NV NATANSH VERMA

When you have to face choices, just toss a coin. Not because it settles the question, but while the coin is in the air, you’ll know what your heart is hoping for.

The night is darkest just before the dawn. Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

Desperation drove me to take one of the biggest risks of my life. Taking that risk paid off, big time.

I love my iPad. It is the one thing I use extensively throughout the day. My computing tasks are increasingly being done on an iPad rather than a Mac. However, I find myself wishing for one feature over and over again. The thing is, I want to be able to use a stylus on my iPad.

Steve Jobs famously eschewed a stylus in his iPhone keynote saying, “If you see a stylus, they blew it”. The thing is, at that point of time, stylus was the norm, and it was important to make people understand the value of multi-touch and how it was way better than using a stylus. Fast forward to today and hardly anyone will argue about that - for most applications.

The thing is, touching is a very approximate mode of input and by shifting to it we lost a form of input that was far more accurate - the stylus - for the comparatively niche areas in which it was way better.

What’s really important to note, though, is that an accurate input mechanism is often important for content creation. Case in point - Adobe Photoshop. The closest one comes to it on the iPad is Procreate. Although Procreate is state-of-the-art stuff, it still sucks to make stuff on it compared to Photoshop on the Mac. There’s absolutely no way to achieve something like pixel perfection on an iPad without wrecking your brains or fingers. Now, with all credit to the iPad, it has proved to be a remarkably capable content creation device. However, that’s been achieved by many by cleverly designing around the iPad’s limitations rather than by riding on iPad’s innate strengths.

Where does this leave us? Do I want the stylus to return? Heck no! Not in it’s previous and current form, anyway. Steve Jobs was right in saying, “Who wants a stylus? You have to get them, you put them away, you lose them — yuck!”. The second part of the statement is more important and informative. I have the following bare-minimum requirements for a stylus, if it ever comes to be.

1. There needs to be a mechanism for the stylus to never get lost. And by that, I don’t mean using a string to tie it to the iPad itself. Also, it should be cheap enough to not worry about too much. The last time I used a stylus, I was dead scared of losing it.

2. The iPad should still focus primarily on the approximate touch interfaces. A more accurate tool like the pen should be required in only apps that actually need it. I don’t see the OS needing it for the moment.

3. The response times to the stylus should not be noticeable. Right now there is a noticeable lag when I draw using existing tools or even fingers.

4. Spurious touch input due to the hands while using a stylus needs to be dealt with.

If you look at it, it’s actually a huge undertaking, but it is best if it is undertaken by Apple because you can trust them to get it right.

At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better. Tim Cook

This is what makes me admire Apple. They own up to their mistakes. No corporate-speak. Just plain, simple English.

Unfortunately, like dialect recognition or speech synthesis (think Siri), mapping is one of those technologies that can’t be fully incubated in a lab for a few years and unleashed on several hundred million users in more than a 100 countries in a “mature” state.

This explains why Apple just had to release Maps as soon as it possibly could. Yes, it doesn’t just work. Yes, it is buggy. Yes, it seems un-‘Apple’ey. However, this is a territory that has traditionally been far from Apple’s core expertise and it requires a different approach to what Apple generally takes.

I don’t believe that Apple can perfect maps all by itself. It needs all the help it can get from it’s users. How often have you seen ‘Report a problem’ mentioned so prominently on an Apple product?

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. Ira Glass

I came across this text quite a while back and it holds true for me now more than it probably ever will.

If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done. Thomas Jefferson

Loved the quote. Something I live by.

Working in a startup environment for 8 months has taught me how important this can be, and how easy it is to neglect.

Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. Mark Twain

As a developer fairly new to web development and scripting languages, I often had to rely on tutorials, screencasts and guides to help me achieve certain tasks. Tutorials and the likes are definitely the best point to begin, but I have slowly learned the importance of being able to dig into the source to figure stuff out.

Most of the open source code that I have found on GitHub is pretty well written, with decent documentation. I have often found a related resource on the web that helped me understand how to use that particular package, or better, I have found it explained well enough in the documentation itself. However, at the slightest of mistakes, I tended to feel a bit lost. Luckily, I am not the only one who commits mistakes in this world and at that point, I used to move to Stack Overflow or other blog posts to find someone else who had the same problem. I used to correct the problem based on their solution and then off I went, tackling other problems.

This approach had significant flaws. I was becoming over-reliant on the documentation - something that is known to be out of sync with the code(most of the time). Also, relying on too many secondary sources like tutorials and screencasts generally doesn’t give the full picture of what the code can do and what it’s limitations are. Finally, learning to code is not all about writing code. There’s a significant reading aspect as well which everyone tends to neglect.

I remember that most of my learning about C++ didn’t come from books, but from reading other peoples code and incorporating the best of their ideas into my own code to make it better. As I transitioned to a web developer, I wasn’t able to understand complex production-ready code in the first go. It was way easier to progress with tutorials and for the sake of speed, I did so. However, now the tutorials have started to fall short for me in their coverage and depth. Hence, I got more interested in understanding the internal workings of the code I use. I went back to the source.

Dalton Caldwell launched a Kickstarter-esque campaign for building App.net, a Twitter without ads. I read his post related to the idea and loved it, but I didn’t progress to actually backing the project.

The thing is, 50 dollars is a ridiculous amount for a year of something is supposed to become a Twitter-like service. Twitter has become a utility and it’s fun, but it is not worth that amount. In my opinion, the best yardstick for comparing would be a service like WhatsApp, that charges $2 per year. Why WhatsApp? It’s because that’s the only text-based paid service I have seen that has had any kind of popularity that a Twitter-like service would require. In comparison to WhatsApp, I think I’d be willing to pay maybe $5/yr for a service like Twitter. The extra amount compared to WhatsApp might be necessary because of the fact that in WhatsApp messaging is generally one-to-one, but in Twitter it is one-to-many which makes it a more difficult problem to solve.

Now, assuming I pay the 5 dollars, I still can’t see the network effects come into play with a paid application like this. In a place like India, that amount is a lot to part with and many will think twice, even thrice before paying. More importantly, many people don’t see the value in it and wonder what Twitter is really for. My prediction is that the masses will stick to a free service, particularly Twitter since it already exists. That means even if I pay the money, I will end up with a raw deal of not having the people I want to follow on the service I paid for. WhatsApp mitigated this cleverly by being dirt cheap - just a dollar at the beginning, and asking friends/people to part with that kinda money was much, much easier.

Thirdly, there’s the switch. Why would someone switch from Twitter, which has become almost ubiquitous across the web and devices? People need reasons, and good ones. The new service has to do something different, or do the same thing way better. Whatsapp nailed messaging that rivalled the likes of BBM, but the killer punch was that it was cross-device. App.net seems to have no such thing - it’s just Twitter, maybe a bit worse. Of course, these are early days but I don’t see anything which suggests that App.net will differentiate itself from Twitter.

Finally, the Twitter experience isn’t bad in its current form. Granted, it seemed better a year ago, but still, the experience is quite polished. I still hold Twitter in high regard for their design. The way it looks to me is that people are scared that the Twitter experience might deteriorate further, and they would like to have an option to shift to a different service if it does. So what App.net seems to be counting on is that Twitter will screw up, but I just don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Having said all of that, I do hope that App.net can get the backing they need to start. It would be a shame for the idea to die down before it could even begin taking shape. Let’s see what happens.