An Allo-rgic Reaction

The signs are clear as day — Google is the next Microsoft; confused, cluttered, and pushy. The company that spent the last five years unifying all its chat services has now released not one, but three new applications to restart the confusion. Some brains, right?

In the last few months, Google has launched a discussions app called Spaces, a video-chatting app called Duo, and now, a mobile messaging app called Allo. But I want to address Allo particularly in this post.

In my opinion, Google’s original chat service, Google Talk, was perfect for its time; it was simple, cross-platform, and lightweight. And along came Hangouts, which made for a decent successor. True, Hangouts initially suffered from numerous performance issues, but today, it is a worthy contender against the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Google doesn’t seem to think so. Google believes that it ought to have its own real WhatsApp-rival, one that works using a phone number and not a Google account. And why is that, you ask? It’s because WhatsApp, in recent years, has grown tenfold in popularity and user base (especially in India) and Google believes that it has the wherewithal to outclass it. Also, no one ever really got the concept of Hangouts, although it’s quite simple really.

So I gave Allo a go for a couple of days and watched it crash beautifully on my Nexus 5X (so much for ideal Android apps testing ground, eh). Feeling content that two days was sufficient time spent testing the damn thing, I uninstalled it, got on my computer, and started typing.

Let's get straight to the rub — the much debated features of the app, Google Assistant and Smart Reply. In short, here’s what Google has developed — a third wheel that will constantly butt into your conversations with ready answers when discussing facts. And it won't just stop at being Hermione; it'll show you suggested replies for your texts, like 'OK’ and 'Haha’ depending on the incoming text. There is also a separate contact called Google Assistant that you can chat with. It’s Siri, but à la Google. Knock yourself out.

To improve these reply suggestions over time, the app will continuously record your replying styles and get a better understanding of who you are and how you text, robbing you clean of your privacy. But for now, let’s try and overlook that, because privacy was lost the day we got online. I am more worried about how we’re being robbed of our individuality.

Have you observed how your recipients read your messages so quickly and easily, but reply less frequently? I’m sure you’ve observed it; even got mad at times. By nature, it’s easy for us human beings to read something, but when asked to actively participate in a conversation, we’ll have to consciously apply time and effort. The Smart Reply feature in Allo is designed to help us in this process of replying, but I fear it may only do more damage than help. I am worried that in the name of convenience, we’ll slowly lose our sense of originality and spontaneity.

Think about it — at some point in the future, this app is going to be answering for us almost all the time, forcing us to choose one of the suggested replies over opening up the keyboard and typing; and we’ll give in, because it’s just so much faster. And our poor recipients will barely be able to tell the difference. Sure, it’ll know us well enough to suggest an ‘OMG! That’s dank!’ over a ‘It’s terrific!’ every once in a while, just to spice things up, but really? Do we really want a machine spicing things up for us?

And OK Google, it’s great to be in the know, but I’d hate to have unsolicited information shoved down my throat all the time. Besides, that’s what Google Now on Tap was designed for — so I can long-press the home button and expect Google Now to scan my screen for potential keywords to Google. Why is Google confusing everything again?

Allo can be a pain even if you don’t install it. Since it’s a Google app, and since Google calls all the shots on Android phones, you may receive text notifications from the app even if you haven’t installed it. Android’s undercover agent, Google Play services will ensure you get a pop-up of the message sent to you on Allo and also offer a link to the installation page. Doesn’t that sound like something Microsoft would do? On the bright side (if you can call it that), Google plans on bringing this app-less notification feature to other messaging apps as well.

Let’s try and sum up what I’m on about. Am I looking at Allo with a jaundiced eye? Yes, evidently. Can I be blamed? No! Because in an era where we ought to be standardising chat clients, we’re only seeing more of them crop up with agendas of their own. I am used to the flexibility protocols like XMPP offered over half a decade ago. And now, I am forced to see (and use, eventually) more and more platform-specific apps whose coolest features are animated stickers and a computer algorithm that can tell me knock-knock jokes.

As a stubborn millennial, all I can do is hold off the transition for as long as I can, dissuade my friends and family from texting on something new and rubbish, and finally give in when everyone I know is using it. Sheesh.


Until next time...
Vignesh

Print History

I was thoroughly ecstatic when, about fifteen years ago, my father walked into the room and announced we were going to buy a printer. I must’ve been in my third or fourth standard and I was in raptures on hearing the good news. Back then, if you were a schoolkid with your own home computer, you were already pretty cool. And I was having the whole works - a personal computer (replete with oodles of games on it), internet connection (I was already communicating with emails then), and a CD writer (floppy disks were passé even back then), soon to be joined by a colour ink-jet printer.

Our first printer then, was an Epson Stylus C41UX - a petite four-colour inkjet. To the rest of the world, it was a run-of-the-mill economy home printer, but to me, it was witchcraft - the right combination of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks could create just about any colour I wanted? No way! And these minute droplets of ink would be squirted on moving paper using tiny piezoelectric nozzles on the print-head that rapidly dashed from side to side? Get out!

I spent the first few months wearing the printer in how a ten-year-old with computer access should; I would print photos of my family, pictures of my favourite cartoon characters (Tintin and Gohan, to name a couple), and recipes for homemade pizzas and whatnots. And if I got bored printing those, I'd waste more ink printing jewel case labels for my mixtape CDs and outlines for paper cut-outs of Japanese hatchbacks and Airbus aeroplanes.

That Epson went on to serve us for over five years. During its final years of commission, the printer would use the better portion of every ink cartridge installed to clean and align its print-head. If the printer seemed to be in a good mood, it would use two out of its four available colours to present us with a dull, pink or bluish image of a beautiful green leaf. And if it didn’t feel like it, it would refuse to feed paper until one of us forcibly jammed it in, and would then continue to be adamant by simply squirting an amorphous blob of ink on paper instead of printing what was commanded.

Our second printer was an HP F4185 All-in-One, a boxy multifunction printer that could not only print, but also scan, and make copies without requiring a command from the computer. I liked how HP’s thermal inkjet technology felt so ahead of the curve and how it was capable of consuming ink in picolitres, unlike the Epson, which always gave us the appearance of a child that constantly wet its pants and asked for more water. The fact that it was a lot quieter while printing was something I both liked and disliked; I guess it was like using a modern, refined fuel-injected car, but missing the bangs and whirrs of the old one.

I was in high-school when the HP came along, but I was just as excited to fiddle around with it. I would print innumerable custom-designed CD labels and posters on expensive specialty paper. I would also slide documents onto the scanning glass and hit the copy button blithely to save myself a walk to the photocopy shop, a lazy habit that would occasionally end with me being severely reprimanded. I’d impress my teachers regularly with full-colour printouts of project work while everyone else submitted black and white. This lunchbox of a printer was also a trooper that survived over five years.

One of my old CD labels for a CD with songs ripped off the radio I think.

Feeling confident about the brand and an itch to go wireless, we replaced the F4185 with yet another HP - the 3515. Boy, were we wrong. This was a dreadful All-in-One printer. It was plagued with a litany of faults right from the start; the paper never once fed correctly without manual intervention, the page alignment was always off, it was utterly incapable of duplex printing (manual or otherwise), and worst of all, the scans all showed up with black patches on them.

I was in college when this foul contraption from hell landed, and I’d already lost much of my interest in playing around with a printer. I remember wanting to gift my friends and family 4x6 photo frames with some old photos on more than one occasion, but the only thing I managed to get out of the printer every single time was a bunch of long error codes. So, I can’t really say I designed and printed anything creative on the 3515, save for a greeting card or two.

I wouldn’t be overstating in the least if I called the 3515 HP’s worst product to date. The very first set of ink cartridges that came with the printer died long before they were fully depleted; the printer simply refused to use them after a few months. It was the same case with the next set of cartridges as well, and the ones after those. And that’s why all of the photos I ever printed were through a Kodak instant photo kiosk from a nearby Printo. The HP was shunted aside and used mostly for printing boarding passes and movie reservations in black and white.

And there we have it. The three printers we owned so far, and my slow passage from childhood to adulthood, mixed with a waning sense of energy and playfulness, and my thickening need to be critical, with a gradual realisation that paper and ink are precious resources.

There’s a special feeling I get when I see a sheet of paper emerge from the printer’s output tray, especially when it’s something I’ve worked on for hours; it’s a mixture of excitement and apprehension, where I’m constantly wondering if all the shapes, the fonts, and the colours will appear the way I imagined it during design. As a schoolboy, this was the feeling I got when I printed my cassette case labels and fridge stickers. Today, it’s the same feeling I get when I print my CVs and project reports. I suppose that’s one nice bit of the experience that doesn’t get lost in the transition to adulthood, and it's probably worth a good printer.

Which is why we bought a new one last week - an HP DeskJet 4535, and I’m happy to report that it’s nothing like the dreadful 3515. It’s a fine piece of machinery that, of course, does everything - scanning, copying, and automatic duplex printing. The input tray is fully concealed and paper is automatically fed, so when I give the print command on my phone, my document appears magically from inside the printer and lands on an automatically-protracting arm. Just splendid. Buying it is probably what triggered me into writing this rather nostalgic post. I’m looking forward to the next five years with this one.



Until next time…
Vignesh

PS - Speaking of replacements has just reminded me that my phone’s transparent case could use a nice new picture. What better time to start creating one than now?

The Apple of My Ear

Ask an Apple user about Apple products and they will most likely tell you how awesome they are. Poke them a bit more, and they will also tell you the cost of that awesomeness. Depending on its size, colour, and well, awesomeness, an Apple product could set you back anywhere between four thousand rupees and one fully-functional kidney.

Surprisingly, Apple’s latest offering in India is rather cheap. But that’s only because it’s not so much a product as it is a service. Say bonjour to Apple Music, the newest music-streaming service that, internationally, is catching up quickly with big names like Spotify and Tidal. Meanwhile in India, it is up against services like Wynk and Saavn that are primarily aimed at streaming regional music. 

I have been using Apple Music for a couple of months now, and I can safely say that it has struck the right note in me. With each passing day, I seem to be using it more. To me, this service is beginning to feel more like a paradigm shift than just another music app. I am starting to believe that this is the way I should have been consuming music all along. Allow me to elaborate.

Pricing
As is the case with many internet users, I ashamedly accept that a sizeable portion of my music has been acquired illicitly. In the last ten or fifteen years, I have managed to amass my hard drives with thousands of albums and songs by either allowing friends to share it with me, or by downloading them off the internet myself. It’s likely that no more than a fifth of my music collection is in the form of purchased CDs.

Frankly, I have never been proud of owning music this way, and I’m glad that the arrival of Apple Music finally changes things, at least by a little. The monthly subscription costs ₹120 for a single user and ₹190 for a family of six users. If we’re honest, that’s a piddly sum compared to the money most of us spend on ad-ridden cable television or internet.

Collection
As something of a music connoisseur, I can confirm that Apple’s collection of music from around the world is quite enormous. I was able to find and stream music from most of my favourite artists. I was left wanting very little outside their collection every time I performed a search. Music unavailable on Apple was either by relatively small artists whose presence was stronger on SoundCloud (like say, Christine and the Queens) or by artists backing Tidal exclusively (Kanye West, Jay-Z, et al.).

A cool feature of Music is that there are tonnes of playlists being created daily by music experts and ‘curators’ that make it easier than ever to try out new artists and genres. Oh you know, there are ones like ‘Intro to Daft Punk’ or ‘Frank Sinatra: Swings’. These playlists are suggested to the user based on their tastes and choices. There are even some activity-based playlists to set the mood right for whatever you’re currently doing. So, whether you’re riding the bus with the other dead people on a drizzly Monday morning or leaving work on a promising Friday evening to meet your mates, Apple’s got you covered.

Hip-hop devotees will bemoan Apple’s thoughtless style of bleeping ‘explicit’ lyrics wherein they’ve only managed to cut out some expletives but completely missed out on what the rest of the lyrics may mean or suggest. You’re better off not using Music for this one genre, if you ask me. 

Apple Music for Android
This is Apple’s first real app for Android and it’s been in Beta ever since its launch in November last year. Four months on, you can easily tell the app still needs a lot of improvement.

It works all right for the most part, but there are a few of those persistent glitches that can make the app unusable on the whole at times. I’m talking about sudden crashes and abrupt halts in playback. If you’re behind the wheel and have to constantly check your phone to take care of an adamant music app, that’s bound to drive you up the wall (along with your car, if you know what I mean).

It’s not all bad news though because the app allows offline storage of downloaded music and that’s just the right ticket for many users (myself included) who like to use their data plans frugally and bank on WiFi networks more.

The most useful improvement arrived a couple of weeks ago in the form of SD card support for phones equipped with a microSD card slot. Most cards go up to a capacity of 128 GB these days and that means that you can carry a lot of tunes with you for the road.

I have about a couple of hundred songs stored offline on my Apple Music app now, and I must say that I am quite happy with the setup. Every other day, I spend a little time in the morning downloading the music I want for the road and play it offline in the car through Bluetooth.

Here are some strange bugs I've noticed so far - a few songs that played perfectly well offline in the morning refused to play in the evening (demanding that it be connected to the internet to play), some sudden disappearances of album arts (for no apparent reason), and pixelation of some icons within the app (that stick out like a bloody sore thumb). You’ll come across such vagaries and then some for the time being, but I do hope Apple’s working hard at fine-tuning them. Still, I get the strange feeling this app’s never getting out of Beta.

Conclusion
All things considered, Apple Music is worth subscribing to if you have had enough of playing pirate and want to plunge into the Netflix era of music. The first three months are free anyway. Earlier on, I may have overstated when I said Apple Music feels like a paradigm shift, but if you’re a user like me you’ll come to understand why I said that. With Apple Music, I no longer have to go to the bother of downloading a song and copying it to a million flash drives and devices. Who’d have ever imagined the route out of piracy to be this easy and this cheap?

On PC/Mac, you can access Apple Music through iTunes. On Android mobile phones (ver. 5.0 and up), you can get the buggy Beta app that is slightly senile. On Android tablet devices, it simply doesn’t exist. And on iOS devices, you can get the stable version of the app but I can’t comment on it because I don’t really own Apple devices save for a few old iPods and they don’t support music via er, Music. But if I ever come across a one-kidneyed iPhone/iPad user who uses Music, I’ll be sure to ask about their experience. 


Until next time…
Vignesh