Support can be a hard, unforgiving job. You get abuse and you feel the temptation to lash out. I saw this on Twitter this morning:

“I’m disgusted by what you do, but I respect you” pic.twitter.com/4QeUsfBlO2

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) March 18, 2016

Firstly, yes, the tone of both emails from the end user are unacceptable. The first one is a bit rude, the second a lot. Having been on the receiving end of similar messages in the past, both for my software company and in my day job, I feel for Federico.

I read a couple of things about the intersection between technology and the liberal arts today, otherwise totally unrelated but the need for a connection between the two.

# What the humanities can learn

The first was in the conclusion of Walter Isaacson’s “The Innovators,” a book about the inventors of the “digital revolution.” He started by talking about how engineers need to understand the arts and humanities (as Steve Jobs insisted Apple did) and moves on to how the opposite is also true:

Keeping with tradition, I’m going to write about my new gadgets but my “unique selling point” is going to be brevity. And, in this case, another angle I bring is being a Brit — much of the mainstream tech press is American and content is still very much a local.

## Good

• The same but better. I liked the old one, so I mean that as a compliment.
• Feels much faster than the old one. (The hardware should mean that it does, but if Android has taught us anything it’s that specs don’t guarantee performance.)
• I think Siri is going to be great, and the more apps that it understands the better. For the past couple of weeks¹ it’s only supported iTunes and some of the less useful stuff (weather, sports scores).
• I really like the remote. Clearly it’s not designed for serious gamers but I don’t consider that a flaw. I’m not a serious gamer. (As an aside, it’s weird that much of the press have been complaining about the remote as a game controller and saying that the device won’t replace your Xbox One or PS4. I think it’s a good compromise between the two extremes.)

## Bad

• I think the price is starting to get a bit high as a casual/streaming device.
• Missing a bunch of apps, though, hopefully, this is something that will be solved with time. There’s already Netflix, but I’d like to see BBC iPlayer², 4oD and Amazon video. US media companies seem to have been more on the ball than those in the UK, though many had apps on the old Apple TV; maybe they had less work to do to bring their streaming apps to the 4th gen?
• I don’t have many apps yet but it’s clear that we’ll need folders sooner rather then later.

## Ugly

• The idea of copying all your credentials and configuration over from your iPhone is fantastic. Entering your Apple ID username and password using the on-screen keyboard is a pain. However, it seems not to be working for a lot of people and for me it took so long that I almost gave up.

Overall it’s already slightly better than the 3rd generation Apple TV and has the potential to get a lot better as the App Store fills out. In my mind, it’s odds of success likely rest on the cost. It’s therefore a shame that it’s possibly on the high side. Of course, that’s not been a problem for Apple in its recent history.

I wrote a few words about iOS 9 when it came out, so I thought that I should also say something now that the new version of OS X is on the verge of release. As before, there are people who have written many words about it as a formal review, so I’ll stick to my highlights. I have no intention of being the most complete or thorough here!

Having said that, I am qualified to say a few words. I’ve been playing with El Cap since the first beta and have had it installed on my main Mac since the GM was first made available.

Apple are announcing their new iPhones tomorrow. Along with the new phone will be a new version of iOS, version 9. You can read all about what Apple thinks are the best new features. I’ve been using it myself for a couple of months now so I thought it might be worth a few words.

Here are my highlights:

• Battery improvements. Actually, they say you get an extra hour but I’ve not noticed. What works great is Low Power Mode. When it gets below 20%, the battery icon turns yellow and lots of stuff gets turned off or the frequency of background tasks is decreased. It’s not magic — if you use your phone it will drop to zero pretty quickly — but if it’s just sat in your pocket you’ll get a lot more life out of it.
• Spotlight search inside apps. This clearly isn’t going to be big until apps support it, but even with my own apps this is really big. I miss it on my iPad 3, which doesn’t support it.
• Looking in your email to guess the names of callers who are not in your address book. It’s kind of freaky the first time it happens. How does it know that this phone call might be from Bob?! But it works and it’s very useful. Oh, and if it can’t make a match it now tells you where the call came from (just as it has done in the US since the very first iPhone).
• Feels as fast, if not faster, than iOS 8 on both my iPhone 5 and iPad 3. After all the press claiming that Apple make big, clunky updates to force you to upgrade that’s nice.

Showing potential:

Share price movements are kind-of-sort-of-rational but not always intuitive. For example, when Apple has a big keynote and announces some significant product, everyone expresses surprise that the share price goes down straight afterwards. Even many smart people get this wrong (“It isn’t based on logic and reason” – The Talk Show episode 53). I hope to explain why the price dropping actually does make sense in this post.

In doing so I’ll likely make some errors. Some of those will be deliberate simplifications. In other cases I’ll probably just be wrong. But either way, I think the gist, if not the details, should give you a good idea of what’s going on.

I never know whether to put blogs about Apple stuff here or on my company website. This time I wrote a few thoughts about the best bits announced at last weeks WWDC keynote (mostly stuff arriving in the Autumn) and put them over on the Wandle Software blog.

It’s easy to forget how much computers have changed over a relatively short. time. A book I found in my old room at my parent house, “Simpleton Explores Microcomputers,” helped me get some perspective.

I don’t know exactly when it’s from, but it’s certainly early eighties. Possibly 1983 or 1984.

It explores the computers that are available at the time and what it’s like to own one. One of the most telling aspects is that it’s written for people who have never owned, possibly used, a computer.

It all starts out with a detailed plan. Then someone says, “Can we deliver by October?” A few features get cut, some of the estimates get revised downwards and everyone gets back to work. Then you get to the end of September and find that someone removed all the contingency and that in the rush to finish the requirements a heap of important stuff got missed.

You spend days, weeks, quite possibly months pushing to get the software developed and, a few months before the real end, a crunch point is reached. It’s missing what’s now realised to be critical functionality; it takes an hour to process something that should be instant; the data doesn’t look like you thought it would; it’s too late for any real benefit to be obtained.

Last week, GitHub was the victim of a days long denial of service attack that meant that it wasn’t available reliably despite the hard work of their team.

What surprised me was the number of people on Twitter complaining that they couldn’t work. I was surprised because one of the key things about Git (the tool rather than the website) is that it is distributed, that is there is no centralised server in the way that there is with, say, Subversion. Clearly there are things you can’t do without GitHub – most obviously downloading new repositories – but almost everything else can be done peer-to-peer. The rest of this post explains how.