In the beginning, it was dark. Very dark. It’d get light for half a day, long enough to find food and explore a bit, but then, it’d be dark again. But then, it’d be light again—until it was stormy, and there was no light for days on end. Those were the days you’d wish for a way to capture the sun.
And then, somehow, a piece of the sun fell out of the sky, and turned a tree into a mini-sun—or so it seemed to you. Here was your chance. Everyone else was terrified, but you walked to the tree, picked up a branch that had caught some of the sun, and figured out that it was fire.
Take it back to the camp, and everyone would think you were insane. You were literally playing with fire. So you’d have to convince them why this fire was good, how it could keep you warm and break the darkness. You’d tell a story.
Fast forward a bit, and you’re tired of walking. You’re doing a lot more walking now with light, and it’s getting tiresome. And so, you notice a rock rolling down a mountain one day, tumbleweed rolling across a field in the breeze, and pebbles rolling under your feet. And suddenly, you’ve invented the wheel in your head.
You chisel and carve and craft the perfect wheel, but then what. Time for a story again. You’ll have to find a way to convince people this wheel is something important, perhaps by describing the tumbleweed and rolling stones.
Centuries pass, and fire on sticks (or in glass lanterns, or on wax candles) has gotten a bit old. There’s this new-fangled thing called electricity, which turns out was what caught that tree on fire way back when anyhow, and if electricity can light up the night sky, surely it can light up your home. You’d just need to capture that new version of the sun in a bottle, again — and this time a stick wouldn’t cut it.
So you’d experiment and try and finally find a way to make a light bulb that works. It’d take forever, but finally, you’d have something. Ding.
But then, you’ve got to convince people to switch—to spend money for seemingly unproven technology. And that wouldn’t do. And so, you’d wire up a whole section of the city to show that electricity won’t burn everything down, and you’d shower the World’s Fairs with lightbulbs so people would see the whole world, brighter.
If you’re Tesla, you’d run a lightbulb off current passing through your body just to prove it was safe. Real-life stories, perhaps, but stories all the same.
Time passes on, the whole world runs on electricity, and it’s time for a new revolution. There was this not-so-little thing called computers, machines that’d take up whole rooms and solve math. Not exciting.
That is, not until the microchip came along, and made PCs possible. Even still, what normal person in their right mind would spend nearly $3k in today’s money for a computer when you didn’t know what it’d do for you? Math isn’t that exciting.
But someone saw more to them than that, and told us stories. He said the computer was a bicycle for the mind—it could let your mind do much more than it could do on its own. It could enable anything.
It was the time when full-page magazine ads were all the rage, and no one saw the need to skimp on words. And so, Apple—and really, so many others—would tell stories in their ads, tell us how we’d put their products to use, and why we weren’t crazy for wanting one. They’d explain what electronic mail was, and how it could save us postage and speed up our communications. They explained what BASIC meant, and how we could make stuff with it.
They told stories.
Sometimes, it just takes a story.
The App Store is filled with apps that have a vague name, an even more vague description, and a few random screenshots. There’s little space for much else. And if that’s all you rely on, you’ll be lucky to get any customers. If the app solves a basic problem—email, notes, or any of the dozens of things people already understand—people won’t know why to try it over the app they’re already using. And if it solves a unique problem, they won’t even begin to grasp what it’s for.
Ed Catmull said in Creativity, Inc. that “We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.” And those paths need stories. People won’t understand what we’re doing—if we’re doing something new and meaningful—unless we explain it. They need be able to see what we meant that thing to do. They later may find other, better uses for it, but it takes that first story to capture their mind and start seeing the possibilities.
That’s why the best apps tell stories. Dropbox’ intro video told us that it was the place to put all of your stuff, and then described how exactly that made sense with examples of people traveling and more. Their homepage had little else—and it needed little else. The story was what mattered.
Basecamp the company, in its previous incarnation as 37signals, found that using a story from a customer increased their signups over 200%. Their initial long-form story, with a signup button far below the fold, increased signups over 100%, and further tweaks of adding a picture (so people could put a face behind the story) and tighter copywriting double that stat again.
And it’s not just fancy apps. More boring services like Draft Revise, a design optimization service, have found that a wall of text that in-depth explains what their service is all about helps prompt signups. Nick Disabato, the guy behind it, says that he’s told people the site address in a coffee shop and seen them stop talking just to read the page. All of that, for a $650/month service that’s inherently boring.
And yet, a story is what helps it work.
“History bears out that people with clear ideas and strong points are the ones we remember,” writes Scott Berkun in his book Confessions of a Public Speaker, after mentioning mistakes in famous speeches and the various speaking problems thought leaders had. That didn’t matter. They told a story, and that’s what we remembered.
That’s how the simplest tools can win: a solid story. No amount of design and features—or lack thereof—can make or break a product like a story. A solid story will win hearts and minds, and help people see how they can achieve greatness with what you made. No story will only let them see your sun captured on a stick, and they’ll wisely run away.
There’s something that loves a multipurpose gadget. The fabled Swiss Army Knife, the microwave oven, the rice cookers that can also make soup and steam break, the spork, the universal chargers and screw drivers and anything else that claims to be universal anything, the crazy tools shown on late night TV. The computer, even, or the iPhone with its promise that “there’s an app for that.” There’s something deep within us that automatically feels we’re getting a better deal when the thing we buy can be used for more than one thing. The more, the merrier.
And yet, seriously, how many of the multi-purpose gadgets do you really use daily (putting aside for the moment your computer and smartphone, since they’re a somewhat different category of everything devices). The best Swiss Army Knife’s screwdriver will never be as good as any standalone screwdriver, and its knives would never stand up to a top-quality real knife. The microwave is only half-way good at anything it does, and you likely only use your rice cooker to cook rice anyhow. And the poor spork is terrible at everything, no matter how much you want to love it.
No matter how much engineering and design and love and care you put into a multipurpose device—and it will take a lot more effort to make anything that does a ton of stuff—it’s always at this weird interception between everything it’s trying to do. It may be ok at a lot of things, but it’s not great at any.
Yet there’s also something that loves the simpler tools. The knife, forged with skills passed down through generations. The clock, ticking steadily for decades. The wood-fired oven, the hammer, the paintbrush, the pencil and paper. We ascribe mastery to those who use them, genius to those who invented them. Those tools may just do one job, but they’ll do them great. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Their simpleness has made them great.
That’s the genius—and surprise—behind the tech gadgets that do just one thing, like the Kindle Paperwhite, a DSLR, an original iPod, or even the Fitbit. They do just one thing, and they do that thing great.
That’s why the iPod Classic was great—that clickwheel and the whole UI were designed just around your music. In the same way, the Kindle (and this is referring to the eInk reader Kindles, not the newer Kindle tablets) manages to have a much better reading experience—and also is far easier to select text in—than any reading app on another gadget, simply because it’s designed just for reading text. When it lets you select text to highlight it, it can do that great since it’s just designed for books. There’s less features, but the features it has can be the best possible for that one scenario. Plus, since its only focused on one thing, its battery life is astounding.
Same goes for a DSLR. I’m so accustomed to random tech interfaces (say, the ones on a microwave or a car’s stereo) being terrible that I just assumed my Canon DSLR’s touchscreen interface would be atrocious. No big deal: I bought it for optics, and the screen just needs to show pictures. But then, surprise of surprises, it’s actually nice. There’s quick access to the photo settings you need, silky smooth swiping between pictures, and little else. And that’s all there needs to be.
Focus breeds something far closer to perfection, almost without trying. Perhaps you can improve on the Kindle or DSLR or iPod interface, but absolutely not by adding features. If anything, you’d only make them better by simplifying them even further, removing all extraneous parts until they’re as razor focused as a time-honed sword.
It’s not just traditional tools that can be single-purpose and focused. Software, too, can be a honed tool that’s perfect for just one thing. There’s Instapaper, with its simple idea to save article to read later and nothing else. There’s iA Writer, the most minimal writing app possible with nary a setting in sight—the closest to a digital typewriter yet. There’s web browsers like Safari, that with each release get closer and closer to having no UI and only the web pages you’re looking at. There’s even something more valuable in extremely focused apps—you can find all types of unique use cases for a read later app or a plain text writing app or anything else that’s focused, just because it’s great at one thing.
Tie a lot of small tools that are great at one thing together, and you’ve got a set of tools that’ll do the stuff you need far better than one piece of software that’s supposed to do everything.
And here’s where I wonder at the current state of the supposedly “smart” watch market. There’s the watches that are essentially trying to cram everything from a phone into a smaller screen on your wrist, while still requiring you to also carry a phone. They’re marketed as things that can do everything: show directions on the go, take pictures, show notifications, and more.
But they don’t do anything great. They by design won’t replace your phone, and are instead essentially just an external display. They make for great demos—or at least they should—but in practical life there’s zero pressing need to use one.
The Fitbit is interesting, since it’s just designed to be a sensor that sends data to your phone about your exercise and movements. It’s simple, single-purpose, and has an obvious use case. Maybe it’s not as exciting since it can’t do so much, but at least it’s easy to explain why one would want to use it.
I don’t know what Apple’s going to do with the wearables market, or if they’ll release an iWatch. All I know is that if I’m going to buy yet another gadget, I’d rather it have a specific thing it does great, and little else. The iPhone’s the hub, the multipurpose device. It’s great at that. Let that remain. Then give us something else that’ll make the iPhone better, not just duplicate features it already has.
Instead of spending time on something that might be sold or shut down tomorrow I much rather put on some safety goggles and build my own thing.
A brilliant call for a return to DIY from the guy behind Kirby, this time in building your own tech. Just the thing most of us should do more of.
Don’t find an app for it. Make your own app from it, even if you’re doing so just by mashing up open tools you can already get. You’d be surprised what you can build with just a CMS as your base.
When your business is selling hardware and software to customers—that is, when the people who use your devices and software are your customers—you can actually care about your users’ privacy, and make that a selling point. With almost every other tech company giving away everything for free and making it back in ads, their users aren’t their customers—their advertisers are—there’s no way they can advocate for privacy as a feature.
This article from Macworld sums up Apple’s privacy focus today. It’s another great reason to love Apple stuff.
The more professional the tool, the uglier it must be—or so it seems if you look at most business software. The new, simple apps get the stylish new designs—typically simple todo list, reading, and photo filter apps—while tools like Office keep the same traditional style forever. Even newer business web apps typically stick to a more utilitarian style, focusing on features more than UI.
When it comes to team task management apps, though, there’s one that’s always been a showcase of design, even as it’s filled with pro features: Flow. Several years back, I worked with their team doing copywriting and support, and even then it was beautiful for a task app. The design then leaned more heavily towards shiny, almost plastic graphics—a notch above, say, Things for Mac’s style. But over the years, it’s gotten lighter and flatter design while still maintaining its great usability, and today it could be a showcase of what OS X Yosemite designs should look like.
Plus, it’s got more features now than ever. There’s an Android app (the most requested feature when I did support for Flow) along with an iOS app and even a Mac app now (though the latter is just a web view, but still is nice). You can add sub-tasks to your tasks, format notes with Markdown, and more. It’s a seriously powerful team todo list app, one we used at AppStorm, and I happen to find it exciting to see how its continued to improve over the past few years.
If you’re looking for a nicer team task app, you can’t get much nicer than Flow. It’s gotten so much nicer over the past 3 years, it’ll be exciting to see what the next years bring.
It’s way too easy to fill up your computer’s storage, especially if you have an SSD. My MacBook Air does good to have more than 15Gb of free space at any given time. Thus, I’m careful with what I store locally, offload most of my pictures and movies to external drives, and selectively sync Dropbox folders to let me store files online, but not have them take up space on my Mac (that’s Dropbox’ best secret, by the way: open your Dropbox app preferences, select Account, then click the Change Settings… button beside Selective Sync. Unselect the folders you don’t want on your Mac, and voila: they’ll stay in the cloud a click away, but won’t take up local storage).
Selective sync is a small patch to one of the broader things that cloud storage doesn’t do right—devices come with terribly small amounts of local storage today, but then say they also have cloud storage. And yet, that does you precious little good if said cloud storage takes up as much local space as it does in the cloud. We need something better—but for now, at least there’s that option.
Except the only problem is, adding files to those selectively synced folders is a pain. You’ve got to upload them through your browser, or add them to another folder then go online and move them.
Now, there’s a simple Chrome add-on that lets you download files directly to a Google Drive or Dropbox folder of your choice: Ballloon. Find a file online you want to download—that image for a project, or an eBook you just bought and need to sync with Dropbox to get it on your phone, or whatever—right-click on it, and select the Ballloon option, and it’ll download it directly to your online storage.
That’s handy for the use-case I mentioned previously, but could be a serious usability improvement on a Chromebook, which lacks traditional file management anyhow, and could be the perfect extra for your work computer so you can “download” files and have them automatically show up in your personal Dropbox on your computer back home. And it’s fast—no more waiting for downloads to finish, as Ballloon takes care of it in the background and saves your files online.
So hey. If you’ve ever wanted to download files directly to the cloud—that is, save them to your online storage without downloading them to your computer—Ballloon is the Chrome add-on for you. Enjoy.
No, really. The first thing you should do when you want better pictures is not to buy a better camera. Instead, learn how to take the very best pictures you can with the camera you have.
If you have a smartphone from the past several generations (say, an iPhone 4 or newer) or a point-and-shoot camera that’s no older than a half-decade, you can take very good shots with the camera you already have. What you need is practice and techniques to get better pictures with your camera. Learn how to focus and adjust exposure—yes, even your relatively basic camera can do that, and more if you’re using a smartphone with photography apps.
Now, learn to organize and tweak your photos on your own. Don’t use pre-made filters: use tools that’ll let you adjust brightness and contrast, tweak the highlights and shadows, and more. Don’t try to make your photos look old or artificially blurred—instead, try to tease the best colors out of the photos themselves. On your phone, you can use apps like VSCO Cam for that, but again, focus on tweaking the photo itself, not the filters in the app. On your Mac or PC, consider getting Lightroom—it’s a great app to organize and tweak your photos, and even works on iOS these days, and you can get it with Photoshop for just $9/month with a Creative Cloud Photography Program subscription. Again: don’t go buy Lightroom presets, the desktop version of mobile photo filters; practice tweaking your photos by hand instead, and even take a course on Lightroom itself instead if you really want more. You’ll learn far more, save money, and have one less thing to not worry about.
Organize everything you want to keep, tweak those shots to make sure they’re the best they can be, and organize them and back them up so you’ll keep them forever and be able to find them easily later. You’re taking photography seriously now, remember.
If you want more than that, pick up a book about the art of photography—perhaps even one with that exact name: (The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression)[http://amzn.to/1m4SA5X] (which, by the way, is as good an eBook as a paper book, and works great on the Kindle since its photography examples are Black-and-White). You’ll learn how to frame your subjects and use light and tone to get the best pictures possible. And you just might find that the camera you have is quite enough—or you might get lured even deeper into the art of photography, and end up back at square one wanting to buy a better camera. That’s ok: this time, you’ll know more about photography—what aperture and ISO and focal length and more mean—and will be ready to actually put your new camera to better use now that you’ve maxed out your iPhone or point-and-shoot photography skills.
Then, and only then, consider buying a camera. And here’s where you’re going to get overwhelmed. There’s a million point-and-shoot cameras, which you can ignore. If you want better than your phone, you either want a larger sensor (see Wikipedia for a comparison of common sizes, and marvel over how tiny your phone or point-and-shoot’s sensor is) which allows more light in—and which means far more than megapixels (in fact, go ahead and quit worrying about stats: they stop mattering for the most part right here). That means you want an interchangeable lens camera, and likely means you want a DSLR.
But here’s where you need to stop and think for a minute, before you go read any reviews or compare cameras. The new fad is mirrorless cameras—they’re smaller and lighter than DSLRs, and often feature cool retro styling. And they can be nice. But the cheapest ones often don’t have a viewfinder, which takes away one of the very things a better camera usually has that can help improve your photography, and their lenses and accessories are often more expensive. And, aside from Sony and Fujifilm’s offerings, they all use Micro Four Thirds sensors, smaller—thus letting in less light—than the sensor in a DSLR.
Entry-level DSLRs are also cheaper, almost always, for similar features—and here we’re looking for photo shooting performance, not extras like Wifi that don’t truly matter when you’re taking a picture. And any DSLR from the last several years will be great—I own a Canon Rebel T5i (otherwise called the 700D or X7i), but the T3i or T3 from a few years back are still great. On the Nikon side, there’s the 5000 series that’s the most similar to Canon’s Rebel line, and the 3000 series that’s a tad cheaper. There’s a ton of other models for both brands (typically, the shorter the number, the more professional—and expensive—the camera from both Canon and Nikon). You’ll find a number of models from each in the $3-500 range in Amazon’s best-selling DSLR list, or could even get one used.
Don’t worry too much about which one to buy. If you want to focus on specs, you can endlessly compare—and if you want to do so, The Wirecutter’s DSLR and Mirrorless camera guides are a great place to start. But really, don’t worry too much about which camera you get. Any decently new Canon or Nikon will be great. In fact, I’d most strongly suggest checking what camera your friends own; if they mainly have Canon, get Canon. You’ll be able to share tips, and perhaps lenses and more.
I promise: I thought way too much about which camera to buy, made comparison charts and asked countless people for help. And in the end, the camera I bought was the Canon a friend recommended at first—I went the whole way around and, even though it wasn’t the top spec’ed camera, it ended up being the one that made the most sense for me. But any of the cameras could have made sense. Just buy one, and start shooting photos.
Wait: don’t shoot photos just yet. You need one more thing: a prime lens. Your camera likely will come with a so-called “kit lens” that’ll go from somewhat wide to somewhat zoomed-in shots. It’ll be ok, but not amazing. For those amazingly sharp photos, and ones with a sharp focus on one object and a blurred bokeh background behind, you’ll want a prime lens—a fixed lens that only lets you shoot at one focal length (so you can’t zoom in or out). For that, the default choice is the 50mm or 35mm prime for your camera—or for Canon, there’s a 40mm “pancake” prime that’s smaller, and right between the focal length of those two (and that’s the lens I bought). If you can, try them out in a store and see which one feels nice to you—and buy it. That’ll cost you less than $200, and will be the key to taking far better pictures than ever before. Do not buy any other lenses yet; use the ones you’ve got now until you know enough to know for sure exactly what you’d use another lens for.
So, all told, you’ll buy a entry-level DSLR, a prime lens, and that’s it. Unless it’s free, don’t bother getting a camera case and SD card just yet; you can likely pick them up cheaper later, and you’re almost guaranteed to not get a better deal with a set of stuff. You’ve also likely got an SD card laying around somewhere, and the case isn’t that big of a deal—you want the camera around your neck most of the time anyhow.
Now, put that prime lens on your camera, and start taking pictures. Lots of pictures. Shoot in Raw, shoot at your maximum aperture to get the great effects you’ve so desperately wanted from a better camera—and then experiment back up until you know what you can achieve with each aperture—and tweak your photos in Lightroom. Don’t buy a book about your camera itself—read the manual that came with it. Then go back to your photography book, and practice. And practice. And have fun.
It’s tough to start over, to throw out what you already have and start anew. And yet, that nimbleness is seemingly the most required trait of successful software companies today. Desktop software that made sense a decade ago often needs far more than just updates today—it needs rethought for the needs and use-cases of today’s mobile world. You can either change, or watch a nimbler new startup take away the new version of the market you used to claim.
Thus, it’s far from surprising that Realmac Software decided last year to kill LittleSnapper, their screenshot tool that made it simple to grab screenshots, annotate them, and store them together in a library, in lieu of the new, lighter and leaner Ember. Instead of being a tool just for screenshots—something that almost only appealed to geeks, who themselves are almost as likely to use the built-in Mac screenshot tools anyhow—Ember was designed as a tool that almost anyone could use. If you ever save images that don’t quite fit in your Lightroom photo library—whether design inspiration clippings or screenshots or font samples or color swatches or anything else—you’ll find a use for Ember.
Here’s how it works. You use its built-in screenshot tools—holdovers from LittleSnapper—to clip anything you see on your screen, or drag and drop any image, video, PSD, AI, or text files into Ember. Or, you click the web tab in Ember or install its browser add-ons, then open a page you want to save and click the Ember button, then choose to just bookmark the page (which saves any site metadata and notes you added, along with a small clip of the front page), clip the entire page (which saves a full-length image of the website, along with its full source code), or in the Ember app’s browser you can select just a portion of the site to save.
Now, you should head over to the main Ember app, where you’ll see your clipped items—screenshots, images, bookmarks, and files—all in the middle of the window, with an inspector on the right side of the screen that lists the metadata from the selected items. On the left, you’ll find quick collections of your items based on the type of clipping, along with any other collections you add to organize your own items. Then, select an item, and you’ll get mockup tools to quickly tweak your clips and share them using iCloud, CloudApp, and more.
There’s features for screenshot geeks. You can snap full-length websites, for one, and then annotate them with simple tools like the Smart Drawing tool that’ll automatically turn your squiggles into arrows and circles and more. Then, as mentioned before, you can view and edit the full source code of sites you’ve clipped, a great way to see how exactly the designers worked their magic in making the site that inspired you. Then, in the built-in browser, you can even resize the browser view or pick from standard device screen sizes to test responsive sites and screenshot them in the way they’d look on mobile.
There’s features for organization geeks who might go for a bucket app otherwise, but who’d also like Ember’s simplicity. You can bring in most of the files you use, now that it supports text and PDF, and can jot down simple notes right in Ember or select and copy text from PDFs if you want. Then, you can organize everything in smart collections that’ll automatically show items with specific tags, titles, format, rating, and even colors that Ember automatically detects. There’s also search—though for now, it only looks at the items’ metadata: their file names, date created, rating, tags, note, and type of clipping.
And then, of course, there’s features for design geeks, the ones the original launch of Ember seemed to emphasize. You can drag in all your inspiring pictures and clip the sites with the styles you like, then organize them into your own categories. Better yet, you can automatically get inspired with RSS subscriptions to image feeds from Dribbble, Inspired UI, 500px, and more, and add images you like to your library (and the UI feeds there will likely catch the eye of screenshot geeks that might have initially dismissed the design features as silly extras).
The original image-only release of Ember wasn’t quite enough to satisfy many, as can be seen in the comments on our Mac.AppStormreviews of Ember. Simplicity, it seemed, was not enough to stand on its own. But still, there were plenty of people who embraced Ember for its focus and simplicity, and the Ember site has a ton of stories of how designers and more the world over have found it useful.
And now, I suspect, with the addition of bookmarking and support for other file types, Ember will prove itself useful to a far wider range of users. If it’d only let you search through the full-text of clipped sites, PDFs, and text notes (since right now it only lets you search through file names and their metadata), and perhaps include Markdown rendering for notes—along with support for web clipping on iOS—it’d essentially be everything you need for a simple bucket app that looks nicer than Evernote. Already, it’s the perfect graphical bookmarking app as long as you add any info you want in the description box, easily as good as Evernote plus the Web Clipper for that.
Ember won’t be the same app for everyone. For some, it’ll continue to be a place for design inspiration, while for others it’ll be a new graphical bookmarking app, and for others it’ll be the place to put all those pictures and other files that don’t quite make sense anywhere. That’s the magic that can happen when you strip an app down to its bare minimum and build up from there. You can make an app that’s more useful to a far wider range of people.
And that’s exactly what Ember is. Screenshots alone aren’t enough to get most people to buy an app—even me, and I take screenshots all day long with OS X’ built-in tools—but combine those features with a library, annotation features, and file support that goes far beyond screenshots into a bookmarking and basic notes app, and Ember ends up being an app that almost anyone can use. And enjoy.
Purchasing Ember
You can buy Ember from the Mac App Store or directly from the Realmac Store for $49.99. Both versions are the same, with the exception of syncing services: both versions can sync your library via Dropbox, but only the App Store version can sync via iCloud.
Ember for iOS is a universal app for iPhone and iPad, costs $4.99, then offers a $1.99 in-app purchase to automatically import screenshots and a $4.99 in-app purchase to add annotations to images. Altogether, that makes it cost $11.97 for full functionality on iOS.
You get something, you lose something. That’s how it always is with new tech. Digital photography lost quality and something more abstract—grain and physical paper-and-chemicals and emotion, perhaps—compared to film, and it took decades to catch up (and, of course, there will always be the purists who prefer film, ‘till kingdom come). Typewriters took away the uniqueness of handwriting, word processing took away the instantaneous feel of letters pressed into paper, eternally unchangeable. Records and radio took away something from live performances, and digital audio took away—crazily enough—the fuzziness that made the former feel “authentic”. I’m sure the wheel must have taken something away from brute-force work and, well, walking.
And thus it is with transportation. Horseless carriages were an obvious improvement over horses: they didn’t get tired, they were far faster, and they gave us smog instead of dung-filled streets (the former giving lung problems and global warming, the latter causing disease endemics. Ok, this point might be a toss-up.). But they were things. Horses are living beings that, almost, became one with the rider. You had an emotional connection with your horse—it was a real living and breathing creature that you’d feel bad for when it was sick. We mostly just feel annoyed when our cars end up needing fixed.
That very livingness gave something horse-based transportation something else that their technologically superior replacement never gave us: consciousness. It’s what gave us an emotional attachment to horses, but is also what kept people safe on them. Countless movie scenes have the rider dozing off or planning ahead or anything else while their horse trots on, no guidance needed. You’d start your horse off on the right path, then let it go on its own pace through the bulk of the journey. Get near your destination, and you’d switch back to more actively controlling your horse—or if there ever was danger, the horse would alert you to it and you’d take the reigns again, literally. And it’s not just horses: that very concept of the animal you’re riding being able to go on its own for the bulk of the boring stretches of your trip is always picked up whenever there’s a story scene with someone riding something intelligent: How to Train Your Dragon 2 illustrated this perfectly with Hiccup nearly falling asleep while Toothless continued flying to their destination, but then taking control again once there was danger. Self-driving vehicles, for the most boring stretches of the road.
This is what motor vehicles lost. Cars demand full attention, all the time, no matter how straight and boring the road. And yet, we’re terrible at paying attention all the time, gazing instead at billboards and the models of cars around us and—scarily enough—even at phones and newspapers and more. Our minds drift off, and then suddenly there’s something in front of us and we have to slam on the brakes. Surely countless accidents could be avoided daily if only our cars were as smart as horses.
As smart as horses. Imagine cars that could drive themselves on the straight stretches, when we feel save relinquishing control, and then let us take control again when we want. It’s not so hard to imagine, even: light-SciFi for years has shown cars that can drive themselves, but then let you take back control when you want to (of course, for action scenes when we’d want to root for the human who’s controlling said car). See the car in I, Robot, for example. It’s smart, but ultimately still a tool to be controlled by a human.
For there’s something human about being able to steer our own destiny, control our fate, and decide precisely how we want to turn into a curve and avoid the bad guy. We like tools that extend us—keyboards and musical instruments and cameras and hand tools. Automation is hard to trust—we all know that you can’t trust Google Maps absolutely, and are far better off supplementing the GPS with your own knowledge of the roads. How then can we expect people to trust fully automated cars, driverless cars that can take us to a GPS destination but don’t listen for our input otherwise?
That, I think, is why Google’s self-driving cars hit an uncanny valley for so many. We’d perhaps like a smarter car, a car that follows the lines and automatically brakes if we’re going to hit something. Perhaps we’d even accept “smart” cruse control that can drive the straight stretches, the boring parts of our commutes and road trips, for us, as the new Cruse is offering next year for $10k, and that we’ll undoubtedly see in many premium cars as a default feature within this decade. If there’s still a steering wheel, and if we’re still asked to make active decisions about our final destination—by hand, mind you, not just by abstractly punching in a GPS location—we’ll feel ok. The car will feel like a further extension of ourselves than the current gas pedal and steering wheel do. But if the car can only follow a GPS route, and must be fully automated—if it doesn’t give us any more control than entering an end destination—it’ll be far tougher to get us to accept it.
Tesla excites me, because it’s pushing the tech of cars forward in a mechanical way—it’s the most advanced dumb horseless carriage yet. Google Self-Driving Cars scare me in a way I know deep down they shouldn’t, because I happen to love driving, and love the control of being behind the wheel. There’s got to be a middle ground, where we can take back control at will, and give freewheeling directions to our cars—say, by saying out loud “Ok, Car, keep driving until we’re 1 KM from Exit 256, then let me know”. That’s a future of personal transportation I’d be ok with.
But I wouldn’t very much like being strapped to a horse that’s taking me to a destination, without any way to change the course or direct it. High-tech whiz-bang won’t change that.
In an odd twist on my normal writing this month, I wrote a tutorial for Tuts+ that was sponsored by LG to promote their new extremely wide monitor. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware, to say the least, and I’d be sorely tempted to pick one up to stick beside a Mac Pro if I were in the market for hardware of that price range. I’m not, and happen to be quite content with my MacBook Air that I use for all of my work.
But that’s not the main part of the tutorial. The tutorial itself is about apps that let you easily use multiple apps side-by-side on your Mac, PC, or Linux computer. If you’re tired of just running every app in full-screen mode, this tutorial is for you.
