Riccardo Mori

Website renovations

July 15, 2014

Briefly

Almost three years ago, on July 18, 2011, I was finally launching this website after two months spent meticulously editing and customising the CSS of a very old WordPress theme — “Futurosity Magazine” — of which I was very fond nonetheless. Two months is a long time but: a) I wasn’t working on this 24/7, and b) I knew very little CSS, so there was a lot of learning by trial and error.

From July 2011 up to now, the visuals of the site have changed little. There have been many refinements over time (I updated my logo, changed the contents of a few sections on the main page, slightly altered the column width in the site’s grid system, changed webfonts and improved the overall legibility, and many other little things) but nothing really drastic.

A few days ago I was trying to make yet another small refinement without immediate success. So, after taking a long, critical look at what had become the website’s stylesheet after three years of tweaking, I just got annoyed and expressed my frustration to my wife. She suggested what I was already thinking about: start anew with a better, more up-to-date theme, something that already integrates features I’d like to add presently or in the future.

The search wasn’t long, as I had already bookmarked a possible list of alternatives. The final choice has been the High Art theme by Allan Cole at Theme Supply Co. I have made a few customisations, but very small, very light ones (mainly I retained the previous typography based on Charter and Clear Sans Screen). The simple truth is that this theme, for me, works pretty well out of the box.

I generally despise website redesigns for redesign’s sake. I must say this change doesn’t come because I got tired of the old visuals, but because I was tired of having to open an editor and alter the CSS for every little detail I wanted to change, add, hide, move. The stylesheet was becoming a mess and I was starting to waste too much time on it.

What I’ve tried to achieve with this new look is a general visual simplicity, focussing on the readability of single posts (now the article body area is at least 100px wider), and trying to reduce the visual clutter a bit.

I apologise for taking the site down for 48 hours or so. There were elements I needed to place differently, and experiments with features and content organisation I wanted to carry out privately before bringing the site back online. Now things should work, but I’m still checking old articles to see if the old formatting plays nice with the new theme, especially for things like numbered and bulleted lists, footnotes, and image sizes. So if you see the RSS feed of Morrick.me updating in a seemingly random way, it’s because I’m refreshing past articles. Thanks for your patience and I hope you like the new look.

Uiee: a wearable charger

July 9, 2014

by Riccardo Mori

Briefly

Uiee

I didn’t know about this accessory. The other day I received an email from the manufacturer through their marketing agency, pointing me to their press release and Indiegogo campaign page. Every now and then I receive this kind of communications, and if the product is interesting enough, I usually have no problems writing a brief post about it on my site.

I haven’t tried the Uiee myself, but I believe that this portable — or rather, wearable — charger is worth your attention. From the Indiegogo page:

Uiee features an 800 mAh built-in battery for charging on-the-go. For devices like the iPhone 5s and Samsung Galaxy S4, this gives around 3 full hours of extra power to play, work, watch or listen. For many other devices it can provide even more than 3 full hours of charge.

The Uiee is small and lightweight. You can see from all the photos on the Indiegogo campaign page that it sports a very well thought-out design. You can easily carry the Uiee around in your pocket or even clip it on your clothes like an iPod shuffle. It’s available in three colours (red, blue, green) and is currently available in US and EU wall socket versions, and with a micro-USB tip or an Apple Lightning tip (slightly more expensive). It looks good, it has a small, unobtrusive footprint, it’s useful and affordable. My honest opinion is that this accessory deserves to have a successful campaign. If you preorder one, it’s going to cost you $40; afterwards the MSRP will be $50.

Uiee press release
Uiee Indiegogo campaign page

(Disclaimer: I haven’t received anything from the manufacturer, nor have I received any form of compensation to mention the product on my site. I decided to write about it simply after visiting the Indiegogo page and perusing the information included therein. The only bias I may have is my sympathy for the Irish, and Uiee is based in Dublin. But if you have a bit of design sensibility, you can easily see for yourself the great potential of this accessory.)

Sorry LaunchBar — It’s not you, it’s me

July 9, 2014

by Riccardo Mori

Software

About a month ago, after reading many enthusiastic comments on the latest version of LaunchBar, I decided to give it another try. I had already tried LaunchBar before — five or six years ago — but quickly discovered it just didn’t fit in with my workflow and how I organise things on my Macs. As I’ve said many times, I like my computer habits like the next tech-savvy guy, but I’m also willing to change them because it helps me stay nimble.

Déjà vu

The first smart launcher I tried integrating in my workflow was Quicksilver, probably around 2004–2005. Quicksilver was (is) powerful, extensible, versatile, but the major obstacle I struggled with for a long while was its learning curve. I tried and tried but never got to a point where things stopped being frustrating and started being rewarding. I kept forgetting shortcuts or confusing them, and the few things I’d memorised were of little use when I assisted friends or clients with their Macs (that was a particularly busy period as a Mac consultant).

So, at the time, my solution was to stop trying assimilating new way to do stuff with Quicksilver, and to remain at a stage where things were manageable, memorable, and where my muscle memory had developed enough inside the Quicksilver logic to enjoy the tool without making typing mistakes and the like. Sadly, I soon realised that, at that level, there was really no point in using Quicksilver instead of the tools provided by Mac OS X itself — system tools I was quite comfortable (and accustomed to) using before taking the Quicksilver path.

Now, LaunchBar’s learning curve is nothing like Quicksilver’s (at least, nothing like the Quicksilver version’s I was using at that time). The déjà vu I’m talking about, which I felt these weeks while trying LaunchBar again, is that — like Quicksilver some ten years ago — I ended up using LaunchBar to do things I already do, quite efficiently, with a mix of Mac OS X’s built-in features and third-party apps.

Overkill

I know, applications like LaunchBar offer the advantage of centralisation: searching, launching applications, opening documents, playing media, all these actions (and many more) can be conveniently performed from the same software interface. They are like sophisticated Swiss Army knives with an amazing array of features. But when you really need a pocket knife to cut or pierce stuff, and occasionally open bottles, getting a Swiss Army knife with 25 different tools is just too much. Not only that, when you’re looking for the 3 tools you use most often, having to go through the whole selection every time slows you down a bit.

There’s nothing wrong with LaunchBar. Don’t mistake this article for some vague criticism aimed at this particular software. During this month I spent trying LaunchBar, I did appreciate its interface and features, and if you automatise a lot of tasks, you should by all means give LaunchBar a try. I automatise very little and don’t rely on fixed workflows (if you’re interested in knowing why, I talk about this in more detail in On workflows and automatisation, a piece I wrote a year ago; nothing has changed since then), so most of the time I just need tools to:

Perform quick searches — Spotlight is enough for this.
Perform in-depth searches in places Spotlight won’t look, and for which I need an interface capable of showing me the full path to a file or folder — Find Any File is my favourite tool for this particular task.
Perform the occasional search of preference/cache/document files related to a specific application — For this, I use AppZapper.
Perform the occasional visual search (e.g. looking for a certain photo in a folder with more than 1000 items, all with too generic filenames) — For this, I really like Raskin.
Launch applications — Again, Spotlight does the job pretty well.

I’m aware that this is a more fragmented approach, but it actually revolves around Spotlight, which is the tool I use most frequently. When I need the aid of the aforementioned third-party applications — something that happens only occasionally — I launch them via Spotlight. And each of those third-party applications has the right user interface for the job.

With this kind of setup, I really don’t know where to put LaunchBar. While I was testing it, I realised I was using it to do the same things I usually do with Spotlight and little more. Everything else was just too occasional to warrant learning new shortcuts, abbreviations or sequences of actions. In short, despite being a great application, I have to acknowledge (once again) that LaunchBar is simply overkill for my needs, and it’s pointless to keep trying to hammer it into my general daily workflow when I’m more efficient with my current tried-and-tested solutions.

Two years after: a brief review of my iPad 3

June 27, 2014

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

iPad 3 unboxing

The first thing I thought the other day, when I found the receipt from my iPad purchase and saw it was from June 2012, was: It’s been two years, really? Because you see, this device doesn’t feel aged one bit.

The third-generation iPad ended up to be the unlucky member of the family: short-lived (both the iPad 2 and the iPad 4 have lasted longer), and quickly unappreciated (It’s slow! – It gets hot! – etc.). Well, it turned out to be a great device and a great value for me. It never had a single issue. And, as I said, it doesn’t feel old at all, both from a hardware and software perspective.

Of course I was a bit bummed when Apple announced the fourth-generation iPad just three months after I purchased my iPad 3, but then again, I was already enjoying the most important feature I wanted in an iPad — the Retina display — so the initial delusion of holding in my hands what had just become an ‘old device’ rapidly vanished.

Battery life

The second great feature of my iPad 3 after the display is its battery life. When new, Apple claimed that one charge would last “Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music,” and in my experience it was a rather conservative estimate. I’ve been using my iPad 3 (Wi-Fi only, 32 GB, black) a lot every day since I bought it and, with moderate-to-heavy use, a single charge lasts two, sometimes three days. What eats up the battery is the occasional graphics-demanding game or app, but for the rest there’s really nothing to report.

Most importantly, though, is that in two years I haven’t really noticed any worsening in battery performance. My iPad usage patterns haven’t really changed, nor have my recharging habits: when I get the 10% Battery Left warning, I plug the iPad in until it’s fully recharged or at least past 85% if I need to take it with me and can’t wait until it’s at 100%.

Slow? Hot? Your mileage may vary

Back in November 2013, Marco Arment wrote in “Significantly hotter” that the iPad 3 had a “lopsided performance and it ran noticeably warm even under normal loads.” In a footnote, he further explained the reason of such performance:

Its A5X [processor] had more GPU power to drive the increased pixel area, but it had the same CPU cores as the iPad 2’s A5. So, while most purely-GPU operations performed decently, any CPU-bound operations on pixel data could perform much worse, as they were processing data for four times as many pixels with the same CPU power.

For developers, the iPad 3 remains one of the hardest iOS devices — possibly the hardest — to support for games and custom animations.

My impression as a user is that this technical explanation paints a grimmer picture than a direct, continued experience with the device itself. In two years of use, I never noticed any particular struggling in the iPad 3’s performance. Perhaps many developers have done a great job at supporting it, because even graphics-intensive games such as Asphalt 7 never felt slow or choppy. In my household we also have an iPad 2 and I’ve tried many times to compare the two devices by making them run similar tasks, but I never found any particularly striking difference in their performance.

In other words, the iPad 3 may be an underwhelming performer from a purely technical standpoint. In use, it doesn’t feel slow. (Of course, if you own an iPad 4 or an iPad Air and you need to borrow my iPad, it will feel slow to you, but that’s expected.)

And from where I stand, I also think that the whole matter of the iPad 3’s hotness is a bit exaggerated. In use, my iPad 3 does feel warm after a while, but not ‘annoyingly’ warm, and definitely not hot. Granted, I use it with a case, but it’s a thin Belkin case: if the device got very hot, I would notice.

Another thing that has never bothered me about the iPad 3 (and seems to have bothered other people, Arment included) is the weight. Perhaps I’m just accustomed to lugging portable devices that aren’t exactly lightweight (12-inch PowerBook G4: 2.1 Kg; 15-inch Titanium PowerBook G4: 2.4 Kg; 15-inch MacBook Pro: 2.49 Kg; 17-inch PowerBook G4: 3.1 Kg; Newton MessagePad 2100: 640 g; eMate 300: 1.8 Kg), so the 650 grams of the iPad 3 don’t seem such a big deal after all.

32 GB was wise in retrospect

Maybe 16 GB makes sense if you’re on a very, very tight budget. But while I usually manage with 16 GB on an iPhone, a 16 GB iPad felt already cramped in 2012. Admittedly I had a tight budget and was tempted to make an impulse purchase and get the 16 GB model right after the iPad 3 was announced in March 2012, but I decided to wait a bit more and go for the 32 GB model. It was a wise decision: looking in Settings → General → Usage, at the moment I have 2 GB available, 25.8 GB used, and the majority of the space is occupied by apps, their data, and documents, since Music and Photos together take up only 4 GB or so. I have a lot of apps installed.

Conclusion

I’m still very happy with my iPad 3. Its battery life is still great, the device handles iOS 7 rather well, it doesn’t feel slow or obsolete, and for now I’m not feeling a particular urge to upgrade to a more recent model. This iPad 3 has handled satisfactorily any task I’ve been throwing at it for the past two years. The 579 Euros it cost me have been one of my best investments in recent times.

Web discoveries of the week

June 21, 2014

by Riccardo Mori

Briefly

1. Good Design Is Good Business — This wonderful tumblelog is a personal project of Sue Murphy, Irish art director based in New York City at Ogilvy for IBM. As Sue explains, “I created this little spot where I’m saving some beautiful IBM work. It’s all absolutely copyright IBM. A lot you’ll see will be by Ogilvy since that’s what I see the most often in my day-to-day, but you’ll also come across stuff from the likes of designers such as Paul Rand, to Carl DeTorres, Office… the list goes on.” Also, don’t miss her site. I really love her portfolio.

Free Faces - Simon Foster

2. Free Faces is a beautiful site by Simon Foster dedicated to showcase, and link to, free fonts that are already available on the Web. I absolutely love how Simon chooses to display the various typefaces. On the home page, they look like a single piece of modern art. When you click on one of the tiles, you’re brought to a brief description of the typeface, along with (usually) just a single, big glyph (see figure). This æsthetic reminds me of some illustrated encyclopædias I used to peruse when I was little. Keep up the good work, Simon!

3. Typewolf — I found Simon Foster’s website thanks to this website. Typewolf is a great resource because it manages to make you discover great sites and great typefaces at the same time. By providing real examples of fonts in use, Typewolf indirectly helps you to understand how two (or more) of them can work together. Don’t miss their posts on Font Recommendations at the bottom.

4. Getwired.com — Maybe you already know about this blog. I didn’t, and it was a great discovery. Hat tip to Kontra, who linked to this post on Twitter the other day. The blog doesn’t give information about its author, but it’s definitely someone who knows their stuff when it comes to technology. Insightful, informative, well written. Added to my RSS feeds without hesitation.

5. Our Incredible Journey — What is an incredible journey? Phil Gyford explains. Added to the tumblelogs I follow, because why not.