Kara Swisher Interviews Mark Zuckerberg

Kara Swisher Interviews Mark Zuckerberg

John Gruber, at Daring Fireball, from his comment on an extract from the interview:

They’re offering a powerful platform that reaches the entire world to lunatics who, in the pre-internet age, were relegated to handing out mimeographs while spouting through a megaphone on a street corner.

The internet has been a greatly democratizing force. You can now share your ideas with anyone anywhere in the world nearly instantaneously. Even China, with a specialized, centralized, actively censored network cannot completely stop people from bypassing their controls to share information. There are, effectively, no gatekeepers who can reliably prevent you from getting your words out to the world.

There’s literally nothing stopping you or anyone else from creating your own web page. Twenty years ago when I was a broke college student I went dumpster diving and cobbled together parts into an experimental Franken-Mac. You can make your own web server out of actual garbage if you want to.

If someone wants to do the internet equivalent of wearing a sandwich board proclaiming “THE END IS NIGH”, they can do it in any number of ways. That’s more or less what Time Cube did until the page’s creator died in 2015.

I am a strong free speech proponent, to the point that I’ve said in the past, “I may think you’re a fucking asshole who doesn’t deserve to share the same oxygen other human beings breathe, but I’ll still fight to the death for your right to express your ideas in public.”

Protecting free speech is not the same thing as providing a platform for that speech. Facebook is not “the internet”, it’s only one large social network; a blue whale in an ocean of information.

It doesn’t matter whether Holocaust deniers believe what they’re saying or not. It doesn’t matter whether the “just asking questions” crowd is actually making an argument in good faith (spoiler: they aren’t). You aren’t obligated to give them a place to speak. Your only obligation is to protect their right to express their ideas in a publicly available forum. The creation of that forum is their responsibility.

There is no reason for Zuckerberg’s company to provide the internet equivalent of a stage, microphone, and TV camera crew to every crank who has an account on Facebook.

Fantastical 2.4

Michael Tsai - Blog - Fantastical 2.4 for Mac

It’s like they read my mind and implemented my four most-wanted features. Great update. Hopefully attachments and travel time will also come to the iOS version soon.

Fantastical at this point is simply the best calendar application on both macOS and iOS. It is one of the handful of apps that I absolutely must install right away when I get a new device. It has come a long way from the first version, when it was essentially a clever menu bar widget for fast iCal (later Calendar) entry.

When Fantastical 2 first came out, I still kept both Apple’s Calendar app and Fantastical in the dock. Some things were better displayed on Calendar than Fantastical. As Fantastical has improved, I found increasingly fewer reasons to open Calendar, and eventually I removed it from the dock. On iOS, I still (technically) use Calendar. Calendar’s widget is better than Fantastical’s for showing the coming block of time, so I have both widgets enabled in Notification Center.

I have been using URIs, and later Dropbox-sharing URLs, as a workaround for attachments in iCal for a very long time, probably nearly as long as it has been in the spec. This works but has never been very elegant. Since I’ve got those habits and some automation built around it, in practice I’ve found I don’t use actual attachments often, though the implementation in Fantastical 2.4 is well done.

The combined calendar display is clever, and it’s both useful and reasonably attractive. I set up a Zapier-to-Google-Calendar workflow to start certain timers on Toggl sometime after I started doing time tracking full-time at the end of 2016. This update makes it possible to leave that calendar visible as an indicator that those events are properly mirrored, without the calendar view feeling crowded and cluttered. Like many good software innovations, it feels so obvious once you see it that you wonder why no one ever did it that way before.

Undo and redo are features that I would have benefitted from literally only hours before the update was released. The extended month view is a good compromise to deal with the problem of high information density in limited space.

Daring Fireball

It really is a great update. I’m not even sure what to ask for at this point. No app is ever “done”, but at this point Fantastical feels feature complete.

Gruber may think Fantastical is feature-complete, but I’ve had something on my wishlist for years. No software on the market offers the ability to set odd intervals or perform date calculations. I’ve had some recurring duties that are supposed to be done every 10 days, not counting holidays.

I can’t simply enter an event like this in any calendar software with a preset reminder and forget about it until I get an alert. Instead, I have to enter dozens of entries at odd intervals; or enter a repeating event, check every single future event, and move ones that conflict, with cascading changes necessary further on.

Supposedly, the automation of detailed repetitive tasks that are easy to screw up if you do them manually is what computers were made for, but no one seems to have filled this niche. This kind of interval is a really common case for educators and students. Though it might be more rare for regular office workers in many places, it’s quite common in Japanese offices to have duty rosters that don’t follow a normal weekly schedule, like my 10 day rotating schedule.

Most calendar programs don’t even have a way to set something like “the third Saturday of every month”. Fantastical gets this right on either macOS or iOS. But I wish someone would build support for entering arbitrary intervals that could be cross-referenced with another calendar, like a subscribed holiday calendar, for conflicts and automatically enter events so that they fall on the appropriate date.

I was so frustrated with having to enter so many of these kinds of events by hand at the beginning every new work year, that I investigated scripting my own solution. Which is like being annoyed by a single mosquito and deciding to eradicate malaria.1

Also, while Fantastical’s natural language parsing is really good, there should be a way to specify a note for the event as part of your entry. You can set notes using the URL scheme on iOS,2 and both iOS and macOS versions will recognize and appropriately handle anything that looks like a URL in the input, but there’s no way to enter a note through the input box without having to click and drop down into the extra info section. A single basic alert can be set by typing something like alert 1 day but neither something like note foo nor note:foo work for setting notes.

Still, these are relatively minor gripes. Fantastical lives up to its name. It is a true Calendar replacement, and it is simply the best calendar for entering new events, which is something I have to do on a near-daily basis.


  1. Sure, no problem. I’ll just whip up a sterility-inducing retrovirus in my spare time. How hard could it be to learn genetic engineering when you figured out basic bio?  ↩

  2. There’s an excellent guide for using Fantastical’s URL scheme at Geeks With Juniors.  ↩

Dickbars and Other Readability Excrement

John Gruber in Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Dickbars:

Medium seems to continue to grow in popularity as a publishing platform, and as it does, I’m growing more and more frustrated by their on-screen “engagement” turds. Every Medium site displays an on-screen “sharing” bar that covers the actual content I want to read. This is particularly annoying on the phone, where screen real estate is most precious. Now on iOS they’ve added an “Open in App” button that literally makes the last 1–2 lines of content on screen unreadable. To me these things are as distracting as having someone wave their hand in front of my face while I try to read…

This is now a very common design pattern for mobile web layouts. Medium is far from alone. It’s getting hard to find a news site that doesn’t put a persistent sharing dickbar down there.

I had quite forgotten about the elegantly evocative appellation Mr. Gruber coined lo these many moons ago: the dickbar.

I’ve periodically collected screenshots of especially egregious examples of readability excrement over the last couple of years. For this post, I’ve cropped out OS or app interface cruft to show only content. Or should that be “content”?

While Gruber’s recent rant about the dickbar was triggered by Medium’s mobile site, which is supposedly mobile-friendly and well-designed — and which should presumably strive to do better than the norm — a similar set of problems has been at least as bad on desktop versions of sites for a long time.

Wall Street Journal, Mobile Site

Wall Street Journal, Mobile Site

On mobile, or on desktop websites, financial news usually seems to be among the worst offenders.

The Wall Street Journal wants me to whitelist their site and not use a blocker, and in return they generously give me about 3/4 of my screen with which to read their articles. It’s like trying to read through the slit in the top of a Kleenex box.

How about the generositiousness[1] of of Fortune, who use a vastly larger desktop display to spray ad bukkake in your face while serving up a content column that’s basically the same width as my ancient iPhone 5s. Actually, it’s more readable on an iPhone since more than 3–4 words a line fit on the screen in mobile view.

Fortune’s Ad Bukkake.

Fortune’s Ad Bukkake.

Tech sites are also terrible. Cnet is basically unusable.

Cnet, y u no lt mi c?

Cnet, y u no lt mi c?

Where the #^¢* is the actual content? You can’t even read the full headline covering the absurdly large “hero” image without a host of popups, pop-ins, and other “look at meeee!!11!eleven!” elements partially covering it. Add a “bonus” autoplay video for flavor. Fun!

Here’s a slideshow on Cnet.

Ultimate(?) iPhone Quiz

Ultimate(?) iPhone Quiz

Quick, how do you advance the slideshow? The forward arrow didn’t appear for several seconds, then worked intermittently, failing about one time every five clicks, and the thumbnail images were unresponsive for several more seconds when I accessed the site.

And how about that sidebar? Wait, sidebar? You thought that was an ad section? Yeah, that’s what I thought too. It’s supposed to be the caption. Oh, you can’t read the caption? Let’s just scroll that a bit… Except, scrolling within that bar is so broken as to be completely useless.

Don’t believe me, try it yourself. Shitshow doesn’t begin to cover it. I took those screenshots about two years ago and have avoided ever going back to Cnet for any reason since.

Surprisingly, one of the really bad websites I found was the Cambridge Dictionary.

Cambridge, Just a Hint: Dictionaries Contain Words.

Cambridge, Just a Hint: Dictionaries Contain Words.

Dickbar + persistent navigation toolbar + share button turds + ads + ads + ads + provide your email for spam[2] + a topper of the “required” EU cookies notice = a shitty user experience.

Even on an “unlimited” data plan, I’ve run into rate limits before the end of a month when I’m doing nothing more data intensive than using my iPhone normally and occasionally tethering for data access for work when I don’t have wi-fi access. Rate limits for my plan on DoCoMo kick in at 7GB, and I don’t watch goddamn YouTube tethered through my phone.

When tethered, besides web access, I sync primarily text files and occasional images through Dropbox, and Numbers or Pages documents through iCloud. I’m pretty damn sure it’s not syncing my actual work that’s eating up data.

Publishers, if you want me to stop running an ad blocker, stop doing shit like this:

Wait, How Many #^¢*ing Scripts Is That‽

Wait, How Many #^¢*ing Scripts Is That‽


  1. Don’t tell me this isn’t a real word. It’s a perfectly cromulent word. In fact I made it up just now to explain the truthiness of my argument. So there.  ↩

  2. Oh please, oh please!  ↩

"Japan's antitrust watchdog considers action against Apple, carriers"

Reuters: “Exclusive: Japan’s antitrust watchdog considers action against Apple, carriers - sources

Both the headline and the lede are greatly misleading. The second and third paragraphs contradict the promised premise:

In a report published last month, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said that NTT Docomo, KDDI Corp and Softbank Group were refusing to sell older surplus iPhone models to third party retailers, thereby hobbling smaller competitors.

Apple was not named in that report, but two senior government sources told Reuters that regulators were also focusing on Apple’s supply agreements with all three carriers.

The carriers are almost certainly responsible for any shadiness in the deals because this only benefits them, not Apple. We’ll probably never actually find out, but I’m pretty sure the reason iPhones are not still exclusive to SoftBank is probably because Apple finally gave in to carrier demands for special concessions.

KDDI and DoCoMo are late-comers to the party. In 2008, SoftBank was the exclusive carrier for the iPhone, and it benefitted greatly. Three years later, SoftBank was still experiencing incredible growth, which was credited in large part to its still-exclusive deal with Apple. KDDI started offering iPhones in 2012, with DoCoMo finally deigning in 2013 to offer iPhones after years of steadily bleeding away customers, primarily to SoftBank.

SoftBank went from a distant third-place player in the market with about 18% share, to near-parity with second-place major carrier KDDI between 2008 and 2013, when all major players, including DoCoMo, finally offered iPhones on their networks. Without SoftBank’s runaway success, KDDI and DoCoMo might still be resisting Apple’s entry into the Japanese market even now.

The existence of business practices that shut out secondary players are an open secret. There is a very limited secondary market for unlocked phones because the vast majority are sold SIM-locked to a carrier. There are only three major players in the market, all of whom lock their handsets and in practice never unlock iPhones even after the handset is paid for and the typical 2-year contract is up. Discount carriers never even have a chance due both to carrier collusion and Japanese market rules.

The carrier that set the lock is the only entity legally allowed to unlock handsets. SoftBank has never offered SIM-unlocking. There have been persistent rumors of the other carriers offering SIM-free (i.e. unlocked handsets) for years, but reportedly neither KDDI nor DoCoMo will unlock iPhones still. Despite being required as of May 1, 2015 to offer SIM-unlocking, the carriers have been allowed to set their own timeline, and apparently their estimate on when they’ll do that for iPhones is somewhere between “#^¢* you!” and “We’ll get around to it … someday”.

Blaming Apple for customer-hostile business practices on the part of the carriers, and laggardly-enacted toothless laws that do virtually nothing to open the Japanese market is absurd. That the present situation favors Japanese incumbents is no coincidence, and past protectionistic behavior is the only element that lends credence to this report that Apple might be investigated in the future. The chance of Apple being found of wrongdoing in anything resembling a fair hearing is extremely slim, in my opinion.

MacBook One Enters

My venerable MacBook Pro has been retired, involuntarily. At first, I thought the intermittent crashes over the period of a couple of weeks were due to a memory module failure, but a thorough memory test and a consistent failure to be able to boot into the hardware test suite in OS X, both at home and at the Genius Bar at my closest Apple Store, led me to believe it was a motherboard problem. If I could isolate the problem and repair it, I might be able to keep the old reliable workhorse[1] for stud duty as a server at home, or a desktop stand-in at one of my work locations.

In the meantime, I needed a computer for work. With only two days left before the beginning of the fall term, I didn’t have the option of waiting until the expected refresh of the Mac lineup, which some people hoped would be announced at the event in September. Unfortunately, it’s generally unwise to bet against Jim Dalrymple, and he was right in being very doubtful about the prospect of a new lineup being released so soon. If I could have held out until around mid- to late-October (my best guess as to when a new MacBook Pro will be announced) I would have just bought a new version of the class of notebook I’ve been using for forever.[2]

The Mac Buyer’s Guide is a simple and usually reliable resource for buying advice. Right now, the whole lineup is marked with a solid row of red DON’T BUY banners … except for the new MacBook, dubbed the MacBook One by Marco Arment. While I wasn’t really looking for a small-and-light machine, I decided to give it a try and see how I like it.

A couple of weeks in, here are my impressions.

She’s Got the Look

Upgrading from a lower resolution to Retina is … wow.[3] While I miss the anti-glare glass a bit, I don’t miss the slight blurriness that even the relatively good built-to-order option “high definition” display (1680x1050) my MacBook Pro had. I’m running this MacBook in “More Space” mode (looks like 1140x900) and even though text and graphics are physically smaller than my old screen, I have less eyestrain. Text is especially clear and easy to read.

Look, Ma, Both Hands!

I’m still getting used to the keyboard. I’m not much of a keyboard snob, having used almost exclusively the built-in keyboards of notebook computers for over a decade. (I bought my first PowerBook just before coming to Japan in 2000, and I’ve been exclusively mobile both by necessity and choice since. I like nice clicky keyboards, but they don’t travel well.) Like some other writers I am not happy about the arrow keys. Over a week into using it daily, I still hit the left arrow sometimes when I want up or down.

I have mostly adjusted to the slight difference in key spacing from my MacBook Pro, but I still sometimes don’t move quite enough to hit the right key. The key travel is okay; not great, not bad enough to be really annoying.

I never hammered my keyboards, keeping as light a touch as possible. Unfortunately, now I have to sometimes hit a bit harder than I think I should or the key won’t register. The keyboard is a compromise for the sake of the overall design, and it shows. The butterfly switch is actually nicer in feel than the old scissor switches — there is a crisper, more solid feel and less key rock — it’s the unavoidably short travel that’s the problem.

Invisible Toucher

Unlike some people, I have used tap-to-click even from the early trackpad days. I think it has probably held off some RSI issues. The Force Touch trackpad is a good compromise for fewer moving parts with equivalent, and in some cases enhanced functionality.

Any mechanical engineer can tell you that moving parts fail. One of the only problems I had with my MacBook Pro started when it was about 4 or 5 years old. Clicks on the bottom left corner of the trackpad often didn’t register. I think some fine grit managed to infiltrate the mechanism and I was unable to get it out without disassembling it, which is not a good idea with a very delicate part like that. When I noticed some hand strain due to pushing harder in attempt to make a click register, which was especially necessary when dragging, I ended up having to activate three-finger drag in Accessibility settings.

With the Force Touch trackpad, I’ve got to retrain myself to lighten up on the trackpad so that I don’t trigger a Force Touch when I simply want to click, or click and drag. This is actually a good thing. I like being able to “click” anywhere on the pad, instead of having to scrunch my thumb up and push in a different spot. That means I have a better, more ergonomic hand position and have less of of a chance of overuse injuries since I can use any finger on either hand to click or drag. Even the higher pressure necessary to trigger a Force Touch is lower than the static pressure I used to have to use on my old trackpad to ensure I didn’t “drop” whatever I was dragging.

Force Touch, aside from being horrible branding,[4] is actually useful. It brings back easy word lookup, which I use a lot when writing in Japanese. One consequence of enabling three-finger drag is losing the trackpad gesture to bring up the dictionary. While ⌃⌘-D is ingrained almost as well in my motor patterns, it’s less convenient than a multi-finger tap, or now a Force Touch.

I disagree with Marco. The Force Touch trackpad is an overall win. I don’t care as much about the feel as the functionality, and the functionality is improved, along with probably less of a chance of part failure since it’s sealed and there are fewer moving parts.

Dongles, Adaptors, and Cables, Oh My

I have wired internet at work.[5] Not surprising since they finally upgraded from XP machines to Windows 7 this April. So, while I was at the Apple store I bought a Belkin ethernet dongle.[6] To transfer files to our lovely, lovely new high-security setup, where printing or uploading files to the server is only possible from our official work computer via the LAN, I have to use a USB drive; another dongle.

This was another problem generated by my need to have it right now. If I had had the option of waiting, I would have bought a USB-C hub or dock, but I had to have something by Monday and I was buying on a Saturday. I eventually bought a HooToo hub, which provides two USB data ports, plus one for charging, an SD card slot, and an HDMI port for connecting to an external monitor or projector.

I already had an Anker 4 port charger. So far, it’s worked well for charging multiple devices, and I especially like the status light on the charger. Since it’s rated at 40W and the supplied Apple charger for the new MacBook is only 29W, I thought I could just carry the Anker, using a USB-to-mini cord with an adaptor for USB-C.

Unfortunately, the Anker charger either doesn’t negotiate power requirements properly with the HooToo hub or can’t supply enough power for everything through one port. So, I have to choose between power or connectivity, which kind of defeats the purpose of the hub. The hub does work with the standard Apple charger, probably because it doesn’t try to do any fancy power switching and pumps all of its voltage through the connection. Anker also offers a 60W charger with a USB-C port and 4 standard USB ports that might work, but I haven’t ordered one to try yet.

(Storage) Size Matters

The only in-store option I could get was more storage — any processor or other upgrades are only available via the online Apple Store as a BTO option — so I opted for a the 500 GB model given that I was migrating from a self-created Fusion drive with a total of 756 GB of storage.[7]

Leery of running out of space, I have treated the MacBook like a new iPhone, only installing things I know I will need. Because of that, I’ve been carrying around the 1 TB LaCie Rugged I originally bought for backing up my MacBook Pro. Since I haven’t even transferred over everything from Documents, I still occasionally find that I need to plug in and grab files.

The limited storage of the MacBook is a bit of a pain, but it helps to counter my digital packrat tendencies. I’ve found that because of being more conscious of storage space limits, I increasingly only save things I actually need to save.

Let Me Sum Up

[8]

The Good

It’s tiny. The whole thing is barely larger than a 9.7 inch iPad. It’s got a decent keyboard that, while not perfect, feels better than anything this low-profile normally would. Force Touch is a bit gimmicky, but it’s a useful gimmick. The screen is gorgeous. The battery lasts out a regular work day with no problem, and only needs a bit of charge time part of the way through a heavy day to make it to the end.

The Meh

It’s #^¢*ing tiny. I’ve been using a 15 inch screen for a decade. The Retina resolution helps, but it still feels cramped even after an adjustment period, which means I’m probably always going to feel that way. I never used an external monitor with any of my previous MacBooks Pro,[9] but I’ve already started using a dual-monitor setup when I can with this one.

The one port practically necessitates a dock or multi-port dongle for most uses, there are only a few decent options still, and none does everything I need without additional complications. While the MacBook is small and light enough that I sometimes double-check my bag to see if I actually packed it, I end up carrying almost as much weight in support equipment as the theoretical savings.

The Grey Havens

It’s probably not a big surprise that, like a lot of other reviewers, I consider this to be a machine of compromises and adjustments. They might be the kind of compromises you’re willing to make for the design and weight. It’s a good computer, and I’m fairly impressed overall, but I still miss my 2010 MacBook Pro.

Since my notebook is my only computer, it has to be capable of doing everything. While for my uses the MacBook “One” is technically capable of doing what I need, since I probably underutilized the processing power of my previous computers most of the time, there are some significant downsides to using it as a primary computer. If connectivity is important, you will probably not be particularly happy, especially at first. You will need to invest in the right adaptors and peripherals for your uses.

I tend to buy for the long term. I buy the best machine I can get at the time, and use the hell out of it for years. I don’t see this MacBook being a computer I want to use for that long. I’ll probably be trading this in for one of the new MacBook Pros when they are released. Considering that the MacBook is a good computer — it’s just not the best computer for me — I don’t think I’ll have a problem finding a buyer for it when I’m ready to sell.


  1. This machine not only had a longer active-duty life than any past Mac notebooks, which were themselves nearly A–10-like in their reliability, but it took on a bike accident where I was hit by a taxi and rolled over the hood. Admittedly, it was protected in a WaterField Designs sleevecase in my backpack at the time, but I rolled over it after getting hit by a car and the only damage was a small dent in the unibody case on the screen side.  ↩
  2. Because of their longevity, I’ve bought only 3 Macs in the last 15 years: Powerbook Pismo, PowerBook G4, and my late lamented Mid–2010 MacBook Pro.  ↩
  3. such resolve. much pixel. amaze clear.  ↩
  4. Force Touch sounds like something that would get you banned from a conference for creating a hostile environment. The 3D Touch branding used on the iPhone and Watch lines is much better to my ears.  ↩
  5. Wi-fi is, like lots of other “advanced” tech, not a thing in Japan. I’ve been in exactly one office in 15 years that had wireless ’net access for the employees. Out in public, not even the Starbucksen here have free wi-fi. You can get optional wi-fi access plans through your cell-phone carrier (Softbank is aggressive in pushing this to reduce the load on their less-extensive cell network) but leeching wi-fi for the cost of a meal or a cup of coffee is simply not possible in the vast majority of places. #welcometojapan!  ↩
  6. Apple doesn’t make a USB-C version, though they do make a USB-A. I guess they figure 15 years of widespread wi-fi usage is enough to make it ubiquitous. As @JonyIveParody might say, “maybe you should buy one of our revolutionary fucking wireless devices”.  ↩
  7. I used this 256 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD in tandem with the original 500 GB hard drive to set up my homemade Fusion drive. Apparently, I neglected to add a link to it in that article.  ↩
  8. If you don’t recognize this reference, scale the Cliffs of Insanity and fight ROUSs, do whatever it takes* to see this movie and fill the gaping maw of darkness in your life experience.

    *Like clicking this link.  ↩
  9. Blame Gruber for this one.  ↩

Cartography Comparison

Justin O’Beirne did a great in-depth comparison of the different ways Google and Apple approach mapping.

From the summary of Part 1:

We looked at 54 pairs of maps across three cities (New York, San Francisco, and London) and found several significant differences:

  • Apple Maps, on average, labels more cities than Google at every zoom.

  • Google Maps, on average, labels more roads than Apple on nearly every zoom.

  • For two-thirds of zooms, both maps generally show the same number of roads. For the remaining third, Apple almost always shows more roads.

  • Both maps, on average, label a similar number of POIs [Points Of Interest] —but have only 10% of their POIs in common on an average zoom.

  • Both maps also prioritize different kinds of POIs: Google Maps heavily prioritizes transit, while Apple prioritizes landmarks. Apple also generally shows a greater number of POI categories on a given zoom—and shows twice as many restaurants and shops as Google.

When Apple Maps launched in iOS 6, I wrote a short post comparing it to Google Maps in Japan. I found that — for my location at least — Apple’s implementation was actually better in some ways at launch than Google’s was after several years.

The main reason I don’t use Apple Maps preferentially is the continuing lack of support for transit. Train scheduling and transfer information is hugely useful in Japan, so I end up using Google Maps much more often for station to station directions, while I usually default to Apple Maps for local guidance when I reach a location. It’s interesting to see that my purely intuition-based switching between them for different roles apparently has some empirical support as well.

Twitter’s Missing Manual

One of Twitter’s problems is that it’s tilted a little too far towards the vim end of the scale. It looks like a dead-simple service, but those humble 140 characters have been crammed full of features over the years, and the ways they interact aren’t always obvious. There are rules, and the rules generally make sense once you know them, but it’s also really easy to overlook them.

I’ve known about Twitter since around 2006, but I’ve only been using it — haphazardly at first — from maybe 2011. Even though I’m pretty good about figuring out unwritten rules (see: living in Japan), as a semi-newb to the service there are a lot of things about how it works that I really didn’t know. This is a fantastic resource.

TextExpander as Subscription Software

TextExpander as Subscription Software

When Should Software Be a Subscription Service?

I don’t contest the fact that developers need income. I have gladly upgraded TextExpander every time there was a new version, even if the changes weren’t important to me. It’s important to support independent developers, to ensure that the Mac and iOS ecosystems have excellent apps. In addition, the race-to-the-bottom pricing that we’re seeing with the App Store model is preventing developers from making enough profits.

This blew up while I was still recovering from some minor surgery and so I missed most of it as it happened. Kirk McElhearn’s take on the pricing part of the equation is very nearly the same as mine.

Besides the huge increase in average yearly pricing that McElhearn laid out very clearly, I have three major problems with the subscription model:


  1. If TextExpander can’t connect to a server, will the snippets disappear until it can? If there’s no offline mode, TextExpander would be basically useless to me. One of the places I work has a very spotty internet connection. Even on my iPhone, I’m occasionally completely offline, but am still doing work that I would normally use TextExpander for.


  2. I have serious reservations about the security of Smile’s syncing solution. I do not have particularly sensitive information in my snippets, but I do have things like email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers. All of that will be stored unencrypted on their servers. They seem to be pushing toward an enterprise market, but the level of security Smile is committing to at this point is inadequate for an only moderately-concerned private user like me.

    In TextExpander’s manual they advise against using it to store anything potentially compromising, like passwords, but for many companies contact information or simply the names and positions of certain individuals in an org chart could be considered sensitive information.

    Usually, in enterprise-level software, companies want to run it on their own servers that they control, and they contract with the software provider for support service for their IT staff. I’m pretty sure most companies who might otherwise consider TextExpander would balk at Smile’s proposed syncing solution.


  3. This move offers zero benefit to me, the user. I don’t use Windows, and haven’t for about 15 years. If I did, I probably would be pretty happy about the announced support for that platform. I don’t work with teams and I don’t share snippets with a group. Having to use someone else’s shortcuts sounds like a special kind of hell to me.

    I have no incentive to “upgrade” other than the stick of eventual obsolescence when the old version breaks. While I could possibly justify the price, given how much I use TextExpander on both OS X and iOS, it’s still a significant jump. The announcement of the pricing change has prompted me to explore other options, and I’m sure I’m not the only formerly-loyal TextExpander user doing so, which can’t be good for Smile’s future sales.


One small misstep like this can drastically change people’s perceptions of your company. Apple can get away with taking away peripheral ports and eliminating optical drives because they generally get it right in the long-term, and sometimes offer temporary fixes in the transition.

Smile probably should have offered a two-tier pricing model: Basic users pay a one-time fee for major updates; “Pro” users pay an additional recurring cost for access to certain capabilities. Most people would have had no negative reaction to that model, and even basic users would have considered the pro upgrade to see if it fit their needs.

Unfortunately, Smile alienated a large section of their most loyal user base with an announcement that made it obvious that Smile’s future priorities and their customers’ priorities are definitely not the same. If it was their way of “firing” those customers in favor of a different user base, as some have speculated, Smile has definitely not put in the kind of work they need to successfully court the enterprise market, even though all of the announced features sound as if they were created for business users over individuals.

For me, ultimately, the problem isn’t the pricing. The problem is that I can’t count on Smile to continue making a product that works the way I want it to work. They’re solving problems I don’t have, and pushing features that make me distrust their future versions.

Apple Pay in Japan

A month with Apple Watch as my wallet

Tom Warren for the Verge:

It all started when I left my house without my wallet. I had ventured out to grab some lunch with no cash or cards to pay for it, only my iPhone or Apple Watch. I’ve used Apple Pay on my iPhone and Watch before, but this was the first time it was actually useful. I paid for a sandwich at my local store with my Watch, and thought nothing more of it.

via: The Loop

Meanwhile, in Japan:

Apple (日本) - Apple Press Info - Apple Pay、モバイルペイメントの変革に向けて10月20日より運用開始

The line at the top 「米国報道発表資料抄訳※—2014年10月17日」 translates as “Selected translation of report released in the US on Oct. 17, 2014”. Like it says on the tin, it’s basically the same text as the original English-language Apple Pay press release. That’s the first and last official news from Apple about Apple Pay that has been released in Japan.

Despite the lack of stated support for Apple Pay in Japan, Touch Lab, an Apple enthusiast site, tested out Apple Pay in February of 2015 to see if it would work with existing NFC terminals and payment systems. Sometimes features aren’t officially supported in other countries, but work anyway. This wasn’t one of those times.

今回試した中では3件中1件で使用できましたが、そもそもEMVコンタクトレスの端末を置いているところがほとんどなく、結局「現状Apple Payは国内でほぼ使えない」ということを再確認しただけでした。

国内では既にFeliCaが普及していることもあり、国際規格であるEMVコンタクトレスの普及が他国より遅れ、日本だけApple Payが使えない状況にならないか心配になります。

5年後のオリンピックでは海外からの旅行客が急増することが予想されるため、その準備として端末が増えることを期待したいところです。

My translation:

At one of the three sites tested at this time it was able to be used, but there are almost no EMV Contactless terminals, so in the end the statement, “Apple Pay can’t be used inside Japan”, has to be reaffirmed.

In Japan, FeliCa has already penetrated. The international standard EMV Contactless is penetrating much more slowly than in other countries, so it is worrying that possibly only in Japan, Apple Pay may not be able to be used.

At the Olympics to be held in five years, it is expected that there will be an increase in visitors from overseas. In order to prepare, hopefully terminals [that can process foreign payments] will be increased.

In other words, while elsewhere Apple Pay has been hailed as possibly the best thing about the Apple Watch, a game-changing implementation that might actually bring NFC payments into the mainstream, in Japan it’s a nearly-useless non-feature. Apple has not been able to either work out deals with market incumbents, or push the adoption of systems that integrate with Apple Pay in the year and a half since its US launch and worldwide announcement.

This is not surprising. Despite Japan’s image overseas as a country that is at the forefront of technological progress, it is an often hostile market for foreign products, particularly those that compete with any incumbent technology, and is bewilderingly behind the times in some ways. There are still many places even in Tokyo where you must pay cash; no credit or debit cards are accepted.

The apparent head start Japan had by implementing contactless payment systems, starting with train passes over a decade ago, has stultified, as all too many products developed for the Japanese market do. Japan has a tendency to be first and best with a technology that is quickly superseded, and then are unable to change course due to massive investment, or create an overspecialized version suited only for the peculiarities of the domestic market.

Desiging for the the Japanese market first and foremost has even led to the coining of a phrase, gara-kei (ガラケー) or Galapagos handset, which I mentioned in Why Apple isn’t Japanese nearly four years ago, and explained in more detail in Mobile Internet in Japan a couple of years before that.

While the phrase was first applied to Japan’s overloaded “feature” phones that quickly seemed inferior to “smart” phones, the idea has been applied to other technology. FeliCa is, in my opinion, one of these technological cul-de-sacs that is well-suited to the domestic market, but unlikely to be adopted overseas, and actively interferes with any adoption of international standards. Technology Nazi[1] says, NO APPLE PAY FOR YOU!


  1. Soup Nazi reference provided because I’m old and can’t trust that whippersnappers will get an allusion to a comedy that went off the air around the time they were being conceived.  ↩