Rui CarmoThese are strange times we live in, and I don’t mean Steve’s leave (of which I shall say no more than Andy and simply wish him the best) or Apple’s current rank in the US economy (after none other than Exxon) or even the upcoming end of IPv4 (which some say is already come and gone).
I’ve been kept busy by work, parenting and catching up on sleep (currently my second leisure priority after reading), but I’ve been sparing the time to whittle out every little piece of personal content from my Facebook account (largely because I’ve finally made up my mind about using it solely for receiving messages), poking around Quora (largely because I’ve yet to find it truly engaging) and looking at new ways to archive my tweets (solely because my current script feels kludgy and I don’t think it’s worthwhile to spend time enhancing it).
And thus we enter another cycle of social self-erasure, most definitely as a way to stop wasting what little free time I have on not actually accomplishing anything of importance. Twitter is a good enough mix between a party line and a news filter for me to keep around (and it’s useful for asynchronous chatting) so I’m sticking to it after doing some cleanups later in the month, but GitHub is the closest thing to a “rich” social network I intend to use routinely this year.
Those are the broad background strokes of my concerns of late. I was also quite saddened by the teasing regarding app switching gestures for the iPad (which are apparently to be removed on the final 4.3 release) because they would contribute greatly to my personal usage of it, and remain somewhat ambivalent towards the Mac App Store and it’s mammoth volume of downloads due to my not really needing any more software than I already have (save, perhaps, iWork‘11, whenever it comes out), but those are mere touchups on the broad canvas of Apple usage and I have felt little need to look beyond them.
It bears noting that my relationship with the mobile industry has changed (not just professionally, which is obvious, but also personally) and that I no longer care about anything but the undercurrents and larger trends. The careless blundering of vendors and handset manufacturers is now nothing but a slight rattling in the distance, and easily tuned in or out at will.
I suspect that might change (I miss very selected portions of the mobile business, namely the bits where I prevented certain disaster by just being “that guy who knows stuff about the Internet” - true quote), but I am not in a hurry - there’s plenty else of interest to do, even if a perennial shortage of time, staff and rivers of cash to do it.
But such are the trade-offs of having both feet on the ground and a nice local ecosystem to work in.