How Important Is Instant

September 27, 2019
2 min read

As every company in the world and then some think that creating streaming service is easy you just need some content, I think they forget a couple of very important aspects of the successful service that are not trivial to implement.

The human brain perceives anything less than 250 milliseconds as instant. So when making Spotify, the CEO and founder Daniel Ek wanted the service to feel instant to make an illusion that every single song is right there on the users hard drive.

“We spent an insane amount of time focusing on latency when no

one cared because we were hell bent on making it feel like you had all

the world’s music on your hard drive. Obsessing over small details can

sometimes make all the difference. That’s what I believe is the biggest

misunderstanding about the minimum viable product concept. That is the V

in the MVP.” – Daniel Ek

When creating Evernote, Libin believed that responsiveness is crucial to the app experience and there couldn’t be any delay between searching for something and results popping up, so Evernote stored everything locally on the hard drive (although it was a right incentive, the implementation was bad, but it is different point).

The same point goes for Netflix, you’ve probably experienced it, when you start watching a movie or a TV show, press play and it starts playing immediately. Especially if it is something new and popular. That is because Netflix partners with ISPs and deploys appliances with the most popular content right to them, that way, when you are watching the newest Netflix original that Netflix heavily pushes, you might be streaming it not from Netflix itself, but from your ISP. And by the way, Netflix doesn’t charge the IPSs at all, so they have only technical or legal requirements to fill.

That is why Netflix has a big advantage over other streaming services, this is an expertise you gather over the years and understanding of your customers, you get only by collecting watching data. That way Netflix can predict what will people in certain regions watch and preload the appliances with the most relevant content.

You may not even realize, but you notice little hiccups in the apps you use, the instant is very important in the user experience.

Why So Many Apps Are Asking to Use Bluetooth

September 24, 2019
2 min read

Privacy became somewhat of a theme here, so continuing on this subject – with the release of iOS 13, a lot of apps are asking for the permission to use Bluetooth. Among them are Netflix, YouTube, Waze, Spotify and of course Facebook.

When it asks for the permission, in the little explanation there is it usually tells, that it will help connecting to other Bluetooth devices. Especially with media apps, users could think, that it is necessary to listen through Bluetooth headphones or speakers, but it has nothing to do with that.

Developers have access to those via other means and don’t need permissions for those. The real reason they ask for Bluetooth is location tracking. Using the Bluetooth and WiFi devices around you, app can figure out your location pretty accurately.

This has been happening for quite some time, but only this year Apple added the ability to disallow the permission. It probably tells you something that a lot of developers pulled this functionality from their apps during beta process.

The one legitimate use I did find, was for navigation apps, like Waze. They use Bluetooth in tunnels to navigate you where there is no GPS and mobile signal. But if like me, you live in a place without any tunnels even in farther proximity, you can safely deny the prompt.

Subscription Fatigue

September 20, 2019
2 min read

Millennials invented cable! This is one of the better memes in the long time, but it works so well. I’ve been reading tech blogs for a very long time and couple of years ago one of the most popular themes was cable cutting. There was a lot of talk, how you can cut the cable, subscribe to a couple of services, buy antenna and save a lot of money.

For some time Netflix and Hulu (in the US) were the ones to have. There was a lot of content, some old, some new, some originals. Now, every company wants to build its own subscription service and charge for it about 10$ a month. And as this is the golden age of the TV you’ll want to watch them all. Subscribing to Netflix, Apple TV+ and Disney, for example, would be about 30$ per month. Add to it Apple Music or Spotify (that’s another 10$) and probably gaming service or two (Apple Arcade and PSN). 50$ and that’s not even trying. Want to watch Office next year – another service.

This all adds up very easily. Apps are implementing subscriptions more and more. Weather apps, Twitter clients, writing apps, Podcasts apps. Everything is a subscription.

For the video services, my plan would probably be keeping Netflix and adding one other services. The service I add will depend on the content it has. There is something new on Disney+? Subscribe for a month or two, until I watch it and something else pops up on another service.

When music streaming became a thing, it destroyed piracy in some markets, as it was much easier to pay and listen to all the music you want, without the need to download, clean meta-data, upload to the phone, etc. Now, with all those video services coming out, I have a feeling, piracy will again rise. You either look for it on some shady website, where it is all lumped together or you take your time to figure out which service it is on. Sure, something like Apple TV could help (app, not a device), but already not every streaming service is in there (and Netflix will never agree to be added).

I hope I’m wrong and those services will prosper and companies will have funds and willingness to produce more great shows.

Facebook And Location Tracking In iOS 13

September 19, 2019
2 min read

As we’ve seen last week with Spotify, the use of location tracking can be explained with business interest – they want users to stop abusing the Family Premium plan. What Facebook is doing after all the scandals it had with our data, is unexplainable.

In the recent Newsroom article titled “Understanding Updates to Your Device’s Location Settings”, the social network company explains how updates to Android and iOS will prevent them from abusing the constant location tracking.

Facebook is better with location. It powers features like check-ins and makes planning events easier. It helps improve ads and keep you and the Facebook community safe. Features like Find Wi-Fi and Nearby Friends use precise location even when you’re not using the app to make sure that alerts and tools are accurate and personalized for you.

Just read the fucking quote. Facebook tracking your location to keep you safe. How delirious are they? Article further explains, that now there will be the ability in OS to allow location sharing with the app only once and if the app is tracking your location in the background with the app closed, iOS will prompt you with notification, showing map of the location data and explanation why the app uses it (to keep you safe, of course).

This article shows how bad these changes are for Facebook. Right now location tracking is the best data they can get on users. Knowing where you’ve been can give a lot of insights. Which neighborhood do you live in, where do you work, which type of restaurants you go to, if you are sick, how often do you travel. All of this information can be gathered using the background location tracking, without users even noticing.

I’m glad both Google and Apple are making changes to the location tracking in theirs OS’s. I’m sure Facebook will find a way to track it anyway, they say so in the article:

We may still understand your location using things like check-ins, events and information about your internet connection.

This article shows how out of touch Facebook is, but the more scary thing is – people believe them. I hope those changes will educate people more on the type of data they are sending to those companies.

Spotify Now Requiring Users to Share Location Data to Prevent Abuse of Family Plan

September 16, 2019
2 min read

As spotted by CNET, Spotify updated its terms and conditions for Premium Family subscribers, where it now says, that users have to provide location data “from time to time” to ensure that plan members are actually living at the same address.

What is interesting, Spotify tried to do the same thing one year ago, but was met with such a backlash that it had to stop, until now, when they just added this to the terms and conditions.

Although in the description of the Family plan it specifies that plan members should be ‘members of the same household’, people take the name of the plan quite literally and point out that it is not a prerequisite for being a family to live under the same roof.

This is one of those things, where legitimate users have to suffer because of the abusers. In the reports about the news it is mentioned that friends use the feature to pay less ($15 per month divided by six users is just $2.50), but groups all over the internet and social networks are full of messages where people are looking for “family members” to share the plan with. Most of them don’t even know each other.

Still, even if I understand what Spotify tries to prevent, this is the reason to leave the service. Today location data is a king and providing it to the music service is just stupid. Sure they say that they will delete location data right away, but who believes them anymore? The price of not deleting and apologizing later is much lower than what they can get selling or using the data.

I’ve been thinking recently about switching as everyone is so positive about recommendation engine (didn’t work for me previously), but after that I’m definitely staying on Apple Music with my Family Plan.

Apple Music vs Spotify

August 22, 2018
3 min read

A couple of years ago when it was hard to find streaming music service in Latvia, I’ve had to learn what is proxy server and how to mask that you are in another country (Sweden if I remember correctly), to try Spotify. It wasn’t a great experience, I’ve had data cap on my phone, so I’ve stopped using it, but I’ve realised – for better or for worse, it is the future of music. Then Rdio and Spotify came to Latvia, almost at the same time. I’ve used Rdio for a long time until switching to Spotify and sticking with it for years. 

Enter Apple Music. I’ve tried the service when it first got announced and didn’t care for it. Spotify was a superior product in my opinion, so after the 3-month trial ended, I’ve cancelled my subscription.

Lately, though, I’ve realised there are a couple of things that drove me away from using Spotify and couple of months ago, I’ve become Apple Music subscriber.

I still like the Spotify design, app icon and interface better, it works closer to how I imagine the streaming music service should work, but there are two biggest things Spotify lacks, which Apple Music has.

First, Apple Music has Russian hand-picked playlists. Russian is my native language, so this is a big feature for me. There are playlists for different genres and general Top for songs in Russian. Spotify lacks it, there is Russian music, but Apple Music just has more of it.

Second, also very big issue, for Spotify Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian are the same, or so it seems. If I listen to one song in Latvian it will recommend me songs in Lithuanian and Estonian (languages I don’t speak and I’m not interested in music in those languages). And I don’t know if I press «Don’t like» button on songs in Lithuanian, will it also show me fewer songs in Latvian? Apple Music doesn’t have this problem. It recommends me a couple of Latvian artists or songs every now and then and mostly I’m glad it does.

Oh, and I didn’t mention Siri, with one of the greatest features – «Hey Siri, play something». It’s amazing how well it works.

It could change in the nearest future, there is a big competition between Spotify and Apple Music, which is good for the consumers, but for now, I’ll stick with Apple Music and see how it goes.

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. 

Spotify’s biggest redesign ever brings long-awaited Collection view

April 9, 2014
1 min read

Spotify’s biggest redesign ever brings long-awaited Collection view

Unfortunately, without its famous yellow stars (and with the addition of a few prominent design cues), the app looks more than ever like a darker shade of chief competitor Rdio — but that might not be such a bad thing for Spotify.

I finally got the update and it messes up with the way I interact with an app. I’ve left Rdio because of all those features. I don’t need collections. I was syncing Starred playlist for offline listening on a phone and it was very easy to add a song to that playlist. Now I have to add it to my Collection and then to a playlist for sync? Not great at all. 

What to listen to while running

March 17, 2014
2 min read

In my recent post I’ve wrote about choosing activity tracking app. After that there is even more important and difficult choice – what to listen to. Running without headphones is not an option. I get borred pretty fast and start thinking about how hard it is to run early on. Here are my thoughts about enterntaining yourself while running.

Running with music

About a year ago I completely ditched iTunes and started listening to music only on Spotify. I have Starred playlist with about 700-800 songs, which get cached on my laptop and smartphone. Being lazy person that I am, I didn’t go through this playlist looking for perfect songs for running. Instead I’ve found two playlists [1] and [2], that were a good fit for my tempo.
My first couple of runs were pretty quick. I’ve run a little more than 2km, so listening to music was enjoyable. Then, as my runs got longer, music started to get boring after about 4th song and it does a bad job blocking those “I can’t! I want to stop!” thoughts.

Podcasts

My second choice was – podcasts. I’ve tried many of them, some work, some don’t. They are just too slow and mess up your tempo, but you can find something that will fit you. Looking for a good one in your podcast listening app takes couple of minutes, and then there are ads. If you listen to podcasts, there is a good chance you’ve heard Squarespace ad hundreds of times. Chance are you skip ads and it’s not easy done while running. That means you have to look for a podcast, which doesn’t mess up your tempo, is long enough and doesn’t have ads, easier said than done.

My last choice – audiobooks

As with podcasts, you have to find the right one. Books, though, are much longer than a podcast, which means you can listen to one book for a week or two. This was the last thing I’ve tried and I stuck with it. If it’s an interesting book, you forget about the fact that you are running. Often I get surprised by the distance I’ve run without even noticing.