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Usually stuff I’ve written personally, stuff I think is pretty good.

My iPhone X Home Screen

It’s 6am. A frankly unbelievable hour. Nevertheless, I’ve caught the earliest bus I can tolerate, all in the hopes I’ll be able to pick up an iPhone X from one of the three Apple stores in the greater Brisbane region. I’ve chosen Chermside as my go-to — hopefully it’s a little less busy because it’s a little more out of the way, even though the Brisbane CBD store is easier to get to.

It’s not that I forgot to pre-order the iPhone X, it’s just that I wasn’t sure I wanted one. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not sure I want one now. But I might as well try. By the time I arrive at Chermside, the queue is maybe 40-something deep. The Westfield is eerily quiet at this time of the morning, but it’s nice. Peaceful, even.

I end up lining up for the iPhone X. It’s the second time I’ve ever lined up for any iPhone. I put in a reservation with the Apple blue shirts when they start working their way through the queue at around 7am, who congratulate me on my new iPhone once we’re finished choosing. The store opens at 8am, but it’s still about another hour after that I get to purchase my iPhone X. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

You probably saw where this was going when I started writing about my iPhone 6 and 7 home screens, years after those devices were released. I thought we needed some kind of catch-up before getting to today’s iPhone X home screen.

Given that it’s only been a year since the iPhone 7 was released, not much on my home screen has changed. I’m still using a home screen organisation method that’s similar to the CGP Grey method, and only a few apps have been swapped out.

Starting from the top:

  • Notesy has been switched out for Editorial, as the former has been removed from the App Store. They’re both pretty similar apps, even if Editorial has a bunch of powerful workflow-type actions that I’ll probably never use.

  • Slack was relegated to a folder after I discovered I wasn’t using it as much as I wanted to be, and Soulver makes a return to the home screen in its place.

  • Vesper was also removed from the App Store and my home screen. I’ve got Yammer in its place, because I’m now a corporate drone and a slave to the man.

  • WhatsApp was moved to a folder because I hardly use that either, and the Discourse app lets me check AppleTalk without having to load up Safari, even if it is just a glorified web wrapper.

  • Ecoute was moved into a folder because it’s hard to beat the inbuilt Music app when I’m an Apple Music subscriber. To be fair, Ecoute still works with iCloud Music Library, but the built-in Music app has Apple Music integrations that aren’t available on third party apps. I’m also using a manual playlist for the “play all music from playlists within a folder” problem that I described as one of my main reasons for using something other than Music originally.

  • Tootdon is on my home screen at the moment because I’m trying out Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter. Mastodon feels a lot like App.Net right now, but we’ll see how it all pans out.

It’s been two weeks since the release of the iPhone X, and so far, Gmail, Google Maps, Clear, Editorial, Soulver, and Discourse don’t support the larger iPhone X screen. I’m kind of surprised Google’s apps aren’t updated, I can understand why Clear hasn’t (they’re apparently working on a complete overhaul, but the app was very custom to begin with), but apps like Editorial, Soulver, and Discourse are a little behind. Discourse is particularly puzzling, given that it looks like just a super-barebones web wrapper that you wouldn’t think has much custom code.

But there’s another problem with the iPhone X that’s just as important as non-optimised apps: it’s almost impossible to find great wallpapers for it. Even if you do manage to find something with the right resolution and the right aspect ratio, the quality of the screen means you’ll quickly notice any imperfections. Thankfully, a few recent Samsung devices (the S8, S8+, Note 8, and slightly older Note 4) all have displays with similar aspect ratios. If you can tolerate a slightly zoomed wallpaper, then there’s a whole range of 2560×1440 wallpapers that you can find. I’ve also been using Vellum.

My iPhone 7 Home Screen

For the first time since the iPhone 4 was released, the iPhone 7 introduced no changes to screen size over the previous model (notwithstanding S-revisions). But sometime during the two years of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 7, I switched to some variation of the CGP Grey method of home screen organisation, once again covered by Ben Brooks. There’s now just one page of apps, at least one row that has no apps at all, and four icons in the dock. Everything else goes in one of the folders.

The advantages of this method of home screen organisation make a lot of sense. The days of having pages and pages of apps were over since Apple introduced folders, and this takes that idea to the next level. No longer do you have to rely on muscle memory to remember which apps are where, and instead, you can rely on Spotlight to find the app you’re looking for. Letting go of any inclination to organise those top-row folders is also incredibly freeing.

Your most-used apps can still remain on your home screen, and with iOS 9 and the introduction of Spotlight suggestions, sometimes you don’t even have to search for the app you want, as it appears in your Spotlight app suggestions. If you’re thinking of adopting this method, I’d highly recommending hit “show more” within Spotlight to show eight app suggestions instead of the default four.

Unfortunately, this requirement for some folders and just one page of apps meant that I had to make some decisions about how many individual apps I had on my home screen. Thankfully, changes to usage patterns made that a little easier. This is going to get a little lengthy, but stick with me.

Let’s talk about what was removed, to start off with. If I was going to keep one of the Camera or Photos apps around, it was going to be Camera, as I could always access Photos from within Camera. The argument could also be made for removing Cameras, as you have shortcuts to it from the lock screen and Control Center, but I still wanted it on my home screen too. With a folder dedicated to games, off went Threes. Passbook, Facebook, and Wikipedia also went — not that I don’t find those apps useful, but I found I wasn’t using them enough to justify a now-scarce spot on my home screen. Once I realised I hardly used the App Store app for finding new apps or basically anything at all, that was also moved into a folder.

Pocket Weather Australia was moved into a folder, which initially proved to be a bit of a dilemma thanks to the fact that the CGP Grey method doesn’t work well with folder badges. Folders only have one badge that is the sum of all the badges on apps within it, and because I use Pocket Weather’s badge to tell me about the current “feels like” temperature, I had to turn off notification badges for every other app in the same folder. As it turns out, none of the apps in there have badges I care about anyway, so off went that switch.

Boxie fell victim to “internal team issues”, which meant that development ceased and the app was removed from the App Store and my home screen not too long after.

Exactly seven apps remain unchanged from my previous iPhone. Fantastical, Clear, Notesy, Instapaper, Vesper, Swarm, and Tweetbot remain the staples of my third-party iOS experience, all representing the best-in-class versions of their respective App Store categories. Tweetbot 4 had only recently been released, which is why I was running it in tandem with the old version until I had a chance to do something about my numerous written, but not tweeted, drafts.

Now, changes.

It was during the period between iPhones that I started a new job in a new city, which meant a work email account. Not wanting to cross the streams, I decided to ditch Mail in favour of Gmail for my personal email. This turned out to be a pretty good choice, as I gained push email and smarter notifications at the cost of not using the built-in mail client. Living in a new city also meant I needed the most accurate data possible for Maps, which meant swapping out Apple’s aesthetically-pleasing maps app in favour of Google’s more accurate one. The jury’s still out on which one I prefer.

Sick of Apple’s unending changes to the Music app which removed features I used, I was trialling Ecoute and Cesium as potential replacements for the default Music app. At the time this screenshot was taken, I had settled on Ecoute as I liked how it created a playlist from a folder of playlists containing all the songs within the folder.

Additions to the home screen this time around include:

  • 1Password — I think I added this because I wanted to focus more on using strong, unique passwords for online accounts. Owning multiple computers meant I was logging into those accounts multiple times, and because I haven’t ponied up for 1Password on multiple platforms, the iOS version is the next best thing as my iPhone is always with me. Which is a good thing, as the 1Password iOS app is great.

  • Slack — I’m not sure why this app is on my home screen. I’m a member of exactly one workspace, which hasn’t had a message in any of its channels in months. I could easily swap this out with something else, but for now, I enjoy the nerd cred that I get from having it there (even if I’m the only one that knows about it).

  • NextThere — A new city meant new, real-time public transport options, and that meant NextThere. No other public transport app comes close to the everyday convenience offered by NextThere when it comes to knowing the next train or bus departing from your closest station or bus stop. And besides, who doesn’t want a smiling bus on the their home screen?

  • Outlook — This is for work email only, although I’d prefer using it for Exchange and Office 365 email over the built-in Mail app. Something about a first-party app just makes me feel more comfortable about the reliability of the thing, you know?

  • WhatsApp — My permanent WhatsApp status says “I begrudgingly use WhatsApp. Please don’t message me here unless you really have to.” I really have no idea why this was on my home screen at the time of this screenshot.

  • Copied — With the demise of the iOS version of Pastebot and no replacement on the horizon, I wanted something capable of doing some iOS clipboard management. The need is largely negated now that iOS and macOS talk to each other and I can copy stuff between both operating systems, but having an on-device clipboard manager has still come in handy on occasions, especially when I’m trying to copy and paste between my iPhone and iPad.

The folders themselves are self-explanatory. I could delete most of the Apple apps now that that’s a thing you can do as of iOS 10, but I keep them around. There’s a bunch of apps in the Tools folder that I rarely touch, and even more apps within Rares that I use maybe a handful of times per year. Games tends to get a few new additions here and there, but for the most part that stays pretty static too.

The eagle-eyed among you will note that I’m not sticking completely to the CGP Grey method of home screen app organisation, because there’s three apps in the row that’s supposed to kept free. I’ve been using that row as a trialling ground of sorts — some apps stay there temporarily to encourage use while I give them a red hot go, and from there they’ll either get promoted to a folder, or if they’re particularly good, a coveted spot on the home screen.

And if they’re not that good, then it’s the little X for them.

My iPhone 6 Home Screen

The last time I did one of these was back in 2013 not too long after the iPhone 5 was released, so we’re definitely long overdue for an update on my home screen. I think it’s interesting how this kind of thing changes over time, either because apps stop getting updated, better alternatives come along, or my own usage patterns change. Either way, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

I don’t have a definitive screenshot of my very first iPhone 6 Home screen, but I think is the closest thing, and it’s certainly the only home screen screenshot from just after the iPhone 6 release back in September 2014. As you can see, not that much has changed from the iPhone 5 home screen: besides adding another row of apps, introducing a whole new dilemma for home screen icon organisation, I’m more or less using the same apps.

Old favourites Fantastical, Clear, Facebook, Boxie, Instapaper, Soulver, Notesy, Vesper, and Pocket Weather Australia all make a return, and Tweetbot retains its coveted number-one spot on the dock. This being a year after the introduction of iOS 7, most apps and their icons have made the jump to feature the divisive flat design.

Changes to apps between my iPhone 5 and iPhone 6 include swapping out the much-loved, but unfortunately no longer updated Articles for the surprisingly great official Wikipedia app, which has all the features I care about in a mobile Wikipedia interface. Following the developer joining Apple, Articles isn’t the first app that was abandoned, and it certainly won’t be the last to be swapped out for a more modern alternative.

The demise of App Dot Net also saw the removal of Felix from my home screen. A pity and a damn shame it’s no longer available in any shape or form, as I’d rate Felix in my top five iPhone apps of all time based on aesthetics and usability alone despite the fact it was tied to a promising, if ultimately doomed, social network.

Sometime in 2014, Foursquare decided to split its app into two. Foursquare became the app for place recommendations, while Swarm was the gamified version, the one you used to check into places and collect mayorships based on how many times you had been there recently. Because the mayorships and check-ins was the original reason I joined Foursquare, I decided to keep Swarm on my home screen. Foursquare was relegated to a folder.

Threes is the only game to feature on my home screen, but mostly because it’s perfect for the in-between moments that life sometimes gives you.

Note that I’m still using multiple pages of home screens, with single icons on the first home screen, some folders on the second, and mostly games on the third.

Subscriptions (and Apple Music)

We’ll get back to the agony and ecstasy of personal transport in a bit, but I wanted to do a quick write up about subscriptions (and Apple Music).

I have something of an aversion to subscriptions.

It’s a bit of a dilemma for me, because while I get that you need to pay for things, the idea that I have to continue paying to get access to a piece of software or, to a lesser degree, some service, is kind of scary. I realise software development isn’t free, and subscriptions make for attractive revenue streams for developers who constantly work on new features, but not enough to release proper upgrade versions, but traditionally, paying an upfront cost for something and then owning it until the day you die is still somehow more palatable.

Maybe it’s just because we’ve paid upfront for software for so long that makes this idea that you need to keep paying or lose access to the stuff that you’ve worked on seem so foreign. Office 365 isn’t so bad in that you can still open and view documents created with the office suite, but even when the price of the subscription makes the cost the same over time, it’s still a hard pill to swallow.

At the time, the Photography Plan for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop made a lot of sense. I recently purchased Lightroom 5 about a year after Lightroom 4, and at that stage I was paying about $100/year for Lightroom, so I’d essentially be paying $20/year extra for Photoshop which seemed like a great deal. Unfortunately, a few things have made this less attractive over time.

For one, Adobe hasn’t released a new version of Lightroom since 2015, so I’ve ended up paying more than those who picked up the standalone version. I also haven’t used Photoshop as much as I thought I would have, making that “added value” null and void, and to top it all off, Adobe has slowly increased prices. New subscriptions to the Adobe Photography Plan are currently $14.29/month, which starts to eat into that extra value of Photoshop, especially if you’re only using it a few times a year.

So that’s software, what about services? Things get a little more complicated when we’re talking about services. I don’t watch enough mainstream TV to subscribe to streaming services like Netflix or any of the other Australian offerings, and even though there are some great streaming services for anime, I’ve never really been able to reconcile paying a monthly fee for their entire library when I only want to watch one or two shows.

I think one of the main problems I have with subscriptions is that most of the time, I’d rather pay for an entire year upfront, instead of a month at a time. It’s weird, but I think I have an easier time justifying $120/year than I do $10 a month, especially if I’m getting some kind of discount that makes the annual option even more appealing.

How does all of this apply to Apple Music? To answer that question, we kind of need to talk about Spotify first…

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The Xiaomi M365 Electric Scooter, Part II: Electric Boogaloo

This post is part two of my experience with the Xiaomi M365 electric scooter. Reading part one is recommended, but not necessary.

As much as I enjoy scooting around on the Xiaomi M365 electric scooter, I find it very difficult to recommend to someone who wants to pick up something for personal transport. Some of it has to do with quality control, some of it has to do with design flaws, but ultimately, the reliability just wasn’t there for the model/revision I purchased back in January 2017 (more on this later).

It’s February, 2017. I’m barely a few weeks into electric scooter ownership, a total of 70KMs on the clock, when I scoot right into my first show-stopping issue: a flat rear tyre. At first I have no idea what’s wrong. I’m minding my own business, enjoying the joys of personal transport and riding along, when suddenly the back feels sluggish. It isn’t until I get home that I realise that the rear tyre is looking a little flat. I don’t even own a bike pump, so I can’t see what the issue might be.

She’s flat, Jim.

A quick trip to the local bike shop and I now own a bike pump. But there’s more bad news: while the tyre inflates, as soon as I inflate it to a certain point, it deflates again. Kinda weird. I’m no mechanic, but at this point I’m thinking it’s the inner tube — there’s no signs of a puncture or any other kind of damage on the rear tyre itself, so it must be the inner tube, right?

Tyre, wheel, and inner tube. Getting them apart was a feat in and of itself.

I get no help from the place of purchase (unless you’re counting “take it to the local scooter repair place” as help), so I pick up a few inner tubes I think will fit from Ali Express. A few tyres, while I’m at it, just in case. A few weeks go by; shipping from China is slow, and I am impatient. I set aside a weekend to do the deed, and following an afternoon of the ugliest work I’ve ever done, I get the rear wheel of the scooter, the tyre off the wheel, and replace the inner tube. The replacement valve sticks out a little more than the previous one, but it’s nothing that isn’t fixed by a cable tie.

One repaired rear wheel, now with cable tie to prevent the new valve from contacting the chassis.

Not exactly a heads-up display, but works in a pinch for working out where I want to go.

My suspicions were right; some kind of split in the inner tube that only opened when it was filled with air was preventing it from inflating all the way. Probably a manufacturing defect, but we’re back in business, and that’s all that matters. And for a while, everything is great. I get a case for my iPhone and a little velco, and pretty soon I have my own on-board computer that I can use for navigation.

I’ve started noticing that the range indicator has become less and less inaccurate over time. Strangely, it doesn’t seem to affect my actual range – even with 0KM showing, I can still scoot along, just more slowly than normal. I pass it off as the battery needing calibration or something. Then it happens — with 100KMs on the clock, I run into my second show-stopping issue. One day, the scooter just stops turning on. And with no way to turn it on, there’s no way to charge the battery.

Unfortunately, things get a little complicated here as now electricity is involved, and I’m no electrical engineer. I open up the scooter anyway, and nothing seems particularly broken that would indicate a major fault with the battery. I get the retailer involved again, and this time they’re nice enough to send out a replacement battery. I discover the product page for the electric scooter now has a warning about only using 220V mains to charge the scooter that definitely wasn’t there when I purchased it back in January. I wonder why the warning was added, and theorise that the higher charging voltage has worn the battery down somehow. Nothing on the internet I can find indicates what kind of an effect higher input voltage would have on a universal power adapter (which definitely says it’s compatible with Australian 240V mains), so I can only speculate.

Weeks pass. While I’m waiting for a replacement battery to arrive, I find a French blog about the Xiaomi M365, including detailing issues about the battery and fuses. I discover that people other than myself have had issues with the battery; fuses that have failed, or faulty connections which mean the proper voltage isn’t provided to the electrics, which means the scooter doesn’t turn on. Hundreds of pages on a Spanish forum say that there’s a design flaw within the regenerative braking system which results in a fuse blowing if too much current is passed to the battery at a time, or when current is passed to the battery when it’s already full. There’s plenty of useful stuff there too, including all of the mods people have done to their scooter, but none of it is particularly helpful. I will point out the 149-page unofficial user’s guide PDF that they’ve put together for the scooter, featuring all kinds of information from people who have taken their scooters apart and put them back together again. It’s entirely in Spanish, but there’s enough photos that you should get a good idea of what you’re looking at.

At the end of May, the replacement battery arrives. It’s basically identical to the one I pull out of the scooter, with the important distinction that this one actually works. With a working battery in the scooter, I take apart the old battery and test it using instructions from the Spanish forum. It seems normal enough — the output is 42V, the fuse seems to be intact, so perhaps the battery cells themselves that are dead.

I take it pretty easy on the scooter for a few weeks, only riding it to and from the Valley on weekends for one of my weekly grocery runs. The thrill of riding the electric scooter is now tempered by the anxiety that this will battery will likely fail as well. I contemplate buying a voltage converter so I can charge the scooter using 220V. But a good quality one is about $200, and you can understand my hesitation on spending even more money on something that has already had so many issues with less than 200 KMs on the clock. For now, I’m just thankful that the scooter is back in the land of the living.

It’s September, and I’m riding the scooter into work on a bright Saturday morning. I brake to come to stop at a pedestrian crossing 200 metres from work, and while I’m almost stopped, I suddenly lose all braking power. I don’t notice something is wrong until the light turns green; I push off into the pedestrian crossing, press the accelerator, only for nothing to happen. I try pressing the power button in the middle of the road, but nothing happens. She’s dead, Jim, and I spend the rest of the 200m kicking my scooter along, and cursing the time I decided to buy an electric scooter.

By this time, you can probably understand I’ve had enough. The scooter doesn’t turn on, and frankly, I don’t care. It’s probably a blown fuse, thanks to the issue that decides to pass power to the battery when you’re braking. If I wanted to, I could probably swap the controller board from my old battery into the new battery, but I’m finding it hard to muster up the motivation to spend time and energy on a product that has already proven to be unreliable.

For what it’s worth, there’s speculation on the internet that later revisions of the M365, or versions with a certain firmware, have fixed the issue where the regenerative breaking will attempt to push more power to the battery than it can handle. As far as I’m aware, I was using the latest scooter and BMS firmware available, and still managed to (probably) blow a fuse on my battery, so I’m not sure how much stock you can put in that speculation. It’s also possible that I got a second dud battery, but the manufacturing dates on both batteries differ by about six months, so I’m not sure what else would have made a difference in terms of reliability. And plus, it was working fine for a few weeks, even if I was only riding it once or twice per week.

It was fun while it lasted, but maybe I’ll just suck it up and buy a bike next time. Or an electric skateboard – but that’s a story for another time.

The Xiaomi M365 Electric Scooter

The Xiaomi M365, all folded up.

Here’s something interesting about the M365. Xiaomi advertises that there’s an app you can connect your electric scooter to, to see your current speed, the remaining mileage, and other current trip statistics. One page of the completely Chinese manual says you can download Xiaomi’s own app or use something called “Ninebot”.

I couldn’t find the Xiaomi app in the Australian App Store when I went to look, but I found the Ninebot app on the first go. It’s pretty basic, but does let you rename your electric scooter and adjust the level of regenerative breaking. But hang on a second, this all seems very weird. How does a Chinese manufactured and marketed scooter, with not a word of English in the user manual, works with an app that has near-perfect English? Something doesn’t add up here.

After doing a little internet sleuthing, I discovered Ninebots were originally manufactured by a Chinese company as a kind of personal mobility device. They’re kind of like Segways, except a little more discreet and don’t have the traditional Segway handlebar design. Still, none of that explains how the M365 is able to connect to the Ninebot app. Did Xiaomi reverse-engineer the app to such a degree that every feature works perfectly with their own electric scooter hardware, down to the regenerative braking setting and the cruise control mode?

As it turns out, Ninebot is a Xiaomi-backed company. It’s perhaps one of the simplest explanations for why the M365 works with the Ninebot app; being the parent company and all, you’d hardly want to go to the trouble of developing an entirely new app when one of your subsidiaries already has something that does exactly what you’re after. It’s not perfect (the Ninebot app doesn’t recognise my M365 as an valid Ninebot), but there’s nothing that I’m missing out on that I can see. My KMs even count towards the weekly and overall distance travelled leaderboards.

What does all of this have to do with Segway? Well, Segway complained to a US trade commission that several Chinese companies were infringing on its patents. They complained in September 2014, and not a year later, they were acquired by the Xiaomi-backed Ninebot in August 2015, which is all pretty hilarious when you think about it.

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