Nu håller vi tummarna att dom fixar den så vi kan avnjuta lite bekymmersfritt bilägande, som man hört ska vara ganska så trevligt.

Känner ni det? Känslan när gränssnittet väljer att hålla sig i bakgrunden så att ditt innehåll kan få skina?

Samtidigt: ”This creates a lively experience that makes using iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV even more delightful”.

Delightful är inte ordet jag hade valt. Man slår knut på sig själv i att försöka rättfärdiga ett designspråk som inte borde fått lämna konceptstadiet. En himla massa fancy marketing speak för att rättfärdiga något man nog helt enkelt tyckte såg coolt och trots det höga priset av försämrad användbarhet, mot bättre vetande, ändå valde att gå vidare med.

Apples design-avdelning saknar något.

Vår snart fyraåriga dotter har egentligen aldrig haft problem med viljan att borsta tänderna. Problemet har snarare varit att hon tappar fokus ju längre det pågår, och det blir progressivt svårare att faktiskt borsta tänderna effektivt. Därför testade vi Folktandvårdens app Rocka munnen.

Idén bakom appen är i grunden alldeles utmärkt: hjälpa barn att få till en bra rutin för tandborstning, både när det kommer till tid och teknik. Efter ett par veckor med appen har jag dock en del tankar.

En snabb recap: appen består av ett band med fem medlemmar som kan spela Rocka munnen-låten som innehåller instruktioner om hur man gör. Alla i bandet kan individuellt spela en av tre stilar (disco, hårdrock eller reggae). Det gör att du i teorin kan bygga 243 olika versioner av låten. Varje medlem kan dessutom stylas med kläder, accessoarer och instrument, och du kan byta backdrop på framträdandet.

Vår dotter tittar inte på TV i någon meningsfull utsträckning och har i övrigt ingen kontakt med plattor eller telefoner. Våra stunder med Rocka munnen på kvällarna utgör sannolikt majoriteten av all skärmtid hon har. Hon gillar att klä upp gubbarna och välja stil för dagen inför borstningen, och jag tycker det är en fin idé.

Problemet är att appen bygger på en klassisk gamification. För varje tandborstning får du “pengar” som kan användas för att låsa upp outfits. För det första tycker jag inte att min dotter ska behöva lära sig om app-ekonomi, digitala valutor och loot boxes för att bli motiverad att borsta tänderna. För det andra verkar appen dessutom lida av en bugg som gör att man ibland inte får några pengar alls.

Så mitt förslag är enkelt: ge föräldrar möjligheten att stänga av hela ekonomifunktionen. Hon skulle vara mer motiverad av att helt enkelt få välja fritt bland alla outfits och bygga sitt eget band varje kväll. Det hade gjort tandborstningen både roligare och mer förutsägbar. Som det är nu blir systemet snarare en källa till frustration, och buggen gör bara saken ännu värre.

Jag borde egentligen spela in min dotters ledsna min när hon efter en väl genomförd tandborstning inte får några "pengar" och undrar om hon inte borstade tillräckligt bra, och skicka den till Folktandvården eller kanske till Sticky Beat som utvecklat appen, det kanske prioriterar upp buggen.

Och när jag ändå skriver om Rocka Munnen, lite annan feedback:

• Låt appen rotera åt båda håll. Just nu funkar bara landscape på ena sidan, inte andra. Den borde gå att ha åt båda hållen.
• Bandet är tyst om man har mute på. Mute-switch borde ignoreras, som det oftast hör när musik spelas upp.

Detta är väl då ett ypperligt tillfälle att fråga efter rekommendationer på alternativ? Gärna utan gamification och annonser.

Inte en dag för sent att iPhone Pro-modellerna äntligen får någon roligare färg än bara mörkt, ljust och närmast homeopatiskt framavlade nyanser.

Orange råkar vara en favoritfärg, så visst kan jag vara partisk, men jag vågar ändå påstå att detta är den snyggaste iPhone Apple gjort. Den märkliga baksidan med den lilla keramiska rutan stör mig inte heller, snarare tvärtom. Den bidrar till en utility-känsla, vilket känns rätt för en produkt som ska heta “Pro”.

Egentligen hade jag tänkt hålla mig till att kommentera färgen på Pro, men eftersom iPhone Air faktiskt är en helt ny produkt i en helt ny kategori är det svårt att låta bli. Det är ett snyggt objekt med hög vill-ha-faktor, men ser samtidigt ganska svår ut att hålla i och skyltar tydligt med sina kompromisser. Framför allt på två områden som nästan alla skulle sätta på topp fem över viktigaste funktioner i en telefon: batteritid och kamera. Här har Apple (än en gång) på sin jakt efter tunnhet landat i en produkt som både har sämre batteritid och en mer begränsad kamerauppsättning än på länge. Vem är det egentligen som är beredd att offra det?

Sånt här tyckte jag var genuint roligt att grubbla över förr, men just nu känns det mest avslaget. Entusiasmen för Apple är på en all time low. De har inte förvaltat sitt arv särskilt väl och de har inte hanterat övergången från underdog till ett av världens största företag särskilt taktiskt. De har gjort sig ovän med i princip en hel värld av utvecklare och kompromissar sedan länge hejvilt med sina egna produkt- och designprinciper.

Men framför allt, eftersmaken av Tim Cooks upprepade rövslickeri av Trump är så genomträngande att den nästan letar sig över till min egen gom.

Anil Dash skrev förresten ett mycket bra inlägg om detta.

Jag tänker att 100% av alla människor utan hjälm som är på väg att köra om kull önskar att de hade haft en på sig. Så alla förstår värdet av att ha en. Det finns också ett nördigt talesätt om att den bästa kameran är den man har med sig. Detsamma kan nästan sägas om hjälm, den bästa hjälmen är den du har på dig. Vilket skulle kunna snetolkas som att den värsta hjälmen är den du bara har med dig.

Mitt enkla knep är att min ryggsäck numera är den permanenta platsen för min hjälm. Alltid överst, alltid redo att användas. För jag kan knappt tänka mig någon värre skam än att råka ut för en olycka och skada huvudet och behöva erkänna att jag hade en hjälm med mig, men inte på mig. Och då blir det enkelt att ta på hjälmen.

Men så är ju skam och dåligt samvete stora drivkrafter i mitt liv, simply playing to their strengths!

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 has been all over my feeds -- probably because having a big screen whenever you want it is great. And with Android 16 and OneUI 8, there's just a ton of stuff you can do to take advantage of all that extra space. pic.twitter.com/Z62tlUob4l

— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) August 14, 2025

För en medelålders man som mig, som ser allt sämre, så fortsätter jag att sukta efter dessa foldables. Jag finner det så självklart en lösning på mitt problem. Jag vill inte ha en iPhone Pro Max i fickan längre (den sortens åsikter har historiskt åldrats dåligt), men en vanlig sized iPhone Pro-telefon räcker ofta inte till när jag vill surfa "på riktigt". Om jag vill köpa något, eller läsa något, eller titta på något, och det är mer omfattande än normalt nyckfullt telefonbruk, så är impulsen alltid att sträcka sig efter min iPad. Att bara kunna fälla upp till en större skärm känns väldigt praktiskt.

Min iPad, en iPad Pro från 2017, den första med FaceID, har hängt med länge nu, och används sannolikt mer nu än någonsin, och trots att den kommer få iPadOS 26, så är den verkligen på slutkampen. Batteritid är usel och betan för 26 gör det ändå tydligt att den nu pushar gränserna för vad den hårdvaran pallar.

...därmed är det snart dags att överväga en ny iPad. Det hade ju varit lägligt om det till generation 18 av iPhones kom en vikbar modell så jag kunde telefon och surfplatta. Och som kan putta bort de mörka tankarna om att man kanske borde överväga Android. Lyckligtvis finns det ett effektivt sätt att skjuta bort de tankarna: Man behöver bara påminna sig om att man i så fall behöver bli Google Photos-användare, och så mycket självförakt har jag inte.

Inga spoilers här, lovar. Jag har haft (och har fortfarande) väldigt roligt med Expedition 33, ett spel som verkligen sticker ut.

Det ska enligt utsagor vara en modern twist på klassisk JRPG. Vad det betyder vet jag inte riktigt, eftersom jag varken har erfarenhet av JRPG eller turbaserade spel över huvud taget. Men det här är utan tvekan ett av de mest minnesvärda spelen jag spelat på länge.

Jag har behövt ta hjälp av Google och guider några gånger för att ta mig över vissa trösklar som kommer med att inte vara bekant med genren, men det har varit värt det. Varje gång jag lyckats räta ut ett spelmekaniskt frågetecken har spelet blivit ännu bättre. Samtidigt är det inte mekaniken som gör helheten. Det är storyn.

Det som verkligen fastnar är känslan, både i världen och i berättandet. Det är snyggt så det förtar, ljudet och bilden är ren konst, och berättelsen hänger kvar även efter att man stängt av. På det sättet påminner det faktiskt lite om Outer Wilds, även om de två spelen i övrigt inte har mycket gemensamt.

Det här är ingen AAA-titel, men den slår definitivt över sin viktklass. Ambitionen är hög, och genomförandet imponerar, särskilt med tanke på att det är en liten fransk indiestudio som ligger bakom.

Expedition 33 får därför min varmaste rekommendation.

I was actually a backer to the initial Ghost Kickstarter. It promised a writer-focused publishing toolm and they delivered on that promise, but I never switched. At the time, I was deep into podcasting, and the need for a blog just wasn’t there. But my podcasting days are (for now) over, and the thing I miss the most beyond hanging out with my old podcasting friends, is having a channel for thinking out loud. And with the demise of Twitter as we knew it, there wasn't much social media for me to hang around on, and I feel like I missed the boat to Mastodon and the other platforms.

But then Ghost version 6 launched, with ActivityPub support, which seemed like the thing I was waiting for. Something leaner than Wordpress, with federated social media features built in.

The official Ghost hosting seems great, but I quickly realized that it’s also quite expensive, especially if you want to dabble with customizing themes. Their lowest tier that allows theme customization beyond the default theme starts at $29/month. That's for sure more than I'm willing to pay. I asked Ghost about tiers for us individual small time bloggers, and they refer to others offering Ghost hosting. So I started looking around.

The closest affordable alternative I found was PikaPods, which hosts a bunch of open-source apps in containers, including Ghost. But at the time of exploration, they didn’t support Ghost 6, and offered no information on when or if that would be available. And I'm quite impatient, so I rolled up my sleeves and went the self-hosting route.

I spun up a small virtual server on Linode, using their $ 5/month Nanode plan. It’s the smallest VM they offer, but still meets the requirements for running Ghost 6.

II went with Docker Compose for simplicity and reproducibility. The stack includes:

I’d love to say I figured all of this out on my own, but no, ChatGPT held my hand through all this. I'm no developer, I know nothing about servers. I fed it all the documentation for ghost 6 self hosting and their community forum and took it from there. We did it two times. First using the Ghost CLI, which we got up and running fine quite quickly, only to learn the ActivityPub features of Ghost 6 only works when doing it with Docker Compose. So VM was scrubbed and we started over. Some small issues along the way to get ActivityPub to behave, but nothing a little prompting with some back and forth with terminal commands and logs to figure out the issues. All in all, the setup took about an hour.

And this is it. This is Ghost 6 running on a Nanode server. A clean, fast blog. no bloat, no plugins, no blocks, no Gutenberg editor. Feels refreshingly clean and nimble. Now I'll do my best to focus on content more than theming.

Ways in which PDFs are inferior to using the web:

• Not responsive. PDFs don’t adapt to screen size, forcing you to zoom and pan on small screen devices (which account for two thirds of all web traffic).
• No live updates. Once downloaded a PDF is frozen in time, updates require sending or finding a new file. Which leads me to:
• Version confusion. Multiple outdated versions often circulate, leading to misinformation and inconsistencies.
• Hard to navigate. The web has a whole lot of tricks for navigating content. The PDF offers... I don't know, anchor links?
• Isolated from context. A PDF offers no context. No related content. And no clear way to verify source or sender.
• Limited multimedia. Embedding videos, animations or charts or pretty much any type of interactivity is awkward, difficult or impossible.
• Extra work. You create the content, export it as a PDF, then figure out how to send it, usually as an attachment, and someone needs to download it, and hopefully be able to open it. On the web, you just publish and share a link. Done. All messaging services supports links, all devices today have a browser.
• Easily manipulated. PDFs look official and final, but unless digitally signed (most aren't) they can be altered without leaving clear evidence, making it risky to assume their contents are true or legally binding.
• Security risks. PDFs can carry malicious scripts, making them a risky file to open. The web is not risk free of course, but at least offers some options to verify legitimacy.

While writing this, I’ve identified two other possible advantages: offline availability and archiving. Offline? We’re rarely without an internet connection these days, and most of the content people put in PDFs doesn’t need offline access. Archiving? That’s more a question about where and how you store something, not what file format it’s in.

If your goal is to share information, use the web. It's pretty great ^[1].

The bonus amount for each qualifying employee will vary based on role and seniority, according to my sources. The highest payouts will be in the mid, single-digit millions for OpenAI’s most coveted researchers, all of whom already make millions per year. Engineers, meanwhile, are expected to receive bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on average. The bonuses will be paid out every quarter over the next two years, with the option to receive the money in OpenAI stock, cash, or a mix of both. Roughly 1,000 employees, or about one-third of OpenAI’s full-time workforce, qualify.

That's crazy. The AI hype train is one hell of a train. Should've been an engineer.

Enter iOS 26 beta 1 and its new UI, including its new camera app design. Instead of picking camera mode by sliding it into the middle like before, you move along a sliding tab bar with a highlighting piece of glass UI. It reversed the behaviour from before and took some getting used to. But with beta 2, they reversed course. Now you manipulate the tab bar behind the glass piece. While it mimics the original camera app more closely, it creates an issue because the glass highlighter isn't abstract, it's very much something on top of the different modes. So now you're moving something that is positioned below something while interacting above it, on a UI element that is not interactive, which is definitely not intuitive. And it get's worse by the fact that if you look at the tab bar in Safari, or any app with the new glass tab bar, it does the opposite. So you have two tab bars with glass highlighting your selection that operates in two different ways. That's a mess.

With a recent beta, they also included an option to toggle how you want the behaviour in the camera app, but unfortunately it defaults to the non-consistent one. And adding settings for such obscure things? That is distinctively non-Apple. Decide what's best and stick to it. I hope this part sees some improvement in the coming betas or later.

This is just one small thing in a new design language that is objectively problematic in so many ways. Subjectively, I just think it looks really bad.

If there are books out there with good adaptations you think I should read and watch? Let me know!

Dark Matter

Pretty good! It's been a while since I read the book, long enough to have been surprised by the plot twists I had forgotten about. It's a good show, good set of actors too, and it sticks to the main points of the book. No complaints. Show and book recommended. Begin with either.

Foundation

It has been said that it's impossible to film these books. It's a complicated set of books. But impossible, I think not. But this adaptation, even though it's visually grand, is hell bent on keeping a set of "main characters" around, when the source material basically only have one single character that keeps returning. That demands some real shuffling around and serious creative manipulation of the source material. And that is exactly what they have done. And it's a mess, I think. You're constantly struggling to match what you see with what you know from the books, and fail. At times I think this show is better suited to people who've never read the book. That will at least lessen the distraction. Because even though surely 80 % of everything in the show is based on the book, it's simply reusing elements to tell a largely different story, which creates a disconnect. I don't know a whole lot of others who've read the book, would love to hear others take on this.

Silo

Wool is the original title of this first book in the series. But they all revolve around a silo, so I don't mind the more clear cut name. It's largely a good representation of the book. It has all the main components, and somehow an extra bonus that it visually appears about the same as I imagined it. That's never a given. Where I do however think it's lacking, is that it's playing the grand mystery of the silo and the people in it much like a cat-and-mouse challenge-slash-crime-of-the-week. It makes it all feel... smaller, somehow. Like the straight-to-DVD version of a blockbuster, if I make any sense. Also, I get all itchy when supposedly smart people do dumb things, and this show is full of it, to increase drama. It's off-putting!

That said, it's a fairly good thriller tv show. The books are much better, and I'm looking forward to how they'll address the next two books. Looking forward to see it play out! Great book, decent show. Definitely read book first if you can.

The Power

When teenage girls around the world suddenly develop the ability to emit electric shocks, the global balance of power between genders is violently upended (aka primarily: men lose their shit).

This show was excellent! It's a fair adaptation, it sticks very close to the book in terms of story and style. The only problem is that they didn't get to finish the whole story, only like two thirds of it. And the show is supposedly cancelled so you're left to the book to learn how it all goes down. Still worth a watch though.

Three Body Problem

This book, or rather the trilogy, is my favorite sci fi book series of all time. So a TV show will likely not be able to meet or exceed my expectations both on that ground, but also due to the scale of this story: It traverses universe, dimensions and time. Not spoiler free, but not at all spoiling it. Call it a teaser: When a signal from Earth reaches an alien world, humanity learns it’s been marked for invasion. But the attackers won’t arrive for centuries, leaving science, faith, and civilization to slowly unravel under the weight of knowing what’s coming.

There are two TV shows in existence. One made in China, called Three-Body, covering only the first book. And one Western one called 3 Body Problem,

Three-Body is a Chinese TV production focused on the first book. I've only seen about 10 episodes of it and while it sticks very true to the first book (which is the book possibly easiest to film), it's rather slow. They spread that story over 30 episodes and that's too much runtime. My plan is to see them all, but it's simply not very inspiring when I expect the rest to be similarly paced.

3 Body Problem however, a Netflix product, has higher pacing, and takes a whole lot of freedom with the source material. Most of it I'm fine with, the combine a few people, shift things and places around, pick things from the second and third book into the first season elegantly to make the story coherent. You get the sense the showrunners are really loving the source material, but they seem to have missed the mark of making intellectual TV visually appealing. I believe these people has a background in Game of Thrones, so they should be familiar with striking visuals. While the show fires on all cylinders to cover the story, the settings feel very uninspired, and doesn't properly align with the content. Mostly this annoys me because the way to secure your job with more seasons, is to make your first season memorable. And while the story is very unique and memorable, the visual style of this series doesn't match it at all. Now, it seems the show was renewed for another season, which is good news. Because if they're moving into book 2 or 3 next, there's no way the shows visual can't be one of their highest priorities. So, my expectations are high for what's coming. As most times, I recommend reading all the books before seeing anything.

Divergent

If memory serves me well, this series of TA books came out around the time Hunger Games were peaking. They are almost written to be filmed, and filmed they were. The first film is very very closely adapted to the book. However, I found the book quite average, and as a result, the movie is just as average. But if you did like the book, you should ideally enjoy this movie. Sources tell me that the movie adaptations of the rest of the books are not following the source material as closely, but I don't know if that has made them better or worse movies. I'll have to get back to you on that.

The Martian

Fun book, lovely tone of voice, inspired writing. And it translated almost perfectly to movie. Great work by everyone involved. I'd read the book first, but you'd do fine either way.

Ready Player One

A book aimed squarely at my age bracket (born in the 80'ies). A fun read in and about virtual reality, that is a bit more of a mystery than the movie counterpart. I feel Spielberg took a few too many unnecessary liberties with the source material. What was on the pages seems pretty easy to make into a movie, and the bits that was removed or sometimes completely replaced with fabricated content, didn't actually improve on the source material. That seems like a waste of time and an easy way to annoy fans.

Wayward Pines

This book is excellent, Blake is a great writer. About a man that wakes up in a town without knowing how he got there. And everything and everyone feels wrong, and it seems difficult to leave this town. It's an awesome read, and it has translated perfectly into a TV show. But here comes the warning. Well, two warnings. See only season 1, avoid season 2 at all costs. Season 1 is based on the book. Season 2 is based on... I don't know, it's a mess and a travesty. Season 1 is so strong and nails the story and vibe of the book perfectly. I don't know what happened. And the second warning; no googling. Don't spoil this book or show. Just get started with either.

Seen, read but not written about yet

• Hunger Games
• The Lovely Bones
• Time Traveller's Wife (The Movie)
• Time Traveller's Wife (The TV show)
• Å han älskade dom alla

Helt plötsligt sitter jag och lär ChatGPT matte, det var ju inte riktigt tanken. Jag trodde naivt att matte, som lämnar så lite utrymme för tolkning, borde vara enkelt för ChatGPT. Men tydligen inte.

However, mycket vill ha mer as the the Swedish idiom goes, which lazily translates to "much wants more".

At times, Spotify recommendations feel artificial and clinical. This point bothered my previous podcast co-host Johan so much that he left Spotify for Apple Music, with the argument that he'd take recommendations primarily based on human curation thank algorithms any day of the week even if the hit rate was lower.

The upside is, of course, the element of surprise.

You can categorize music with endless attributes to make the algorithm calculate similar music to recommend to it's user. That covers the broadcasting end of the music listening experience pretty well. The problem lies in the other end, the listener. You can inform the algorithm of what you think of recommended music based on behaviour such as repeat listenings, saves to playlists, songs skipped. That covers the receiving end, but not very well. Because it's harder to quantify taste. It's more likely than not that you'll like a song that's similar to the attributes of music you've saved than a song that's not similar. But the mind doesn't always respect the boundaries of it's own taste, and it's hard to artificially extrapolate into the unknown when taste is so fickle.

I digress, what I'm trying to say is that it's hard to guess what else you like when you don't even know yourself what else you like... until you hear it.

And that's where humans come in handy. They can throw curve ball recommendations at you without caring for any of the actual metrics that matter, only based on their own hunches, vibes, mood, feelings or any other hard-to-quantify quality. There's a high risk a lot of music recommended to you that doesn't match your preferences will not be of interest to you. But it might! High risk, high reward.

So I have a feature request for Spotify. It's not likely that they will leave the artificial space of music recommendation. It's truly a fantastic tool (side note, I'm so looking forward to the AI prompt playlist feature), but like with all products, there's room for improvement, so here's my proposal:

Looking at my saved music, my playlists, and my stats. My music taste likely doesn't make sense. It's all over the place, which is a good definition of how I'd define it myself. And I think there are many others like me, and many of those might have overlapping data with me. If there was another user our there that shared similar traits in their saved music, playlists and stats, let's say we have a 50 % overlap in some arbitrary metric, I would be HUGELY interested in listening to what that other 50 % was.

So I would love access to digital twins in Spotify. A way for me to browse other Spotify users, anonymised of course, to learn more about what they like. Perhaps even ways to sort and filter based on metrics, like show me best matches in a specific genre. Or find my a digital twin for a specific playlist. Or time of day.

This would allow Spotify to offer a human element. Crowdsourced automatically by it's users, to recommend music, to extend upon or beyond it's own algorithmic recommendations, to provide that much needed element of surprise.

The EV9 is not only the EV car of the year of 2024 but also THE car of the year 2024. Those are some high praises. In many respects I can see why, but our anecdotal experience with this car leaves us more frustrated than impressed. The big problem is we’ve seen and lived the future. And while this is marketed as a car of the future, it's rooted in the past in a way that the Tesla was never.

Let's get the good out of the way first: The EV9 is an incredibly well built, comfortable and quiet car. I think it looks great and it's roomy like no car I've ever owned. Those are all physical aspects. Basically, you can tell Kia has been building cars for some time. But a tech company they are not.

Let’s start with the future part. In a Tesla, you set up your profiles, connect them to key cards or your phones. The procedure then is this: you approach the car, it unlocks itself, you get in, put it in Drive, and drive away. Then you put it in park, exit the car and leave, and it locks itself. Fairly straight forward, it takes care of the unlocking and locking, turning the car on and off automatically. With the EV9, not so much.

The car will unlock on approach, but not lock when you leave. Once in the car, you need to turn it on, and when you leave, you need to turn it off manually. If you forget to turn it off, you can't lock it. And from the outside there's no way to turn it off, from either key fob, phone key or the Kia app. Speaking of, you have two key fobs and you can use your phone as a key. However, you can only have two profiles, plus a guest mode, and one phone key. You can share your phone key, but not by actually sharing it. The intent has to come from someone else. They need to set up the whole Kia account first, then request access to your vehicle, then you can share it. Weird.

There are so many peculiar limitations and unnecessary steps. Be prepared for the wonderful push notification telling you that you left your car engine running and just hope you're not getting it while boarding a plane or something, since it means your car will be left on and unlocked and there's nothing you can do about it without physical access to the car.

Two profiles, that’s such an unnecessary software limitation that creates a really poor experience for any owner where more than two drives it. Any additional driver will need to rely on the guest mode, but it’s also really easy to accidentally select one of the two profiles and mess up their settings, since the car will auto select a profile if no manual input is made. A profile can be protected with a PIN code and biometric fingerprint security to prevent this. But since the screen is so far away, it’s not very comfortable (and also quite slow and sluggish) or easy to enter a pin every time you get into the car so you might be swayed to use the fingerprint sensor. Bad news then that this sensor is really unreliable, inconsistently unreliable even. You get half a dozen tries before it locks up and asks you to use your PIN instead. I think my success rate here is about 50 %. That’s just not good enough, so I leave it off.

To prevent my seat settings from being ruined, I can use the seat memory settings (of which there are two). This way, if someone accidentally change my seat while using my unprotected profile, I can rely on the second memory to restore settings. But the documentation for these buttons are poor, and it’s only by trial and error that I’ve learned how they relate to profile settings.

When interfaces aren’t intuitive, one would hope the manual could be a great resource. However, the EV9 manual is a complicated mess that is incredibly difficult to follow. A great example of this is the very first time I wanted to use the car. I was able to turn the car on, but unable to put it in Drive or Reverse. I was trying to do it the way the rep had told me. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the car to move. So I went for the manual. How to start the car is explained in this simple 8 step guide:

Most things are likely covered in the manual, but those are 650 bitter pages to wade through even navigating by search. I've resorted to YouTube for learning things about this car, which has proven more effective.

From YouTube, I’ve learned that there’s no button to pause media, only a mute button. But the EV9 in the US, the button is pause for media and mute for radio, which makes much more sense. "Can’t you use the on-screen controls to pause?" I could, if they were accessible. However, since the car insists on auto-playing audio no matter how you configure it or your (in my case) iPhone, the need for this button is immediate from the moment you start the car. But there's the slow profile selector that you can't dismiss. Once profile is selected, you're greeted and told to drive carefully, which you can't dismiss, and since you're leaving, the car is in park mode with all the cameras, which you can't dismiss. So you and everyone in the car will have to hear whatever the car chooses to turn on (sometimes it's music, sometimes it's podcasts, I've found no consistency in how it behaves), until you've been able to login, pull out and drive away. It's not nice. Since writing this post, I’ve learned that the infotainment system's on/off button works as a media play/pause button when pressed. It only works as on and off with long press. Things you learn by accident.

The app is difficult to use. So many views and settings that are grouped and presented in different ways. It's hard to figure out the information architecture of it. I can mention that the app will not let you open the trunk or frunk, it can’t tell the temperature in the car, it can’t be used to share locations from a map app (only the built-in one), it can take minutes for settings to change, the charge speed is oddly presented in percentages, and each event triggers a notification (even successful ones). But the main problem is that you're always lost. There's hardly no visual hierarchy, it's all 50 shades of light gray and five times too many menus and sections that all feel awkwardly squeezed in. I get the feeling this app initially did very little and now it is responsible for a whole lot, but there wasn't enough time or effort spent on making sure the app.

Luckily my home and life situation affords the ability to charge at home. In fact, I’ve not charged the car anywhere else than at home since getting it four months ago. Which is good, since the car offers no entertainment features beyond playing music. No Netflix, no games, no nothing. There is no way to stream anything on this system while waiting to charge. What you can do is record voice notes, which is a weird car feature. Browsing AliExpress or similar gives you the opportunity to buy wacky computery dongles that you can plug in to get Netflix and other services. So there is a way, but it’s not very elegant.

At some point I need to wrap this post up. It’s hard, I keep finding new annoyances. So I’ll just finish with this baffling thing:

There is one pedal drive, confusingly named i-Pedal. Then there are a couple of levels of regenerative settings, all the way down to free rolling (Level 0). All things related to this is controlled with paddles behind the steering wheel. It’s all they do, navigate up and down among these settings. Long press and it will set regen to auto, in which it does something automatically, but I haven’t figured out what. Here’s the weird thing. When you start the car, it always defaults to Level 3. So if you prefer any other setting, instead of saving it to your profile, you’ll have to set it manually each time. However, if you prefer auto mode, you can toggle to that and THAT is saved to the profile. No other regen setting is. For someone like me, coming from a Tesla, I’m very used to and prefer one pedal driving, I kept toggling it on every time for a few weeks, but finally gave up. There are so many settings to do each time I get into the car, that I simply accepted defeat and got used to the default setting. Perhaps a good thing, because it also turns out that one pedal driving, which has maximum of regenerative breaking, which one would assume is the most economical mode to drive, is in fact not so. In one-pedal drive mode, unlike all other levels, the 4WD is permanent, meaning both front and back motors are engaged. Not sure why it has to be like this, but something tells me whatever I make up from max regen on one pedal drive is more than lost on always on 4WD.

Building cars is hard. Writing software and designing for cars is hard too, I’ve actually worked with interface design for cars (or HMI, as they prefer to call it) for Lynk & Co, so I have first hand experience of how hard it is.

But you got to nail the fundamentals. User centric product design revolves around the user needs and what they value. So much about the software experience in this car only makes sense in isolation at best, but as part of a whole, it falls hopefully short of feeling like anything else than the very first stumbling step into the future. I'm loving the boldness of Kia in designing the hardware aspect of this car. At it's core its the hardware that takes you from A to B. But the actual experience of that movement goes well beyond the physical aspects of a vehicle, it's the sum of all parts. In the EV9, there are just too many parts missing or faulty.

Oh, did I mention the Home button on the dash doesn't actually take you to the home screen? Things like that.