The anti-upgrade, from Apple

A month elapses between posts, five days pass between tweets. Once again I find myself with nothing left to say - which doesn’t sound likely - or no time in which to say it, or perhaps I’ve once again forgotten how. I passed on the gift-wrapped opportunity to give the BBC a well-deserved kicking over the Newsnight debacle and have given my brain cells a well-deserved kicking instead; and all because the developer loves his WPF. Well maybe it’s too early to call it love, but there’s enough of a sense of how much there is to learn and how worthwhile it will be. My car, I wrote about my car, several paragraphs about my car and I have no interest in cars. My car has gone to the great big scrapheap in the sky for which I was paid a sum just short of a cheap tablet computer, or a fraction less than the cost of my daughter’s Christmas present.

Then just as I’m about to give up the ghost, Apple push me over the edge when I rather optimistically decide that, yes, I will update iTunes and I’ll update the firmware on an iPod Touch. What was I thinking? Logic suggested this way I might be able to run some of the newer apps. I was tired. It’s not something I’d normally attempt, especially on a device that’s three years old, which in technological terms is still three years old but to Apple is an opportunity for a good shunning.

I have two complaints; I’ll start with the minor first. If I have my device connected, you’d think when purchasing an app the store would be able to first detect whether the device is capable of running it; you’d be wrong. The tipping point however was finding that previously purchased apps won’t re-install on an iPod Touch with the updated OS because they now require an even newer version of the OS, one not available to your ancient device. Can you imagine the shit storm Microsoft would endure if an OS upgrade resulted in a third of people’s purchases no longer functioning? Apple doesn’t really care.

And that’s because of you since, thirdly - OK, three complaints - whilst this might be Apple’s fault, really it’s yours; maybe it’s not you, but statistically speaking there’s every chance it’s the person sat next to you. S/he’s the person who nodded approvingly when Tim Cook CEO issued his non-apology for the farce over Apple Maps; since it sounded vaguely like an apology that was all it took for some of their captive audience to express sympathy - yet it was something entirely avoidable and it happened for two reasons. Let’s not kid ourselves that Apple was in any way surprised over the inadequacy of their product. They upgraded their customers to Apple Maps because there’s a lot of money in controlling the map, and also because they don’t care, or at least they gambled correctly that they could get away with it.

They don’t care because they don’t have to. You see, you - or the person sat next to you - are equivalent to Ferris Bueller’s best friend Cameron, and Apple is like his hypothesised girlfriend. And Ferris was right to be concerned:

She won't respect him, 'cause you can't respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn't work.

For you

This gentle kiss, the slightest trace,
those tactile moments that lead to more.
I recollect desire, bound in memory,
ofttimes wistful though ne’er forlorn.

Wishing well emotion extant,
my verse unbundles, undone while
I think of passion once laid dormant
and it gives me cause to smile.

Quiche, through and through

It was a long week. Last Sunday I finally decided to fix the car which had been SORN’d for over three and a half years. I started by replacing the battery. For reasons that I’m not going to make clear as it would make me sound like an idiot, I’m curious as to how long a never-used battery lasts after having been bought. Is it I suspect, like a not-used-in-a-long-while battery, dead unless given a charge every now and then? Let’s pass on that, on Saturday I bought another battery, and on Sunday I took over two hours to remove the dead one in the car. On the VW Polo there’s a plastic casing inside which the battery sits that wasn’t quite as described by the Haynes manual my father helpfully bought me 18 months ago. Nevertheless I felt a misplaced sense of manly achievement, though this wasn’t enough to fix the car.

Three and a half years and I confess the main (only?) reason for this effort was the knowledge my Ford Puma - 117,000 miles on the clock with one not-so-careful owner - had about as much chance of passing its MOT as I have of reading The Busconductor Hines, which was Friday’s Kindle Daily Deal. This of course was a purchase with the noble purpose of understanding how the other half think (other readers that is) and at less than the cost of a prawn sandwich I couldn’t go wrong, though on reflection I should have bought the sandwich; given that it’s set in “Thatcher’s Britain” I only have myself to blame.

On Monday I called the RAC. My heroic and ultimately successful struggle with replacing the battery had not been enough; the engine turned as if from a slumber with no intention of waking up. It was time for the professionals. Mine spent hours in the rain with me watching him doing something with coils and spark plugs and fuses, several times he removed and replaced the engine cover - I didn’t know you could do that, I didn’t even know it was a cover - at one point he used a hair dryer and hit the base of the car with a screwdriver. Was an oxyacetylene torch involved? It may have been. Yet even an expert wasn’t enough; at a cost of £90 (since it had no MOT and therefore wasn’t covered) I had to have the car - the good car that is to replace my crappy car - towed to the garage.

To Rockhampton; a small village that can be reached along the back roads from my not so tiny town, there you will find Woodward Motors. An essential part of my motoring life for several years and the one on whom I was reasonably sure. It could be the fuel pump, was their guess when I handed over the keys, and a phone call the following day confirmed it to be the case; this, some rusted up brakes, a service and an MOT accounted for an impressively large bill, impressive for a VW Polo. I wasn’t impressed; I’d deserted the car and gotten my just desserts.

Flooding meant a delay of a few days; it wasn’t until Friday when I could pick up the car from a sand-bagged garage. I had only the car tax left which at ‘only’ £135 was cheaper than before. On the point of applying online, being prepared to wait a few more days before I could drive, I remembered something called a post office and thus only 15 minutes later I had a legal car, one I could drive once I get rid of the smell.

If car tax was the second, the first saving was insurance. A worthless car costs more to insure than one with value, this despite the insurer only replacing to the market value of the car. My father reminds me this is because I am seen as more likely to have an accident in a 1.7L Puma than I am a 1.2L Polo, though as anyone who’s seen me drive will know, I am no more likely to have an accident in one of those cars than I am the other. I can’t possibly be blamed for having been hit three times, though there was that one time I span off into a ditch. Oh, and the time I swiped the concrete pillar in the car park, accounting for a large dent over the rear wheel arch. Yours, for less than the cost of a cheap tablet computer. Though on reflection....

Continuing adventures

I’ve not been too productive when it comes to writing, but then I have an excuse; not so long ago, I started a new job. As befits a new job, at least one worth sticking with, there’s a level of tiredness from taking in all that’s new; that’s the attraction. A new language, a new subsystem for building the UI, a new model design pattern, it’s all good. Mind you the office is 170 miles away, which is why I work from home with an occasional one-day visit; that’s a long day; up before 5am, back home as late as 8pm. So the reading has faltered too.

I was on a roll; The Sense of An Ending, Waterland, The Mayor of Casterbridge and A Tale of Two Cities to name a few. I’ve started the long run-on sentences of All The Pretty Horses – thankfully I’m used to McCarthy’s play-by-his-own-rules punctuation - but it’s had to wait until a short break this week to give it its due. Before then, instead of useful activities such as practicing how to read and write, I found myself perturbed by the recent events in Emmerdale. How did their first ever music festival make a £0.5 million profit on those crowds? Oh, and somebody else was murdered. It’s enough to have you lying awake at night wondering whether the alphabet can be re-produced in a semi-recognisable format using only nine pixels; some companies spend millions producing ‘retina displays’ but I like to ‘think outside the box’. It must be the long hours.

Zombie apocalypse preparation update

“The best place to hide” I mused some time ago whilst waiting by the fountain in The Mall at Cribbs Causeway - where all the cool kids hang out - “the best place to hide in the event of a zombie apocalypse would be John Lewis”. A rather childish thought I realised on a subsequent visit to their top floor; whilst the escalators to the food hall are easily blocked off, I hadn’t taken account of the elevators. “Can zombies operate elevators?” I wondered. I still do, I can’t remember from The Walking Dead whether they can even use doors, but I think the thing is, with all those flailing arms someone - or rather something - is going to get through unless you lock it up/down.

And then there are the emergency exits. And staff access. We’re going to have to do something about that.

There were three prompts

This may be an indication of my short-attention span, but placeholder text used as the label has been bugging me for a while, and it seems to be getting more popular. I use it on the web version of this blog; the Search function in the top right uses a placeholder, though if you’re using Internet Explorer you won’t see anything unless it’s IE10. And if you’re using Firefox then older versions will result in the text clearing on focus, unlike Chrome (and presumably other WebKit browsers) where it only clears on user input.

Imagine however that all browsers implement HTML in a consistent manner and that there’s some placeholder text identifying the input that’s been designed to disappear on the text box receiving focus. Or imagine I’d used jQuery. For a single input field it’s a fair solution but for more than one it doesn’t work; I’ve found it niggling for something as simple as the usual three prompts (email, name and website) before adding a comment.

Proponents will point out the snapshot is unfair. In real life I’d be entering this information together; I’d know what I’d just clicked on. This might be true for some, it depends on the point at which your focus moves to the next field; is it before or after you click? For me it’s ‘after’, or would be if I used the mouse (or similar) to navigate the input. However, I use the keyboard and, I suspect like most who do, my focus doesn’t move until I tab away; hence my attention would only move to the next input field after it had already received focus, and lost its identifying label. Therefore if there is placeholder text it shouldn't clear until the input has content, though I'd question whether user content is an adequate identifier.

Materialistic wobbles

On Tuesday I caved. In the week in which the world updates their iPhone, I upgraded my Nokia... to another Nokia. This is my first smartphone and I chose not to follow the herd, or even the Android herd that copies follows it; at least that’s what I tell myself. From a distance I genuinely prefer Windows Phone to those two big hitters; so what if Microsoft supposedly makes more money from wielding its mighty patent sword at Android than it does from its own operating system - it has originality to commend it. But comparisons are unwise since the closest I’ve come to a Jesus phone is a three year old iPod Touch, though I did once hold a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Could this be a case of blissful ignorance? It matters not, as the main reason for my conversion was a £7.50/month tariff, cheaper than what I had been paying; this isn’t a materialistic wobble after all. It’s not an iPhone or top-of-the-range anything; it's more a bottom-of-the-range something that still manages to drag me into the modern world. I’m not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing. I suspect bad. I suspect I'll forgive myself. And reading of the misfortunes riddled in Apple Maps I confess to a certain schadenfreude since the pre-installed Nokia Maps on my Lumia knows exactly where I am - in my bedroom - useful that.