Stupid Hoaxes

I watched two videos today where people drilled into their iPhone 7s, claiming that was all it took to add a headphone jack to their phones.  Obviously, poorly done hoaxes, but apparently some people have fallen for it.  I kept waiting for them to validate how it worked or give specifics about where to drill and how deep to drill, but they never did.

Here's one plausible reason they could have used: you're drilling into a speaker. You'll destroy the speaker but expose the wiring to allow your headphones to make contact.  And here's a second plausible reason... but, please, please do not actually follow this advice.  But here's how my hoax would go:

Replace the Missing iPhone 7 Headphone Jack

When the iPhone 7 was released, Apple claimed they were making the courageous choice to eliminate the headphone jack in the name of progress.  A recent tear-down by Fixer Squad turned out Apple wasn't so courageous after all - the headphone jack still exists!

Why would Apple do this? The current theory is that next September Apple will unveil the iPhone 7s with the headphone jack. They'll announce that "the people have spoken and Apple listened."  But in reality, it will be the exact same phone with a modified case and a modest bump in memory (and a not-so-modest bump in price).

If you don't want to wait until September to enjoy your existing headphones and you're feeling brave, it is possible to fix your iPhone today.

You'll need a 3.5mm drill bit, a good ruler, a variable speed drill and masking tape. Optional: Vise and handheld vacuum (or a vacuum with a hose and wand.)

Start by measuring 3/4" on the drill bit.  Wrap a piece of masking tape around the drill bit so you'll know when you've reached the proper depth.  You'll be drilling through the case and the plastic plug that Apple has inserted into the headphone jack.

Turn the phone off entirely (very important!!!) and then secure the phone so that it can't move while drilling.  A vise works best, but if you don't have access to a vise, a few heavy books should hold the phone still you're drilling.  Don't use other heavy objects that aren't wide and flat - you don't want them to move or jump and crack your screen.  As a last resort, you could use masking tape to secure it to the edge of a table, but you'll need to be extra careful if you do that.

Look at the bottom of the phone with the screen facing up or away from you.  You'll see the Lightning port in center and a series of dots on either side.  The dots on the right are for the speaker, but the lots on the left are just for symmetry - they serve no purpose!!!

Line your drill carefully with the third dot.  Begin to drill slowly.  You'll see a small amount of metal and plastic come out.  This is natural.  Drill slowly - the headphone jack will guide you once you've broken through the outer casing.  Every 1/4" in or so, remove the drill bit and gently blow across the opening to remove drilled debris. If you've got a handheld vacuum, this will work well to make sure there's no plastic bits inside the headphone jack.

After you've drilled down 3/4" and cleaned out the debris, check to see if the headphones fit snugly into the jack.  If not, you may need to use the drill a little more - there may still be plastic from the plug inside the jack. Insert the jack and while drilling slowly, move the drill in a slight counter-clockwise direction to widen the opening ever so much.  Be careful not to overdo it - headphones that constantly fall out are worse than no headphones at all.

Once the headphones fit snugly, unplug the headphones and turn the phone on.

Wait until the phone has restarted and go into the Settings and tap on Sound.  Then plug in the headphones.  After about 2 seconds, you should see the Headphone settings appear on the menu when it recognizes them.  If you have the iOS 10.1.0.1 upgrade, your iPhone may crash at this point. If so, simply power down the phone and restart and repeat the process.  We expect Apple will fix this bug before any new iPhone with a headphone jack is released.

That's all there is to it.

And remember, don't really actually do this. I'm kidding. This isn't real.

People pleaser

So I asked Siri if it would be raining tomorrow. (ok, it was a few weeks ago before the weather got awesome, I've just been a little delayed).

But still, this is goofy. Either the data's wrong or the presentation's wrong. I wonder if this comes from testing it only in Cupertino where it's always sunny.

Apple vs. Google #onejob

Siri, you are no help at all. 

You get an F.

(You had one job, Siri. One job.)

Thanks, Google - a video and everything. 

Brilliant.

iPhone Theft-Deterrent Lock Screen

This is what I see now when I turn on my iPhone. On Monday I hope to confuse some of my friends in the IT department who don't read this blog.

Hey Apple

Apple puts a blue icon next to items you haven't opened since you downloaded them or since you updated them.  That's all well and good, especially if you automatically update your apps.  Only I don't do that.

They should have also used a red or green dot to let you know if there are apps ready to be updated.

Oh, APPL

The new Apple iPhones were announced today. Apparently people were not impressed. 

A shame, really. I know, if you look at the overall stock price, it's recovering, but this just goes to show you that you shouldn't throw a party without a guest of honor. Between leaks, rumors, and an uninspired new set of offerings that feels more like overpriced catchup, this was probably a non-event. Apple showed the world how to do it and they did it. Too well. 

Time to reinvent something else.

Unless, of course, this stock manipulation is being pulled off by rich Microsoft, Google or Samsung employees amusing themselves.  Maybe? Nah.

Mac to the Future

I did it.  I switched to a Mac at work.  And if I'm using a Mac, it must not be cool anymore.

I suppose it was inevitable when you look at the Appling of our house... Airport Extreme (replaced the dLink), Airport Express*, iPod Video (a gift), iPod Nano*, iPhone 3G* (acting like an iPod), iPhone 4 (Lori's), iPhone 3GS (work), iPad Classic Original First Edition (work).

* Surplussed by their original owner.  Yeah, they just leave their old stuff here - like we're an electronic recycler for them or something.  Not that we don't appreciate it.  :)

So I have a MacBook Pro with the SSD and the 8gigs and... the training wheels.  Other than a few months of playing with a MacBook Air a few years ago, most of my experience with Macs was about 25 years ago.  It's interesting to see how they've changed and how they haven't.  I can't help wonder if some things that they've kept the same (menubar disconnected from app window, for one) were poor choices they regret now but stubbornly hold on to because they don't want people rioting and burning police cars in the street.

I'm slowly learning my way around Mac OS, but I didn't get it for the operating system, I didn't get it for the caché of the glowing palefruit. I got it because I know it's a solid machine, a well manufactured machine from a company who pays attention to detail. And an operating system designed to work well with it.

That is, it's not a Dell (the only other choice at work). I've been a Dell fan for a long time. But the one I have at work made me stop being a fan. It overheats (and shuts down) regularly, the bezel has cracked and is pulling away from the machine, and it overheats. Yeah, that's a really irritating thing. If I were to take it to a meeting, I can't dock it when I get back to my desk because that kills it. Often I had to have an external fan blowing on it. It came shipped with Windows 7, they downgraded it to XP, and then later upgraded it back to 7, but their version of it. Locked away, crippled, frustrating.

But you know what? I've been spoiled. My modern experience with Apple has been iOS. I know it's difficult, inventing something new, something better. And then looking around you and realizing that when you start over, you can scrap so many mistakes, leave so much legacy out. Build it solid, built it smart, build it right. But all around you, people proud of their work, resistant, resentful of the new. Slowly, your learnings make their way back to the legacy product, but it's difficult. So that's where we are with Mac OS. The learnings are slowly making their way over, but it's still early. Things don't work as well as they do in iOS and some stuff (like the app store) just doesn't seem thought out well at all.

The good news is that there's plenty of learnings from iOS and plenty of potential for future improvement in Mac OS. It'll be interesting to watch.

That poster up there?  It hung by my desk at UltimateTV and Warner Bros. I should find out if it's in storage somewhere.  That would be a cool thing to put in my cube.

I'm sensing...

I'm sensing a disturbance in the force...

The Importance of Testing (A Work-Related Post)

Yesterday Apple released iTunes 10.5 in anticipation of today's launch of iOS5.  Also launching today, iCloud.com - the cloudy part of the whole Apple ecosystem to keep everything synched.  

Sign in easily enough with the same username and password I have for iTunes and all my media and app purchases.  

Only thing active so far is Find My Phone.  But there's a small bubble at the top informing me that mail, contacts, calendar and iWork is available after I upgrade to iOS5 or OS X Lion and an invitation to click the link for more information.

So I clicked it.  Uh...

I suppose this will be fixed quickly enough, but it does show the importance of always testing, even the dumb little stuff.  

Apple's DNA (or why they seem to just get it)

This is worth repeating. It's in Apple's DNA that technology is not enough. It's tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it's the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive. 

-- Steve Jobs, March 2, 2011 (at the end of the iPad 2 unveiling.)

Sure, these post-PC devices need to be easier to use than a PC.  But, why can't a PC be easier to use than a PC?  Reader, think about what you do today and who your audience is.  Are you doing the same thing you've always done?  Or are you actively working to make things easier, more pleasant, more enjoyable for your audience?

I did not realize I had an opinion on this.  You probably don't.

I was recently involved at work on a discussion about user experience.  The speaker wanted to talk about technical constraints inherent in the system -- Javascript won't let you do this, AJAX causes this type of interaction, etc.  I looked around the room.  It was just me and my technical peers.  No marketers, no design people.

To me, this seemed extremely backwards.  I tried to suggest that design had to be at the front of any new user experience work.  That we needed to build a framework.  That if all we did was give developers and vendors and the QA team a checklist.  Also, gives them some flexibility to read between the lines, to capture an essence or ethos, to figure out what to do when the rules aren't specifically stated out.

 If an asynchronous element on a page takes longer than 1.3 seconds to load, a spinny thing must appear on the screen to indicate that it's still loading.  (Not a progress bar.)  That spinny thing must be on a white background and be colored #002200 (may be displayed as Pantone 433C in a printout) and it must have 36 radial arms each 10 pixels tall and 4 pixels in thickness with tapered ends and be offset by 5 pixels from the midpoint.  Each arm must fade out at 20% per the appearance of each new arm. A full rotation of the spinny thing must occur every .75 seconds in a clockwise direction.

I can teach my daughter to memorize 6+7 and 9+4 or I can teach her Doubles-Plus and Bridge-to-Ten so she can immediately feel confident that she can take on 7+8 and 9+8 even if she's never seen them before.

Doesn't mean we eliminate the rules, but if we don't first talk about the heart and soul (or the why) then it's not something they live and breathe.

It's why Apple is as successful as it is. They know the experience starts with the visual design. Whether it's their emails, their website or their actual products. They look good, they feel good. They have a certain commonality to them that says "Play with me."

Dell's taken its own approach with the darker colors, brushed metal and angular lines that suggest power, seriousness, business.  Microsoft is just starting to realize it... for the first time in a long time, people are actually positively commenting on design choices and user experience found in Windows 7, Windows 7 Mobile and even Zune.

We don't need to copy Apple or Dell, but we ought to be able to (and I'm genericizing for this blog post) "Help us (do what we do). Be confident that we do what we say we do and we do it with integrity because we're called to serve by Jesus Christ.  Our website makes that clear to our audience by presenting an experience that's (a), (b) and (c)." or whatever it is we ought to be able to say.  (Yes, ours is a Christian non-profit.)

Then out of that we can draw specific philosophies like...

Authenticity: "We'll make it easy for the site visitor by always doing these functions the same way."

(Translated: We will hunt down and quash inconsistencies.  We will adopt consistent proven standards used by other web developers/websites.  We will establish a design language to spec out consistency where needed.  It will be clear enough that where it's not spelled out, the designer is able to understand what should be done and arrive at the right decision on their own.)

Confidence: "We won't waste donor's time with unnecessary hoops, and in the process, they will attribute 'effortless' and 'joy' with giving [via our website]."  (Translated: We will work hard to map out the paths our audience can take.  We will make the desired (happy) path clear, we will work even harder to eliminate undesired (sad) paths that could serve to confuse, frustrate or present our audience with a dead end.)

Transparency: "We will anticipate bottlenecks and work to resolve them or make them more bearable with the following tactics like a progress bar or a spinny thing" (with specific specs and descriptions of when to use).  (Translated: When we can't fix it, or fix it right away, we will anticipate the frustration, anticipate the confusion and do everything in our power to mitigate or minimize it.)

My boss likes to say "If you don't know where you're going, you'll always get there quickly." and "If you don't know what you're aiming at, you'll hit the target every time."  It's so true.  It's almost like we need a vision statement or guiding principle that helps us inform into a design language.  (Sorry, couldn't fit paradigm and synergy into that sentence.)  

Not some 400 page document that specifies every little detail but doesn't ask developers and designers to actually think, innovate, or even - heck - be creative.

/rant

Hyperbole

I always thought it interesting that you heard a politician so often say "The Great State of California" when I lived there. I decided it wasn't a fluke, that either currently, or at some point in the past, someone had told people to say that, as a subtle part of a marketing campaign.

On the other hand, we've suffered through "The Other Washington" and "Washington. The State" (as opposed to the dead guy or the capital or the more than 80 cities in the U.S. that contain the name). And don't even get anyone started on "Say WA." A candidate running who's run (and lost) for nearly every top state job in the past decade (wow, that money could have fed a lot of hungry children) had a website where people could submit ideas about making the state better and I posted the simple observation of the Great State of California and the marketing sense of injecting some kind of thought about Washington into people's minds and I was roundly dismissed by the other people contributing to the site. Closed minded little dullards. If this was his constituency, no wonder he keeps losing.

And here's why hyperbole works. Say it enough and people believe it. Is California "great"? Not 100%. But they say it is and you buy it. Now, granted, they also have a strong film commission and a lot of other things going for it. (But my non-starter original plan for working for the Washington State Film Commission in the mid-90's when I graduated from college isn't the topic of this post, nor am I suggesting my failure to act in this regard has any impact on anything.)

But yeah, call something magical long enough and people line up, waving fistfuls of cash. I just hope the second unicorn has front *and* back cameras. (Those of you wanting retina display will have to wait a bit longer.)

Magical

Well, that takes some of the sting out of a rotten day at work.  Don't worry, this has a legitimate work purpose beyond simply improving job satisfaction. 

Odds and Ends 47

-1-

CNET -- Hotel to guests: Pedal for electricity, get a voucher

-2-

INFINITE FRONTIER -- (via Skip) NASA 747 pilot shares experience carrying the space shuttle - there are a bunch of comments suggesting this isn't true, but still a great read

-3-

WASHINGSTON STATE HIGHWAYS -- Washington State Route 106

-4-

MASHABLE -- What Types of People Raise Money for Web Startups?

-5-

CROSSCUT -- The Texas model vs. the Seattle model

-6-

INHABIT -- NYC Dumpster Pools Make a Splash with All Ages!

-7-

CHEAP mumble CONDOS -- SoHo Townhomes (Atlanta Ga.) - I love that CSC is gaining notoriety beyond Seattle for its critiques of bad condos.

-VIDEOS- After the break... some great graphics on an iPhone, a racing video game recreated in the physical world, a new NASA robot

Odds and Ends 34

-1-

ENGADGET -- Chrome overtakes Safari for number three browser spot in the US sez StatCounter. Wow.

-2-

I, CRINGLEY -- Apple Goes Semi-Pro, Part 2 - AppleTV to become a video game platform with iPods and iPhones as the Wii-like controllers? Wonder how often these are real products that he has inside knowledge on and how many times he convinces other companies to create products simply by inventing them and then suggesting that a particular company is already working on them?

-3-

SETH GODIN -- Goodbye to the Office

-4-

THE HIGH CALLING -- Wages and Roses

-5-

REDISTRIBUTING KNOWLEDGE -- MoveOn.org Scrubs their "General Betrayus" Ad

-6-

MASHABLE -- 10 Fascinating Facts You Didn’t Know About Apple - fascinating might be an overstatement

-7-

UNCLUTTERER -- Ask Unclutterer: Encouraging kids to help out at home

-8-10- After the break...
Videos for a new product from Samsung, an upgrade from Ford and a music video from a Tesla fan that works best with the sound off.

Odds and Ends 33

-1-

ENGADGET -- Hey Apple, you're holding it wrong

-2-

I, CRINGELY -- Doing the Right Thing - What BP could learn from Monsantao Chemical

-3-

SEATTLE VINTAGE -- Seattle Center under construction. Fascinating. Part 1 and part 2.

-4-

UNCLUTTERER -- Choosing Simple Living - if only it were that easy...

-5-

SETH GODIN -- Validation is overrated -- "You're handing over too much power to someone who doesn't care as much as you do."

-6-

MASHABLE -- Microsoft Invention Lets You Insert Batteries In Any Direction

-7-

I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER -- Respect For All

-After the Break-

Videos: First Hill Streetcar, Woot Acquired by Amazon, Kittens in Autotune

A Lot of Settlin' Going On

And then it was Friday. Friday, Friday, hello Friday. I can't believe it's already nearly 11 pm. It's nearly no longer Friday. How many times am I going to say Friday? Not sure. Maybe that's enough for now.

Watching Firefly. A very interesting concept. I am glad I'm watching it now as a really long miniseries and not in the messed-up out of order method the FOX Network showed the episodes in. It's been fun, it's quite funny. And it's great getting to see more of Colonel John Casey beating people up while Chuck is on reruns.

Today was an interesting day.

Odds and Ends 26

-1-

SEATTLE TIMES -- Vulcan welds old with new in South Lake Union makeover

-2-

MASHABLE -- Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers - you don't just have to watch out for the criminals. *sigh*

-3-

ENGADGET -- The fate of a generation of workers: Foxconn undercover fully translated (update: videos added)

-4-

ENGADGET -- Editorial: Thoughts on Foxconn

-5-

LIFEHACKER -- Check Your Local Library for Free Museum, Concert, and Event Tickets

-6-

CAR BODY DESIGN -- Mercedes-Benz Hexawheel Concept - an articulated, 6-wheeled monster. Cool.

-7-

CNN -- Has the iPhone lost its cool? - yes it has. I'm getting one. Mwuahahahaha.

-8- VIDEO

Robot that balances on a ball. No big deal? Gets cool when they start showing applications (like an omnidirectional wheelbarrow or a motorized platform that can move in any direction at the end)

Odds and Ends 22

-1-

CROSSCUT -- We need more gathering places in our urban neighborhoods

-2-

ENGADGET -- Apple's Next iPhone - What We Know and What We Don't

-3-

LIFEHACKER -- Foreign Service Institute Offers Free At-Your-Own-Pace Training in 41 Languages

-4-

WS DOT -- WSDOT invites public to comment on proposed change to SR 99 in downtown Seattle

-5-

SEATTLE TRANSIT BLOG -- Rethinking Station Access pt. 2 -- still say stations need parking

-6- VIDEO

Woman (age 100) buys her first computer (is it a computer? really?)

iPad - Final Release Model

thanks to Rob for the photo

And now, what you've all been waiting for....

Yes, my review of the iPad.

In a word?  Eh.

It's ok, but I'm hoping in two or three revisions, it will be a useful device.

First, where's the camera?  Second, where's the USB port?  Not clear on how you're supposed to get materials in and out.

Why is everything extra?  I mean, yeah, that's par for the course for Apple, but if you want to sell it as a book reader, make it possible to read books from anywhere.

I know that's not the Apple way, but, well, sigh.  Steve Jobs, you've really underdone yourself this time, buddy.