Those Great New Calendar Tools Probably Won't Help You



They’re built for people who hate meetings, not for those who need to be great at them.

Photo courtesy of JEShoots.

There is a new movement around tools for managing your calendar. My favorite is Reclaim, but there are many others. They provide help running meetings, rearranging them, and avoiding them.

It’s great that these tools exist. The calendar is the least improved area in the average office worker’s life in the last few decades. My particular bugaboo is that calendar apps don’t know that you exist as a physical person, so they are perfectly willing to let you schedule two in-person events five minutes and 3000 miles apart. Any other kind of application would see that as a catastrophically brain-dead bug, but somehow the tools we use to arrange our lives don’t.

But… Something always struck me as off about these new tools. I didn’t want to use any of them. I’m a tool junkie, so this is pretty weird. Even Reclaim took me a while to understand and fit into my life. It was obvious these tools weren’t for me, but why not? Who were they for?

They’re for front-line workers: Developers, accountants, SREs. I used to be one of those. I’ve certainly been yelled at enough by them for putting meetings on their calendars.

But I’m not one today. I haven’t been in at least a decade.

My employees at Puppet used to say they hated meetings (I’m sure they still do, they just don’t work for me any more). I would tell them: Replace “meeting” with “collaborating with my team-mates” and say that again, eh?

So yeah, I have a different perspective on meetings.

Not that I think they’re all awesome. But for me — and most other leaders and managers — meetings are how we do our job. The life of a manager is built around communication. Much of it can be unscheduled, and ideally asynchronous. But a lot of it needs to be direct, synchronous, interactive.

That interactive time is much less efficient than, say, email, which means managers have to schedule their time carefully to ensure they get everything done. And of course, employees hate it when a manager shows up at their desk unannounced and asks for time. They want that meeting scheduled, too.

So a manager’s day is built around meetings, and there is a new crop of tools to help with them. What’s not to love?

Well. The tools are built by and for people who hate meetings, and often who aren’t very good at them. Instead, I want tools for people whose job is built around meetings, and who know they must be excellent at them.

Managers do need help. Not nearly enough of them are actually good at the mechanical parts of their jobs, including managing meetings. But these tools are mostly about avoiding or constraining them. They’re for the people asked to join, not for the ones calling them or running them.

I hope these tools do well. I want there to be a mature market of great tools in this space.

But even more so, I hope to see a parallel mature market for tools to help make better meetings. The average employee suffers from all the meetings they have. If managers were better, there would be fewer meetings, and the ones remaining would be better.

That’s a much better world.

The Automator's Dilemma



Automation is not to blame for all the job destruction and wage stagnation. But you can still do great harm if you build it for the wrong reasons.

We’re told that automation is destroying jobs, that technology is replacing people, making them dumber, less capable. These are lies, with just enough truth to confuse us. You can have my robot washing machines when you pry them from my cold, wet hands.

I’m not some Pollyanna, thinking tech is only ever positive. Its potential for abuse and hurt is visible across the centuries, and especially so today. But I’m more optimistic about the upside than I am pessimistic about the down, and I’m uninterested in scaremongering screeds against it.

And yet. Technology and automation are not forces of nature. They’re made by people. By you. And the choices you make help to determine just how much good or bad they do. Even with the best of intentions, you might be doing great harm. And if you don’t have good intentions at all, or you don’t think ethics are part of your job, then you are probably downright dangerous.

I’m here to convince you that you have a role in deciding the future impact of the technology you build, and to provide you - especially you founders, tool builders, automators - some tactical advice on how to have the best impact, and avoid the dark timeline.

As I was building Puppet, explaining that I was developing automation for operations teams, execs and sales people would think they got it: “Oh, right, so you can fire SysAdmins!”

Ah. No.

When prospective customers asked for this, I offered them a choice: You can keep the same service quality and cut costs, or you can keep the same cost, and increase service quality. For sysadmins, that meant shipping better software, more often.

Their response? “Wait, that’s an option?!” They only knew how to think about their jobs in terms of cost. I had to teach them to think about quality. This is what the whole DevOps movement is about, and the years of DevOps reports Puppet has published: Helping people understand what quality means, so they can stop focusing on cost.

And those few people who said they still wanted to reduce cost, not increase quality? I didn’t sell to them.

Not because they were wrong. There were real pressures on them to reduce costs, but I was only interested in helping people who wanted to make things better, not cheaper. My mission was completely at odds with their needs, so I was unwilling to build a product to help them fire their people.

This might have been stupid. There are good reasons why a CEO might naturally build what these people want. The hardest thing in the world to find for a new product is a motivated prospective customer who has spending authority, and here they are, asking for help. The signal is really clear:

You do a bunch of user interviews, they all tell the same story of needing to reduce cost, and in every case, budgets are shrinking and the major cost is labor. Great, I’ll build some automation, and it will increase productivity by X%, thus enabling a downsizing. The customer is happy, I get rich, and, ah, well, if you get fired you probably deserved it for not investing enough in your career. (I heard this last bit from a founder recently. Yay.)

This reasoning is common, but that does not make it right. (Or ethical.) And you’ll probably fail because of your bad decisions.

Let’s start with the fact that you have not done any user interviews. None.

The only users in this story are the ones you’re trying to fire. Executives aren’t users. Managers aren’t users. It seems like you should listen to them, because they have a lot of opinions, and they’re the ones writing checks, but nope.

This has a couple of consequences. First, you don’t understand the problem if you only talk to buyers, because they only see it at a distance. You have to talk to people on the ground who are doing the work. Be careful when talking to them, though, because you might start to empathize with them, which makes it harder to help fire them.

Even if you do manage to understand the problem, your product will still likely fail. As much as buyers center themselves in the story of adopting new technology, they’re largely irrelevant. Only the people at the front line really matter. I mean, it’s in the word: Users use the software. Someone, somewhere, has to say: Yes, I will use this thing you’ve built, every day, to do my job.

If you’ve only talked to buyers, you have built a buyer-centric product, rather than a user-centric one. Sure, maybe you got lucky and were able to build something pretty good while only talking to managers and disrespecting the workers so much that you think they’re worthless. But I doubt it. You’ll experience the classic enterprise problem of closing a deal but getting no adoption, and thus not getting that crucial renewal. Given that you usually don’t actually make money from a customer until the second or third year of the relationship… not so great.

Users aren’t stupid. Yes, I know we like to act like they are. But they aren’t. If your value promise is, “Adopt my software and 10% of your team is going to get fired,” people know. And they won’t use it, unless they really don’t have a choice. Some of that is selfish - no one wants to help team members get fired, and even if they’re safe today, they know they’re on the block for the next round of cuts. But it’s just as likely to be pragmatic. You’re so focused on downsizing the team that you never stopped to ask what they need. Why would someone adopt something that didn’t solve their problems?

What’s that you say? You ignored their problems because you were focused on the boss’s needs? This is why no one uses your software. Your disrespect resulted in a crappy product.

Call me a communist, but I think most people are skilled at their jobs. I am confident that I can find a learned skill in even the “low skill” labor. I absolutely know I can in most areas people are building software.

I was talking to a friend in a data science group in a software company recently, and he was noting how hard it was to sell their software. He said every prospective buyer had two experts in the basement who they could never seem to get past. So I asked him, are you trying to help those experts, or replace them?

He said, well, our software is so great, they aren’t really necessary any more.

There’s your problem. You’re promising to fire the only two people in the whole company who understand what you do. So I challenged him: What would your product, your company look like if you saw your job as making them do better work faster, rather than eliminating the need for them?

It’s a big shift. But it’s an important one. In his case, I think it’s necessary to reduce the friction in his sales process, and even more importantly, to keep those experts in house and making their employers smarter, rather than moving them on and losing years of experience and knowledge.

The stakes can get much bigger than downsizing. In his new book, Ruined By Design, Mike Monteiro has made it clear that designers and developers make ethical choices every day. Just because Uber’s and Instacart’s business model requires that they mistreat and underpay workers doesn’t mean you need to help them. While I don’t think technology is at fault for most job losses, there absolutely are people out there who see the opportunity to make money by destroying industries.

This is not fundamentally different than the strip mining that happened to corporations in the 1980s, except back then they were making money by removing profit margin in companies and now they’re making money by removing “profit” margin in people’s lives. Jeff Bezos of Amazon has famously said your margin is his opportunity, and his warehouse workers’ experiences makes clear that he thinks that’s as true of his employees as it is of his suppliers and competitors.

Just because they’re going to get rich ruining people’s lives doesn’t mean you have to help.

I think your job matters. I think software can and should have a hugely positive impact on the world; not that one project can by itself make the world better, but that every person could have their life improved by the right product or service.

But that will only happen if we truthfully, honestly try to help our users.

When, instead, we focus too much on margin, on disruption, on buyers, on business problems…. we become the problem.

The Rights You Lost When the Document Died



There are many upsides to the era of the smartphone and the cloud. But I’ll never forgive them for killing documents.

Photo by Daniel Zurnau

The limitations of mobile devices perfectly complement the strength of the cloud, as foretold by Sun Microsystems two decades ago: Your computers will be weak and hold no data, and the servers will be powerful and store everything. They were just wrong about what form those weak computers took (and, of course, who would be selling the servers).

I obviously love the benefits of mobility, of having an amazing computer in my pocket and having access to the world’s information pretty much wherever I am. And there are many capabilities we take for granted that you just could not provide without large central collections of data that the cloud enables.

But many of the changes in our tech landscape are accidental outcomes of cloud + smartphone. I regret them. And I want to fix them.

One of those big changes is the demise of the document.

You might think, no, I still have documents. I mean, yeah, I used to have Microsoft Word documents, but now I have Google Documents. Right?

No. The content you have in Google Docs is stored in a big database. Sometimes, when they choose to, you can treat it like a collection of documents. But it’s not.

This is pretty obvious when you try to use Google Drive. Compare using documents there to a Dropbox folder full of Word (or Pages1) documents. One comfortably exists in a world of folders, hard drives, and file systems, and the other just feels…. not quite right. That’s because Google Drive is wearing the camouflage of a filesystem, but it’s a database in the back end, and the truth leaks through. We’re not fooled that easily.

It starts with a miserable user experience, but doesn’t end there. Because Google is storing all of your data centrally, you need their permission to use it. This is new.

Until the smartphone and cloud took off, Microsoft had a comprehensive monopoly in digital documents, in text, spreadsheets, and presentations.2 To participate in business, you pretty much had to own Office. Their position was so strong they built a Mac version just to prop that platform up enough for it to look like a viable competitor. The market just didn’t see an OS as competitive without office.

But lo and behold, times change, and now you want all of your files online. Google wants to help you do it, and just happens to have a couple of fancy features you couldn’t (at the time) get without uploading everything. Real-time collaborative editing is actually pretty sweet.

Microsoft worked for years to prevent other apps from reading their documents, but they seem to have stopped that at some point. I don’t know if they just gave up the arms race, realized they had already won so it didn’t matter, or actually felt the need to reduce their market power. But by the time Google acquired Writely and rebranded it as Google Docs, it wasn’t that hard to read these docs separately. This was a massive boost for Google (and theoretically smaller companies, but it didn’t turn out that way).

After all, all the docs you care about were right there, on your computer. You didn’t need to ask Microsoft for a copy; you did not have to export them, wondering what data was included and what was kept back. And the form you’d send to Google is the exact form you’d send to anyone else, via email or on a USB drive. Their ingesting of all of your critical data was pretty easy as a result.

But in 2019, things are very different. Want all of your data from Google Docs in the next new company’s fancy web app? Step 1: Export. That’s right. You have to ask Google to give your data. Because, and I hate to belabor this, you don’t have it.

Then your fancy app needs the ability to import the special arbitrary 100% proprietary format Google exports in. It’s true that some apps might allow you to skip this step: They’ll authenticate directly to Google and slurp your data down. But just like when Facebook shut down data access for Twitter and other competitors after building its own network by copying data from Friendster and others, Google will only tolerate this kind of integration when they don’t feel threatened.

You need their permission, their tolerance. Given their use of monopoly power to weaken Yelp, among many others, you can be sure they’ll have no qualms about quashing a budding competitor by making this hard if someone gets close.

So here we have two analogous situations, with almost identical data, but in one case you have your data, and in the other, you’ve got to ask permission for it. There are downsides to each, but there’s no argument they’re different.

Note that this isn’t really a question of data “ownership”. Google would probably argue that you do actually own your data, as might Facebook. You just can’t access it in a useful way.

I’m thrilled that the cryptocurrency/blockchain communities are driving a conversation around data ownership, but it’s still disappointingly naive. This concept runs up hard against the reality that digital copies are free, and it’s basically impossible to prevent people from copying data you’ve given them read access to. Conversely, “ownership” means nothing if I can’t get all - and I mean all - of my data in a useful form.

What they need to talk about instead is rights. Realistically, I can’t own my birthday. Would that be a copyright? Trademark? Patent? Of course not. It’s just a fact, and facts can’t be property. But we all know that my birthdate matters.3 I need the ability to prevent you from, say, publishing it widely, or using it in combination with other facts to impersonate me. These are legal rights, not aspects of ownership.

I miss the rights that documents gave us, now that we no longer have them. Because these rights were implicit, a consequence of the technology reality at the time, we did not even know we were giving them up. But we’ve got to fight now to get them back.

The first thing you can do is be conscious of this when you choose your tools. All life is a compromise, and sometimes it’s the right answer to give up rights for functionality. But many apps are functionally equivalent, yet make vastly different choices about your rights.

As one example, I recently migrated away from Evernote, because their business model is shifting to a focus on businesses, which, well, I am not. It was a nightmare. Even though everything in my Evernote notebooks was either a text file or a PDF, I couldn’t export literally a single thing as text or PDF. Well, that’s not true. I could export each individual item that way. But not the whole collection. My choices were HTML or a proprietary format. It took hours of manual work, and a lot of it I just dumped in a folder, never to look at again unless disaster strikes, because it wasn’t worth it.

Compare that to what I’m replacing it with: Keep It (as of today, anyway). I’m sure I’ll give up some features to pick it, but, ah, I haven’t found any yet. And all the files I put in it? They’re just - hold on to your seat, folks - files. I can open that directory on my Mac. I can add things to it. I can remove them. Then I can see them in Keep It. If I stopped using it tomorrow, I would have to, um, add the files to something else. Or use the Finder, or Dropbox, or something similar.

It’s obvious that Keep It respects the document, and they see their value as adding functionality on top of it, rather than subsuming it in some way.

This should be the gold standard. You should be able to adopt an app that gives you functionality, but does not take away rights.

In the age of documents, apps like Microsoft Word could try to curtail your rights, but other developers would be on your side trying to give them back. In the age of the cloud, and the smartphone, you don’t get that option. You no longer have rights, you have “permission”, with a side of binding arbitration.

I don’t think we can go back to the era of documents on a disk. But it’s worth looking back and asking: As we’ve gained so much, what have lost?

And then demanding that our software providers begin to give some of that back.

  1. Although even Pages, and all of Apple’s productivity apps, weaken the definition of a document, because they use bundles instead of a single file.
  2. I was on team break-up.
  3. I can’t believe you forgot mine last year.

Review of the 2018 iPad Pro



The sideways logo gets hidden, rather than fixed.

Photo by eleven x.

Yes, I know this photo is of the old model. But it perfectly captures what’s still wrong with the new one.

The iPad has been my primary mobile computing platform since a couple years after it came out. I’ve had every version since the very first, and I immediately replaced that one when a version with LTE arrived. I spent two months traveling with my family last summer and only used my iPad. I’ve taken countless trips with nothing but it and my phone to get work done.

I’m not mobile-only. I have a 5k iMac on my desk, and am far more capable and productive on it than I would be on anything else, because of screen size if nothing else. It’s worth noting that I’ve worked professionally on MacOS (Classic and X), Solaris, Linux (I tried nearly every distro available until around 2008, and even tried the BSDs), BeOS, and once in a while a little Windows. I had two 21" Trinitron monitors on my desk in 1999, and I’ve spent more hours than I could count fiddling with my computing experience to maximize productivity. Heck, that’s what ended up with my starting Puppet: I just wanted to get more done, faster. So when I say the iPad is the most productive device for me in many situations, I’m saying that within the context of twenty years pursuing exactly this.

I’m a heavy iPad user, and it’s really important to me. I use my phone, but I love my iPad.

That context is important for this review to make sense. We’ve seen many reviews of the new iPad that could be summarized as, “I’ve been using a Windows desktop for twenty years, and the iPad still can’t replace it for my use cases.” Those reviews are useless. I mean, unless you’re one of those people. Get a Kindle, I guess. This review is for people who are willing to shift work styles and recognize that different platforms optimize for different problems. Success for the iPad is more about whether it has valid and compelling uses rather than whether it works for each and every one.

The short version of this review is that I love the new iPad Pro, but I decided not to keep it. I already have two of the older versions at home. The difference between this and previous generations is not a big enough jump for me in the ways I use it, especially given I’m between jobs. For the things that were working great, they now work better, but more of the things that weren’t working, it doesn’t really make an impact.

Your scroll bar is telling you, though, that this is a much longer review. Settle in. (Or silently close the tab, and save half an hour of your life.)

How I fell in love with the iPad

I know some find that travel is explicitly where they struggle to survive without a laptop, but it’s where I flipped the fastest. The easiest explanation for why - also explaining the importance of LTE - is my pattern of travel when I was still running Puppet.

Here’s what it looks like if I have a laptop:

I show up at the airport. I find a seat, pull my laptop up, log in, and join the local wifi. Most of the time this doesn’t work, because airports, so I tether with my phone. Then I wait. No idea how long. I use Apple’s Mail, and the desktop version has consistently had some issues downloading mail efficiently, especially from Google. I’ve tried literally every other mail app; don’t @ me. So I wait. When boarding is called, or all the mail is obviously downloaded, I close my laptop. I have often found myself carrying an open laptop through the boarding line because it’s not done yet.

On the plane, once we’re at 10k feet, I process the mail. When I was running Puppet, I received about 230 mails a day, and sent about 30. Ideally a 1.5 hour flight between PDX and SFO (my most common trip) would at least get me to “no scroll bar in my inbox”, and sometimes even inbox zero(tm).

I land. If I am taking a taxi, I get in, open my laptop, tether to my phone, and let the mail start flowing out. Some of them make it. Some don’t. I’ll try to join every wifi network I spend more than five minutes around. If I’m not taking a taxi, no mail gets sent until I get to my hotel after dinner, most likely - I can’t do this while driving, and the trains are usually too far underground to get service.

I just spend the rest of the day dealing with inconsistencies in the inbox on my phone and the one on my laptop. 🤷‍♀️

Here’s what it looks like on my iPad:

Once I get on the plane, I open the mail app on my iPad to make sure it’s fully synchronized. I then put it in airplane mode, and start reading on it. At 10k feet, I lower the tray and start typing. I’m a little less efficient on an iPad than a laptop, so I get a little less email done, but it’s shockingly similar.

When we land, I turn airplane mode off. I open the mail app just to ensure it’s going to synchronize as quickly as possible.

I get annoyed texts from my team about the torrent of emails I’ve just unleashed.

That’s it.

You could argue that this says nothing about the iPad. Any device that was always on and had an LTE connection could do this, no problem. But of course, my other computers don’t and can’t have these features. I honestly don’t know why I can’t get an Apple laptop with an LTE chip in it, but I do know why it’s not running 100% of the time.

Once my primary travel computing use case - email - flipped, I found a way to make most other things do so.

There are many people whose primary use for computers is sitting in one place, working on one or two problems for hours at a time. I’d be surprised to find those people prefer an iPad. Even if I could program on one, I wouldn’t want to, because the screen just isn’t big enough to show everything, and I can’t have all the windows open that I need.

But as a CEO, my job was constant change, constant context shifts, constant movement. I craved depth, but usually in vain. The iPad fits that life perfectly.

That’s why I love it.

The iPad today

Everyone has said this 1000x times: The iPad’s hardware is great, it’s the operating system that’s lacking. I agree, but I have more to say than that. And it’s not just about features like reading files off a disk, which I doubt I would ever use.

Apple has to (ahem) think differently about the device altogether. They’ve gotten better: They’ve agreed it’s not just a big phone, it has different users, different use cases. It needs a different experience.

But they’ve barely begun to work through the consequences.

I love my iPad. I use it more than every other device put together. I have for years. It is great at so much.

But its user experience for absolutely mundane work is a shocking embarrassment.

I built an automation company to almost 500 people. Our software was built on the recognition that system administrators - the people who make your computers work for you - were spending too much time on menial tedious work, and it got in the way of their real work. Puppet helped restructure their entire work life, automating away the tedium and making space for the most important, most valuable work.

The iPad has provided me great new abilities, but forces me to take the long way to using all of them. If you were to watch me using it, you’d notice that a huge portion of my direct interactions with it are only necessary because of its failures, not my desires. Some of this is not a ton better on the Mac, which always focused more on simplistic usability than working hard for power users. Coming from a fully customized keyboard-driven experience in FVWM and its descendants, I was never going to be happy. I still miss focus follows mouse with no window auto raise. But man, it could be a lot better.

I need you to understand. I want you to feel what I feel.

On my desk, my mouse is less than an inch from my keyboard.

But every single time I have to take my hand off the keyboard - every time - a large buzzer sounds in my room, a million candle power red light starts flashing, and the overhead sprinklers turn on.

Ok, it’s not quite that extreme. To the observer. But that’s what it feels like to me. When I say I want to do everything on the keyboard, what I mean is every time I have to do non-keyboard interactions it is a massive disruption in how I work, move, flow. It breaks my interaction. Some of these are ok - scrolling is probably the least disruptive, although it’s such a core use case it’s amazing there’s no good option from the keyboard1. But clicking into a text box? Selecting text? *shudder*

I grew up remodeling houses with my dad. Imagine a hammer that required I put it down every time I needed a new nail. Or a screw gun that required two hands to load a screw, so I had to hold it between my knees on a ladder. Insane. You could never get flow. You’d throw that stupid thing away.

That’s what it’s like to use an iPad.

Let’s just pick the simple stuff. Something I do every day, often multiple times a day. Let’s walk through each little step, get granular so you really see it.

I have to make a calendar event based on an email. I’m in Apple’s Mail, and the calendar app is next to it. Again, there’s an air horn next to me, a strobe light mounted to my left, and a bucket of water above my head, ready to tip over every time I touch the screen.

I’ll be generous. We’re making the appointment for today, so no need to navigate within the calendar to pick the right day.

Task one: Switch to the calendar app.

Oops. I foolishly have both apps on screen at once. You can’t shift focus between those apps. Or can you? Wait, what does focus even mean on an iPad? No one knows. I’m in Mail, so I know it starts with focus. I lift my right finger up, and select the slot on the calendar I want. The world explodes.

In this case changing focus would not have helped, because Google’s execrable iPad apps don’t really support keyboard shortcuts. Huh. The company whose keyboard shortcuts are so dominant in desktop email that everyone else is copying them, doesn’t even use them on mobile? Maybe if Apple cared, Google would? Probably not, but since Apple clearly doesn’t, why should they?

I wipe the water from my face, and am now in the new event pseudo-pop-up. Oops, I need to copy the email address of the person, because it’s someone not in my contacts. I slowly, cringing, move my finger back to the mail app. How many taps does it take to get to an email address? I’m not sure, but I think it’s about four. It should be Cmd-Tab, Cmd-R (to reply, which I have to do anyway), Shift-Tab a couple of times to get to the To field, Cmd-A, Cmd-C to copy the address (I can use arrows and such to get just one if I want), Cmd-Tab to get back to Calendar, Cmd-V to paste.

Yeah, not here. I think focus is now in the calendar app, so I have to touch the mail app again anyway. I hit the reply icon. I use Shift-Tab to get to the To field, which mostly works. I then try to copy the address. This fails at least 50% of the time. Like, just fails. I mean, the buttons on the keyboard work. But when I try to paste elsewhere, the clipboard appears to be empty. Or something. Nothing happens. Since I’d rather have a crappy workflow than an inconsistent one, I use my finger again to touch the email address. How does one copy an email address when copying doesn’t work?

You don’t! You drag! Because absolutely, the one fix I want to bad keyboard shortcuts is different touch experiences. I love that drag and drop is more powerful now, but can’t you get the basics working, too?

Honestly dragging is also inconsistent, but weirdly, I’ve found it’s more consistent than the keyboard. I frequently swap email addresses in a mail - when I respond to an intro, I swap the default ‘To’ person to BCC, and move the ‘CC’ to ‘To’. If I drag them around, it almost always works, but if I use the keyboard, it just… doesn’t. It fails differently all the time but nearly always fails.

Ok, so I drag it into Google Calendar. Hmm. I can’t seem to drop it on the Guest field. Maybe because it’s not the active text field? Ok, I let go, touch the calendar, and then tab to the guest field.

Hah! Just kidding. Tab doesn’t work, it just puts tabs in the event title. I touch the guest field, and drag again. This seems to actually work.

By now, I have successfully put a person’s email address in a field, and I’ve had 14 buckets of water dumped on my head, I’m flash blind, and I’ll never hear again.

I won’t bore you with the details of actually getting the rest done. Obviously GCal not having keyboard shortcuts of any use hurts a lot, but even better shortcuts would not help much, because the biggest disruption is switching apps back and forth, and once in an app, picking the correct field.

And before you tell me to switch to Fantastical or something, please. My calendar is currently showing eight separate calendar feeds, all different colors so I can easily tell them apart. E.g., mine, my wife’s, my travel, my kids, the two soccer clubs I follow (#gunners #RCTID). My main event feed further colors every event by event type. Just today I can see four different colors of event. And I only have one meeting I’m personally attending. Apparently no one else does this, because no other apps even come close to Google in effectively managing this overlay of info. Don’t @ me. I don’t know how you people live.

And also don’t try to tell me I should automate this whole process. Sure, you’re right. Except again, it would only work sometimes, I’m always dealing with natural language text that doesn’t easily parse, the automation would be brittle and I’d move from being pissed off at Apple and Google to being pissed off at my own code, and I’d spend my time trying to figure out how to build abstractions over similar automations on different platforms, version control them all, package and deploy them, and suddenly I’m trying to use Zapier with microservices in a docker container in a VM on my iPad just so I can create an event. That’s definitely better.

It should be clear to you by now that every time I do this from my living room, my basement floods, my neighbors call the cops because of the sirens, and the lights have knocked countless birds from the sky. It’s a disaster.

And this workflow is one of my most important, most common.

The basics just don’t work. Maybe you didn’t know you can “minimize” an email by dragging it by its top bar to the bottom of the screen. Where’s the shortcut for that? What about the one to cancel an email? Honestly just deleting email with the keyboard fails most of the time, and 100% of the time after the first few. Delete, delete, ooops now it doesn’t work. Of course, this is true on the desktop, too, so…

Everyone else, all the other app developers, they follow Apple’s lead. They know Apple does not respect the keyboard. So they don’t either.

But the thing is, this diatribe has nothing to do with the keyboard.

It has to do with my flow. And the flow of everyone who uses this device.

I love my iPad. But Apple has clearly not taken a critical eye to where it supports flow, and where it breaks it.

I grew up on a hippie commune in rural Tennessee. When I was about 7, the state built a bridge across a ravine, which shortened the drive to Nashville by 30 minutes. One bridge, and suddenly a trip we took all the time is an hour shorter, round-trip.

One little simplification can have a massive impact.

Apple is adding features, but not connecting them. They’ve run a freeway into town, but haven’t built all the feeder roads so people can use it. There’s a fancy bridge between two cities, but the roads to and from it are still gravel. There’s a high speed train between cities, but the stations are outside of town and you have to walk there.

It’s not enough to put things in place, they have to fit into a coherent, cohesive system.

And until Apple respects the iPad enough to really think about how it all fits together, I will finish my work day soaking wet. Brrr.

Now, about that new iPad

Naturally, I bought one of the new Pro models when it came out. I have the original (2016?) 12.9" at home, and also the 10.5" that came out in the spring of 2017, both with LTE and the keyboards, and one pencil to share.

I almost never use the big one. It’s just too big. It doesn’t fit into my EDC bag (mostly because that was specifically chosen to fit the smaller ones), it’s too unwieldy to read in bed on, and it’s just hard to move around like I do with my main one. I mostly use it to watch soccer games on while I’m making breakfast on weekends. I’d sell it, but we often have five kids at our house playing Minecraft or Roblox, and I would never hear the end of it if we were short one.

I think Apple did exactly the right thing by making the big one smaller and growing the screen size of the small one. I don’t think it will, but I really want the new big one to work for me. The thing I miss most about my desktop is the big screen. I want more space, bigger screens, multiple of them. I had two screens on every one of my computers starting in 1998, until I got this 27" iMac - the screen is finally big enough, and managing windows on multiple monitors on a Mac was just not worth it.

So, I got the big one to try it out. I bought it just before heading out to visit my family for the holidays. I left my smaller iPad pro at home, to force me to use this for everything, including reading books in bed.

I returned it on the 14th day.

I loved it. If I were still gainfully employed, I would have kept it. I’m having to optimize a lot for lack of income right now, and that goes big time into my decision. Even without that constraint, a lot is riding on iOS 13 to deliver real improvements. I’m expecting to be disappointed.

The reality is, the device is too similar to the two I already have. When I was less money constrained, it made sense to take every incremental upgrade. Today it does not.

For all my lack of keeping it, though, I think it’s worth sharing my experience. I think it’s enough different from others that it stretches the tapestry a bit.

The bigger one is enough smaller that it really does feel different. I could see myself traveling with just that, no smaller one - I just did for ten days. But I would have to replace the bag I have carried for years. A bigger bag would mean I’d pack more, and be less happy. But honestly, I think it would be worth it. I could consolidate to just one iPad, mostly portable but big enough to be more productive. I would love that.

One area performance was immediately obvious was loading photos. One of the things I love most about the iPad Pro compared to other iPads is just how fast it downloads from SD cards. last summer I took more than 6000 (yes, you read that right) photos, mostly on my Fuji XT-2, and processed them all on my iPad. The connection on the Pro is waaaaay faster than on the normal devices, and it makes a huge difference. The new one seems to download the photos even faster, so fast the thumbnails are shown even more slowly than the data makes it onto the device.

That being said, most of the speed doesn’t matter that much to me right now. I’m typing this on a 12.9" that’s almost three years old, and I suffer through the app reloads and web page refreshes that the new one did not force on me. But it’s a pretty minor sacrifice for what I do, which is mostly reading and writing.

One of the biggest features in this new one was a mixed bag. I love having Face ID. Sometimes. Apple stubbornly insists this is a portrait device. That’s wrong for the smaller device usually, but always for the big one. Like, literally, I never use it in portrait mode. I know some do, in a stand or something. I don’t. That poor decision by Apple compromises Face ID so badly that I think they’ll move the camera in the next release. Here’s why:

I’m right handed, so I use my right index finger for most touch interactions. This leaves my left hand to hold the device, move it around, etc. And when I do that, where am I holding it? Right over the camera.

Pair that with the fact that Face ID is built to be used less than two feet from your face, and it’s a bad setup. I am sitting on my recliner in my living room, and every time I use the device here, it would say, “Face too far away”. I grab it with my left hand to move it closer, and now I’ve got the camera covered.

When I got the iPhone X, it was a magical experience. I just did not notice Face ID. On the iPad Pro, I’m getting a constant “You’re holding it wrong” experience instead. I’m having to babysit how I log in or authenticate, and have constant friction. Again, all because Apple is wrong about how their customers use this device.

The other big feature is the new pencil. I would use this one more than the old one, but not a lot. I basically only ever use them when taking notes in meetings. That was much more important years ago, less so now, but it’s still not that useful for how I work. Most of my text apps don’t support it (e.g., the app I’m writing this in, Ulysses), so any notes get sequestered in Apple Notes, which is a consumer app that fails quickly for me when asked to do complex information management. I need complex folders, with PDFs sitting next to notes and text files. I mean, duh, I want to organize by content subject, not content type. Plus my handwriting is illegible. So I agree the pencil setup is better, but that’s more a statement of how bad it was than how clever or great it is now. I know this matters a lot to some, just not that much to me.

The larger screen really is better. I don’t do “multitasking”, but I often have two apps on screen. E.g., when I process email, I almost always need to look at my calendar. With the bigger screen I can have my calendar in a small window, showing daily view, and it works great. I can only do this on my small device if I squint a lot. Being in my 40s is awesome. (It’s not all work; I also often have Destiny Item Manager and Discord open at the same time.) Again, note, this is about allowing me to get all the apps for one task on a screen. The computer is multitasking, I am not.

The new keyboard folio is pretentiously named, and such a bad wrapper for such a beautiful device that I’m embarrassed to touch or see it. I think technically the first case for the first iPad might have been worse, but wow that’s a low bar. So I have three color choices for my $1500 device, but I have to wrap them all in a slate-colored piece of vinyl? Shameful.

I guess the new setup is better. I definitely love having two angles, and it’s certainly less confusing for others to use the device. It’s a bit more disorienting for this expert user, though. I never got lost on my old iPad, but this one is sufficiently featureless that I’m always struggling to hold it in just the right way when opening it. Where’s the hinge? What corner does the camera go in? I frequently felt like I was studying a foreign object rather than using a well-known device. It needs to be far more obvious how to grab it, how to open it. The asymmetry of the old one was ugly, but you would never be confused about where the hinge is, or the bottom, or anything else. And the keyboard being exposed on the back is just a mess. It gets filthy, that filth passes to the screen, etc. Yuck.

That being said, the actual keyboard bit is better. I am typing this on the old one, on my lap, so clearly that was never a problem for me, as it apparently was for others. But the new one is more rigid, and the actual typing seems better. I mean, not good compared to my mechanical keyboards, but better.

So for this one, I’m calling a pencil: Wow the last one was really really bad. This one’s a bit better, so it’s only really bad. Unlike the pencil it’s a real downgrade in orienting yourself on the device when you first pick it up. The materials and handling issues guarantee no better than a middling grade.

I like smaller bezels and the new form factor, but honestly none of that matters to me except for how it makes the device smaller. Yes, Apple has a knack for industrial design that immediately makes everything that came before seem antiquated, but I’ll suffer through somehow. My car is six years old. I’ll be ok. I’ll just start calling my old devices dadcore.

Conclusion

It often seems that Apple’s industrial designers are their favorite kid, and the software designers are only there because someone has to fill the machines with stuff. Jony Ive gets to lovingly expound from his featureless white room on the physical bits, but, ah, not so much on what it’s like to use it for anything other than a dinner plate. That’s someone else’s job, someone else’s love.

I don’t think this is “new Apple”. Holy cow I hated early releases of OS X. Yes, it’s far more important than my interfaces be lickable than usable. Of course.

Apple’s operating systems usually do have a much user experience than others. But, ah, you’re comparing yourself to XWindows, which still can’t automatically detect an external monitor2, and Windows, which is a clean-room copy of MacOS done by aliens. The competition isn’t exactly fierce.

After college, I switched from MacOS to BeOS. I loved that OS. There was so much forward thinking in it, and there was a real conversation about what usability really meant, with a close connection between the people building it, developing for it, and using it. When it went away, I had no real choice but to switch to Linux. Literally every year I cycled through all of the distros in hopes of finding one that didn’t require me to hand-maintain my X.org config to support two monitors, but always ended up back on Debian, because at least its packaging was sane.

I finally switched to Mac when I realized: Once a year, I spend a week being livid, utterly pissed, bright red and burning hot, at Apple, all their products, and how they seem to just not like or trust their customers.3 But I spent an hour every day feeling like that about Linux. I eventually concluded I’d rather compartmentalize all of that into one chunk than spread it evenly throughout my life.

So yeah, I love my Apple devices, but, like, only compared to everything else. I hate software, but I’m pragmatic.

With that as a preface, here is the most accurate, but also most damning, review I can give for these new iPads:

They are a stunning implementation of the wrong thing.

The easiest way to see this is looking at the Apple logo on the back of the iPad. If you use the new keyboard, it’s covered in shame, but on my existing devices, it’s either hidden or sideways. If I am not using the keyboard, it’s wrapped around hiding the logo, but if I am using it, then I’m in landscape, and the logo is on its side.

The crazy thing is that Apple already learned this lesson! They used to ship their laptops with the Apple logo upside down. Or rather, it was right side up when just sitting there, but not when you actually used it.

Look, I don’t care about the logo. It wasn’t my blind spot that led to this.

What I care about is what it means that Jony Ive, Tim Cook, and all of the other leadership aren’t seeing these sideways logos every day, and tearing their hair out.

I’m trying to imagine an exec meeting there, with fifteen Apple logos sideways around the room, and everyone just shrugging. I can’t. Someone has to notice, be pissed off, right?

I can only conclude they don’t use these devices the way I do, and that causes me some despair. They still have a long road to walk. They’ll get there. But not soon.

The first thing I do every morning is turn off rotation lock, and enabling it is the last thing I do every night. I only need it enable when reading it bed, and the rest of the time I want to easily switch back and forth. This little bit of software friction cuts my usage of the keyboard by like 50%. One of the best things about using the big iPad is it’s too big to read in portrait, so this problem goes away.

A teeny software change could just ignore rotation lock when the keyboard is attached.

That software change would have happened ages ago if the people building these products used them anything like how I do.

Since they obviously don’t, I am not optimistic they’re going to make the right fixes.

Yes, there are a bunch of features they should add. But it’s more important they make a psychological shift in what this thing is for.

This device does give me some bit of hope. Even they can’t ignore the debacle that is Face ID with these things in landscape. That will push them to reorient.

Until then, you’ll just have to hide your sideways logo. But I’ll know it’s there.

  1. Page up/down aren’t scrolling; most apps handle them poorly.
  2. I’ve no idea if this is true. But it was true last time I checked, and that time was in the 21st century, so it’s still embarrassing.
  3. This was more so at the time, around 2007, then now.

We Were Promised Flying Cars and Five Hour Work Weeks



Work is not a zero-sum game

Image courtesy of Clem Onojeghuo

Remember those stories from a few decades ago, about how improvements in productivity and automation would mean that we’d only be working 5 hours a week by now? They seem as fanciful, and predictive, as The Jetsons.

It’s almost a punch-line now, because many actually work more hours today than back then. How could they have been so stupid?

Of course there is actually a lot baked into the fact that higher productivity has not reduced hours worked (nor, it turns out, has it raised wages for the bottom 50% of earners in the last three decades, quite contrary to the previous, oh, 200 years). But a big part of why that prediction seems so silly now is it included an implicit assumption: That the work we’d be doing today is pretty much the same as what we did then. You know, before computers.

And I don’t mean, they could not foresee how much time we’d waste on social media. Their primary mistake was not thinking about how we’d use the space created by greater productivity.

We’ve known for centuries that increased efficiency results in increased consumption - we keep improving fuel efficiency, yet we’re consuming more gas than ever. Why?

We also know that expanding a freeway has never reduced traffic congestion. It has the same cause.

Induced demand. People who would not have driven with only two lanes, because of all the traffic, will now drive if there are four lanes. Trips you would not have taken because of the gas cost now become affordable and reasonable.

If your goal was to get more people driving, and maybe get the resulting increase in economic activity, then I suppose you got what you wanted. But if you were trying to reduce traffic - which is why most people say they want more freeways - then you’ve failed. If anything, you made it worse, because now twice the number of people are stuck in traffic. You didn’t reduce the problem, you just spread it around.

Demand is induced in many other areas. I grew up remodeling houses with my dad and got to see the impact of pneumatic nail guns and paint sprayers, which automated a huge chunk of how we’d spent our days. Of course, we didn’t use that newly free time to sit around, we changed our behavior: We did higher quality work, we finished jobs faster so got more done in a year, and we lowered prices.

I ran into this perception conflict all the time as I was building Puppet. I’d say I was building automation for the data center, and salespeople and execs would say, “Oh, so you can fire sysadmins!” I don’t know what they had against operations teams, but no, I would respond: I can give you a choice between reduced cost at the same service level (i.e., you fire people), or keep costs the same but increase service quality.

“Wait, that’s an option?!” Without higher level tools like Puppet, people had no idea how to increase service quality. Cost was their only dial, so they focused on that, even if it made no sense. Once I gave them other choices, of course they wanted better quality.

So where success in 1999 was shipping twice a year, and not going down, like, that often, now success is shipping multiple times a day and never appearing down to your customers. The standards have changed entirely, and that change was made possible mostly through automation. You can bet Netflix doesn’t become the new standard for infrastructure hotness using the bad old manual practices of the 90s.

You might say, no, people’s standards changed and that’s what motivated them to invest in automation, but you would be wrong. They always wanted higher quality. They always wanted better service. They just felt they had no choice but to accept the status quo, until we showed them other options.

I’m not saying automation never destroys jobs, never reduces the amount of work to be done in an area. But it’s by no means the default result.

The first impact of automation is to increase quality. I felt this myself, building houses. The main reason I’m no longer a carpenter is because of how incompetent I was at setting trim nails. You drive the nail most of the way into the wood1, then use a small punch to recess it. You cover that one little hole in spackle, and no one can tell. Unless you’re me. When I do it, I make a little sunflower, with a hole in the middle and holes all around in a circle, because I’m just that good at letting the punch head slide off the nail, into the wood. If we’d had the trim nailers that exist now, even I could have done a decent job. That kind of success might not have driven me out of the industry and into the welcoming arms of computers. I’m not a lot better typist, but the delete key does wonders for my self-confidence.

And let’s be honest about what we’re automating: It’s literally the most boring and least useful work we do. I wasn’t exactly high skilled labor, but I assure you there were more valuable things for me to do than try to set a nail while on my knees, bent over to the base molding. As a SysAdmin, yeah, my bosses thought my job was typing the same command 1000 times a day, but we can look back now and see that definition actually got in the way of the work, rather than being it. We had much more important stuff to do. Or at least, I did. Not sure about the bosses.

If we were all willing to drive cars from the 70s, while living in houses from the 70s (oh god the colors), using computers from the 70s (all three of them), watching channels from the 70s (all three of them), then yeah, maybe we could also work 5 hours a week.

But we all know what we’d do with the spare time: We’d make more work.

You’d do something silly, like write a book. And obviously, most of those books would be junk, but enough would be good that it would become someone’s job. And maybe the other writers didn’t actually have a knack for writing, but found they could be great at helping other writers. Oops, now you’re an editor, or a publisher. And now you’re working more than five hours a week again!

Stupid entrepreneurship.

Or maybe you don’t want to be a writer, you just hate Avocado Green enough to do something different with your kitchen. Oops, now your friends want the same thing, and you’re an interior designer.

Or maybe you realize that the gas-guzzling death-traps we all drive in are insane, and you figure out some way to start bringing those sweet little rides over from Japan. You know, just to fill the time. Because you can only consume so much of your day watching three channels (and remember, no ESPN in this scenario).

You’re not the only one that’s bored. Everyone else has more time, and a need to fill it. They can spend the effort to become experts in watches, furniture, bicycles, hiking, boating, economics, philosophy, or any number of other areas. And we all know the main outcomes of expertise, beyond insufferable newsletters: Demand for more specialized stuff, or enough disgust at the lack of it that you’ll just do it your darn self.

Some number of us won’t do the work, but we still want more, because why else would I have read three books on horology? It only takes a few people to step in to fill that demand, and suddenly your time is taken up.

And of course, if you want to buy that fancy Patek Philippe to pass on to your kid, you probably need to work a few more hours than the minimum.

So now you know why we don’t work five hours a week, and hopefully you have a little more confidence that automation will generally be good, not bad. It’ll create more entrepreneurs, raise wages, increase quality, and reduce cost. Not every time, but most times.

It doesn’t explain why those prognosticators in the 70s were so silly, but, well, I bet it wasn’t the worst decision they made that decade.

  1. 16oz Estwing finish head with a curved claw, natch.

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