The latest smartphone I was issued is a Galaxy Note 3. It is aggressively helpful, an imperfect DWIM device. It provides a constant stream of offers and requests, most of which are not of interest to me and I am sure I have turned down some things I want just because there were six pop-ups in the course of trying to run a simple search. Those will slow down over time, I’m sure, but at the moment it is as if getting a glass of water required as many questions about my preferences as the most complex order possible at Starbucks. And then the faucet remembers that order an immediately starts pouring it the next time I enter the room, and I need to click six levels deep to make it stop doing what it thinks I want to do.
I had my first real fight with autocorrect yesterday. I ended up adding “PvZ2” to my dictionary because it was late and I was too frustrated to find the correct way to force the Google app to let me search the term I wanted without autocorrecting it to something else. I’m sure the design is very intuitive to an interface designer.
It also comes with many pre-loaded apps I need to remove. I am finding some of them because they have audible alerts for things I never turned on, although not always visible alerts to tell me why my phone is making noise. Google’s own services seem to be the main culprit there. Anytime I get an e-mail or chat through Gmail, my phone alerts me. I didn’t install or turn on Google Hangouts, but the phone helpfully comes with that. I signed out of Hangouts to stop that, which the phone helpfully reactivated when I tried to confirm that I was signed out.
I like many things about this new device, and I am sure we will settle into a workable relationship. At the moment, it is being clingy and high maintenance.
: Zubon
And now I need to go disable the audio alerts on e-mails because KTR is getting a tidal wave of comment spam. There’s a DWIM I need: after the 16th time in a morning that we send a comment to “spam” from the same name and address, start treating that address as spam. And stop asking if links from Kill Ten Rats to Kill Ten Rats are spam; I should not need to verify on my site that my posts (not comments, the posts) are not spam.
I used to zealously fight technology’s attempt to “help me” by deciding what I want to do with it. I would spend hours deleting and un-installing everything I considered to be bloat-ware. Recently I have more or less given up and I just tick the boxes and sign up for everything they throw at me. I am not quite sure why my latest phone (a HTC one) needed to know the name of my cable TV provider but for an easy life it was easier just to tell it.
Nostalgia: I kind of miss Clippy. At least I miss the constant source of humour that parodies of Clippy provided.