“Which way am I supposed to hold this device?” he growls at the vertical Zoom through which he speaks to us from his home in San Diego. “It’s almost impossible to hold it without your finger hitting the screen, and if you touch the screen, you can do something you didn’t mean to.” That something, depending on which apps one has open, might involve calling someone you don’t want to call, sending a sticker to a work chat or taking a beautiful, out-of-focus photo of the wires curled underneath the television, a passer-by’s ankle or whatever else happens to be directly in front of the phone.
“Apple computer used to be famous for the fact that you wouldn’t even need a manual. You could just pick up the telephone or plug in the computer and in seconds, you could use it and learn. It was self-explanatory,” says Norman, with the kind of fluid speech that can only come from decades of university teaching. “But unfortunately, the designers who care only about aesthetics and beauty have taken over. And I also blame the journalists who have said that the iPhone screen should be as big as possible, with no boundary [and that the center button that pre-2017 models featured should disappear]. Because when the telephone rings, I can no longer answer the phone.”
When I switched from Windows to Mac, I was frustrated by the lack of basic features I had gotten used to. But after months of testing, I found these apps that filled those gaps perfectly, and now my Mac works exactly how I want it to.
I was listening to podcasts while working on my hobby project this afternoon, when I heard the guest on the podcast objected to the description of a skill as soft skills because, they argued, this skill is not easy.
Which triggered my someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong sense, and I proceeded to spend the afternoon reading all about hard and soft skills, and how the labeling came about.
I think I need to learn the soft skill of focus-and-not-get-distracted. It's hard.
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Thanks for reading.