¶ July 11

July of 2008 was a busy and significant month for me. Most importantly, I celebrated my first wedding anniversary with my wife, and welcomed our son into the world.

But that month also holds other historical significance, one being recognized by a lot of geeks this week. On July 11, 2008, the App Store launched alongside iPhone OS 2.0, the iPhone 3G, and MobileMe. That morning I woke ridiculously early to drive an hour to my nearest Apple Store and wait in line. In retrospect, it was pretty silly of me to head an hour away from home when my wife was home 9 months pregnant and days away from the due date. I remember standing in line kind of afraid my Motorola RAZR would ring.

The next few hours went by uneventfully. AT&T's activation servers had turned into molten slag, so I was able to purchase my iPhone and head home, where I activated it through iTunes later that day.

Since the prior winter I had been using a first-generation iPod touch, which ran nothing but Apple's stock apps. So July 11 was pretty neat in that the App Store was opening up. My first purchase was Twitterrific, which is now in its fifth version and is still my twitter app of choice. In fact, it has held the same position on my home screen for five years through three different iPhone models I have owned.

The App Store really did unleash the true potential of the iPhone, and later the iPad. The iPhone is essentially my connection to the world at large. Sure, I have my local friends and community, but the advent of the iPhone and the apps people have made have connected me to new friendships across the globe (back int he day those were called pen pals ).

Heck, if it weren't for the booming success of the App Store and iPhone and iPad, I wouldn't be where I am today. I don't think my job would exist without the App Store.

So much has happened in the past five years. I am days from celebrating my sixth anniversary with my wife and my son's fifth birthday. I am coming up on a year of working at the company of my dreams, and Apple's future is shining bright as they prepare to radically re-invent what iOS will be for years to come.

I really can't wait to see where we'll be on July 11, 2018.

¶ Yummy Yummy Chat Heads

I have to admit, like my friend David Chartier, I am a rare breed of nerd who actually likes Facebook. David talked a lot about Facebook Home and its potential. I want to talk about the new iOS app, Facebook 6.0.

The 6.0 update to the Facebook app streamlines the interface for the better, and beefs up its messaging capabilities. One way it does this is through Stickers, which are fun little pictures you can sling around through private or group messages. They’re cute, because they were designed by the awesome David Lanham.

But the real news here is Chat Heads, which show the avatar of the friend(s) you are currently chatting with in a little circle off to the side of wherever you are inside Facebook’s app. You can simply tap the circle and a conversation expands as a layer on top of where you are at, you send a message, tap the circle again, and it collapses the conversation and you go right back to where you were.

It’s a really enjoyable and nice experience.

On Facebook Home for Android, Chat Heads can appear anywhere on your device, even when you are in another app. Right now, this only works within Facebook on iOS, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it stayed that way.

But here is why I like the concept of Chat Heads, and where I’d like to see them go as a concept.

I like that they are not too intrusive during a conversation when you are doing something else. And I think they’d be the perfect interface for iMessage. Right now on iOS, it is kind of jarring to have an active back and forth with a friend over iMessage when you are also trying to look at or do something else. You switch fully from what you are doing to the conversation, then have to switch fully back.

Let’s say I am writing up a post like this on my iPad. I would much rather an iMessage come up off to the side as a little icon and wait for me to tend to it. I simply tap the icon, a conversation popover appears, I fire off a sentence, and tap back to what I am doing. It is a much less distracting way of giving a few seconds for a reply. Why?

Because even though it is a context switch, it is a very good illusion of a partial context switch (which doesn’t exist). It feels like you are only giving away attention peripherally, instead of having to be ripped from your focus of one app and dumped into another. Because you feel like you only give away quick aside of context, and you can see the task at hand right behind the conversation popover, it is easier to return to what you are doing.

Facebook and Apple seem to have a nice relationship, what with the deep integration with iOS and OS X last year. I hope that relationship could start a collaboration where maybe Apple can use the Chat Heads concept for iMessage and SMS, if they also allow Facebook Messages to be a global deal through it. I think I’d be okay with that, especially if there were a toggle.

¶ Three Years

It is a little hard to imagine that in a short three years how much the iPad has changed the world. It almost feels like it has been around much longer than three years.

I remember not knowing exactly why I needed wanted an iPad, but venturing out to look at one anyway. Of course, I ended up buying one. And I remember finding that oversized iPhone to be magical.

In these past three years I have owned four — count ‘em, four — iPads. The original, the iPad 2, The New iPad (or iPad 3 in regular person speak), and the best of them all so far — the iPad mini.

I still think that not even Apple knew exactly what the iPad would become when they launched it. And the truth is, it becomes whatever app you are currently running. It can be a book, an instrument, a race car, a movie studio (or movie theater), or be the future of communication drawn into the present.

The truly great thing is the amount of creativity the iPad can unleash in a person as the barrier to interact with a computer is broken down to simply directly touching the thing you are creating.

With each iteration of the iPad, my favorite has been the concentration of it to the lighter, more portable iPad mini. And I can’t help but feel that if we have come this far in three short years, how much further will we be in three more?

¶ Twenty-Thirteen

Happy New Year. I had planned to have some grand post about what is coming up for techēse this year, but I don’t have anything concrete planned. I have an updated design on Squarespace 6 (I’m currently on Squarespace 5) that I hope to launch soon, as long as a couple components on Squarespace’s end fall into place. The new design would include responsiveness for smaller screens, and a few other goodies.

More than anything, I am conscious that most posting has dropped off quite a bit. I’ve had a lot of changes in my life the past few months, and I am still settling into new roles and routines. More so, I have felt a lot like I have been repeating what others are already saying.

I feel like my voice is not my own, and in order to find it I need to write more. I’ve known this, but I have been afraid of it.

And then I read an article today by John Acuff that was a fricken kick in the pants.

So what now?

As we face 2013 down and our fifth year of this blog, what do we do going forward?

That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with for the last three months.

And I think the answer is we get messy again.

We let go of the sanitized ideas, the safe ideas, the easily digestible ideas.

And we open the gates and seize the day. (Newsies!)

Go read John’s entire post, because it’s awesome.

While my site has not become “big”, I have the same fears. I have enough readers to where I feel the compulsion to placate by not challenging any ideas. And that is why I have been another “me too” and I am tired of it.

So, I do not how things will progress this year. But I know I’ve lost my voice (or maybe never fully found it). I need my voice. And maybe in order to find it I need to let things get a little messy.

Merry Christmas

I hope you all have had a wonderfully merry Christmas. I have enjoyed a wonderful day with family, and it was great to witness the delight on my son’s face when he opened his presents.

As a bit of nerdy Christmas cheer, I leave you with this tweet I saw earlier today, which pretty much describes my life as the Family Geek.

And in those days Caesar Augustus decreed that all must return to the town of their birth, that they might sort out their parents’ computers

— Phil Rodgers (@PhilRodgers) December 24, 2012

P.S. Don’t forget to give the Gift of Geek.

¶ The Eleventh iTunes

I’ve been using iTunes for a long time. I remember using it when it debuted on Mac OS 9. I remember making the jump to purchasing my music on the iTunes Store when it arrived in 2003. To say I am invested in iTunes is an understatement.

Over the years Apple took that foundation of a music player and kept bolting on new features such as managing iPods, movies, TV shows, iPhones, apps, books, and all sorts of other things on top of the same basic design. iTunes has felt cluttered and stretched to the seams for years.

And for years I have been wanting Apple to do something drastic with iTunes. To trim the bloat — even through reorganization — and make something interesting and fun to use again.

Enter iTunes 11. The first major overhaul to how one uses iTunes that I remember. The sidebar that showed all your libraries, devices, the Store, and playlists is gone. Well, I should say it is gone by default — you can resurrect it in the View menu. If you are reaching for that menu right now, stop it. Give the new design a chance for a week or two. There is a reason the sidebar is gone.

In the past all those things in the sidebar held the same level of significance, even though they aren’t all of the same significance. It was a hodgepodge of where your priorities should be.

Now, whatever you are viewing at the moment is of the utmost significance. The bar along the top has a button on the left to switch the primary context of iTunes — Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Books, Apps and Tones. The center of the bar further whittles down the view of each of those categories. Let’s focus on Music, since that is probably the most prominent.

Music

With Music locked and located for the context, the center of the bar displays Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres, Video (that’d be music videos), and Playlists. Songs gives you the old style list of all your music. Albums, however, is now the primary way to interact with music in iTunes.

Albums shows a grid of all your albums and their artwork. This view, at first blush, is not all that new. In iTunes past, you would double click and album and get a song list view of it. Now, a single click on an album cover has a new twist — Expanded view.

If you’ve ever used an app folder on iOS, or in Launchpad on the Mac, Expanded View will seem familiar. The screen splits open to show the content of the album. I also shows the album art a little bigger, and iTunes color matches the view to the colors of the album. I honestly really like Expanded view. It is both beautiful and functional. And when you don’t need it, it is simply out of the way.

Another great part of the Music context of iTunes is Playlist creation. You can use the Playlist view, or, from any other Music view, just start dragging a song or album and a panel slides out with Playlists ready, and you simply drop the music into the playlist. The Panel then scurries away, out of sight.

However, my favorite part of the Music context is Up Next. Start playing an album or playlist and all of it is added to Up Next. However, if you need to satisfy a quick ear worm, you can click on an arrow next to a song and tell it to play next. This jumps it to the top of the queue. When it’s done, you go back to your regularly scheduled programming.

One final great feature I want to mention is the new Mini Player. Activated by a small glyph in the upper right of the screen, the mini player is a great way to have iTunes tucked away into a corner of your screen. The Mini Player has been around for a very long time (maybe since iTunes first debuted?). Though for the first time it is truly useful. You can use search from the Mini Player and queue up more music into Up Next. You can manage Up Next. It shows music information but changes to player controls when you hover over it. The new Mini Player is a tiny powerhouse of musical awesome.

Context, Context, Context

I spent the majority of my thoughts on the Music context of iTunes. But much of what has become iTunes over the years is still there. I cannot escape the idea of context, though. iTunes 11 has taken a page out of iOS. With, say, an iPad, the device is whatever you are using at the moment. The use case of the entire device changes from the context you place on it from the app you are using.

While iTunes 11 doesn’t fully reach this ideal, it gets close. When you want Music, all you see if music. When you want to browse the Store, all you see is the store. When you want to manage an iOS device, that is all you see.

And as I mentioned with Playlist creation, where a panel slides out when you start dragging music — things are only present in the context of them being useful. This is why I am happy to see the obfuscation of the sidebar. I don’t need to see all that stuff when I don’t need to use any of it. Seeing my playlists does not matter when I am managing my iPhone.

A lot of people dislike that Apple is making much of their ecosystem more like iOS. Many nerds are afraid the Finder will someday disappear from OS X. Honestly, I find iOS to be a breath of fresh air. The file system is not something most people know how to deal with, and they often shouldn’t. It is okay to abstract complexity away. Apple has achieved much of this with iOS. They are slowly making inroads toward it with OS X. And now they are bringing the abstract of singular focus and context back to iTunes.

We’ve never been great multitaskers. Be honest. We are really great at switching our context focus quickly. Maybe instead of having anything and everything available at once begging for our attention, we could allow ourselves to slow down with a more singular focus in our computing habits. Singular focus abstracts complexity. And less complexity is more enjoyable.

More enjoyable is exactly what iTunes 11 is.

¶ Why I Use Squarespace

techēse has resided at Squarespace since its inception in January 2010. Over time, the service has become better and cheaper, and I can’t really imagine techēse being anywhere else. I hope to move to Squarespace 6 soon, once the growing pains have subsided.

Squarespace is located in New York City, which was hit by a hurricane a few days ago. Squarespace warned there would likely be downtime — maybe even days of it.

So far, Squarespace hasn’t gone down, thanks to the heroic efforts of their staff. The entire story is chronicled here.

It is effort like this which I consider to be above and beyond, and that is one of the many reasons I am proud to use Squarespace.

¶ A Terrifying, Nightmarish Lesson on Security

Over the past three decades, more and more of our lives have transitioned from analog to digital. First, paper and typewriters yielded to word processors. Next, music went from albums, to cassettes, to CDs, to files on an iPod. Then our photos went from film to JPGs.

It used to be, in the analog, the only ways you’d really lose something is if your home were hit by a natural disaster, or you were burgled.

Not anymore. Mat Honan found this out the hard way. He was hacked. Hard.

At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere. When I set it up, years and years ago, that seemed pretty secure at the time. But it’s not. Especially given that I’ve been using it for, well, years and years. My guess is they used brute force to get the password (see update) and then reset it to do the damage to my devices.

The backup email address on my Gmail account is that same .mac email address. At 4:52 PM, they sent a Gmail password recovery email to the .mac account. Two minutes later, an email arrived notifying me that my Google Account password had changed.

At 5:00 PM, they remote wiped my iPhone

At 5:01 PM, they remote wiped my iPad

At 5:05, they remote wiped my MacBook Air.

[…]

I still can’t get into Gmail. My phone and iPads are down (but are restoring). Apple tells me that the remote wipe is likely irrecoverable without serious forensics. Because I’m a jerk who doesn’t back up data, I’ve lost at more than a year’s worth of photos, emails, documents, and more. And, really, who knows what else.

This is horrifying. A nightmare. As I read Mat’s post this weekend, I could feel a sense of dread creeping on me. I knew I had vulnerabilities to some of my accounts, where I had traded some security for convenience. It’s no excuse. I’m a faithful user of 1Password on all my devices. I have no excuse for not having great passwords.

Except, in this case, not even the strongest password would have helped. The hacker didn’t even try to figure out the password. They had a back door.

From Mat’s follow-up piece on Wired (emphasis mine):

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

[…]

On Monday, Wired tried to verify the hackers’ access technique by performing it on a different account. We were successful. This means, ultimately, all you need in addition to someone’s e-mail address are those two easily acquired pieces of information: a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card on file.

If you lost your wallet, let’s say it contained your driver’s license, your credit card, and a business card with your iCloud email address. That is all someone would need to destroy your digital life.

Thankfully, Apple and Amazon have, for now, closed the loophole while they tighten security.

Here’s the thing: what happened to Mat has been going on for a while. These loopholes have existed for quite a while. Mat was just the first person to get hit that had a significant audience.

Unfortunately, that’s usually how these things are discovered.

I’d love to see Apple take Marco Arment’s advice on how to make password resets a better:

And ideally, before resetting a password by phone, they’d send a forced “Find My”-style push alert to all registered devices on the account saying something like, “Apple Customer Service has received a request to reset your iCloud password. Please call 1-800-WHATEVER within 24 hours if this is unauthorized.”

Then make the person call back the next day. If you forget your password and the answers to your security questions, it’s not unreasonable to expect a bit of inconvenience.

Marco is right. If you forget how to access your account, a little inconvenience of waiting a day to get back in is okay.

---

I am largely sympathetic to Mat. What he went through sucks. But I can’t get past his one blunder. He didn’t have a backup of his Mac.

How does a technology writer not keep backups? Heck, he uses a Mac. OS X has had backup built-in for 5 years. Here’s a free tip, folks: go learn about Time Machine and then use it.

For even better backup practices, go read Shawn Blanc’s backup tips.

Macworld’s Dan Moren & Lex Friedman have some security tips, as well.

As for me, I’ve disabled Find My Mac on iCloud. The Find service is more practical for devices like the iPhone and iPad, but the idea of someone being able to remote wipe my Mac gives me the willies. I keep backups, but the whole idea just doesn’t sit right with me right now. Anything on my iPhone or iPad already exists on my Mac, so I’m not worried about those devices ever being wiped.

I’ve lost some trust in Apple and Amazon. It was ridiculous how easy Amazon let someone into the account.

And Apple? Well, they deservedly bear the brunt of mistrust. Why? Because they have been asking us to trust them more and more over the years.

I created an Apple ID for the iTunes Store in 2003. Back then, it was only for music. But over the years, it has grown to house music, movies, apps, and now my email, contacts, calendars, notes, reminders, my location, and the keys to wipe my devices.

I’ve realized many of us have a lot of our eggs in one basket. A basket we trust not to tip over.

My advice? Use the basket, but don’t trust it entirely. Keep backups. Use really good passwords (and go buy 1Password for all your devices). And, since 1Password can help you fill in credit card info on a site in a couple clicks, consider not storing credit card info on the web.

¶ Ruminating on Updates

Just a little late night ruminating on the eve before OS X Mountain Lion hits the App Store.

Gatekeeper

I’d say my Applications folder is pretty evenly split between App Store apps and non-App Store apps (hereafter referred to as direct apps), once you take away the system apps.

Of the direct apps, I honestly haven’t seen as many as I thought I would gain Mountain Lion and/or Gatekeeper support. Gatekeeper is Apple’s new security system in Mountain Lion that ensures a developer of a direct app is known by Apple. And, if a direct app does anything nefarious, Apple can shut down that app’s developer ID, stopping the spread of malware cold.

Here’s the thing: Gatekeeper is on by default. And if developers have not updated for Gatekeeper yet, users will either have to exempt each non-Gatekeeper app one by one, or disable Gatekeeper entirely, rendering this new layer of security moot.

That isn’t good.

If users disable Gatekeeper, they will likely never reenable it. I guess they compute at their own risk, huh?

The far greater risk, however, is users becoming used to allowing any direct app that asks to circumvent Gatekeeper to do so. If they develop a Pavlovian response to clicking Allow every time an app wants through the Gate, they will have a false sense of security if a malicious app does someday surface. The trained response should be to say no to such prompts.

iWork

Another thing that has been bugging me is Apple’s lack of showing off any truly significant updates to iWork — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. We know iWork will be gaining iCloud’s Documents in the Cloud feature with Mountain Lion, so the apps will need to be updated in some fashion.

My concern is whether this will just be yet another bolt-on update to the current versions of iWork — which have been around since January 2009 — or whether iWork will truly get a proper update for 2012.

Furthermore, Apple only allows App Store apps to take advantage of Documents in the Cloud. Like I said, iWork has been around since 2009, well before the App Store existed on the Mac. My copy of iWork came on a DVD.

Now, Apple certainly has the right and the ability to give the non-App Store versions of iWork access to iCloud, much like my non-App Store version of Aperture can use Photo Stream. But I can’t help but feel like iWork has been deprived of a significant rethink for too long. I’d like to see iWork 2012 (or 2013, or just plain iWork) in the App Store tomorrow.

---

Transitions are always awkward. The transition to Gatekeeper will take some time. I just thought more developers would have been ready for it.

I’d also like to see Apple start wrapping up the transition from the apps that were sold on physical media to App Store versions by putting iWork ‘09 to rest, and giving the trio of apps a much needed update in this era of refinement.

¶ (In)Consistent Experience

About a week and a half ago, Twitter’s Michael Sippey penned a letter on Twitter’s developer blog about the service’s ambition of delivering a consistent Twitter experience.

A lot of speculation has swirled around Sippey’s post the past week, primarily because of this paragraph (emphasis mine):

Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” That guidance continues to apply as much as ever today. Related to that, we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

Why is this important to you and me? Well, it probably isn’t if you are happy with Twitter’s official clients. But for those of us who use third party clients like Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofon, or Plume — this potentially spells disaster for our favorite client.

I see this thinly veiled threat from Twitter being fully revealed in one of two ways:

1. Third-party Twitter clients will have to introduce Twitter’s promoted tweets (ads) into the stream, and possibly modify how they present tweets to be in line with Twitter’s guidelines on Twitter Cards.
2. Twitter kills all third-party clients by revoking their API access completely.

If the first option is what happens, I don’t see that as a bad thing, really. Twitter has to pay its bills, and they’ve chosen to do that through ads (I, honestly, would have paid a subscription for Twitter). Third-party clients get to use Twitter’s API for free, and many of them are paid apps. So, third-parties are making money for themselves while not having to provide direct revenue to Twitter.

I can live with ads in the tweet stream. Heck, if you use the official client, you already do.

Now, the second option. This is the tough one. I honestly don’t know if I could stomach using Twitter if third-party clients were killed. Why?

Because Twitter is a hypocrite. Here they are, claiming they want to deliver a consistent experience. But have you used various official apps from Twitter? They are anything but consistent.

The iPhone and Android apps behaves somewhat like the website experience, having both the Connect and Discover areas. However, the iPad app has hardly any of the same features as the phone apps and web. It also has a vastly foreign user interface in comparison.

And I don’t even want to get started on the Mac app, which has been neglected for over a year — its last update was on June 1, 2011. The Mac app cannot even upload an image to Twitter’s own picture service.

Now, maybe there are big updates in store for Twitter’s first-party apps that will unify the experience. But for a company that is implicitly saying it doesn’t want third-party clients in the ecosystem because they are “inconsistent”, they have been showing through history that they do not care about a consistent experience.

So let’s talk about a consistent experience. Go try Twitterrific out on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Everything is laid out relatively the same and the apps are updated consistently at the same time, rolling out new features to all platforms at once. If you use Twitterrific on one device, you know how to use it on the other.

The same goes for Tweetbot. Currently, Tweetbot is on the iPhone and iPad, and if Twitter doesn’t pull the third-party rug out, there will soon be a Mac version. On the iPhone and iPad, the Tweetbot experience is consistent and easy to move between one device to the next. I assume the Mac version will be very similar.

Simply put: third-party apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot have proven they do a much better job at maintaining a consistent Twitter experience than Twitter itself does.

I know that when a company builds their product on top of another company’s product, they should expect that the rug could be pulled out from under them at any time. But it seems such a shame the way Twitter treats third-party developers, since I doubt Twitter would be half the juggernaut it is today without having been built up by third-parties in the first place.

Twitter, historically, has been largely unoriginal in how it has developed new features. Things like mentions and direct messages came from users, not Twitter. Twitter had to buy the leading third-party iPhone app (at the time, Tweetie) to offer the first version of an officially branded client. Even the use of the word tweet and associating a bird icon came from a third-party developer.

If Twitter pushes third-parties out the door, I don’t see a bright future for Twitter. The evidence shows they have little original inspiration and even less commitment to a consistent user experience.