Author: Bob Martens

Categories
Technology

Google (and Gmail) is Google+

File this one under the Just Be Aware category. Also, yes, this is more sour grapes about Google from me. You should be used to this by now.

Google has announced, and The Verge has reported and clarified, a new “feature” that will be introduced into Gmail in the coming days. It basically boils down to this:

  • Google+ is now even more integrated into Gmail
  • When you type in a person’s name to add them to an email, Google will recommend people with that name from Google+ … both people in your circles, and people outside of your circles
  • Now anyone can send a message to your Gmail account
  • If you do not have that person in your circles, it will be filtered into the Social category
  • This behavior (people being able to just search for a name and send a message to your Gmail Social category) is opt-out

People who know and love Google and Google+ might not have an issue with this, and that is fine. Everyone is free to make their own choices on what services they use and how they use them.

However, this is another case where I am glad I’ve moved my personal email off of Gmail and to somewhere and someone else (iCloud at the moment).

The consolidation of every Google property into Google+ freaks me out as a user. The fact that they make such things opt-out instead of opt-in is just another case of being willing to burn down everything to try to beat Facebook at their own creepiness game.

John Gruber pretty much echoed my first thoughts with his short commentary:

This has to be a mistake. Surely Google will change this from opt-out to opt-in.

But the more I thought about it, the more I agree with Marco Arment on the overall theme of many of the decisions Google has been making not just with Google+, but with every single product that they own:

I don’t know why anyone’s surprised. To be clear, for anyone who thinks Google is some benevolent, selfless entity handing out free services to everyone out of the goodness of its heart:

Google’s leadership, threatened by the attention and advertising relevance of Facebook, is betting the company on Google+ at all costs.

Truth be told, Google is free to do this if they like and people are free to continue to use Google services knowing full well what Google is trying to do. That’s the beauty of having choices in this market (and luckily, we do have choices).

However, this is another nail in the coffin between myself and Google. I’m hoping that they will enable an option in their Google Apps for Education admin interface for me to switch the default to either Circles or No one. At that point, people can make their own decisions on how they want people to be able to find them.

In the end, maybe that is my main beef: the default setting. Defaults matter. Defaults, many times, say something about your company.

Making this opt-out tells me just a little bit more about where Google is heading.

Categories
Life Technology

Technology Can Enhance

There are many times I scoff at the idea of technology being able to always change our lives for the better. That is not to say that it CANNOT change our lives for the better, but the idea that adding technology will ALWAYS change our lives for the better I think is not just wrong, but toxic.

However, there is one area where it does help me and that is in keeping track of what I am eating.

I am not going to pretend that the Lose It! app is going to magically make me more healthy, but what it does provide me is an avenue to look at what I am eating and to make some decisions. For me, it is portion size.

Being able to scan the bar codes of what I am eating/drinking and to know the nutritional contents of that item without needing to sit down and tabulate and read makes it something I am more likely to do. Keeping track over time allows me to keep track of how my habits might be changing. Adding the ability to track my weight at the same time gives me a measurable outcome with which I can see a difference being made.

Those are all good things.

However, it is also not enough. I still need to take that information and make choices about what I am and am not going to do. Technology can help us with things, but it cannot replace us as humans nor our need to make choices for ourselves.

So often technology tries to take the human out of the picture, but we love something important: the human.

Technology can help, it can be a tool, and it can enhance but it cannot, and should not replace.

Categories
Technology

Learning iOS Programming … Again

Time to dig into the past again … something I have been hoping to do but never jumped in and actually accomplish.

I’ll let you, the reader, search through the archives to find my failed attempts at learning iOS development/programming along with any number of other technologies. It is really a running joke in my own mind by now that I can’t follow-through with anything in this realm. I haven’t launched any products (web or otherwise) and haven’t put anything up on the App Store either.

Learning iOS Dev

I’m back at it again, however, and I hope I can get something onto the App Store this time (no matter how small it might be). This time I have Learning iOS Development from Addison Wesley to work through along with my prior work in iOS 5/6 to get me through this and to the next level.

Apple has pushed the platform ahead quite a bit with iOS 7 and there is a lot to learn. I’ve been lucky enough to watch the iOS 7 Tech Talks along with some of the WWDC 2013 sessions as well. It has worked not so much to give me an overview of the changes (which it has), but to get me pumped up and excited about development and the platform as a whole.

I’m shifting my focus a little bit to some small agricultural apps to start (I hope). There are many “paper only” tasks on the farm right now and I want to be able to capture those in some useful ways along with eliminating the need to write so often for things which really are just numbers.

I’ll hopefully have some more information that in the future as I continue to try to work out the specifics, but it will piggyback on the new farm entity we created (more on Martens Family Farm in the future, obviously) and the primary use will be small-to-medium farms and helping them get the most out of their work.

I hope.

Categories
Life Technology

Future Farming

I have been reminded that I should probably write some updates on how the farm projects are currently coming. We have a few “irons in the fire” so to speak, so I’ll just run through a few of them here.

Martens Family Farm

For the first time we have taken the steps to create a business entity around some of the farming operation. Mainly we’ve taken our existing hog operation and turned it into a partnership and then had that partnership expand from there. It has allowed us to bring in more people officially and also start looking to the future and more expansion from our start.

By setting up the entity we are also able to free up one member of the family, my brother, to hopefully being working on the farm as his primary means of income. The hope is that this dedicated time will allow us to not just improve the existing operation, but free up some flex time for expanding into new areas as well.

Expanding the Hog Operation

The main area of expansion for 2014 is the doubling of our hog operation. This was the impetus for the creation of Martens Family Farm, the entity, and also will allow my brother the freedom to spend more time on the farm operation. It also means I will have a lot more to do with compliance paperwork and finances.

Right now the barn is nearing completion with much of the interior work to be done, but once the barn is complete we look forward to spending a single day bringing in all 4000 head of hogs into the entire operation and getting things up and running as quickly as possible. It is quite exciting.

Paperless Farming

This is my main goal. I want to try to eliminate as much of the physical paper being moved around the farm as possible. My parents own iPhones, and iPad, and an iMac so getting the files stored and moved around should not be a huge issue, I just need to start experimenting so that we can get things working.

We are using QuickBooks Online to handle the money portion or the business and their iOS apps make it quite easy to add receipts into the system. I have not really needed to touch the desktop web interface all that much since we started. It has been pretty good.

The next thing on my list is to purchase a small, portable scanner so that I can take it to the hog office, scan in the paperwork, and then go home and handle the task of organizing things from the comfort of my own home. I have narrowed it down to a few scanners and will report back what I will be using.

Some other ideas focus around the creation and completion of some simple iOS applications which would allow us to track the progress of the hog operation without needing to send faxes back to our partners every single day. That is a long-term goal, but I think I’ll have more to say on that in the future.

Future Ideas

I’ve already stated one of them, the creation of some iOS apps to help with record-keeping and progress-tracking, so I won’t rehash that here.

I am actively looking at FarmLogs to help us track our crop operation as well, which is separate from the hogs but would allow us another testing ground for things. It would allow us to track more information about what we are doing and have done with our individual fields so that we would have some sort of electronic record of what is going on. I am just starting to see if it is something we could use in the coming year. When all of your partners in the operation own iOS devices, it opens up new possibilities.

We have a very small group of egg-laying hens right now and we plan on maybe starting to expand that as well. So far we have enough eggs for our family to use, but adding more hens would mean we would get to open it up to some of our friends in the area. I guess my grandmother used to keep 300 hens on the farm … but we are not looking at anything like that.

One larger project we are just beginning to talk about would be adding a small herd of beef cattle onto the place as well. We need to look at what permitting we would need to look into and also prep an area for the herd to graze, but we’ve always like the idea of keeping a small number of beef cattle around for our own benefit along with allowing us to sell custom beef to local people and restaurants. A lot more planning needs to go into this, but it is something we are actively thinking about.

Conclusion

There are many changes going on right now and many more to come. 2014 should be another banner year as we continue to push ahead with what we’ve done and diversify into new areas as well.

The agriculture sector is a mish-mash of expensive technology available only to the largest growers and nothing, which is how many smaller growers are still doing things. I think it is a fertile area for some small companies to make a big difference.

Categories
Technology

Downside to Automatic Updates

On the Debug 24.1 with Daniel Jalkut, Ryan Nielsen, and John Siracusa as guests, they talked quite a bit about what is going to happen with software updates in the future. I recommend both Debug 24 and 24.1 for a really great discussion around many things Apple and software development in general.

However, their almost wholesale support of automatic updates for everything scares me quite a bit. It isn’t surprising really because as a person who is excited about progress in technology myself I usually ride the edge as much as possible, but I think there are some things not considered by people who either are used to running the latest version of everything or have a vested interest in having people on the latest version of everything.

  • Automatic updates will allow developers and companies to push controversial features without people having the opportunity to keep an older version until everything cools off. Tweetie-turned-Twitter for iOS is a great example of this. If people were not able to keep their older version of Twitter for iOS, then you would have had to wait until it blew over or just grin and bear it because it is updated and you have no choice.
  • The idea of “tough luck” being the default answer for people who are automatically pushed to new versions seems like a user-hostile-but-developer-friendly way of handling things.
  • Being able to support anything goes out the window. If everything automatically updates then you no longer are able to keep anything stable. We already deal with this often with web applications and it is a pain (probably the greatest point of pain).

This is the part where people often scream “but this is the future, just deal with it” … and I smile, nod, and then think quietly to myself why.

As humans we seem to have a serious issue with thinking that something newer automatically is better. For whatever reason we think progress is always a good thing instead of always being a compromise each and every time and maybe, just maybe, it isn’t always a good thing.

We don’t always make things better. We don’t always get it right the second time around. It is entirely possible that the choices you are making today are worse in some very important ways and we need to live with that.

The every-present  feeling that we need to keep pushing forward faster and faster and into more areas is entirely human. However, we need to always be aware that while we might think we’re doing something awesome … we might just be wrong.