The world of Silicon Valley isn’t like the rest of the world in many ways. I’ve written in the past about how location and context awareness break down in the urban density of New York City. It’s a lot easier for GPS-based location services to pin you down when all the places you go are separated by more than a quarter-mile. The sprawling suburbs of the southern Bay Area where so much of this technology is born presents a way of life that is alien to many, and if any of it is going to catch on and spread, it’ll have to adapt to our way of life, not the other way around.
Electric cars, as an example, are currently ill-suited to East Coast urban environments. In cities, many people lack dedicated, private parking to plug a Tesla in. No garages, no carports, no driveways. It’s either on-street parking, or not owning a car at all. So, where is a theoretical Tesla owner with no private parking space going to charge their car at home? Short of communal parking lots with charging stations, which would be tricky in places with high land value and existing construction, I can’t see a reasonable solution for residential areas. In downtowns, though, the first city to roll out combination parking meters and car charging stations stands to make a killing.
With home ownership rates falling, particularly among younger, and likely more tech savvy adults, I wonder how well the latest batch of “smart home†hardware will do. Many leases, for homes and apartments alike, don’t allow for replacement of major home hardware. Even installing simpler hardware like “smart†light switches wouldn’t be worth the hassle if you don’t plan to stay permanently. And I’m still not convinced that adding “smarts†to simple, functional hardware is an improvement, and not just adding more points of failure.[1]
Google’s self-driving car works well enough in the wide streets and highways of car-centered Silicon Valley. I’d like to see how well one deals with rush hour traffic in Manhattan. dealing with delivery trucks, fare-seeking cabbies, suicidally crazy bike messengers, and the typically lackadaisical attitude towards traffic of New York pedestrians—author included—is taxing enough for human drivers. I can’t see AI being an improvement. I could see self-driving technologies applied to urban busses, but even then dedicated bus lanes, or good old-fashioned light rail are more reliable, thought the latter is pricier.
It’s possible that most of these issues will be worked out in time for mass adoption. The only thing I’m truly skeptical of is wide adoption the self-driving car. With the global rates of people living in dense urban environments already high, and growing, if the businesses behind these technologies want real mass adoption, they’ll have to figure it out. Shaping the technology of the future is a give and take process, and right now it’s more give than take.
How many apps do you allow to interrupt you on your devices?
Notification fatigue is a real issue, and with seemingly every app on phones asking if they can pester you out of the gate, it’s way too easy to get overwhelmed. Enough so that there’s a new, growing market for gizmos you can wear on your wrist that’ll keep you from pulling out your phone to see what stupid app just buzzed you. At least, that’s how a lot of companies market smart watches. Is moving notifications from the pocket to the wrist going to be an improvement? I doubt it. As evidence, even Apple Watch is going to force you to winnow down your notifications anyway if the rumors are true. So why wait?
Real data on push notification adoption is hard to get. A cursory Googling says either 52% of people turn notifications on, or 60% of people turn them off. And with the granularity of app-by-app notifications settings, there’s really no good way to tell from here. I am confident enough in user behavior to say that most people, once they allow push notifications for an app, will never turn them off—though they might uninstall particularly gross offenders. Regardless, it’s time we take control over the things that make our phones beep, buzz, and shake, for a quieter, saner technology lifestyle.
How many of the notifications you get are things you need to deal with right away, anyway? Merlin Mann was harping about this sort of thing in 2007, with the original Inbox Zero talk. If an email client on your phone, or your desktop, or both, is dinging you with a new email every 5 minutes, you’re getting a notification 24,000 times per year. Even if you have Do Not Disturb turned on while you sleep, you’re still getting nearly 200 buzzes per day. For email. And moving it to your wrist is supposed to help?
Look at the apps that you have given explicit permission to bother you. Do it now. How many pages is it? I have twelve apps that are allowed to interrupt what I’m doing, though when I started this, I had closer to twenty. Look at each of them and decide if each app is allowed to pull you away from whatever you’re doing, be it playing Threes! or doing your day job. Think about how often they interrupt you, and what they interrupt you for. I love Overcast, and I love podcasts, but do I need to know the moment every podcast I listen to updates? Of course not. So I took it out of my notification center, and denied it the right to make my phone buzz and beep when a new podcast comes in.
One of the great things in iOS 8 is that there’s now a global toggle for notifications for each app on your device in the Settings app. When an app has pushed you past the limit, just go into Settings, scroll to the listing for the offending app, tap it, tap “Notificationsâ€, and turn it all off. Banish the banners and the pop-ups to the hell from whence they came. [1] I can’t speak for Android, but I imagine the process is similar. All too often, however, we’re left to inertia. Changing settings remains a power user move that the average person doesn’t do. It’s time to start.
Repeat after me, friends: “And if thy new app’s push notifications offend thee, cut it off!â€
As a slightly belated birthday gift, I got a Jawbone UP Move from my girlfriend. And lost it within 36 hours. In those 36 hours, I was so taken by the Jawbone UP ecosystem that as soon as I had the chance to get to a store, I bought a replacement. Yes, fitness trackers are largely hype. No, this isn’t my first dalliance with trackers. I started 2014 with a FitBit One, lost that inside of a day, and bought a replacement that I lost five months later. I’ve used fitness tracking apps on my iPhone, despite ongoing issues with Health.app that I only solved by nuking and repaving my iPhone.
I decided to get a tracker because it reduces some of the failure points in getting a sense of my activity. Since the UP Move is a very basic clip-on tracker that runs on a watch battery, the main point of failure is losing the stupid thing. Again. Considering the flakiness in using my phone as a fitness tracker, this seemed a smart investment. What I like most about the UP Move is that is does not try to be much more than it is. As fitness trackers go, it is the most basic, bare-bones device one can get. It tracks steps, it tracks sleep. That’s it. All the really fancy stuff happens in the app ecosystem, and I can’t imagine that logging my lunch on a 1.5″ screen is going to be much fun.
The basic fitness tracker is far more compelling to me than a “smart watch†because of its simplicity and focus. Nobody has articulated exactly why I would need a screen on my wrist, and the benefits it would give me over just taking a phone out of my pocket. Apple, as I mentioned in September, has come the closest to articulating it, but I’m still not convinced this is something I need. My life, and the way I use my devices, mitigates the need to have something buzzing on my wrist for something important. I’ve set up my phone to only buzz if it’s something worthy of distracting me. We’re already going to have to curate the crap that gets sent to our little wrist-buzzing screens. I’ve skipped a step and curated it before it even hits the phone.
As the Apple Watch launch grows near, and as more companies enter the smart watch space, bringing new ideas and interfaces, I’m maintaining cautious optimism that someone, probably Apple, will make exactly the right case for a device I can wear on my wrist to solve some problem I didn’t even know I had. Until that time, the problems I have are already solved by existing, and cheaper solutions. Too many buzzing and beeping notifications on my phone? Turn them off. Needing to know how much I move and how well I sleep? I have a fitness tracker. Need to know what time it is? I have a plain, ordinary wristwatch—one I also clip my UP Move to and so I don’t need to spend the extra sixteen bucks on a rubber wristband for sleep tracking.
These things are the right solution for somebody. Patrick Rhone is huge on personal fitness, and sees the Apple Watch as a perfect replacement for a runner’s GPS watch, and more. Andy Ihnatko has been singing the praises of the Moto 360 for months, and it works well with his lifestyle of regular travel. That’s two use cases right there. The case has been articulated for both of them, and it’s been articulated for others. It’s all just plain overkill for me. Until either my life changes to the point where a smart watch makes sense, or a smart watch maker articulates a use case that makes sense for me where I am, I’ll stick with what I’ve got.
In the realm of iOS Automation, if Federico Viticci is a Guru, I am merely an Advanced Beginner. But that still might be further along than you. If you’re curious about working apps like Drafts, Workflow, and Launch Center Pro into your iOS life, I’ve put together some advice on getting started.
Pick one app to start
What do you do with your iOS devices? If you find yourself doing a lot of repetitive tasks in various apps, or want to link a bunch of apps together, look into Launch Center Pro. If you type a lot, look into Drafts. If you wish you had fast ways to do various processes on your device, Workflow is for you. If you write a lot on your iOS device, Editorial is a good place to start. It’s easy, too easy, to get overwhelmed by what these apps can do. By picking one app, and one subset of things you can do, you can get your feet wet without going crazy.
Try pre-existing workflows and actions
For Drafts and Editorial, there are huge databases of pre-existing actions and workflows you can download and install to get started. Just scroll though the Drafts 4 Action Directory, or the Workflow subreddit and see if anything there does something you find yourself doing the long way around. Launch Center Pro doesn’t have a directory for finding things you can do with it, but its built-in Action Composer has useful ways to get inside of a bunch of apps with deep URL schemes. It’s worth poking through to see what you can do just with the apps you already have on your phone.
The “biqnx†file
This is something I stole from Merlin Mann. I keep a note file tagged “biqnx†(for “Bugs, Ideas, Questions, and Notesâ€) that stores every thing I want to know how to do in a certain app. Every so often, go through that file and see if you can’t either find a pre-existing solution to integrate, or make your own. I know from my experience that I’ll often think: “wouldn’t it be nice to do $thing with my phone,†and then forget about it. Having a biqnx file gives me a place to quickly stow ideas, and set them up when I have time to experiment. And even when I don’t, it gives me something to crawl through action directories for.
The pains of being an early adopter typically include the risk that things will break. We know this, and yet there’s a growing chorus in my circles of early adopter type people bemoaning the fragile state of technological infrastructure. In fact, Episode 201 of Back to Work might have been the apotheosis of this latest round of griping. Who can blame them, really? People of a certain personality type are attracted to the shiny and new, the promise that we can have whatever we want, when we want it, or at the very least in two days when the UPS guy shows up. When it works, it’s magical. When it doesn’t, it’s crazy-making.
This is why I find myself moving towards minimizing the possible points of failure in my systems.
Think about, say, iTunes Match. When announced, I drooled at the idea of having all my music, no matter what method I chose to acquire it, everywhere I go—if I have a connection. Then, I found out I could only have a maximum of 25,000 non-iTunes purchased tracks on iTunes Match, crushing the dream. However, the reality of iTunes Match in execution, at least from what I’ve heard from people who try to use, leaves me quite content with having to plug in my iPhone, and manually manage the music I carry with me. There’s less chance of failure with locally stored music, instead of relying on the cloud. I don’t have to worry about having Wi-Fi, or a cell signal, or if the servers are behaving. The minor inconvenience of plugging into my computer is more than made up in reliable access to music.
Why not extend this approach to more places in my technological life? How many of the things that drive me batshit about the think I use every day are because I’m simply overreaching into something they’re either not designed for, or even capable of. Or, more likely, how many of them are just not fully baked and reliable enough to make part of my daily life? It’s a similar line of thinking to Patrick Rhone’s “Final Choices” and Jamie Phelps “Sensible Defaults”. Is something that works 95% of the time, but saves five minutes over something that works 99% of the time really worth it? Especially when it take far more than five minutes to get things to work when it fails? I say no.
So much of what we use exists beyond our control. When it fails, it fails in way we not only cannot fix, but in ways we cannot even determine the root cause of. Minimizing the potential points of failure is not a guarantee that things will work all the time. It’s a way to ensure that when things do go wrong, we have, if not recourse, a better sense of what we can and cannot do, to make things work again. It’s also a way to reduce the stress in our lives of either fixing things, or stress of being unable to fix things. Take a look at what you do every day and the systems in place to do them, find what fails most often, and find a way to route around it. It might take a hair more time in your day, but you’ll feel so much better.