Bill Gates responding to Jimmy Fallon about technological advancements.

Gates: I thought that people would be doing handwriting more on the tablet device—I think that’s still about to come—but, making it so that it feels comfortable, and the size is just right…

Fallon: Because, now it’s all pixelated and it just doesn’t look like handwriting.

Gates: No, it’s too weird. Most people, if you’re going to write, you write on paper, still. But, the software to recognize your handwriting, and the way that works physically—I think, you know, we’ve got people hard at work on that—and paper tablets will be the next thing to go.

This line of thinking underscores a common misstep in the tech industry: mistaking innovation with improvement.

Blaming technology for the lackluster adoption of handwriting input on tablet devices misses the point. No matter the innovations, handwriting will never be an improvement for the majority of input situations.

First, handwriting relies on the use of a separate piece of technology—a pen or stylus—with only one point of input. On the other hand, software and hardware keyboards can make use of 2-10 inputs (from thumb-typing to touch-typing). No matter how fast a user writes, the simple taps of a keyboard will always be faster and more efficient.

Second, handwriting lacks consistency. Each user’s letter forms will vary from person to person as well as within their own writing. The human eye can discern the consistency easy enough, but for a computer, this is a complex problem. This fact provides the basis for CAPTCHA systems. Additionally, handwriting lacks consistency of spelling and grammar so that computers do not always know which letter the user was trying to put in any given word or sentence.

Contrast this with keyboards, whose characters are 100% consistent from one person to the next. No matter the user’s proclivity, an “e” typed on the keyboard will always result in the same character. This eliminates a huge variable from the computer’s work, making contextual analyzation a real possibility. This makes room for the computer to interpret spelling and grammar.

Of course, there are many use-cases where handwriting is superior to keyboard input (diagraming, drawing, even quick notes), but those times are the exception and not the rule. Most users, most of the time, will find that a keyboard input results in the least amount of friction. This is why keyboards have become the de facto input option. No doubt, future innovations will likely overshadow keyboard input, but not for the time being, and certainly not because of better handwriting recognition.

It’s time innovators cease doggedly hammering away at problems that have largely been solved only to prove a point.

(Watch the interview on YouTube)

When the Lord covenanted with Abram, he gave him a new name in token of the promised blessings for Abram’s obedience.

As with Abraham, so with us: our prior identity should be swallowed up in our new covenants. Thus is our former self put away and buried; and we emerge a new man or woman of God. From there on, our identities are fully woven into the fabric of the foretold promised blessings we will receive if we fulfill our duties to the Lord. That new name, that new birth, that new life, is a reminder not to look back, but to move faithfully forward toward the prize.

Covenants are opportunities to begin again. Covenants can change us.

While it would be easy to scoff at a cell carrier getting into the banking business, this move makes sense because T-Mobile is becoming the de facto first-choice carrier for many lower-income individuals, at least from my own observations. The option to use a phone without a contract and make check deposits without any charge is a great selling point that gives T-Mobile leverage over competitors in the reseller space (think, Boost Mobile, etc.).

I have been using a less traditional banking service called Simple for over a year, and I love it. With some of the same features (plus several other superior ones), online banking has become a real joy. As a current T-Mobile customer, I would probably jump on this new service if I weren’t already satisfied with Simple.

Outdated and archaic banking websites don’t serve the needs for a majority of people, and all the fees make the tradeoffs less of a concern. Most people want a simple way to track expenses, cash checks, and do this all without feeling like they’re dealing with some back-alley crook who’s looking for any opportunity to steal their hard-earned money. It looks like T-mobile may be offering that kind of solution. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Glassboard, a private social network for groups, has updated their iOS app. The modernization to reflect iOS7 conventions is a great first-step and I’m excited to see where the  recent acquirers Second Gear take this beloved tool.

This is a tool I use every day with friends, family, and colleagues. As such, I’d like to suggest a couple of improvements.

Board Differentiation

I love the way glassboard, by default, displays all posts from all groups in a waterfall list. This makes catching up quite easy, and reduced time spent jumping from one board to another. The drawback is that it’s difficult to quickly discern which board you are reading from on any given post. The only differentiation is a title line at the top of a chronologically grouped set of posts from the same board. This can get lost easily.

Currently, the board name sticks to the top of the screen when scrolling through a post, but this can become useless in a very long post where you are more inclined to want to know the post author. This could be replaced by the post header, showing the author, profile photo, and time stamp

My recommendation is to make use of color to enumerate different boards. In the left menu, different boards are shown with icons. Each of these icons could receive a colored stroke, unique to each board. I suggest the colors be chosen at random, and according to the number of boards. Fewer boards should result in greater contrast between the colors, with increasing number of boards resulting in increasing variety of colors.

Then, in the main column view, place a running line along the right side of the screen, since this is where text is least-likely to be. That line should change color according to the board from which any displayed post is taken. This would make it easier to differentiate between boards being viewed, very quickly without taking up too much screen real-estate and without distracting headers or other denotations.

Comment Differentiation

At present, comments look deceivingly like their parent posts. These should be slightly inset, or receive a different background color. In fact, using the background color assigned to the given board would reinforce an awareness of context for the user.

Notification Granularity

Admittedly, most users will never need to adjust their notifications according to post type, comments, favorites, etc. However, power users with many boards would likely love to be allowed to decide what exactly they get notified about per each board.

This passage presents the Lord’s admonition to Cain in consequence of his unacceptable sacrifice offering. The wording of the text may be confusing. The ESV translates this passage with a bit more clarity:

“If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”

Clearly, the Lord is seeking to help Cain understand both the power of his own agency as well as the significance of the stakes. The adversary of our souls lurks just outside of us, awaiting any opportunity to be granted entrance, and thus, put us in a precarious and weakened position. We simply cannot leave sin waiting outside our habitations: we must decide to use our agency to evict sin, to send sin out from our dwelling. Dispelling sin requires action; positively affirming our agency in righteous ways.

What Cain failed to understand was the power of enemies unconfronted. Simply remaining in his tent, hoping his foe would simply become bored and wander away was not realistic. Cain’s lack of asserting, of making a commitment to choose to serve God (Joshua 24:15), would prove his consequent downfall.

The lesson is stark for us: we must either rule or be ruled.

With today’s updates, I have created a new version of this action that uses the [reminder] parameter instead of prepending “Todo”, which was a clever way to tell the parser to make the item a reminder instead of an event. This, however, did not work when including a specific reminder list via “/listname”, which would instead create a calendar item if you have a calendar with the same name.

In practice, I would try to add all these events to my “School” reminders list, but they would end up created as events in my “School” calendar. This may not be an issue for most people, but since I want to segregate my school stuff from personal, work, or church events/reminders, this became an issue. I lived with simply having all these show up in my regular reminders list, but today’s update made that fixable.

As well, I have made use of the [add] parameter so that the reminders are automatically added without any user input. This is especially handy for me because I have up to 50 school tasks a week (yes, it’s ridiculous) and hitting “Add” fifty times in a row is a little monotonous.

As with the previous action, space reminders between empty lines. Here’s an example from this week’s school reminders for me:

Here’s the URL:

fantastical2://x-callback-url/parse?sentence=[[line|1]]&reminder=1&add=1&x-success={{drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=[[line|3..]]&reminder=1&add=1&allowEmpty=NO&action=Auto-Parse%20Reminders%20In%20Fantastical}}&x-cancel={{drafts://}}

You can install the action into Drafts using this link in iOS.

Upon learning of the impending death of Google Reader, my response, as well as the response of others, was, “this is why we pay for services“. But with so many paid services dying the same death, perhaps it’s time to reconsider this view point.

It seems as though most funding models for these sorts of services involve an investment based on trust, either from venture capitalists who believe in the potential for growth or subscribers who believe in the promise of reliable and useful services. Most successes seem to pick one of these routes and run with it.

There is, however, a service that took a different route. Evernote used an approach to both satisfy the need for massive growth and offer services-in-kind. As much as I hate the word, Evernote’s freemium model seems to have promoted both a viable and stable service.

I began using Evernote as a free user and stayed that way for a year or so with no compelling need to upgrade. The service worked great for me, and I became a huge fan. However, with continued use of the product, the selling points for their premium features became more tempting. While the need for these options was difficult to explain at the onset, use of the product became the very best sales pitch Evernote could have had. So I was more than willing to plop down some money to unlock the full potential of their service.

Thus, the lifespan of Evernote had seen numerous burnouts and failures while they keep chugging along like a train refusing to be derailed. Perhaps Evernote provides a valuable template for other services trying to do right by their subscribers: free users pay the piper by providing growth allowing premium users to call the tune.

“[A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.”
—William Wordsworth, in his preface to “Lyrical Ballads”

The further we get from the industrial revolution of Wordsworth’s day, the more clear becomes the fact that we are not machines. The monotonous factory work of the late eighteenth century that spilled over into our school systems and career expectations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is sufficiently eroded. We can see how it is breaking down. Is it any wonder that so many of us admire the independent craftsman? Modern-day desk jockeys cling to their field notes notebooks for some sense of what we lost in the past: a sense of individuality.

That’s why the greatest bits of technology today are not merely portals to the drudgery of modern life, but rather tools with which to explicate ourselves. Applications and gadgets are most joyful when they empower our thinking instead of merely stimulating our neurons.

This came as a huge relief to me. Taking a full-load of online undergrad courses, I average about 40 assignments per a week. Adding them one at a time had become a huge chore.

Moments like these market a shift from thinking these tricks were excessive gimmicks to seeing them as real life-savers.