iSpective

Igor on tech and life

The Legend

iphone, 5s, legend |

Despite Apple each year proclaiming that they created the best ever iPhone, in my opinion iPhone 5s was best iPhone Apple ever made.
Legend-1

Not only it brought the new soon to become industry standard - Touch ID, but it continued on the amazing industry design which got even better after being introduced in the iPhone 5. Many years after and few months ago they reused those straight lines in the latest iPad Pro unfortunately leaving the polished cut of the bezel of the iPhone 5s behind.
Legend-2

That phone's design was so unique at that time that I wanted to keep it as a memory on how good the hardware design might be because I had the feeling it will be hard to release something more beautiful. And I think none of the next designs on the line could achieve that level of polish. Unfortunately, I had to give my personal phone away long time ago so I wasn't able to leave it for my collection of awesome hardware I owned. But recently I was lucky enough to buy it for testing content on smaller screen devices, which are seemingly going away. The iPhone 5s is the last 4" Apple device supported by the latest iOS and that's probably the last year of support for this phone by the latest software. But it was a good ride, and supporting it for 5 years is unheard of in the industry.
Legend-3

I'm really happy that I am able to keep this marvel of engineering in my drawer to be able to take it once in a while in order to appreciate this piece of technology.

Purposeful limitation

apple, iphone, portrait, mac |

After being misled on the promise of the 2x camera on my iPhone I felt the same thing with portrait mode.

On the iPhone Xs (and previous 2-camera lens setups) portrait mode supposedly is possible because of the second camera whereas on the Xr you can get them with one camera. Google for example does portraits with one camera on their Pixel 2 and 3 for few years already and does actually a quite job with that. The same as with digitally stabilizing video on the original Pixel which turned out to be really good comparing to OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) at that time.

Don't get me wrong, I like portraits, even the fake ones you would get from a mobile device. They look noticeably better than regular pictures we had all this time and I'm glad the whole industry moved into that direction. But forcing buying a two-camera phone for portraits is just pure marketing, the same as forcing to upgrade from an iPhone X to Xs for Smart HDR which essentially is a blown-up saturation software-wise possible on the X as well.

Previously the push to new hardware was with actual improvements in it. Now it's just purposeful limitation accompanied by better selling marketing shots. Just like with the new butterfly keyboard on the Macs (which no one actually asked for) that made the product look better on photos but made its operation worse on a daily basis. People keep dealing with it, which let Apple not to fix the flawed keyboard much for three years already. The same reason of people accepting everything lets Apple charge for features on newer devices that technically could have been on older devices as well.

All that said Apple doesn't feel being a pioneer in technology like when I started using their products twelve years ago. Nowadays formerly known copycats like Xiaomi or some even less known Chinese brands are pushing the envelope by building ideas that market leaders can't deliver. Maybe it's not Apple's fault in particular, but it's just what happens with companies that get big. Just recall the huge Nokia back in the days overrun buy a considerably small at that time company from Cupertino which was so far ahead in everything and so easy to recommend to switch to.

You're overpaying for your iPhone's camera

iphone, camera |

Just as I've mentioned in my summary on why you're overpaying for your high-end smartphone's camera, here are my thoughts specifically about the iPhone's dual camera setup and why you're overpaying for it.

iPhone camera

I got a dual camera first in the iPhone X, so I personally wasn't familiar with it on the iPhones 6 Plus, 6s Plus, 7 Plus and 8 Plus (which was presented along the iPhone X).

First, I was sold on the 2x camera since quite few of my photos started making more sense with having objects to be bigger to be recognizable and framed better in general. I also had to do less movements trying to capture something and not having to physically get closer to it.

But then I stumbled upon some article comparing 2x optical zoom from the second lens to the 1x lens digitally zoomed in two times. And somewhere in that article I noticed the author mentioning the fact that the 2x camera might not even being used depending on the conditions. Whether the phone would use 2x or not mainly depends on outside lightning. So at times when you're surrounded with dim light, and take 2x photos, they are actually taken with the 1x lens and 2x digital zoom.

Here's an experiment: go to a place with dim lightning, close your 2x camera with a finger and switch to 2x. You'll see the image zoomed, even though your finger is clearly in the way. And since you paid for the 2x camera which is not always used, it means you overpaid on the promise of it.

I get that's no surprise the 2x isn't always used, because with that tiny telephoto lens and tiny sensor you can't fight the laws of optics. But Apple is still not shy selling the zoom feature like it's the best in the world and people buy and pay for that idea and not the actual thing. And I get this is pure corporate marketing BS aimed to boost sales but previously I never felt that mislead like I do this day. And from now on each time I will hear about camera improvements pushed so hard each year as one of the biggest on the market I would be much more skeptical to what is being promoted and promised.

Continue reading my thoughts on the potrait photo letdown when that post goes up.

About Ukraine

ukraine |

I was going through this station to my University each day for 5 years, and all the time before that while living with parents since it was the closest metro station to our home:

If you come with USDs or Euros, this is definitely true, especially outside of Kiev:

Chaos in Winter is absolutely true. Few years back we had an enormous snowfall in Kiev in March where even the driving rules stopped being relevant:

This is funny, and also true:

Baseline UX

ux, post |

Yesterday I've sent my first parcel via the self-serving post boxes and it got me thinking.
Inpost

I'm not new to these boxes, but not as a sender - previously I received plenty of parcels there and it is very easy to get one. You just come to the box, tap 'Receive', enter your phone number, door opens, you take the contents and close the door. That's it.

But I was always unsure about sending anything through it, because it felt like it should be much harder to do that unlike receiving. And boy I was wrong 🙂 You just print out a shipping label, stick it onto the box, come to the post boxes, tap 'Start', scan the barcode, door opens, you put the box inside, close the door and you're done! How crazy is that?

You might wonder, why the topic is about UX? Because in both cases my user-flow and user experience was short, clear and seamless. With few taps I can both send or receive a parcel within a country, and this is the new norm, the new baseline. Any new shipping service should have that by default, and probably make the process even more streamlined. Which in this case already sounds hard to do, only if the next shipping company would save your travel time to the post box and would actually deliver and take boxes from your porch with drones 🙂

Random flight

drone, gdansk |

Short footage from this weekend's flight. Recorded a plane flying half a kilometer away but decided to exclude it from the end result because the plane was way to far to be interesting on video. And you probably shouldn't fly close to planes anyway 🙂

Mario joins the battle!

nintendo, switch, super, smash, bros, ultimate |

On Sunday got this gem. And it's epic!
SSB-2

As the cover says, everyone is here! It's the biggest character mashup I've seen so far:
SSB-3

And most importantly, you can play the game anywhere you go:
SSB-4

I unlocked Mario in one of the few battles, freed him from possession and he joined my (the!) battle!
SSB-2

Being honest I missed out on the previous Super Smash Bros, so maybe for someone all of this is not new. But for me this game has so much diverse content, that I think it easily deserves its 93 points on Metacritic just for the content itself. The game's score is a bit lower than the 97 of my another most favorite and the most diverse game I ever played. Super Mario Odyssey which was the 2nd best game of 2017 which I bought the Switch for was beaten last year only by Zelda's Breath of the Wild, another Ninendo's marvel. I guess in this company of awesome unique games Super Smash Bros has good chances in getting into this year's Top 10 games as well.

Btw, just noticed my game cartridge has German writings on it, so probably Germany is Nintendo's main region in Western Europe 🙂:
SSB-5

And here's my Wedding Mario Amiibo, which I bought few months ago. Now I can fight using specifically this skin as well in all the battles to come. Because not only you get all major Nintendo's characters, but you get all of them in a variety of skins, including Wedding Mario 🙂
SSB-6

Once again Nintendo oudid themselves.

Microsoft Surface

windows, surface, apple, microsoft, macos |

Yesterday I was listening to the latest episode of ATP where one of the hosts discussed what he saw on his recent flight.

The host as many of the Apple customers has few different devices in each category. And him being an independent developer he tries doing work on the go. That's where to his flight he brought his MacBook Pro which he uses for development and his iPad Pro that he uses for everything else. And this is a real case: you can't code not on an iPad because Xcode requires a proper desktop OS, in this case Mac OS. But doing everything outside coding is more often better doing on an iPad (or tablets in general, but since Android tablets are essentially non-existent, I'm using the most successful tablet for reference).

For the flight the host took an almost $3k spec'd MacBook Pro and the most current generation bezel-less $1300 iPad Pro. And what he was doing with them? As most developers do - coding on the Mac and browsing and reading Twitter on the iPad, because the former is limited to Mac OS and requires typing via a proper keyboard and the latter is done so much better via touch on an all-screen device.

From the host's story he saw a guy next to him using a Microsoft Surface Pro or Go. And that guy used it for a while like a laptop, then flipped the keyboard and used it like a tablet, adding some pen input from the stylus. And all of that in one convertible device with a touchscreen, which starts from $500 for the Go up to only $1500 for the Pro. Whereas if you're in the Mac ecosystem, you would have to have to pay 2x-3x more and struggle with two separate devices, charging and managing them separately, etc. Even if Apple is building something for a bright future, Microsoft actually delivers something already.

I've played with the Surface lineup few times and was amazed how well built the devices are and how well-thought, well-designed and sturdy their stand mechanism is. Yes, they might not have USB-C sometimes at all, so they're less future-proof, but they are well equipped for now and who knows when. I'm in the USB-C (aka dongle) world for two years already and the transition to it is painfully slow, albeit faster than before the USB-C push from Apple with their latest laptop lineups.

Another situation was when we went to our friends and one of them was swiping pictures on her laptop. My wife was blown away with a touch screen on a laptop, since she has been surrounded with non-touch MacBooks all the time. And although a laptop with a touchscreen looks like a mess from all of those fingerprints, people actually enjoy using them, the same as everyone does enjoy using their smartphones despite them being covered with skin oil 🙂

Sometimes it feels stronger than ever that Apple lives in their own universe where people use what Apple thinks is best and not what people actually enjoy and understand using. On one hand Apple brought the touchscreens into the masses, but on the other they refuse bringing them to the laptops despite people nowadays trying to touch each screen by default and then revert to physical controls. Having an iPad in Apple's lineup helps but its OS still is very limited to let the iPad replace traditional computers.

Speaking of OSes, for me having Windows on the Surface is the big downside. I worked with both Mac OS and Windows for years and Mac OS is so much better for work. Although I would admit, with Apple's major focus on the iPhone and iOS, Mac OS becomes more and more overlooked overtime with clumsy bugs creeping in over and over again. I wish we would get a touch-based Mac OS device or a major improvement in iOS's productivity, so Apple users would be also able to get a one for all device in the nearest future. And I hope Apple's direction is not just towards the PC market at all.