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Tech review: iPad Pro 10.5 edition

Anna's iPad Pro

Anna’s iPad Pro

Every new January for me means the coming of my birthday! This year, since I got a nice yearly bonus from the day job, I treated myself to a birthday present: a new iPad Pro. Today on Here Be Magic, the group blog I participate in, I’ve got a post up about what it’s like to use this device to write on. Here on my own site, I’d like to expand on that somewhat and talk about what I like about this device so far, and why I decided to get it.

Long post is long! The rest is behind the cut.

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News

Heads up, fellow owners of i-Things: UPDATE YOUR DEVICES NOW

iOS 9.3.5 has just been released, and it’s a very important security update. Important enough that it made the news–because it’s fixing newly discovered security flaws that had the potential to give a remote attacker pretty much complete control of your phone. So jump on this ASAP and get your devices updated, mmkay?

The BBC has covered the story here:

Apple tackles iPhone one-tap spyware flaws

(If you own an older device that’s running an older version of iOS, better check and see if a similar update has been released for your version, too. If your device is capable of updating to iOS 9, you might want to put serious consideration into doing so. If it’s not capable of updating to iOS 9 and Apple hasn’t yet released a security patch to your version, go get on them about that.)

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And now, a rebuttal to my own rebuttal

There’s a reason “Go to not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes” is one of my favorite Tolkien quotes. Funny story: somebody once asked my belovedest Dara, re: that quote, “Is that true?” Dara immediately unthinkingly replied, “Well, yes and no–” And then caught herself, facepalmed, and swore, “DAMMIT!”

Case in point, I’m about to give you a rebuttal to my own rebuttal, in which I just talked about why tech companies drop support for older software. That post was with my QA Engineer hat on. Now I’m going to talk about the same question, but this time with my user hat on!

Because yeah, boy howdy, it’s annoying when a tech company decides to stop supporting a thing you’ve been quite happily using for years. Or, when they decide that the way a program works has somehow stopped being okay, and they completely change it up on the next version and expect you to cope.

Example: you’ll notice I mentioned at the end of that last post that they’ll pry Mac Word 2008 out of my cold, dead fingers. Why? Because I loathe the ribbon on the newer versions of Office, and Mac Office 2008 was the last version that didn’t have the ribbon. I hate that thing because it’s visually cluttered. It’s confusing. And Word was already stupidly complicated even after they slapped the ribbon on there, and making everybody have to figure out all the various brand new ways they had to now do the same things.

Example: Google deciding to get rid of Google Reader. Y’all may remember I was QUITE displeased about that. That’s part and parcel of a bigger, broader push by the tech companies away from using RSS in general–I was annoyed, too, when Apple decided to drop RSS support from OS X. That cost me the ability to easily keep up with Livejournal and Dreamwidth, and specifically, friends-locked posts on those sites. But the tech giants at large appear to have decided RSS sucks, whereas down here on the ground where the users are, we’re all still going “BUT BUT BUT we’re USING THAT”.

Example: Every single goddamn time Facebook changes something, for no apparent reason. I find it PARTICULARLY annoying that my News feed on Facebook keeps reverting back to Top Stories, no matter how many times I click on Most Recent. But they’re bound and determined to make people use Top Stories, and I’ve heard rumblings Twitter wants to do something similar, too. No matter how many users go “NO, NO, NO GODDAMMIT, we don’t want that!”

Example: Web browsers deciding you don’t really need a menu. NO. Every single time I do a fresh install of Internet Explorer, y’know the first thing I do? TURN THE MENU BACK ON. Because honestly, I can spare the narrow bar of space at the top of the screen that a menu occupies, I REALLY CAN, honest. Having it there and visible at all times is way less annoying than having to remember to hit the Alt key every time I want to do something.

And don’t think you’re off the hook either, Chrome. I’m not amused with you stuffing all the menu commands over onto that tiny icon over on the right. There’s no web page I visit on a daily basis, either in my day job or in my personal browsing, that has so much vital screen space that I can’t spare any for a menu I can easily find on a regular basis. On a mobile device, sure, it’s justified to hide the menu where the screen real estate actually matters. But on a desktop monitor, really, HONEST, we have enough space.

Example: Windows 8 not being consistent in its treatment of the classical Windows interface versus the new one. There are REASONS Microsoft is moving back towards that classical interface for Windows 10. Reasons involving enough users yelling, “No, dammit, WE WERE USING THAT.”

But when push comes to shove, what can you as a user do about examples like this?

Best thing I can suggest is, tell the companies in question. Send in customer feedback and tell them what things don’t work for you and why–though as I pointed out in the previous post, remember, the people that make these products are just people doing jobs, and they’re not out to make your life deliberately difficult.

Another thing you can do is to participate in usability testing. This is when companies have open testing sessions for people to come in and play around with new things, and offer feedback on what the experience of using them is like. This is different from my job, which is quality assurance. I come at it from the standpoint of engineering and making sure the thing works. Usability testing comes at it from the standpoint of the end user.

Yesterday, for example, we had a usability testing session here at Big Fish, and one of my teammates went to observe the process. He told me this morning that he found it humbling. An engineering team knows a product backwards and forwards. But when we see people who aren’t engineers having trouble with our babies, it’s a valuable and necessary reality check.

If you’re an author, of course you want people to like your books. You want them to leave you good reviews and come away with a warm and fuzzy feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment. Same deal with software. An engineering team wants the users to have a good experience using the software they create. But that team needs to hear from the users what the actual experience is.

I Fight For the Users

I Fight For the Users

And hey, you can tell the Internet, too. Because yeah, a good rant IS cathartic. For us techies, too!

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On why tech companies drop support for older software

A fellow Carina author has a blog post up today expressing her frustration over technology companies forcing people to upgrade even if they don’t want to–brought on in no small part by Microsoft dropping support for Windows XP. If you’re in tech, it’s worth a read, just as a reminder that a lot of end users of your product are NOT going to approach that product with the same mindset that you will.

But I did want to talk about one thing Janis has to say in that post, which is on the question of why Microsoft dropped support for XP.

Sure, software companies want to make money. They’re companies, after all. And in order to keep making money, they do have to keep developing new things. But any given team at any given software company has only so many people available to do that work. Developers have to write the code that actually creates the thing. The QA team has to test it. And this includes not only getting that thing finished and ready to sell, but also keeping track of any reported bugs, and releasing fixes for those as necessary.

The team I’m on at Big Fish, for example, is in charge of features on our web site. I’m a QA tester. What that means for my job is that if we change any given thing on the web site, I have to load up the appropriate page in web browsers and make sure that that change behaves the way we want it to. But it’s not as easy a question as “I just load it up in a browser and look at it once and say whether or not it works”.

Because there are a LOT of browsers in active use. Internet Explorer–MULTIPLE versions of IE, in fact. Firefox, on both the PC and Mac. Chrome, also both on the PC and Mac. Safari on the Mac. AND Safari on iPhones and iPads, multiple versions thereof (we’ve got iPads in our device locker that run iOS 6, iOS 7, AND iOS 8). Chrome and Firefox on Android devices as well.

I have to look at changes in all of those browsers. And that’s just one change on one web page. My job gets progressively more complicated the more complicated a change I have to look at.

This is called a test matrix.

When I first started working at Big Fish, our test matrix involved IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8. But as I’ve continued my job there, the versions of IE we’ve needed to focus on have changed. IE’s most recent version is IE 11. And if I had to worry about every single version of IE that’s still in use out in the wild, that by itself would mean six different versions of IE I’d have to test on. And I STILL have to also care about Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, on the Mac and all those iDevices and Android devices too.

It’s not possible to test when your test matrix starts getting that big. I do still have to sleep and eat sometimes, you know. Not to mention write.

Now, imagine I have to test an operating system, not just one change on one web page. Then my job gets even MORE complicated–because there are a LOT of things that go into making an operating system. And it takes way, way more staff power to develop and test something that complex.

Nevertheless, the team that makes an operating system still has to also care about its test matrix. Only in their case, they have to think about things like “how many different types of computers do we have to load this operating system on?” That includes both desktop machines and laptops. And in the case of Windows 8, they had to think about making it work on tablets, too.

And if that operating system team is spending most of its time working on making the next version of that operating system, they’re going to have only so much time available to spend on supporting older versions of that operating system. Because again, those people have to also sleep and eat!

If Microsoft was to continue supporting XP, they would need to keep enough people around whose job it would be to focus on that. They’d also need to keep machines around that’d be old enough to run XP. Microsoft hires a LOT of people, and they occupy a whole heckuva lot of space in Redmond. But even their resources are finite, at the end of the day. It’s easy to dismiss their decision to drop XP support as a question of simple greed–and again, see previous commentary; yes, Microsoft wants to make money, just like any other company on the planet. Eventually, though, they’re going to have to decide that it’s just not worth it to keep that support active, when their available people and resources can be more effectively spent on something else.

But next time you want to rant about why any given software company is making you upgrade a thing you’re used to using a certain way, I ask that you also take a moment to remember that the team that actually made that thing aren’t out to personally make your life difficult. Promise! We just want to do our job just like anybody else, and have time at the end of the day to come home and have lives.

In closing, two final notes:

One, Bill Gates hasn’t worked for Microsoft for years. So if you want to rant about any current activities of theirs, they’re not Gates’ fault anymore.

And two, I AM a raving technophile and love me some shiny upgrades. But they’re going to pry Mac Word 2008 out of my cold dead fingers. 😉