I teach a lot of different students this year - the entire year 9 cohort, most of the year 7s and 8s (spread over the year), and a few classes of year 10s. Seeing all of them regularly gives me a pretty good look at how they use technology (with the exception of mobile since, like many schools, students are prohibited from using their phones during the day), which makes for some interesting conversations. ...
So there’s a certain element of hyperbole coming up. Just saying. Google Allo (which of course makes me think of the classically cheesy ‘Allo ‘Allo) was outlined in the recent Google IO keynote. One of the features which bears some consideration is Smart Reply which suggests replies to messaging and learns from your responses over time (and I assume also does learning on the aggregate, playing to Google’s strengths in large scale data analysis. ...
I’ve written about my Pebble before and the things that I like about it. This week a new firmware and app version got pushed out and I noticed that after tracking health data for some time (steps and sleep), the iOS app finally got a reporting screen for it. I thought it was worthwhile looking at, since it has a really nice reporting graph. Rather than simply reporting the number of steps and sleep hours, it gives an area plot showing current and typical data. ...
My wife and I recently returned from Honeymoon Part 2 on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. This isn’t a travel post though (although it’s a lovely, if somewhat rugged place to go!). When booking the holiday back in February I looked around for car hire and noticed that one outlet was advertising electric cars. Since Telsa (spoiler: we didn’t get a Telsa) has been in the news for ages and I wanted to learn more about plug in electric vehicles, I figured we’d hire one for a few days and see what it was like to drive one. I went to the trouble of looking at how many charge points there were around the island (one per town on the eastern side of the island, for a total of five) I went ahead and booked a Nissan Leaf. ...
I shuffle my attention between four devices: a (beloved if aging) 2012 13" Macbook Air iPhone 6S+ iPad Air 2 Work Surface Pro 3 Because I split my attention between them all, it can be a struggle to manage the list of things that are interesting to me so that when I’m in a time which is suitable on a device which is right, things that I care about are easy to reach. ...
This morning I woke up to an email from Smile Software titled “TextExpander 5 Lives!” and I was a little sad inside. Now I still think that their original plan of moving to a subscription pricing scheme was the wrong decision, but I really wanted to see that they had a plan for it. As tech pundits left and right have said, Smile has been around for ages, they should have a good idea about how the business works. ...
I remember someone else talking up Slack’s release notes before, but looking at them side by side with Box’s lately… I honestly don’t know why Box bothered with more than the first line since the other three dot points mean exactly the same as the single first dot point, providing no additional information at all. Slack does a great job of what is arguably the job of release notes: information about features, and which bugs have been fixed. More importantly, they do it in such a way that you might actually read the release notes because they are entertaining, not just because you might be frustrated with a problem in an earlier version and you want to know if it’s fixed yet. ...
Since deciding to turn part time hobby development for myself into a part time hobby that produces stuff others might actually buy, I’ve been looking through my list of ideas and trying to figure out some sort of progression through them. This involves evaluating which ideas are practical for me to pursue (I’ve got some pretty out-there items in my list which I think would be awesome that I just don’t have the time or expertise to attempt at this point) and which might actually be appealing to others. ...
Sleep wake on laptops is terrible. But why is it terrible? We’ve had close to a decade of smart phones, and on every phone and tablet I’ve owned, sleep and wake have been great: you push the button, the device wakes up and is responsive. In that decade of smart phones, every laptop I’ve had (both Apple and otherwise) has had some aspect of sleep/wake be unsatisfactory. My Apple laptops have been by far the best of the bunch, but even they tend to be fairly unresponsive waking from sleep, with keyboard input being glitchy in the first few seconds after the display wakes (i.e. when I’m trying to type in a password). ...
There was a fair bit of chatter in the blogs that I follow today that Smile’s TextExpander is changing from an upgrade pricing model to a subscription model (details at their pricing page). It’s an interesting decision, which I guess probably works out well for them since everyone that I see writing or talking about TextExpander seem to be daily users. I say interesting, since it brings to my mind a question of conflicting values: the perceived value to the customer against the value to the developer. To generalize, I think upgrade pricing for software lets it become more valuable to the customer over time as they can amortize their initial investment while retaining the original functionality. From a developer’s perspective (especially if they are active in maintaining software for platform updates, bugs etc) their software gets less value over time as their time investment increases with no additional return per customer. ...