Two contrails mark an X in the sky

An Apple Break

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

A few weeks ago I bought some software via the Apple Store but changed my mind about wanting the software. I requested a refund, as I have in the past, and they asked for a justification so I gave them one, and they refused again. Out of principle I then cancelled all my app subscription renewals, as well as stopped looking at the Apple book store.

One reason for using the Apple store, rather than buying apps direct from companies, is that reimbursements and more should be simpler. It also means that we have a single point of failure, rather than a dozen. In theory this keeps us safer.

Refunds as a sign of Good Will

Although Apple should refund, or not refund, at its discretion, refunding is a commercial gesture. By this I mean that if we’re browsing through apps, and our curiousity is peaked, then we are more likely to spend, if we know we could get a refund.

Apps on the app store are sometimes, crap, whether for the phone, laptop, or tablet. If we make a mistake then it is usually very easy to undo. and we can keep behaving in a “risky” manner. If a refund is refused, and we make a mistake then we are thrown into the lake of remorse, and our spontaneous habit changes.

The Long Tail of Refusing a Refund

It is over a month since the incident and I have hardly browsed the app store, I have forgotten about Apple Books, and I have not considered getting any apps for the Apple universe. With books the impact is felt immediately but with apps the impact may take up to eleven months to be felt, as apps are cheaper, when bought for a year, than a month.

Although the app cost 30 CHF, the cost of refusing a refund is not 30 CHF, but several hundred francs, in theory. Every app is 30CHF or more per year. Every book is 5-10 CHF. The willingness to get a better version of icloud is 10CHF per month. By refusing 30 CHF, Apple have potentially lost hundreds of francs. They sell devices, but their key revenue stream is services, and if we are given a reason not to contribute to that revenue stream then their model slowly erodes.

It is a raindrop in the pacific ocean.

Locked In

The more we move to digital the more we are locked in. We are locked in to Amazon with Kindle books, we are locked in to Apple, via the apps we buy either on the phone, laptop or tablet, and we are locked in to android with other products. We can’t jump around like we could before.

There was discussion about Portable web apps, and cloud based services that can be used on any device, without being locked into an OS. This is a good move. I would prefer to use a website on my phone, than be locked into one platform or the other. I want to slide from android, to iOS, to macOS, to Windows, without having to make the decision of which platform to purchase something from.

And Finally

And finally it is a shame that apps are not developed either for all platforms, or if not, then for the web. This app costs 30 CHF on individual platforms, but 80 for windows and mac. This isn’t much, compared to how much software cost in the past so the issue is not with paying for an app. The issue is with paying for an app, and being locked in. From now on I will buy apps direct from the vendor if possible.

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What they offer are:

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Planned Obscolesence as Fragility

Planned Obscolesence as Fragility

Byrichard

I want to discuss Planned obsolescence as fragility. In the days of Nokia you could buy a phone and give it to a teenage boy and expect it to survive without breaking. I know because I was a teenage boy with a Nokia phone. So were plenty of my peers. It was more likely that someone would lose or drown their phone than break it. I only broke one phone display in those days and that took some effort. 


Ingress


A few years ago I was playing Ingress and I managed to shatter three screens in quick succession and it was frustrating but it was due to me walking while playing ingress. I replaced the screens three times before I bought a rugged crosscall phone that was designed to withstand falls, submersion and more. I didn’t use it for long because I had connectivity issues. These were android devices. 


Lifeproof, Otterbox and Quad lock


When the risk of breaking phones increased so did the need for protective cases. I have used lifeproof cases for iphones, otterbox for iphones and a blackberry device and quad lock for the most recent iphone. I use these cases because dropping a phone just once will shatter either the front panel or the back panel. It’s for this reason that I used an iphone SE for more than a year. You can break the screen but you can’t break the back. 


I thought another iphone wouldn’t fit with the protective case within the clasps of the DJI drone remote control so I took it out of it’s protective case. Within 30 seconds the phone fell to the floor and the rear glass shattered. I promptly put the phone back into its case. 


On the one hand brands like Apple say “Look at our beautiful device devices, they’re so sleek and elegant” and then you shatter one of the screens within days of getting it and you think “What is the point of elegance if it shatters?”


The unfinished device


The Unfinished device I am thinking of is the Apple Watch. As I mentioned in an earlier post I have had at least half a dozen fitness watches and two diving watches. My Suunto Ambit 3 came with me for three years of sporting activites without showing any real signs of wear and tear. The straps are fine, the screen is fine. The only signs of wear are on the bezel that protects the screen and this is key. 


Most luxury watches use sapphire glass and despite the rugged qualities of this glass they protect them with a protective bezel. If you’re climbing and hit the watch against rocks, metal rungs, door frames or other surfaces the bezel keeps the glass safe. 


I know for a fact that my suunto Ambit 3 took rock impacts straight to the screen as I climbed but the glass is concave, sloping inwards from the centre to the bezel. If it suffers an impact it is designed to survive. 


The Apple watch has an unprotected glass screen that is flat. It is unsuitable for climbing because when you’re climbing your wrists hit rock, metal, resin hand moulds and ropes or cables. Whereas Suunto watches are designed for rugged sports Apple watches are designed for park runs and boardrooms. You find articles like this one about how to protect your apple watch when doing sports. To me the notion that you would need to protect a sports tracking watch is absurd. The whole reason for a sports tracking watch is to be light and tough, to survive indoor climbing. 


In indoor climbing the materials you come across are wood, metal and resin hand holds. They’re not granite, limestone and other forms of rock. They’re soft and forgiving. 


I have a theory that the hairline fractures that appeared on my screen after a fourth session of climbing with this watch were caused either by A) the rope somehow whipping the screen and fracturing it or B) When going from one hold to another I applied pressure to the screen at just the right angle for it to shatter in two places, splitting the touchscreen in three. 


The display itself is fine. The only reason I noticed the damage is that the touch screen failed to respond. 


Take it off


The most absurd suggestion to not damaging a sport apple watch is to take it off when you’re exercising. If you buy a sports version of the apple watch is taking it off a viable solution? If that’s the solution then buy a suunto or a garmin. They cost the same, have good battery life and they will survive any sport you can survive. Just google search broken suunto screen. A search for broken Garmin screen will yield broken screens. 


The protective sleeve


If a solution to protecting a device is a protective sleeve then it is an unfinished device. Your biggest fear with a watch should be that the screen gets scratched as you use it over the years. It shouldn’t be that you shatter it while climbing indoors. 


Conclusion – Buy a case


If you buy an iPhone you should automatically get a case. With Apple’s current design philosophy you should not buy an Apple watch until you can buy a protective case for it. The new design philosophy for mobile phones, watches, and as of yesterday laptops is to push the boundaries of survivability to their limits. I hope that the trend to make things more fragile goes away. 

Switching From MySQL to MariaDB with Infomaniak
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How to create a database and tables in MariaDB


To learn about the differences between MariaDB and MySQL.


The plugin I modified for my own use, works on one of my local wordpress installs so I could port it to the website. I still want to experiment with having custom css for those pages without pasting the code as custom html. Custom HTML in WordPress is messy to deal with. I prefer to find a clean solution.

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Updating Old HTML Webpages

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Most websites are simple. They have five to ten pages at most but usually a single page is enough. Most pages are about one specific thing, whether it’s a CV inspired page to find new clients or a simple page with a few products. Most are usually about a single topic. 


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The challenge with updating this website is in the size of the website. Since 1996 I have been adding pages, until about 2003 when I switched to wordpress- The website still has a thousand or more individual pages. Every time I update I have to update hundreds of pages. 


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For the sake of consolidating my knowledge I was watching a learning path about HT and I saw that one challenge was to take an old HTML page, and improve it, to be a semantically correct web page. This is a process that I have done several hundred times over the years. 


I created style sheets, one for the Romans section, another for the Surfing The World Wide Waves Section and one or two other CSS files, where one CSS file is used by multiple pages. It helps to make the website uniform. 


Removing Tables and Inline formatting


Front Page 2000 and other website editor software added a lot of code, inline, which, today is not needed. Part of the process of going through the old pages is to strip out old code and replace it with modern code. I replace tables with divs, strong, and other tags with headers and more. I make it so that the website uses less code. 


Old pages sometimes have the font, font size, strong and other tags for each p tag. That’s a lot of code, for a page where CSS does the same thing, just once per tag, header etc. 


A Quick Tip


If and when you’re working on an old page you may find and other tags. In VS Code you can search and find and use find and replace to review every individual use individually and it automatically moves on to the next instance. 


I converted some long blocks of text from html to php within an echo tag and I had to escape a lot of ‘. I did this by selecting “‘“ and using find and replace with “\’” to go through every occurrence individually before moving it to an echo tag. I saved time and effort. 


List Items


If you’re working on a list of items you often have to write the same code for each list item and this takes time. With VS Code you can option select the front to each individual item and type

  • just once. With the closing tag you do the same, except that it will auto-complete the tag so that’s even easier than expected. This saves time. 


    Re-working an entire website is slow and repetitive but that repetition is good for two reasons. The first is that it gives me time to think about what I am doing, and to understand why I am doing it. The second is to develop work flows that increase efficiency. 


    I read, assess, clean up and then re-format individual pages so that they’re template friendly. My Surfing the World Wide Waves section is now like a blog, where I have the bare bones code on each page, and the content in a centralised place. If I took one more step then it would be a one page website. As I gain experience I can take that last step. 


    I am now focused on putting what I have learned to practice. I am consolidating what I have learned and finding solutions to practical challenges I encounter while working on my website. 

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