RECaf 1.6

For a while now, I’ve noticed RECaf users had a very different approach than I intended of logging an item from earlier in the day, or from the day before.

The frequents list on the front panel of RECaf is great for one-tap access to your most frequent sources. But logging that way always records the current time and date. If you want to customize the date to say, this morning, my intention was for people to go through the custom logging process. (Push down the frequent and favorites panels, choose your category, drink, amount, and then set the time before logging.)

Instead, what I observed many people doing was simply logging the item with the frequent button. Then, they would slide over to the history screen, tap into the newly created log entry, and edit the date from there. (I’m fairly certain this takes longer, but nevertheless, it seems many believe this is the only way to change the date—after they’ve logged.)

For a long time, I’ve had a quicker remedy than both of these methods planned, and with version 1.6 it is finally ready.^[1]

Enter our old friend, 3D Touch.

Now, if you force press on a frequent button (or tap and hold on it on devices without 3D Touch), you can bring up a quick actions menu to change the date (or the amount) very quickly.^[2]

I’m sure I’ll still see people in the wild logging, then editing the entry just to change the date. But hopefully this will help some folks log just a bit faster.

I’m hoping to add similar functionality to the favorites menu soon as well. Along with many other improvements in the works.

Fall is here, and that means it’s time for yet another chapter in Joe’s Adventures of Getting His iTunes Music Collection onto His New iPhone.

Don’t worry: This one has a mostly happy ending.

Long-time readers will recall past issues with getting my music situation settled on the iPhone every year. Here’s the short version:

• I want ALL my music on my phone, downloaded, and ready to play. I am away from internet connectivity often enough (on the subway, on airplanes, and so on) that having local music at the ready is essential. I do not like choosing the music I might want to listen to two days before I go on a trip. Call me crazy, but I expect my music experience in 2018 to be as good as what I had with my iPod back in 2002.
• I have tons of music in my iTunes library. Hundreds of gigabytes worth. Tens of thousands of songs.
• Much of the music in my library is from iTunes. Much of it is not. I’ve ripped old CDs, downloaded tracks from indie bands, bought tracks from other online services, etc.
• A good number of my tracks are not available on iTunes. Either they never made it there, or they have since been taken down. Most of these tracks are obscure stuff from unsigned bands or alternative releases that are only available in physical form, etc.
• In a new twist for this year, I’m now an Apple Music subscriber. I use the service mainly for discovery, and so I can ask HomePod to play things for me very easily. But I still want to keep my precious collection of owned music safe and secure, in case I ever stop being an Apple Music subscriber.

If any of the above sounds familiar, congrats. You are as odd as I am when it comes to music. I get that most people don’t care about locally stored songs, and they listen to the same five tracks over and over again for several months at a time. Congratulations to them. Apple has you well covered. For the rest of us, getting our peculiar musical needs met takes a bit more effort.

This year, because I’ve added Apple Music into the mix, and along with it iCloud Music Library, I had to change up my methodology a bit.

I won’t go into why here, but you can read all about why I use iCloud Music Library on my phone and iPad, but not my Mac. Unsurprisingly, that bug has still not been addressed.^[1]

So here’s what I did. I’m happy to report this worked out very well.

Step One - Get a new phone, but leave music alone

I tend to order my new iPhone for pickup at the retail store. I like to get up in the morning early, head down to the Upper West Side, pick up my phone, and get home by 9am or so.^[2]

When I got my new phone this year, I restored over the wire from a backup I made on iTunes that morning. This is preferable to an iCloud backup in a few fundamental ways. First, it’s encrypted, which means all my passwords to my apps come along for the ride. I don’t have to spend the majority of my day launching apps and logging back in. I may have to reauthorize FaceID a few times, but overall it’s far smoother. Second, it’s much faster than an iCloud backup.

iCloud backup is great for daily backups and emergencies. For a new phone, I highly recommend running an iTunes wired backup of your old phone just before purchasing.

Once my backup was restored, I waited for my apps to download, then went about my day. I made no attempt to get music onto my phone, unless it was to download an album or two to listen to while working. The real process was going to have to wait until bedtime.

Step Two - Get any music that was inadvertently downloaded off the phone

Just before bed that first night with my new phone, I went into Settings > Music > Downloaded Music and erased any songs I had downloaded throughout the day. This is to prevent accidental duplicates. Then I went to Settings > Music and turned off iCloud Music Library. This is necessary for allowing my Mac to transfer files to my phone manually. (Remember, I keep iCloud Music Library off for my Macs, for reasons stated here.) I also double checked to be sure Optimize Storage is turned off.^[3]

Step Three - Plug into iTunes and get ready to drag some music

Next, I plugged my new phone into my MacBook Pro and fired up iTunes. I made sure I had music selected from the category selector. Once the phone was recognized, I could see it in my Devices list on the left. I selected artists from the Library list (you could just as easily select songs if you like), selected ALL of the tracks by first selecting a track, then typing Command + A to Select All, then dragged all of those files over to On My Phone.^[4]

After a few seconds of waiting, the head’s up display on iTunes confirmed that the files were indeed beginning to copy.

Step Four - Go to bed

Seriously. In the case of my library, this was going to take a few hours. There’s a reason I do this at the end of the day.

Step Five - Confirm everything has copied

The next morning, I awoke to find that all of my files had copied over just fine. No error messages on my Mac, and a quick trip to the Music app on my phone showed tons of tracks in the Downloaded Music list. Long-time readers will understand why this made me so happy. If you’ve been dragging and dropping from iTunes to phones over the years, you’ll know that this hasn’t always been a guaranteed outcome. I am glad to see that this is still working perfectly in the latest iTunes and iOS versions.^[5]

Step Six - Re-enable iCloud Music Library and do some downloading

Now that my entire library from my Mac was on my phone, I wanted to get iCloud Music library up and running again. That’s as easy as going back to Settings > Music and flipping that switch back on. The phone will ask you if you want to keep the music you’ve already got on your phone. Make sure you do that, or else you’ll end up with no locally downloaded music again. I worried for a moment that I may end up with duplicates in my iCloud Music Library as a result of this, but so far that does not seem to have happened.

Finally, I went to the Music app on my phone, scrolled through the recently added section, and downloaded those few albums I had downloaded recently on my old phone for discovery. Those tracks aren’t on my Mac (thanks to the fact that I can’t run iCloud Music Library on my Mac), so I needed to bring them back down onto the phone manually. Not a huge deal, compared to downloading everything that is on my Mac manually.

Conclusion

Compared to previous years, where I’ve spent several days or even weeks trying to get my entire library to my phone, this worked out great in one night. It would be a bit easier, of course, if Apple fixed the iCloud Music Library duplicate issue on the Mac. But for now I’ll take it.

I’m sure I’ll discover an album or two I had downloaded to my old phone that I’ve forgotten to re-download on the new phone. I figure that will be a minor annoyance compared to years past.

Hopefully, if you’ve got a bug up your ass about music like I do, this method will help save you some agony.

I’ve seen a number of complaints about the iPhone X keyboard implementation. “So much wasted space.” “They should put the spacebar down at the bottom, where it always was.” “They should fill that space under the spacebar with emoji buttons.” And so on.

All of these suggestions strike me as poorly thought out. I immediately understood why Apple made the choice to leave that area mostly blank. The space bar is where it used to be. The home button used to be where that empty space is.

Given how difficult it is to change muscle memory, and given how much of a stretch it actually is to reach the bottom of the iPhone X in real-world use, putting frequently used buttons down at the bottom is a really bad idea.

I got to test this firsthand with my own app, x2y. I wasn’t expecting to get my iPhone X version finished in time for the release date, but at the last minute I had some time, and I was able to handle all the changes I felt were necessary—except one. My custom number pad still reached down to the bottom of the phone. I figured this would not be ideal, given what Apple had chosen to do with the built-in keyboard, but not having the hardware in my hands, I figured I’d ship it and see what happens.

Sure enough, as soon as I played around for a few minutes on my own iPhone X, I knew this could not stand. I was accidentally typing the wrong numbers constantly. And it was just too much of a stretch to get to that bottom row regularly.

So I fired up Xcode again and started figuring out a fix. In the end, the new design technically doesn’t look as good, but in practice it feels a thousand times better. My number pad isn’t quite as high up as Apple’s own built-in version, but it’s up above the Safe Area, at least.

So there you have it. Apple clearly did the right thing with keyboard placement on iPhone X. As I mentioned before, just because your screen goes edge-to-edge, that doesn’t mean your UI should. The extra space is most often best filled with background color.

A lot of folks probably don’t remember, but the very first iteration of TouchID was problematic for some users. Most had no issues, and it worked great. For others, including me, it would work for a short while then stop unlocking the phone. I would have to retrain my fingers every few days just to keep it going.

There were even hack tricks, like training the same finger twice, that supposedly improved performance. I tried this as well. It made things nominally better, at best.

Then Apple released a software update, and it worked great for me from that point on. I even joked at the time that perhaps Apple had “fixed” TouchID by simply making it less secure.

Then the hardware for TouchID was upgraded a year later, and it got even faster and more reliable.

I’ve been reminded of this while reading some sporadic reports from friends about FaceID. Most people, myself included this time, have no trouble with FaceID at all. (I think my phone has failed to recognize me maybe three times out of hundreds of unlocks in the past week.) But for a few folks, it seems to be a little less reliable. Particularly for those wearing glasses or with facial hair. (Oddly, both things that would apply to me, yet I appear to be unaffected.)

Thanks to the benefits of machine learning, though, we can expect that FaceID will get better quickly for those who are currently having a bit of trouble. First, with a software update or two. Then with even better hardware.

Any way you slice it, it’s clear to me that Apple was right to go all-in on FaceID. I can’t wait to have it on my iPad, my MacBook Pro—everywhere. Putting my finger down on my MacBook Pro to authenticate seems so antiquated already.

Last time I left off at the artist listing screen. Today, I want to dig into the individual artist view, album view, and the now playing screen.

One of the reasons I chose to give Music another try in iOS 10 is that Apple has finally given us a proper artist album listing, with albums that drill down into their own screens. This means we can finally choose an artist, then play a single album without it continuing on to the next album. Sounds like a small thing, but I dropped Music altogether years ago for that one reason alone.

Best iPod we’ve ever made, my ass.

Unfortunately, unlike iTunes on the Mac and Windows, Music on iOS still only sorts albums by name, giving us no option to sort them by date instead.

This is one of those head slap moments that makes you wonder if anyone at Apple has ever been a serious music collector. As far as I’m concerned, Apple cannot claim that it loves music ever again until it gives us the option to sort albums by date. No self-respecting music geek sorts albums by name. I don’t care if you hide the option in the Settings app, just give me the option for date, you wankers.[1]

Sorting issues aside, I like most everything else about the Artist page in Music. Album art is square and large, as it should be. There’s a quick option to shuffle all albums, in case that’s your thing. And, as I said before, choosing an album gives you a separate view with just that album’s tracks.

At the bottom of the artist page there’s also a new link “See more by…” that takes you to that artist’s other music on Apple Music. I’m not an Apple Music subscriber, but I guess it’s okay to be able to see what tracks are available without having to bounce into the iTunes app.[2] Unfortunately, any links inside here only give you the option of subscribing to Apple Music. You can’t link over to iTunes to buy any tracks you find. You can’t even preview tracks to see if they’re worth subscribing to get. It’s subscribe, or go screw yourself.

I’m sure the artists love that.

What’s so hard about offering a link, even via 3D Touch, that takes you to the iTunes store to buy a track?

Buy a track? Come on, Joe. Who buys tracks nowadays?

Oh yeah, that’s right. People who LOVE MUSIC.

Once you choose an album, you get the track listing, as you’d expect. Shuffle is right up there at the top again. Okay. Not something I ever use, but I guess a lot of people like shuffle. (More on this in a moment.)

Choose a track, and it starts playing immediately. At the bottom of the screen, just above the tab bar, you get a new bar for now playing, which stays there no matter where you go in the app. I like this a lot. I always hated how hard it was to get to the now playing screen on my old iPod and on Apple TV. This makes it one tap away at all times, which is brilliant. Music also doesn’t assume that once I’ve chosen a track I want the entire screen to be filled with now playing. This is also a good design choice. Once my music is running, I may want to select something else to play next, or keep reading the rest of the track listing, or just go exploring more through my catalog, etc.

At the bottom of the album page, there’s “More by…” again, only this time with albums and images listed. There’s also a “You Might Also Like” section with music from similar artists. Okay, now I’m getting annoyed, Apple. I switched Apple Music off in Settings. I’m clearly not interested in joining Apple Music. Fuck off , already.

Again, every link in these two bottom sections I didn’t ask for give me no option to even preview tracks from these suggested artists. Just subscribe now.

No thanks.[3]

The now playing toolbar has convenient buttons for pausing and skipping the current track. Another great design decision. One-tap access to pausing is essential, and sometimes you really do need to skip that one track you hate immediately.

Tap into the full-screen now playing view, and you are treated with nice big album art and some more controls in an overlay “card” type view that is reminiscent of Palm’s WebOS. I mostly like what they’ve done with this screen. But there are a few odd choices here.

The big one that others have mentioned before: Where are the shuffle and repeat buttons? For all the emphasis on shuffle being at the top of the past few screens in a row, I get to now playing, and shuffle has disappeared. Turns out, the now playing view is scrollable, and shuffle and repeat are just below the “fold.” Why? No reason I can discern. There’s plenty of room under the volume slider for more than two buttons.

Also, if you’re going to make this screen a scroll view, some indication that it can be scrolled might be a good idea. I know several people who had no idea that they can scroll this view at all. And that’s a shame, because what’s down below the fold is actually quite nice: an Up Next listing, where you can manually reorder or remove tracks from the upcoming cue.

Up Next is a pretty powerful thing. Setting up a quick one-off track listing for a party, for instance, becomes quite easy. I never use playlists, but I often will select a number of albums to listen to in a row when I’m in a certain mood, or I have people over the house, or when I’m on a road trip, etc. The “Play Next” and “Play Later” options on albums and tracks make setting up a quick cue super flexible and easy.

Overall, I actually like Music in iOS 10. The app is far from perfect, and I really want the heavy-handed Apple Music sales pitch to go away, but otherwise, for my listening style, this app is greatly improved over iOS 9 and earlier versions of Music.

And, lo and behold, since I’ve started adding tracks back to my iPhone, I have yet to experience the old issues I was having with files disappearing, doubling of tracks, tracks that simply won’t play, etc. Maybe the file system bugs I was experiencing are gone? I may just upgrade to a 128GB or even 256GB iPhone in a few weeks. I’d love to retire my old iPod again for good.

I’ve heard mixed reviews on the new iOS 10 beta’s music app. Long-time readers will no doubt remember that I gave up playing music on my iPhone altogether a while back, due to the Music app being completely incongruous with the way I listen to music, not to mention constant issues with songs not downloading, going missing, etc. So I’ve been happily using my old iPod Classic for a while now.

And that’s going great, actually. The old iPod is still working. But I’m a tech geek, and I don’t believe in hanging onto the past forever, so with every new iteration of iOS, I am bound to look at what Apple does with Music to see if there’s a chance they may have actually fixed the issues that drove me away.

Right off the bat, looking at Music.app in the iOS 10 beta, I see two things that have me rather hopeful. First, there’s the Downloaded Music section, which shows you only the songs you actually have living on your iPhone, rather than showing your cloud songs mixed in with your downloaded songs. In previous iterations of Music, there was a switch in Settings to show or hide cloud music, but this dedicated space within the app is actually way better. It gives me the option of looking for a cloud album to download when the mood strikes and I happen to be connected without having to drop out of the app and dig through Settings to flip the cloud music switch.

Second and much more important, when you sort by Artist, you now finally once again have a separate screen between the albums and the individual songs. Which means it’s now possible again to play a single album from an artist when sorting by artist. Hooray. Functionality that existed in iPhone OS 1.0 is now back—many, many years later. This alone was the reason I originally ditched the built-in Music app for Ecoute before giving up on Music on my iPhone altogether.

So, what does this mean for me? Well, I’m doing a little experiment. I’ve moved Music.app back to my main home screen, and I’ve downloaded some music to my phone again, via iTunes. Not my whole library, as I only have a 64GB iPhone at the moment, and my whole library wouldn’t fit on a 128GB, anyway. But come fall, when iOS 10 is released, and with it hopefully a 256GB option for the next iPhone, I may finally be able to replace my old iPod Classic for good, if all the file disappearing and syncing issues have been resolved in iOS. I may finally have all my songs in my pocket again, without carrying around a separate, aging device with a hard drive and battery that are due to fail any minute now.

But that point about the file issues is a huge if. Thus, the experiment. So far, I’ve only added about 15GB of songs onto the iPhone, to see if they actually stick. I’ll keep adding more and more as I go and keep a close eye on whether or not the songs are actually there. Will songs simply disappear again? Will duplicates show up for no reason? Will album tracks show up out of order? Will tracks appear to be there, but when I hit play simply skip to the next track? If history is any indication, all of the above are not only possible, but likely. But I have my fingers crossed. After all, I’m an optimist at heart.

The Music app is far from perfect in iOS 10, but just those two simple changes are enough to get me to at least try it again. I’ll write up some of my gripes about what’s still broken in the near future.

A previously undocumented requirement asks for a passcode in a very particular set of circumstances: When the iPhone or iPad hasn’t been unlocked with its passcode in the previous six days, and Touch ID hasn’t been used to unlock it within the last eight hours. It’s a rolling timeout, so each time Touch ID unlocks a device, a new eight-hour timer starts to tick down until the passcode is required. If you wondered why you were being seemingly randomly prompted for your passcode (or more complicated password), this is likely the reason.

(via Glen Fleishman for Macworld)

Makes sense that I seldom bump into this on my iPhone, since I only sleep about six hours most nights. But I’ve often wondered why my iPads, which I don’t necessarily pick up first thing in the morning, need a passcode so often. I assumed it was a bug.

If Apple declared that a 3D Touch was the moral equivalent of a long press, it would have to make some adjustments to the iOS interface (including changing how we reorder app icons), but in the end I think we’d have a more cohesive set of common iOS gestures. 3D Touch users would benefit by not having to wait for the OS to pause and see if you intended to long-press an item, but users of non–3D-Touch devices wouldn’t be left out of the party.

via Jason Snell, writing for Macworld

There was lots of talk about this last September with the introduction of 3D Touch. I don’t think it’s a great idea.

Long press is a purposefully slow gesture. It makes you stop, literally, and wait a second or so before you can move on with other things. Therefore, it’s suited best for tasks that you want to do very deliberately and only very occasionally, like rearranging the icons on your home screen. The nature of the long press makes it very unlikely you’ll do it accidentally, and so it’s perfect for these sorts of tasks. You have to think about a long press, and that’s a good thing[1].

3D Touch, on the other hand, is meant to speed you up. Application launching shortcuts take you directly to a spot within the app in one gesture. Pressing hard from the left of the screen helps you invoke the app switcher faster. It’s all about the speed.

Peek and Pop, of course, is supposed to be all about speeding you up, too. I agree with Jason; it’s more gimmick than useful at the moment. I just about never use it.

I also agree that Quick Launch shortcuts are limited (though already much more useful than Peek and Pop), and 3D Touch would be more useful if it were possible to use in many other places, like the Notification Center. These are all great suggestions by Jason. I have no doubt Apple will be adding many of these features and more to iOS this year and beyond.

That doesn’t mean, however, that long press and 3D Touch belong together as one gesture. They just seem to be diametrically opposed, from a user interface standpoint. Forcing non–3D Touch users to use a long press for all these actions that are meant to speed up the iOS experience will make those users feel like frustrated, second-class citizens. Their phones will feel like slugs.

Not having those features at all is better than having them at the expense of feeling great about using them.

I suggest Apple keep 3D Touch and long press separated. The problem of some people not having devices with 3D Touch will be solved by time. Touch interfaces need more gestures, not fewer, if they are going to become more powerful tools.

1. Some people seem to have trouble invoking a long press on a 3D-Touch enabled iPhone. Seems like pressing long and pressing hard are equivalent in many people’s minds. It doesn’t help that for many years prior to 3D Touch, you could press long and hard to invoke a long press. It takes some practice, but eventually you manage to tap and hold for a long press without pressing hard by default.  ↩

I’ve been complaining since the introduction of the iPhone 6 that I am no fan of the larger iPhone trend. I truly disliked my 6 when I owned one, and I wasn’t shy about saying it. I dislike my 6s Plus considerably less (if you’re going to go big, just go big), but I’d still much rather go back to a 4-inch screen.

I’ve been so vocal about my disdain for the current crop of flagship iPhones, in fact, that pretty much every one of my friends has assumed that I’ve already ordered my SE. But here’s the thing: I haven’t.

The SE packs all of the most important functionality of the 6s into a smaller shell. There are a few tradeoffs, of course, but all of them are acceptable to me. It almost seems as if Apple designed the SE just for me. But it’s not that simple.

For one thing, I just got myself into a contract last September via the iPhone Upgrade Program for the 6s Plus. (I recognize that this is was my choice, by the way, so I’m not blaming anyone but myself.) To buy out the remainder of my contract on the 6s Plus and get myself an SE, I’d be out around $900[1]. That’s a lot of money to get myself a smaller phone.

Things don’t get better in September, either, as I reach my 1-year milestone with the 6s Plus. The iPhone Upgrade Program does allow me to upgrade after only one year, but the program doesn’t include the SE. So while I can trade up to the iPhone 7 (or whatever Apple calls the new phones at that time) I can’t trade down to the SE. I’ll be in the same boat. Wait another year, or buy out the remaining contract. It’ll cost less at that time, but it’s still a pretty high price to go back to 4 inches for those of us who were too impatient to wait last September.[2]

And if I wait out the full 18 months for my iPhone 6s Plus to be completely contract free, will I still want an SE at that time?

Well, a lot depends on what Apple’s future plans are with the SE.

Greg Joswiak mentioned during the introduction of the SE that there were two groups of people the SE is meant to address: 1) people who just want smaller phones, and 2) people who were buying their first iPhone. The way I see it, these two groups of people overlap a bit, but there are also plenty of people who belong to one group but not the other.

The SE is trying to serve two masters, in other words. And it does a much better job of meeting the needs of those first-time buyers than it does of the smaller phone lovers. At least in the long term.

So what happens six months from now? A year from now? 18 months from now? The answers to these questions would be helpful for someone like me to make an informed decision whether or not to invest in an SE. But we can’t answer any of those questions given our current information. We can, however, venture a few guesses, as long as we’re careful to re-evaluate as we get new information.

Six Months from Now

Apple will release some new flagship iPhone this fall. Call it the iPhone 7 for now. (I’m hoping Apple drops the number in the name, but we don’t know that at the moment.) The question is whether or not there will be a 4-inch variant of this new flagship phone. A 4-inch iPhone 7 would mean that Apple is serious about serving those who want smaller phones, and the SE is simply a stop gap on the low end to serve more budget-conscious customers. This is my dream scenario, but I think the chances of it happening are slim. Even if it were to happen, that would be an argument against buying the SE now, since I’d want to change phones again in just a few months.

A Year from Now

Maybe Apple will release an update next March to the SE to keep it up to date with the internals of the iPhone 7. A new processor, maybe the faster TouchID, and so on. But what would this phone look like? Would it still be in the 5s shell? I love the 5s design, but isn’t that case going to get a bit limiting eventually?

Ben Thompson has rightly pointed out that part of the problem with the iPhone 5c was that it marked the buyer as having bought the “budget phone”. The SE eliminates this issue by looking like a former top-of-the-line phone. It’s cooler, after all, to be driving a five-year old BMW than a brand new Toyota. But in tech, that only gets you so far. Old is old. You’re going to look behind the times carrying around a phone that appears several years old, even in Brooklyn. More importantly, being tied to that form factor is going to limit Apple’s ability to add newer technologies, such as 3D Touch and whatever else is coming after. Apple is torn between adding features and keeping their margins with this device. The 5s shell simply can’t be Apple’s 4-inch offering forever. So the SE can’t be a long-term product.

What does Apple do, then? They don’t have a newer form factor of a 4-inch device. If they design a new one, they lose all the tooling and manufacturing benefits of putting new innards in an old body. They might as well just make a 4-inch variant of the flagship. So let us consider this update scenario unlikely as well.

Like it or not, putting the SE in a 5s shell is a signal from Apple that this phone is more about grabbing the low-end customer than it is about making smaller screens.

More likely, then, the SE will not be changed a year from now, and Apple will continue selling it as it is today. Which means 4-inch phone lovers who want the latest features are stuck with no upgrade path for at least 18 months from today’s SE, which is already six months behind the 6s.

Eighteen Months from Now

Apple will introduce the iPhone 7s (or whatever they end up calling it) in the fall of 2017. It would normally be an “s” year, so if they follow the usual pattern a new form factor is unlikely. Which means if there were no 4-inch variant in 2016, there will likely be none in 2017, either. New rumors are suggesting that Apple will break with tradition, however, and make a major shift in 2017, but even those rumors mention nothing of a smaller, 4-inch screen. They talk instead of an even larger 5.8-inch screen.

SE owners will likely be stuck then for at least another 6 months with nothing to buy. Their phones will be feeling rather crusty at that point. All the new shiny features of two generations of iPhone will still be unavailable to people who love the 4-inch form factor.

Two Years and Beyond

Nothing really changes in the math two years from now. Apple might update the SE with some new innards, but the case will still have to be a 5s, which will be getting really long in the tooth by then. The tradeoffs for wanting a smaller phone will increase. And even that update is somewhat unlikely, because six months later, the iPhone 8 will be arriving. And this is where I believe it may finally get interesting.

You’ve likely heard the rumors by now of the edge-to-edge iPhone: imagine an iPhone 6 that has a true edge-to-edge screen on all sides. No chin, no forehead, even less space on the sides. Just screen right up to all four corners. At that point, the device would be smaller overall, if maybe just a little wider, than the surface area of an iPhone SE. The screen might not be exactly 4.7 inches, but I can at least imagine a phone with a true edge-to-edge screen satisfying people who currently like the 4.7-inch 6s and those who prefer 4-inch phones. The Plus size would remain for those who want the giant screen experience, but an edge-to-edge screen would eliminate the need for a third size altogether.[3]

I believe this is Apple’s long-term play for people like me who want smaller phones. Rather than making a flagship 4-inch phone, they will shrink the body of the 4.7-inch phone enough to satisfy everyone. It’s just a shame it’s going to take so long.

No matter what, I’m likely looking at 2 and-a-half years before I get a flagship phone from Apple that I’ll actually like. That leaves me in a tough spot in the interim. I could spend the $900 now and just live with an SE for 30 months, or I could continue to buy Plus sized phones for a few more years and deal with not loving the size. The SE would certainly cost me less in the long run. But I still make my living building apps and services in this ecosystem. Not having access to the latest features would put me at a disadvantage to understanding many of my customers. And not taking advantage of Apple’s latest technologies is a lost opportunity for making my products as good as they could be.

Not to mention, I just like having an up-to-date phone. The SE would serve me well for a brief while, but I believe in the long run I’d be left going back to the larger size at some point in the middle just to get newer features.

I wanted a smaller phone. Not a budget phone. If I were still using a 5s or even my 6 from last year, I would make the jump. If the SE were part of the iPhone Upgrade Program, I’d probably get it this fall. The SE is a great solution for a lot of people. It’s just not for me at the moment.

I’ll re-evaluate my decision this September, when we find out if the first of my many guesses ends up being accurate. Meanwhile, I’m reluctantly sticking with my 6s Plus. The SE is awesome, but I don’t think Apple had me in mind when they designed it.

1. $750 remains on my contract. If I were to sell the phone after that, I’d likely only get around $380 for it. (Check Gazelle, if you don’t believe me. The 6s Plus has an absolutely lousy resale value for an Apple product.) Then I’d have to buy the SE outright at $500 (for the 64 GB model). Add tax, and we’re over $900. The alternative is to pay $49 for the SE and saddle myself for another 2 years on Verizon, but I’m not willing to do that, either. The whole point of the iPhone Upgrade Program is to get away from carrier obligations.  ↩
2. In my defense, exactly no one expected Apple to release the SE when I bought my 6s Plus last fall. When I suggested that Apple might make a 4-inch phone again someday, I was laughed out of the room on several occasions. If I had known the SE were coming this spring, I would have at least considered not getting the 6s Plus. And even when rumors started about the SE, I imagine most people assumed the SE would be included as part of the Upgrade Program. But it isn’t.  ↩
3. I’d love to see this happen sooner than 2018, but most of what I’ve read suggests that it’s at least that far out. I have no doubt Apple is working to make it happen, though. Maybe this is part of the new 2017 OLED all-glass rumors, but I’m not getting my hopes up. More likely, the 2017 phone will merely be a step in that direction.  ↩

Bringing Fin to the big screen was easier than I thought it would be. Certainly easier than developing for Mac, and probably even easier than Apple Watch in many ways.

I still think the Apple TV app market is going to be a tough place to make a whole lot of money short term, but I do find myself thinking quite a bit about the long term potential of this new platform.

In any case, I figured it was worth the effort just to wrap my head around a new device. Three weeks of spare hours here and there to get myself familiar with the HIG, the UI challenges, etc. was well worth the effort, as far as I’m concerned. And now I get to see if any of my users find the TV app useful, or if I pick up any new attention as a result of being there.

How often do people need a giant countdown clock in their living rooms? I don’t know. But as with all of the iOS devices, I tend to try and see the possibilities for professionals and prosumers. And there’s where I think an app like Fin can be rather beneficial.

Music and video studios, live events, classrooms — there are all sorts of places where having a big screen showing the time remaining in a session would be very helpful. In fact, I think there are all sorts of possibilities to provide other benefits in those environments as well. And those are the places I want to spend more time thinking about, rather than the living room, which is likely to be crowded and dominated by giant names like HBO and Netflix for a long time.

How much does a basic HD TV go for these days? A couple hundred bucks? Add an Apple TV at another $150, and you have a pretty cheap solution for all sorts of things in professional environments. The question is, will people start picking up Apple TVs for these purposes, or do the apps need to be there first? Time will tell.

Meanwhile I think the UI for Fin translates well to the big screen and remote. The app isn’t quite fully featured yet, but it does the main job of keeping you on schedule quite well. I plan to enhance it as users start giving me some feedback.

If you’re a Fin user and you have a new Apple TV, the app should show up in your purchased tab. If you buy it on your TV, you’ll get the iOS version as well. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Twitter is a horrible place to try and have a spirited debate.

I read this article by Craig Mod yesterday, arguing that faster Touch ID had actually annoyed him more than it helped. And I largely agreed that there was a big problem with the lock screen situation, though I didn’t think his proposed solutions were ideal.

Then I read Dr. Drang’s reasonable, well constructed rebuttal. (Note to tech nerds: Acknowledging that the other person has a point and showing some empathy is helpful if you want to win someone over, rather than just be “right”.) And then I read a few others agreeing with Drang that faster Touch ID’s gains outweigh the drawbacks. But no one seemed to be selling me on what those gains actually were. I wasn’t convinced that having my Touch ID authenticate in a millisecond instead of a half second was worth rendering my lock screen utterly useless without clumsy workarounds.

So I went to Twitter and proclaimed that I think, for me, faster Touch ID was actually a net loss, and hoped someone would help me understand the other side better.

Instead, I got a few people agreeing with me, a few offering empathy, and a whole lot of people telling me “I’m holding it wrong.”[1] I’m still, in fact, getting more and more people telling me to use my thumb nail, use the sleep/wake button, etc. Missing the point entirely. [2]

So, given that almost no one seems to want to do it, here’s the argument I wanted someone to make to me about the benefits of faster Touch ID:

Hey, Joe. Aren’t you the guy who said that thinner laptops are what made Apple Watch possible? Maybe faster Touch ID is going to be part of some new product, and making it function as fast as possible is critical to it working effectively. You have no idea what the future holds for Apple, nor why having a super-fast Touch ID might play into much more exciting products in the future, so just consider that these things come in stages, and it will all be made clear eventually.

Besides, faster is always better. Touch ID is about much more than the lock screen. Faster authentication in 1Password, the App Store, and so on, are better, if only by a small margin. Every millisecond counts when you’re on the move. And those milliseconds add up as you use your phone all day.

Drang came close to making these points when he said: “I’ll bet the time you’ve saved overwhelms the time you’ve lost. And I’ll bet Apple studied iPhone usage enough to know that would be the case long before the improved Touch ID was released.”

For most users, he’d probably win that bet. But for me, he’d lose.

Still, simply saying, “That sucks for you, but it’s probably a net win for a lot of other people” would be preferable to endless tips about using my thumbnail. At least then I would be forced to look back at what’s really frustrating me about this lock screen situation, which isn’t actually Touch ID.

Faster Touch ID is obviously a good thing.

No. The problem isn’t that authentication happens quickly, but that it’s now impossible to read my notifications without some crappy workaround to how I’ve been unlocking my phone for several years. Essentially, lock screen notifications, which were a part of my daily workflow, now disappear too fast to read them, and I’m reminded of this almost every time I unlock my phone, which is several hundred times a day.

Imagine you launch your favorite Twitter client, and every time the app launches, it shows a screen with your latest activity (mentions, DMs, maybe some stats) but then the screen immediately disappears and shows you the regular timeline. That’s a bug, right? No one is going to argue with me that it wouldn’t be buggy behavior to have such a useful screen disappear a millisecond after it appears. You wouldn’t argue that I should launch the app differently, or that if I swipe down from the top of the screen that the view would reappear, and that makes it okay. You’d wonder why the screen shows up at all if I’m not supposed to be able to read it. You’d call it a bug.

Well, the lock screen in iOS has this bug.

If the true goal of faster Touch ID is to get you authorized and on your way much faster, then why show the lock screen at all? If by the time I’ve clicked on the home button, Touch ID has already scanned my print and decided I’m good to go, why not skip the lock screen (and the slow animation of icons onto the screen[3]) and just show me my home screen immediately?

Remember, the original point of the lock screen was to prevent other users from accessing your phone, or to prevent you from accidentally activating your phone while it’s in your pocket. There’s no good reason from a User Experience standpoint why the rightful owner needs to see this screen in order to accomplish that goal. The limitations of the technology in 2007 necessitated that the lock screen exist in earlier models as a technical limitation. And while that limitation still persisted, they added notifications to the screen to make that screen more useful, as long as it had to be there, anyway. But super-fast Touch ID makes this screen unnecessary, at least when it’s you that is using your phone.

So get rid of it.

Such a simple, elegant, solution. If authorized, skip the lock animations altogether. If not authorized, show the lock screen as it is. I might still be upset you took away my lock screen notifications, but at least you’re not flashing them in front of my face like an asshole.[4]

1. For those unfamiliar, this is a reference to the classic Steve Jobs misquote during the Antennagate kerfuffle. What Jobs actually had said was “then don’t hold it that way.” But the point is, blame the user, not the product. People kept telling me that I should unlock my phone in some other convoluted way, rather than just press the home button that was sitting right there under my thumb, the way I had been doing since the first iPhone.  ↩
2. Two more came in as I was writing this.  ↩
3. You know what’s a lot slower than the old Touch ID? That stupid animation of icons from the lock screen to the home screen.  ↩
4. The way to placate people who still really want their lock screen notifications would be to add a settings switch to simply slow down Touch ID on the lock screen only. Still, if you turn that switch off, the lock screen should not appear at all.  ↩

While it’s a bit early to call the death of the headphone jack just yet, we sense that Apple’s interest in thinner, sleeker designs means that the 3.5mm connection is likely living on borrowed time at this point.

via PC magazine

Here’s my prediction:

1. Apple will indeed drop the standard headphone port on the iPhone 7. Or 8. Or at some point. Guaranteed to happen eventually.
2. There will be an immediate uproar from the tech community when this phone is announced (despite the discussions we’ll be having over the next few weeks already, thanks to this rumor), with special emphasis on Apple’s “obsession with thin”. Much gnashing of teeth will ensue. Hundreds of hours of podcasts and tens of thousands of words will be committed to the outrage.
3. A $19.99 headphone jack to Lightning connector will be immediately available, solving the short-term issue in an albeit clunky way. Beats headphones, meanwhile, will be the first to come with the Lightning adapter standard.
4. People will survive.
5. Apple will sell more of the iPhone 7 (8, 9, or whatever) than they have of any previous model.
6. There will be some awkward years with headphone manufacturers offering free adapters, then offering two models of their headphones. Amazon will begin to sell the reverse Lightning to 3.5mm audio jacks. Bluetooth headphones will get better.
7. Moving forward, whenever Apple releases any new product that packs incredible power into a teeny tiny package for good reason (like the Watch, or the Pencil), the tech community will continue to fail to see the connection between Apple’s insistence on always driving things thinner and lighter everywhere and those new products. They will assume that Apple could just as easily make those teeny products alone in a vacuum, rather than making miniturization a core value of the company and continually shrinking everything they design in small increments over the course of many, many years.

It was all the way back at WWDC 2014 that my friend Hans vershooten suggested what eventually became the marquis feature of x2y 4.0: Percentages.

x2y has always been able to calculate x or y dimensions for you automatically. It would be nice, Hans suggested, if it could also tell you the percentage difference between the original image and the new one. So if you want, for instance, a rectangle that’s exactly 245% of the original, x2y should be able to calculate both the x and y dimensions for that.

And now it does. (Sorry it took so long, Hans.)

Other new features in this update include 3DTouch shortcuts on the home screen, for devices such as the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. You can jump straight to a particular aspect ratio with one gesture. To customize which aspects end up in the shortcuts, simply put them at the top of your customizable common aspects list.

Also new in this update, two new color themes. I have fun changing up the look of x2y on occasion, so I wanted to add a few more options. Also, all themes are now unlocked by default, so no more hunting around looking for ways to get all the themes to unlock.

I’m a bit surprised that years after this app was first released, I still find myself using x2y several times a week. This was my first app, and I never imagined that I could take it so far. Once again, I can say with confidence that I’ve spent more time thinking about aspect ratio calculators than anyone else on iOS.

x2y an invaluable tool for any designer or developer who needs to resize images often, particularly in code. You can download it on the App Store here.

Seeing this tweet a lot today in my timeline.

Here's another way of looking at it. Original iPhone screen in the empty space between the apps on the iPad Pro. pic.twitter.com/MwVLiwp8cL

— Dennis Munsie (@dmunsie) November 11, 2015

The comparison is wrongheaded, because the people sharing it are confusing points with pixels.

The original iPhone screen did indeed have 320 horizontal pixels. It was also a 1x screen, which means it had 320 points, as well.

The iPad Pro’s screen, on the other hand, is a 2X Retina screen. Thus, the 324 pixels between the app columns on the home screen represent 162pts, or roughly half the width of the original iPhone’s screen. Even that isn’t quite accurate, because the two screens also have different pixel densities. But the point is, the comparison makes no sense.

I am typing this on an iPad Pro, and I assure you, an original iPhone’s screen wouldn’t come close to fitting in between the home screen columns of the Pro.

More importantly, the point those who are sharing this are trying to make is also flawed. More space on the home screen does not mean we should jam pack it with more icons. Just because you have the space, that doesn’t mean you should fill it with more options. This is UX design 101.

I don’t know what the maximum number of icons on a screen is before the number of options becomes too confusing to the average user, but I’m willing to bet Apple does. I’m also willing to bet there’s value to having a little bit more consistency between the layouts of the various home screens of our iOS devices. Imagine setting up your new iPad Pro from a backup of your old iPad Air. Having all your apps not only restore, but restore to their familiar layout goes a long way to making that first run experience more familiar and pleasant.

“But the home screen just looks ridiculous with all that space between the icons.” This is an unbelievebly dumb reason to add another column or row of icons as well.

There’s no doubt in my mind Apple tested the Pro home screen with more densely packed icons and decided it was a bad idea. They obviously have the technical expertise to have the Springboard space icons in various ways, because they’ve done it with the various screen sizes of the iPhone. Perhaps in this case, the extra icons didn’t add value. Perhaps they have research from their customers that users find it annoying having inconsistent layouts. Who knows? The assumption that Apple is simply being lazy, or that average Twitter guy knows better is astounding, though.

Setlists 2.0 finally hits the App Store today. It’s a huge update that involved not only tons of under-the-hood improvements to take advantage of Apple’s latest iOS technologies, but also the addition of a large number of our most requested new features. To say it was a massive undertaking is an understatement. The team really outdid themselves on this one.

I can’t wait to use it on stage during the next few Airplane Mode gigs.

The most interesting aspect of this update for most of my readers, I’m guessing, is the change we’re making to our pricing strategy. For years, Setlists has always been a paid-up-front, “premium” app at $9.99 USD. This time around, though, we’ve decided to experiment with making the app free to download, with a single in-app purchase to unlock the app’s full potential.[1]

Will this make Setlists a better business for us? We’ve looked at a lot of other apps that have similar strategies, and we’ve tried to avoid the pitfalls others have warned us about—but time will tell what the results of our experiment will be.

One interesting way to look at this switch is that our marketing no longer has the burden of making the sale. Our web site, our screenshots, whatever press we get, whatever ads we buy—all of that now only needs to convince people to download and try the app. Still not an easy task, but it’s easier than asking them to fork over money for an app they’ve never used.

The app itself now has to make the sale. And that sits better with me. I’d rather be judged by the app than the ads we place for the app or how pretty our screenshots are. Whatever the downsides of freemium (and there are many) that one change is certainly a good thing.

We’re confident once musicians try Setlists, a large number of them will find it suits their needs. So much so that we made the price to unlock $14.99 rather than $9.99. This might not be a “free trial” officially, but as with a free trial, our buyers aren’t being forced to take as great a risk, and thus we can charge accordingly.

In any event, everyone at Bombing Brain is looking forward to much smaller, incremental updates for a long while after this.

1. I know, we’re late to the freemium party, but we’re still not at all convinced that freemium is right for every app out there.  ↩