Magic
I’m playing Oz: Broken Kingdom. (Yes, “400 flying monkeys” from the iPhone 7 launch.) If you’ve read The Wizard of Oz, or really most any fantasy novel, you won’t be surprised to hear that there’s good magic and bad magic in this game. Good Magic is good. It helps people and brings happiness. Bad magic is bad. It brings confusion and sadness.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke
My iPhone unlocks for me—and only me—at the touch of a button. It anticipates my needs with commute times, warns me when it’s about to rain, and can check whether Krispy Kreme is still open when a late night craving strikes. Its magic delights me.
Photos has acquired more magic with iOS 10. I don’t geotag my photos, and I don’t take lots of portraits, but I saw a co-worker watch an auto-generated video of his recent vacation in a national park. I saw the magic light up his face.
But the magic of Photos isn’t all sunshine and light. A relative off-handedly mentioned to me that she deleted every photo from her phone as soon as she’d posted it to social media, because otherwise her phone would run out of room. A little detective work later, we found over 95% of her phone’s available space was full of 10 years worth of synced photos—including all those ones she’d been carefully deleting! She used Camera daily, and carefully saved a few favorite snaps in the camera roll. But she didn’t even know Photos existed, or that it contained an entire set of wedding photos and the life histories of each grandkid.
The secret pile of photos came up as a plot point again when I helped another family member sort out whether she needed to start paying for iCloud space. While trying to make space to upgrade to iOS 10, she also turned off and deleted all backups for her phone. Fortunately, the upgrade went smoothly. But I’m waiting to hear back whether the photos were helpfully synced over by iTunes, or if she really took 500 photos in the single year she’s owned a smart phone.
People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us… It’s people who claim that they’re good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of. — Wicked
I’ve been learning Swift and Objective-C simultaneously. It’s pretty cool how well Xcode can tab-complete, flag bad code, and debug in both languages. At WWDC 2016, the Swift team announced the Great Renaming for Xcode 8 and Swift 3. But they also announced that Xcode 8 could find and offer suggestions to fix many of those changes semi-automatically. The Xcode engineers work hard to make the lives of other Apple-flavored developers easier. It’s a little bit magical.
Last night, I took a first baby step into Core Data. I pulled out my Big Nerd Ranch iOS Programming text and turned to chapter 21. I cruised through a couple pages of explanation, then began following the tutorial and hit a brick wall. The book was published in December, 2015. At best, the authors had peeked at Xcode 7.2 as the book went to press. More likely, their first copies were already on their desks as they downloaded the official release. (It’s unfortunate how mismatched software and book publication timelines are these days.) And 9 months later, Xcode 8’s Core Data tools look nothing like these screenshots. Mostly, options and checkboxes seem to have been taken away, and now it ‘just works’ without needing to write—or even being able to read—so much code. I probably need to find the right WWDC video to watch, but to understand that video, I probably have to already understand Xcode 7’s Core Data. To a seasoned Core Data wielder, these Xcode 8 changes may be huge time-saves and bug-preventers. But to a newbie like me, trying to learn, right now they feel like too much magic.
Witchcraft to the ignorant, … simple science to the learned. — Leigh Brackett
I don’t think many of us set out to be wicked, but sometimes our efforts to do good get away from us. Can we hone our witchcraft and tools for other wizards in a way that still welcomes the apprentice magician and delights the townsfolk?
