My father got an iPhone 5 this past Christmas. I know he’ll enjoy using it.

How do I know this?

This is usually what happens when my wife and I go back to Jersey to visit my parents:

Me: [lays iPhone on kitchen counter]

Dad: [picks up my iPhone, starts messing with it]

Me: Dad, what are you doing?

Dad: Ha, I figured out your passcode, 1111.

Me: Congratulations, Dad.

Dad: [Continues to swipe and tap around, eventually puts it down]

Dad: Ha, neat stuff.

My dad’s an engineer so by his nature he’s a tinkerer. I know what you’re thinking and no, he hasn’t tried to take his iPhone apart to understand how it works. He knows a lot about computers and technology and he took the time a few weeks ago while I was on the phone with him to “enlighten” me on a “trick” he learned on his iPhone. I was intrigued.

Dad: So Mikey, you got your iPhone handy? Do this: Go to your Home screen. Okay? Now double-click the Home button. Ok, you see all those apps? Now tap and hold on one until they all start shaking. Now you can kill apps that are running in the background and draining your battery.

Mike: Dad, who the hell told you to do this?

Dad: The guys in my IT department recommended I install a task killer app on the Galaxy S3 they gave me. They said these task killer apps let you quit apps running in the background that are draining your battery. Once I discovered this [App Switcher] on my iPhone I figured it worked like the task killer app on my Galaxy.

Mike: No, no, no, Dad. No, you don’t need to do this on iOS. The operating system handles on this for you. And so began the re-education of my father on how background processes work on iOS. I explained to him the App Switcher tray can be thought of as a history of apps you’ve used. It’s not showing you everything running in the background. I explained to him, sure, he might only have 5 items total in his App Switcher, but I have over a dozen in mine. This does not mean over a dozen apps are running in the background on my iPhone.

He understood things after our conversation, but it makes me wonder how many other people are misinformed about how iOS handles resource management?

A few weeks after our conversation, he sent me this scan of a magazine my mother bought him called iPhone Life:

It’s a bit hard to read, but #2 says:

Shut down background apps. Double-tap the home button to bring up the multitasking bar with the recently used apps. Tap and hold any app icon until it starts wiggling, then close it by tapping the little red button on the top left of the app icon. Sometimes these apps consume power even if they are not being used (especially Location Services).

Now this battery saving advice isn’t 100% false. Apps using Location Services can be a drain on your battery even if they’re not being used. For instance, I love the app Dark Sky. Its key feature is it can tell you, almost down to the minute, when it will start raining where you are. In order to be so accurate, it has to track your location via GPS, regardless of whether you’ve launched the app or not. This eats up some some system resources. Dark Sky is the exception though, not the norm.

Reading through Apple’s Developer site can shed some much-needed light on this whole background process issue. On the page titled, App States and Multitasking, Table 3-1 lists the five states an app can be in: Not Running, Inactive, Active, Background and Suspended.

Let’s look at what “Suspended” is:

The app is in the background but is not executing code. The system moves apps to this state automatically and does not notify them before doing so. While suspended, an app remains in memory but does not execute any code.

When a low-memory condition occurs, the system may purge suspended apps without notice to make more space for the foreground app.

Farther down the page, under the heading, Moving to the Background:

When the user presses the Home button, presses the Sleep/Wake button, or the system launches another app, the foreground app transitions to the inactive state and then to the background state. These transitions result in calls to the app delegate’s applicationWillResignActive: and applicationDidEnterBackground: methods, as shown in Figure 3-5. After returning from the applicationDidEnterBackground: method, most apps move to the suspended state shortly afterward. Apps that request specific background tasks (such as playing music) or that request a little extra execution time from the system may continue to run for a while longer.

To be clear: all apps immediately transition to the inactive state once a user presses the Home button, presses the Sleep/Wake button, or the system launches another app and then they move right to the suspended state unless they request specific background tasks.

This highlights one of the most important differences between “open” platforms like Android and curated ones like iOS. In addition to controlling background processes on iOS, Apple also requires every developer put their app through an approval process where Apple checks for things like unnecessary background processes or malicious, [back doors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing).

On Android, there are no approval processes if you decide to publish your app outside Google Play. If you want to make an Android app, you just do it. This sounds great, but it requires things like task killers to quit resource-hogging apps.

To me, this defeats the purpose of a smartphone.

What can Apple do to dispel the misconception that all the apps in your Task Switcher are running and draining your battery?

Everybody’s having fun speculating about Apple’s supposed iWatch. Bloomberg is telling us there’s already a team of 100 people working on it at Apple.
Over at The Atlantic’s new site Quartz, they went step further and are telling us some 18-year-old could beat Apple to market with his own iWatch. Ha! Take that!
It seems even Samsung is trying to preemptively copy Apple and release one of their own smart watches, which they’ll inevitably change in order to look like whatever Apple ends up shipping because, well, they told us they like to copy their competitors.
I was talking with Bryan about this over instant message earlier today and I agree with his view, “If I think it’s an ugly watch, I’m not wearing it.” I’m not wearing it either (OK, OK, maybe I’ll wear it.).
This is why Apple made the iPhone as much as an uncarved block as possible. Jony Ive’s philosophy is to distill a product down to it’s essence. Like a naked body, let individuals decide how to “cloth” their devices. Me? My view on cases for iPhones is the same as bras on beautiful cars.
But as Bryan pointed out in our conversation, there’s a big difference between a phone and a watch. A phone can go in your pocket. A watch goes on your wrist for everyone to see, all the time. A phone only has to be fashionable some of the time, but a watch is on the catwalk the whole day.
Which is why I think everyone is thinking about it wrong. Here’s the thing. The iWatch, if it is in-the-works, is as much a watch as the iPhone is a phone. It brings to mind the (unverified) quote attributed to Henry Ford, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”
Everyone is thinking of a faster horse right now, while Apple (if they are working on something) are working on an automobile.

Original caption reads, “Dennis Stock’s famous image of James Dean in Times Square, marked with Pablo Inirio’s printing notations.”
via the literate lens

—Jean-Michel Basquiat

Clay Christensen recently spoke with Jeff Howe at Wired and shared his thoughts on what industries will be disrupted next by the Web (via GigaOm):

Journalism, certainly, and publishing broadly. Anything supported by advertising. That all of this is being disrupted is now beyond question. And then I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.
Some people love to claim they’re all about innovation and disruption. Very few actually are, because when real disruption occurs, entire industries get upended and lots of people lose money. Just look at what the iPad is doing the “traditonal” PC industry.
It takes real balls to embrace disruption, but the alternative is worse—Falling to the wayside and becoming irrelevant.
As someone who has been designing websites for over 13 years (and most recently mobile applications), things are constantly in flux for me. I used to make most of my living designing and programming sites with Adobe Flash. Now we’re not only in a post-PC world, but a post-plug-in world.
I always keep this quote by Charles Darwin in my head:
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
I don’t care what industry you work in. If you live by those words, you’ll be in good shape.

photographs of the Sun by Alan Friedman
Via PetaPixel

Stephanie Smith, writing for NBC affiliate KXAN in Austin, Texas on a scan that may detect brain disease in the brains of NFL players:

An insidious, microscopic protein that has been found in the brain tissue of professional football players after death may now be detectable in living people by scanning their brains.

Researchers say they found tau protein in the brains of five living retired National Football League players with varying levels of cognitive and emotional problems.
Research like this is great and should continue, but I have a better idea.
How about dudes stop running full speed at each other and smashing their heads together?
It might, just might, get rid of that pesky, “insidious, microscopic protein.”
Call me crazy.
Thought: I’d be interested to see if anyone has compared the condition of brains between NFL players in the United States and brains of rugby and Gaelic football players. Given the latter two don’t wear helmets during game play my guess is they’re much less likely to smash their heads into others’ and thus be less likely to get brain disease later in life.

Dan Eden wrote an essay about what it takes to be a designer. It’s sound (and raw) advice.
It’s a great compliment to my piece, Don’t, on Stemmings.
Note: Dan has a dirtier mouth than me. He drops three f-bombs in his essay. I only drop one “bullshit” in mine. Just saying.

#waterbreak

—Andy Warhol

via Instagram

Dustin Curtis on using “your” versus “my” in user interfaces:

After thinking about this stuff for a very long time, I’ve settled pretty firmly in the camp of thinking that interfaces should mimic social creatures, that they should have personalities, and that I should be communicating with the interface rather than the interface being an extension of myself. Tools have almost always been physical objects that are manipulated tactually. Interfaces are much more abstract, and much more intelligent; they far more closely resemble social interactions than physical tools.

The answer for me, then, is that you’re having a conversation with the interface. It’s “Your stuff.”
It’s funny how subjective this stuff is.
For me, I’m on the opposite side of the coin as Curtis. As he mentions in his post, because I think of my device as an extension of myself, “my” is the most appropriate modifier to use within applications and settings on my devices.
“Your” seems foreign.
Think about how invasive it feels when someone inadvertently grabs your phone at a party thinking it’s their’s and starts rummaging though it. “That’s my phone!” is the first thought in your head.
Dustin is wrong.
Is’s My Stuff.

Hey developers, you’re probably already reading Hacker News on YCombinator.
Hey designers, do you know about Designer News on Layer Vault?
Maybe you’re like me and you read both.