Whenever Possible

It all started with a mistake, that’s fully admitted. I was browsing a web site that had some app recommendations. Tapping one app icon on the site opened the App Store app that in turn told me that the item was not available in the German Store. Oh, and whether I wished to switch to the U.S. store.

Thanks, no. Somehow (and here comes the mistake part) my tap was a bit too much off-center and registered with the “yes, switch me over” button.

Welcome to the U.S. store.

At least, that’s what it looked like. Instead of naming the price of an app in € the labels all had a $ on it. At this point, it was totally safe for me to assume that the switch actually happened.

I struggled with a faint memory of a similar incident a couple of years ago: there had to be a way to switch back immediately, and got confirmation by the fast-reacting @AppleSupport Twitter account. Kudos, I was really impressed by the prompt reaction.

Unfortunately, I was still unable to follow the advice: In order to proceed into the “Country/Region” section of my Apple Id properties dialog, I was told that first I would have to cancel my ongoing Apple Music subscription and then wait until it expired. Which would not happen before (you guessed it) end of February.

Great!

As an aside, I really don’t understand why tapping on “Country/Region” results in the information that I can’t switch without cancelling Apple Music instead of just telling me what my current region is. If this were the case and Settings.app had informed me about my current region the whole issue would have been over by then (I have filed a radar).

Frustrated, I called Apple support on the phone and was quickly connected to a support person who, after listening to my story, confirmed to my surprise that the switch had actually never happened. According to the support person, I was positively still on the German Store.

And yet, this information was somehow at odds with the fact that the App Store app on my phone insisted on app prices in $ instead of €.

So I did what I was supposed to do in this situation: reboot the phone. Still: $.

I went to my iPad, launched the App Store app and watched all the little € appear in the place where they are supposed to appear. This was another reassuring indication that the switch really never happened. But how on earth would I be able to get my phone back to my native currency.

After some time, I wondered what would happen if I tried to purchase an app on (what still seemed to me) the U.S. App Store.

Here’s the thing: after confirming my intention to buy a random app I was informed that this app was not available on the U.S. App Store and, hallelujah, whether I wanted to switch to the German App Store.

Yes, sure. Please do it. Can’t wait.

Now that everything is back to where it belongs I’m still struggling to understand what was happening. It seemed that the App Store app initiated the switch which, however, was immediately deflected by my existing Apple Music subscription.

But somehow the App Store app had convinced itself that the switch went through and it would only be able to get back on track when an actual purchase transaction was attempted.

Whatever, I’m pleased that this adventure turned out well. Apple support in Ireland (yes, you apparently get connected to Ireland if you call from Germany) deserves an honorary mention for the crucial confirmation that my account was never actually moved.

I can’t help ending with the clever conclusion that if you want your iOS devices to prevent your account from inadvertently switching to a different App Store: buy an Apple Music subscription!

I had this struggle with double notifications in Pocket Casts. First, I seemed to have found a solution by signing out and into my account again, but after some time the pair-wise notification were back.

Tired of this issue, I eventually deactivated notifications within Pocket Casts. After that, you’d expect that notifications would stop popping up altogether going forward, right?

Wrong.

Here’s the thing: I still got notifications, only the notifications din’t come in pairs any longer. Weird.

OK, time for more radical measures. I deleted the app, and reloaded it from the App Store. Unfortunately, I did not even make it to the first notification when I realized that the audio effects were simply not available.

The buttons were just inactive, and it was not possible to use these features. This was no good.

After taking a deep breath, I was willing to give it one additional shot. If that worked I would stay with Pocket Casts, otherwise it would finally be time to leave.

Again, delete the app. Reload. Launch. Try audio effects. Wait for incoming notifications. Phew.

The tentative conclusion is that the last install seem to work according to my expectation. However, I have to say that this job stretched my loyalty to the product dangerously close to the snapping point.

Yesterday, my phone started to show two notifications for the release of a new podcast episode in Pocket Casts. First, I tried to fix the issue by deactivating and then re-activating notifications but that didn’t help.

What fixed the situation for me was to sign out of my syncing account and log right in again.

One of the most successful¹ articles on my static site has been created as the result of taking notes while fixing the installation of a printer driver for my Dell laser printer while running the El Capitan beta.

Frankly, I was expecting that the issue went away after the product release of El Capitan. I was expecting that driver developers would quickly find a way to provide a seamless installation experience in the times of System Integrity Protection (SIP).

I was more than surprised that this article sparked such a resonance. And I was even more surprised to learn from commenters that the issue obviously persisted long after the product release.

Naturally, I was having mixed feelings when ticking the list of actions for the installation of my new computer, and “install printer driver” came closer and closer.

I went to Dell’s website and downloaded the latest driver for my C1765NFW printer. I started the installation and everything went its way just smoothly.

The printer started printing and I was relieved to see that I didn’t have to apply my own recipe to get the stupid thing behave properly.

So that problem thankfully seems to have gone for good.

I listen to podcasts nearly every day, and I think I have a pretty good feeling how playing podcast episodes impacts the battery life on my devices.

That’s why I was stunned to see what happened to my battery after a modest amount¹ of time spent listening to an audio book played by the Kindle App on iOS.

There’s a word for what the Kindle app did to my battery of my plus-caliber iPhone, and the word is slaughter. Within said time period the charging level went from well above 50% down to 8%.

And, as could be expected, it gets significantly worse if the audio goes to the internal speaker.

I did a quick search on the Internet, and indeed found complaints about the Kindle app’s impact on battery life here and there. But these were mostly years old and probably do not represent reliable data points for the current app.

I guess I’ll finish the book reading …

Update (2016-12-03)

Predictably, I tried the Kindle app again, trying to verify the astonishing effect of the first time. This time, the loss of battery life was way less pronounced, and not even close to the frustrating result of my first try.

Therefore, I can’t help but come to the preliminary conclusion that my experience must have been a fluke, despite the fact that I really didn’t do anything else with my phone than listening to the audio book.

Whatever happened during that period, it does not seem as if the Kindle app could be blamed for it. The book is not finished, so maybe there will be further opportunities to either reproduce my initial impression or get reassurance that it was just a one-time effect.

Only Evernote does what Evernote does. Just in case, I’m talking about the ability to store lots of documents and notes, sync all of these between a bunch of devices, and provide a world-class search over your entire repository.

And yet, the advent of “features” like “Context” or “Work Chat“¹ may be taken as an indication that Evernote is evolving into a direction that makes me start to worry about the long-term viability for my intended purpose.

If you’re an Evernote user you probably know what I’m talking about. If you’re not, you probably don’t care.

Anyway, while I’m actively² using Evernote on a daily basis, I’m always on the lookout for alternative solutions that could better fit my needs long-term.

Enter DEVONthink. I’ve had it on my radar of potential replacements for Evernote for quite a while. The Mac app convinced me on the spot, but the mobile counterparts (a.k.a. DEVONthink To Go) left a lot to be desired.

This extended to syncing options but also to the general functionality and stability of the apps. Note that this asessment applies to the 1.x versions of DEVONthink To Go

This has changed in the meantime, DEVONthink To Go has been released in early Augst. It is taking benefit from an improved syncing technology that has been rolled out on the Mac version previous to the new mobile app³.

Development of DEVONthink To Go continues at a steady pace⁴, and I couldn’t be happier with it. Naturally, the app follows the same approach as Devonthink for Mac. This means that new content appears in the inbox of a database, which is roughly an equivalent to a notebook in Evernote.

DEVONthink To Go does not sync in the background. However, in most cases, a short syncing period as the app starts up doesn’t really take that much time. I’m getting used to that quicker than I thought I would.

One detail that makes DEVONthink in general stand out from Evernote is meta-data. I love that I can assign a URL to a note or document in my database. That’s a simple feature, but pure genius in day-to-day work.

Search is another discipline that left much to be desired in V1.x of DEVONthink To Go. V2.x has improved in that regard, although it does not reach the level of the Mac app. The latter, in it’s most expensive incarnation, is required to OCR documents in the database.

This ability to OCR documents comes by default in Evernote, and the quality of the results are mostly good. The OCR algorithm of DEVONthink Pro Office, however, plays in a different league. The results that I get from DEVONthink Pro Office are simply outstanding.

In contrast, DEVONthink To Go does not do any OCR at all. It would be really nice if it did (and I would pay real money for such a capability, especially if it delivers on the level of DEVONthink ProOffice). On iOS, there’s no shortage of apps⁵ capable of running an OCR on a document. But the results are on average just not as good.

To summarize, there’s a stable chance that I’m going retire my Evernote account soon. I’m still in the process of evaluating DEVONthink, but it is already safe to say that it would take some serious issue to get me back onto Evernote.

From an e-mail to subscribers:

As you know, some of the best Instapaper features were limited or gated behind the Instapaper Premium paywall. Now that we’re better resourced, we’re able to offer everyone the best version of Instapaper.

This is the second milestone on the road to assimilation. Optimism wasn’t warranted when the news about Pinterest acquiring Instapaper broke, and it is even less warranted now.

Converting a paid product into a freebie is done with the intention to put it on a growth trajectory to gain as many users as possible in the shortest amount of time. Then step three happens.

I’ve been a long-time active user of the Instapaper product, but this is now coming to an end. I don’t want to be part of the growth. I’ve tried Pinterest once, didn’t like it, and have no motivation to return.

For context, I have more or less stopped watching Apple keynotes because in my day-to-day life, I just don’t have the time to watch live and I usually have few motivation for watching the recording.

Whatever, I did watch the “Hello Again” event, primarily because I was sitting in a hotel room with plenty of time to kill. This time, I was even pretty interested in what was about to be introduced. That’s because I’m totally in the market for a new Mac, and my hope was that my new computer would be unveiled in the event.

After all, if Apple takes the trouble to organize a press event you can expect around 90 minutes of presentation. There’s got to be something to talk about¹, it couldn’t be all about the rumored touch-sensitive function key replacement, right?

In the first segment of the keynote, however, Tim Cook went through a lengthy introduction of the TV app for tvOs and iOS, that is ironically not going to be available on the platform that this event was dedicated to. Off to a good start, I guess. No matter how often the line about “the Mac being in Apple’s DNA” is repeated, this was already starting to look bad.

And, frankly, it didn’t get better. It was all about the touch-sensitive function key replacement. Look, we have a demo. And then, another demo. And if you still didn’t get it, here’s another one. And then, a Jony Ive vide. Got it?

It was so much about this one feature that the low-end model that does not have a TouchBar was not even mentioned until it could no longer be hidden.

I went through all of this because I wanted to see the price points Apple was going to shoot for. That’s where my jaw finally dropped. These computers have gotten really expensive with this new generation.

Five years ago, I was able to purchase a mid-tier configuration 15″ MacBook Pro for less than the underpowered, bottom of the line 13″ configuration that is available from now on.

I did a calculation of what would be the lowest spec-ed configuration of the non-touch-bar model that I could call decent and came out north of EUR 2500. And this is not even taking into account the EUR 200 worth of dongles required to make the stupid thing usable. No way, Apple, no way.

Long story short, effective the day after the event, I’m officially out of the market for new MacBooks.

I will still use a Mac, but it will either be a years-old MacBook Pro, or I will switch to an iMac. You can get² an SSD-equipped 5K iMac for pretty much the same money as a halfway decent configuration of the bottom of the line late 2016 13″, no TouchBar MacBook Pro.

All I wanted from the event was a decent, affordable laptop that I can run macOS on.

The worst thing about this is that it is not only me. I watched other people respond to the event, and I talked to some. And what what I took from it was that many others pretty much reflected my frustration about the situation.

On the bright side³, without the event and the latest product launches we wouldn’t have something as awesome as this hilarious “review”.