That's No Space Station

Showing 639 posts tagged tech

tech, humor, and nuance by David Chartier—tech distiller, freelance writer, Macworld contributor, wrangler of Finer Things in Tech

Liked Posts

Pick your poison: messaging will be fragmented, expensive, or locked-in | The Verge

Everyone’s eager to kick SMS to the curb but Bohn is right, the New Messaging landscape is a messy work in progress right now, partly because none of these apps talk to each other.

If your family, friends, and coworkers aren’t nerdy enough to have a religious fervor for one proprietary message service and an irrational hatred for another, they’re too lazy or simply indifferent to bother signing up for 50 different services.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: the “open” services of Old Messaging—like IRC and email—are all either essentially dead or terrible. IRC didn’t make it far and email is a spammy bag of hurt. If you ask me, good riddance.

We’re in a transition period right now, and it’ll be a bumpy ride. We don’t have all the answers yet, but the user experience and usage of every New Messaging we have now is worlds ahead of the previous generation.

Regular users clearly prefer New Messaging. We can work out the rest of the details as we keep building.

The Verge | BlackBerry bringing BBM to Android and iOS this summer

Everyone loves a good comeback story, but it feels like RIM is just doing it all wrong. For the last year or two it’s been nothing but a bunch of non-announcements of things that are months away from shipping (assuming they ship on time, which they haven’t), instead of in a week or—even better when it comes to software that doesn’t need time to physically move locations—right now.

Actions speak louder than words, and BlackBerry’s actions are saying terrible, terrible things.

You’re probably right. As a non-dev but just-dangerous-enough power user, I’ve heard mixed bits of how iOS works in a case like this. Early on, as I understood it, iOS threw out the baby with the bathwater when you delete an app. These days it sounds like it’s evolved into some sort of “yes it holds onto some types of data in some cases and maybe iCloud can restore you data if you reinstall an app even if it isn’t built to use iCloud’s services” and the whole thing is just confusing. Sometimes deleting an app nukes everything so you truly get a clean slate when you reinstall. Sometimes credentials are left in the keychain (which seems to be Evernote’s case). But in general it’s turned into a pretty confusing user experience these days, and a risky troubleshooting step. I don’t know how iOS will behave in these cases, and iTunes isn’t helping matters. I can’t trust it anymore. That’s a problem.   High-res

You’re probably right. As a non-dev but just-dangerous-enough power user, I’ve heard mixed bits of how iOS works in a case like this. Early on, as I understood it, iOS threw out the baby with the bathwater when you delete an app. These days it sounds like it’s evolved into some sort of “yes it holds onto some types of data in some cases and maybe iCloud can restore you data if you reinstall an app even if it isn’t built to use iCloud’s services” and the whole thing is just confusing.

Sometimes deleting an app nukes everything so you truly get a clean slate when you reinstall. Sometimes credentials are left in the keychain (which seems to be Evernote’s case). But in general it’s turned into a pretty confusing user experience these days, and a risky troubleshooting step. I don’t know how iOS will behave in these cases, and iTunes isn’t helping matters.

I can’t trust it anymore. That’s a problem.

iTunes has gone rogue and turned on my iPhone and iPad

For the third time in about six months, it’s removed apps from one or both of my devices. In most cases the data is there when I reinstall, in one case it resulted in data loss. Today it was Evernote and a couple others. My credentials were still on the device and the app asked me if I wanted to log back into the account; it’s as if the Evernote folks were briefed on the situation and decides to build a contingency plan.

By all accounts, this behavior is an act of treason. iTunes should be considered armed and extremely dangerous. Do not approach it under any circumstances. Shoot to kill.

Please.