Apple’s map app, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18.3.1. The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico as of early this afternoon. But not for much longer.

Google’s web map, via Vivaldi, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18.3.1. The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. So what happens when I use Proto VPN to go outside the US, to some other country? Let’s go to Australia and try this again.

My VPN connection is up, and the access point is St. Lucie, Queensland, Australia, as shown by this simple test using Weather Underground. Now let’s try Google’s web map again.

We see the original Gulf of Mexico, with Gulf of America in parenthesis. That means we really can’t get around this stupidity, can we? What about the Apple map app? That’s interesting. First of all as I was writing this post it appears that my Apple map app cache reloaded, so that it started to show Gulf of America. Even if I tried to view it again through VPN, it still showed it. And then I accidentally zoomed out somewhat on the Apple map, and this is what I saw next.

Zoom in just a little tighter and Gulf of America appears. Zoom out like this and it’s back to Gulf of Mexico. And I think this is a feature, not a bug. Unlike Google, who will always show Gulf of America no mater where you are in the world, Apple seems to be a little more clever in how they’re showing this. I can’t really use VPN to fake out Apple maps because it’s using my location information to serve up the map data for my location. Which is that big blue dot over Florida.

I wish that big blue dot where somewhere else in the world right now.

As you can read on the screen capture above I’ve got a Debian 12.6 VM running under crosvm (Chrome OS VM). What’s very interesting is that the Linux kernel is 6.6.30, but Debian 12.6 is supposedly released with Linux kernel 6.1. I suspect that the kernel in my version of Debian is 6.6 because that’s the version running on my Chromebook. And that’s another surprise, because the version of the Linux kernel underpinning Android is 4-dot-something, or maybe 5-dot-something with the latest Android release. But it damn sure isn’t the same version as the kernel in Chrome OS.

The Linux purists will look askance at what Google has done with Linux to make it work in a Chromebook and refuse to concede that this Chromebook is indeed a Linux success. I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of Chromebooks have been built and sold since Chromebooks first started shipping in June 2011, but the only personal computer with a Linux kernel that has shipped more has been Android, which can be counted in the billions. This is yet another example of the overwhelming power of open source. But I digress…

This little machine keeps ticking along. It has ten years of support, which means I can depend on updates out to at least 2030, six years from now. As I noted in my last post, I should live so long. This little machine is so flexible, capable of satisfying all-around needs such as writing and web surfing for most folks, to tinkering with a Linux shell for tinkerers like me. The only thing it won’t do is play a AAA game that demands a multiple-thousand dollar rig capable of consuming enough power to keep a middle-class home powered and lit up. And I don’t care.

What I am waiting on with considerable trepidation is if I’ll get any of that Google AI goop that Chrome Plus Chromebooks are now supposed to support in the coming months and years. Frankly I dread the slathering of this AI bullshit all over everything, and I’m now looking for ways to beat it back and keep it from gumming up the works on everything I own and use. *sigh*

I will always put “AI” in quotes because every “AI” vendor is gaslighting us so hard about their machine learning software being “AI” when in reality it’s not. Google is no different, having recently announced both Gemini “AI” as well as Gemini coming to their Pixel line of smartphones. In order to invoke Gemini “AI”/machine learning you need to write Android applications that can invoke Gemini, and in order to invoke it you need support from your development tools such as Android Studio Jellyfish, which it proudly announced when first started up after Android Studio’s installation.

I have nothing that can remotely run Gemini because, according to news articles, the only Pixel phones that can handle it will be any Pixel 8 and soon-to-be-released Pixel 9 smartphone with at least 8GB of internal memory. I’m sure that it will also require reasonably up-to-date processors running on the phone as well. But if you want to get involved with Google Gemini running on a Pixel 8 or later that can support it, Android Studio Jellyfish is your on-ramp to this exciting future.

This past week I dove in even deeper and managed to trigger within myself the same level of disgust I’d experienced late last year. This time, however, I decided to find out exactly what was driving that emotion of disgust, and I think I found it, at least for me.

It is, for lack of a better term, the “oh-ain’t-it-awful” form of reporting.

It doesn’t matter if the talking heads making the report are liberal or conservative or whatever, the formula is basically the same; talk about a given subject/target, go into great detail how and why it’s awful, and finish up with an advertisement for something related to the channel. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And the YouTube algorithms know that’s what drives “engagement” and from there, advertising dollars.

As an experiment this last pass into YouTube, I started to mark what YouTube was trying to hand off to me with either a not interested or else don’t recommend this channel. I’m not sure what the not interested flag is supposed to do because I kept getting videos with the same subject matter, but on different channels. Even marking a channel not recommend still didn’t stop it completely, and I believe the answer to both questions of why is because there are a lot of people/bots out there grabbing other channel content and reposting it as their own. It becomes an exhausting whack-a-mole effort, which is what has driven me out of YouTube yet again.

Links

notube november

The first exception has to do with stories that include any video content, such as movie trailers or any news reporting. You’re reading the story and embedded right in the middle is an embedded YouTube video that you need to click in order to view it. In the beginning I did click through, but over the month of November I trained myself not to. Now if I’m reading a piece of news and a YouTube-hosted video is part of that news, I skip the video portion.

The big exception has to do with training videos. Right now I’m re-training myself to use Blender 4.0.1. If you go back to the beginning of my blog you’ll see I wrote a number of posts about learning how to use a much earlier version, and how I managed to gain a foothold in understanding Blender basics and turning out simple but effective 3-D illustrations. Like a lot of things in that period I let my attention wander away rather than sticking to it. Now I’m trying almost ten years later to pick Blender back up again, but a lot has changed, especially the controls. I tried to use the old training videos from that earlier period but Blender 4’s controls have changed too much for me to use those old videos with the current Blender. So now I’m going through the learning process again, but this time with training videos on YouTube written for Blender 4.

The lesson here is that I can’t completely drop YouTube, but I can sure come close to it. I’ve cut down my viewing of YouTube to the point where I no longer let it affect me, and addict me, via its algorithmic charms. I’m using YouTube as it was originally conceived, as a way for the general user to present information to others via short and informative, and above all truthful, videos.

Links

notube november

Now is the winter of our discontent…

Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1 — William Shakespeare

I’m not the one who coined the term “NoTube November.” Credit for that appears to come from another blogger, Marc Beebe (no relation). You can read what he had to say about it on his blog here: https://marcbeebe.wordpress.com/2023/10/26/notube-november/.

I agree with him on every point in his blog post. There’s nothing more for me to add. Except to say I agree with Marc 100% and as a consequence I’ve signed out of YouTube and will never sign back in, even after November ends.

My first Google mail message was from Google itself. Re-reading it for this post, I came across this paragraph:

As you’re using Gmail, you might also see some ads or related links. We believe that you shouldn’t have to share your inbox with large, blinking, irrelevant ads. Gmail’s small text ads are matched by computers, and designed to be relevant to the messages you’re viewing. Which means for once, you might even find ads to be interesting and useful.

As the security self-righteous like to preach, don’t say you weren’t warned. I don’t ever remember having read that, or if I reacted to it, I don’t remember what the emotion was. I just dove in and started using it. It’s now over 18 years later and I’ve got nearly 10,000 emails. I would have had more if I hadn’t curated (i.e. deleted) my messages. If you’ll recall, in Google mail’s early years you couldn’t delete any emails, only mark them as hidden. Over time Google relented and provided a way to delete unwanted of no-longer-needed emails in their account.

What’s driving me towards separate email readers such as Thunderbird is search. Google’s search results now return way too many ads, and the results, once you get through the ads, are of poor quality. My number one search engine these days is Brave.

I’ve begun my journey away from all embracing Google mail by installing and using the Flatpak version of Thunderbird. I’d like to say Thunderbird is a slam dunk solution, but I have my issues with its quirks. I’m going to touch on some of them in this post.

The top image shows a partial default look-and-feel. When Thunderbird is first started, the way it wants to list messages is in ascending date order, which means that the most current emails are at the bottom of the list. Literally every other email reader, when it first starts, lists emails in descending order, with the most current emails at the top of the list. I can easily reverse Thunderbird’s date listing order by clicking on Date column header, but why it’s in reverse is a bit odd, and because I’ve grown so used to the descending date listing that Thunderbird’s listing caught me by surprise, and a bit of confusion before I got it sorted properly.

The three-column view you see isn’t a default view. Microsoft email clients, specifically Exchange, as well as Google Mail and Proton Mail, either default on startup to three column mode, or allow it to be quickly configured to three column mode. Not so much for Thunderbird.

The default layout is for all the folders on the far left, with the email list in a top window above the view of the selected email in a bottom pane beneath. To select three column mode in Thunderbird go to the hamburger menu on the top right, click it, then click View, then click Layout, then click Vertical View. Difficult to discover, but fairly straightforward to set up. That gives you the view that I believe the majority of the world prefers. I have, in the past, used a modified vertical view where the folders are at the top, then a second view of a selected folder is beneath the folders, and then the single email view on the right. This works for constrained screen devices, but for all practical purposes its still a vertical view. I have no idea if, or how, to configure that in Thunderbird.

Once the general layout is configured, you need to configure how images within an email are displayed. By default, nothing is displayed. With Thunderbird it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. Off to the upper right of the email is a drop down menu allowing you to select what items will be displayed. In other words, you have to opt in, rather than hunt down and opt out of things you want to block, such as trackers. Most, if not all other email clients, provide a way to block trackers, small 1 pixel square “invisible” graphic elements that have a link back to some server that is activated when you open the email. There is nothing like that convenience feature in Thunderbird. Instead you get a long list of all the graphic element’s sources in a drop-down menu, and it’s up to you to enable any of them, or just say to hell with it and select the bottom entry to accept everything.

Once all the necessary Thunderbird configurations are discovered and set the client visually functions pretty much every other email client I’ve worked with.

One surprising feature of Thunderbird is its use of tabs, a feature it probably borrowed from its Firefox roots (and before that Mozilla Suite, and before that, Netscape Communicator). If you double click on any email, it’s opened up in its on tab. If you click the Settings gear on the bottom left, settings are opened in a separate tab. This is much different from other email clients, and it’s a feature you have to be aware of from the get-go. I wasn’t, and was surprised to finally pay attention to the very top and see all the open tabs. What makes the Thunderbird tab feature not so welcome for me is that it’s using Firefox’s tab buttons, detached from the underlying page it’s associated with. I totally dislike that feature in Firefox, and I totally dislike it here. Whereas I could hack Firefox to eliminate it, I’m not sure how to eliminate it from Thunderbird. If I were planning to keep Thunderbird and use it extensively, I might research a solution, but I’m not motivated to do so.

Thunderbird isn’t the kind of email client I want to keep on my machine. The developers and users who support Thunderbird also support how it looks and works. Since I’m neither one of those types, and based on my decades long use of other email clients, I’m not a fan of Thunderbird. Technically I believe Thunderbird is a solid application. It’s in the details where I have issues, and those issues are important enough to me to keep using what I already use, even if I also look askance at what’s available, especially Google’s web email client.

If you’re interested in a local email client, then by all means give Thunderbird a whirl, especially the Flatpak version. It may suite you better than me. In the meantime I continue to look.

I purchased the 2XL on a fire sale from Amazon for a fraction of its original MSRP to support a project I was working on in 2021. I use Android phones as development and test articles for Android application development because real hardware boots and runs far faster than in emulation as provided by Android Studio. Being stuck at Android 11 makes them rather useless for that task, as I now want to write applications that used the features of the Android 12 and Android 13 APIs.

After reading a number of blog posts from different folks who upgraded abandoned Android handsets to LineageOS, I decided to give it a go myself. As luck would have it, in March of this year I read another article where the FSF awarded the “2022 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor … to Tad (SkewedZeppelin), chief developer of the DivestOS project.” I looked at the DivestOS website ( https://divestos.org ) and read that DivestOS “is a vastly diverged unofficial soft fork of LineageOS.” I decided to try DivestOS because of the claim nearly every Google hook had been stripped out of AOSP. Here was another test for the 2XL to run, replacing its original Android with DivestOS.

Note that if you want a better chance at successfully installing DivestOS, use the installation instructions on the LineageOS web site. So, with that out of the way…

Even though I performed the swap of Android with DivestOS in late March, it’s taken all this time (being early May right now) to grow comfortable enough with DivestOS to keep it on the 2XL, let alone write about it. When an Android replacement such as DivestOS says it has removed just about everything connected with Google, you need to realize that Google functionality is gone and you’re not going to get it back. And I tried. I downloaded and attempted to install four APKs that contained Google Play and its support libraries, and Google Play would not start.

The attempted Google Play installation made such a mess of my initial DivestOS installation that I factory reset the Pixel 2XL back to an unadulterated state. From that point onward I stuck with F-Droid. Before the factory reset I managed to download two regular Google Play applications, one of which was Edison Mail. Edison Mail worked OK on DivestOS, but after the factory reset I’ve not re-installed it. Edison Mail wants to do too much out of the ordinary for my personal tastes.

The best feature of an Android handset that does not have Android installed is that there is no need to log into a Google account in order to use the device. To me this is the real freedom provided by these alternative distributions, and why I’m willing to live with DivestOS.

I’ve used DivestOS’ built-in resources to create a “flat” look on the home screen. This phone is not on a mobile phone plan so I don’t have the phone app or text app on the front screen. The 2XL works with WiFi, and on occasion certain Bluetooth accessories, but that’s it, and that’s all I really need. The Appalachian wallpaper comes stock with DivestOS, so I choose that and a matching color scheme. I decided to put the calendar widget on the top third of the screen because why not? The time is already in the upper left corner, so a big fat clock in the middle of the screen seems redundant.

The screen shows the icons of the two lone apps I’ve installed from F-Droid; K-9 Mail and Mulch. There is no mail app with stock DivestOS so I had to try out a few on offer before I settled with K-9. As for a web browser, I choose Mulch because it works with everything on the web that I care to go visit.

One feature I find odd seems to be how it handles OS updates.

On the update screen there’s today’s update, and then beneath it an update from mid-April. I don’t know why the OS doesn’t remove the older update entry. I tried a number of times to download and install April’s update, but it still keeps hanging around. When I look at it now after downloading and installing May’s update, April’s entry has a delete button, while May’s still has an installed… Oh, wait. If you open the Update screen’s preferences, there’s a toggle “to delete updates when installed.” Mine is toggled off. I suppose I should toggle it on and see what happens…

So far I have seventeen apps installed on the 2XL. Compare that with the over 100 I have on my iPhone 11. I have way too many on my iPhone. I could probably stand to cull a few more off the 2XL. Unless I side-load one of  my Android apps, I won’t install any more on the 2XL.

This is the beginning of an ongoing review. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it in the future as I spend more time working with it. Do I recommend DivestOS? It depends on what you want. Spend some time with it and give it a reasonable chance, but don’t hesitate to try something else if you find DivestOS to sparse for your needs. DivestOS and other open AOSP Android alternatives provide a way to keep perfectly functional electronics that have been arbitrarily end-of-lifed, fully operational.

I’m now approaching my first month using the Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook, 13IML05. I purchased it from a Costco when it was selling for US$400, $100 less than what was claimed to be the regular price. It came with a tenth generation Intel Core I3 processor, 8GiB of RAM, and a 128GiB SSD. It’s powerful enough to drive the Chrome browser which is the centerpiece of Chrome OS on this notebook.

If you’re always in Chrome, if you’re using the web-based versions of major applications such as Microsoft’s Office 360, or if you prefer the Google equivalents to Word, Excel and PowerPoint (Docs, Sheets, and Slides), then paying twice or more for an equivalent machine from Apple is a waste of your money. Really.

Before you pipe up about how Google is stealing your personal information, let me remind you that your personal information has been mined and cross-correlated by data brokers for decades, long before everyone started to voluntarily share that with various web companies. After all, how many years did you have your address and phone number in the AT&T white pages? Remember the opening of the first Terminator movie? Just a few sheets of paper in a Terminator’s hands and he was off and killing all sorts of folks because they happened to be named Sarah Connor.

It has a long battery life, allowing me to sit in a comfortable piece of furniture and word smith. It’s light weight and comfortable and cool in operation. And if I want to get real crazy, I can open up a Linux shell and go do fairly complex Linux “stuff”, usually in shell or Python. Chrome OS is essentially Linux with the Chrome browser as the primary UI.

There will always be a niche need for something as complex as a MacBook Air or Pro. I get that. You need a Pro to edit video and do series “creative” work, except… It’s getting to the point where a lot of that can be pushed back up to the “cloud.” All you need is a UI into that, and you’re on your way to getting some serious work done.

As for the argument of being “locked in” by Google, what do you think you have using Apple products, or Microsoft products? I’m truly tired hearing the about the evils of Big Tech. In spite of what you might think, it’s not nearly as bad as the critics would make it all out. We get in “trouble” with Big Tech because we’re too lazy to think through to the consequences of our actions.

I enjoy using the Lenovo. I enjoy using the web-based tools (such as the latest WordPress editor, Gutenberg). I like the quality feel of the Lenovo, which I believe is at least as good as any MacBook Air. This also means I’m giving up my attempts to write using my iPad Pros. I’ll continue to use them as content consumption devices until they eventually die or else Apple refuses to eventually upgrade them with iOS. On that day, I’ll probably continue to further use them until they just die and I will then recycle them. But not replace them. I’ve purchased my last iPad.

A key part of my decision process is retirement. Whatever reason(s) I may have had to buy and use Apple gear is vanishing as time goes along. I no longer see the benefits, and I now question if I ever did or if I was just fooling myself into buying Apple gear because of the perceived coolness factor. Who knows anymore…

I still have my Instagram account, and I still upload photos from time to time. I do that via my personal computer and Google Chrome (the irony of using one privacy abusing company’s tool to circumvent another’s privacy abusing tool isn’t lost on me). I did this in the beginning because I take the majority of my photos with my cameras, and in spite of trying to do all my post processing on my iPhone, in the end I still go back to my PC and its photo post-processing tools because the combination is so superior to the smart phone and its apps.

When I want to upload photos I’ve finished processing to Instagram, I go to the website and then right click on the page, anywhere really.

It looks pretty much as you would see on the app, with one major exception. You don’t have the button to add any photos. To get that button you right click on the page (anywhere that’s not an active link) to get a property menu.

You want to click on Inspect. When you do you’ll get the following rather frightening looking page.

I think it’s rather impressive looking, and there’s a lot in the code I find fascinating. But I would, me being me. The problem of uploading is still there, that being no upload button. What you want to do is go up to the little itty bitty icon that sits in the upper left corner of the middle panel of code. It looks like an outline of a smart phone over an outline of a tablet. If you hover the mouse over it, it will display “Toggle device toolbar,” which is where the button is located. If you click that you’ll get the following:

It’s now closer looking to the mobile app, but it’s still missing the vital button. Now refresh the page to get to the final result:

Now you have your upload button at the bottom. From this point forward every time you want to add a photo you can. Just click that button. What I find interesting is that when the mouse icon moves over the Instagram button it turns into a round translucent gray ball, just like the mouse pointer on the iPad with the latest versions of iPadOS. Which I find amusing as there is no tablet version of Instagram.

One more note: if you leave this page, and then come back and redo all of this, it will remember the state of the “Toggle device toolbar” toggle.

Is this better than the app? Not really. In particular, it doesn’t know about your location, so if you want to add a location using the desktop version then you’re out of luck. I personally don’t like to do that anymore. When I did add a location, I tended to obfuscate my exact location. Now I don’t bother.

I configured my iPhone for Dark mode (Settings | Display & Brightness) when it was first released with iOS 13 and I’ve kept it enabled since. There’s an Automatic switch setting which I have turned off, thus it’s always in Dark mode. And that, it turns out, is a problem with Apple Maps. It follows the same setting as iOS overall. It’s readable in any light except out doors in the bright Florida sun. Here’s what it looks like with Dark mode enabled.

Looks kind of hip for all of five minutes, until I have to look up something while out of my vehicle and in the sunlight. Then the map almost totally disappears. My first reaction was to try to turn off Dark mode just for Apple Maps. You can’t do that because the Apple software geniuses made the decision not to add it because they probably thought you would never need to do that. I beg to differ on that. But anyway, I decided to install Google Maps and work with that. That was a mistake, and here’s an example to illustrate why.

It’s bright and readable, and it’s covered with crap. What kind of crap, you ask? Why those lovely category buttons at the top underneath search and the option selections running along the bottom. Guess what? You can’t turn those off either. Since plan ‘A’ wasn’t working, I went back to Google to search for a plan ‘B’. And I didn’t like what I found there. One suggestion in one of the forums was to go to the Control Center (Settings | Control Center) and add a Dark Mode button. The reasoning being that when you wanted to see the map in light mode, you’d pull down the Control Center and hit the Dark Mode toggle button. And that, unfortunately for me, is what I’ve done. For example:

The Dark Mode toggle button is the very right lower corner, and Dark Mode is active. When inactive the button goes black. This is of course how Apple Maps looks in non-Dark Mode. To be honest it’s a bit washed out in illustrating secondary roads. I’m just glad that more of the map surface is given to the map, and not to extraneous buttons and non-critical illustrations.

This work-around reminds me of what I had to do to add autodial back onto my iPhone. The only reason I continue to use Apple Maps is because its interface is much cleaner than Google’s. I don’t know how long that will last.

The principal of least astonishment states that a user interface should behave in a way that most users will expect it to behave. In this case I expected to find a control (a toggle) in Maps Settings (the circled ‘i’ in the upper right corner) to enable or disable it. Having to add a toggle to Control Center to turn off the iPhone’s Dark Mode just to turn it off for Apple Maps is, as they say, quite astonishing.

Today after publishing the last post about my trip to Michigan, I got three emails from WordPress that three readers had liked the post. Every one of them came into my GMail inbox as show above. I clicked the Looks Safe button and reloaded the emails. All three were normal WordPress emails.

I went looking over the web for this type of email problem and sure enough I found the usual selection of possible causes and possible solutions. This is Google’s problem. I’ve gotten thousands of these emails without issue ever since I started this blog in December 2013. I don’t know what is triggering this response now. But it’s definitely a false positive on Google’s part, which does absolutely nothing to install confidence in Google’s filtering system.

I can’t go cold turkey on Google. I have multiple Gmail accounts to handle various tasks, having been a Gmail user since 2005 when I was invited to participate in the Gmail beta. In the past I attempted to use Google+, and I will on occasion go slumming through YouTube to look for some off-beat bit of music or old TV program. I experimented using G Suite and its individual tools in place of Microsoft Office, but I’ve since just installed and use Libre Office everywhere, not out of some misguided idealogical motivation but because it wouldn’t do all I wanted, the way I wanted.. Finally I’m a Go language user, Go having been developed by Google and for Google’s internal use before it was released as open source for the rest of the world. Google search was the first Google product I turned to, abandoning Yahoo! search completely the day I switched to Google Beta in late 1998. That’s over two decades of using Google products in some form or fashion. And I haven’t even talked about Google World and Google Maps…

Regardless, I fell under the sway of the screaming mimies that Chrome in all its forms was Evil, as was using Google Search. Ok. So on my iPhone and iPads and Mac I started using Apple’s Safari. It was pre-installed and Apple has this big deal about being privacy focused. I’ll give it a shot. For search I turned to DuckDuckGo, the current champion of the digital cognoscenti everywhere. So how did that work out for you Bill?

In the beginning it was a little rough. Search results, in particular, were a little thin, both in quality and quantity. Using Safari was OK and wasn’t all that different than using Chrome or Firefox. Until later.

Over time I found a problem with Safari on both macOS and iOS and iPadOS. It would crash and any open tabs were lost. On. All. Three. Platforms. I use my many open browser tabs to keep track of research that is ongoing at any given time. Over time, the oldest open tabs bubble to the back and are eventually closed by me. I make those decisions. But after three crashes (two on my iPad, one on macOS), I got really peeved. I’ve never had the problem with either Chrome or Firefox. They may crash, but they have tab recovery. No so Safari. The worst crash was on macOS where I had over a dozen leading tabs out of almost 100 open to areas I was actively using for my software and hardware development. That one truly hurt.

I’ve now gone back to a combination of Chrome and Firefox. I won’t even consider Microsoft Edge, so please don’t mention it. As for DuckDuckGo, when I switched browsers I switched back to Google and got what I consider much better search results. For technical questions, I consider Google’s results to be much superior.

Lesson learned? In the future, take everything that is pushing a technical ideological agenda with many grains of salt.

It’s been a little while since getting all the Flutter bits installed, running, and working together. I finally found a few moments this Sunday morning to spin it up and go farther into the Flutter Getting Started demo on the Flutter website.

I’ve gotten into the habit of running ‘flutter doctor’ every time I open a shell because I’ve found that, for whatever reason, the Android SDK licensing check gives me an “Android license status unknown” for 26.0.2, even though I run tools/bin/sdkmanager from the shell. That seems to clear up any licensing issues, at least from the command line. Run ‘flutter doctor’ from within Visual Studio Code and it pops back up again.

Another problem is with libimobiledevice, a library that is a royal pain to get installed cleanly along with its dependencies. And you need that to talk to XCode and Apple mobile devices. The last time I had a problem with libimobiledevice I finally got it straightened out with ‘brew doctor’ and then installing libimobiledevice yet again. So far, right now (as you can see above), everything is OK.

My second set of initial impressions:

• I got this up and running without writing a single line of code so far. The app running on the iPhone simulator is equivalent to your “Hello world” examples everywhere else.
• It is interesting that I’m using Microsoft’s editor to debug an iOS application in an Apple simulator running on macOS. If I were really into cross-development I’d use the Android simulator as well, and I have no doubt it would work.
• Hot reload works a treat. Starting the simulator takes more than a few seconds, but hot reload is very fast and does not require a simulator restart.

My overall impression is that it is very much still a work in progress. It feels fragile, especially when the Flutter doctor keeps reporting Android licensing and imobiledevice issues at odd times, either at the shell or within Visual Studio Code.

Having said that, it’s remarkable to see all this major systems lashed together into a decently working development environment. There is great potential in Flutter. If I can write better iOS applications within Flutter and do so with less frustration and at a faster pace, then I’m all for this and want to see it succeed. In the past, app development has (and still is) heavily siloed, where you get the development environment unique to each platform (XCode for iOS, Android Studio/IntelliJ for Android) and dealt with cross-platform development as best as possible. Now we’ve got the emergence of Flutter with its largely open source underpinnings. As long as Google keeps serious Flutter development going to at least a solid 1.0 release, then I think it will succeed.

And I personally want to see it succeed.

I’ve been chased out of Facebook twice over Facebook’s privacy flaps. I’ve left Twitter once, and then gone back. I’m about ready to leave again over advertising in my time stream. I tried Instragram, staying nearly a year, before deleting my account the end of May. Why? Changes in how the stream presents itself, ads, and the fact it’s just another property of Facebook. My Flickr account has gone dead because of the chaos at Yahoo, and how everything changed on Flickr as well. Even LinkedIn, the social network for finding work, has reached a point where I want to pull the plug on it, primarily over its sloppy security (see “How LinkedIn’s password sloppiness hurts us all“).

That leaves me with Smugmug, VSCO (barely), my WordPress blog, and my presence on Google+. I came so close, so many times, to just junking Google+. But it looks like, as a process of elimination, that I may just wind up on Plus because that’s about all that’s left, and it’s not like everything else I mentioned that I’ve dropped. Who would have thought I’d turn to Google+ in the end? Certainly not I. And there’ll be more to come…

It only goes downhill from there. Android Gingerbread (2.3) still has 2% and change of all of those devices. The last time I used a Gingerbread handset was my HTC myTouch on T-Mobile, and I switched to AT&T and the Samsungs because T-Mobile at that time would not update the HTC handsets and did not have the latest and greatest Android handsets for sale at that time. When AT&T came calling with their more comprehensive plans and handsets it was a no brainier to switch.

Unfortunately two-plus years with Samsung on AT&T, with it’s oddball software updates and the would-they-or-wouldn’t-they-update-at-all eternal question finally pushed me into the Apple camp. I have repeatedly commented on how Apple keeps its iOS software up-to-date on a regular basis across all devices. It might not be perfect, and there are those who say that Android, especially Android 6, is far better than iOS 9. But I’m not in the mood to buy one new expensive handset after another just to get the latest Android release. Google itself made an promise that starting with Android 5 (Lollipoop) major new releases would run without impact across all devices if they are least could run Android 5 to start. I’ve seen that promise delivered on my 2013 Nexus 7s that uypgraded OTA from Android 4.4 to Android 6.0.1. Unfortunately Samsung with AT&T stopped at Android 5 on the Galaxy S4. I was certainly no fan of the S5, and didn’t care all that much for the S6’s features either. When the S6 came out looking like a clone of the iPhone 6, I figured I might as well go buy the real thing. Especially when it was revealed that the Apple iPhone 6 was less expensive than the Samsung Galaxh S6.

I don’t care how good Android is compared to iOS. You can’t get the latest releases with fixes and new features unless you commit to a purchasing a new Android flagship phone (or one close to it) every 6 to 12 months. With  Apple I have the knowledge that my iDevices will all be automatically updated to the most current release.For example my iPad Air 2, purchased November 2014, has upgraded automatically from iOS 8 to iOS 9.x, all when it was supposed to. It runs as well now, if not better, than it first did with iOS 8. In the short time I’ve had my iPhone 6S+ it’s also upgraded, on the same day as my iPad, to the same version. Timely upgrades and having the latest to run on my iDevices is a key feature I won’t trade away it purchasing another Android device. I don’t ever see Google fixing this problem.

I couldn’t help but revel in Google’s Mic Drop fiasco these past few days. The company that wants to bring you the best of artificial intelligence like AlphaGo seems to have left all its organic intelligence at the door when it conceived the Mic Drop April Fools’ joke. How else could you explain the Minion Mic Drop gag that went so far as to replace a key Google Mail feature (Send and Archive) with the “Send + Mic Drop” gag button (Google says it was “too close”, but whatever), triggering all sorts of unintended, negative consequences.

Google’s problem is their arrogant cultural attitude that they can do no wrong, when history is so full of examples that they can (Buzz, Wave, Glass, Plus, etc). Even their successes have caveats; self-driving cars work only with carefully mapped streets and can’t deal very well with dynamic environments; while Android has around 80% of the world mobile market it’s so fragmented across all its handset partners it can’t get important bug fixes out in a timely fashion; their AI’s are very focused on one very specific problem (Go, for example); or the fact then even when they have a truly successful application like Mail, that they can’t leave well enough alone, making questionable enhancements that at times are enough to drive a mad-man crazy. If I didn’t have correspondence and a presence with Google Mail that goes back to 2005 I’d have left it years ago…

Google makes oodles of money, primarily via advertising. So they can have these little experiments and jokes so long as they don’t impact the primary money maker, advertising. And as long as these questionable decisions, such as this year’s April Fool’s joke don’t impact that cash flow, Google really won’t learn anything important and we’ll continue to suffer with them all.

Why not leave Google? Because, in general, there’s no-one else out there that’s better enough to reward the time and effort to switch. I’m still with Google because, as in politics and wireless service providers, I’ve chosen what I consider the least of all evils. At least I can be thankful that Google isn’t like Yahoo…

Google’s AlphaGo has won its second game against Go master Lee Sedol, winning the first two out of a five game series. Under normal circumstances I’d shrug my shoulders and move on, because to me Go is a complicated, remote game that makes chess look exciting. But I’m paying attention because of all the stories being generated by all the technology outlets (Wired is in the lead on this) about the significance of this achievement. And I’m paying attention because it’s something Google built, and a part of the Google internal infrastructure. Like search.

I don’t believe the robot overlords are massed at the gates of our society, just ready to come crashing in to obliterate us. We have too many sociopathic politicians and leaders who are doing that already. I’m concerned because Google has created the world’s most sophisticated and powerful machine-based idiot savant. A machine that still requires human-in-the-loop to direct its capabilities to whatever end the human masters have in mind.

After watching how Google (and recently Facebook) have taken foundational computer science and turned it into a world straddling system for monitoring us for advertising purposes (and leaked it over to the NSA for a world straddling system for surveillance) I’m concerned how such systems would be used by the US as well as other countries. And don’t kid yourself. China in particular has been a top tier member of the supercomputer fraternity for decades. Other countries, such as Russia, Iran, India, and Great Britain, can purchase hardware powerful enough to run the equivalent of AlphaGo for their own secret uses. And once they do they’ll begin to use such systems to determine a strategy to run the world that will not be to 99% of the world’s benefit. Unless, of course, you’re rich and in charge already.

Whether it’s war or societal logistics, those with the best strategists and planners will, in the end, come out on top of every other group they compete with. I see AlphaGo and its descendents as the self-correcting part of any planning system, capable of refining its techniques over a very short time. Look at how AlphaGo has beaten Lee Sedol in the first two matches, and a cold chill begins to settle over you. A chilly feeling that here’s a system you might never be able to outsmart, because it not only knows what you know, but it has the ability to execute winning strategies you would have never even considered. Imagine what society might come to if such a system were used to control any protests, any dissent, and know in advance who to spy on and how to keep protests from forming by automatically identifying key leaders in any movement and controlling what kind of critical information is disseminated amongst all parties. We now have all the keys for the ultimate totalitarian state. All it takes is the right person with no conscious to come along and put them together in the right way.

Just like all their competitors, including Apple, Samsung released the next iteration in their Galaxy series, the S7 and S7 Edge. There’s so much hype surrounding this release I’ll let you use Google to read all about it, if you haven’t been overwhelmed at whatever news source you frequent already. Although I switched to an Apple iPhone 6S Plus back in November, the Galaxy is still interesting enough to pay attention to. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.

• The S7/S7 Edge have micro SDHC card capability again. My Galaxy S4 had it and I used it as well as Android 4.4 and Android 5 would allow, which wasn’t much. Google really screwed over users when they restricted external SDHC card usage as much as they did. That negative change was the first big push away from Android and Samsung and towards Apple. Fortunately for those who’ve stuck it out, Android 6 is supposed to make external storage devices like micro SDHC cards look like part of the overall storage pool. I have no details how that works as the only Android 6 devices I still own and use are a pair of 2013 Nexus 7 tablets. Of course, with the 128GB of device storage on my iPhone 6S Plus, the need for a piddly external micro SDHC device is pretty much eliminated. I’ve yet to read of an S7 being offered with 128GB.
• The S7/S7 Edge are dust and water proof – again. The S5 (or at least the S5 Active) was dust and water proof, but the S6 wasn’t. No explanation about why that critical feature was dropped when the S6/S6 Edge were released, except perhaps Samsung spent so much time on making the S6 pretty they must have run out of time making it physically robust. The iPhone 6s Plus is reasonably water resistant (as reported here by Wired), so that was a big fat positive feature for me. Another reason to move to Apple.
• The S7/S7 Edge are coming out of the chute with the latest version of Android, 6.0.1. That’s nice, considering that past Galaxies have been first released with older Android releases, and it took Samsung a very long time to release more up-to-date versions of their cooked version of Android. I have no idea how quickly Samsung will now follow Google when Google releases newer versions of Android going forward. Ideally Samsung’s release would be the same day as an Android update is announced, much as what Apple does when it announces a new release of iOS. I got tired of waiting not for major feature releases of Android on my Galaxy S4, but critical bug fixes that Google would announce. Part of the problem of timely updates is Samsung itself, part of the problem is AT&T. When I finally bought my iPhone, I did so knowing full well that even though AT&T is my provider, they don’t get in the way of Apple pushing out iOS updates.

The S7/S7 Edge look very pretty to be sure. And with the latest processor and support for even faster graphics, the S7 appears poised to make some spectacular mobile gaming possible. They even have a tie-in with virtual reality via Oculus; that’s one reason why pre-orders will get free VR headgear.

All exciting to be sure. But there’s one feature that nobody is mentioning that has my attention at the moment, and that’s on-device encryption. Apple is in a brutal battle with the DoJ, where the D0J wants Apple to create a backdoor into iOS in order to get the contents of a specific iPhone 5C used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. I believe in what Apple has done so far with iOS encryption on all its mobile devices, especially fighting incredible government overreach, enough to put my hard-earned money into buying Apple hardware. And it will stay that way, regardless of how pretty the latest Samsung phones are (or any other Android phone for that matter). Hopefully I won’t have to eat these words later, but I trust Apple to do the right thing on this important issue. That same level of trust is totally lacking with all Android handset providers, especially where AT&T is directly involved.

I made my switch to Apple back in November. I have no intentions of switching away.

To add a library dependency, select the Dependencies tab at the top right, click on the plus symbol on the far upper right (see big red arrow above) and then click “1 Library dependency.”

This brings up the “Choose Library Dependency” dialog. I’ve stretched it out to show all that are available to me. You selection will be dependent on the all the APIs you’ve chosen to support. I’ve highlighted the v4 support library. Once you’ve selected the dependency library you need click “OK” all the way back. Once that’s done the project will resync itself, and if you’ve found all the dependencies that project says it needs, Gradle will complete successfully.

Editorial Comment

I realize this is beta code. But this was a new project and all dependencies should have been automatically settled during the creation process. The way Android Studio is behaving right now it’s as if it were still late stage alpha code.

This is also one of the worst UI examples I’ve ever come across, bordering on disastrous. None of this is intuitive, all the way from digging out the main dialog. I know that Google didn’t write the IDE, but they selected it, and they now share responsibility for how bad it is. And this is very bad indeed.