Fully dressed robotic core

One nice thing about phones being slimmed down in themselves is that you can add things to them as you like, building them out in personal ways.

I have mostly been a naked robotic core person, using a bare Iphone without a case or other additions.

The exception was my Iphone 6, which I kept in a case and also broke harder and more often than any other phone. Cases are clearly not meant for me.

Not for protection, at any rate.

But I do like to try new things as well. And when I do, I tend to go all in.

So, now have my largest phone ever, and today I added my largest case ever to it.

But it does bring something special to the party.

This is the Clicks keyboard, and I am childishly excited about having tiny physical keys for a phone again.

(I may also need to get a purse or something, even though it still is somewhat pocketable it is not a very comfortable or well-fitting event.)

To the phone, Clicks is like any external keyboard. It plugs in to the lightning or USB-C port depending on model, so no pairing or battery is required. You just slide the phone into the case and start typing wherever input is required. Just like the Ipad, the phone does not display the on-screen keyboard when a physical one is connected (but you can still bring it up if you wish). That means you get quite a lot of extra space on the screen as you type. Chat apps in particular take on a completely different look, but text apps like Obsidian where I am currently typing also change in appearance. Things look a bit ... cleaner and calmer, if that makes any sense.

Typing itself also feels a bit calmer, and of course much more tactile. So far I am slower like this, but I would not be surprised if I catch up speed-wise over time. Not least when you take correction of mistakes into account. Just hours into clicking, I am already starting to be able to find some things without looking, and when I do make mistakes they are the single-letter ones of physical keyboards, rather than the confusing messes of getting misinterpreted or even worse auto corrected by on-screen "smarts".

The keys feel good too, as good as any key this small can possibly feel. Depending on how you angle your finger, the keys can feel a bit stiff, but I think they have the right firmness to avoid accidental presses and to provide clear feedback when a press is registered.

This is literally my first day with Clicks, so all impressions are of course assumed to change and evolve. And that is a huge part of the fun.

In the library

My home screen from the last post? It still looks just like that, and I still enjoy it.

I spend too much time in the app library, and too much time on the phone in general, but I have also been on holiday for most of the time since the last post so I try not to read too much into that.

And hey, the Kodsnack episode with Bebop's creator Jack Cheng is finally out! As someone who generally tends negative to everything involving LLMs, it is great to hear about someone making heavy use of them to create things, and feel that they actually would not have got the thing started at all without these tools. More and better perspectives make Jack a less dull boy.

I am also very happy with how the cover image for the episode came out. All human-drawn, as usual, in Procreate, as usual, and one of those times where the feeling of the final image actually came pretty close to what I had in mind as I was drawing it. One of the positive sides of LLMs is that they make me appreciate plain old human-created things that much more, including my own drawings.

So, summer holidays are over, work and school has started. There is a degree of settling back into regular routines, and a refreshing coolness in the air. I would very much enjoy a long autumn where it feels like things are rolling along slowly and calmly.

Then I will blink, and it will be December. Again.

But for now, it is still the end of August, and time to slip over into work mode.

Bebop and a clean home

Once again, I have managed to decrease the number of things on my phone home screen.

I fully admit that this may look a bit extreme. Some explanation may be in order.

Contents

First of all, what are we looking at?

On top is a widget stack. It contains the battery widget, electricity prices, Mercury weather, and Apple's app suggestions.

Below that is a single row of apps. From left to right they are Messages, Reminders, Instapaper, and Photos.

The search indicator is turned on just above the dock, and there are no other app pages.

Finally, the dock contains a single app: Bebop.

Bebop?

Yes, Bebop. Bebop is a wonderfully clean and simple app for - basically - making notes without being distracted by things. It opens to a blank page and accepts text. When you hit the save button, the page clears, ready to accept new input. Beautiful.

Behind the scenes, Bebop by default saves each note to a new text file, but I have set it up to append each note to a text file named by today's date. You can save anywhere on Icloud drive, and I have unsurprisingly set it to save in my Obsidian folder.

This is exactly the same workflow I used Drafts for, which worked great. But Drafts grew and evolved and did so much more, and since I used only this tiny corner of its enormous power I did not feel motivated to upgrade to the modern subscription versions. Bebop, on the other hand, is a cheap one-time purchase, and since it does only this exact thing it feels even cleaner and nicer to use. I have a thought, unlock my phone, tap the one dock icon, jot the thing down, hit save, move on. (Plus any annoyances from the Iphone keyboard, of course.)

(A Kodsnack episode with Jack Cheng, creator of Bebop, will appear in the near future. Stay tuned!)

But why?

This whole setup is very much about trying to steer myself in directions I want to go. What I have on the home screen is essentially things I want to spend time on. I want to capture thoughts, I want to get my tasks done, I want to read saved articles, and I want to look at my photos. Messages is sort of an outlier or candidate for removal now that I think more about it, but I do want to communicate with people, and it is the one app I actually want to see notifications from right away, so I think it will stay.

There are of course a whole host of apps I use a lot which are not here. Ice cubes for Mastodon, Safari, podcast listening, home apps, maps, money transfers and banking, password management … But they fall in two clear categories: Apps I know when I want and need to use, and apps I can easily spend too much time in.

I will never forget and app I need, or be in that much of a rush to find it. I know my password manager and can easily find it by search or in the app library when needed. And the apps I spend too much time in I would actually like to forget sometimes. I do not need to be reminded that they are an option, and so I keep them off the home screen and give myself a small selection of "good" activities to choose from there.

In an ideal world, I would like to only pick up my phone when I already have the intention of doing something, and never just to see what I can find to distract myself.

Does it work?

It definitely does not hurt. I still frequently find myself swiping over to the app library looking for distractions, but I am working on ignoring the app library and getting into the habit of using only Spotlight to launch apps not on the home screen. That is why the search indicator is visible, I turned it on yesterday to try and remind myself. The clean home screen acts as a nice and calm speed bump when I unlock the phone, an extra check if I am actually intending to do something, or just looking for a random disctraction from the work of actually thinking about something. If I do not know what to do but write down a thought about it, so much better. Same thing if I go into Instapaper and read some article I deemed worthy of saving.

And if I still want to trawl through the oceans of Mastodon or Wikipedia, let me try to do so by thinking of them and lanunching them through spotlight, rather than swiping through the app library until something looks shiny enough.

(If I removed an app? I would probably put Books in its place, I have a lot of interesting reading stashed away there too which I could do well to look at more often.)

A Mac flashback

We were walking to the Apple store in Milan - and were just arriving at the fountain entrance - when I was was hit by a flashback of how using the Mac felt back in the days when I was a relatively new Mac owner. It was a feeling of beautiful interfaces where you could do powerful things in simple and well thought-out ways. Coloruful widgets, hard candy-like and brushed metal interfaces …

I want that feeling back in my computer use. And in the things I create as well.

(This is, of course, in no way coloured by nostalgia.)

Airpods goo

I think my Airpods are on their way out. Their latest downturn is not being as able to notice actuallt being in my ears anymore.

Unfortunately, I do not like them enough to look forward to paying for the latest and greatest version.

They are good at what they do, and I can get nothing else which does the same things quite as well, but … Paying again for the same easy to drop things, expensive little gadgets running on finite non-replaceable batteries which I feel almost compelled to bring everywhere? Not appealing.

I put on my still surprisingly strong-going Sony headphones (bought in February of 2017!) for a bit of podcast listening while making tea, and once again discovered how much nicer sound can be coming out of slightly larger hardware, softly yet snugly seated over and around my ears rather than inside them.

(How and why do their batteries still last, and last so well?)

Perhaps I will switch back to the Sonys if and when the Airpods give up the ghost, and run them completely into the ground before checking what else is out there? It is not - I think - as if I will miss any of the Airpods' special sauce enough to really go crazy. Or panic-splurge.

Also: I hold my phone way too much.