 from iOS 9 to iOS 10 (between 15 and 20 minutes) than it took to update from iOS 8 to iOS 9 a year ago (between 25 and 30 minutes). As a personal practice, I always connect the iPhone to iTunes for major iOS updates, while minor updates are done over the air.
  • When it was explained that iOS 10 would replace the traditional Slide to unlock gesture with Press Home to open to unlock the device, I was disappointed and a little annoyed: discontinuing a long-standing, well-designed gesture always feels a bit user-hostile. Same goes with the rearranged swipes — left to get to the camera (instead of upwards), right to enter the Today View. I remember thinking it would take me a long time before I could effectively retrain my muscle memory. I was wrong: it took me just one day, and now I even find the Press Home to open gesture more convenient than Slide to unlock. In one-handed use, and in cramped spaces such as a crowded bus or train, or whenever I had only one hand free and had to quickly take out my iPhone and check something, I often found difficult to simultaneously hold the phone securely and unlock it with a swipe. There were times when the iPhone would not unlock because I basically did not ‘swipe enough’, if you know what I mean. Now in the same situations I can comfortably wake the iPhone and unlock it by clicking the Home button twice. Perhaps my retraining didn’t take much because the iPhone 5 doesn’t have Touch ID. I heard from iPhone 5s and 6/6s users that they’re still trying to adjust to the new gesture.
  • Animations and transitions are shorter than under iOS 9, so, in a way, the device feels faster than before when navigating the springboard and launching/closing applications. On the other hand, I’ve always had a few apps on my iPhone that took longer to launch than others. Under iOS 10, ironically, they feel slower at launch because of this effect. In other words, you tap on the app, iOS 10 quickly displays the opening transition, then you’re stuck a few seconds with the app launch screen. The app doesn’t really take more time launching than under iOS 9, but feels a bit slower at load time due to the faster transition iOS 10 now provides when entering the app. I hope I’m making sense.
  • A few system sounds have changed. If, like me, you’ve always kept the keyboard clicking sound activated, you’ll notice that now the keyboard has a different sound. It’s softer, and modifier keys have a different ‘tune’ when hit. The general impression is that the new clicking sound is more cartoonish and whimsical, where the previous was more typewriter-like. Some like it, some not. I like it, actually. It reminds me of raindrops falling on a soft surface. The ‘clack’ when you lock the phone has also changed. It’s less harsh now and I can’t really describe it, but I’ll admit I’m not a fan, and I very much preferred the old sound.
  • I found myself liking the redesigned Control Centre much more than anticipated. It’s another detail of iOS 10’s user interface that didn’t convince me when it was first presented — I felt that giving Control Centre multiple screens was a bad idea, a needless complication of an effective and easy-to-use feature — but it’s a definitely better experience when in use.
  • Performance isn’t disappointing at all. Nothing feels slower than before. If you were satisfied with iOS 9 performance on your iPhone 5 (and 5c), you shouldn’t have problems updating to iOS 10. This may be a premature assessment, but it seems that third-party keyboards behave a bit better under iOS 10, at least the two I have installed — Microsoft’s Word Flow and Google’s Gboard. Jumping from the system keyboard to one of them feels faster, as it does using them; they feel more integrated overall. (At least to me.)
  • Speaking of performance, some iPhone 5 users have told me they’re not exactly happy with multitasking, finding the process less snappy than before and also finding the iPhone more ‘forgetful’ about the app’s state when returning to a previously used app, needing to reload content more often than before. Again, I don’t know if I’m usually more patient or if the issue is connected to how different users approach the same device, or if the differentiating factor are the apps involved or how much free space is left on the device, but I haven’t really noticed anything strange on my iPhone 5 (32 GB, with about 8 GB free). Multitasking-wise, my iPhone seems to behave basically like before. Your mileage may vary, I guess.
  • I haven’t conducted any specific tests regarding battery life, but in my normal, day-to-day use I haven’t noticed anything different than under iOS 9.3.5. My iPhone 5 doesn’t seem to discharge faster or consume more energy than before — which is a good thing.

So far, I’m very surprised and very pleased by iOS 10 on my iPhone 5 and, like Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica, I certainly recommend the upgrade to other fellows still using an iPhone 5 or 5c. iOS 10 feels like a solid release, and by upgrading I think you gain much more than anything you may lose. I might update this piece in the following days with further observations. If you have specific questions or doubts, feel free to contact me via email or Twitter and I’ll try to be helpful.