David Smith

A few personal usage tactics I’ve been experimenting with, since I’ve been dealing with smartphone overuse since 2005:

1) No social media apps.

2) Four icons on the home screen (for iPhone, go to this site: https://david-smith.org/blank.html click share button and add to home screen. Change wallpaper to black. Each black icon you add to the home screen will take up a space where an app would have been, helping you focus on apps that you find most important)

3) Airplane mode when I’m on vacation (so I can still use the camera but won’t be tempted to reply to a text).

4) Few notifications other than calendar, phone, and text. Absolutely no email notifications. Selective and timed Slack notifications since I’m often mobile and don’t want to be the bottleneck at work.

5) No games.

6) Limited video use. Overuse hasn’t been a problem, so I don’t set hard guidelines on this.

7) Leave phone in car [clearly I don’t live in SF] or at home during scheduled time with loved ones.

8) Wear cellular Apple Watch and carry AirPods in pocket when leaving phone at home - if there may be an important call coming in while I’m intentionally preventing myself from working while mobile.

9) Keep phone charging at night in bathroom on do not disturb. No checking during middle of the night bathroom usage.

10) Limit non-essential apps to informational apps - like HN.

Smartphones are tools first or they can be toys first. That depends on the goals and discipline level of the user.

For devices that _can_ have the OS upgraded - stats seem to show a remarkably high level of upgrading by users, at least for major version numbers:

http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/

If you scroll down to "Device Breakdown (sorted by Usage)", you see a bunch of devices with 90+% stuck on the "last supported OS version" - 97% of iPad1G on iOS5, 97% of iPhone 3GS and iPod Tough 4G on iOS6, 91% of iPhone 4 on iOS7. Even including thise devices, they're showing 75% on devices on iOS8 and 20% on iOS7.

I'm in the "left behind" category - with both my iPad1 and Mac Mini single core being "stick" at iOS5 and OS X 10.6 respectively. Im somewhat disappointed at the lack of patches for the known security holes in iOS5 - especially since those numbers still show over 3% of the iPads in use are not upgradable past iOS5...

Your app vendors are making their business decisions. They can hit 98% of customers by coding with the modern, feature rich, man hour efficient APIs. The short tail of early model iPads in use don’t justify the larger expense to develop and test using the older APIs.

Apple doesn’t say it out loud, but they can’t just decide to support the new iOS versions on the first few versions of hardware. There just isn’t enough processing power there to deliver a respectable user experience with the new software. Sure, it worked fine when new, but as processor cycles got more plentiful, they still all got used by programmers.

␄

* one site is showing 98% of users running iOS 12 or higher.

* just 0.1% are stuck at iOS 6.

* the site: http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/template_

They actually said this in their September 9th press release, although most people missed it:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/09/09Apple-Unveils-Apple-Watch-Apples-Most-Personal-Device-Ever.html

"With Apple Watch, developers can create WatchKit apps with actionable notifications and Glances that provide timely information. Starting later next year, developers will be able to create fully native apps for Apple Watch."

Someone from Apple also essentially reconfirmed this earlier today on the WatchKit developer forum.

Edit: here's the source that first tipped me off to this detail hidden away in the press release:

http://david-smith.org/blog/2014/11/06/expectations-for-watchkit/

Mechanical watch:

https://monochrome-watches.com/the-elegant-mixture-of-time-and-space-debethune-db28-digitale/

Prague’s astronomical clock does that too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_astronomical_clock#Moon

More about spherical moonphases:

https://www.the1916company.com/blog/variations-on-the-moonphase.html

A smartwatch complication:

https://www.david-smith.org/blog/2019/09/26/moon-plus-plus/

> Geneva Moon seeks to provide a highly accurate, visually pleasing indication of what the moon looks like right now, right where you are. My goal was to make it so that if you look down at your wrist and then up into the sky the images you see should match.

So that means you will use pre TLS v1.0 to support those browsers that can not deal with SNI.

You must feel very smart to be able to support old Android browsers like Gingerbread which represent 1% of the Android market share [0], and iOS pre v4.0 browsers which represent less than 0,1% of the iOS market share [1].

Now according to TLS/SSL support history of web browsers [2] your server is vulnerable to BEAST, POODLE, CRIME, etc.

Congrats your SSL cert is useless.

[0]: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

[1]: https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:TLS/SSL_support_history_of_web_browsers