Month: February 2020

I learnt a couple days ago about Britain’s plans to advance the deadline to stop sales of petrol and diesel vehicles from 2040 to 2035. The article also mentions India’s own deadline of 2030.

As I read though the article, I realised how slowly the auto industry moves at a macro level. We are talking about fifteen years from today. Cars sold in 2005 aren’t that different from ones sold today. The car I drive today is the exact same model introduced in 2005. Today’s model, two generations after, is slightly roomier, slightly more powerful, slightly more fuel efficient,  and has a lot more electronics in it. But it’s not radically different.

Meanwhile the phones, computers, wearables we use today were probably unimaginable in 2005. The sophistication of software we use today (Photo editing, Maps, Uber, Zomato, Netflix, Slack, even Whatsapp) would not have been possible to imagine on mobile then. Nearly everything about information technology has been transformed during that period; comparatively very little in automotive technology has.

No wonder auto manufacturers are concerned and are complaining. If Norway, India, Britain actually meet their targets, the cars on the road then are unlikely to be from the manufacturers who make cars today. Massive disruption is afoot because the industry has just never gone through a major discontinuity and therefore has no idea how to retool itself quickly. Even the oil shock of the early 1970s, now almost fifty years old, has not led to any major lasting changes. 

Given all this, maybe Tesla’s stock price rise is justified. It is the only car company that’s got it together – manufacturing, software, infrastructure, distribution.

A person at a gathering today expressed wonder at how all of the products Google has made and the impact they’ve had on our lives has been underpinned by ads and billions of clicks.

The cynical view of the company is that it creates products with the sole intent of gathering more information about you and creating more destinations to serve you ads.

The more optimistic view is that Google  remains a company that seeks to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. And that they are thrilled that the success of ads from an early day has helped them with the cash to fund this mission. I would like to believe that this is how management thinks, despite the company’s growth over the past twenty years and the founders stepping back.

Over ten years ago, I wrote of Google and Microsoft

Companies like these are larger than the “next big thing”. Their own “thing” is so incredibly significant, so humbling. 

– June 2009

Google’s Gmail, Photos, Android have done a tremendous job organising personal information. Maps and Search are modern-day wonders that have indexed and organised the real and virtual worlds. But there are new types of information constantly being created. There is so much more left to be indexed, made sense of and ‘made accessible and useful’. 

This is a mission spanning at least fifty more years, probably much longer. And if ads can help achieve it, so be it.

I use iOS Shortcuts multiple times everyday to make life easier in little ways. Many of those are to log things about my life. Some are fun, like automatically tracking when I arrive and leave the office, using iOS’ geofencing support. Others are useful, like logging expenses (which I have done for nearly three years now). But some others are important. When I sought treatment for migraines last year I logged my pain on a scale every day, and continue to do so. It helped see the effect the treatment was having. 

Recently I added a Shortcut to track my water consumption. I know there exist several apps that help remind, track and visualise water intake, but I wanted to build my own so it was flexible, extendable, shareable and reusable. The shortcut is exceedingly simple, run from Launch Center Pro (manually, but quickly) and taking input from a list:

The only difference is I plug the data into Apple Health in addition to my usual plaintext file format. It makes for quick visualisation, which I would have to build manually with the plaintext CSVs. 

But I realized that the phone is already tracking my Steps and Sleep via Bedtime (both only approximately), and I can easily have my meditation log feed into the ‘Mindful Minutes’ heath category. In short, even without an Apple Watch, Apple Health is becoming a repository of my wellness data. Because it is possible to export data from the Health app, my current thinking is to embrace the summary and visualisation it offers and expand it, over time, to more categories. 

Azeem Azhar in his excellent newsletter Exponential View:

Cloud computing infrastructure will be the substrate of the exponential age. In some sense, like controlling the power plants, roads, and factories, for the economy—while also having the deepest insights on which parts of the economy are doing well, and which aren’t.

I found this blog post particularly helpful. It’s so well written that it’s hard to quote a paragraph that describes the essence. This is what the post is about

[Overcommunication] can dramatically improve your work life, not just in the short term but for the entire arc of your career. 

An employee helps take care of their manager by proactively communicating project status and what, if anything, is impeding success. A manager helps take care of their employees by making that communication psychologically safe even when it contains bad news, and by offering constructive support to solve problems. 

The writer goes on to describe how communicating more than is strictly necessary helps in the following cases:

• Implementing a new process
• Dealing with a personal struggle
• Working on a long project
• Something awesome happened
• Manager doesn’t understand what you do day-to-day
• Feeling overwhelmed
  

And ends with describing how to overcommunicate with an example, summed up as ‘great communication is honest. relevant, respectful and concise”. It is also, importantly, distinct from cover-your-ass communication.

I found this important because at the startup we’re now at a stage where multiple things happen independently of each other. There are immediate fixes, current planned tasks, longer-term projects and somewhat more strategic thinking. Across sales, marketing, business development, engineering and operations. While most of the team is in a single location, it’s no longer feasible to keep the entire company apprised of all of what’s happening at a single meeting.

We have to overcommunicate.

From the book ‘The Upstarts‘ about the early success of Airbnb and Uber, this bit:

Uber’s financial results also looked promising.The company was exhibiting an elusive phenomenon called negative churn, in which users who joined the service were more likely to stay with it and gradually increase their frequency of use than they were to leave. In other words, once customers joined Uber, they turned into a sort of high-yield savings account. The lifetime value of a user seemed unknowable, perhaps unlimited. 

The more general definition of negative churn seem to be a state where a business generates more revenue month on month (MoM) from existing customers even as it progressively loses some of them.

Good SaaS businesses can display negative churn. But a wealth business is a particularly great candidate for a negative churn business when it’s achieved momentum. A wealth manager generates revenue

• (a) from new customers added MoM
• (b) from existing customers investing more MoM
• (c) from the MoM growth of existing assets under management

Even when customers from a cohort inevitably churn, increased revenue from (b) and (c) can counteract that loss, continuing revenue growth from that cohort. In particular, (c) is unique to wealth/investing.

As we saw in the last post, there’s been much written about the iPad’s convoluted multi-pane interaction system as of iOS13. Here is some of it:

Michael Tsai’s extensive roundup of blog posts and tweets about the subject.

Rene Ritchie’s idea mocked up (YouTube video). Essentially pinch-and-drag a full-screen app to one side to snap it into place, revealing a mini-home-screen to the side, from where you could pick a second app. (How could one use this technique to pick a slide-over app once both apps are visible?)

This tweet from Steve Troughton-Smith about how Windows 8.1 implemented multi-pane apps. It’s worth noting what a difference the presence of a persistent taskbar (and start button) made. And that given enough screen width, you could have an arbitrary number of horizontally snapped windows.

Finally, this three-year-old post from Federico Viticci on the idea of a ‘shelf’ to hold a set of app icons and the ability to reveal it and drag and snap apps in place. This was before iOS 11 and the current multi-pane system. iOS 10 had the limited ability to add a second app from a hidden tray to the right of the screen, first introduced in iOS 9.

There’s been a ton of press about the 10th anniversary of the iPad announcement. Most of the Apple blogosphere has been about its current unrealised potential.

I have owned iPad from 2012 (iPad 3, 9.7″ iPad Pro, 2018 12.9″ iPad Pro) and have used them extensively at work and home. The iPad has been my most-used machine for years now.

Apple nailed the form factor, the size, the weight distribution – right from the start. It feels like it was made to be propped up to, watch Netflix. But it feels equally at home in your hands, browsing and reading as Steve did in the Le Corbusier chair on stage. And it is just as natural a digital slate placed face-up on a desk to write and draw on.

And there is an incredible variety of software made for the iPad. Procreate for art, Pixelmator for image manipulation, Notability for illustrations and note-taking, Mindnode for mind mapping, Reeder for RSS feeds, Fantastical for calendaring, the entirety of the Omni Group’s products like OmniFocus, and so many many more. 

Much of the criticism is about the iPad not being enough like a regular computer – for example, lack of support for pointing devices and for an escape key, for more keyboard shortcuts, for a file app that more resembles the Mac OS Finder. But I don’t want the iPad to resemble a laptop. Arguably it’s least appealing when it’s propped up in laptop mode. 

Touch is a totally different way to interact with information, and more software should embrace it. The iPad already has support for deep drag and drop, for window manipulation. Pinch, swipe and twist have been around from the start, as has software support for the accelerometer and gyroscope. The Apple Pencil has pressure and tilt sensitivity and now a double-tap gesture, and iOS supports markup throughout the system. Let’s make more software that embraces these primitives.

The iPad is absolutely a personal computer. It is also the archetype for computers of the next decade, maybe two. Let’s start building software for the future.

Some interesting points I ended up reading when the EU Parliament passed a resolution calling on the European Commission to pass a law for a common charging standard in Europe for devices, making it essentially a USB-C versus Lightning debate:

This Quora answer points out one key difference in the two standards:

Contact springs [for Lightning] are in the socket, not the cable, a design the USB people abandoned with the Micro-B connector. So when the springs wear out — and they will — you need to fix or replace your iPhone… 

[USB-C is an] Industry standard with a specified 10,000 cycle plug-unplug life. Contact springs in the cable, not the socket. When the srings wear out — and they will — change cables. Cheap.

But USB-C is a whole thing by itself.USB Type C ports can support many interfaces in addition to USB: Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, MHL, and HDMI. But it’s not always clear what cables support what capabilities: against an image of a single Apple USB-C cable, the article asks the following question: 

… can you tell what kind of USB Type C cable is shown? What USB speeds does it support? Does it support Thunderbolt? What is the maximum current it can carry? 

The answer:

not full-featured, USB 2.0, does not support Thunderbolt, and 5 Amperes.

The USB-C standard supports up to 100W power delivery, and using a cable to transfer higher-than-rated power can damage the cable and the device.

Marco Arment describes this in painstaking detail, including

Some cables don’t support USB-C PD at all, and most don’t support laptop wattages. Apple’s cable supports USB-C PD charging at high wattages… unless you bought the earlier version that doesn’t. Most standalone batteries sold to date don’t support USB-C PD — there are only a handful on the market so far, and most of them can’t charge a laptop at full speed, unless it’s the 12-inch MacBook.

You can use USB-C PD to fast-charge an iPhone 8 or iPad Pro with a USB-C to Lightning cable. But it doesn’t work with every USB-PD battery or charger, or every USB-C to Lightning cable, or every iPad Pro.