Thinking About Screentime

I’ve become much more of a book person as I’ve gotten older. Also, notebooks. That would seem quizzical to my younger self that reveled in every new productivity and reading app released on iOS or Android as I combed through blogs, subreddits, and Twitter lists, looking for the latest and greatest note-taking app.

Alas, getting old is interesting.

Screentime is definitely something that’s been on the front of my mind for the last few decades as I’ve welcomed children into this world (including Lily as of August 1!) and young people ranging from 12 to 18 into my classrooms. 

I plan to read this book, so I’m using this as a space-saver for myself to return to when I’m done (and in the middle of the school year).

Screentime is a fascinating cultural concept. The amount of “screentime” we actually consume is lower than it’s ever been (no, really). But is the measurement of “time” really what we should be focused on or worried about?

Regardless, my students will still have their devices in the “off” mode, and we’ll focus on the great ideas with our brains, pen/cil, paper, and each other’s voices like we’ll continue to not have devices on during dinners or downstairs time here in our home…

A Different Way to Think About Screentime:

Parents have a hard time when they don’t know something. I’ve written this elsewhere, but I think one of the basic things that underlies a lot of the book bannings and pronoun panics from parent-activists on the far-right is the very simple fact that parents don’t know what their kids do all day. My daughter Maeve is 7, and I volunteered this spring to help with a field trip for her first-grade class. The bus was late, and so I ended up just sitting in her classroom for about 45 minutes while the day went on as usual. Maeve is very talkative, and she loves telling us stories about her day, but it wasn’t until I sat in that classroom that I realized how little I actually knew about what the ordinary beats of that day were like, what the social dynamics were, what kind of job her wonderful teacher — hello, Mr. Diego Fernandez — is tasked with doing.

On Notes and Note-Taking Apps

I’ve long been a fan of note-taking apps going back to my beloved Evernote in its early beta days of 2007 or so (I still have the t-shirt). I’ve used most every iOS and a slew of Android note-taking apps as well. All have the same promise that I’m looking to fulfill… a place to store things I come across that I don’t want to lose. 

We need to forget. But we need to forget safely. That’s why we use note-taking apps. 

I recently rediscovered my love of note cards and Zettelkasten while diving into the wonderful app Obsidian. I’ve long used notecards to process good thoughts, bad thoughts, interesting thoughts, and things I need to remember (or forget). I have a huge storage box of them. Somewhere along the way, I let that practice go in favor of more digital means of keeping notes.

But here we are in 2023 and I’m in love with notecards again.

This comment hit home…

Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022) | Hacker News:

Writing is part of the creative process.

Writing it down helps to solidify an idea into the heap from the stack, maybe even take it from hot storage to cold storage. It allows you to jot it down while it is still fresh and offload it to focus on it later. This is super helpful in ideas, jokes, thought streams, todos, one pagers on some projects, etc. It does help you remember but also allows you to move to the next thing for now.

Writing down ideas is like a sketchbook, ideas/actions/iteration of thoughts both good and bad. It is important to write thoughts down though because how many times have you had a great idea and you are like “I’ll never forget this” and then a while later you are wondering what that was or you entirely move on because life moves fast.

Creatives, writers, comedians, developers, or just projects, are better when writing is involved in ideas to realization of those ideas.

Writing it down and notes is a form of brainstorming. Brainstorming allows ideas to be spontaneous and allows improvisation to get to better ideas. Even writing down bad ideas because somewhere in it is something good.

I use notes apps but more now just a repo (super easy with github.dev everywhere) and notes have easy history that way and you can freely add/remove without feeling like notes are lost. When I use notes apps or even Google Docs, yes they have history but it isn’t as fluid/quick as github for that. The important thing is find something that works for you that makes the barrier to writing it down almost non-existent. It needs to be very easy to write things down in between busy days and to capture these fleeting moments.

via drawkbox on Hacker News

Apple Shutting Down ‘Dark Sky’

I’m going to miss Dark Sky. It was one of those important iOS apps that made a generation of early adopters into lifelong users.

As a reminder, Apple says it will be shutting down Dark Sky on January 1, 2023. The popular weather app was already removed from the App Store in September and it will stop functioning for existing users starting tomorrow.

Read More on Mac Rumors.

Facebook Advertisers Panicking over Apple Tracking Options

Retargeting was fun while it lasted, right? … interesting time for online marketing.

Facebook advertisers, in particular, have noticed an impact in the last month. Media buyers who run Facebook ad campaigns on behalf of clients said Facebook is no longer able to reliably see how many sales its clients are making, so it’s harder to figure out which Facebook ads are working. Losing this data also impacts Facebook’s ability to show a business’s products to potential new customers. It also makes it more difficult to “re-target” people with ads that show users items they have looked at online, but may not have purchased.

Source: Facebook (FB) Advertisers Impacted By Apple (AAPL) Privacy iOS 14 Changes – Bloomberg

Putting the Days to Bed (My Paper Notebooks)

If you’ve met me IRL, you’ve probably noticed I have a notebook either in my shirt pocket or in my hand (or a stack of index cards tucked away somewhere). All of them make awkward appearances when I hear a good quote, someone has a question I need to look up, if I was trying to record a student’s robot time trials, or if the spirit moved me.

I’ve long been a doodler since my time in Mrs. Hinson’s 3rd Grade class where we learned that sketching helped with creativity (I might have made that up… but it stuck). When I got to Wofford College, my mentor Larry McGehee kept that alive by talking about his doodling process during staff meetings and other such nonsense. That was inspiring to me at the time, but his tips and tricks on the doodling life hack helped me survive countless staff meetings as a teacher myself as well as Board meetings and team meetings and all the meetings we have to go to when we decide to throw ourselves into grown-up world.

I’m at the point in my life now where I don’t have to attend so many mandatory meetings and for that gift I feel blessed (looking back, I do feel some regret for how immature/bored/inattentive/distracting I was during teacher staff meetings… I’m sorry Dear Administrators, but I do feel that I added spice to our gatherings by throwing out bombs to get everyone riled up and awake such as whether cursive was really necessary in Middle School). But with that gift comes a clear place of loss in my creative process. I have to make time to doodle now. It’s weird how you spend years thinking “Oh great, another meeting… it’s Doodling Time!” and then you find yourself secretly giddy because you know you’ll have 4 extra minutes to sneak in some surreptitious doodling while your toddler finishes their breakfast. But here I am.

So I’ve been thinking a good deal about my paper notebooks and my doodling and my journaling and all those Instagram posts that I heart on a daily basis displaying some young person’s admirable bullet journal or Panda Diary or a Mom’s Moleskine Menagerie (wow, that’s a great name… Moleskine can run with it… I’m just the idea guy). I’ve spent too many hours thinking over this issue and watching YouTube videos comparing GoodNotes and Notability on the iPad Pro while jogging off the extra weight I gained sitting in meetings and doodling and reading blog posts that compare paper journaling to “digital” journaling.

The issue is complicated by the fact that I’m typing this on an iPad and I do love this form factor and device. The iPad Pro really has become my main computer when I’m not chained to a laptop working on a piece of code or having to review artwork in Adobe Illustrator for a brand client (but the iPad is getting there!). I’ve always been the “digital” guy or “techy teacher” or the preacher that preaches with an iPad (I’ve also preached from a Blackberry, a Palm T5 (loved that thing), and a Palm m100 over the years), or the consultant who has all the fun tech toys. So when I show up with a paper notebook, it’s a little jarring to some people and frequently leads to a conversation about my note booking style or journaling preferences or the types of pens I prefer. I’ve bonded with many clients over the benefits of a Pilot G2 Extra Fine 0.5mm refill cartridge compared to the competition.

But year after year I go back to my paper notebooks when it’s time to put the days to bed on another year. This year is going to be no different it seems. I’m an old man stuck in his ways, what can I say? “I’ve got my drip pan, ready for my nap” as Lightning McQueen says at the ends of Cars 3 (again, I have a toddler). But there is magic in opening a new journal and getting ready for the year while looking back at all the collected thoughts, doodles, dreams, failures, completions, incompletions, interceptions, and incantations from the previous trip around our closest star. It’s really magical in a self-serving and privileged way to pull down a notebook from ten or fifteen years ago and do the same. There is probably some magic in doing the same with a backup file in Dropbox of a PDF exported from GoodNotes in 2013, but magic, like notebook and pen preferences, is subjective.

So my prayer for me and for you in 2019 is… Blow up your tv, throw away your Twitter, go to the country, find you a home, eat a lot of peaches, try and find Jesus on your own… and do some doodling.

The Apps You Should Really Be Concerned About with Your Privacy

After examining maps showing the locations extracted by their apps, Ms. Lee, the nurse, and Ms. Magrin, the teacher, immediately limited what data those apps could get. Ms. Lee said she told the other operating-room nurses to do the same.“I went through all their phones and just told them: ‘You have to turn this off. You have to delete this,’” Ms. Lee said. “Nobody knew.”

Source: Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret – The New York Times

Everyone is afraid of what Google and Facebook “know” about them and how much information they’re sharing with these services because of poor media coverage.

While those two services need to be investigated and questioned, it’s the “bottom half” of the advertising industry connected to seemingly innocent apps that you install on your mobile device to give you the weather or locations of gas or local sports scores that are really the most alarming in how they treat your personal location data.

Good report here by the NY Times (we need more of this type of journalism in the tech-sphere).

Welcome back, serifs

I’m a font nerd. I’m constantly working with (and sometimes against) clients who want a particular “look” for their website or app or presentation and trying to push them to look ahead. One of those conversations typically has to do with fonts.

One client I didn’t have to fight with was Guy Sayles. His new site is one of my favorite designs I’ve done in a long while. Part of that has to do with the font Adamina that was used for headlines. It’s whimsical and full of motion but also conveys wisdom and experience. It reminded me a great deal of Guy’s personality, so I had to use it. I think it looks just beautiful on the new From The Intersection site, and I’m glad he trusted my push to use a serif font for the design. We just launched the redesign this week.

The “design world” has been quickly re-adopting serif fonts for ads, apps, and websites over the last couple of years after they were mostly maligned in the early to mid 2010’s. However, as “mid-century modern” has come back into vogue stylistically for furniture and dress, we’re seeing the resurgence of serifs.

I installed iOS 12 betas on my iPhone and iPad this week for testing, and low-and-behold there are serifs! Apple is famous for its attention to detail and its use of Helvetica and then its own San Francisco font. Apple lead the way on San-serif fonts (such as the body text here), so it’s wonderful to see the serifs returning to apps like the renamed Apple Books (formerly iBooks), which makes sense. Apple has even created a new font titled “SF Serif” to mark the occasion.

So, keep in mind that even though you might think you know what “modern” is, there’s always a corner to turn. Find a good guide. And never ever use Comic Sans or Impact. For anything.

A few images from my Apple Books collection showing the new font:

iOS 11.4 with Messages in iCloud

Lots of good updates today for your iPhone and iPad, but Messages in iCloud is definitely something I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced last year. Better late than never.

Messages in iCloud is also now available as part of iOS 11.4. This feature lets you keep messages across devices in sync sort of like modern email. If you delete a message on one device, it will go away on all your devices. And if you set up a new device from scratch, your messages will appear without needing to do a full restore from an iCloud backup.

— Read on 9to5mac.com/2018/05/29/ios-11-4-airplay-2-homepod-stereo-messages-icloud/

10 most downloaded iPhone apps in the world

It might be surprising to Americans, but neither Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube is the most downloaded app on the iPhone anymore. As we continue to move into the 21st Century, we’re seeing the rise of Chinese apps and companies. This will only escalate in the coming years, especially as the US seems more preoccupied with tribalistic policies.

“Known as Douyin in China, Tik Tok is a music video and social media app. The app lets you shoot and edit short clips, then add music and special effects to them. Tik Tok is owned by the same parent company that bought social video app Musical.ly for $1 billion last year”

Facebook-owned apps dominated the App Store charts during the first three months of the year, but a Chinese-made music video app called Tik Tok took first place – Business Insider