The first thing I found interesting about Yiren's piece is how little money factors in. Sure, there's the usual, appropriate, digs at over-inflated valuations for companies that haven't made any money, or have a revenue model. However, there's no discussion of the financial motivation behind people going into the startup world, either as employees or founders. Like high finance in the years leading up to the Great Recession, hedge funds in particular, technology startups are attracting smart, money hungry youth. If you can get $10,000,000 for your startup with a minimum of effort, why work for the man? Or, if you're not the entrepreneurial type, but you can sling code, why not take a six-figure salary and live in San Francisco?
Money isn't everyone's motivation, but it's one motivating the number of copycat startups out there. Ev Williams strategy for creating a successful company is to find a need, and make it easier for someone to get it. It's a recipe so simple, it can be copied with only minimal changes to make something that'll get a decent investment. Just take a compatible business model, and shoehorn in your niche audience: professional social networking, virtual rewards for watching cartoons, one-on-one hookups for My Little Pony fans. If you can get an L-curve in user growth, you don't even need to make money before someone offers to buy you out. Boom, you're rich overnight.
Okay, it's not as simple as I'm making it sound, nor is it guaranteed to succeed. Hedge funds might be a more secure place to strike it rich if you're a well-networked college grad with a CS degree, but they're not cool anymore. Cool factor is as important as money, sometimes even moreso. Even if I didn't get a six-figure salary and a ton of perks, saying that I worked at a startup was a point of personal pride for a while. When you combine the the two, it's going to be a dangerous cocktail.
All that money and cool chasing comes at a cost, and here is where Yiren and I agree. The money and talent being frittered away on goofy, copycat startups that prioritize growth over revenue, and exist to be bought out by someone bigger. It becomes a dangerous cycle: the more companies that fit that profile and succeed, the more money and young talent they get to trap in their web. The companies that are trying to do longer-term, less exciting, but more important work to improve the technology everyone relies on are left to fend for scraps. If you could get a six-figure signing bonus to work for Facebook, or just “market rate” at a company doing less glamorous, but more important work, what would you take?
And, what would you take if you were a college graduate in your early 20s, with a pile of student loans?
I get an hour for lunch every day at work. That’s more than enough time to walk to one of the many inexpensive lunch places on 7th Avenue, eat in comfort, and take a walk around Chelsea. On a good day, I’ll even get over to Madison Square Park, by the Flatiron Building. It’s important to me to get out and walk around in the middle of the day. It clears my mind of all the stuff I have to do when I’m at my desk. It recharges, provides essential Vitamin D on sunny days, and helps undo the damage I’m doing to my body from sitting for hours on end. I usually do it right in the middle of my 9 to 5 work day.
Lunch is the fulcrum I balance my morning and afternoon work on. A low-tech dividing line (save for my iPhone and Kindle) between hours of HTML, Excel, and reams of emails. It’s easy to establish that sort of dividing line in my work life, mostly because I work a corporate stooge job. Trying to find a balance in my personal life between the things I want to get done, the things I need to get done, and the things I’d rather do (like aimlessly click around Reddit) is trickier. It’s why I hate working from home. The mental shift of being in a different space is enough to mostly silence my distraction-craving lizard brain that keeps me hitting ⌘-Tab every few minutes.
I recently read Ben Hammersley’s Approaching the Future: 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then. I enjoyed it, though it rehashed things I already knew. The last two chapters are the most important: “Just Enough Digital,” and “The Zen of Digital Living.” Both are about the movement among Old School Internet Users to do things in meatspace, establish limits to where and when they’re connected, and find a balance between digital and real life.
Speaking as a member of the second Internet generation, the one that missed out on BBSes and newsgroups, but was there for the late Wild West of the Web, I’ve hit the point where I need to learn how to do the same thing. My (slightly less than) three week social media sabbatical was meant to be part of that process. By spending time away from the stream of “other people’s moments,” I hoped that I could make some of my own. It didn’t work out, unless you count playing SimCity 4 and goofing off on the non-social web as “making moments.” I didn’t even get any good reading done. I didn’t break my dependence, I merely switched from one glowing teat to another. The idea was right, the motivation pure, but I stumbled on the execution.
Finding a balance doesn’t come unplugging from the ’net, or even just getting away from your desk for an hour. It comes from finding your own limits, and your own weaknesses. These are going to be different for everyone. If you’re distractible enough that you can’t get any sustained writing done unless you’re doing it longhand, or on a typewriter, go do that. If you work online, but are constantly tempted by pleasure surfing, install a blocker. And when any of these stop working, notice it, and find a way to fix it—or yourself. We’re only slaves to our technology if we let ourselves be.
Not long after I bought my first iPad, I decided to hand down my much-loved Kindle Keyboard to my girlfriend. The iPad became my book reader of choice. And why not? It has a sharper and easier to read screen. I could read PDFs and ePubs in iBooks, as well as my Kindle books with Amazon’s app. I could also read with Instapaper, and Flipboard, and even read comics! The screen is backlit, so I can even read in the dark. What did I need this Kindle for, anyway?
It didn’t last. The iPad I have is just too bulky to whip out on the subway and read with, so I often used my iPhone. (This had its own set of problems.) I often read in the evenings at home, and the bright blue light of the iPad, even with all my reading apps in white-on-black, was probably messing with my sleep from reading before bed. The amount of reading I did on my iPad, and elsewhere, reduced to a trickle. Instapaper articles piled up, eBooks I bought sat unread, and my brain atrophied just a little. I knew I had to get back into reading, and pronto.
And I love it. It solves all the problems I had with the Kindle Keyboard, and is a far better reading experience than my chunky (yet, beloved) iPad 3. E-Ink displays have generally been extremely readable, but usually on par with newsprint, not real books. The Paperwhite has a 200+ dpi display, which—while no Retina Display—is at least as sharp as a well-printed paper book. Swiping to change pages is much more comfortable than tapping narrow edge buttons, too. The Kindle Paperwhite’s front lighting is great in dark rooms, though I’m not sure if the blue tint will still be great for my sleep. Either way, I keep it turned way down from its default setting, even in the brightest rooms. Finally, the smaller size means it fits neatly in my pants pocket, so I have no excuse not to carry it around with me. [1]
The iPad still has a role in my life. It’s my portable writing machine, my comic reader, my preferred way to use OmniFocus, and much more. However, for a pure reading experience, it just doesn’t hold up. Sure, an iPad Air or iPad mini would fix the portability issues, but they’re much pricier and still glow in my face at night. I’ve often maintained that I’d prefer something several things that do one thing well to one multi-function device that does a bunch of things poorly. The Kindle can do a bunch of things: browse the web, play rudimentary games, edit some text, but it does these all so poorly that it may as well be a single-purpose device. And I’m glad for it.
I also sprung for an $20 Omoton case, the same one recommended by The Wirecutter. This way, I don’t have to worry about damaging the screen, or accidentally turning it on in my pocket. ↩
I have an app idea for any dedicated iOS developer. Write it, get it in the store, and I will easily pay at least $9.99 for it. I’m sure other people would pay just as much. The idea is simple, and I’m surprised nobody’s put out an app like it yet.
It’s a geofenced app launcher.
Everything a developer needs to make this is already baked into iOS. Plenty of apps use geofencing for things like notifications and reminders, or background updates. With the M7 chip in the iPhone 5S, it wouldn’t even be a huge battery drain. Launching apps is trivial with URL Schemes. It’s the backbone of apps like Launch Center Pro and Drafts. Combining the two would be brilliant. In fact, if the nice folks at Contrast were to add geofenced app launching in as a feature in Launch Center Pro, even as an in-app purchase, I would jump at it.
The idea came to me after a few weeks at my new job. I’m now living a cross-platform existence, using Windows at the office, and a Mac at home. I need to track my work projects, and I’d much rather incorporate it into my existing OmniFocus system than try to use Outlook or a web-based solution. Having a notification pop up on my phone when I’m at the office to launch OmniFocus, directly into my Work perspective, would be awesome. Currently, I use a repeating reminder in Due set for a few minutes after I get into the office, but what if I’m running late, working from home, or just off for a holiday? I only want my phone to buzz when I really need it to.
Context-aware computing is going to be the next thing in mobile technology. While the rumor mill says that iOS 8 will be all about fitness apps and health, I’m hoping that the changes to the ecosystem will also enable iOS to become more aware of a user’s environment. Imagine, if you will, your phone knowing you’re at the office, turning off the ringer, and reconfiguring the home screen to apps you use the most at work. When you leave the office, the ringer turns back on, and the home screen switches to apps you use on the go. At home, your phone home screen changes again to apps you use there, maybe turning the ringer down to a quieter level. With Keyboard Maestro, you can already do a lot of this on a laptop based on Wifi networks, but I rarely take my laptop anywhere.
My phone, however, is always with me. The hardware is all there to make context-aware computing happen. We just need the software to tie it all together, and I trust Apple to do it in a way that’s easy, effective, and integrated. If the M7 co-processor can know when you’re driving and when you’re walking, why not tie that in with the application launcher, the settings to connect to Bluetooth and Wifi, or any of a host of other hardware and software features in our phones? That is the future of mobile computing, and I’m ready for it.
When the original iPad was released in 2010, a single phrase by Adam Engst described the device perfectly: “The iPad becomes the app…” This transformational ability explains the heavy physicality of iOS before iOS 7. Skeuomorphic software design helps the device identify itself as the thing it is emulating, be it a book, a map, a game table, or an audio player. Whether this was actually necessary is a matter of debate, as is whether iOS 7 went too far in the other direction. The logic behind the skeuomorphic design is that familiarity reduced the learning curve, especially when your device is nothing but a blank surface that can become any interface.
Except that it can’t. Whatever the iPad, or any other touch-based digital devices tries to do, it’s still pictures under glass. It’s important to think about this when we consider how we relate to the a device that can become anything, versus a physical object that is only one thing?
The digital object doesn’t so much have “a function†as a series of functions under an umbrella of one or two metafunctions… The association between object and function that was often one-to-one has become multiplied, perhaps receding into infinity…
Like skeuomorphic software design, the tension between physicality and multiple functions puts the cultural divide around eBooks and physical books into perspective. Even a dedicated eBook reader, like the e-ink Amazon Kindle, has other functions beyond reading book. A book doesn’t let you browse the web, look up definitions of words without leaving the text, or play word games. Those limitations are encoded in its very form. There is precious little you can do with a book and have it still be a book. Door stops and leveling out extremely wobbly tables come to mind. Those in the physical book camp have internalized this disconnect and summarized it as “I like the physicality of a real book.”
We relate to single-purpose objects in a very different way, and it’s a relationship defined by simplicity. These objects represent a singularity of purpose, and their function is embodied in their form. When we reach for a physical book over an iPad or a Kindle, we are making a deliberate restriction of our possible choices. Even if we would have been reaching for that iPad or Kindle so we could read something on it, the physical book is a commitment to just reading. When a writer uses a mechanical typewriter to bang out their first draft, they make a similar commitment. While it’s possible to use a multi-functional digital device for a single task, it takes a lot more willpower not to switch modes. It’s even harder when the device is set up to bother you whenever something else demands your attention.
Believers in the idea that physical media will go away and that print will vanish ignore the value in the simple relationship between a thing and its purpose. Believers in the idea that digital media is a fad, and that multi-function devices are more trouble than they’re worth are giving up a wealth of power and new tools that can be used to create previously impossible new ideas. There’s room in our lives for multi-purpose devices and the single-purpose objects they purport to supplant. Those of us living in this transition have the opportunity to not only find the balance that works for us, but also define this balance for future generations.
If you’re old enough to remember life before we could read a thousand page book on device that weighs only a pound (or less), it’s hard to imagine a world where you never experience a single-purpose, non-digital device. I don’t expect this will come to pass, but I do expect that multi-function digital devices will be the primary way people born today will interact with media. We may save the physical stuff for things we want a special connection with. A part of the human psyche demands to have tangibility, and it’s best we don’t forget it.