Riccardo Mori

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

July 9, 2014

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.

Ulterior motive

June 20, 2014

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Dieter Bohm at The Verge, writes:

The phone’s rear camera has a lot more work to do than just taking photos. It also facilitates one of the Fire Phone’s key features: Firefly, a way to scan and identify products and media around you just by pointing a camera at something. Amazon wants you using this a lot, and it’s put a dedicated button on the side of the Fire Phone that’ll send you right into Firefly mode.

This lets the Fire Phone do a number of different things. For one, you can pull up more information about TV shows or paintings, you can look at a record to start a new radio station based on it, or you can scan in text, like a phone number. More important for Amazon though is Firefly’s ability to identify products, like food and books. You can guess exactly where this feature is going: once you scan a product, you’ll have the opportunity to buy it from Amazon. It’s a clear shot at brick-and-mortar retail stores, giving shoppers an incredibly fast way to compare prices. And usually, there’s a good chance that Amazon will win out. There simply has never been a better device to help you indulge in impulse purchases — a prospect that has us both intrigued and terrified in equal parts.

This is precisely what makes me uncomfortable about the new Amazon Fire Phone. Since it was unveiled, this smartphone gave me a bad vibe, but I didn’t know exactly why. After thinking over it a while, maybe I’ve found the reason. The Fire Phone doesn’t feel like a personal device, it feels like a consumer tool, a purchase enabler, and little more. Something that reminds you all the time how very directly it is linked to the business of the company that made it.

You may say “Duh, but of course it is,” and you may also say that it’s how Amazon takes care of its ecosystem, just like Apple does. The difference between the Fire Phone and the iPhone, however, is that when I’m using my iPhone, I don’t feel like I’m holding a device designed to make Apple rich with every 1‑click purchase I may make. Sure, Apple takes its 30% cut with every purchase in its various Stores; and sure, Amazon and Apple offer different things and services; but I hope you understand what I mean.

More importantly, the Fire Phone is a customer tool that’s also designed to make you a potential accomplice of Amazon in screwing its competition. With Firefly, the Fire Phone is the best possible device to engage in that practice I despise — entering a shop, scanning an item, and purchasing it online at Amazon instead of buying it from the very shop you’re in. As Bohm writes, often that item’s price will be lower on Amazon, but I’d like to think that, by spending a little more (and sometimes it’s really a matter of a few Euros) you can have the item right now and you can support local businesses.

I know, the Fire Phone is mostly targeted at Amazon customers, and if you read Farhad Manjoo’s conversation with Jeff Bezos on the New York Times, you’ll see Bezos singing his usual tune, that Amazon is doing what it’s doing to help customers, that the device is designed to be “different constrained by customer caring,” et cetera. And it’s not that I don’t believe that, but — on a purely emotional level — I feel more respected as an Apple customer than as an Amazon customer. I’m not comparing the quality of the service, but the approach. With Amazon, I always have the feeling there’s some ulterior motive at play, like I’m constantly being enticed and nudged towards the purchase of goods. From what I’ve seen so far, the Fire Phone is Amazon’s best device to offer that kind of user experience, which I don’t find appealing at all.

On a final note, as soon as the Fire Phone was introduced, I asked a friend of mine — who does a lot of shopping at Amazon and owns an old Kindle and a Kindle Fire — whether he was interested in getting the phone as well and going ‘all in’ with Amazon’s ecosystem. He promptly replied that no, he wasn’t interested and found the phone “a bit perplexing and kind of creepy.” He added: “And all that tilting and auto-scrolling, no thanks, I’m already seasick as it is.” He’ll keep shopping at Amazon from his Kindle Fire and he’ll definitely keep his iPhone, he says, because he can shop Amazon from there just as well if he wants, and because of the “superior app offer.” The iPhone, he said, is the best of many worlds, while the Fire Phone is just one world — Amazon’s.

Why you should read me

June 14, 2014

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Today, more than ever, it seems that everyone is writing; everyone has an opinion on everything, and apparently everyone’s mission is to let the world know about it. The amount of noise, online, is disorienting. That makes building an audience difficult. And even when the occasional article is mentioned or linked by prominent writers or websites, people will come — perhaps even a lot of them — but few will stay.

In The post-traffic-spike chill, I wrote:

In other words, people don’t seem to stay or at least willing to explore more when they arrive on a blog they probably never saw before. I’m surprised, and not because I’m so vain to think I’m that charismatic as to retain 90% of new visitors, but by the general lack of curiosity. I can understand that not all the people who followed MacStories’ link to my site had to like it or agree with me. What I don’t understand is the behaviour of who liked what they saw. Why not return, why not decide to keep an eye on my site?

The other day I was thinking about this subject again and I figured I could address it from another perspective.

As I was saying, there’s a lot to read online these days, lots of interesting voices, but we can’t read them all. When we find someone new, there’s a question going through our minds while we’re deciding whether to add this someone to our feeds or not. The question is, essentially: Why should I add this person? What makes him/her special or otherwise worthy of my attention?

So I’m going to try to offer you an answer here. I might sound immodest here and there, but I’m simply being honest with you.

The short answer

I know how to write, I’m good at what I do, I do my homework, I publish an article only when I have something to say, I respect my audience and welcome constructive feedback, and I also write fiction if that’s more your thing.

If you want a more articulate answer, keep reading.

A few reasons why you should read me

I know how to write — As immodest as this sounds, it’s something you can readily judge for yourself. Feel free to explore my site and read my articles. While you do that, think about this: English is not my first language. (I’ve studied it since I was 4, and I’ve been writing fiction in English since the 1990s.)
I know my stuff — I’ve been passionate about technology since my teens. I was involved in Desktop Publishing when I was 18. I know computers. I’ve researched the subjects of design, user interfaces and usability for years. I’ve read a lot about the most diverse subjects because I was born curious and eager to learn. If I write about something, it’s because I’ve had experience of it; before writing about something, I do my homework.
I write only when I have something to say — Growing up I was taught to give an opinion only when I really had something to say — something useful to bring to the table — and to shut up otherwise. And it’s what I do here, that’s why you won’t necessarily find ‘new stuff’ every day. I’m usually up-to-date when it comes to the latest tech debate, but if I feel I don’t have much to contribute to the discussion, I won’t write about it.
I respect my readers — If I keep my site updated and my projects running, it’s not because I’m hungry for pageviews. It’s not because I somehow make money out of it: there are no ads here, and no annoying social media widgets either. I want this to be a pleasant place to visit, I want to contribute something useful and to provide articles that can retain some value over time, not just spur-of-the-moment pieces that are bound to lose their relevance as soon as a certain discussion is over. And although comments are disabled, I’m always, always interested in constructive feedback and criticism. As I said above, I know my stuff, but if you know more or have more experience on the topic I’m discussing, I’m always ready to stand corrected if I make some mistakes or provide incorrect information.
I don’t rehash, reblog, or do one-line commentary — The vast majority of what I offer here is made of original articles. I don’t like ‘linked-list’ or ‘parasite’ blogs maintained by people who evidently have little to say and to offer apart from a quip or a few words of commentary; people who basically have something to say always in response/reaction to someone else, but rarely — if ever — contribute to the debate with something personal, original, genuine. I never wanted my website and blog to be like that. I don’t like the idea of using a link and a one-line comment just to create filler content for when I have little to say — you know, just to keep the place updated. I respect my readers too much to do that.

I also write fiction

Here on Morrick.me I mostly write about technology, software, design, user experience, usability, and then I have a section — Et Cetera — that I use to publish articles and writings about other subjects I may occasionally cover, like creative writing, translation, or even thoughts and musings of a more personal nature.

But before being a tech writer, I’m a writer — period. I’ve been writing poetry and fiction since the late 1980s/early 1990s. It’s been hard work. I started in Italian, of course, then for a while I wrote stories both in English and Italian, and in recent years I switched to English-only.

I have published the first volume of short stories of a series called Minigrooves, and you can purchase it on the iBookstore. If you want to know more about the book and the project, read this article. As I wrote there, The 42 stories are quite varied and should appeal to a wide audience. Each of them has its particular ‘groove’, each of them has its mood, and since each story is self-contained, you don’t even have to read them sequentially. Some stories are longer and more complex than others (they were published in parts when they first ‘aired’ online), and therefore you’ll likely enjoy them more when you have more time to read.

If novels are more your thing — especially sci-fi novels set in a dystopian near future — then you may be interested in Low Fidelity, the novel I’m currently publishing in serialised form inside Vantage Point Magazine (a compact digital magazine I’ve launched on Apple’s Newsstand platform).

If you want to know more about Low Fidelity — to have an idea of the project, the world of the novel, etc., you can also check out the Crosslines//Low Fidelity website.

If you want to know more about Vantage Point Magazine, read this article or visit Vantage Point’s website.

You can support my writing by purchasing Minigrooves and/or subscribing to Vantage Point Magazine. I strive to offer quality content and good fiction, and I think I’m not asking that much in return.