I finally purchased a 13″ retina MacBook Pro for my birthday/business/a desperately needed upgrade. I’m mostly happy to be back to Mac for the first time since I was a teenager, but I’m still struggling with more than a few aspects of this transition.

I’ve become a bit of an Apple nerd without a Mac after Grant gave me a first-gen iPhone in 2007, and later introduced me to the 5by5 network and its current and former hosts right around the time Back to Work was starting. So I feel like I was well prepared for this move back to Mac in some ways, but also had my expectations built up unreasonably high by the Cult of Mac in other ways.

The whole concept that “things just work [better]” on Mac is what convinced me I needed to switch over, but Mac isn’t as flawless as I had dreamed up in my fairyland of operating system dreams. These are just some musings from a not-very-power-user who pays attention to the little details.

Cons:

Safari: Man, Safari is buggy. I thought the default browser would be all seamless and gorgeous, but it’s all sad and weird. Plus, perhaps I’ve whined about this excessively already on my social networks, but the lack of favicons in the bookmarks bars is a difficult adjustment for me. I cram a LOT in there and use the visual favicon indicator as a stand-in site name. This is a snippet of the first THIRD of my bookmarks bar, for example:

I also just love the customization that browsers like Chrome allows. I don’t know if Safari even supports extensions/add-ons/whatever, but I haven’t even bothered trying. Chrome is my go-to even on this new machine.

Hardware woes: My hardware is finicky, and I think I can safely say it’s my new rMBP’s fault, and not a PEBKAC thing. (I’m full of self-doubt about anything I deem an issue, but Grant’s 15″ work MacBook Pro helps us isolate Virginia Issues vs. Real Issues, and it turns out all this is real.) My Thunderbolt ports are wonky with HDMI display; I had to switch to HDMI-only to make things work properly. My external Logitech wireless keyboard regularly fails to correctly transmit my typing, even with fresh batteries and at the same physical distance as my old Dell laptop. It misses huge swaths of letters or just takes a full ten seconds to respond sometimes, which is maddening. And I don’t always realize it happened, because I type easily 100 WPM, so sometimes my email address gets entered like this:

This is supposed to read gentlesouls @ my full name dot com shut up yes I buy grandma footwear sometimes what of it

And my special Evoluent mouse was a bitch to set up with outdated custom drivers. My Logitech wireless mice don’t have the same sensitivity as I’d like, no matter how much I futz with the settings. And the trackpad system settings, while awesome with gestures, contained a few options that were so new to me I inadvertently set them up in a way that made it damn near impossible to use that mouse. That last one is my own fault, but it was interesting how the settings allowed me to fall into a fail-hole. (A Genius pointed this one out to me and I felt like a real ass that I’d actually taken the thing in thinking my trackpad was broken.)

Screen woes: External monitors are weird with this thing. It is MADDENING that I can’t have any program full-screen-ified on either display without the other display turning to 100% Useless Linen. What the fuck is that!? An Apple employee told me on the DL that that’s a bug Apple has no urgency about fixing. This is insanity-making to me; I love having the smaller screen full-screened on something visual. As of right now, I manually futz with the window size to accomplish this, but it’s a lot of extra mousing which is rough for me ergonomically, and it seems like it should be one of those things that “just works,” you know? The good news is that sites with embedded video tend to allow THAT component to full-screenify just fine. And then their video looks terrible on my awesome screen, haha. Lastly, I got really comfortable with the way I could snap and lock in Windows 7, and I miss that but I’m too cheap to pay for Moom or the other recommendations I’ve gotten about that sort of thing. I’ll get there, though! I also find the retina/non retina transition a little awkward, but less so now that I’m using straight-up HDMI and not Thunderbolt for my display.

Form over function in physical design: Maybe I’m crazy, but I actually find the latch-notch to open the screen incredibly awkward. I basically always have to do it two-handed, which is surprisingly inconvenient, and I often wind up greasing up the screen right around the FaceTime cam when I’m opening it, which of course is annoying. I miss the feeling of something that snaps shut and kinda springs open.

I also find that, not only am I short the number of USB ports I need, but they’re all way too close together when you have everything plugged in at once as I usually do. I had to buy an external USB hub, and when Grant got me this adorable Kikerland one, it didn’t work because the ports are just barely too close to one another so I can only use it with either no Ethernet to Thunderbolt adapter and charger, or no HDMI display. Just annoying given that these things were spaced out differently on my Dell. I foresee more annoyance with, say, certain USB memory drives and whatnot. I’m always annoyed when an admittedly pretty chassis gets in the way of actually making the  stuff inside more useful. (Side note; I don’t think I’ll ever start pronouncing “chassis” correctly.)

Software weirdness: I find it SO awkward to mount an application to the Application whatever on the whatsit. What the fuck kind of user experience is that? It’s also weird as hell to give permissions to different levels of developers.

Some of the Apple programs make me crazy, too. I hate how the menus in visual-tasked programs like Preview are text instead of visual, so it takes me nine years to find the way to highlight an element of a screenshot with a rectangle. (YES, annotate makes sense. But so does selecting a rectangle-shaped box like I’m used to, haha.) And this one is iTunes specific, but I see Mike Monteiro is as pissed as I am here:

You seriously have to click the fucking little cloud icon for EACH song you want to download?

— Mike Monteiro (@Mike_FTW) May 15, 2013

 

I don’t understand why I can’t delete selected files by pressing delete or backspace, and why there’s no command-plus-key listed when I right click them with my admittedly non-Mac mouse. Such keyboard shortcuts are displayed for other types of activities. Why the heck wouldn’t there be a shortcut for such a crucial activity, and why wouldn’t it be listed? I finally looked it up and figured out it was CMD+backspace, which I’m sure I’m capitalizing and punctuating like a noob.* But why make me blind from that option in the righty-clicky menu that’s probably called something else on Mac? Is this one of those instances of Mac trying to make things better for me? I take a LOT of screenshots that I subsequently delete, so I don’t appreciate being forced to use the less ergo-friendly mouse-select-drag option or to look up how the fuck to perform a simple operation, which I also don’t appreciate now requiring two keys instead of one.

In fact, I’m annoyed that multiple things now require a multiple-key combo to work. PC keyboards have a Print Screen button; how great would it be if that still worked on Mac? And cropping a screenshot in Preview requires a splat K. (Shut up; you know what I mean.) And so help me god, I miss the Clear Desktop option SO MUCH. All I’ve figured out is Option-Command-H while in Chrome, then manually minimizing Chrome. I know I’m doing it wrong; I know. But you see what I mean about missing a one-clicky path? I guess those weren’t so much obvious as habit for me, but the work of setting up new habits makes me sad. I also find it super fiddly how much futzing I have to do to mimic basic behavior like tabbing through fields, etc. from a PC.

I also find it super weird how photos work. I love importing my iOS photos via iPhoto, but then those don’t show up in any kind of browsable path when I want to upload them to a blog post, for example. I can only access them by dragging and dropping them from iPhoto to a drag-and-drop-friendly upload option. It just seems weird. Again, I’m sure there’s some trick I don’t yet know, but why wouldn’t I be able to get to them via a standard file-browsing path? Why make everything so difficult?

And Finder. Ah, Finder. When I search for files, it does show me all these fucking developer files by default. WHY would I want that enabled by default? If you assumed I was too dumb a user to be allowed to delete things, do I really want crap from some JSON library or whatever? Just a strange thing to me. (I usually use an alternative to Finder, based on helpful recommendations from people like you, but still.)

I also found it insanely confusing to set up network connections within our home. Grant had to do it for me, and I still have to enter a password (?) every time I want to get shit off my PC laptop. It’s also weird how you have to manually turn on and off Wi-Fi. In 2013. WHY are we not yet at the point where the assumption is that if I have an Ethernet cable plugged in, you should use that, and you should just switch to Wi-Fi when that’s the only option? I swear my computer back in like 2004 managed that decision making well, and yet the new shit gets all confused by various options. Not a problem exclusive to Mac, but still!

Oh, and when I set up my Ethernet connection, it was surprisingly non-simple. I had to get an Apple employee to walk me through several confusing, in-depth network settings changes that were necessary to use the Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter successfully, which seemed weird since again, Apple shit should “just work.” Thankfully, he solved the issue, but it was definitely a software thing and not a network thing, which just seemed strange and needlessly complex. Ethernet is definitely not dead and definitely not just for power users in my mind. I also really would’ve appreciated just having a damn Ethernet port instead of having to buy a $30 thingy, but oh well. :)

What the fuck messages and restarts: Mostly, this machine is rad. But sometimes, when a program goes into Deep Failure Mode, no amount of force-quitting will actually make it quit. Sometimes that program is iTunes, and it won’t stop screaming Katy Perry in a Starbucks all of a fucking sudden, and the software-tied mute button doesn’t work, and the thing won’t quit, and the machine won’t shut down, and I have to manually press the fucking power button in 2013 and look like an ass (and yes I know I should’ve had the headphones plugged in but so help me god sometimes I’m That Person, OK? And I’m sorry. But I miss the hardware-tied mute button on my 1999 laptop that worked as fast as my reflexes did, rather than as fast as my locked-up OS did.) I’m sure I fucked up the closing parenthesis with closing punctuation rule there, but you get the idea.

Oh, and sometimes I get messages like this for no goddamn intelligible reason at all, usually from iTunes but sometimes from other things:

What. This is worse than every Windows error message ever. OK not really, but still. What?

Yeah, and sometimes I also get updates like this, which I SWEAR the Cult of Mac promised would happen like never! To be fair, they’re rarer than the non-updatey kind, but still!

Surprisingly weird ports: The USB, HDMI, and Thunderbolt ports made out of metal feel really low quality whenever I’m plugging things in or removing them. I suppose, being used to slightly flexible plastic-encased ports, they just feel scratchy or like I’m damaging them, or they don’t perfectly fit even the first-party cables I plug in and out. I don’t yet have a dock (I’m kinda holding out for an Apple display in the new skinny iMac chassis, fingers crossed for retina though I know it’s unlikely) so I plug things in and remove them a LOT. Obviously the Mag whatever charger is amazing and fuck you for making it different than the one we use to charge my husband’s 2011ish MBP, but everything USB and Thunderbolt feels… off. Low quality. In a way that really surprises me given the rest of the thing’s admittedly superior quality and design, you know?

Spinny cursor of death: That still exists! I kinda miss when it was black and white, though. I’m surprised how often it has crashed, and how it behaves when it does—usually when this thing triggers there’s no amount of force quitting that can solve it, and I have to shut the damn machine off with the power button which freaks me out because SSD. I guess I expected less crashitude but what do I know? Not much about what causes that. So, oh well, at least for now. Windows crashes weren’t vastly less or more frequent, but I feel like they required a full reboot less often. I don’t exactly have great data on this, though. :)

EXPENSIVE software: Holy fuck am I broke. I’ve spent more on software for my new Mac since March 15th than I have in the entire past fifteen years of PC usage, if you don’t count MMO subscriptions. I appreciate the cool development community, but damn. At this rate I’m going to have to stop, like, drinking fancy-ass Seattle cocktails when we go out. (Hahahahaha good one, Self.)

Pros:

RETINAAAA: Oh my GOD the retina screen. It’s just mind-blowing. Everything is so crisp and clear and delightful. This screeeeen. I don’t even mind how I can see how much of the Internet uses crap fonts and images, and how janky most favicons look when they haven’t received The Gruber Treatment. I don’t care. It’s glorious. I use it for reading more than I expected because of the screen, though I expect to iPad read more once I get a retina Mini. C’mon, guys, don’t hold out on me.

Beauty: The industrial design is phenomenal. Everything looks and feels more attractive, despite my whining about the pseudo-latch and ports above. I can’t believe how sexy that aluminum is, especially after my cheap Dell laptop from 2007 that had a broken Ethernet card slot and a cracking, creaking hinge on one side. The elegance of opening and closing and using and touching the thing is amazing. And I love the matte black whatever of the hinge in the back. I could do with less bezel, but oh my God shut up Virginia you are so privileged.

Ergonomics: The built-in keyboard is a lot less ergo-unfriendly than I expected given my crazy tennis elbow. I think the switches on these keys are kinder to me. It still hurts to use for long periods of time, since the basic position of a flat rectangular keyboard plus trackpad is all wrong for me, but I’m broken so that’s unsurprising. And I normally find trackpads WAY rough on my tennis elbow, but this one is better (though still sometimes painful because I tend to overuse it). I’m surprised at how OK I’ve become with the freaky-ass new scrolling direction, too.

Gestures: The gestures on the trackpad are amazing! And so useful! I haven’t even bound anything special yet, but the default ones are fantastic and intuitive and I just love them. The pinching to zoom in and out ROCKS and I discovered it so naturally.

Messages: I know everyone whines about Messages on Mac, but I love itso far. Because my tennis elbow is oh so severe, anything I can do on a Big Keyboard instead of an iOS screen is helpful ergonomically, and I tend to message a lot with my husband. This makes that way easier. I also have terrible phone behavior and I appreciate not having to pay attention to that brick when I’m on The Big Screen computing. There have been a few weird glitches where messages seemed to disappear, or temporarily failed to be transmitted properly, but for the most part I’m a huge fan of having them on my actual computer.

SSD OMG: That hard drive! So fast! So quiet! AND DID I MENTION SO FAST!? SSD FTW 4EVA. BFF. I love it so much. (I paid to upgrade to 512GB, in case you were wondering.)

Sync City: I’m still figuring out how exactly to make everything play nice, and certain things don’t sync the way I want, but for the most part everything does sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And when it works, it ROCKS. I love using Photo Stream; I love having text snippets theoretically sync in TextExpander (haven’t actually made that work yet, but I will); I love OmniFocus syncing even though I still don’t fully grasp how to get the most out of that damn software; I love more than anything that simple, boring-ass Notes syncs so I can edit and clear out items on a Big Keyboard and have them show up all edited on my phone when I’m on the go. Love Reminders syncing too. And Tweetbot, although it seems a little wonky and I wish it synced drafts across platforms. But still. Having a Mac opens my eyes to more of the benefits of being in the Apple ecosystem with my other devices.

iPhoto imports: I really love iPhoto. The way it snags stuff off my devices, sorts it, and deletes it is so much more helpful than the janky experience of attempting to do this with no helpful software on my PC. It’s by no means a perfect program, but I just appreciate something clearing off my phone of all those large photo and video files so I can keep track of everything while maintaining room for music on the go. Simple, but I really value it.

General love: And obviously, the thing just runs. The battery life is nice, the extra cable thingy they include is nice, the initial setup wasn’t horrible (I set it up as a new machine), and the memory kicks ass so it can handle the gabillion tabs I have open and programs I have running at any given moment. I love the thing and am glad I bought it, despite the whinings above. I guess I just expected the Pro column to be longer and the Con column to be shorter, you know? Still learning, though, so this will hopefully change over time. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you think I’m failing to grasp a certain set of helpful tips or software suites or what have you! Anything to get me over the New User hurdle is greatly appreciated. :)

 

 

*Also, fuck autocorrect for frequently changing “noob” to “boob” and having Marco Arment call me out about it on Twitter. Dammit. Not used to a global autocorrect yet! Mostly more helpful than harmful, but that learning curve suuuucks when suddenly every device I own is prone to Damn You, Autocorrect-isms!

We all know that many big tech figures hate email. Merlin, Dan, and Marco have all been pretty vocal about this, and I totally get it—they’re media figures in a way I’m not so they get flooded in a way I don’t. But I still maintain that email is the best medium for oh so many tasks if you’re a Regular Person like I am (at least for now, heh). But I’m clearly still swimming upstream; even my non-tech contact points prefer non-email communication. And sometimes, that drives me insane.

There are multiple families on my block who have cats and travel a lot. My husband and I have sort of become the go-to kitty sitters, but as the neighbors get more and more close to us friendship-wise, they’re more prone to just texting us their vacation dates and just dropping off a key whenever. This really, really doesn’t work for me. Like, those cats are gonna fucking starve doesn’t work for me.

When I receive a piece of information that absolutely requires a follow-up action on my part, I really want that to come to me over a medium that allows for robust customization. I want to star/flag/mark that shit unread, and I want to forward it to my husband so he knows too, and I want to have it potentially integrate with my calendar via that iPhone linked text event thingy (shit, now I’ve lost my technical audience. Sorry. You know what I mean.) so I can make sure that the necessary reminders and alarms happen so I will break my routine to see that your pets are cared for.

This is important. This is not fleeting. This needs to be delivered to me in a way that doesn’t disappear from my home screen if I answer a phone call. This needs to be “processed” in the Getting Things Done sense of the word. I care about your cats enough to be kind of a pain in the ass about this. But three separate households of older-than-me, less-technical-than-me neighbors all texted this request, and only followed up via email when I prodded them to. And even then they sort of maybe needed reminding to email, or an explanation why that medium was necessary.

Now, I can’t demand that level of communications catering in any social setting; I can only demand it when someone is asking a favor of me. I feel like in that context, it’s fine for me to dictate the parameters necessary for them to get that favor done. But I ALWAYS prefer an actual email if the subject isn’t something fleeting or immediate, and you know what? Bonus points if your email is old-school enough to contain a signature with things like your cell and even your land line in it. I still find value in that convention, and I hope it doesn’t go the way of Facebook because I really hate so much about this new communication era. (OK, I mostly just hate how the stupid graphical smileys Facebook inserts will never stop screwing with line height. Fine. There you have it.)

 

Neighbors, I love you. If you somehow happen to read this, I’m not like mad about you! I’m mad about the way communication is shifting in our entire culture to a way that I’m clearly not good at catching up with. Your cats are fantastic. Please feed ours in early June. I trust this blog post will be sufficient notice of this request JUST KIDDING OMG THAT’S A JOKE LOVE YOU GUYS. <3

Facebook Graph Search is kinda dumb, still.

When I search for “My friends who live in New York, New York,” I get a pretty clear list with an obvious end point.

When I change that search to “My friends who live near New York, New York,” the list remains identical.

When I change THAT to “My friends who live near Brooklyn, New York,” I get a few Brooklyn people and many of the New York people.

When I input “My friends who live in Brooklyn, New York,” I get a much longer list with a bunch of people who never showed up in any of the prior searches.

When I input “My friends who live in or near Brooklyn, New York,” it lists people from Oregon.

It’s nice that I can do this at all, but call me when it works, ya know?

I’m trying to learn to become more independent in graphic design. I’m not remotely trained in any way. I’ve got an increasingly defined sense of design, although I’m just as susceptible to trends as the next blogger who suddenly decided that rounded corners were over yesterday. I finally got a copy of CS6 of my very own, but with no training or experience whatsoever, I of course suck at using it. And I’m constantly paralyzed by that. And since Grant is the one who’s been doing most of my image editing up until like right now, he’s the only one with access to the .psd versions of anything at all.

Beyond sucking at the actual tools, and not having assets, I’m just kind of clueless and/or thoughtless about the actual content I want to create. Sometimes I build things dumb or ugly just to not have to rebuild an entire other thing, you know? I understand this to be a common problem in software development; it certainly was in the game companies I’ve worked at. No one eeeeever designs the UI to be big enough for German terms, for example! Take that sidebar, to the left. The text “my day job” is not an effective or eye-catching way to link out to what I actually do in my online dating consulting business. This is a really, really important part of my identity; I’m trying to do it full time after leaving Big Tech and it’s scary and I’m broke and I’d like to generate more traffic and more paying clients. So you’d think I’d want to really make that stand out, right? But my stupid, stubborn sense of aesthetics dictates that everything in that sidebar (custom built by Grant, and tweaked with some help from John Hardman) should be the exact same height/font size and roughly the same width. So instead of rebuilding the sidebar to allow for some different copy, or reworking it so that all of the link-images were larger and could contain more text, I just came up with “my day job” placeholder and asked Grant to tweak it into place and now it’s stupid and doesn’t tell you to please go hire me for the fascinating weird thing I actually charge money for. Sure, you can get there if you’re curious enough to click, but I don’t trust you! :)

Anyway. I got this new Mac recently too, and am sitting on a post about my process adjusting to Mac after fifteen years of PC. I got this idea to make an iPhone app and I’m sitting on the process of really figuring out how I want it to work and learning enough fragmented bits of how to program to understand how to formulate reasonable requests to the very kind folks who have expressed an interest in helping me make something functional. And I got a copy of Photoshop and I have no idea how to use it. Sometimes I just feel so stuck by all the things I’d like to learn more about and can’t justify taking the time to learn more about, ya know? Not that I’m always using my time well (self-subtweet to this blog post) but I feel guilting spending money and time on a Lynda course when I should be doing more things to generate Heartographer leads.

I’ll get there; don’t worry. And I’ll come up with something catchier than “my day job” eventually. Maybe you can help—what do you think I should put there to drive people to The Heartographer? (Oh, and I turned off comments à la Marco and John but I’m not coding-savvy enough to know how to hack my custom theme to turn them on for certain posts only, so I guess you’ll have to tweet/FB/App me your response. Which you were probably going to do anyway, because it’s 2013, right? (But I still get blog comments on my other blogs sometimes, and I LOVE THEM when they happen and aren’t spam or dicks. So maybe I’ll go back.)

You thought this whole rambling post was going somewhere, didn’t ya? GOTCHA!

Oh wait, I was going to post something. This is some of my incredibly unprofessional art-attempts that I’ve made in my pre-Photoshop days whenever I needed content for a blog post or an ad campaign and didn’t know diddley about image editing or computer drawing or anything like that and I just needed to GO already. I think my Shlok Crest inspired me to at least feel semi-competent at creating stupid little doodles that other people might find amusing, and it was just so much easier than trying to learn an entirely unfamiliar software program to get something simple out the door. Sometimes you just have to ship it instead of really making it great, you know? Which I hate. Anyway. Enjoy!

I believe this is the one I used in my Facebook campaign, because I am a professional. I believe the copy was something like “Is your cat worried about you? It might be time to start dating again.” I don’t fucking know. It helped me break 100 Likes which was the douchey goal from a friend who’s a marketing consultant. Yay confused felines?

This was a part of the one we used for my Stranger (local alt weekly) ad. The birds are supposed to make you jealous, I guess? I drew it with ballpoint pen on paper and Grant scanned it and futzed with it in Illustrator, I think.

The sad bird represents you, single person who wants to pay me money to help you find love online. Also for the Stranger ad.

This bird was an early attempt. You can see me experimenting with avian eyebrows. I have no idea what I’m doing. Pretty sure this was in MS Paint, and I tried to make the body out of smart shapes. Bad call. You can totally tell where “circle” ends, huh?

This was an earlier attempt at a kitty for the FB ad. I’m partial to him even though I’m not sure why his face is curly and his body hair is straight. Also not sure why he’s a he, nor why he lacks whiskers. Life is full of mysteries. I did this on Paper on the iPad I think, just the free pen setting.

Another lovelorn kitty for FB attempt. Sorry for the failure to crop, but this is just gonna get slapped in here all speedy-like. He didn’t look sad or confused enough.

This cat is concerned about your love life. This is more the direction I was going in, and I like the colors, but after I did this guy I realized the dimensions were off for Facebook’s very rigid specs.

Anyway, there you have it. I have no idea what I’m doing but these were kind of fun and I didn’t have to buy anything, pay anyone, or violate copyright. Yay.

We order pizza kind of a lot. We shouldn’t, but we do; it’s easy and  yummy and one of the few delivery options we have at our house. We usually get Pagliacci, because it’s delicious and predictable and they have great customer service and even a few healthy options. But every once in a while, we like to switch it up and try ordering from different pizza places, just to see if there’s anything better we’ve been missing.

The other non-chainy pizza joint that delivers to us is called Stacia’s. Stacia’s is insanely expensive, but they offer insanely good deals with ValPak coupons. Now, I hate coupons, and I hate unsolicited envelopes full of small pieces of paper, but I get that some older-school businesses firmly believe in the whole direct mail marketing model. And ValPak now has an iPhone and iPad app with mobile coupons, so that helps a ton. Often not every deal is listed there that would appear on a print coupon, but this is a nice little compromise for a nerd like me.

I just fired up the ValPak app, and not only does it have deals for Stacia’s, but it also has a neat little feature where you can export a specific deal to Passbook. It’s a bit cumbersome (and hitchy and takes forever even on a solid Wi-Fi connection), but it’s nice of them to think of that, and I like to think it could minimize annoyance for both customers and businesses, right? Right. Except no. I clicked on the “Disclaimers” link just to double-check, and lookie here:

Sooo, uh, mobile coupons are great according to ValPak, but not necessarily ValPak’s advertisers. Fine. Maybe they’re just extra-careful with these because some customers abuse them? (It’s worth noting that I’ve totally used the mobile ValPak app before to buy pizza from these guys. Maybe I’M the reason they added this fun little disclaimer.)

I called the place up, and asked about this disclaimer. The guy who picked up was extremely befuddled.. He said, and I quote, “You can’t just print it out?” I suppose I could, but I don’t wanna. A) Our printer keeps conking out from expensive low ink reserves, and I don’t want to futz with it for half an hour to make sure it’s working only to deplete its ink for this. B) I shouldn’t effing have to, right? The whole point is that it’s mobile, paperless, painless, and your delivery dude even gets a little Passbook QR code to scan. Why print? And C) the guy was kind of a dick about it, so now I really don’t want to; I want to muster up the gentleness to coax him into letting me use the goddamn iPhone coupon. I explain that our printer isn’t working, that we’ve used mobile coupons before and haven’t ordered in several months (i.e. I’m not using this every night), and that I don’t think printing it out is how this is meant to work. This last bit clearly wasn’t the right tack. He immediately switches to Confusion Masked by Authoritative Dismissive Voice, and says, “Yeah, we don’t do that phone stuff. Paper coupon only.”

Sigh. “That phone stuff.” Why build the tech, why integrate the feature, if business owners are too old-school to learn how to play nice with the new tools? Can ValPak train businesses to figure this out? Is there no number I could read to you to have you write down so you know I’m not allowed to claim this deal a second time, just as if I’d handed you a piece of paper? Must you charge so much in your base menu that I’m unwilling to conduct any kind of transaction with you unless I have a valid coupon for it?

I ordered from Pagliacci.

 

I’ve wanted to make an iPhone app for ages now, but it’s always been a far-off “when I have the time and energy to learn how to code” thing. Recently, I realized that I have an urgently needed app in mind that’s based on Siracusa’s Annoyance-driven development: All the existing apps in this space are ugly and unstable, and all of them lack certain core features. I recently realized that I can either keep saying I’d like to make this app well into my forties, by which time I probably still won’t have managed to teach myself enough coding to pull it off, or I can feel out the developer community and see if anyone is interested in helping out on the coding end while I tackle art, production, marketing, QA, et cetera.

I want to make a calendar that tracks women’s health and reproductive cycles. I know, boring, but stay with me. ALL of the apps in that space are so ugly it makes me want to cry.

 

As you can see, these apps are almost exclusively pink or lilac or -maybe- some other pastel shade. They’re 80% flower-driven design (because I’m a delicate flower? F-ck off. Because when I got my period I flowered as a woman? Also f-ck off. Because this whole bleeding inconveniently every month is all a beautiful part of nature, therefore look at this flower? Shut up and f-ck off. Because women run around in a field in Massengil commercials? Go douche yourself and then f-ck off). Ahem. I don’t care for the look. I’m betting that most men and women who read this post will agree with me, even if they wouldn’t have used quite as many F-bombs to make the point.

Colors and motifs aside, these apps have stretched UI elements and horrible fonts and weirdly low contrast text and some of  the worst textures/skeuomorphic design choices that make Podcasts.app look like a home run. They have no idea what “retina” means. And they all seem to be made by men who don’t understand what features and design choices makes this type of app useful and appealing to women.

Marco Arment noticed this dearth of decent design when he and his wife had their baby boy Adam, so he created a breastfeeding timer app with laudably simple design. When he first released this app, he mentioned that similar pregnancy-related stuff, like baby naming apps, were just appalling. That hasn’t changed yet. His beautiful, clean, simple, and functional design eventually inspired me to try to apply the same principles to a cycle-tracking app.

Aside from design complaints, there are also functionality problems in this category. These apps crash constantly. They have  no calendar integration and no ability to export data to iCal or other common calendar formats, and no helpful push messaging options*. They require you to input made-up guesstimates or to configure data that you probably don’t have if you need a cycle-tracking app. They generally exist in a freemium model, but the freemium apps are so bad and the features described in the paid versions so pointless, that I’ve never been inspired to shell out for a “premium” version. (Neither has any woman I’ve ever met.)

Furthermore, why does anyone bother tracking their cycle in the first place? Besides knowing when your period will arrive, there are two basic things such an app should be able to help you do:

1. Get pregnant.
2. NOT get pregnant.

Guess which feature is missing from every single app I’ve tested? That’s right: none of them help track your cycle to avoid making a baby. Read that over again. Of every single app I’ve ever tested (and I’ve been searching for a good fit ever since the iOS App Store came into existence), NONE of them are designed to help you avoid an unwanted pregnancy. There are tons of ways to optimize becoming pregnant, with varying windows of optimal conception, but all you can do is aggregate said data and attempt to extract a reasonable “safe” window. Heck, there’s even an app that lets you select a desired birth date or Zodiac sign, and back-calculate an ideal window of conception (!!), yet there is no choice that teaches women how to avoid having sex when they might be likely to get unintentionally pregnant. The rhythm method (as it’s called) is a valid primary or secondary birth control method for so many people, but you wouldn’t know it from the iOS marketplace.

So, I want to create an app that includes both let’s-make-a-baby and let’s-not-make-a-baby modes. I want something that integrates with iCal and ideally Google Cal (or vcal), or any other calendar that the iPhone community might suggest. I want logical, configurable push notifications to shove some tampons in my purse, or that I should start using condoms to avoid unwanted pregnancies for the next X days. I want a non-embarrassing reminder that I’m probably ovulating and should go jump my husband even if he’s in the middle of a complicated Tomb Raider level. (Er, for example.) I want a clean, non-condescending design that my husband wouldn’t mind having on his own phone, in case he felt like picking up tampons or jumping me in the middle of a complicated blog post. And most of all, I want everything to just WORK. (And if there are useful features that I’m not thinking of or that come to my attention over time, I’d like the app built on a framework that lets me layer in new features.)

It’s a long shot that any developers out there would want to take time out of their busy profitable coding endeavors to help fill this marketplace void by coding such an app. But if I can talk you into helping on the coding end, I’ll do literally everything else and will of course share revenue on the app. And heck, if I get a positive response to this, maybe I’ll start investigating crowd-sourcing the development of this app, so I can really get excellent design and programming without feeling like I need to learn three new careers of my own to pull it off.  I may also circle back to the realization that I have to do every aspect myself, including programming, and that’s OK too. I know there are more and more resources available to teach me, and that most developers aren’t wild about the idea of a revenue-sharing model since they’re just as stretched thin as I am. But I’m kinda supposed to be writing a book and growing my business and generally earning money via other time-consuming channels, and therefore this app probably isn’t going to happen in the immediate future if it remains a one-woman project. So if you think you might know someone who would want to connect, please put us in touch!

 

*To be fair, one app recently added a push notification option for tampons. However, it can’t be adjusted or configured to read custom text or to notify at a different time than the app’s auto-calculated choice, and you can’t export any such reminder to useful places like Reminders/Calendar/Mail, let alone OmniFocus, Drafts, Evernote, etc.

I’m kinda broken. I have super bad tennis elbow, which I’ll expand upon soon, but needless to say my medical needs hamper my ability to comfortably use and enjoy technology. I don’t just like using a split keyboard, I NEED to use one. I have this special terrifying mouse that’s so guest-unfriendly, I make a point of keeping a wireless “guest mouse” to the left of my keyboard. Touch screens hurt me. Monitor stands are too short for me. I have an entire Pinterest board devoted to ergonomics. And most Apple hardware can kiss my broken ass.

I’ve become a bigger and bigger Apple nerd since Grant surprised me with a first-gen iPhone in early 2007. However, I haven’t actually owned a Mac since high school. Shameful, I know! I fully intend to pull the trigger on an upgrade as a birthday present to myself in March. Yet this isn’t an easy decision, partly because Apple’s products, while beautiful, are incredibly unfriendly to my body.

I now spend more time working from my home office than anywhere else, largely because I like to force myself to work from the most ergonomically happy setup possible. It hurts me within ten minutes if I type from my laptop on the couch. So in deciding upon an upgrade, I first thought I might get an iMac to reinforce working from the same spot. I had my eye on the previous 27″ model, which was the ONLY model at the time that had a removable stand with VESA mount compatibility. But that was their ONLY option with that capability—they did away with the removable stand in the sexy new iMacs. So disappointing. Especially because a computer with an attractive display is a huge benefit for my client-facing desk setup. So I decided to get a laptop and maintain portability instead, even though I have to bring a keyboard and mouse with me to use it safely.

I’d also love to have a Bluetooth keyboard as sexy and beautiful as Apple makes them, all white and alumin(i)um and whatnot. But of course, those aren’t great for ouchy typists like me. Not only are they rectangular and the wrong springiness of key, but they have that stupid non-removable tube at the back that places them at the wrong angle for wrist health. At least they do make a model with no num pad, which is better for mousing since it allows you to place the mouse closer to your core, but still.  If they made a lovely wireless split keyboard that wasn’t a perfect rectangle but had the typical Apple keys, I’d still go for that. It’s 2013; it kind of blows my mind that the company that drafted their well-respected Human Interface Guidelines for software doesn’t seem to give a damn about how the rest of the human body works.

The exception to this problem might be their mice, sort of. I can’t tell yet. I find most track pads insanely painful to use, but the track pad on Grant’s work MacBook is less horrible than the 2007 Dell track pad I have on my laptop. I can’t tell if this is because track pads in general are better now, though. And I can’t yet say how I feel about the Magic Mouse —I’ve only gotten to play with them at Apple stores, and that never feels like an authentic user experience to me. If I do ever buy one, I’ll let you know how I feel.

Few can argue that Apple’s industrial design isn’t stunning, especially compared to the sea of shiny black plastic out there. But the “function” part still seems stuck in the 80s. If the retina iMacs and skinny retina displays down the road aren’t VESA-compatible either, I’ll be even more frustrated (and forced to seek some sort of attractive non-Apple hardware to get my needs met). It’s a real shame, since pretty matters to me almost as much as healthy does. Almost.

On The Crossover Episode 8 today, a very important conversation happened. Sarah Parmenter and Whitney Hess joined Dan and Haddie to speak about serious harassment that both women have experienced. Sarah’s story in particular was harrowing, in that someone specifically targeted her by faking porn pictures of her and going out of his (come on, it’s a he) way to try to expose those photos to everyone in her large and prestigious professional circle. She wrote a recent blog post about the issue, which Whitney followed with a post of her own, and both women were very eloquent and amazing as they told their stories. I urge you to go consume all of that content for yourself, in this order: Sarah, Whitney, Crossover. Go back and do that before you finish this post! Or don’t, but you should. :)

I’m not a stranger to harassment, but I’m lucky. I haven’t been nearly as harassed or harassable as most of my female colleagues at most jobs I’ve worked at. I don’t know exactly why; I expect it has something to do with being naturally tall and loud, both of which are things I can’t change about myself (at least not easily). I hope part of it is my personality, too, but I honestly don’t know. I used to attract harassment when I was a teenager, but only from random strangers when I’d walk around the city, etc. Never from people I interacted with on a regular basis. That came later in life, and in a subtler costume.

I was harassed at my first “real” job after college, as a legal assistant for an attorney who turned out to be a Red Flag Elemental. I didn’t realize it until I’d been there a while, but his harassment of me was much subtler than anything I had learned to spot as harassment, even though I grew up surrounded by hippie feminist liberals. I was more skeeved out by some of the questionable law practices in that office than by any of the potentially inappropriate harassment-type stuff, and I booked it pretty quickly even though I didn’t have a good exit strategy, because I just didn’t want to be around that vibe even if it meant I was broke and desperate and totally alone.

That drove me to a different law firm job, for a high-powered attorney who was both feminist and old-fashioned. She always wore below-the-knee skirts with nylons because you never knew when you’d end up in court, and some judges are old school enough to believe women shouldn’t wear pants in their courtrooms. (That thing that happened to Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife? Totally happens in real life.) She was a very ethical senior partner, but shady things still happened out of her line of sight. After I left the firm, and I believe after my former boss passed away, I heard through the grapevine that a female legal assistant was let go after sticking up for herself when a partner (later disbarred for unrelated reasons) smacked her rear with a newspaper in the copy room. I like to think such a thing wouldn’t have happened on her watch, but I think lesser things must have.

Then I moved on to jobs with a more subtle type of harassment; the ones where you’re denied opportunities for growth because you’re female, or you inherit a higher-powered position without inheriting a commensurate salary bump, or you’re spoken to in different ways than your male counterparts for the same types of offenses, or mansplaining is inescapable. Those are standard rate at almost any place of work, and you have to learn how to advocate for yourself in those circumstances. There’s discussion I don’t care to expand upon here about how that’s partly gendered behavior; about how some men face those same challenges. I don’t doubt it. But all that was minor league stuff compared to what I encountered when I entered the video game industry.

Working as a female in games is a blessing and a curse. So many amazing women are entering the field more and more often, but I get why they’re reluctant. I get why the #onereasonwhy phenomenon struck. Women who are comfortable wearing attractive clothes are slobbered over; inappropriately joked about or to. Women who are not conventionally attractive are the subject of some seriously messed-up conversations and jokes. It doesn’t help when you work on a product that has a minimum cup size of approximately Z for all its female NPCs; I hate to think of what the entertainment (or adult entertainment) industries are like. The most wildly inappropriate things have happened at the allegedly-AAA places I’ve worked at, though I have to say it seems like working in QA is truly the dregs. Testers and people who work in testing somehow seem to have a massive overlap with people who either lack appropriate social graces, or choose to override them to deliberately harass, belittle, demean, and disgust the women in their workplace. This is insanely frustrating as a tester who simply loves being picky about errors and making things look better. I didn’t ask for the stigma that accompanies a burning perfectionist core and a devil’s-in-the-details eye. (Watch me make like nine typos in this post.)

I don’t yet feel like I have enough distance or legal protection to get into the specifics about the things that have happened to me and to my female coworkers. But you know the strangest thing? Big Tech jobs are where I’ve felt by FAR the least amount of harassment thus far. Big Tech is where everyone was professional to me, where there was a decent balance of women vs. men (even if the women tended to be more PMs and the men more SDEs), and where I generally felt that there was less homophobia, bigotry, and inappropriate expression. It wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t nearly as rough as when I worked in video games. I felt more of a dev/business animosity than any kind of male/female animosity. But I also wasn’t in any Big Tech role for long, and I was always there primarily as a linguist for hire, and not a lasting asset.

I’m grateful that I haven’t gone through the types of things that Sarah and Whitney (and yes, even Haddie) have experienced. But you know what? I suspect it’s coming. I’m prettier than I used to be (neither fishing nor bragging; I simply know how to put myself together better than I used to). I’ve gained a bunch of weight, which in some views makes me less attractive, but of course I’m curvier as a result and that invites a different kind of harassment. I’m also likely to become pregnant at some point, which will invite a different kind of creepiness, I hear. And I’m growing my business. My Twitter following has more than doubled in the past few months, and my Facebook page is growing slower but will probably take off if I do things right. I’m trying to scale up a very public business that involves very personal and intimate interactions, and I don’t know how far it will go, but I aim to become something of a minor media figure someday kinda soon.

I’m sure that unacceptable trolling and harassment  is something I’ll face again even though I don’t work in game studios or law offices any more. Stories like the ones Whitney, Haddie and Sarah shared help raise awareness, help women everywhere stand up for themselves, and help educate and encourage men to stand up for an environment free from sexism, harassment and nastiness. Please go peruse their stores, and please pay it forward in whatever way you can by impacting your own circles with an understanding of the fact that it is absolutely not okay to tolerate harassment, even the minor kind. Women everywhere need your support. (Including me.)

I’ve continued listening to QUIT!, and it keeps helping me as I delve into my business relaunch. I called in again to Episode 9, and I listen eagerly every week.

Last week, on Episode 10, Dan was talking to Shlok Vaidya about his emerging after holing up to write his book, and they made a crack that it was like a phoenix rising from the ashes. In fact, I believe these were the exact words:

“…a really big, masculine phoenix, with huge guns.”

I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head, so I kinda make him a crest. I wish I were savvy enough with any software to have made this on a computer, but there ya have it. old-fashioned pen and pencil (and yes, hilighter).

It’s pretty clear from this that a) I’m not an artist, b) I was limited to basic office supplies, and c) I’ve never seen a gun in real life. Anyway, Shloky, you have free reign to use this on your online dating profile if you’d like! ♥

I’ve been a proud domain hacker since 2009. My main business, Lovebug, has a top-level Ugandan country code, so the website is www.loveb.ug. It’s short, sweet, and a tenth the cost of the parked dot com equivalent. I found that I kinda liked this short and sweet system, so I later registered Heliotro.pe and Framboi.se for two personal blogs. I was seeing domain hacks like Del.icio.us, Who.is, Despicable.me, Youtu.be, Goo.gl, Bit.ly, About.me, and BrokenRul.es, so I hoped that they would catch on and the non-geek world would relax a bit about them all.

That is not what happened. At least, not enough for me.

Strike One, early 2009: I’m calling my local phone provider to reserve the business number 206-LOVEBUG. The gal keeps putting a .edu at the end of the email address I give her. No matter how many “No, B DOT U G AND THEN NOTHING ELSE WHATSOEVER” directions I give her, I end up giving her my Gmail address because she’s incapable of processing it over the phone.

Strike Two, circa 2010: I’m wearing a T-shirt with the URL www.loveb.ug on the back, at a big fancy foodie event called Voracious. A white-haired woman comes up to me all concerned-like, and tries to inform me kind of subtly that I put the dot in the wrong place. I ask what she means, even though I’m starting to piece it together amusedly, because I wonder where she’ll tell me the dot should go if there’s no dot com whatsoever. She fumbles. I explain it to her. She glazes over.

Strike Three, a few weeks ago (late 2012): I’m bantering with someone online about a podcast we want to do. We need a name and its respective URL. I ask the main host how he feels about top-level domain hacks, in case our target URL is taken or too much. He says “Nah, looks cheap.” Now THAT is a different complaint than I’d heard before.

Strike Four, a couple days ago: I post a loveb.ug/blog link on Facebook, and one friend can’t access it. She says it just goes to a “Frontier search page.” Some troubleshooting and a screenshot later, it looks like Frontier (a local crappy ISP), when confronted with a .ug domain that isn’t prefaced by www, decides that the user must have intended a search query, and just inputs the entire URL into its search engine. A couple days after THAT, the same thing happens to an App.net buddy with a DIFFERENT blog post. Thanks, guys. (After multiple visits Frontier or whatever other ISP usually does finally parse the link as a link, but who knows what other shitty ISPs don’t recognize that TLDCC as a valid URL? A: Too many for my comfort given that this is supposed to be how I make my money.)

Strike Five, always: I link loveb.ug in an Apple message or doc, and it always fails to be automatically hyperlinked because .ug isn’t parsed as a TLD suffix.

The verdict: I give up. I’m not doing any more top-level country code domain hacks, at least not for sites that really matter to me. :) You’re too slow and clunky at adapting to this, you dumb world, you! How come Nyan.Cat is fine, but Loveb.ug isn’t? Uganda is a COUNTRY and Catalonia is a GENERALITAT! (Don’t get mad at me, Catalans; I’m pro Independència in theory, but so far it hasn’t technically happened.) Anyway, no more hacks for me, unless they’re just for fun. I’m going to be changing the name of my business in the next few weeks, and you can bet your sweet .be I’m using a dot com this time around.