Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

iphone

And here we are, but first – a story...

Yesterday was my 4 year old's 5th birthday. Michelle and I go back and forth about who's going to take video and who's going to take stills for singing “Happy Birthday”, and decide I'll take the video.

We get up to the part where she's lighting the candle and my phone stops recording – “Your phone is full, please manage storage under blah blah blah...”. This is an iPhone 6+, bought it two months ago. Obviously I bought the 16GB model, but this was never a problem with my 5c so why would it be a problem with the 6+?

It has been a problem with my 6+. I just deleted all my music and podcasts off of the phone less than a week ago, and as you can tell from the screenshot, whatever is on here does not add up to 11.something GB of stuff. Not to mention, why is there only 11.something GB of available storage in the first place. The OS is taking up over a quarter of the disk space??

So I'm googling last night, trying to figure out what's taking up the space on my phone. Obviously something is cached it would seem to me, but I have no control over what this is or how to free up that space. Some random post advises me to backup and restore the phone, which seems really janky to me, but the poster says this will wipe the cached stuff and only leave “your stuff”. I decide to try it, even though I'm respecting myself a little less at this point (I'm a developer for pete's sake, not some non-technical moron who has to search the internet for how to free up storage on his phone. Or am i??).

I'm told by iTunes that I don't have enough free space on the phone to restore from the backup I've just made. I'm wasting my life being frustrated at a phone at this point, rather than spending time with my wife on our son's birthday.

I have a moment and I remember why I jumped to Apple gear in the first place...

After years of loyalty as a Windows user, after years of hating Justin Long's smug pre-hipster persona as the cool kid in the commercial opposite John Hodges, I bought a new HP laptop with Windows Vista on it. I felt betrayed. It was such a poor, clunky experience that I immediately regretted buying the laptop. Two weeks later I bought an iPhone, as chronicalled in part 1 of this series. It was, I can honestly say, life changing. It just worked. It didn't nag me, it didn't crash, it didn't hide useful features behind 3 submenus, it just worked. It catalyzed the entire career path I've been on for the 7 years since I bought it.

You can guess where this is going. My iPhone 6+ is no longer a device that “just works”. It does the exact opposite and costs me video of my 5 year old's birthday. I guess Marco Arment wrote about this a month ago, but I'm officially done paying this much money to be frustrated by technology.

I'll go ahead and say it – if Jobs were still alive, he would've fired the motherfucker who even suggested shipping their top-of-the-line phone with only 16GB of storage, not only because it makes for an obviously crappy user experience but because he had an apparently much clearer long view – that happy customers keep coming back and unhappy customers flee at the first opportunity.

My first opportunity is in 10 months when my T Mobile jump plan comes back around. I'll probably go retro, since I have less than a home screen's worth of apps installed on this thing anyway. The only ones I actually really use are Email, Twitter, and Reddit, and arguably all of those on a phone are just ways to kill time when I could be enjoying the life around me.

Life moves on.

#life #random #iphone

note: Parts one and two.

Phase Four – Complacence

It happens to the best of us. We sometimes take our loved ones for granted. We don't remember the thrill of exploring the new relationship, and start to get annoyed when we're forcibly reminded that those days are over. We see others walking around arm in arm with their new love and you think to ourselves “enjoy it while it lasts” or “I bet you just play games on that thing, don't you, chump?” Soon, it seems like everyone has an iPhone. The 12 year old brothers across the aisle from you on the plane – why the hell do they need an iPhone? Your entire crew gets them and you just know they're gonna be borrowing your charger. Yes, I've got my charger with me. Jesus...

You've since moved away from actually programming the thing, since object oriented programming is one giant blob of convoluted shit for a 30 year old bass player with a kid to try and pick up in his spare time. Besides, web development really seems like more bang for the buck. Might not pay as well, but this whole iPhone gold rush is pretty much over anyway. You read all the tech blogs by this point – you've turned your manager onto NetNewsWire before abandoning it yourself to try Google Reader but you'll ditch that soon, too – so you know how annoying it would be to try and get your app through the Apple process were you even capable of coding such a thing. You don't even check out the App Store that much anymore, since there's nothing but a bunch of stupid games over there anyway.

Phase Five – Resentment

This began in earnest for me about three weeks ago. In fairness, it's not completely the fault of the iPhone. A good bit of the aggravation is due to AT&T's service. It's just not that good. It was really good (or so I thought) when I first got the thing, but I swear since however many millions of people have bought iPhones the network has gotten noticeably slower and spottier. There was a voicemail outage this past weekend that affected nearly everyone on the network whether they knew it or not. I was in St Cloud MN last night with “full bars” and 3G service, but couldn't get a page to load all night.

This is pretty inexcusable to me. AT&T's one and only job – for which they are well paid – is to deliver the services that they promise. At Rothbury and Wakarusa the service was unusable and the 10,000 or so iPhoners that were at Rothbury (not an exaggeration, they were the only phone I saw all weekend, at least half the phones there it seemed) were reduced to communicating via text. Whaa, whaa you might say, and ordinarily I might agree with you, but you know what Verizon did at both of those festivals? They brought in a mobile antenna to provide service to the festival site for their customers. Does AT&T even have such a truck? Could they be bothered to bring it to the festival site in the middle of nowhere where 10,000 of their customers were going to be savaging their shitty network all weekend? Apparently, no, on both counts. Inexcusable. (The upside is that someone had the good sense to put together a Rothbury App which worked great for me all weekend. The schedule was imbedded so I wasn't reliant on the no-cell coverage and I always knew what band I was watching at the time. Very cool.)

The other thing that I've noticed in the last weeks is that the new OS 3.0 is a good bit slower than the previous version. Boot up time and app launch time, both slower. This is ostensibly because there are new features loaded into the new OS, but many of those features aren't even available to 3G and OG iPhoners. So all we get is copy and paste and a dog of a phone. I'll be getting the new one, whatever version it is whenever I get it, but in the meantime I'm left avariciously playing with Stacy's new 3GS.

In closing

The iPhone is awesome, but if you don't have one – wait. It will most likely be coming to Verizon sometime in the next year. I will be jumping ship when it does. My advice for the meantime – get an iPod touch and stick with your cell phone that works. There will be a new phase for me after the resolution of this current dark period while AT&T gets their act together (I hope), or it goes over to Verizon, but in the meantime it's #attfail for me.

#random #iphone

For me, it began in December of 2007. Anyone who reads this blog or has stumbled across it (as a surprising number have, unless there's a bot out there relentlessly searching for my post on the Best App Ever) knows that I'm a fan. I started off as a casual appreciator of the iPhone, and have since proceeded to jettison a lifetime of loyal MS-DOS/Windows computing in favor of being a blogging, Mac toting dork. I'm not ashamed. My personal productivity has skyrocketed over the last 18 months, due almost exclusively to the tectonic shift in mindset brought about by my consumer relationship with the House of Jobs. And now, for your enjoyment (I hope), I present the emotional cycle of iPhone ownership.

Prehistory

It started off for me simply enough. I'd been a Cingular customer-cum AT&T customer since the dawn of cell phone use (for me). I'd been through a few phones over the years, most notably the old bricky Nokia that worked great and only did that one thing. I was perfectly happy for a number of years, but eventually I was seduced. I wanted something with a bit more style, more pizazz. I'd been reading the Motorola Razr PR for a while, and thought that perhaps it'd make me happier, what with it's flippy coolness and it's camera. It even held the promise of being a music player, though a cursory glance could've shown a lack of a headphone jack or any real internal storage. I didn't care!! I was leaving the droll stability of the good thing I'd had with Nokia.

You can tell where this is headed. The camera sucked. The phone dropped calls all the time. The flip thing bothered me as much as I always knew it would. It wouldn't even let you set your own ringtones from your own music that you already freaking owned. It was extremely uncomfortable against your ear. It would connect to the crap ringtone store spontaneously and download the new NeYo tune for me. Repeatedly. Finally after less than 6 months, the thing just died altogether. Actually, I snapped it in half one night, so I guess you could say I terminated it, with extreme prejudice. This was about two weeks before Noah was due, so obviously I needed a new phone pronto.

I'd already seen Jimmy hanging out with it. He sent me an email with the signature at the bottom reading Sent from my iPhone. What a dork. I was intrigued...

Phase One – Infatuation

It was a rainy December day. I had a notion that since I'd just re-upped my Cingular contract months before, the new contract discount wouldn't be applying to me on this day. The suspicion was confirmed by the (very cool and helpful) dude at the store. A new Razr would cost me $379.

Or I could just get an iPhone for $20 more.

The first week was a revelation. The mere act of checking my email and being done with it in less time than it took my POSVRPC (Piece of $h!t, Vista-running PC) to even reach the first splash screen on booting up was like a dream come true. I immediately regretted my purchase of the POSVRPC only two weeks earlier, as the iPhone could easily get me through the relatively gig-light winter. I wrote a blog on the iPhone within days on MySpace – old-school – praising Apple as the “Barry Bonds of product design – every swing, out of the park”. This was before the steroid allegations really came to light, but the comparison is probably still apropos.

I'd never bought an iPod, so having music to listen to was another big one. I'm sorry if I've written about all this before, but the real winner was when Noah was born and I had pictures emailed to the family within minutes.

The contacts and the calendar? I'd actually bought a Palm Pilot in college, deep in my freelance gigger days, but couldn't make myself carry it around all the time, which seriously negated it's effectiveness. In short, I started to see that if I couldn't get my life together with an iPhone, I was hopeless.

#iphone

Phase Two – Love

The day that I knew I'd found the one was July 12, 2008. The 3G and the OS 2.0 software update had come out the day before. I'd updated as soon as I could, playing my part in the server issues that Apple had that day. I was fascinated by the prospect of adding apps, though I didn't really know what I would want to add to the thing that wasn't already there.

Had a nice loooong road trip down I-81 to contemplate such matters. I spent most of the ride and all of the battery perusing the app store. By the time I got to wherever we were going, my life was changed forever. “My God, this is going to change everything! RRE needs an app! Everybody needs an app!, if for no other reason that to format the information that's already on our website for the mobile screen. Everybody in the future is going to be carrying these things around, so if you're not with it, you're a friggin Dinosaur! I wonder how you write these things? It must not be that hard – the experience is so smooth, it must be really easy! I need to do some research.”

So I'll spare the details of what I found about programming iPhone apps, since that's basically the theme of this entire blog, but let's just say it's a bit more involved than I thought.

My involvement with Facebook only really began after the installation of their iPhone app. Same with Twitter. Or Wordpress. Or jogging. Or blogging. And on and on. So in a way, you could say that everything I've gotten interested in, or re-interested in, over the last year and a half – programming, design, marketing, my band – has been because of that little doo-hicky. Thanks Steve! On the other hand, the recent dearth of LiveDownloads is also partially attributable to that thing, also, since engineering and production have kinda lost a bit of their luster as a serious career path for me. Sorry, guys. Net positive, though, to be sure.

Phase Three – Seperation and reunion

I lost my original iPhone. I won't go into where, or when, or how, but it was a major bummer. I'd already bought a Mac by that point, since iPhone and Mac development doesn't happen on a Windows machine. Oh well, twist my arm. Besides, in the year that I'd been an iPhoner, my life had slowly but surely realigned itself around being in touch and on top of things, so even if I hadn't decided on development as a future career path I was certainly not going back to the “old way”.

Luckily, at the Rockaway Mall Apple store, they gave me the AT&T subsidy, so that my 3G didn't cost me a million bucks. Only half a million. The 3G, of course, has GPS, which I didn't think was really going to be that big a deal. I was already a good navigator and always had a map in my pocket. I was wrong.

GPS went hand in hand with a cool app that I'd gotten just after that called iMapMyRun, which tracks your runs, your training progress, and just happens to run on that little doo-hicky that you already had in your hand since you like to listen to tunes while you jog, which, by the way, neither did you jog nor did you listen to tunes a year prior to that. Goodness. So you could definitely say that loosing my original phone turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

#random #iphone

I don't know why it took me so long to bop on over to the app store and search Wordpress, but of course there's an iPhone app! I'll use it now to distract myself while Sheaffer drives us to the airport.

We're headed to the Mile High music festival in Denver tonight. We're playing tomorrow afternoon at the exact same time as Ani DiFranco, which is a real bummer because she was the best set of music I saw all weekend at Rothbury. I'd never seen her play before, and all I can say is Holy Crap. She played the Sherwood stage, which faces that forest you might have heard about. She played her song Napolean, which I'd never heard before. Sitting there on the side of the stage with her voice echoing off the forest was the best way to hear a tune like that for the first time. I'm kind of in love with her now. Anyway...

#wordpress #iphone