Excursions

What’s it with the UX of the apps on Android? They just don’t look clean, finished. Is it a limitation of the platform? Or the complexity of the SDK? Or it is simply the misguided belief that design is not really important for users of an “open” platform?

I recently ordered a new t-shirt and, of course, it was delivered with a pair of extra red buttons. I have never used these - most often, I simply throw them away. Who finds these useful?

I couldn’t help but remember this act from Seinfeld.

I recently finished reading Suspect by Robert Crais. I enjoyed this book, almost most of it. However it is, by no means, a great book.

The story is too formulaic. The mystery is predictable. Most of the characters are not built well. Every plot “twist” can be seen chapters ahead. Even the narration is too simplistic. It is linear with the problems introduced in a chapter and solved right in the next one. There is simply no tension.

However, the overall book is a breezy read. No part gets boring. I especially liked the parts where it was just about Scott and Maggie, the German Shepherd. I usually do not enjoy the subplots involving pets. They are overdone most often, made too dramatic. That’s not the case here. The bonding between them is developed really well. You care for both. And that’s where lies the strength of the novel. I just wish it was backed by a nice crime mystery.

I do not fathom the recent craze for folding devices. Basically, we were tired earlier of the thick phones - so we all rushed behind thinness. And the devices became larger. Now we want smaller ones, the thickness is fine again? I can never fully understand us.

I was part of a technical forum today where a question was casually floated - what is the difference between AI and ML? And I was surprised to see so many varied reactions.

This left me wondering what’s the simplest and not-too-technical way to summarize the distinction?

My 6-year old daughter casually said, “the roads are so bumpy now-a-days”. And left me wondering how old this girl thinks she is to confidently claim she remembers roads from any other age. Kids these days 🤷🏽‍♂️

The decade gone by - 2010-2019 - was the most important decade of my life.

This was the first full decade that I lived an independent life away from my parents - shaping my own life in a way. My personal life. And my professional life. I spent the decade before this one completing my education, setting things up for my life to come. But it was in this decade when I started recognizing myself. Defining myself.

I got settled into my first job. I fell in love and then married her. We moved in into a house and made it our home. We learned to live together. We purchased our first car. We decided to settle in and shifted to a new town to do just that. We found a house where we felt we could start our independent life together and purchased it.

We decided the time was right to welcome another member to our family. We were blessed with a baby girl, our little angel, and I fell in love again. She became our life. For the next years to come, every decision we took, I took was to make sure our daughter has the best life.

I grew professionally. I proved my worth and gained respect amongst colleagues. And when that started dwindling towards the end of the decade, I decided it was time to move on to a new job. By this time, I was pretty clear what I wanted out of my carrier and thankfully I found a place and a role that could provide me with that.

I identified my interests outside of work. And they have managed to provide me with the stability, the sanity in my lone times.

As I look back at the years gone by, I can’t help but think this was indeed the most important decade of my life.

If there was one common theme that defined this decade for me was the decisions, the life-altering decisions I had to make throughout the past 10 years. The decisions that would make or break my life.

And I think I have managed to come out unscathed. Bruised, scraped now and then, sure. But not marred. I feel satisfied with that.

Here’s me looking inwards at the start of the year on how the past 10 years have affected me.

the fidgety teen from 10 years back has given way to the calmer, saner, thoughtful self of today. I feel content within and that is the most important thing.

No doubt, today’s is a changed, improved me over 10-years-younger myself. But if the decade gone by was defined by the decisions, I believe it would be the balance that defines the next decade - a balance between change and stability. Exciting times!

Login to your Google account and access the activity controls.

Find the “YouTube History” section and switch off the setting. Also, make sure both the checkboxes in the section are unchecked — the first one is about the videos you watch and the second one is about the searches you make on YouTube. You do not want recommendations from either. And apparently switching the whole setting off does not disable both by default.

Click on the “Manage Activity” setting and clear all the activity. You can also consider setting it to automatically delete after every 3 months.

(And while you are at it, you should also consider pausing the location history tracking. This does not break any of the Google services.)

You can also make the “Cinema Mode” as default on your video controls. This should leave less space for related/similar videos recommendations from YouTube.

It is easy to get addicted to YouTube - unknowingly spend hours clicking through the myriad of recommendations that algorithms through at you. The experience sucks. I have been burnt many a time. So much so that I spent a month off YouTube this year. It helped.

But staying off YouTube completely is difficult. The above steps have helped me not stay glued to the app for hours. I either access the video directly (if I know what I want to watch) or browse my Subscriptions page (when I don’t know what to watch). The home page is useless without history turned on. And so are other recommendations. Trust me, you do not want them.

The season finale of The Morning Show was brilliant. Extremely powerful, and so well performed. Not just the leads, but supporting cast too. And the use of opera was brilliant. Over 10 episodes, the makers have managed to make me connect with and care for all the key characters.

Spotify has one job: make a great music player. They execute. Their app has none of these problems. It’s fast and bug-free. Spotify delights.

Even I had recently switched to Spotify. I believed Apple always nails an experience - so they would even for music listening. At least, they would do a better job than other players. But I was wrong. Spotify is far ahead, especially with playlists and recommendations. They rarely get it wrong.

As a side note, I always wonder why companies struggle while designing good music apps. It is such a simple use case, however most fail to get it right.