rantings.next

iPad Pet Peeve: Notifications

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:43:11 -0500

Last weekend, Jake showed off a pretty great little program for my iPad: Noteshelf. After using it on his iPad for a few minutes, it all clicked, and I ran out to get a stylus for my iPad. Since, my iPad has replaced my collection of pens and Moleskines – if you know me at all, you know that’s a Big Deal.

What this means is that I’ve been using the iPad a lot more, especially at work. That also means that the little annoyances of the iPad are really starting to irk me. The first one, and the biggest one for me, is the Notifications system.

I’m used to Android. I love Android. When I get an alert on Android, I get an icon in the status bar, and in some cases, I get a little ticker with a blurb of info about the alert - the sender of an email, the first few lines of a Google Voice message. The Android team has a great new page on the Notifications system for Android as part of their new Android Design developer portal. In short, I love the way Android does notifications, and in my opinion, it’s one of the key plusses about Android when compared to iOS.

On the iPad? Apple’s trying - the new Notifications Center works well, and the idea of shuffling off the alerts to Somewhere Else obviously apes Android. But, take a look at the Notifications Center page again, specifically this section of the screenshot, showing a notification alert:

Do you see the problem I have with that implementation? Compare it to the notification ticker on Android 4.0:

The notification alert covers up UI elements that I interact with!

The biggest problem is when I’m using Safari, but it also happens quite a bit with Noteshelf: I’ll reach up to interact with the application and, as my finger or stylus is moving, I’ll get an alert. Instead of tapping in the address bar, or hitting the UI element I want to interact with, I’m now shuffled off to the application sending the alert, since I tapped on the alert instead of what I was planning on touching moments before.

Today, in a meeting, I actually dropped a couple of curses twice, when I was tossed off to Mail without wanting to.

Notifications suck. I might just turn them off entirely.

Not sure I’m a fan of the Export-to-Tumblr plugin...

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:19:00 -0500

Not sure I’m a fan of the Export-to-Tumblr plugin I’m using for Lightroom yet.

We’ll see…

Thursday Morning Chatting

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:35:00 -0500

Braz
9:12 Sweet. I got my first Google Talk spambot request in, like, forever.
9:12 Unless xgirlylizz2@aol.com is a real person.

Matt
9:13 I’m going to go out on a limb and say no.

Braz
9:13 Hmmm. Maybe I should chat with her. She sounds HAWT.

Matt
9:13 “Hey, baby, want to give the Turning test a go?”

Braz
9:13 Oooh. Her real name is summer corbett. She MUST be real.

Matt
9:13 I bet she’s an heiress.

Braz
9:14 An heiress whose husband/boyfriend is abusive, and is looking for a nice guy to help her escape the Hong Kong brothel/Nigerian rape camp/SoCal porn set.
9:15 All she needs is a couple hundred dollars for a plane ticket, and then she and I can get access to her trust fund and live like kings. Sexy, sexy kings.

Matt
9:15 Ask her if she’s okay with being the keytar player for Rock Band.

Braz
9:16 We need one of those. Maybe she’d even buy the XBox 360 version for us.
9:16 Because Kinect looks cool, thank you very much.

Matt
9:16 That’s right. She IS an heiress.

Braz
9:16 Once she gets here, I’m sure she will.

Matt
9:17 See if she can cook.

Braz
9:18 Oooh, she’s 22/female.
9:18 Sweet.

Matt
9:19 22/Venusian would have been tough.

Braz
9:19 22/Martian would have been a little too John Carter.
9:19 But awesome.

Matt
9:19 22/Orion
9:19 Captain James T. Kirk has blazed the trail.

Braz
9:19 Did you see that The Shat has a one-man show on Broadway in February?
9:20 And, guess who’s going to NYC in February for work…

Matt
9:20 I saw he did a G+ post about it, but I didn’t really read it.
9:20 Are you now, you lucky dog…

Braz
9:20 I am. I just need to convince Adin that’s a wise expenditure. I think she’d understand.
9:22 You know, it’s a sad testament to life on the Internet when messing with Nigerian chat scammers isn’t even fun any more.

Matt
9:22 It happens. You get jaded.
9:22 See if they’re a midget. That might put some zest back into it.

Braz
9:23 Ah, too late. When “she” ignored me saying that I don’t char with people I don’t know, I lost interest. I mean, she didn’t even TRY.

Matt
9:23 They just don’t have the same drive to succeed they used to.

Braz
9:24 They really don’t. Maybe they should just go back to gold farming. Or whatever crap you collect in SW:TOR. Wookie pelts.

Matt
9:24 Bantha pudu.

Braz
9:24 Well played, Mauer.

Yeah, we pretty much never turn it off.

iPad Impact

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:50:22 -0400

Several people have been asking me what I think of the iPad, and I’ve been meaning to write something long-form – a quasi-review, if you will – up here. Long story short, that still hasn’t happened.

What’s the short-form review? It hit me this morning, when I plugged in my MacBook at the office and unlocked the screen.

Staring at me were my Chrome windows from the last time I was using my MacBook: Friday afternoon, when I was troubleshooting the DSL, and a window from Saturday when I was working on setting up a third 802.11 base station with WDS at home.

Other than that, I’ve been using the iPad all weekend.

Work? Long writing spells, like Strategic Plans and the like? Totally MacBook.

Everything else? It’s either the iPad, or when it’s being used or just “too big”, my Nexus.

We’ll see what Ice Cream Sandwich has in store tomorrow, but this past weekend with iOS 5 is the first time I’ve seriously considered looking at the iPhone for my next upgrade.

"Why didn’t I play longer? That’s a good question. You see, the game requires an..."

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:48:30 -0400

“Why didn’t I play longer? That’s a good question. You see, the game requires an always-on Internet connection, and the servers seemed to set themselves on fire a few hours after I downloaded the beta, and this dumped me from the game. You not only need to be online to play, you need to connected to Blizzard at all times. So if your connection goes down, or if their servers crash, you can’t play. Not even single player.”

- Hands-on with the Diablo 3 beta: keep that Internet on!

Every time I get marginally excited and start thinking about Diablo III again, the “always connected to the Internet” bit comes up and reminds me why it’s a bad, bad idea.

: Playing around with auto-bracketing for HDR a little bit.

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 02:25:29 -0400

Playing around with auto-bracketing for HDR a little bit.

"I believe each time your company doubles in size, it needs to reinvent how it communicates, and each..."

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:23:29 -0400

“I believe each time your company doubles in size, it needs to reinvent how it communicates, and each subsequent transformation is increasingly radical and foreign. Fred, if we’re going to grow we need to constantly reinvent ourselves.”

- Rands In Repose: Fred Hates It

Consistently, I love Rands.

"Corporate earnings are the highest they’ve been relative to worker wages and benefits since just..."

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 10:40:41 -0400

“

Corporate earnings are the highest they’ve been relative to worker wages and benefits since just before the Great Depression. And the richest 1 percent of Americans are getting a higher percent of total income since just before the Great Depression.

Get it? It was only a matter of time before the boom on Wall Street turned into a bust. Economic booms cannot continue without American workers participating in them.

”

- Robert Reich

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:57:02 -0400

"I’m enough of an old technology hand to know that any love we harbour for our gadgets is..."

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 09:18:26 -0400

“I’m enough of an old technology hand to know that any love we harbour for our gadgets is unrequited and generally tragic – not least because you are not destined to have a long-term love-affair with your gizmos, as they will be semi-obsolete in a year or two.”

- Android and iOS both fail, but Android fails better | Technology | guardian.co.uk

I think Cory nailed why we call gadgets “sexy” and have some degree of techno-lust: they’re not the long-term relationship types. They’re the hot love affair that burns with a tremendous brightness, and then flames out as soon as the next New Hot Thing comes along.

"Once you have the installer application, you could (were you so inclined) dig into it..."

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 09:33:16 -0400

“Once you have the installer application, you could (were you so inclined) dig into it (control-click, then Show Package Contents) and find the meaty center, a 3.74GB disk image (InstallESD.dmg, stored in the Contents/SharedSupport folder). You could then use that disk image to, say, burn a Lion installation DVD or create an emergency external boot disk.”

- Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica Review

Thanks, John. That little tidbit is worth the herculean effort of reading the entire review.

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 23:59:39 -0400

"Mann’s advice can shade, occasionally, into Buddhist territory. “There’s no shell script, there’s no..."

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:57:00 -0400

“Mann’s advice can shade, occasionally, into Buddhist territory. “There’s no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why the fuck you’re here,” he tells me. “That’s on you. This makes me sound like one of those people who swindled the Beatles, but if you are having attention problems, the best way to deal with it is by admitting it and then saying, ‘From now on, I’m gonna be in the moment and more cognizant.’ I said not long ago, I think on Twitter—God, I quote myself a lot, what an asshole—that really all self-help is Buddhism with a service mark.”

- In Defense of Distraction | nymag.com | Readability

Damn, why hadn’t this article made it into my inbox before someone else linked to it on Twitter? I heart you, Merlin Mann.

(And thanks for linking to it, @jacobcharold)

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 02:02:04 -0400

Meeting @manch107 for lunch. Yummy Irish pub.: Taken with...

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 02:18:49 -0400

Meeting @manch107 for lunch. Yummy Irish pub.:

Taken with picplz at James Mackey’s Public House in Washington, DC.

Meeting @manch107 for lunch. Yummy Irish pub. (Taken with picplz...

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:14:32 -0400

Meeting @manch107 for lunch. Yummy Irish pub. (Taken with picplz at James Mackey’s Public House in Washington, DC.)

Google change wall at #nten #ntc11 (Taken with picplz.)

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 02:09:13 -0400

Google change wall at #nten #ntc11 (Taken with picplz.)

Funky fantastic decor.: Taken with picplz.

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:26:47 -0400

Funky fantastic decor.:

Taken with picplz.

Funky fantastic decor. (Taken with picplz.)

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 02:13:12 -0400

Funky fantastic decor. (Taken with picplz.)

In a five-act play, she’s one half of the two-person...

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 04:33:33 -0400

In a five-act play, she’s one half of the two-person scene. #likefatherlikedaughter #prouddaddy: