Tag: apple

Review: Twitter vs Twitter

Like most people, I use Twitter. I don’t always use the official Twitter tools for that, though. For example, I rarely use the website itself as it’s slow and annoys me. I’ve almost always used Twitter apps on my computers, too.

In July I decided to try using the official Twitter app again. I’d stopped when, at some point, they stopped working on it. Since they’ve picked it back up, I felt I should try it out. As a whole, I like it 90% but … well let me explain.

Tweetbot

This is my normal, go-to Twitter app. I’ve used it for a couple years, and it meets nearly all my needs for a Twitter app. I can have multiple accounts, which is a must-have for me, and it separates my @-replies from my likes/retweets. I really like that. It also makes those @-replies a different color in my timeline so they stand out.

But… It only tracks likes/retweets for while the app is open. So if I log off, get a million retweets, and log back in, I’ll never know. Also it lacks some of the basic Twitter features like being able to report users and seeing if my other accounts have messages etc I need to pay attention to. I have to click to expand the other accounts to see what’s going on.

Interestingly, all third party apps, be it iOS or MacOS, seem to have this issue with the notifications. They just can’t keep track if you’re not logged in. I’m guessing it’s a matter of the API and limiting calls. Most annoyingly, recently Twitterific has just stopped showing me @-mentions from people I don’t follow.

Twitter

Currently it has a brain and does everything you can do on the web. Multiple accounts, which I can see at a glance who has an alert or message, and it’s easy to switch between them. One click. I can see

Downside? Sometimes when I log back in, the Live Stream is messed up. Also the notifications and mentions and replies are all jumbled up, in the worst ways. I can’t just see replies or likes or mentions. There’s no indication that a message IS a mention in my main-timeline. And the alerts that tell me I have an unread are for notifications and mentions combined.

That I can’t easily find my mentions, which I want to reply to, sucks.

So Which Wins?

Right now, Twitter’s app is winning for the simple reason of easy user status, easy user switching, and actually being able to see all my likes/retweets. Which is important in some cases. It certainly sucks that I can’t easily identify my replies, and I can’t separate mentions from notifications like I can in the web-app, but the reliability of the API is (currently) worth it.

11 August, 2017
Postbox: Desktop Email That Doesn’t Suck

While I greatly prefer to use Apple’s default apps whenever possible, I’ve been using Postbox for my email for a while now, especially since I switched over to Gmail for my email hosting.

While you can use Mail.app with Gmail, it has a lot of issues. I’m not a fan of Gmail in a web browser, either, though I do use it for other things. I like having an app separate to my browser where I can read email. Gmail was built for … well … the browser. It’s never really been a happy marriage to Mail.app, and that’s because Gmail’s IMAP isn’t really IMAP.

Enter Postbox.

This is an app based on the open source Thunderbird, but I find it much easier to use. It has a Windows and Mac client, and it looks clean. Since the recent update this year, it’s a purchase I’m happy to have made.

I currently have two email accounts, one is my Gmail account and one is my ipstenu.org email… Except that second email actually houses a dozen aliases. They all get funneled to different folders based on which alias they’re sent to (or who sent the email at all). My goal was to have only my important emails land in my inbox, which basically means my wife or my family.

Postbox pretty much just works for me. It’s well documented for how to configure for gmail and it lets me use my keyboard to navigate between folders. I love the arrow keys to go up and down and see what my email is.

About the only thing that annoys me is there’s a random [Gmail] folder I can’t seem to get rid of. Also you have to be careful about the Gmail All Mail folder being too large but that’s really a problem with Gmail more than any app. In fact, it’s most of why Mail.app is so terrible to use with Gmail.

Postbox isn’t perfect. It can suck up a lot of memory, and there is some hands-on configuration. This is no ‘set it an forget it’ email client, but again, that’s back to Gmail being a giant moron with regards to IMAP. When compared with Mail.App, I find it more reliable if you have multiple accounts, but also if you have a lot of dynamically sorted folders. Like I do.

If you’re just using one Gmail account, or you don’t have a complex set of filters and rules, this is overkill. But if you do, give Postbox a try. It has a free trial after all.

4 November, 2016
Apple Watch UX: Too Small

The biggest issue I have with my watch is the UX to perform an action.

I use the WebMD app to remind me to take my pills every morning. At 7:15 it pings my watch and says to take them. I have to scroll down and tap ‘take’ but it gives me three options: Skip, Take, Dismiss.

This is not the same as the alert they show on their Apple page:

That shows up when you miss the alert and go check what you need to take.

This strikes me as a bit off. The information is too small and the buttons are not as clear as they should be, and I have to scroll down.

So let’s think what does someone want when they get that alert? They either take the pill or not. Or they dismiss the alert. We want them to take the pills, so we should make that button bigger and green. We don’t want them to not, so make that normal and red. As for dismissing, we can swipe the alert down, so you can leave that button off completely and use the built in UX.

When we consider the Human Interface Guidelines of the Watch, I think they’ve aimed too small. While they say to have buttons be “large enough to be tapped easily” and “Create buttons that are easy for the user to tap.” the minimum sizes they provide are shockingly small.

A 42mm Watch has 390px of usable vertical height. 52px (which is the minimum size for the 42mm) is 13.3% of the height. That’s 13mm. Hold on to that number.

There was a study by the MIT Touch Lab which investigated Human Fingertips in the Mechanics of Tactile Sense and they determined the average width of an adult human index finger is 1.6 to 2 cm (16 – 20 mm).

Now Apple’s saying the minimum height is 13mm when the smaller end of average is 16mm. That means if your button is the minimum, most of us will have trouble tapping your button.

I’m not a graphic designer. I call myself a monkey with a crayon. I’m not a UX expert. But I am is a very experienced user and I’m someone who understands how users think. That’s distressingly more rare than you’d think. I understand how a user goes from A to B and gets lost on C.

When I first got my Apple Watch, I struggled. I had a lot of confusion over force touch (something I still find a little difficult to get correct). But I’ve learned the one thing. Those buttons need to be bigger.

These are the buttons for alarms. The one I don’t have is the nightstand mode button but I use my Watch for an alarm and I don’t have a snooze. Sometimes I have trouble tapping the button in the morning, but I don’t think that’s a function of button size. That said… Those buttons could be larger.

The Watch tries to separate functions on the Watch, alerts, by ones you look at and ones you interact with. I think the interactions need to have bigger buttons in order for more meaningful, easier, usability.

Some of this will be addressed in WatchOS 3, which will have us swiping less. But the majority of apps are still trying too hard to cram more information onto small screens. WebMD included. We need to get better about separating information from alerts on our notifications and devices. We need to have everything be easily dismissible with one gesture.

Thankfully we’ll keep iterating and getting better.

24 June, 2016
Apple Watch Faces

I’ve had my Apple Watch for getting near a year now.

Time flies I guess.

I started out using the basic Utility face, with the round clock and simple notifications along the edges. The more I used it, the more I realized I needed different faces for different days. That’s something the Watch lets me do with surprising ease.

The Workday

What I need to know the most is ‘what do I have scheduled next?’ Meetings of course, but I also put appointments and I schedule ‘to do’ slots in there. I need a half day to fix some code? I’ll do block that out.

The complications are the date in the upper left, the calendar in the center, and the bottom row are the weather, my activity, and MacID. The last one is a premium app which lets me lock and unlock my laptop from my watch. Since I leave my laptop open on my desk all the time, I find this helpful for security. Pop off the bathroom, lock the laptop. Come back, tap the watch, unlock.

If you don’t have a watch, they have an iOS app that works too. In fact, the Watch uses the phone app.

The Weekend

I like an analog watch face. It’s my default. This one shows me the time and date with the day, the corners are battery and activity. The bottom is weather in detail. If I tap on the date, I go to my calendar, but most weekends I don’t need to worry about it.

The Traveller

When I travel, I don’t actually need my calendar so much. It’s weird, but since I mostly go to WordCamps or similar conventions, I don’t tend to schedule things past ‘event – 8am to 5pm’ followed by ‘After Party – 6pm to 9pm’ and so on.

That means what I need for my watch is the weather (I’m often in places for the first time). The bottom row is the time at home (so I don’t call my wife at one in the morning), activity, and my flight status. I almost always fly American these days, so I put that complication in.

The Apps

I mentioned MacID already. It’s $3.99 and worth it. I also use Wunderground for my weather, since it has the right kind of alerts. I can see the clouds and the rain and that’s all I want. I use the free version. American Airlines has a free app, and it’s surprisingly good about alerts for gate changes and rescheduled flights. I’m constantly getting updates before gate agents. I also use TripCase since I can track my hotel and event information in it. The bonus there is my wife can check and know where I’m supposed to be, in case she needs to get a hold of me.

What Else

I actually have other faces I use. I have a photo I took in Japan that I like to use with the time, and nothing more, when I have a non-stress, non-fuss day. I have a red-text time only face for when I’m in theaters (red light is less ‘glaring’ than others if I should happen to check the time). But the three I listed above are my regular watch faces. All on one watch.

11 March, 2016
Mapping the Apple Watch
While in Japan, I had the chance to use my Apple Watch to get around and I figured out something.

For walking or driving, the Apple Map app is the best to use with the Apple Watch. Not only do you get turn by turn directions with the haptic taps, but you can quickly see what’s next if you’re not sure what side of the street to be on. The haptics I love:

A steady series of 12 taps means turn right at the intersection you’re approaching; three pairs of two taps means turn left…

I use this feature constantly. It’s brilliant to be able to walk around and enjoy the area I’m in without worrying that I’ll get too terribly lost. As I walked through Kanda, my wrist tapped “tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap” and I turned left like a boss. The only time I used my phone was when I was at a five-way intersection. I can even use it to walk from my father’s apartment to his mother-in-law’s house a few blocks away. Or the 7-Eleven (which are awesome in Japan).

For public transportation, the Google Maps app is brilliant. No. It’s phenomenal. Ueno station, in Tokyo, is one of the more complicated and confusing stations I’ve ever seen. It’s crowded, it has a damn shopping mall on top of it, and it’s where seventeen major train lines meet. The Google Map can, most of the time, tell me what track to be on and when for what train.

Ueno makes Penn Station look tiny.

But Google Maps can’t do ‘both.’ In fact, I’ve learned the Google Maps app is getting worse at things. You see, you go through Ueno to the Keisei Skyliner (the train to the airport) when you take the train from my dad’s apartment to Narita. It’s very simple. Takasaki line from Ageo to Ueno, exit Ueno via the South (not the Park) exit. Turn right. Pass the duck. Done.

Instead of showing you a walking route, when I asked Google Maps to get me to Narita, it drew a straight-as-the-crow-flies line from Ueno Station to Keisei Skyliner. Yeah. Not so much there, Google-San.

It only got worse when I wanted to take the train from Ageo to Kanda for WordCamp. You’d think that Google would be able to alert me, since they have an Apple Watch App, with taps “Hey, get off the train at the next stop.” But they don’t. In fact, the Apple Watch app just lists the directions, not very well, and doesn’t give me alerts. Even worse, you can’t easily track from the iPhone to the Watch. When I put in a direction on my Apple Maps, it automatically triggers the map on my Watch. Google Maps only shows ‘recent searches’ and Work and Home.

It’s an absolute fail to use the technology properly.

To make Google Maps ‘right’ for the Watch is pretty simple.
1. Direction alerts. Tell me when to turn left or right. Steal it from Apple or make your own.
2. Change train alerts. Tell me when I should get up. This will prevent people from sleeping through their stops.
3. Give me easy directions to anywhere. Let me set up a path on my phone and immediately transfer it to my Watch.
4. Use Siri. “Hey Siri, use Google Maps to get me home.”
Four things. I’d settle for the first two, though I think the first three should be a priority for user experience.

Until then, I’ll have to use my iPhone for transportation in a strange land, and my Watch for walking around the planet.
18 November, 2015
App Review: iStat Menus

It’s a simple question. If the meeting is held at noon Pacific time, what time is it UTC? The answer is 1900 hours.

The reason for the question is complicated. I work with people around the world. My family lives in a multitude of timezones, some across the date line. I travel a lot. I need to know when ‘now’ is, and I need to know when ‘now’ is for someone else all the time.

Enter iStat Menus for Mac.

It’s not actually meant for what I use it for. iStat Menus is to help you make a menu item on your Mac that shows you some interesting stats. I can see, at a glance, how strong my wifi really is, or my computer’s temperature (I’m on a MacBook Air, so this is important). I can look at how much memory I’m using to quickly see why things are slow. It gives me quick links to deep dive into things. It’s wonderful when I’m testing new apps and I can see that, yes that one is slow slow slow.

But the side benefit for me is how it replaces the Time and Date Menu in my Apple menu bar. When I click on the time, I get this:

I get my month at a glance, a list of everything for today (including birthdays which I blocked out for you) and then it lists what time it is now in various place. If I hover over each time, I get more details including a Mercator map showing where daylight is right now and relative other places people care about. For $18 I’m able to keep track and know “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t ping someone on social media when it’s 2am for them…” For that alone it would be worth it, but the rest have become invaluable to debugging why my laptop was rebooting randomly.

If you just need the basic stats, iStat Mini is pretty brilliant. And it’s free.

30 October, 2015