The Photos Problem

My iPhone camera is becoming my biggest problem. And I am sure you have the same problem as well. We are taking too many damn photos everyday.

We are literally creating matter from light. Think about it. We take a photo using light, on our phone. That photo resides on the phone for a few minutes. It is then uploaded to the cloud and now stored on a server hard drive (matter). The cloud company is constantly buying new servers and new hard drives to store our mostly crappy photos seemingly forever. Light is now turning into matter at an unprecedented rate.

So the billion dollar question is, how do we manage these photos ?

I have tried various solutions over the years. I started with iPhoto in 2002 and pretty much have stuck with it since then. A couple of short quick forays in trying Lightroom and Aperture convinced me that I just needed iPhoto. Apple then launched several web services over the years to help manage, share and backup photos - iTools, .Mac, Mobile Me and finally iCloud. I stuck through them all. My photo library survived, though collected a few scars along the way.

My cloud library was relatively small until the iPhone 4 came along. About 25,000 digital photos since 1999. But after the iPhone 4, taking photos became a daily, almost hourly activity. My digital collection suddenly exploded and I had to find a way of storing these now 100,000+ photos somewhere safe. Along with a hard drive based backup, I needed to find a cloud storage location for universal access across all my devices.

So I tried every cloud photo service that came along: Everpix, Loop, Trunk, PictureLife, Flickr, Picasa, Amazon Photo, iCloud Photo Library and now Google Photos. I gladly paid the fee for the highest storage tiers each service offered. For naught.

Everpix shut down a few months ago. Loop, Trunk are ok for backup but no smarts. PictureLife has a few good options for smart searching and I like their organization better. If only they would add a calendar for their Time search. Flickr, Picasa are too unwieldy for daily use. Amazon Photo is the best solution for backing up since they offer unlimited storage for Prime members. Google Photos compresses your images if they are larger than 16 megapixels but offers unlimited storage for free. Joanna Stern over at WSJ has a good review of Google Photos. Currently I am unable to upload my iPhone photos using the Google Photos app due to some bug - Brad Horowitz, the VP for Streams, Photos & Sharing at Google, personally replied to my frustrated tweet. I guess they are pretty serious about getting things fixed.

That leaves iCloud Photo Library. It's the default solution for iPhoto and it works fine. Mostly. The most useful tier costs $4 a month for 200 gb of total iCloud storage, not just photo storage. That means your photos share that space with your iPhone backups and other app backups. There is a final  1 TB tier for $20 a month. I haven't reached that tier yet, but I think I will need it in a few months.

But that still doesn't solve my problem. Or problems.

iCloud does not offer an efficient way to search my photos other than search by date, location and unreliably, by faces. I cannot, for instance, do a search like 'show me all the photos of food in the last 2 months in Los Angeles'. Google Photos actually can do that. Or so they say.

How do I carry my entire 100K+ photo library on my iPhone ? That doesn't make sense though. About 80% of my photos are multiples or one time use photos. I would like someone or some algorithm to analyze each and every photo, classify it, tag it and only then store a subset of the most important, relevant and best quality photos on my iPhone.

Then there is the Family problem. Everyone in my family has their own iPhone. Thats four of us. They are taking photos all the time. They have their own iCloud account so they can backup their photos. But there is no way to have one common Family Photo Library that syncs with every iPhone automatically. You have to choose a photo manually and add it to the Family album, after you have turned on iCloud Family Sharing. Those photos then sync across all the iPhones that are registered in Family Sharing. Provided you have sacrificed an animal to the iCloud gods.

This is too much work. Yeah, I know, first world problems again. Don't judge. If you are reading this then you live in the first world too.

So here is my ideal photo solution for iCloud:

1. Offer an Unlimited storage tier for $200 a year for the main Master iCloud Family account.
2. Sync all photo libraries from all iPhones registered in the Family account to the Master Family account.
3. On each iPhone, display & store only photos taken in the last 6 months AND photos that are analyzed to be 'worth keeping' as determined by aforesaid algorithm.
4. Offer a natural language text search box or Siri on the Photos app, that actually searches your entire unified Master iCloud Photo Library. The search results show thumbnails and you can quickly tap on each photo that you want to download and store on your iPhone for storing locally or sharing.
5. Offer the same features on the Mac Photos app, except, show all thumbnails for the unified Master Library with a lightning fast local search.

The key here is unifying photo libraries across users and the natural language image search. Google Photos offers the latter, but I have not seen any documentation or review where it offers to unify photo libraries across multiple accounts.

I am sure that the Product Managers for Photos & iCloud at Apple have similar photo management problems. I don't know how they are getting by. Who do they complain to ?  Are they all young single people who don't have to worry about kids with trigger happy iPhone cameras generating a photo every few minutes? Or maybe they are aware of this problem and realize its a crazy tough problem to crack and they aren't getting paid enough to solve it.

In either case, get on with it Apple. I pay you far too much money already. Take some more and solve the photo problem. Or somebody is gonna get hurt real bad...

Apple TV is now the HomeKit Hub

Apple, in preparation for WWDC 2015, put up this new support document on configuring HomeKit accessories with your iOS device. When Apple launched HomeKit last year at WWDC 2014, there was a puzzling UX discrepancy: Apple had not defined how the HomeKit accessories could be controlled remotely.

The blogosphere and the pundits guessed and apparently guessed right. The support document states that an Apple TV is now required if users want to control their HomeKit accessories remotely using Siri.

If you have an Apple TV (3rd generation or later) with software version 7.0 or later, you can control your HomeKit-enabled accessories when you're away from home using your iOS device. Sign in with the same Apple ID on your iOS device and Apple TV, and you'll be able to use Siri commands to remotely control your accessories.

I had purchased the original Apple TV when it launched in 2007. Anyone remember those ? It looked like a Mac Mini and even came with a built-in hard drive. But it was too slow and unwieldy and there was not enough content to watch. I jailbroke it and installed Plex. But even that was buggy. I soon abandoned it.

When the next generation hockey puck Apple TV launched, I checked it out but realized it wasn't suited for my viewing needs. I did not purchase/rent any movies or TV shows on iTunes and Apple had not added the various streaming channels that are now available (including HBO) upon launch. I preferred the Roku, then the Xbox 360 for Netflix & Amazon Video. I have a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV running Plex as my local content viewer.

But now I may have to finally give in and get an Apple TV as it now becomes the HomeKit 'hub'. This is a shrewd strategy of repurposing the existing base of millions of installed Apple TVs and leapfrogging over all other hub solutions that control IOT (Internet of Things) devices.

I predict that a year from now, the Apple TV HomeKit Hub will be far more successful than other proprietary IOT hub solutions out there.

Hey Siri, turn off those study lights, will ya ?

Tim Cook: Defender of Your Freedoms →

Tim Cook made a fanastic stand on user privacy and encryption in a speech to EPIC's Champions of Freedom gathering in Washington DC on June 1, 2015.

Matthew Panzarino has a breakdown of the speech and some hard commentary at TechCrunch:

Cook then laid out an Abraham Lincoln quote (which I vetted, it’s true): “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. We shouldn’t ask our customers to make a tradeoff between privacy and security. We need to offer them the best of both,” Cook wrapped up. “Ultimately, protecting someone else’s data protects all of us.”

Emphasis is mine. That is the boldest stance yet that Tim Cook has taken and a direct attack on Google, especially in the light of recent Google I/O announcements.

So if you don't know what you are buying or if you are getting something for free, then YOU are the product. I hope people will realize this soon enough. Its not that I am a blind Apple follower, but I know for sure that Apple won't sell my data or spy on my content.

After all, there is something to be said about Apple's mantra being 'Building the best product for our users' and Google's refrain of 'Don't be evil'.

Whom would you trust ?

BGP: A quick-fix hack that still directs the Internet →

Great article by Craig Timberg at the Washington Post on the Border Gateway Protocol:

“By the time a pair of engineers sat down for lunch together in Austin, the Internet’s growing pains had become dire. Once a novelty for computer scientists, the network was now exploding in size, lurching ever closer to a hard mathematical wall built into one of the Internet’s most basic protocols.
As the prospect of system meltdown loomed, the men began scribbling ideas for a solution onto the back of a ketchup-stained napkin. Then a second. Then a third. The “three-napkins protocol,” as its inventors jokingly dubbed it, would soon revolutionize the Internet. And though there were lingering issues, the engineers saw their creation as a “hack” or “kludge,” slang for a short-term fix to be replaced as soon as a better alternative arrived.
That was 1989.”

I was soon to encounter BGP in 1991, my third year of studying Computer Engineering. This turned out to be important in 1997 when my brother and I launched India's first private ISP - WMINet - and we worked with VSNL, the state-owned ISP, educating them about BGP.

Those were early wild west days of the Internet in India and built on personal relationships with admins at each ISP. So personal, that I had root access on giaspn01 - the first commercial public email server in India operated by VSNL. That story for another day.

But within a couple of years the Internet exploded in India and that, was the end of the innocence.

The Watch

It has been exactly a month since I got the Apple Watch. Well, Watches. I ordered 3 of them, one for personal use and two for testing at work. I like my day job.

I ordered the personal one first, a 42 mm Steel with black leather loop. Since the steel watch is just called the 'Apple Watch' by Apple, it gets hard to refer to it specifically. I think we have all settled in calling it the Steel Watch. The lineup is now the Sport, Steel and the Gold and that's that.

As soon as I placed my order for the Steel, I saw the shipping date was not the launch date of April 24, but May 13. Damn. I didn't pay attention to details. So I went back to the Apple Store app and ordered the 42 mm Sport with the white fluoroelastomer band. And I added a 38 mm Sport with the blue band for good measure. Shipping date April 24. Bingo.

The Sport watches arrived late afternoon on April 24. By then, Twitter was alive with unboxing and setup screenshots. iMore was getting crazy with Watch tips, how-to's and videos at the rate of 2 per minute. Gruber was analyzing his Watch review for the Nth time and agonizing over the right time to post it. Dalrymple was trying to find a band that matched his beard. Snell started planning a 2 year series of day long Watch podcasts. And Ihnatko sat polishing his Moto 360.

Since then, you have probably read a few thousand articles on every aspect of the Watch. The Setup process, the fumbling with the Digital Crown and Contacts button, getting lost in the app vs clock face/glances navigation and the joy of the Rings of Activity - all have been dissected, criticized and mastered.

My experience was similar. The joy of the cool setup was short-lived as it failed the first time. Probably due to a timeout issue. On a Watch. Bada Bing. I guess I was too slow in progressing through each step as I was busy admiring the fit and finish of the Watch. It took me a second try and I was up and running with my 42 mm Sports Watch with the white fluoroelastomer band.

Fast forward a month and here is the long summary of my experience:

1. The Watch took a bit getting used to. I had not worn a watch for over 16 years. The rubber band was comfortable and chic. I liked the look.
2. Battery is NOT an issue. The 42 mm lasted me all day with 30% remaining by midnight. The 38 mm too lasted all day with about 25% remaining by midnight.
3. The Taptic notification buzz was a bit damp. I had to turn on the extra strong Prominent Haptic pre-notification buzz so I noticed it every time.
4. It took me a while to understand the difference between Clock mode and App mode. In Clock mode you can activate glances by swiping up on the clock face. Pressing the Digital Crown in Clock mode launched the App mode. Pressing the Digital Crown in App mode centered the Clock app if it wasn't already and if it was centered, it launched the Clock app.
5. I settled on a few Glances after trying out every Glance from every Watch app I had installed. Besides the default ones, the other third party ones that are useful to me are Dark Sky, Twitter & OverCast. I pretty much removed any Glance related to news, as the delay in loading the news frustrated me even more. The Glances that are not native, do need to load information from the iPhone - tweets, maps, podcasts - so get used to a loading spinner on the watch.
6. The Contacts button on the side of the watch launched the Contacts/Friends app in both Clock and App modes. Though these are Contacts, Apple refers to them as Friends in the Apple Watch iPhone app when you set them up.
7. Since I had 2 Watches on day 1, I gave the other one to my seventh grader. She wore it proudly to school and immediately was the cool girl on campus. But she didn't see any value in it as her other friends did not have the Watch. She didn't want to trade messages with her Dad - after the first drawing and the second smiley, she immediately put a stop to that. Sigh.
8. I also found out that if you send the funny animated emoji text message from the Watch to an iPhone it will render with animation. That was a great touch by Apple to let the recipient know that the sender was using an Apple Watch to send those cool emoji.
9. After a week at school, I then offered the Watch to my wife for a couple of days. She tried really hard to use it. But she doesn't wear watches as well and it was difficult for her to get used to it. Even sending my heartbeat didn't sway her from giving back the Watch on the third day. Oh well.
10. My clock face of choice was the Modular one with digital display of time and chock full of other complications. My second favorite was the Utility one that I switch to for evenings.
11. I found myself rarely spinning the Digital Crown for scrolling, instead relying on my finger to scroll and swipe. I think I used the Digital Crown to scroll only while customizing my Watch face or choosing from Contacts/Friends.
12. I found myself removing all the Watch apps that their parent iPhone apps quietly installed whenever the parent app was updated automatically by the App Store. I have a small list of apps installed: Uber, Amazon, Dark Sky, Skype, Automatic, Instagram, Zillow, Yelp, HipChat, OverCast, EverNote and Tempo.
13. Managing the Watch from the iPhone Watch app is a pain. The Watch app on the iPhone is slow to launch and generally unwieldy to operate. And, it is also a App Store for Watch apps. The long list of Watch apps does not indicate which apps are installed on your Watch. You have to tap each app and then dive into the app specific page to check if the corresponding Watch app is installed or not. The UI could do with a little hinting at the top level to indicate it the Watch app was installed on the Watch or not.
14. To add to the confusion, there is a separate Activities app that displays your physical activity stats. Its also the only place to check your 'Activity Awards' medals. Once the Watch displays your Award medal and you dismiss it, there is no way to see it again on the Watch. You have to go to your Activities app on the iPhone to view those.
15. I paired a BlueTooth headset directly with the Watch and went for a walk with just the Watch. Since I could sync only 1 playlist with the Watch I had to choose carefully. I didn't bother to make a podcast playlist, since I use OverCast for my podcasting needs and setting up a separate podcast playlist in iTunes and then syncing that with the Watch seemed like a terrible chore. First world problems. I know.
16. Audio quality was excellent over BlueTooth and the Watch barely dropped battery over a period of 90 minutes of listening. I think this is definitely a good usecase for the Watch.
17. The Watch prompted me after a few days to calibrate the Watch with my regular walk using the iPhone GPS for about 20 mins. I started that but since I was walking my dog, I had to stop frequently. I need to do this calibration unfettered and on a level running track. This, according to Apple, will allow me to use just the Watch for walking/running without having to carry the iPhone for it's GPS.
18. I tried using the Watch for Apple Pay at Home Depot. The transaction kept getting rejected for some reason with my Amex card. I tried another Visa card and still the same result. The lady at the counter remarked that this was unusual as other customers had paid with the iPhone Apple Pay before. I tried iPhone Apple Pay and that didn't work either. I chalked it up to ghosts in the machine and reverted back to paying like an animal.
19. I received my personal 42 mm Steel Watch with the black leather loop on May 13. This came in a square box as compared to the long rectangular box for the Sports watch. Both boxes were unusually heavy for the actual contents. The Watch cases themselves contributed almost half the weight of the package. They are gorgeous iMac white plastic boxes. Collector's items each. Check with me in 20 years. Too bad Leo threw his away.
20. The Steel watch comes pre-configured with the exact length (small, medium or large) of the Watch strap you chose while ordering. The Digital Crown inset color also matches the watch strap you select. I guess hence the packaging is smaller for the Steel watch. You don't get the luxury of different lengths of the watch straps as you would with the rubber.. sorry.. fluoroelastomer bands with the Sports.
21. I easily backed up the Sports watch to my iPhone and then restored in on the Steel watch. I had to remember to setup my Apple Pay again on this new Steel watch. Apple creates a unique id for every device you setup for use with Apple Pay - this secures your credit card.
22. The Steel Watch doesn't feel heavier than the aluminium Sports watch. It does look more elegant though. I tried the Steel with the white fluoroelastomer bands and it looked pretty nice.
23. After a few days of use I found myself fiddling with the leather loop incessantly - especially if I was sitting still in a meeting or watching TV. The loop has these smooth ridges that are magnetic and extremely addictive for tactile fiddling.
24. The Rings of Torment - aka Activity Rings. Since I don't exercise much I presumed that wearing the watch and getting reminders every hour would make me turn into an exercise freak. A la Marco. But after a few days I learned to ignore the call to standup. And my green ring never made it past the half mark. I guess I have to apply myself here. A lot.
25. I also tried flipping the Digital Crown orientation to be on the left side of the watch as worn on my left hand. Hockenberry seems tickled pink with that discovery and swears by that orientation as being the most natural position. After two days of use, I think I can get used to the new orientation. Though putting on the leather loop in this orientation is getting a bit awkward. Then I realized I could flip the bands as well. Duh !
26. The heart rate monitor seems to work alright. But what do I do with that information ? Apart from monitoring it while I watched Mad Max: Fury Road and checking the times where my heart rate spiked up during the action sequences, I have not found any app that can use it effectively.

So that in a nutshell (assuming its a fairly large nut), is the long and short of it.

The Watch definitely has a use for notifications, checking time & appointments, ordering Uber (that was pretty cool) and sending messages. Those activities meant that I took out my iPhone 6+ less often and was able to stay focused on tasks at hand without going down a Twitter rat-hole.

I can't wait for truly native Watch centric apps that will appear in the next six months.

Until then, keep calm and watch on...