Riccardo Mori

Some thoughts after recovering from a hard drive failure

April 16, 2013

File under: I didn’t see this coming

Don’t get me wrong: I’m enough experienced to know that you can’t naïvely expect a hard drive to last for long, especially if it’s the internal hard drive of the machine you use most. Yet, despite your level of preparation, the death of a hard drive tends to catch you by surprise quite often.

In the last 20 years of dealing with hard drives, I’ve witnessed the most diverse demises. A hard drive usually dies rather quickly, but it generally has a way to warn you that its passing is getting alarmingly near: it starts emitting new noises or noise patterns that are different from the usual. This ‘acoustic’ approach has saved me in a couple of situations in the past, when I wasn’t as backup-savvy as I am now. By hearing different ticking patterns, I could predict the imminent failure and save 80–90% of my stuff in time.

I also witnessed extreme cases, like with the internal 40 GB hard drive of my 12″ PowerBook G4, where the drive degradation was so gradual it actually kept working for two months after manifesting strange (and at times frighteningly loud) mechanical noises. During that period, the PowerBook could boot fine and a lot of things were working well. There were no performance-related issues or applications that took a suspiciously long time to launch. But the upcoming death of the hard drive was evident, not only because of the noises. Disk Utility had deemed the disk ‘irreparable’ after aborting a verification process that had already taken 45 minutes. After half an hour of use, the PowerBook’s fan would rapidly reach full speed and the chassis would become extremely hot in the disk drive area. I was lucky I could save everything before having to replace the drive. At the time, money was quite tight, and that ‘slow death’ bought me some time to save enough for a replacement. (I can’t emphasise this enough: this is not common hard drive failure behaviour, so treat this anecdote as the exception, not the rule).

Two nights ago, the hard drive of my MacBook Pro did nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite, actually. It just died without warning. No strange noises, no unusual ticking patterns, not even an increase in noisiness (even quiet drives tend to get a bit noisier as they grow old and especially when their time’s about over). I periodically run Disk Utility on the main drive to check up on its health. Never a problem, not even the occasional mix-up in the drive’s logic structure. Nothing. I was watching a movie and suddenly the image froze, while the audio kept playing for a while. I thought there was something wrong with the video file, or that the player application was acting up, so I tried quitting it. No response. Force-quitting didn’t get me far, either. The Mac quickly became unresponsive, so I forced a reboot.

Grey screen. Apple logo. Spinning wheel. Minutes passed. Not good. Fans started, rapidly accelerating. Not good at all. Then a flow of text and command strings (like when you reboot your Mac in Verbose mode) appeared briefly. Then, a message in various languages warned that the computer would restart due to a problem. Definitely not good. At this point, the Mac entered a self-restart loop, trying to finish the boot process but never succeeding. After seven attempts, I turned it off. The drive was evidently gone. I felt more surprised than angry or worried. I stared at the powered-off MacBook Pro for a few moments: Did that just happen? Really? — I was asking myself.

A bit of luck

I keep various backups of my stuff, and despite not being the perfect tool, I’ve always given Time Machine a chance since day one. I keep Time Machine backups of my MacBook Pro, although I don’t keep the external Time Machine drive always on during the day. In other words, I don’t do hourly backups (also because I have CrashPlan always running in the background, keeping a tight backup schedule of my entire Home folder), but I turn the external drive on during the day, usually towards the end of the day, and do at least three or four backups.

Luckily, when disaster hit on Saturday night, I’ve had the Time Machine drive running for a few hours, and when the internal hard drive failed at 3:50 AM, the last useful Time Machine backup was completed at 3:43 AM. I thought, If the backup is fine, I can restore the system from Time Machine without losing practically anything.

The problem is that drive failures always catch you in a bad moment, and I needed to recover and have the Mac up and running again as soon as possible. Having a drive die on you on a Saturday night means waiting at least until Monday to do anything. So I started browsing online for a quick replacement. Again, since my current financial situation is not good, another constraint was the budget, so the replacement had to come quick and be cheap. Disappointingly, the online Apple Store doesn’t sell internal hard drives for Mac laptops, only a few expensive solutions for Mac Pros (at least here in Spain). I checked other good sources and found a few eligible candidates: not needing a huge internal disk (the one that failed was the stock 320 GB this MacBook Pro came with, and I still had 60 GB free) was another good thing, because today internal hard drives in the 320–500 GB range are in fact quite affordable. Yet, even for the best of options I would have to wait a few days for international shipping. Oh well, I can’t do much to speed things up anyway; — I thought — I’ll place the order on Sunday evening and hope for the best, meanwhile I can continue my work on my 12″ and 17″ PowerBook G4s.

Yesterday I went for a stroll with my wife in the city centre, to clear my mind and divert it from the paranoic trains of thought one inevitably has in these situations (“What if my backups are corrupted and I lose all those important documents and a year worth of photos?“, things like this). We visited the FNAC store just out of curiosity, though I clearly remembered from a previous visit that they didn’t sell internal hard drives — they mostly had desktop and portable external storage solutions. When I saw a box with a Seagate 500 GB 2.5” internal hard drive on special offer, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had found an affordable solution that was also bigger than the drive it would replace. And I had found it in a store. On a Sunday. If all went well, I could be restoring everything in a matter of hours.

Keep calm and carry on

Yesterday night was devoted to replacing the hard drive and attempting to restore the entire system from the last Time Machine backup. I connected the external disk via FireWire 800 and crossed my fingers. When I booted the MacBook Pro I realised it couldn’t boot from the Recovery HD partition, because that was a blank new hard drive, but evidently there was one in the external Time Machine drive, because after a few instants, the OS X Utilities main interface was there on the screen. I selected Restore from Time Machine backup and prepared to wait a long long while as almost 200 GB worth of stuff had to be copied back in the internal hard drive. At around 9%, the recovery application aborted, citing unspecified errors. I was bummed. Since it was the most recent backup, the backup performed just 7 minutes before the previous drive died, I thought that maybe an error had occurred because some of the essential files in that backup had been corrupted. So I tried with the penultimate backup. An error, again. It was 4 AM, I was tired and a bit depressed, and decided to go to bed.

This morning, as I resumed the recovery operations, something occurred to me. I verified my suspicions and I was right: I had tried to restore a Mountain Lion backup using an older version of the OS X Utilities, the Lion version. Since Internet Recovery was out of the question (I tried rebooting with Cmd-Option‑R a few times, but nothing happened), to have a working Mountain Lion Recovery HD partition I would need to install a fresh copy of Mountain Lion on the MacBook Pro, then reboot the MacBook Pro from that partition, and try the Restore from Time Machine backup option again. But I had no physical copy of OS X Mountain Lion. When I upgraded I forgot to create an installation disk for cases like this, mea culpa. Luckily I still had around the USB pendrive with a copy of the OS X Lion installer, so I installed Lion from the pendrive, connected to the Mac App Store, redownloaded Mountain Lion, upgraded, and finally rebooted in the correct, freshly-created Recovery HD partition. The process of restoring the entire system from the last Time Machine backup went smoothly, although the wait was long and suspenseful.

Considerations, in no particular order

– The Restore process is rather amazing. After the final reboot, I was presented with an almost identical snapshot of my system just minutes before the previous hard drive died. All the applications that were open before the disaster simply reopened, with the browsers restoring all open tabs, and other application reopening the last opened documents. I know it’s something that has to be expected from restoring a full backup, but I was amazed nonetheless.

– If you want to be up and running in no time, keep a bootable clone of your main system on an external hard drive, and update it at least once a week. Use great tools like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

– Create a bootable backup install disk of the latest OS X version. Believe me, it really comes in handy in situations like these. On the Web there are quite a few good articles explaining how to make such a disk (for Mountain Lion, see for example this one from Ars Technica, or this one from Macworld, just to name two of the most prominent sources). The process is straightforward, and you only have to invest in a small 8 GB USB pendrive.

– Checking the SMART state of the hard drive is of little use to predict impending failures. It has never worked for me, always reporting “Verified” or similar reassuring statuses even when performing diagnostics on patently bad drives. This time was no exception. Don’t rely on that. Try to develop a fine ear for your hard drive’s noises, establishing a baseline of normal noises and patterns during daily operations, and watching out for anything out of the ordinary (strange repeated ticking, unexpected whirring, and the like).

– Even if you don’t check your internal drive routinely, drop everything and do so the moment you notice something unusual happening on your Mac, e.g. unexpected slowdowns in system performance, applications becoming sluggish or non-responsive for no apparent reasons, applications that take an unusually long time to launch, etc. In my experience, the most telling visual sign of something odd involving the hard drive is the whole system becoming sluggish and registering any user action with noticeable delay (cursor movement included).

– Remember: hard drives die unexpectedly in most cases. (Solid State drives too, in case you’re wondering). It will happen when least you expect it. It will happen at an inconvenient time. You will be bothered. If you don’t have a backup of your stuff, you will also be panicking. Be prepared.

– Backup, backup, backup, of course. Maybe I was just lucky in trusting Time Machine, but if you really don’t want to invest energies in developing a backup strategy, at least buy an external drive and configure it as a Time Machine drive. It’s an easy, hassle-free and low-maintenance method. Even if you can’t restore your entire system from a Time Machine backup (for whatever reason or error), and you need to reinstall OS X, you will at least be able to recover some settings, documents and data from that backup using the Setup Assistant.

– Check which version of the OS X Utilities you’re using to restore your Time Machine backup. An older version won’t be able to restore a Time Machine backup of a newer OS X version. I was trying to restore a Mountain Lion backup using the recovery utilities created by Lion, and I kept getting errors. You can tell which version of the OS X Utilities you’re using by looking at the icon of the Reinstall OS X option.

– If you’re looking for good quality, step-by-step guides to replace your Mac’s hard drive (and much much more), keep iFixit’s online Guides in your bookmarks. Really an invaluable resource.

Low Fidelity and Crosslines

April 10, 2013

by Riccardo Mori

Et Cetera

Low Fidelity and Crosslines

Low Fidelity — Revisiting an abandoned construction site

As you can read on the What is: Low Fidelity page, the idea for this novel is far from recent. It came to me in late 1995, while I was working on my first novel Richard Martyn. I had hit a creative dead end with that first novel (started in 1992 and finally completed in 1999), I was feeling a bit trapped in its themes (amnesia and its identity-related implications), and I badly needed fresh ideas.

Low Fidelity’s very first concept was extremely radical: since I was fed up with characters, dialogues, strong first-person points of view, and the like, I wanted Low Fidelity to be a novel about places and objects. The challenge was to write a story without characters. However, after a promising start, I soon realised that while such a story was definitely doable, it could not easily stand the sheer length of a whole novel. I stored all I had written up to that point, and planned to re-use it later, as a part of a bigger project or as a standalone short story.

Despite this false start, the mere process of working on something else that wasn’t Richard Martyn had the positive effect of reigniting my creativity, and on an evening in December 1995 while I was at the library trying to study for my Italian Literature exam, I started jotting down ideas and a possible plot involving a conspiracy related to culture, information propagation, and books. Since the beginning I had a rather clear idea of the main character, a skilled, seasoned ‘cultural investigator’.

As soon as the main plot lines began acquiring a bit of strength, I noticed that the project was rapidly growing into something more ambitious. The snowball effect, in retrospect, was obvious: every aspect of the plot begot questions, whose answers begot more questions. Things started getting less manageable as the world of the novel needed to be expanded and planned in more fine-grained detail. As I mention on the What is: Low Fidelity page, the novel quickly reached a sort of perennial work in progress status, with alternating periods of abandonment/inactivity and periods of resurgence and information-gathering. As my life got increasingly busy, I couldn’t find enough time and energy to devote to this project, but I would keep gathering information and ideas that now lie scattered throughout 16 different Moleskine-sized notebooks.

The actual story-writing has been a different matter. Since I couldn’t decide a proper structure, I started writing the story in self-contained scenes and fragments, to be rearranged chronologically at a later date. Also, I was writing in Italian at the time. Translation into English of both the narrative fragments and the collected bits of information related to the fictional setting began in late 2011, when I first attempted to revive the whole project.

Then Minigrooves happened, and it’s been a important step towards rediscovering my creative writing. As I wrote here last June:

Anyway, I experienced a serious creative block around 2002–2003. I’ve been recovering from this block roughly since 2010, when I started writing poetry again. As for short stories, my Minigrooves represent my most serious creative accomplishment in the last fifteen years, but most of all they represent the end of my creative drought. […] [I]magine my joy when I felt the wheels moving again at the start of this humble literary project.

The important creative realisation I’m referring to is that — believe it or not — my creativity has returned through discipline. I could have started Minigrooves by opening the website and publishing a new story whenever I wanted […] Instead, by self-imposing such a strict schedule, i.e. a new story each Monday and Thursday, I have noticed how the urgency has stimulated the flow of new ideas for new stories.

The extremely positive effect of the Minigrooves project on my creativity is what ultimately stimulated me towards rebooting Low Fidelity. It will be published in serialised form starting next month. Soon I will announce where and how you’ll be able to read it, so stay tuned if you’re interested.

I must say that the process of going back to an abandoned work (for projects of this scale I actually use the term ‘construction site’) has been quite exciting so far. Low Fidelity takes place in the near future (from 2070 to 2073) in a fictional megalopolis that constitutes the Metropolitan Isle of Arslan. Strictly speaking, the setting is post-apocalyptical, but this time the apocalypse doesn’t involve mass contamination, epidemics, aliens, zombies, or other natural or artificially-induced disasters. Rather, it’s mostly centered around technology, culture and society at large. The worldwide Internet collapse is one of the most momentous events occurring in a world where people’s lives are devastated by wholesale surveillance, loss of privacy, an unprecedented rate of cybercrimes happening at every level; in a world whose hyperconnected infrastructure reaches a breaking point and collapses under its own weight.

This collapse happens roughly 20 years before the events in the novel, and represents a ‘point of no return’ on many levels. In the words of Bert Kay, the protagonist, the world of Low Fidelity is “a place that’s trying to recover from a mass techno-overdose”. In the 20 years following the collapse of the Internet, this recovery has taken different directions in different parts of the world. There are places rebuilding the network infrastructure and keeping an optimistic outlook on technology, despite the constant fight against criminal hackers. While in other places — such as the Metropolitan Isle of Arslan — governments have taken a very different direction: to rekindle the relationship between humans and technology, it’s necessary to take one step back to take two steps forward. Hence the decision of reverting to a low-tech approach and bringing society to a ‘new old era’, banning all kind of portable electronic devices and computers from public use, and going back to low-tech forms of security.

What’s truly fascinating for me is to imagine how a world like that could be. This is why a project like Low Fidelity needs a lot of world-building information: it’s set against a background where a lot of significant events have happened, and everyone is dealing with the aftermath. I’m building a coherent, rich, detailed setting where the main story takes place. Arslan is a huge city with its particular geography, transportation system, its address scheme, its government and law… you get the picture. It’s a peculiar place, with its mixture of advanced technology and analogue aesthetics, its contradictions and their implications, and I hope the readers will be intrigued by its charm as much as I am while building it.

Crosslines — getting to know the world of Low Fidelity

You can find a good summary of what Crosslines originally was and what it has become at the What is: Crosslines page. As I write at the end of that section, Crosslines is now an online place which serves as introduction and ‘further reading’ of the world presented in Low Fidelity. It’s a sort of Chapter Zero, but since it cannot be described as being either a prologue or epilogue, I decided to use the term exologue, meaning ‘outside the narration’.

When Low Fidelity begins, Bert Kay, the protagonist, is about to close a very intricate case involving a mysterious terrorist organisation, but in the process uncovers a few things that will lead him to another, equally convoluted investigation, which is what constitutes the main story in Low Fidelity. In this context, consider Crosslines as if it were ‘bonus content’. You don’t need Crosslines to understand Low Fidelity, but it’s something that adds to the story and to the world of the novel, and it can help people get accustomed to the place where the events of Low Fidelity unfold.

Crosslines presents different scenes and fragments that largely take place before Low Fidelity. These scenes are useful to get familiar with many of the characters introduced in Low Fidelity, and we can also get a few glimpses of the kind of investigation Bert Kay is carrying out (I’m referring to the case he closes as Low Fidelity opens). I figured it can be an interesting way of providing all kinds of information and extra details about a certain world and the characters moving inside of it.

Crosslines moves at its own, independent pace. It went online a month ago, and I’ll keep adding scenes and fragments even after Low Fidelity officially starts and develops, and it will probably be updated even after Low Fidelity ends. It’s a sort of open channel to the world of Low Fidelity, and a playing ground where I can keep adding details and stuff about all things Low Fidelity, so to speak.

To sum up

Low Fidelity is a literary project that will be published in serialised form (i.e. in regular instalments) starting May 2013. More information will be provided here and over at the Crosslines website as the inauguration date approaches.

Crosslines is a companion to Low Fidelity which serves as introduction and ‘bonus content’ of the world of Low Fidelity. If Low Fidelity were a movie or a TV series, Crosslines would be its collection of extras (featurettes, mini-documentary, additional behind-the-scenes information, etc.). It has its own website and Twitter account so far, both providing narrative updates and the occasional ‘public service announcements’ related to the Low Fidelity project as a whole.

I hope you’ll enjoy both parts of this ambitious enterprise!

Some initial thoughts on Mailbox

April 4, 2013

by Riccardo Mori

Software

There was a moment, after the introduction of Mailbox, when the hype was deafening. The most recent cycle of the ’email is broken’ debate was raging, and for some Mailbox looked like the right answer at the right moment. And since I’m among those who think that actually there’s nothing wrong with email itself, all the talk about Mailbox didn’t particularly pique my interest. Even less when I learnt that there was a reservation system in place, practically putting prospective users on a waiting list before they could effectively use the app.

What started to interest me, though, was the subsequent debate around Mailbox, and after reading some positive reviews (Lex Friedman’s at Macworld, this one at Gadget Review, and Cody Fink’s at Macstories, just to name a few), I shrugged, thought Well, why not?, and installed Mailbox on my iPhone. If I have to criticise something, my usual course of action is to try it first-hand. After a little more than a week of use, I believe I can share some initial impressions.

Preamble

I manage email in a pretty straightforward way (for me at least). I have separate accounts to handle different types of incoming messages (personal, work-related, mailing lists, newsletters and promotional emails, notification messages from social networks/services, etc.). I generally do not accumulate enormous backlogs: work-related emails are always top-priority, then there are personal communications, then mailing lists, and then all the rest. I don’t follow the Inbox Zero school of thought, and as I sometimes say jokingly, that’s probably why I reach Inbox Zero that often. Humour aside, I think that it’s just experience. As I said previously, In the end it’s just a matter of setting up an effective filtering system. I devised this approach over a weekend years ago, and it hasn’t changed much since.

If you’re familiar with Mailbox and its underlying philosophy, you’ll be inclined to think that it’s probably not the best email client for someone who manages email the way that I do. And in fact the short answer is that no, it’s not the email client I’d put in my iPhone dock. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good email client.

The reservation system

Let me tell you: the experience of waiting in a virtual line before being able to set up the app was frustrating. When I signed up, on February 27, I had roughly 870,000 people before me. The wait lasted a whole month. I understand the reasons behind the reservation system: as the developers wrote on the Mailbox website, Mailbox checks email from the cloud in order to deliver it as fast as possible to the phone, support push notifications, and facilitate email snoozing. The IMAP protocol is nearly 30 years old and a part of reinventing the inbox is building a secure, modern API that’s better suited for mobile devices. In order to provide a robust, world-class email experience, we are filling reservations on a first-come, first-served basis.

The negative side-effect of this reservation system is that people are not exactly accustomed to waiting a few weeks before being able to use an iOS app. The App Store dynamics celebrate instant gratification. The waiting experience did put my patience to the test, and after fifteen days of wait, my interest in trying out Mailbox definitely waned. One thing I had to do was to simply stop thinking about it, so I buried the app in a folder and started checking the queue occasionally. When my Mailbox was finally available I was very close to delete the app for good.

The UI

Mailbox’s UI is designed around efficiency and minimalism (the good kind, the staying-out-of-the-way kind).

Mailbox main interface

As you can see, just the list of messages, a Search field and five buttons, all with clear, unambiguous icons. I also like that it uses the iPhone’s status bar as its activity panel. Again, pleasantly out-of-the-way design.

Simplicity is also found in how you interact with the app. I usually dislike applications that heavily rely on gestures, because if gestures are not implemented thoughtfully, it’s easy to end up with obscure or accidental actions. For that matter I generally prefer buttons: either you tap a button or not. But Mailbox implements simple gestures, and with enough visual feedback that’s very hard to make mistakes (and even if you do make a mistake, every action is ‘undoable’). For example, at first I scratched my head to understand how to perform a ‘short swipe’ versus a ‘long swipe’ when handling messages, but in practice it’s far more intuitive: as soon as you put your finger on a message and slide it on the right, for instance, Mailbox shows you what happens in real time using colours and icons. First green and the ‘Archive’ icon, then red and the ‘Delete’ icon. Very difficult to select the wrong action.

Email management

As other reviewers pointed out, Mailbox’s method invites the user to take action on email messages as if they were tasks in a sort of to-do list. Here’s a new email message: what to do with it? With simple gestures, you can archive it, delete it or choose to deal with it later by ‘snoozing’ it. Gestures are spatial and you always know in which direction to swipe because the button layout is there to remind you: the ‘mailbox area’ is in the middle, left is ‘Later’ (I love how the icon for ‘Later’ can be seen as a clock but also as a ‘L’ inside a circle), right is ‘Archive’. The goal is to get to the end of the day having dealt with all incoming messages, in a way or another, and hopefully having reached Inbox Zero.

If you follow the Inbox Zero school of thought, I believe that Mailbox is the mobile email app you were waiting for. It’s simple, fast, efficient. But what happens if you don’t usually manage email that way? A little friction is what happens. Little, because it’s not an unsurmountable obstacle, but enough that it’s unlikely you’ll adopt Mailbox as the primary email client on your iPhone.

For example, since I manage email more traditionally, when I look at Mailbox’s Inbox view (the image above), I just see all my read messages, i.e. a list of messages I have already dealt with (their status is Read, which in my mind and in my management system is the equivalent of I’m done with it). But in Mailbox’s system, all those read messages are still messages you need to act on, they are like tasks you haven’t tackled yet. In fact, if you enter Mailbox’s Settings > App Badge Count and select Show inbox conversation count (which is selected by default), you’ll see the Mailbox app icon with a probably very high badge count (2,600 in my case) and you’ll think: But those can’t be unread messages/threads, I’ve already read them! It’s because Mailbox sees all those messages as ‘undone tasks’. To make that high count disappear you’ll have to deal with every single message.

And apparently Mailbox doesn’t allow handling messages in bulk (at least, I haven’t found a way, maybe I’m missing something), so if you set up a Gmail account which has thousands of emails in its Inbox folder, and if you want to deal with email the Mailbox way, I suggest you visit that Gmail account via the Web interface, select everything and choose Gmail’s Archive option. That way, the next time Mailbox syncs your account, everything will be archived and will ‘disappear’ from Mailbox’s inbox.

This is where I noticed the most friction when using Mailbox. I’m not used to ‘archiving’ messages in my various Gmail accounts, and I just leave everything in the Inbox. And I may be receiving a series of email notifications I want to deal with quickly by marking them all read. Due to Mailbox’s different approach, there isn’t any option to select multiple messages and mark them read, yet I find myself looking for it all the time. This aspect — for me at least — is a constant interference and slows down my email management. To be fair, it’s not Mailbox’s fault: the developer’s website is very clear about what to expect from the app, and the friction I experienced mainly stems from the collision between two different methods for managing emails. Still, a little bit of flexibility on Mailbox’s part would be appreciated.

Provisional conclusion

Some time ago, Mat Honan wrote this about Mailbox:

Sure, Mailbox makes getting to inbox zero easier. But after spending a few days with it, I’m not sure that it actually makes me faster or more productive at reading and responding to e‑mail. It imposes a rigid system on me that doesn’t do everything I need it to, so I end up opening other e‑mail apps anyway. That means I’m ultimately spending even more time than I already was on e‑mail. I hate e‑mail.

Mailbox will be great for some people. But it doesn’t reinvent email; it just automates a process that may not work for you.

Considering my experience with Mailbox, so far, I tend to agree with Honan. I don’t hate email, but I certainly don’t like to end up spending more time managing it, either. As I’ve said, Mailbox is a very nice app, and gets a lot of things right, especially in the user interface and interaction departments. Whether it’s going to be a great app for you largely depends on how ingrained your email management habits and methods are.

If you already have perfected an efficient, satisfactory system to deal with your email, and such system doesn’t involve the Inbox Zero philosophy, then I guess you’ll have a hard time getting used to Mailbox.
If your email management is rooted in a ‘Getting Things Done’/Inbox Zero approach, then using Mailbox will likely be delightful.
If you don’t have a specific method to manage email and your email situation is generally a mess, Mailbox could be an interesting tool to use, giving you a good way to start managing your email more efficiently.

I’m in situation No. 1, and I’m actually a happy user of Apple’s iOS Mail app, but I’ll definitely keep Mailbox around because I’m very interested in its future development, now that it has been acquired by Dropbox.

Slow the hell down

April 1, 2013

by Riccardo Mori

Handpicked

In his latest article, Hey Apple, Where’s the Fire?, Joe Cieplinski talks about something I’ve been mulling over for a while now. I’ve never liked discussions about ‘what Apple should/shouldn’t do’, and I’ve refrained more than once from writing articles and contributions along those lines. That’s because I like to think that, considering what Apple has achieved in the last ten years or so, there are many people at Apple who know how to do their jobs, and are certainly more knowledgeable than me (and you) about what the company should or should not do.

But that doesn’t mean that all Apple products, hardware and especially software, should just be accepted without criticism. I’m a long-time Apple user, and over the years I’ve been consolidating my workflow mostly around first-party software. (It makes sense when you think that on a daily basis I use a variety of Macs of rather different vintages, and with versions of Mac OS X spanning from 10.3.9 to 10.8.3). And I must say I’ve been feeling increasingly disappointed in the quality of certain pieces of Apple software. Just to make a quick example I have before my eyes right now: how can it be that an application like iBooks Author should lack a basic feature such as handling footnotes? Good grief, isn’t it an application for creating books!? But as I said, this is just a tiny example.

Cieplinski writes:

Apple has introduced some incredibly cool technology over the past several years that hasn’t come close to reaching its potential. FaceTime, Passbook, iBooks Author, iCloud—just to name a few—were all so promising when they were introduced. But most of them have failed to be completely successful, not because they aren’t great ideas, but because Apple isn’t doing a whole lot to either improve or evangelize them.

If the pattern used to be “release, then iterate, iterate, iterate,” it seems like Apple is not giving itself enough time for the “iterate” part of that process. It’s being pressured to move on to the next thing. And that leaves us with a lot of half-baked products and a ton of unrealized potential.

And this paragraph from his conclusion is where I agree most with him:

If Apple took the year and worked on half of its existing products rather than trying to introduce new ones, they’d be doing themselves and us a much bigger favor. If they spent the year fixing the unbelievably sloppy bugs that still exist in iOS and Mountain Lion (I’m talking boneheadedly simple things like drag and drop on the Mac), rather than bringing five new half-baked apps like Podcasts to the platform, our phones and our laptops would be better at surprising and delighting us.

There isn’t much talk about iOS 7 and Mac OS X 10.9 at the moment, and I’m seriously hoping it’s because Apple is doing with them what Cieplinski and I are wishing: taking a step back and fixing things. I don’t have particularly exotic wishes or feature requests for either operating system. I’m not craving for new eye-candy stuff in iOS or Mac OS X. I want both to be robust improvements over their respective previous versions. Unlike others, I don’t ask Apple to innovate all the time and at all costs. And let’s be frank here: the kind of ‘innovation’ some are really asking from Apple is the mindless feature creep that has always characterised the approach of other tech companies, not Apple’s philosophy.

What I use: Finder alternatives

March 30, 2013

by Riccardo Mori

Software

Raskin overview

Raskin

It’s going to be a one-item list, because Raskin is the only application I use other than the Finder to navigate the filesystem on my MacBook Pro. Strictly speaking, it’s not a Finder alternative — not for me, at least — but a nice Finder augmentation tool.

I’ve been using it since its beta version back in 2010, and despite a few performance problems, it’s the only tool in the ‘Finder alternatives’ category that has remained with me over time.

Raskin is a zoomable user interface to view and manage practically everything on your Mac within a sort of giant desktop surface. Its name is an obvious reference to Jef Raskin and a homage to his research on the ZUI (Zooming User Interface). You can read a detailed overview of Raskin’s features at Raskin’s website. What I find most useful is the fact that I can see at a glance the entire contents even of huge folders and subfolders, because with Raskin you can browse and move through your stuff as if it were all laid out on a giant desk. You can pan and zoom anywhere, and the feeling is somewhat similar to using Google Earth to make virtual trips around the world. Or to having a telescopic Quick Look feature.

You can use Raskin to move from an application to another, and if you focus and keep zooming in on a particular document, you actually open it in the designated application; but I mostly use Raskin as a photo browser (with Light Table View), and as a search tool. Thanks to Raskin, in fact, on more than one occasion I’ve been able to find certain files (PDFs and images, especially) that I had misplaced or whose location I’d simply forgotten.

In my opinion and experience, Raskin is quite useful to find items whose filename you can’t even recall, or whose filename is so generic you can’t possibly remember what it’s about. This is particularly the case of sizeable folders containing dumps of iPhone photos: if you haven’t tagged them in any way, it’s not easy to locate that photo you took outside the Louvre in a folder with 1,600 image files all with names like IMG_3389.jpg, IMG_3390.jpg or DSCN4783.jpg, DSCN4784.jpg, etc. With Raskin you just zoom in on the target folder and scroll until you see the photo you’re looking for. This technique also helps when you want to create a themed photo gallery with criteria like “All the photos prominently featuring a certain colour (red, yellow, etc.)” or “All the photos with type-related elements”, and so on.

The only problems I’ve experienced with Raskin have all been related to performance and responsiveness. As you can very well imagine, to be able to show you so much all at once, Raskin has to create previews, calculate item sizes, things like these. In the past, when I was using it less frequently, things could get frustrating because every time I opened Raskin, it had to update all the information that had changed since the last time I used it. That task was usually very resource-intensive, and trying to do anything in the application during the ‘rebuilding’ stage resulted in spinning beach balls and general unresponsiveness (and sometimes even the unexpected quit). But these problems have been constantly addressed by the developers over time, and Raskin has got snappier. You still need a powerful Mac to have a smooth user experience, though. On my 15-inch MacBook Pro (mid-2009, 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8 GB RAM) it feels ‘just right’ with the occasional hiccup. Your mileage may vary.

You can purchase Raskin on the Mac App Store or directly from the Raskin Store. At $24.99 / €19.99 for a single user licence, it’s hardly the impulse purchase, but you can download a free trial version from Raskin’s website and see if it’s the tool for you.