WeatherNerd

I won't dispute the fact that I am a nerd, but if you called me a weather nerd I'd probably mildly protest. You won't find me debating whether the puffy cloud up there is a nimbus or a cirrus, and I'm not the type to while away my day watching the weather channel.

However, if you looked at my app history, I couldn't blame you if you thought I was a little obsessed about weather apps.  I've probably downloaded at least a dozen of them, most of them I only used for very short period of time before reverting back to the stock iPhone app and Dark Sky. 

So what's my beef? Why have I rejected nearly every app I've tried?  

It seems that every app would fall into one of two unacceptable categories.  

1. The app that goes into a ton of detail about the weather, but makes me dig around multiple screens before I know if I need my coat or my umbrella today. 

2. The app that immediately tells me the temperature and the rain, but I have to dig too deep to get the details. What's the dew point gonna be today? Will I be sweating through my dress shirt on the way to work this morning? 

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WeatherNerd Today View

A couple weeks ago yet another weather app caught my eye and I felt compelled to buy it, as I am prone to do. The app, WeatheNerd, definitely had a name and an icon that appealed to me but I figured it was destined to end up in the same graveyard that the rest of my discarded apps have ended up. 

My first impression was that this one definitely had an attractive interface. It gave a nice line graph of the days weather, and had a nice animation of the probability of the rain throughout the day, as well as spinning windmills to indicate the wind speed.

It also had the current temperature in a big font at the bottom of the screen, with highs, lows, dusk and dawn time, humidity, and other pertinent data available at a quick glance.

It also gave a quick summary of the temperature: "2 º cooler than yesterday"? How helpful! The biggest thing I want to know when I check the weather is, how should I dress my kids today? The temperature is nice, but what better reference is there than yesterday? I was there yesterday, and I know now that dressing my kids in snowmobile suits on a 60º day was a mistake. I'm not going to make that mistake again now that I know it's even 2º warmer.

I also like the fact that the bar graph has a lighter line that indicates yesterday's temperatures. Again, it gives me a good sense of how similar or different today will be from the prior day.

A good app needs to tell you what to weather to expect in the future too. WeatherNerd's tomorrow view looks very similar to the today view and, as a reference, it tells you how the weather will compare to today. 

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Of course, there's a week view with a quicker summer of all days, and even longer term weather predictions. As you get further out it will give you predictions based on historical data, which could be helpful if you're planning a future trip to a different geography than you're used to.

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Like most modern weather apps, it also incorporates a Dark Sky-like, to-the-minute rain and snow predictions and has local area maps for watching storms move in on doppler radar. 

Additionally, it can send you a morning alert to give you an early message on what to expect for your day.

And, if you really want to nerd out, there is a button named . . . well, "Nerd Out". Clicking it will show all the fine little weather details to make the geekiest weather nerd scream like a little girl.

As you might have guessed, I really like this one and I think I've finally found my weather app.

Certainly not number two

Admittedly, a refraction (the process of measuring a glasses prescription) can be a little stressful for a patient. Sometimes it's difficult to make a choice, sometimes both choices look back, and sometimes you might even say "one" when you meant "two". People fear that, if they make one wrong decision, they're going to end up with a bad pair of glasses.

In truth, this should not happen with a proper refraction because it's a very sound process that starts by breaking your prescription into three parts, the amount of nearsightedness or farsightedness, the amount of astigmatism, and the axis (or angle) of astigmatism. For each part we show more and less amounts of power (or axis) until one of a few things happen:

1. There's a clear cut best power.
2. The choices start to look the same - This means we're splitting hairs so fine we that the changes were presenting are beyond the patient's threshold for seeing a difference.
3. The flip-flopping begins.  If the answers are telling us "I want more power. No I want less power. No I want more power" we know that, again, we've narrowed the value down to a small range and we can't go any further.

In my humble opinion, the most helpful thing to do while being refracted is to limit your answers to one of three things: Lens one is better, lens two is better, or they look the same. It doesn't matter if the one you're choosing is still blurry, sometimes that's the case. We just need to know which is the clear-er of the two. The primary goal of everyone involved is to clear things up, but that might not happen until the end of the process. When we ask which is better ("one or two") we're trying to find out which direction we need to move our power - up or down, or which way to twist our axis, left or right - to reach our objective of getting the best possible vision. Most other information besides "one", "two", or "the same" is extraneous. "Choice one is better, but it's blurry" doesn't really tell us anything beyond the fact that we need to move the power in the direction of choice one. 

Optometrists learn to refract pretty quickly. Within a couple years we've done thousands of refractions and are quite proficient at it. We start to feel like finely tuned machines - if you say "one" we reflexively make our change in the instrument and ask our next question.

One thing that throws me off is when people don't tell me which choice they like, but when they tell me which one they don't like. On the surface it the distinction between the two seems insignificant. If there's only two choices, and you know which one is worse, then the other one is better, correct?

I was trying to figure out why this seemingly little thing seems to interrupt my flow so much. I was looking for something to compare it to, and I thought of another situation where you might have to make frequent choices between two options : Getting directions while driving. Sure, if someone constantly told me to "turn not left" or "turn not right" I could pretty much figure out how to get where I'm going but, the way my brain is wired, being told "turn right" or "turn left" is a lot easier for my brain to process.

All that being said, a good refractionist has to be flexible. To the best of our ability we need to educate our patients how to respond to our questions, and we need to alleviate their stressors and fears while being refracted. However, sometimes we just have to parse our patient's responses to the best of our ability and just do our best.

Using the Paprika app to manage recipes and grocery lists

In my last post I wrote about how I use Siri, Reminders, and an app called AnyList to manage grocery lists. I feel that this works extremely well for adding a few individual grocery list items on the fly.

However, I find it to be a cumbersome process when I'm trying to add more than a few grocery list items at once. For example, when I have a recipe for tonight's meal and I need to pick up most of the ingredients, using Siri to add each item to my list is a bit time consuming. In this case I'd rather type each ingredient into AnyList (they have a nice autocomplete feature, and it remembers your favorites), but it's still a little slow for my taste.

After getting our first iPhones, my wife and I had managed recipes in Evernote. It satisfied our needs well. If we found a recipe on the web we'd just use the web clipper and import it into Evernote. If we liked grandma's potato dish at thanksgiving we'd just use the camera to take a picture of her recipe and it would be saved for posterity. And, since we share an Evernote account we'd both have access to whatever was in there, whether we were at home cooking or at the grocery store buying the building blocks for our culinary masterpieces. 

So, Evernote was working just fine. But, I can never leave well enough alone, so when I read about The best recipe manager for iPhone on thesweetsetup.com I decided I'd give Paprika a try.  And I liked it.

Since that article summarizes Paprika so well I won't do that here, but I will point out some of my favorite features:

• Importing recipes from websites extremely easy. It's nearly automatic if you're browsing a popular food site (eg, allrecipes, foodnetwork, epicurious, etc), and with minimal effort you can import recipes from more obscure sites.
• All recipes are formatted with the same way. That consistency is kinda nice.
• Everything is synced between our phones, iPads, and desktops (this does require buying mobile and desktop versions of the app).
• And, coming to the point of this post, it's really helpful for grocery lists.

As I said in my last post, I like to use Siri and an app called AnyList to manage my grocery lists. Paprika works well with my system by letting me export ingredients from a recipe into a Reminder list, which then gets automatically sent to AnyList. To make this work you first need to go to Paprika's settings, select the Reminders Export Options, and set your list name to the one you use in the Reminders app (in my case it's named "Grocery").

Then, when you're looking at a recipe, click the shopping cart icon.

This will bring up a list of ingredients from the recipe. Leave the ones you need checked, and uncheck the ones you already have. Then click the "add" button. This will maintain a grocery list in Paprika (which actually could be enough for a lot of people's needs).

To work with my Reminders / AnyList system, I next go to the grocery list part of Paprika, hit the export icon in the lower right hand side of the screen, and choose the "Export to Reminders" option.

This will send the list to my grocery list in Reminders, and it'll ultimately end up in AnyList (see my previous post for more about that).

One thing to note - exporting your grocery list to Reminders won't affect the list in Paprika. As a consequence, the next time you add a recipe's ingredients to your list the old ingredients will still be there, which you probably won't want if you've already bought those items and made that meal. To avoid this, I'd recommend clearing the grocery list after your export (this can be going through the same steps above but choosing the "Clear Grocery List" option).

As I type this out step by step I feel that it sounds really complicated. It really isn't, as this video will hopefully demonstrate.

So, whaddaya think? How go you manage recipes and grocery lists?

Grocery list nirvana: How I use Siri to maintain and share grocery lists

I like Siri. It's far, far from perfect, and I think people hold it to a very high standard (it's easy to do when your basis for comparison is human intelligence). But there is a limited set of things that it does do well, and I find those things extremely helpful.

Set a timer for 10 minutes (so I can kick the kids off my iPad).

Remind me to bring Drew's snowpants to school on Monday morning at 6:30.

Remind to place that order when I get to work.

Basically, it supplements my brain and helps me remember things I'm almost certain to forget.

Perhaps my biggest use of Siri, however, is managing grocery lists. This helps me in innumerable ways, which I will now outline. In a numbered list.

1. I never forget to add something to a list. I use the last of the peanut butter, I pull out my iPhone, hold down the home button, and say "add peanut butter to my grocery list". Bam. Not gonna forget the PB.
2. I always know what I need when I'm at the grocery store. I never have that nagging feeling that I'm forgetting something, and I never get home and kick myself for neglecting to pick something up. And my six year old never has to reprimand me for forgetting to pick up his apples.
3. I always know what my wife needs at the grocery store, and she knows what I need. I might just stop in to buy donuts on a Sunday morning, but a quick look at my phone let's me know that Lisa just used the last of the garlic powder and I might as well grab that too.

Now, there's a few things that make this easier.

First of all, I have a list that's named "grocery". To do this, open the reminders and hit the "+" button to make a new list. If you open the reminders app and don't see the "+" button you might need to tap the area at the bottom of the screen that looks like a bunch of stacked index cards.

If you're looking at a list, click the bottom of the screen to see all your lists - and get the option to create more lists.

To share with your spouse, go into your newly created grocery list and click the edit button. Then click the Sharing opinion, then Add person.., and find the person upon whom you'll bestow your list sharing privileges.

This all works very well, but we decided to take it to another level with a third party app called AnyList.  AnyList has a number of nice features, including:

1. It separates your grocery list into groups such as "produce" or "meat" or "dairy". That way, when you walk through the grocery store, you can get everything you need in each section without having to repeatedly zigzag  back and forth throughout the whole store.
2. It also has the option to share with a spouse and sync with desktop and browser apps.
3. And, for my favorite, it can import lists from the built in Reminders app. In my case, from my Grocery list. This has the awesome result of letting you use Siri to populate your AnyList list. To import from Reminders, go to AnyList's settings and turn the "Reminder's Import" option on. Just make sure the name of your list in AnyList matches the name in Reminders (in my case they're both named "Grocery")

By the way, the things I'm describing here don't have to be limited to groceries. I've followed this exact same process to make a Target list, a Home Depot list, and a Costco list.  

Here's a short video on how I use the lists. The one thing that I don't include is perhaps the most useful feature of all: The fact that all these additions are almost immediately present on my wife's phone as well.

In my next post I'd like to talk about something very closely related to groceries: recipes. Stay tuned.

Reflecting on Back to the Future

Back to the Future is another movie that I have a lot of fond memories of. Who wouldn't love a mad scientist, a time traveling Delorean, and a skateboarding Alex P Keaton?

2015 is Back to the Future's 30th anniversary. Marty McFly started off in 1985 and time travelled back 30 years to 1955. In the second movie, he went 30 years the other way, from 1985 to 2015. I've been seeing a lot of articles looking at the predictions made in Back to the Future II, such as hoverboards, self-lacing tennis shoes, and flying cars.

While this is funny, there's something else that I can't stop thinking about. When I saw B2tF in 1985 the scenes from 1955 looks soooo ancient to my 13 year old self. Tiny little TV screens. Old fashioned cars. Weird, stuffy looking clothes. 

It was pretty obvious to me that a lot had changed in 30 years, from 17 years before I was born and the 13 years I'd been alive.

On the other hand, from my perspective, it seems that very little has changed in the 30 years since my 13th birthday.

Or has it?

Introducing my kids to Star Wars

Seeing Star Wars was one of the seminal moments of my childhood. My mom saw it when it came out in 1977 and immediately decided to see it again - with me, her 5 year old son. She was a little worried that I'd be scared of some of the creatures, particularly the riffraff in the Mos Eisley cantina. Needless to say, that wasn't an issue, and I spent the rest of that day acting out the movie with light sabers made with crayons and cardboard. 

I'm now 43, and gave three little boys of my own. I thought it was time the older two, ages 6 and 4, see Star Wars. I've been telling them stories about the movies for years, but I've been a little cautious about when to watch it. I had the same concerns about it being to scary.

Secretly, I was also a little worried about how they'd react to it. For kids growing up with fantastically rendered Pixar movies, would 1977 special effects seem lame? Would they respond to the story? I tried to set my expectations low. If they didn't like it I couldn't let it detract from me childhood memories.

So, how did it go? 

See for yourself: 

I'd say it was a success. 

On teaching kids to code

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to introduce my three young boys to programming. As much as personal computers have evolved over the last 30 years, I feel learning to code has gotten more complicated.

Computers weren't very accessible until about 1976, when Steve Wozniak developed the Apple. My grade school, like just about every other school in the country, got an Apple II that sat at the back of the classroom. Considering that computers had always been room-sized objects that only existed in movies, it seemed like the future had arrived.

It seems kind of crazy now, but there were actually very few things we could do with the computer at that time. We had a couple games, such as Oregon Trail.  We quickly discovered that the Apple II came with a BASIC compiler, so we started to learn how to use it. During breaks between classes, three or four of us would huddle around the computer and type in programs from magazines like Enter (I wrote about my love of Enter a while back). 

So what is different nowadays? Why should learning to code be more complicated in 2014 than it was in 1980? I can think of at least a couple reasons.

Kids are harder to impress. When I was a kid, just hitting letters on a keyboard and seeing them show up on a screen was pretty thrilling. Until then, the only thing I'd every seen in a screen was whatever the TV station decided to show me. Even cooler, typing

10 PRINT "Todd" 

20 GOTO 10

would print my name an infinite number of times. What could be cooler than that?

Today, my kids play with computers all the time. I hate to admit it, but I frequently take a powerful one out of my pocket to keep them entertained when I need a little peace and quiet. They have pretty high standards: an app the prints 

Drew

Drew

Drew

Drew

isn't going to impress them.

Coding is a lot more complicated. Computers can do so much more than they ever could before. However, this adds countless layers of complexity and, as a result, creates a much larger barrier to entry.

When I wrote little programs on an Apple IIe, I just fired up the computer, fired up BASIC, and started typing. Today, it's a little more abstract. For most, the easiest place to start would be to write some javascript and HTML in a text editor and run it in a web browser. However, this still requires multiple steps along which multiple things could go wrong. After this option, things get a lot more complicated: proprietary software, frameworks, fancy IDEs, etc. might be required just to get started, which would likely be out of reach of any kids that don't have a programming- savvy adult to help them out.

I do think things are improving, however. Apple's new Swift programming language includes Playgrounds, which allows newbies to write small amounts of code and immediately see the results.

"Playgrounds make writing Swift code incredibly simple and fun. Type a line of code and the result appears immediately."

Definitely a much easier way to start experimenting with programming concepts.

Maybe it's because I now have small kids and it's on my radar, but it seems like there's a lot more awareness of the need to teach kids to code. The Hour of Code seems to be a great program that has introduced a lot of kids (and the President) to coding.

There are now a number of iPad apps that teach programming (Tynker, Hopscotch, Scratch). For the little kids, this doesn't mean coding - 6 year olds aren't going to write lines of Objective-C. However, they teach the systematic approach to programming: breaking your problem down into tiny little problems and solving each one in an elegant way. In my opinion, this is the most important part of writing code. Once you've got this down it doesn't really matter what language you're learning

And here's something else that just showed up in my RSS feed today: BitsBox, from a couple employees of Google's Sketch:

"Each month a surprise comes in the mail, filled with dozens of programs to type in. Like the computer magazines of the 1980s, we invite kids into learning with irresistible projects."

It's a Kickstarter project, but it sounds like a great way to get kids excited about programming. Kids love getting packages in the mail, after all!

As a dad, and a geek, I'm really excited that there seems to be a renewed emphasis on teaching kids to code

The Innovators

I just finished Walter Isaacson's book, The Innovators. You might remember Mr. Isaacson as the the man Steve Jobs approached and ultimately convinced to write his biography, but he also wrote a couple excellent memoirs about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. 

The goal of The Innovators  is to walk us through the major advances in computer science that brought us to the technology that we enjoy and love today. 

In my opinion, the most fascinating part of this evolution begins in the 1840's, when Ada Lovelace essentially mapped out the steps that are used to write a program computer program over 100 years before engineers could actually build a machine capable of running a program.

The book then moves on to discuss vacuum tube computers such as Eniac, the development of the transistor, the development of the microchip, the invention and popularization of the mouse and GUIs, Bill Gate's software commoditizing hardware, and the explosion of the Internet. And, of course, the collaboration of countless innovators that fueled this revolution.

I've read a number of books (Steve Jobs, iWoz, Nerds 2.0.1, Eniac, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web) that discussed many of these individual topics, but The Innovators is a great summary of the age of computing from it's humble beginnings to the present day.