And Despite All Those Things, I Love It

October 18, 2018 - 3 minutes read time

I use a Mac at work amongst a sea of Windows and Linux fans. As such I sometimes get drawn into friendly banter about why Macs are terrible and Apple is the worst. As a long time Apple fan, none of this is new to me, this is just how it goes.

We had one of these brief discussions today and at one point I said “yes, those things can be annoying, but I love my Apple stuff anyway.” As I mentioned in yesterday’s podcast, It’s a sentence you don’t often hear when discussing this sort of thing. When we debate why something we like is better than something someone else likes, it is surprisingly hard to give even an inch in the debate. But if you never give even an inch, you start to argue for things that you don’t actually believe in.

For example, today we were comparing the app upload process for the App Store and Play Store. I will not hesitate to say that the process for uploading an update to an existing app on the Play Store was easier than it was on the App Store. It was faster, easier, and had no human involvement, so I was able to release when I wanted with little hassle. The App Store has a worse upload experience, more frustrating UI1, and took days to approve. I’m happy to say that this experience was better overall in the Google tool than the Apple one.

But that doesn’t mean I find Android to be a general dumpster fire in terms of productivity. Nor do I think it makes trusting Google with all of my data easier. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I would prefer to use a Chromebook to do my work than a trusty MacBook or iPad Pro.

The world would be boring if we all liked the same things. Especially in tech, things are rarely a zero sum game. You can love all things Apple/Google/Microsoft, but if you find yourself defending literally everything the company does (something not even these companies do themselves) then you might want to consider a slightly more critical view of your pet company.

  1. It has some nice things going for it and I think it’s structured more clearly, but it’s so god-forsaken slow that I can’t say it’s better. ↩

Just a Simple Apple Wallpaper

October 18, 2018 - 1 minute read time

It feels like Apple is trolling me today because not only did they release at least 86 variants of their logo today, but they made all of them crazy tricky to replicate.

Soooooooooooooooooo…

Here’s a simple Apple logo I made after trying to mess around with one of those many versions. It’s not my best work, but I thought it was important to maintain tradition and post at least something today. If you like it, yay! If not, I promise the best one will be a little fancier 😁

Disengaging from the Apple Blogger Life for a Moment

October 14, 2018 - 5 minutes read time

In the past month or so, I’ve had things pick up at my day job significantly. The short of it is that an app I’ve been “directing” (to use John Gruber’s terminology) is making its official launch after almost a year in the works. On top of that, my development team is tackling a project that apparently has been in the works for 4-5 years but we’ve never been able to crack it. We’re likely a few weeks from putting that out into the world as well.

Needless to say, this is taking up a considerable amount of brain power and energy. This has lead to a couple things:

One, I’m finding it hard to disengage from work. There is so much going on and I’m so invested that it’s hard to leave work at the office. I’m not working long hours from home or anything, but it’s constantly on my mind, which is annoying.

Two, decision fatigue is a real thing, and after a day of making hard decision after hard decision, I get home and don’t want to decide what to have for dinner, much less how I feel about the new stuff going on in the Apple world.

And three, despite being annoyed by a bunch of stuff and feeling overwhelmed at times, I’m doing undoubtedly the most creative and engaging work of my career. This is the stuff I was dreaming of doing all those years when I was working retail, so it’s a joy to be actually working on this stuff.

At the same time, I’m trying to get my relaxation time most under control and focused on low impact things that are more substantial than before. I was previously listening to a boat load of podcasts and spent a considerable amount of time browsing Twitter. These things are good, but they have a way of exploding. You find one, then two, then three podcasts, and before you know it you have 40 subscriptions and you’re listening to dozens of hours of shows per week. And while Twitter does a pretty good job of surfacing the most interesting tweets first, you can scroll your timeline basically forever and never run out of content if you really want it.

I felt I loved Twitter and podcasts, but that I was leaning on them too much and was not getting enough out of them. A few podcasts are great, but at some point you’ve heard everything you need to hear about topic X, Y, or Z.

So I’ve used Screen Time to set a soft limit of 30 minutes on Twitter per day. At first I was surprised how fast I got there, sometimes hitting it before I was done with breakfast (yikes), but it’s helped me reign in my use. According to Screen Time right now, I’ve averaged 33 minutes on Twitter per day over the past week. Not bad.

I’ve also made a concerted effort to listen to more books than podcasts. I did the hard thing and unsubscribed from about 20 shows that I didn’t feel were giving me enough back, and moved my podcast app out of my dock for the first time in years. Audible moved in, and in the past few weeks I’ve listened to Authority, Creative Selection, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work, The Paradox of Choice, and just started A Darker Shade of Magic. I also re-joined my work’s book club where we’re reading Jitterbug Perfume.

And I’m trying to run more…which sucks but I always feel good about doing. Also, running is a great time to listen to audiobooks, so it’s kind of a “kill two birds with one stone” situation, which helps me get out and do it.

This is a lot of writing to explain why I’m not writing that much right now, but I hope you understand where I’m coming from. It’s not an issue of hours in the day; I could still record a podcast every morning and write a new BirchTree article at night if I wanted to. The problem right now is that I don’t have the mental capacity to keep the same routine I’d built up over the years.

I fully expect to get back on the horse as the year winds down and things slow down at work. I’m combating a few of my compulsions to work too hard and make my work my life, as well as adjusting how I spend my free time so that I’m decompressing in a more rewarding way. Resetting these parts of my life should hopefully help me get back to a place where I want to write every day, but I’m not there right now.

Everything but the Pixel 3!

October 10, 2018 - 1 minute read time

Today I’m taking a look at all the non-Pixel 3 things shown off at yesterday’s Google hardware event.

Oh, and the AC kicked on for the last couple minutes of the episode, so if you hear a hum start near the end, that’s just me unexpectedly getting a little bit of air. Sorry for the hum!