X

January 2, 2018
4 min read

There is no shortage of reviews of the iPhone X, some very traditional (loved how The Verge portrayed Face ID working), some looking in the future, others a bit in the past. Now that I’ve had my iPhone X for almost two months, I have some short thoughts I’ve wanted to share.

When Apple presented the iPhone I didn’t like the notch, I thought the screen was good, not something groundbreaking and liked the camera improvements a lot (designated chip for the photo processing and OIS on both cameras were both great additions). I’ve had my iPhone 7 and was ready to keep it for another year, but I was reading more about it and looking at pictures and videos, so my wife persuaded me to order one. And here I was on day one of the sales with the brand new iPhone X.

I immediately fell in love with the X. First time I’ve set up Face ID, it looked like magic and I’ve had a smile on my face just from unlocking the phone, it still holds up, I think Face ID is great, except in the morning, when it doesn’t recognise my sleepy face. The phone itself, I loved the Plus size phones (it was when Apple introduced big screens, I’ve made a switch back from Android), but the X lies perfectly in the hand and the weight of it, makes it feel substantial and even luxury. I love how black it is, love how the edges look and feel, how it’s less slippery than 7 Plus (I’ve had matte black finish). 

The home indicator is weird for about five minutes, after that it just feels natural, you mostly wish it wasn’t there all the time, gestures are easy to learn and discover. The one thing that is borderline unusable is Control Centre, I think Apple will change the position of it in one of the next versions of iOS, but as of now, I’ve noticed how I almost don’t use the Control Centre anymore.
The screen is gorgeous, you don’t notice the notch while using it, because you mostly look at the centre of the screen, it is considerably worse for video watching than the Plus sized phone, because both choices – embracing the notch or letterboxing the videos don’t look good – one hides some part of the picture and another one makes videos small.

As this new iPhone is all glass, I’m constantly worrying that I might shatter it and got Apple Leather Case as a present, but I still prefer to use it case-less, not only because it feels great in the hand, but because the screen looks better if there is no frame of the case around it. This may sound silly, but the screen just looks better when the iPhone is naked.

When Samsung first introduced the Galaxy S8 and I’ve seen Casey Neistat review of it, I’ve tweeted how iPhone looked dated compared to it. 

iPhone looks dated as fuck, especially in this shot. pic.twitter.com/mdUVGWafRG

Now, with the iPhone X, I think Apple is ahead, the notch is clearly the great idea, considering choices. It looks more like an all-screen front than Samsung and it looks very recognisable, while Samsung looks like a very generic Android phone (thank god there is no space to put Samsung logo on the front of the device anymore).

In my opinion, iPhone X is a great device, showing us where the future of smartphones is heading. It’s very pricey, you can buy a MacBook for the same price, but you’ll just have to consider, how much the phone is worth to you, I think most people use phone considerably more than a laptop nowadays.

In the loop: Jony Ive on Apple’s new HQ and the disappearing iPhone

November 14, 2017
2 min read

In the loop: Jony Ive on Apple’s new HQ and the disappearing iPhone

Great article in the Wallpaper* magazine. Stunning photos of the Apple Park, you should really see them on the best screen you have. 

I’ve always been fascinated by these products that are more general purpose. What I think is remarkable about the iPhone X is that its functionality is so determined by software. And because of the fluid nature of software, this product is going to change and evolve. In 12 months’ time, this object will be able to do things that it can’t now. I think that is extraordinary. I think we will look back on it and see it as a very significant point in terms of the products we have been developing.

This quote by Jony Ive could be very promising or completely uninteresting – it could probably mean that Apple is working on the new design in iOS 12 which takes into the consideration the OLED screen of the iPhone X, for example, Dark Mode. It could also mean, Apple is just working on the new iOS 12 which will add features to the old phones like it always does.

I hope it is the former.

Apple Watch: My Experience

November 12, 2017
5 min read

When Apple Watch first came out, there was not a lot of reasons to buy one in Latvia – we don’t have Apple Pay, there were not a lot of apps for the Watch – we don’t have Uber, most of our homes are not smart and we still go to the stores to buy groceries instead of them being delivered to our houses. That’s probably why local retailers still don’t sell Apple Watches here (even official Apple resellers). The one I’ve found a month ago was the carrier selling 38mm Apple Watch Series 0 for about 460$ (yes, in 2017).

So when we were travelling to New York City this September, as per tradition – we’ve gone to the Apple Store (this time to the Grand Central), I’ve walked around and came right to the table with all the watches and here it was – 42mm Apple Watch Series 3, a couple of question to the employee, tap of the credit card, typing my e-mail and 10 minutes later I was out of the store with my first smartwatch. I’ve got GPS only version, as again, cellular doesn’t make much sense in Latvia, as carriers don’t support those and I’m not sure they will in pretty long time.

Activity tracking
Some time ago I was reading a couple of articles saying how Apple Watch helped them be more active and even lose some weight, for example, Jim Dalrymple and his weight loss story, I was very skeptical. I’ve had Fitbit before counting my steps and it wasn’t motivating me a bit, I’ve just tracked steps without really going out of my way to reach the goal. In a couple of months, I’ve lost my Fitbit and never got a replacement.
But with Apple Watch it was very different, right from the first day I was closing all three rings and it somehow mattered. First, it was easy, as I was in New York City for the first time, so 2 out of 3 rings were usually closed at about lunchtime, but at home, it got a bit harder, I’ve had to make a bit of an effort to close those rings. Now, I try to finish my lunch early, to have time for a walk and on some days with my wife we «walk the Watch».
Through the day, the Watch keeps reminding me to stand and I’ve got a habit to go and have a glass of water, which helps again.
So far I’ve lost 4kg in about one and a half week (change in a diet also helped) and had my first perfect month in October.

Notifications
I’ve long had a thought that Apple was destroying Notifications Centre when they’ve removed the grouping by an app, it became impossible to use the Notifications Centre for me and I’ve mostly relied on the icon badges all over the home screen, which, as you can imagine, is not very good solution. Just after getting the Apple Watch notifications became a bit more useful. They all appear on my wrist first and I can manage them from the watch, leaving some of them to see on the phone and replying to others using dictation, which became pretty good, even in Russian. Having my watch buzz every time I receive a notification, also helped find the ones I don’t need and turn them off.

This is just one of the examples how Apple rewards you for being all in in the ecosystem. Like how Apple Watch can unlock your Mac, for example, which at first was hard to get used to, because I have developed a habit of opening the lid and starting typing first character of the password right away which canceled unlocking with the Watch, but after a couple of days I’ve got used to the automatic unlock.
The second cool thing was when my phone was charging in the bedroom and I was in the other room, I’ve put my Airpods in the ears, opened Overcast watch app, chose an episode and started playing the podcast from my phone. It felt really nice.

Time
This is a bit silly and a bit surprising, but probably the worst thing about Apple Watch is how bad it is at telling time. I’m not saying it tells the wrong time, far from it, as far as I’ve read it is one of the most precise time peaces, but having to raise the wrist to see time is pretty bad. I’m one of the rare people who was wearing a watch before getting smart one and was very used to just glancing at my wrist to see the time, now I can’t do that. I have to flick the wrist every time I want to see what time it is, which, while working, is not a good experience.
Taking into the consideration that on a normal day, I have about 65% battery power left and Apple Watch having an OLED display, I think it is possible for it to have always on time. It could be a feature off by default, but I would love to have it as an option.

After having a watch for a little more than a month, I can definitely tell that I like it very much and will continue to wear it daily. I’m still closing all three rings every single day and trying to raise my Move goal in the beginning of every weak even if by just a bit. It is a solid product with the bright future ahead of it. I’m not seeing a lot of them in Latvia, but that’s probably because you have to go out of your way to find one, but when we were in NYC I was shocked to see so many of them on people wrists and now I can see why.

Samsung Galaxy S8

March 29, 2017
1 min read

I was never a fan of Samsung phones, but after quick glance at some first looks of the new phones, there are a couple of positive thoughts about the device. 

1. I think even John Gruber will agree – FINALLY there is no space on the front of the device to put the stupid SAMSUNG logo, I hope most remember without constant reminders what phone they use. 

2. There was one shot in the Casey Neistat’s video for which I’ve paused, took screenshot and looked at it for about a minute.

Here, an iPhone looks dated. This edge to edge screen next to the iPhone looks like the first iPhone looked next to the smartphones with buttons. This is clearly the way forward. 

Very much looking forward to see what Apple will show at it’s September event. iOS and the edge-to-edge display would be instabuy!

2016-2017

January 1, 2017
1 min read

If you are using any social network you would know, people associate 2016 with everything bad that happened. All the celebrities that died, terrorism, brexit and even Trump.
For me, in a lot of ways, 2016 was a great year. A lot has happened, good and bad, but I am happy with where I am.
There are a lot of plans for 2017 and some of them involve this blog. I’ve subscribed to a lot of blogs in 2016, after getting tired of all the “tech news” I’m much more interested in stories and opinions.
I hope to make 2017 even better than 2016. And will see what this year will bring us.

iOS 10

September 19, 2016
2 min read

Probably the biggest change in the iOS 10 for me is lock screen and all that’s changed about the locked phone. Only after updating did I notice, that I had a few habits that are hard to change. One of them is putting my finger on the Sleep/Awake button while getting the phone out of the pocket and pressing the button to see the lock screen as I look at the phone. What happens now, is I get the phone out of the pocket, it automatically turns on, because of the Rise to wake feature and I turn the display off, by pressing the Sleep button, so then I need to wake the phone, by pressing Home or Sleep button. I have mostly changed the habit in less than a week of using the iOS 10, but there are those little things you don’t notice while using the phone.

Also, the big change — sounds. I’ve always been in love with Windows Phone keyboard sounds. When I’ve had Android phone, I was looking for a keyboard, that made sounds similar to WP. Now on iOS it comes pretty close. I love those new sounds. Actually, I’ve had my phones muted for about two years and now more and more I keep turning the sounds on, just to listen to the keyboard sounds. 

This year Apple made a very solid update to the operating system. It totally feels like a new phone after installing iOS 10. Love all the changes introduced. 

Hockey and Today Widgets

May 24, 2016
2 min read

IIHF World Championship is over and I’ve already deleted the official app, but there is one thing that stays and that’s the habit of using Today widgets. It was so easy to look up scores in Notifications center and not by opening an app that it got me thinking – maybe other widgets can be useful too. 

Right now I’m trying to better understand which widgets I would like to use, so I add/remove one every couple of days and see which ones stick with me. Excluding IIHF Today there are currently three other widgets – MyFitnessPal to quickly glance at my remaining calories (I’ll post about my diet and logging food later), CoinKeeper – for quickly adding expenses and I’m experimenting with using different Weather app instead of default one, so the last widget is WU Weather. 

I couldn’t find much use for widgets for half a year I use iPhone, until I found one use case which was appealing enough for habit to stick. When I’ve used Android I’ve used widgets a lot, but those were on the home screen and it was easier, because they were always there, on iOS, you have to remember to go to Notification Center and then scroll to the side. I still think that widgets as they are implemented on Android make more sense, but iOS widgets are not as useless, as I thought before.

The Daily Show’s Head Writer on How the Muppets Lured Him to New York

March 22, 2015
1 min read

The Daily Show’s Head Writer on How the Muppets Lured Him to New York

I’m still not totally sure New York isn’t just a movie. Even after 15 years of near nonstop New Yorking, it still seems more filmic than real. Nothing I do in New York feels completely believable unless it reminds me of something I’ve seen someone do in New York in a movie. And even something as mundane as walking and talking becomes exciting when you see it in a movie. Especially something mundane like walking and talking.

For a long time, when someone would ask me where did I want to live, New York was my go-to answer, but I was always afraid I wouldn’t like it. This essay illustrates this point perfectly.

Windows Software

September 24, 2014
3 min read

Previously, in my days of (possible) piracy of everything, installing all the software after reinstalling Windows was a pain. You had to download the latest version of the program from the website or torrent tracker, you had to install every program by itself, if it was from torrent tracker, you had to apply some kind of crack or jump through the goops in order to make it work. Later, came one of the greatest tools ever – Ninite, you could choose programs you want to install and get this bundle of apps (only those, that were free, of course). You still had to install cracked apps separately, but it was much lesser pain.

Today I don’t have questionable software on my computer and this time I’ve decided to download programs only as I need them. That way I won’t have cluttered laptop right away and it’s pretty easy to download and install something if I need it. So, I wanted to take time and write about all those apps that allow me to do my work, study and helped me not to lose all the data.

Microsoft Office 2013. I’ve mentioned it in previous post about reinstalling Windows. This is a great piece of software. You can start using it even before it installed on your PC, streaming apps is a very cool idea. Also it comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage space, I’ll talk about that a bit later. And for the price I paid It’s almost free – 70€ for 4 years. The greatest deal.

Microsoft OneDrive. Let’s get all the Microsoft products right out of the way. I’ve used Dropbox for a long time and love the product. They have some very interesting features, like saving Screenshots. (Windows 8 also saves screenshots if you press Win+PrintScreen). Also it offers integration with all sorts of services, but since I’ve started using Office 2013, I’ve migrated all my documents to OneDrive, integration with Office makes using it a lot easier.

Dropbox. I’m using it for the photo backup. It would make more sense to use 1TB of OneDrive for that, but Dropbox works with photos so much better, especially automatic photo uploader on Android.

Evernote. This one is interesting. Like Dropbox, I’ve been a user of Evernote for a long time, but I still have trouble managing it. I can’t find the system that works for me. Mostly I’ve tried everything tied to Notebooks, I still have to try managing everything using tags or try to use Google Keep. I dump all the articles I find interesting there, but then rarely read them.

Spotify. After Spotify came to Latvia, it became the only place I listen to the music. I’ve had couple of albums bought in iTunes, but I don’t have iTunes installed on my laptop for a long time. I cache one big playlist to my laptop, so I have something to listen to at all times.

Chrome. I’ve tried to use the newest IE for a couple of weeks and really liked it, but the lack of extensions just kills it. So still using Chrome as my main browsers. Ones in a while, I try every other of big browsers, but nothing matches Chrome, unfortunately.

That’s all the software I’ve installed after installing new OS and this is mostly stuff I do use daily. There are probably other programs I’ll install later, but I use those rarely, comparing to the main ones. 

Installing Windows is such a pain

September 23, 2014
3 min read

In the previous post I’ve wrote about hardware side of things when your hard drive fails. It’s definitely not the greatest experience in the world, as you realize you’ve lost all of your data. Fortunately, we live in the world full of clouds and the data is mostly safe. All of the photos, work documents and files for school were backed up to some kind of cloud solution. I could instantly remember couple of files I’ve lost, but not anything important.

How do you return everything back to normal? If you didn’t have some kind of hard drive clone (and I didn’t), you start by installing OS. Here Microsoft doesn’t make it easy, at least for me. In Latvia, installing Windows for most of the people is easy, you just download the copy you want with some sort of “activation” and install it, easy enough. I’ve went the legitimate rout. I’ve bought my laptop with Windows 7 and when 8 came out I’ve paid what was small amount then (about 30€) for the update. It seemed like a great deal at the time.

When you try to start from scratch, as I did, you can’t just install Windows 8 from scratch using your key, because your key is not good enough, it supports only updating from previous version of Windows. That means, I had to install Windows 7 first and then update it to Windows 8. Fortunately, I didn’t have to install all the updates for Windows 7 and could just go straight to upgrade. In addition, it’s worth mentioning, thanks to the speed of the SSD, it takes far less time than it used to, to install the OS.

Windows 8 is with us for a long time already and so it got many updates and there are some drivers updates, that means you have to download and install, in my case, 140 updates, before you can upgrade to Windows 8.1. That takes a long time. Nevertheless, tens of minutes and two or three restarts later you are ready to download Windows 8.1 upgrade. I’ve went to Windows Store app, where the big tile was waiting for me, but when I clicked “Download” it just showed an error message, which said something about not being able to download the update right now. Not very useful, considering the true reason of the message was not entering the code for the 2 factor authentication. How someone supposed to just know that is beyond my understanding. I’ve downloaded and installed Windows 8.1 and thought I could start downloading apps I use, but not too fast. There are couple more updates about 200MB in size. Why can’t they include all of the updates in to Windows 8.1 upgrade?

After you have your OS running, everything else is easy enough. Kudos to Microsoft for the new Office, all I had to do is go to the website and click Download button and in about 10-20 minutes I’ve had full Office suit running on my laptop, ready for typing this complaint. Clicking the second button, I’ve deauthorized previous install. Office 2013 is truly an outstanding product.