Apple is Settling All Debts  

I won’t go into too much detail on the announcements coming out of WWDC. That’s been done better and more thoroughly by many others. I will say that this feels like Apple settling all the debts they’ve accrued over the past few years.

“Oh, you wanted apps to be able to talk to each other? Here you go.”

“Widgets on your notification screen? Yep. You got it.”

“You wanted apps to use the TouchID? Ok.”

“That whole ‘I should be able to move files around in iCloud’ thing? All set now.”

“Objective-C not modern enough for ya? Meet Swift.”

There were a bunch more announcements that basically amounted to “We told you to chill while we put in place the way to do these things safely, securely, and without trashing your battery. Here they are.”

And I think that’s a big part of what iOS 8 and Mac OS 10.10 are: the culmination of a few years worth of groundwork and infrastructure building that came together and bloomed all at once. It’s going to allow for almost everything people have asked for, and more, and to top it off, Apple brought out things like Continuity where you devices simply act as logical extension of one other. It’s a simple, powerful feature that will be hard for other companies to duplicate.

(All of this assumes Apple’s cloud services continue to get better … which seems likely given I’m not sure they could get much worse.)

John Gruber has a very nice take on it.

A Tale of Good (and a Bunch of Stupid) with Comcast  

When I received a letter from Comcast a few weeks back informing me that they would ship me a new cable modem for free, I didn’t think much of it. I figured “Sure, why not. Should be better than my current one,” as my current cable modem is over four years old.

Less than a week later, I had a package from Comcast containing the new cable modem and the instructions on how to set it up.

I should say, first, that from a technology perspective, I’ve never really had a problem with our Comcast service. I have almost never had outages, I get pretty solid performance, and I’ve never had any issues with seemingly getting throttled. Looking at our history, our house uses between about 100 and 150GB of data per month (well under Comcast’s limit). That’s 90% Netflix viewing.

Prior to setting up the new modem, I grabbed the current performance of our connection from speedtest.net.

32Mb down is pretty solid—according to this site the average in the US is 24.5 Mbps, and in Massachusetts it’s 33Mbps. So pretty much dead on.

The upgrade process was pretty straightforward (it’s an Arris TG862G modem). Hooked it up, followed the instructions for online activation. And … nothing.

So, as I sort of expected, I had to call Comcast. I luckily got a competent phone agent who verified me as quickly as Comcast seems to verify you [1]. The agent sends a couple of reset signals and the modem springs to life. I’m able to get onto the web, all of my devices are working, everything seems great. I thank the agent and go about my business.

I want to secure everything (I don’t want people leeching off my network, as best I can), so I log into the modem to change its management password and to turn off its wifi (since I’ve already got a wifi network). Turns out, you can’t turn off the wifi without calling Comcast. [2]

I decide I don’t care enough about turning the wifi off. I’ve turned off the SSID, it’s WPA2, and the password is complex enough that nothing should find it too easily. I pick up the land line to make sure it’s working (since with Comcast, it’s cheaper to have a phone number than not—even if you tell them you’ll pay the same amount, you just don’t want a phone number). It’s not working. Oh well. [3]

I pop open the backup battery compartment just to take a look. It’s empty. Turns out, Comcast charges you $40+ for a battery. That’s a real dick move. [4]

Now, to the fun stuff. I rerun the speed test …

Well, that’s pretty nice. Almost doubling our download speed.

And, in the end, that’s why I stay with Comcast. I generally get good internet performance, generally don’t have issues with our cable, and they’ll generally let me handle stuff on my own without having to wait for someone to show up at my house.

That doesn’t make me like Comcast. There’s a reason they’re the second most hated company in America.

• They constantly screw with your billing, even when you call them and they agree to fix your billing.
• They nickel and dime you for everything because they are dicks. Franchise Related Cost, Regulatory Recovery Fee [5], another Franchise Fee.
• They do stuff like charge you for the battery backup for your modem, and don’t let you turn off the wifi on the modem without calling back into their team.
• They’re dicks about net neutrality

And, somehow, they’re still the best option many in the country have available. [6]

At least my internet is fast.

Open Floor Plans are (Mostly) Pure Marketing  

Came across this post on open floor plans via Gabe at Macdrifter. The article is about labs, but I think it’s applicable to offices in general. Our new office has a major problem with not having enough quiet space. We moved from an office with lots of offices and meeting rooms to an office with fewer offices per employee and many fewer meeting rooms. The other side of that exchange? More “open space” and the serendipitous collaboration that theoretically results.

Open offices can work. Open offices can be beneficial. But there has to be a place you can go have a meeting, or go make a phone call, or go get some quiet work done. I’d worked in an office for 5 years before we moved into our new building, where I ended up trading an office for a cube. I don’t mind that (well, that much).

What I do mind is the inability to lock out the world and get work done when I’m on a deadline. With an office, or at a minimum, with a door, the act of shutting the door is a sign “Hey, I’m busy, it has to be really important.” It’s a simple mechanism to increase the friction required to interrupt you. And, as we all know, it works.

Cubes and desks don’t facilitate that. You are at your desk, you are fair game to interrupt.

Open offices aren’t inherently bad. They can and do foster collaboration. They can encourage the type of interactions that drive innovation. There’s a great presentation by my basketball comrade Bill Aulet about designing office space for innovation, and I think he’s right: you want a particular type of office for collaboration, innovation, and invention.

There’s also the famous discussion by Joel Spolsky on the need for private offices for developers. The gist: developers need the ability to work privately as they think through and work through the complicated tasks they’ve been tasked with solving. You can likely extrapolate that to many job roles.

As they say, everything in moderation. If you’re in an office where you require collaboration on a daily basis, and private work is the exception, an open office may be perfect. If you’re in an office where you’ve got a team on two week sprints and tight deadlines, the last thing you want is people having conversations and interrupting the entire team. There’s a balance.

And almost every open office space I’ve seen misses the mark. Our current office space did. There aren’t enough quiet places to go and close a door and get work done. The biggest thing I’ve done for my productivity in the past few weeks was use my seniority to claim a better cube and position white boards as movable walls. Now, people can’t actually tell if I’m at my desk, so they’re less likely to walk up and interrupt me, and will use email or IM (both media that I can ignore) to query me. If I need to work with a team, I can go to a space to collaborate. If you asked me to redesign our office space, I’d invert the ratio of open space to private space. I’d give people a place to work privately by default, and allow them many rooms to come together and collaborate. But, hindsight, 20/20 …

In the end, this is the most telling thing about open offices:

But no matter what, there's one area that never does seem to turn into a big, open, collaborative share-space: wherever the higher-level executives work. Funny how that happens.

Ain’t that the truth.

(Via Macdrifter)

OmniFocus 2 is out!  

I’ve been using the OmniFocus 2 beta for a few months and on Wednesday, The Omni Group officially released OmniFocus 2.0.

They’ve launched it with a bunch of nice videos, an iBooks-based manual, and an entirely new site devoted to folks’ workflows and ideas on how to use OF. That should help temper the learning curve for OmniFocus a bit and help show the myriad ways it can make your life a bit easier to manage.

OmniFocus 2 has been the impetus for me to get even more stuff into it, to try to better manage the hundreds (or thousands) of things that come across my desk/email/brain every week. Between OF2 and Evernote, I feel like I’ve got a reasonable handle on my time and organizing my tasks and info (though I do spend far too much time pushing tasks I ran out of time for into the future, which isn’t quite as rewarding).

The best way to figure out if OmniFocus is for you is to watch someone else use it. Check out the videos (or this in-depth video tutorial/review) and see if it’ll work for you.

See, Other Folks Love the West Wing Too   ⚐

A really supremely clever recap of a single episode of season two of The West Wing. You should also check out the behind the scenes creation.

(Via Dave Winer.)

The Television Reckoning  

’twas a bad end to the television season for me.

Community, which I think I rate in the top 10 shows ever (and probably top 5 sitcoms), was canceled.
Trophy Wife, a show that was probably one of the better new family sitcoms, lasted one season.
Suburgatory, a show that, at its best, gave us Ryan Shea (aka Eugene Goldfarb) and Dalia Royce, was canceled.
Enlisted, a touching, funny show that stole “Ryan Shea” from Suburgatory, didn’t even make it through its first season.
How I Met Your Mother, a show that had a great peak, nearly ruined its legacy with a tone-deaf final season.

Topping it off, Parks and Recreation and Cougar Town are both finishing up after one more season.

Want to know why people are spending more time on Netflix? I’m not worried about them canceling The West Wing or Scrubs (again).

Bah.

Backing up iPhoto to Flickr   ⚐

Ever since Flickr upgraded to their 1TB plan, I’ve been looking for a good way to backup my photos there. Over the weekend, I stumbled upon this Github repo, which has a bit of AppleScript to get your photos and albums from iPhoto, then sets about uploading them to Flickr.

Even better, it keeps track of what it’s already uploaded, so you can run it every time you add some photos to iPhoto, so you’ll have a solid backup.

For me, this solves a lot of problems:

• One, I like having my photos backed up. I think this will be my seventh photo backup, which makes me at least feel pretty good that a bad disk or virus or malware won’t eat all my photos.
• Two, it solves the “how do I keep a lot of photos on my phone” issue.

That latter solution is a big one. iOS still has a pretty bad solution for managing photos, particularly doing it wirelessly. Syncing photos is still over a cable, so I’ve moved to using Photo Stream as a way to get photos off my camera, as imperfect as that is. But that means the photo albums on my phone never get updated, as they only get updated when you sync via USB.

Now, I can use the Flickr app (as long as I’ve got some sort of internet access) and have access to every single one of my photos going back to when I first got a digital camera (Christmas of 1999). That’s pretty awesome. And they don’t take up any space on my phone. Even better.

There’s some little downsides and gotchas. If you’ve already uploaded anything to Flickr, you’re going to end up with duplicates (at least I’m pretty sure you are—I’ll know when my upload finishes). That’s pretty easy to clean up though. I’ve noticed some photos getting uploaded in the wrong orientation. That’ll take a little while to go through and adjust, but hey, easy enough to scan through albums and rotate some images.

Once done, I’ll have 15 years of images available to me at pretty much any time. I can add comments or descriptions and search on those, or browse albums. Flickr’s new app is pretty nice, and not a bad way to view photos on the go.

Revisiting Harmontown on the Nature of Art  

Back in September, I mentioned a Harmontown podcast that delved into the nature of art. It’s a pretty great, moving conversation between Dan Harmon, Kumail Nanjiani, and Jeff Davis on art (and what art is), emotions, inspiration, and a variety of other topics.

Thankfully, someone snipped about 12 great minutes of the conversation and put it on SoundCloud. I’ve embedded it below.

There’s a great moment right at the beginning with Kumail talking about seeing Michelangelo’s David, realizing that he did that at the age of 29, and immediately going online and canceling his pre-order for GTA5. Such a razor-sharp modern reaction to seeing someone’s amazing art and realizing that many of us just piss away our time.

Also, to quote:

I saw the David and I was like “everyone can have one great day, what else you got?”, and you see the Sistine Chapel and you’re like “oh, ok, also this. Also this.”

Really, give these 12 minutes a listen. If you like it, track down the full podcast and listen to the next 20 minutes, which are also just great.

For me, it has served as a much needed spirit lifter at the end of a couple of hard weeks (much like my first keytar bear sighting yesterday).

Light, in the midst of a generally awful week ...  

In the middle of what has been a week from hell, I’ve at least stumbled upon a very entertaining podcast, Wits.

Wits is a sort of adorably goofy variety show, an SNL- or Daily Show-lite, with a celebrity guest, skits (involving said celebrity guest), and a musical act. It’s not the funniest show, or the most daring. It’s just two parts clever, one part “aww shucks”, with a little bit of edge tossed in.

There are moments when you wince at the forced humor, or, if you listen to a few shows in a row, when they go back to the well for a repeated joke.

But, mostly, you just kind of grin at their goofiness of the “Pop Song Correspondence”, when they act out the other side of a famous song. The best, and what hooked me on the show, is Kristen Schaal as the Horse from Horse With No Name. I don’t want to ruin it. It’s good.

Take a gander through their episodes, grab a couple that have guests or artists you like, and give a listen.

A Chorus of MJs  

Every once in a while you hear something that just makes you say “ohhhhh”, and then makes you just sort of weep for what people can do with the human voice.

The ones that always stop me in my tracks are the vocal only tracks from The Beach Boys on Pet Sounds.

Go listen to this:

and listen to this:

This week I saw a link to a recording of Michael Jackson laying down the demo to Beat It. It’s unreal. It’s an a cappella chorus of MJs.

Go listen to it. I’ll wait.

…….

Seriously – amazing, right?

I came across this from a link that someone had sent to this post, which has a really great story of how Michael Jackson used to layout songs:

As Jackson couldn’t fluently play any instruments, he would sing and beatbox out how he wanted his songs to sound by himself on tape, layering the vocals, harmonies and rhythm before having instrumentalists come in to complete the songs.

The rest of the story is even better, but I don’t want to steal it all, so head over to that aforementioned post to get the rest of the story.