Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity.
Despite all this, we rely on our mobile devices far too much to give them up, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Fortunately, there are ways to fight the iHunch.
The app was a tremendous success, Walsh said. More than 17,000 users paid tickets through the app, and an average of 2,100 tickets were paid each month. The city gave out an average of 108,000 tickets each month in fiscal year 2014, according to the city.
But in September, when Apple released iOS 9, an update to its operating system for mobile devices that comes on every new iPhone and analysts say is used currently on about 70 percent of iPhones, the app needed technical changes that the TicketZen team did not have the resources to complete.
In this blog post I've told a story of how I made a series of technology choices over a lengthy time frame (almost 20-years, which if you convert to "dog years" gives you well over a century, which is about how long this feels on a technological time scale). At each point I endeavoured to make an "optimal" decision, one that would give me the most benefit at an appropriate price. I was wary of lock-in effects, and only regretfully allowed them into play as a calculated risk in the name of angling for the right cost-benefit trade-off.
Still, no matter how hard you try, over this kind of time scale, and sometimes even over much shorter ones, you'll find yourself in the situation of having to revise, undo, or remake your decisions. This is the stuff of life in the internet age, I guess. Just keep on doing your best: things generally work out all right in the end.
Of course, it's not entirely fair to knock developers for not immediately changing their product roadmaps to support a new feature that's only accessible to a small portion of their users (and hey, there are a lot of apps that haven't even added Quick Actions yet). Still, there are some easy basics that they could choose to add support for, without spending time developing a strange or novel use. That's because Apple didn't make 3D Touch a total free-for-all: instead, it introduced the concepts of "peek" and "pop," which let you preview ("peek at") a photo, website, or some other content in a pop-up and then fully open ("pop into") that app with a light and then hard press.
When Graham Lefford started working as a butler in 1989, his daily tasks usually involved planning formal dinners and carefully arranging the daily breakfast tray with coffee and a newspaper.
But on a recent afternoon, Mr. Lefford had to tackle a more modern butler problem: a giant TV screen that had failed to descend from the ceiling. He spent nearly an hour troubleshooting the electrical system, testing the drop-down motors and scrolling through the multimedia TV controller before finally rebooting the home’s universal software interface to get the screen to pop down.
Just finished the book "Fates and Furies." Because I knew about the plot device which the author has deployed, my brain was working overtime during the first half of the book, trying to imagine what could possibly be in the second half of the book.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing.
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Thanks for reading.