Dev Time

This post is my current stream-of-conciousness on iCloud Photo Library as part of the new Photos App in OS X Yosemite. Please excuse grammar/spelling errors. May contain cursing and words not appropriate for those who don’t like bad words

<rant>

I have no FUCKING idea what in the hell is going on with my iCloud Photo Library, and I hate it.

A few days ago I expanded my iCloud storage space from the measly 20GB I had been paying for before (at a wonderful DISCOUNTED rate of $10.99 a year, instead of the current rate of $2/month… magical) to 200GB. This was due to it being completely full of my device backups. Could I have cleared some? Sure, but the iOS 9 beta seemed to make all my devices ‘new backups’ and I was feeling lazy and I didn’t want my email to run out of space (yay iTools/MobileMe/iCloud email and your backup data being the same storage amount). So I got 200GB. I figured, since I have this space, I may as well use this iCloud Photo Library thing everyone has been talking about. I have a decent number of photos over the years, and I’d like to have them backed up somewhere. I pay for Crashplan, so I technically have the photos backed up that way, but in iCloud it promised to be much more accessible. Yay!

So I enable it, it seems to backup the pictures in my existing iPhoto library, which are mostly images from my iCloud Photo Stream anyway. This works fine, I think, as far as I can tell. Then I get into the fun part!

Over the years I’ve had a variety of computers, and I’ve backed up those computers in different ways. From manually dragging and dropping user folders to external hard drives, to Time Machine, to now Crashplan etc. I’ve also had a variety of iPhoto, Lightroom and Aperture Libraries over the years, from my phone photos to ones taken with different Canon DSLRs. Safe to say it’s a bit of a mess. My plan was to simply grab the folder of originals from each and import them into the new iCloud Photo Library. I didn’t care about my metadata, I didn’t want the images moved, and I figured this would be the easiest process. I thought Photos.app would be able to remove any duplicates based on exif data.

So I did these transfers, from around 5 or 6 different folders from my Mac Mini and let it finish. I did a couple of other folders from my Macbook Pro today. I was warned about duplicates, as expected, to which I answered “Do Not Import” and “Apply to All”.

• I have some photos repeated 4 times, some twice.
• I have some photos missing.
• I can’t search for some photos by date, but they appear when I scroll around and find them.
• I have no idea what photos are in my library.

I still have some collections of RAW files from Lightroom that I’m holding off until I can figure out what’s going on. As far as I can see Photos.app has no way to detect duplicates. I don’t know why search won’t work so I can’t easily establish what photos are missing. And on top of that any operation like an import or while it’s uploading totally thrashes both of my computers to make them almost unusable.

</rant>

Ugh do I have to use Google Photos?

Serious spoilers here. Seriously…

Netflix is starting to popularize the available-all-at-once seasons of TV shows with its original programming like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. There’s an inherent issue with these shows however, where discussing them is difficult when they first come out (and are most likely to be in the popular mindset). With a traditional TV release format (one a week for 24 weeks), there’s always a new episode to watch and talk about at the “water cooler” at work. However, when shows are immediately available to consume at once, different people have different amounts of availability to binge watch a show.
You probably know this already, but it brings me to why the first episode of the second season of House of Cards is so well written.
Read more…

So, iOS 7 features a brand new “light” interface, with thin fonts to take “full advantage” of the retina displays on new iOS devices. Now, whether or not you like it or agree with the decision (personally I wasn’t a fan to start, but I’m really starting to like iOS 7 now!), there’s one little snag incoming.

Apple didn’t release an iPad version of the iOS 7 beta yet, and I think I might know part of the reason why. There were rumors that iOS 7 was slightly behind schedule, so obviously they focused on the iPhone to get a good announcement and initial beta going. However, I think the iPad mini is an issue that I’m interested to see how they will address. It’s the only non-retina device that supports iOS 7, and since it came out so recently it has to be supported for a couple versions at least. I’m assuming a retina iPad mini will be coming out soon, but even so, how will it work on the iPad mini? I just got mine and don’t want to give it up anytime soon (it’s not so cheap to easily replace 🙁 ). Will the text be legible? I guess they’ll probably just make the font a bit thicker, but I’m curious if they will compromise on their vision of what iOS 7 should look like.

Just a random stream of consciousness post.

Edit:

@joshhinman brings up a good point that the iPad 2 is also supported. That’s even less pixel dense than the iPad mini, so we’ll see how iOS 7 works on those devices. In any case, I think that Apple can drop the iPad 2 in iOS 8 without too much uproar while the mini should stick around a bit longer. I still wonder what they have planned for non-retina screens.

I’ve been playing around with App.net. I’m not sure how I feel about it just yet. It feels like a twitter clone and every app is basically a twitter clone. Someone needs to make something cool with App.net, a “killer app” as the tech news people like to say, to make people realize what it’s for. What that is I can’t claim to know. People will only pay $100 a year for a little while with 0 return. There needs to be something to draw people to the platform, something so cool that people will run out of invites. And then those people will discover and use the other products.

Is this obvious? Probably.

Regarding this news story: http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/04/netflix-strikes-licensing-agreement-with-disney-will-be-exclusi/

I was talking with a friend (Jon Badeen, @badeen on twitter (http://badeen.com)) during one of our NSCoder meetups when I read this news. He brought up an excellent point: Apple’s streaming service must be far away. Unless Apple completed dropped the ball, would Disney be signing an exclusive contract with Netflix if an Apple service was on its way? I really would hope not, considering how close their relationship is. On the other hand different news sites keep reporting on how Apple execs (notably Tim Cook) are talking about how movie/tv streaming is a big focus for them. Maybe they’re more focused on TV shows, but Disney has a decent number of those as well. In any case, I’m not looking for anything from Apple in the near future (although they do tend to surprise).

I found this post in my drafts folder. I’m not sure I ever reached a consensus in my own thoughts on this, but I figure I’ll post it anyway.

I was reading this article linked on reddit from IGN called Playing Games for all the Wrong Reasons by Justin Davis, and the author states that the times in his life where he played videogames the most are times of high stress or difficulty in his life, where he needed to achieve/be successful at something and used video games to do that. Then he questions whether or not this is healthy and whether people use video games to hide from their fear of failure.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with the direction he was trying to take with the article. Videogames, like many other media, are a form of escapism. I know that personally during finals in High School and College I would often end up watching episode after episode of a TV Show on Netflix that I had never cared about before, or reading a couple books I had been meaning to get to, or play some videogames. Everything that wasn’t studying for classes was suddenly extremely interesting! Now was I trying to achieve success with these activities? I don’t think so.

My goal was simple: escape. I was tired of studying, mentally and physically. I needed a break so I would do something that allowed me to relax my brain. Games act the same way. If your life is causing you stress, yes you could spend all day worrying about it, but sometimes you need a break, to refresh, to recharge. The same thing applies to programming, if you can’t figure out a problem, take a break, relax, come back to it fresh. Videogames are just one way of doing that. Do you get feedback in games? Definitely. Is it so bad to leave everything behind? I don’t think so. Now whether or not you can stop yourself from playing to get back to your original problem is something that’s entirely up to you, whether you escape by playing games, reading, or other things entirely.

The more I’m writing this post, the more I seem to be agreeing with the author. I guess my main point is I don’t feel like it’s a negative thing to escape your worries for a while. Going on a hike or a vacation are not seen as negative things to do to escape, and video games allow you to do that even if you can’t take time off.

I find myself often writing a comment on some site like reddit or Hacker News, and deleting it because it doesn’t fit well there or I figure it won’t be seen (any post after 30 minutes on reddit). So I figured I’d start writing those comments here, to at least get my ideas down so I don’t just hit the cancel button. Hopefully I’ll be posting more of those soon.