iStuff Snapshot 2013

(This is hopelessly egocentric post which will probably be of no interest to anyone other than myself.)

LifeHacker wants to know how many apps are installed on your smartphone.  This is the kind of thing that is interesting to look back on when it is in the past, so I though I'd capture a snapshot of my phone/iPad usage today.

In general my philosophy is to fight my urge to be a packrat. Although most apps are impulse-buy priced, I have been fairly ruthless about culling things I don't use. The reason for this is I can't stand the litter that comes with having piles upon piles of apps installed -- since there's no organizational standardization, the end user is left with the responsibility of imposing their own. I have never had more than three screens of apps, and even on the iPhone with its reduced real estate I currently only have two. Use of folders and the ruthless culling of unused apps has helped.

This philosophy is admittedly sort of on hold right now as I adapt to having the ipad in rotation. Eventually I'll go through the iPhone and eliminate those apps which are now only used on the iPad.

This is my iPad homescreen:

Wallpaper is "Autumn Fury", a preschool painting that Alex did years ago.

On the tray:

• Chrome
• Gmail
• Mail (for work-related mail)
• Facebook
• Twitter

I have moved away from Safari pretty much completely, only using it for stuff that might clash with something in Chrome or something that Just Won't Work in Chrome. That's not very much these days (for my usage, anyways).

In Games:

• Carcassone
• Zombie GS
• Ascension
• Jetpack Joyride
• Bloons TD 5 HD
• Shark Dash
• Ragdoll 3 HD Redline

As far as games go, I play Jetpack Joyride the most (I have something like 22 hours in-game according to the in-game tracker). I have some Ascension and Carcassone turn-based games going, but due to their nature they are very much make-your-turn-then-quit type interactions. Shark Dash was one of this year's free games, and I never play it, I should delete it.

In Productivity:

• SSH Term Pro
• Most of the iOS built-ins

In iOS System:

• The rest of the iOS built-ins
• Find iPhone

In Internet (which should frankly be retitled "stuff from Google"):

• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• Blogger
• Safari
• Google
• Planets
• Write Room
• Google +
• Skype
• Google Earth
• Evernote
• GoodReader

Dropbox should go since I never used it and I have paid space on Google Drive now. Write Room was something I used as a writing scratchpad mostly for Blog posts, but now that I have the Blogger app there doesn't seem to be much point for it. Evernote is a new experiment. GoodReader is for reading PDFs on Google Drive. And I should really delete the "Google" app since there's less functionality in there than there is in Chrome.

In Audio Video:

• VLCStreamer
• TSA
• 360

VLC Streamer was for watching movies over WiFi. Now that we're in the process of putting all our movies into iTunes, there doesn't seem to be much point, but it is useful for watching some of the movies which have not been imported into iTunes.

In Hockey:

• CBC Hockey
• Senators

Not in folders:

• WeatherEye HD
• Living Earth
• Remote

So by my count that's 32 additionally-downloaded apps.  Pretty thin.

Most of my time is spent in Chrome, Mail, or Twitter.  Most of my game-playing time is spent with Jetpack Joyride, although when I do play Bloons TD 5 I usually end up spending a lot of time with it.  I'm frequently in Ascension because I have a bunch of games going, but they are usually quick in-and-out one-move operations.

Other than that, my usage for anything else is pretty thin.  I don't like either hockey app -- the Senators app is inconsistent with game updates, but the CBC one only works in portrait mode (I actually have my iPad locked to landscape) and doesn't have the focus on Ottawa that I prefer.

It still annoys me that the Newstand can't be deleted or hidden in a folder.

This is what my iPhone looks like right now:





There's a lot more crap there because I used to use the phone as a general platform before I got the iPad.  On the phone I spend most of my time with Mail, Gmail, Phone, and Twitter.  Occasionally I use the GPS apps, but I'm not sure I've found one I liked yet.  I don't game on it any more unless I'm desperately bored.

Right now the phone has 44 additional apps installed on it, and most of those can/should be removed.

Going through this should give me the encouragement to clean up a bit. Frankly if I decide I want anything back, downloading it from either the base PC or the App Store would be very easy.

Moar Internets

Just installed the new Rogers cable modem.



...not that I have a record of what it was before, but anyways.  The main reason for this was the bandwidth cap -- the boys are living on the internet right now and the overages were awesome.  This new plan doubles what we can use per month... which means we should be OK until the summer at least.

Why I'd Consider A Blackberry For My Next Phone

So leafing through the Blackberry X hype, and I find myself considering that I would seriously consider a Blackberry for my next phone. Yes, I've only had this iPhone for 14 months and I may be stuck with it for another year and a half (but hopefully not -- hopefully only another half year) but it isn't ever too early to consider what I'd do if it was time.

Last time around the choice was pretty clear, and for the most part I have been happy with my Telus iPhone. It does apps, it does GPS, it does mail, it does internet, it does phone. There are problems, of course:

• As a phone for coverage it sucks both in comparison with the Rogers Blackberry Pearl 9100 I had, as well as with the Telus Blackberry Bold 9700 my co-worker has.  So it isn't the network, it is the phone.
• If you use the apps, the battery life is sharply reduced.  So when I'm on call had have to have the phone, I can't play games or surf the web.

But really these are small quibbles.

And really, it isn't so much that "Blackberry is now so good I'll get a phone of theirs", it is more a case of my usage pattern changing.  What's really changed in my life is that I now have an iPad mini.  So for my portable web browsing and app using and movie watching and game playing, I use that.  The mini is great -- it even fits in the back pocket of most of my jeans, meaning I can carry it around the house with me when I'm on kid patrol.  So frankly, running apps on the phone no longer is a huge issue.  I would like some sort of GPS functionality -- and frankly I'm not really happy with the GPS apps I have for the iPhone, I miss the one I had on my previous Pearls -- so over all I'm not tied to the iOS platform as a phone platform.

The Blackberry mail experience was superior to that of the iPhone.  The Blackberry phone experience was superior to that of the iPhone.  And while I do listen to music on the phone occasionally, it isn't very often.  So the fact that I have a bunch of music in iTunes is a bit of a hindrance, but not a huge one.

Put that together, and I just might go back to Blackberry the next time around, depending on what handsets are available at the time.

(It also occurs to me that since I'm no longer tied to iOS as a platform, the same logic could mean Windows Phone becomes a possibility too.  But not Android -- frankly the negatives in the Android ecosystem have not been addressed yet, so Android phones are still not on the table.)

Private Notebooks

One of the blogs in my RSS feeds spat up an article on making better use of your time.  The author went through and discussed some of the things he's done to make his workflow better and to eliminate some of the time sinks that inevitably creep into a daily routine.

While I'm onboard with some ideas (a couple of years ago I dropped almost all my mailinglists in favor of RSS feeds) and disagree with others (RSS feeds are for collecting -- gotta get 'em all!) what I want to talk about today is the idea of Evernote.

I was a OneNote fan for a long time. I still am. However, I switched to Linux two years back, and then moved to a Mac a few months ago. The switch to Linux required a virtual machine to keep OneNote around, but that was a little cumbersome. Then moving to a Mac, I wanted to integrate into that OS more. Thus, I switched to EverNote (Yay cross-platform!). Doubly helpful is their cloud storage of notebooks that I can see and use on many other devices.

I've glanced at OneNote a couple of times but never seemed to really get what it wanted me to do and what it could do for me. I've also looked at Evernote a couple of times with more diligence -- mostly because of the web-based service and being synchronized/accessible by iOS devices, of which I have a couple now. And today, triggered by the article above, I downloaded and installed Evernote.

Having done that I think I "get" what Evernote wants me to do, and what it will do for me. It is very cool -- the recognizing text out of images is neat, and upgrading to Premium might be worth it only for making all my vendor PDFs searchable from one place. But I'm still not sure I want to buy into it, and today I figured out why.

Evernote, and I presume OneNote, is a really well-done Wiki program. It is easy to get data in, easy to organize and find data, easy to store and easy to access. Evernote is a brilliant success at this.

The problem is: it is private by default.

Not just organization-private, but individual-private. By default, what goes into it isn't viewable by arbitrary people.

Which for a lot of applications, is great! You don't want your private business, your secret sauce, just out there for anyone to take and copy. This is the value you add.

Like the joker says, if you're good at something, never do it for free.

But for what I want, generally, I want public-by-default. A lot of the problems I see and fight with and solve professionally have proprietary details, but the underlying logic of how to line the hoops up to jump through to get the result I want -- that's general. And usually I solve it with some hints from the Internet, usually from other people's blogs and wikis showing what they learned when they did what I'm trying to do.

And therefore I feel a duty to give back to the Internet. Thus, the public wiki, where I put out what I've learned. There are some articles which I am proud of up there. (Some others, not so much.) And very occasionally I get an email from someone saying "thanks!" (or "you are wrong/incomplete, here's why"). But the hit counts on some articles keep going up. I'm doing my part to make the Internet include answers, not just questions.

Now that I've wrestled that revelation out of myself, I'm going to try Evernote for a while to see if it will fit in my workflow. I'll probably even up for the Premium for a year -- I've spent more than $50 on worse things.

The Problem With Curing Autism

One of the things which has been bumping around in my head the last week has to do with the autism story that went through the media last week.  The sum of the story is that a research study suggests that for some people, autism is a diagnosis they can lose.  That they can grow out of autism.

One of the articles I read (but have lost) made reference to patients who "no longer met the clinical diagnosis of Autism."  This caused me some thought.

The problem is that autism is, currently, a diagnosis made through the accumulation of certain numbers of behavioral symptoms.  There is no arbitrary mechanical test, through blood or DNA or pathogen detection, that can arbitrarily draw the line between autistic and non-autistic.  Treatment, therefore is about teaching autistic people how to deal with their natural tendencies to replace unhelpful behaviors with more productive substitutes.

The problem is: if you have masked a behavioral symptom to the point that the behavior is not detected, have you actually cured anything?

Consider an amputee.  You can replace the missing limb with a prosthetic with such quality that to the casual observer there is no difference between the amputee and a non-amputee.  However you have not actually solved the underlying problem: there is a missing natural limb.

Similarly, giving autistic people coping mechanisms is useful, but it isn't actually curing anything, and until we really understand the underlying biological pathology and can take steps that cause real change in that pathology, we can't claim to be curing autism.

Humour

Today's Penny Arcade is on The Big Bang Theory.  (Well OK its more about some kind of game with The Big Bang Theory thrown in as a punchline, but work with me here.)

I know more than one person who watched an episode of Big Bang Theory and at some point said something along the lines of "I know it's funny, but I'm uncomfortable laughing at myself."

Sheldon is an exaggerated parody, but many of his foibles are based in real life tendencies.

Responsibility

I'm going to attribute this to Martin Luther King, but I may be wrong:

"One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."

Most "activists" today seem to want to weasel out of the penalties for breaking the laws, to hide from the consequences.

If the crime is unjust, fight the crime.  But if you do the crime, do the time.  Take responsibility.  Stand up in a court of law and say, "yes, I did that."

(Inspired by seeing the quote here.)