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Future Shock and the Stress of Change
This post is all about First World Problems.
When I was in junior high, my English class (or maybe it was Social Studies class -- the program I was in had them paired with the same set of students and we often had joint assignments covering both) was assigned Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, a book about (as the author summarizes) "too much change in too short a period of time". The book was published in 1970, so it would have been quite recent when we read it. My thoughts went back to that book as I sat down to order my new Apple Macbook Air.
I don't think it's just a sign of being an old fuddy-duddy that I hate the rapid pace of computer-interface change with a passion. The flip side of "always offer something new and improved" is that for 99% of my computer use, something old and half-assed works perfectly well. And what works best is not having to constantly learn new ways to do the same old thing. And change purely for the sake of change? Changing the visual appearance of my phone interface, or the layout of the program tool menus, or the names given to various actions? It's hard not to see that as simply messing with us just because they can.
I have a friend who's a professional computer usability expert, and it's fascinating to read him expound on the nuances of determining the "perfect user experience" and how such things are measured. But in many ways, the perfect user experience is the one where the means of the experience are unnoticed in the moment and the user can focus on the end result. It doesn't matter if an interface is 5% better than the previous one if what I notice is that it's 100% different.
But computer-updating future shock isn't only about superficial aspects of interaction. Every time I approach a major operating system upgrade, I cast my mind back to all the software I've had that was obsoleted by a new OS that wouldn't run it. For the big programs--the MS Office and whatnot--I shrug and shell out. But over the years I've picked up a lot of programs that I might use a few times a year, or that I might be waiting for the right opportunity to explore, that were turned into junk by an "improved" OS. Eventually I learned my lesson. I stopped buying marginally useful software. Now there's a way to support the larger software industry! Discourage users from trying new things and taking chances.
After the last time this happened--installing OS 10.7--I bit the bullet and started running a second machine with an older OS so that I could switch over for the occasional project. That's where I'm running Adobe Creative Suite 3, for those three or four times a year when I want to mess around in Photoshop or do a booklet layout in InDesign. That's where I'm running MacLink so that I can continue working through my old WordPerfect files and convert them to something I can actually use.
I approach every software update with an underlying terror that something I've found useful, something I've invested time in, something my creative output is currently locked into, will be snatched away from me. Something as simple as the data in the automobile data log app that an iOS update made completely inaccessible because the app developer had decided to abandon it. (Fortunately, a competitor was snapping up new grateful customers by offering to do the data conversion to port it over to their app.) Or something as complicated as the music software files for various songbook projects that I may never be able to retrieve. (Including some arrangements that I may not have other copies of.)
My response to computer future shock has been to hunker down, retreat, become conservative in my usage. Stick to using a few core programs for everything, even if it means using them in awkward ways. Always know your escape route. It's made me even more committed to avoiding any program or system where I don't have direct control over and access to my data. Cloud storage? Only to mirror things that live on my hard drive. "Rented" software that requires a wifi connection to use at all? No thanks. (I noticed that the current Office suite is really pushing their "rental" version with their own proprietary cloud storage. Fortunately it's still possible to avoid that.)
What does hunkering down look like? My current laptop is 6 years old. When I bought it, it came with OS 10.6. It was upgrading to 10.7 that sent me into a tailspin of "OMG I could lose access to all my work and programs!" So I'm still running 10.7 and the most current version (El Capitan) is 10.11. I'm a version behind on iTunes, a version behind on iOS. But I can't update those until I get the new OS. The problem with hunkering down is that the world doesn't stop moving. You drop your phone and have to replace it. It comes with an iOS that requires a more recent OS. You update your phone apps and the new version won't run unless your running the current iOS. In the case of my favorite Twitter client (TweetBot), it hit a built in "kill date" after which the current version won't even open.
So I figured that if I need to bring everything up to date, then I might as well do it with a new machine as well. (I'm delighted to have left behind my "three-year burglary-driven laptop replacement plan".) But now I'm spending vast amounts of time and energy making lists of my current programs, researching reports on whether they'll run under El Capitan, identifying whether updating the programs will require jumping to a rental/cloud system, and above all else, working with the expectation that I'll lose a week of productivity getting everything to play nicely together after the shift. It makes my stomach churn just to think of it. I'm making a list of programs to update after the purchase--just the core ones I use all the time. I'm probably going to bite the bullet and start storing more stuff on Apple's iCloud simply to buy space on the phone and tablet. (Though most of my music is ripped from CDs, so iCloud is useless there.) And Apple has a long history of jerking users around about cloud storage and accounts and whatnot. (Mobile Me. Remember Mobile Me?) But I'll keep my Dropbox for documents because it works the way I'm comfortable with and it's never betrayed me yet.
And in the mean time, being a belt-and-suspenders type of gal, I've decided to make a drag-and-drop backup of my personal files to supplement the Time Machine backup. Just in case something goes badly wrong. And I find that the old external hard drives that I used for offsite backup in my pre-Time Machine days no longer talk to the laptop. It isn't worth figuring out why or how, but since they have old backups on them, I'll need to destroy them before discarding them. What a waste. So now I'm trying to figure out how to turn my older Time Capsule into a plain storage drive so I can do the backup. It isn't obvious. Fortunately, the personalized laptop I ordered (always upgrade everything to the top of the line when you only buy a new machine every 5 years or so!) won't arrive for a couple weeks. That should be enough.
Well, at least they're only First World Problems and I don't have to worry about drought or natural disasters or the looming threat of despotic fascist governments. Oh, wait.
When I was in junior high, my English class (or maybe it was Social Studies class -- the program I was in had them paired with the same set of students and we often had joint assignments covering both) was assigned Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, a book about (as the author summarizes) "too much change in too short a period of time". The book was published in 1970, so it would have been quite recent when we read it. My thoughts went back to that book as I sat down to order my new Apple Macbook Air.
I don't think it's just a sign of being an old fuddy-duddy that I hate the rapid pace of computer-interface change with a passion. The flip side of "always offer something new and improved" is that for 99% of my computer use, something old and half-assed works perfectly well. And what works best is not having to constantly learn new ways to do the same old thing. And change purely for the sake of change? Changing the visual appearance of my phone interface, or the layout of the program tool menus, or the names given to various actions? It's hard not to see that as simply messing with us just because they can.
I have a friend who's a professional computer usability expert, and it's fascinating to read him expound on the nuances of determining the "perfect user experience" and how such things are measured. But in many ways, the perfect user experience is the one where the means of the experience are unnoticed in the moment and the user can focus on the end result. It doesn't matter if an interface is 5% better than the previous one if what I notice is that it's 100% different.
But computer-updating future shock isn't only about superficial aspects of interaction. Every time I approach a major operating system upgrade, I cast my mind back to all the software I've had that was obsoleted by a new OS that wouldn't run it. For the big programs--the MS Office and whatnot--I shrug and shell out. But over the years I've picked up a lot of programs that I might use a few times a year, or that I might be waiting for the right opportunity to explore, that were turned into junk by an "improved" OS. Eventually I learned my lesson. I stopped buying marginally useful software. Now there's a way to support the larger software industry! Discourage users from trying new things and taking chances.
After the last time this happened--installing OS 10.7--I bit the bullet and started running a second machine with an older OS so that I could switch over for the occasional project. That's where I'm running Adobe Creative Suite 3, for those three or four times a year when I want to mess around in Photoshop or do a booklet layout in InDesign. That's where I'm running MacLink so that I can continue working through my old WordPerfect files and convert them to something I can actually use.
I approach every software update with an underlying terror that something I've found useful, something I've invested time in, something my creative output is currently locked into, will be snatched away from me. Something as simple as the data in the automobile data log app that an iOS update made completely inaccessible because the app developer had decided to abandon it. (Fortunately, a competitor was snapping up new grateful customers by offering to do the data conversion to port it over to their app.) Or something as complicated as the music software files for various songbook projects that I may never be able to retrieve. (Including some arrangements that I may not have other copies of.)
My response to computer future shock has been to hunker down, retreat, become conservative in my usage. Stick to using a few core programs for everything, even if it means using them in awkward ways. Always know your escape route. It's made me even more committed to avoiding any program or system where I don't have direct control over and access to my data. Cloud storage? Only to mirror things that live on my hard drive. "Rented" software that requires a wifi connection to use at all? No thanks. (I noticed that the current Office suite is really pushing their "rental" version with their own proprietary cloud storage. Fortunately it's still possible to avoid that.)
What does hunkering down look like? My current laptop is 6 years old. When I bought it, it came with OS 10.6. It was upgrading to 10.7 that sent me into a tailspin of "OMG I could lose access to all my work and programs!" So I'm still running 10.7 and the most current version (El Capitan) is 10.11. I'm a version behind on iTunes, a version behind on iOS. But I can't update those until I get the new OS. The problem with hunkering down is that the world doesn't stop moving. You drop your phone and have to replace it. It comes with an iOS that requires a more recent OS. You update your phone apps and the new version won't run unless your running the current iOS. In the case of my favorite Twitter client (TweetBot), it hit a built in "kill date" after which the current version won't even open.
So I figured that if I need to bring everything up to date, then I might as well do it with a new machine as well. (I'm delighted to have left behind my "three-year burglary-driven laptop replacement plan".) But now I'm spending vast amounts of time and energy making lists of my current programs, researching reports on whether they'll run under El Capitan, identifying whether updating the programs will require jumping to a rental/cloud system, and above all else, working with the expectation that I'll lose a week of productivity getting everything to play nicely together after the shift. It makes my stomach churn just to think of it. I'm making a list of programs to update after the purchase--just the core ones I use all the time. I'm probably going to bite the bullet and start storing more stuff on Apple's iCloud simply to buy space on the phone and tablet. (Though most of my music is ripped from CDs, so iCloud is useless there.) And Apple has a long history of jerking users around about cloud storage and accounts and whatnot. (Mobile Me. Remember Mobile Me?) But I'll keep my Dropbox for documents because it works the way I'm comfortable with and it's never betrayed me yet.
And in the mean time, being a belt-and-suspenders type of gal, I've decided to make a drag-and-drop backup of my personal files to supplement the Time Machine backup. Just in case something goes badly wrong. And I find that the old external hard drives that I used for offsite backup in my pre-Time Machine days no longer talk to the laptop. It isn't worth figuring out why or how, but since they have old backups on them, I'll need to destroy them before discarding them. What a waste. So now I'm trying to figure out how to turn my older Time Capsule into a plain storage drive so I can do the backup. It isn't obvious. Fortunately, the personalized laptop I ordered (always upgrade everything to the top of the line when you only buy a new machine every 5 years or so!) won't arrive for a couple weeks. That should be enough.
Well, at least they're only First World Problems and I don't have to worry about drought or natural disasters or the looming threat of despotic fascist governments. Oh, wait.
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I'm just over here being the hallelujah chorus.
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Seriously though, Dropbox as a synchronization product to keep your files in step among different machines: it's great. As backup: pass the garlic and holy water. You really want backup on multiple hard disks on multiple computers, one of them in a friend's house, and rotate it every month. Dropbox probably won't go bust (they're a gigadollar company these days) or quit the business (it's all they do), but it's not your data if it's not on your machine.
I trust iCloud -- and Apple's business apps like Pages -- as far as I can throw them. Pages can barely open 3 year old files; they keep changing the file format and don't care about backward compatability. Apple -- I hate to say this -- are utter rubbish when it comes to looking after their customers' data in the longer term.
But back to hard disks. External 5Tb USB 3 drives go for around GBP £130, or about $150 plus tax. For a Macbook Air, that's overkill -- 2Tb travel drives are about $100 and if you're buying a new laptop you should grab two or three such drives over the next few months and begin rotating them.
Software I love: Scrivener. It's written by a tiny company (originally just one guy) and it's a labour of love and it's designed for novelists. Oh, and it ties into Dropbox pretty neatly -- especially the coming iOS version (which I am not supposed to talk about in public yet). And it doesn't claim to own all your data. What's not to like?
LibreOffice ... it's OpenOffice, only properly maintained and doesn't keep trying to upsell you rubbish like MS Word. And it can read a huge number older file formats -- Word Perfect, naturally, but also esoteric stuff I've barely heard of.
Firefox: because it's a powerful general purpose web browser.
Thunderbird: unfortunately Mozilla are losing interest in their dedicated email client because everyone seems to be heading for walled gardens -- Gmail, iCloud, or Outlook.com. But it's still hanging on, and I suspect someone will pick it up for maintenance sooner or later.
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MS Office falls in the "simply my life" category, however. I use Office products every minute of my working day (at the Day Job) and it simply isn't worth the aggravation to use two different suites for writing/spreadsheet/presentation.
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I tried to discuss this with Chaz, and he isn't even aware that there is a synchronization feature in Dropbox, though he uses it all the time (as a copy-and-paste).
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... and why I got three copies of this comment is beyond my understanding. Possibly a computer taking revenge on me for badmouthing it.
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10.7 broke a crap ton of stuff because it dropped PowerPC support. 10.9–11 broke very little. 10.12, by the sound of it, will break an unspecified number of legacy apps. (By 'legacy' I mean using technology deprecated in 10.8 [2012]). This means that developers had 4-5 years to update their apps, and anything not updated in that timeframe probably...
... well, I still mourn the odd OS9 app. I totally get that one comes to rely on something and then it breaks, and I'd adore to have ColorIt back (a PowerPC image editor, and my all-time favourite) ...
... but in the end, anything not updated for five years is probably dated anyway. The other side of the coin are all those instances of 'wow, I can do *that* with only a few lines of code? That's so useful' moments I'm having every time a new OS is announced.
Here's another thing. The closer developers stick to Apple's frameworks, the easier it is to update code to run on the current system. The cleverer developers think they are, the more likely their code is to break when those exploits are no longer possible. And the better Apple's tools become, the easier it will not only to be to write software, but to write great software with the standard toolbox, which lessens the load involved in updating.
So in a way, software that does not run on the next (and next, and next) system is very often a sign that the developers were just as mentally locked into their old tools/ways/tricks as users are.
I've done the 'but I'm perfectly happy with this, I don't wanna learn a new tool' a few times now. HTML tables vs. CSS (learning CSS was a pain, but it's So Useful, I should have done that way earlier). Certain aspects of Filemaker scripts. Cocoa Autolayout. And every time I eventually have to learn New Thing anyway. So I'm holding out on principles - software subscriptions? Never - but otherwise trying to go with the flow, even if I hate parting with old habits.
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I bit the bullet a couple of years ago and upgraded to 10.9 after I found TotalSpaces2 (yes, using a grid instead of a line for desktops is important to me.) but I kept a copy of the old system on a bootable partition of the new machine's disk. It worked like a charm the one time I've needed it so far. Ditto for the external disk copy I made; I've used it to boot machines having problems, so CCC works.
Differences between 10.6.8 and 10.9 have been few, and nothing so far I haven't been able to find a work around for. As far as individual apps, I'm still running an older version of iTunes when I upgraded to it, it quietly trashed the cover art I had scrounged or scanned where gracenote lacked it. Now I only use iTunes for ripping; if I want to play or reorganize I use Clementine.
10.10 and especially 10.11 haven't offered anything I need or want so far, and especially with 11 some clear disincentives. I'm experimenting with different Linux distros to see if I think they're a reasonable replacement for MacOS. So far, in a pinch, sure, but I'm not ready to abandon the Apple boat (which I've been on since 1979) quite yet.
Good luck with the new machine. I hope it turns out to be a painless experience for you and look forward to hearing how you like it.