Defiant Sloth

Crooked Media's newish podcast, Pod Save the World, has a great 45 minute interview with The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, who has been a long-time journalist and constitutional lawyer. His biggest journalist contribution of recent note, of course, was the work he did to sift through and communicate the files and intel Edward Snowden brought to bear. Much of the interview focuses on the Snowden situation and his book, No Place to Hide, but there are some amazing nuggets about how and why Snowden did what he did, national security, and privacy in the modern era.

Of note:

[Snowden's] overwhelming priority was to make sure he meet with the journalists with whom he had selected and safely provide that material to us and review that material with us to make certain we that understood what we needed to understand, and start reporting it.

The fear of being detained before he could get the materials into the journalists hands was felt in both of the recent films about him (Snowden and Citizenfour, the latter of which Greenwald plays a significant role). But the extrapolation of this narrative by Greenwald is fascinating to listen to all over again. The places Snowden goes to, how he instructs the journalists to secure their communication, and the delivery of only some of the materials after he poured over them himself -- essentially, the high-level decision-making around how, why, and with whom to share such sensitive, earth-rattling intel is still to this day underreported and underappreciated. As Greenwald notes, he could have dumped the entirety of the files to Wikileaks and had the whole thing publicly revealed, but instead he took the time to read, understand, and to the best of his ability, share the right kinds of files that we as Americans must trust are the most important aspects of what he had access to that infringe upon our rights as US citizens.

Round-up for March 11-12

Machine Bias: ProPublica's ongoing investigation into machine/data-driven usage for criminal risk assessments and crime predictions.

What should you think about when using Facebook?: Facebook logs drafts of posts/keystrokes before you post, or even if you don't post.

Apple says it’s already patched ‘many’ iOS vulnerabilities identified in WikiLeaks’ CIA dump Title says it all, but it’s a hopeful reassurance that Apple has detected and patched many of the alleged CIA exploits brought forth in the Wikileaks unraveling.

Your Own Facts: A great essay/book review on the “filter bubbles” we continue to create ourselves or sign up for with external apps and services. Essentially, author Eli Pariser argues that “this is not to deny that Silicon Valley engineers […] have responsibilities that extend far beyond their job descriptions. But their modest quests to improve relevance, alleviate information overload and suggest books that may interest us — rather than to engage in algorithmic paternalism and assume a more critical social role — may be the lesser of two evils”.

Internet Censorship and What We’re Doing About It: A leading encryption-based email service provides a rundown of why we should care about internet censorship, and what some of its plans are in terms of helping the wider world. Of course, this is leading up to a release later this summer of their ProtonVPN service, set to compete against other VPNs (virtual private networks) that can assist in black boxing your internet traffic and behaviors.

This happened just a short while ago, but an important development nonetheless. According to the New York Times:

The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first part of the document collection, included 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments, the group said. The entire archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code, it said.

Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

And here's the link to the vault of documents on WikiLeaks. Haven't had a chance to read through anything yet, but will update as needed over the next week.

Update | March 07, 2017 11:42AM CT

Edward Snowden posted an update on Twitter regarding one of the big call-outs, thus far, from the leak: "first public evidence USG secretly paying to keep US software unsafe."

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              <noscript><img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/529a26eee7.jpg" alt="From Edward Snowden's tweet" /></noscript><img class="thumb-image" src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/529a26eee7.jpg" data-image="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/529a26eee7.jpg" data-image-dimensions="840x499" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" alt="From Edward Snowden's tweet" data-load="false" data-image-id="58bef0caff7c50a1c83ce2bb" data-type="image" />
            
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        <div class="image-caption"><p><em>From Edward Snowden's tweet</em></p></div>
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Round-up for March 4-5

New Bill Would Force NYPD to Disclose Surveillance Tech Playbook: Though not as pressing as other privacy disclosures, this is a timely local-level one that could predicate other states/cities following a similar line. What's notable here is that we are all essentially under a watchful eye from city security cameras, other citizen's cameras, and a myriad of tactics alluded to in the bill (including facial recognization). The New York Civil Liberties Union's statement on this being "critical to democracy" is rather obvious.

How to Keep Messages Secure: Friendly rundown of why teens (ahem, anyone) should avoid using popular chatting apps like Snapchat, et al, for serious communication or for chatting at all. Surprising editorial source, too.

Is There a Business Model For Serious Journalism in the Age of Trump?: Comprehensive analysis on the state of serious journalism.

Smart Condom to Track Your Sex: Here we go with another invasive Internet of Things product. At this point we're just turning ourselves into constantly-monitored subject matter for government, medicinal, and corporate overlords.

Government's Privacy Watchdog is Basically Dead, Emails Reveal: Should we have seen this one coming? "[T]he agency, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, is down to just a single voting member — which means it has been stripped of nearly all its powers, according to emails obtained by The Intercept." Important to note: it appears that this didn't start with Trump, and it's been "been withering away for almost a year."

That Free Health Tracker Could Cost You: Handing out Fitbits is something my agency recently did, and I've seen a number of health insurance providers do the same thing -- not sure if all circumstances are leading to more risk pooling bullshit, but this is certainly where it starts.

Want to Improve Data Quality, Reduce Liability, and Gain Consumer Trust? Try Deleting: In its latest white paper, CDT "explores th[e] disconnect and the reasons why commercial data stores have grown. We make the case that it is neither in a company’s nor a customer’s best interest to hold onto large amounts of data." Deleting old, unusable, or irrelevant data is absolutely a consideration to make, especially if you don't plan to use it anymore.

Great piece from The Guardian on how no one reads terms of service for apps/services/hardware they sign up for, and points to solutions in the way of redesigning them.

[T]here’s a lot in click-to-agree contracts that would give many people pause if they knew about them. For example, users give web-based services – and third parties the services contract with, about which users know nothing – the right to keep, analyze and sell their data. Increasingly often, too, people click away their right to go to court if anything goes wrong. “There’s a real concern that consumer protection law is basically being swallowed by click-by-agree clauses,” said David Hoffman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who researches the law and psychology of contracts.

Hoffman is among the legal scholars who believe the no-reading problem isn’t new. After all, he points out, few people read the fine print even when it was literally in print.

However, it’s possible that the design of click-to-accept pages makes the problem worse. A few years ago Rainer Böhme of UC Berkeley and Stefan Köpsell of Dresden’s Technische Universität tested alternative wordings of a simple consent form on more than 80,000 internet users. Some were told their consent was required and presented with highlighted “I agree” button. They went along 26% more often than did other users, who had been politely asked to participate (with phrases like “we would appreciate very much your assistance” and both “yes” and “no” options represented by lookalike buttons).

In other words, when design invites people to consider their options, at least some do. If the design nudges them instead to follow a habit that years of click-to-agree has instilled, then they’ll do that instead. “Ubiquitous EULAs [end user license agreements] have trained even privacy-concerned users to click on ‘accept’ whenever they face an interception that reminds them of a EULA,” Böhme and Köpsell wrote.

This kind of thing has been pointed out ad nauseum, but it is a vital struggle to acknowledge and consider. There is a great site out there called Terms of Service; Didn't Read that operates as a user rights initiative rating and scoring websites' terms of services/privacy policies from Class A (good) to Class E (miserable). A wise read for anyone who has clicked or tapped away on agreeing to walls of unreadable text before engaging with software.

There was once a time when human societies were truly free from mass surveillance — at liberty to say, do, and think as they pleased within mutually-agreed upon, reasonable constraints. And yes, could feel safe doing so in their own homes. Few, if any, of our ancestors could have anticipated how quickly our societies pushed forward in technological and political complexity. Our progressive willpower in these areas has overwhelmed global culture and political infrastructures with exponential innovation in data-driven decisions, Internet plus hardware application, and laws (or lack thereof). Now we enter an era with the ubiquity of connected technologies — in our cars, in our homes, in our pockets, on our bodies. And due to our inexhaustible tenacity to produce data and content, our inherent right to liberty and privacy is under constant siege. At the rate these technologies evolve, paired with the menace of terrorism, international hacking, and the nearly incomprehensible extensiveness of government surveillance, our liberties and privacy have been inextricably compromised.

As citizens, we have the ability and right to understand the repercussions of technology we use or other agents surround us with, and most importantly, the spirit to challenge these conveniences, compromises, and innovations. We should not sit idly while legalese in terms of services obfuscate or bewilder us, surrendering our privacy and data to those who would use it against us or for their own ends. We should not, for want of convenience, ignore modern practices of safe password management, profile protection, and behavioral tracking. We should be concerned with the reckless abandon organizations have built, maintained, and even stagnated on core communications technologies that affect our everyday lives, imperiling privacy in email, messaging, social networks, voice-over-internet, web browsing, and file-syncing services. We should care about the way our data, communications, and media are stored, maintained, and protected. And we also should know where our data is stored -- not all countries share the same privacy and security standards. This isn’t asking much, but it does beckon you and our fellow citizens to pay attention. To be willing to learn. And to be willing to share and educate.

This isn't to say that we can't still enjoy the delights, conveniences, and usefulness of technology. At this point, we're in too deep for any government or corporation to start reversing the saturation of all this technology. So while we should continue to invest in this future, we need to let our concerns be known to leaders, corporations, and peers around the world -- the union of hardware and software can make our lives better, but shouldn't at the expense of inherent human dignities. We have to tread cautiously. And smartly. After all, this progression has made life better for many people and businesses around the world. I am not suggesting we retreat to Internet-free zones, removing ourselves from connectivity, smartphones, and Internet of Things devices. But I am suggesting that we take the considered time and effort to become more informed about the current privacy climate, that we acknowledge that our privacy has been irreversibly compromised, that companies and governments should be held accountable to the tremendous changes in communications in our modern civilization, and that we as a people can do something about it. Democracy and fairness cannot reign unless we are able to speak, act, create, and litigate freely. If everything we say, write, or do is tracked and archived, how else can we possibly feel other than creeping ever closer to a police state, worried about potentially irresponsible or libelous use of that data? As many have said before, would you feel comfortable with an advertising agency or government reading and storing your personal letters, your physical journals, your bank statements, your doctor visits, your bodily functions, your every movement on this planet? The likelihood they have access to most of this is already great. And for those who say they have "nothing to hide" are woefully ignorant of the larger consequences of this movement. As Edward Snowden so astutely declared, "arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

Defending our privacy and data will continue to be an important movement as we make progress as a society. The perseverance of surveillance back doors in software and hardware can compromise our financial and personal security, domestically and abroad, if exploited by ill-doers. And the big business of technology, security, and surveillance will continue to slither forward as an ouroboros of corporations and government. And there is no end in sight of the application of algorithms for everything in our lives -- you don't need to turn to an episode of Black Mirror to see this in action because it's already happening all around us (search engines, social media, advertising, economics, wellness, prisons, education, you name it). But if creators and users of these algorithms are not transparent, are not willing to cede to constructive collaboration with others to iteratively improve these action-driving usages of data in meaningful ways for society and civil liberties, we could be in for a very challenging time ahead. And let’s not forget that algorithms are only the first step. The machine-learning era of artificial intelligence will further compound the use of algorithms and could end up instructing us (or bypassing us entirely) on how to apply the insights for efficiencies and actions across the board, all based on the blueprints of an algorithm programmed by a misinformed coder years ago.

As such, the purpose of this site is to inform readers of the large-scale movements in data use, algorithms, advertising technologies, privacy risk, and state surveillance. I hope to make it a trustworthy, if at times facetious (because how can it not be?) resource for methods to safeguard your personal information, secure communications, and productively collaborate without unwarranted intrusions. Together, we can keep a discerning eye on the ever-watchful governments, health organizations, insurance companies, advertising agencies, and technology corporations who continue to benefit society with their inventiveness but simultaneously solicit us to normalize always-on, active Internet products and services that can and are used for self-interest and disingenuous means. Don't get me wrong -- I love technology. My smartphone is a miraculous device that saves me time, provides me nearly unlimited access to information, and allows me to accomplish things I could only dream about in my childhood. I’ve read, watched, written, and captured the most important events in my life through its omnipresent screen, camera lens, and microphone. But I also expect that these moments, this data, this usage is inherently mine. As soon as it does not become mine, I’m likely the product, or the subject, or the variable in some larger scheme. If you're comfortable with that, fine. But I'm not. And I’m not alone.

Instead of leaving you with a reminder of the lofty aims of the Fourth Amendment (of which whose authors at the time couldn’t even have fathomed the technological progress of the modern era), I will leave you with this quote from long-time cryptographer and computer security specialist, Bruce Schneier, who warns on the misappropriation of the debate for privacy:

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Thanks for your time. I hope this is a compelling enough beginning for you to continue reading in the weeks to come, and at the very least, a resource to check in on every once and a while for your own sake.

Hello readers.

It was inevitable that this day would come, particularly if you’ve been reading the tea leaves on where our technology culture and data-wielding organizations are moving towards. We are living in a present climate that permits the break-down of individual citizens’ privacy, and the propagation of mass surveillance and advertising systems driven by hardware and data engineering.

And so I am relaunching Defiant Sloth as a site dedicated to the advocacy of privacy in the modern era, and will be keeping tabs on organizations and institutions of technological and data-wielding power. It’s not enough to stand by and watch as citizens continue to use the latest smartphones, download the latest apps, upgrade software with infinitely more convoluted terms and conditions, disregard username and password housekeeping, sign up for services with little background into why they are free to use, and roam the planet (or their own country) knowingly, and perhaps willfully, permitting traceability and monitoring without clear consent. We also need to wise up to the use of this data, which can in turn by used for both good and misdirected intentions, including “weapons of math destruction” that can lead to dangerous revisions to laws, education, prison systems, advertising, and government.

So please think about continuing to follow this site. Its name will remain the same — Defiant Sloth, a credo that hints at our laziness to be as proactive about the data we create and share with organizations, government, and advertising behemoths. I hope to see you back at the end of this month to join it on a new, forward journey through technology, government, and advertising with a lens (and dare I say panache) for the defense of our right to privacy. As a nation, we can’t be lazy about the speed of change in this arena — we need to be defiant.

Jonathan Irons writes about his defense of using ad blockers on news sites and how these companies shouldn’t place the blame on users — “How newspapers voluntarily gave away their online income”.

The newspapers (with very few exceptions) bet all their online revenue on pay-per-click ads. They swallowed the promises of the ad companies, above all Google. They believed them, and they remarkably failed as a complete industry to come up with any more nuanced and niche alternatives. Now the revenue is falling away, and the newspapers are struggling. At the same time, the revenues of the likes of Google are skyrocketing. And now it’s my fault.

Also of note are the screenshot-shaming of several news sites with layouts usurped by ad placements. Right in line with my Hostile Reading Experiences.

And here's a nice accompanying graph to further extrapolate the view:

Advertising revenue 1950-2014. US newspapers vs. Google, Facebook. In bn. US$, inflation adjusted. Data source: NAA, Statista. via Chris Lüscher of IA.

This is a brief bit about hostile reading experiences. I've been keeping a reference gallery of hostile reading sites (mostly screenshots) from around the web for a few years, but have been slow in updating it. But today I had to update it. An article linked to on Time was so fucking over-ridden with ads, the actual article didn't begin until scrolling below the fold. It also had two video ads auto-play upon arrival. Possibly the worst experience you can have trying to read actual content besides the derided "timed overlay" ads.

Here's what I saw when I visited the site in my work PC's Chrome browser.

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Due to the nature of my work, I don't block ads in-browser (though I do use 1Blocker on my Mac at home and all my iOS devices). Either way you look at it, this is a ludicrous way to make money off content on your site, particularly when the only use-case scenario for Time.com is reading its content.

I don't need to rehash my thoughts on privacy and the advertising marketplace, but this is just another testament to how the publishing industry should change or modify some of its practices to allow for a better experience with its readers and customers. They have a right to choose the advertising networks and technologies on their website, and this is a call to evaluate that without compromising on their bottom line.

For what it's worth, the article is pretty good (interview with Shigeru Miyamoto on Nintendo bringing Super Mario to iOS, which was announced at the iPhone 7/Apple Watch Series 2 event on September 7).

Growing up, a summer seldom went by that didn't include copious amounts of steaks, hot dogs, and burgers sizzling on a propane-powered grill out on the deck. My Dad was a fastidious griller, and those afternoons or evenings when grilling was our main meal, it served as fun break from the usual stove or fridge-spawned dinners.

It’s been years — well over a decade — since I’ve been able to truly grill after my move to Chicago. My roommate/buddy and I actually bought a smallish Weber grill back in 2013, but it was dinky and powered by a camping-sized propane canister. Now, having just moved to a new apartment with a fairly large deck just this past month, we lucked out to receive an early wedding gift from my parents — a Weber grill. Specifically, we are talking about the highly-reviewed Weber Spirit E-210. The next week was very exciting.

It’s worth noting that about three days into moving into our new place, our unit’s stove exploded. We’d been preheating it for a meal and things went haywire (General Electric should be ashamed of whatever model was installed at our apartment — the model number was burned almost completely off, so I can’t publicly slander them as accurately as I’d like). So as you’d expect, we were hankering to fix something heated to eat. Enter: the grill.¹

My Dad had it ordered at the Home Depot not too far from my apartment, so I took the car over one weekend and loaded that sucker in the backseat. Amazingly it fit laying horizontal in the backseat, pre-built at Home Depot (which I’m thankful for, because I probably wouldn’t have had the patience to put it together the next day). I had to leave it in the car overnight anyway, because I needed Ashley’s assistance getting it out of the backseat and up the two flights of stairs to our deck. This, of course, happened the next day.

Once this whole thing was set up, it was fairly straightforward getting it to work. The only concern I had was hooking up the LP tank. For some reason, the first tank I had challenged me with a faulty valve (the thing wouldn’t turn to open), so I had to return it to Home Depot for one that worked. And it did.

Design & Function

Designed for the space-conscious, the Weber Spirit E-210 is a great fit for tight spaces. While our deck is fairly large, I can’t say the next place we rent (or buy) will have as spacious a layout — this grill should fit snug into almost any city deck. It comes with two metal side-tables that fold down (making it even more compact). For reference, it measures 45½ H-by-50 W-32 L-inches. Two top-ported linear burners output 26,500 British thermal units (of which, I’ll admit, I know little about), but it does quickly heat the 360 square inches of cooking surface area. And since we’ve already had people over to grill with us, I can say that the cooking surface accommodates meat and veggies for 3-5 people.

The controls are deceptively simple. Twist the left knob to kickstart the crossover electric ignition (which does require a AA battery, included with the grill), and flip the second knob if you want to crank the heat up for some high-degree cooking. While I haven’t pushed it to the limits, I’ve heated it fairly hot at around 475 degrees, and it only takes a few minutes to reach that cap. The porcelain-enameled, cast-iron grates are very easy to clean with a steel-bristled brush, and the middle center grate pops out with ease. Weber includes a cast-iron pan to replace it if you’re in the mood for cooking anything inside it (like cast-iron pizza or veggies), and there’s even an add-on pizza stone if you’re ambitious. There are some neat additions to this grill, though how neat is hard to say since I haven’t used any other grill. Weber has what you could call burner shields (they call them Flavorizer Bars) which sit like long pyramids over the burners and prevent food drippings from sizzling directly on the flames. The bars also allow for close proximity smoke to raise up right under your burger and hot dog meat to, I guess, simulate a charcoal-like flavor (hence Flavorizer). Who knows how gnarly this is — all I know is that you make a mean burger on this thing, and sure, it takes kind of charcoal-smoky.

Some other nice details:

• The propane tank succinctly fits under the grill in a - chamber, which comes with a grated cover to make the whole grill look nice and clean for visitors
• The propane tank sits on a cubby that gauges the remaining amount of propane, which is useful for knowing when to fetch a replacement
• Hood-mounted thermometer
• 10-year warranty

Overall Thoughts

I can’t complain about anything related to this grill. While I don’t know too much about the material build of it (I’ve read that it is primarily made of enameled steel, something “Weber is very good at”), but based on using it almost every single day for two weeks straight (remember, no stove!), the thing hasn’t stuttered or disappointed once. As usual, I’ll probably update this review in six months or a year to check in again (included its winter use in Chicago).

If you’re scouting for a compact, powerful little grill, the Weber Spirit E-210 won’t let you down.

→

Weber Spirit E-210

• Product Type: Weber 46110001 Spirit E-210 Liquid Propane Gas Grill, Black
• Product Dimensions — 32 x 50 x 63 inches
• Item Weight — 119 pound

1. We did, finally, get a new stove installed, but about 30 days later. Thanks for the long delay, landlord. ↩︎

It's been a while, but I'm back at the wallet reviewing game. This time we have a marvelous new entry with a fresh material concept that hasn't been represented in many of the slim wallets I've tried over the years. It's also a bifold wallet, which aside from a few Bellroys, is not a particularly popular build choice when it comes to slimness targets. The good news is: SlimFold Wallet delivers despite a couple design peculiarities.

Design & Utility

The SlimFold Wallet arrives in a sealed plastic slip. This is the first of any trendy wallet I’ve seen arrive in such packaging, and it was a bit off-putting. Cheap, plastic wrap with a peg hole under-represented the wallet as uninspiring; it could be hung on any department store shelf like the rest of them.

Opposite the front of the packaging, the insert inside the plastic stated a number of SlimFold Wallet tentpole features, including its thinness (“3x thinner than leather; fits in your pocket”), lightness (“2x lighter than leather; reduces bulk”), and strength (“crash-tested; 100% waterproof”). In addition to all its compelling features, the material is also machine washable.

Great. I'm intrigued.

Plastic packaging aside, these were features I hadn’t seen unified into one wallet before. My current go-to wallet, the Trove, is wrought from a thick elastic band paired with leather. While a fantastic wallet, it’s definitely not waterproof, and I certainly wouldn’t wash it in a machine (or by hand). In contrast, the SlimFold Wallet material used is also lighter and thinner than any of the elastic-band based wallets I’ve tested before it. For all the compactness of the Trove and Supr Slim wallets, and even though the SlimFold Wallet is bifold, its standalone material is thinner and lighter.

When you pry it from its casing, the wallet is surprisingly light and compact. It also opens and lays completely flat, which is an affordance I’d never seen before in a bifold wallet. The wallet's composition is built from one long piece of thin, fabric-like material (they call it Soft Shell), and stitched and cut together in a clever way. There is one opening for full bills (no more quad-folding my dollars like an idiot with the Trove, one “ID slot/window” with plastic cover on the left side, and two slide-in slots on the right side.

Since the material is so thin and light, the designers decided to reinforce the wallet with plastic inserts against the back wall (where you can store either cash or more cards). Optically, these inserts don’t draw attention to themselves, but feeling them and knowing they’re there makes the wallet feel jankier than it is. You can remove them, but the wallet begins to look and feel like a deflated balloon, mostly because the inserts keep the wallet a certain size and regality, and without them, the top of the wallet flimsily folds over the stronger, card-enforced body. With both inserts in and the wallet loaded in all its slots, the wallet does not open as naturally (or as wide) as you’d expect when looking to pry out dollar bills, and it no longer lays as flat when closed. But with a reasonable number of items in there, it looks and sits just fine.

Aesthetically, the wallet is true minimalism. The color is black and without texture, the slot cuts inside have no ornamentation, and the only branding is a small “slimfold” logo pressed on the lower-right inside slot. The only knock against it is the colored stitching, which can be seen along the bifold seam in the back, and along the vertical sides at the opening of the wallet. Using black stitches would have hidden the constructed nature of the wallet, and avoided the distracting, slightly slanted stitch lines. It’s a small thing to note, but it does draw away from an otherwise precisely-crafted product.

In terms of utility, SlimFold Wallet claims to be ideal for eight cards, but will hold up to twelve. For context, my current load out for the SlimFold Waller is the following:

• Debit Card
• Charge Card
• Ventra (Chicago Transit) Card
• ID Card
• Costco Card
• Office Security Card (thickest by far)

If you count my office card as two, since that’s about the weight/thickness of it, you could comfortably say that seven cards is about the best it can do before feeling like a normal, fat wallet. I hardly ever carry cash, but a few bills inside don’t add too much thickness to it, but after several bills (or more cards), the wallet’s tolerance for laying as flat (when closed) on a tabletop shortens. (This is really the measure of slimness I’m grading it against, since it’s up against non-folding wallets of a similar competitive arena.)

Use

It took me a while to re-acquaint myself with a bifold wallet, as it’s a style I hadn’t carried in over 10 years. Luckily, the material itself was thin enough for me not to notice while walking around with it in my preferred front-left pocket. Since the size is larger than the Trove, and the cards inside aren’t so tightly condensed, the wallet actually feels like it lays flatter against my leg. Without a proper comparison to every bifold wallet in the world, I can say it's the thinnest design for a bifold I've ever seen and used.

Though the wallet is slim and unobtrusive, there is one design choice that is noticeably a nuisance, albeit minor, to every day use: the card slots. It seems so obvious at first, but it actually took a full week of use to pinpoint it: The front panel card slots (the most used ones) face each other across the wallet's fold. Nearly every other bifold wallet positions the card slots upward (for vertical insertion and extraction); the SlimFold Wallet, however, requires you to load them horizontally. This causes an issue with the agility of every day use: you have to open the wallet completely to extract a card. With other bifold wallets, extracting a card is as simple as partially opening the wallet and sliding a desired card out of its slot. With the SlimFold, you need to either lay the wallet open flat in your hand, or fold it back on itself and then slide the card out. Again, it's a small inconvenience, but it's enough of a change in pace that it's noticeable. And while you could argue this is actually a more secure way to keep the cards from unintentionally slipping out, that never seems to be a problem.

The other complexity added to this layout is stacking cards in the slots. The right-side slots are designed in such a way that if you grab the rear card (I store two in each of the “horizontal” slots), it becomes difficult to navigate it back into the rear slot after use since the slots are cut from the same sheet of material. I'll quickly try to do it while I'm getting past a register or bus terminal, and the card will often hit the inseam of the slots (that optically separates the two horizontal slots, when it’s really just an aesthetic card slot separator bar of the same material sheet), or just tuck in right behind the first card in its same slot. It sounds inconsequential, but in use, it is slightly slower than top loading cards vertically into the same slot.¹

Other than extracting items out of the wallet, its daily use is pleasurable. The wallet is unobtrusive, lightweight, and easily slides in and out of your pocket. The Tyvek® MICRO does not pick up lint or other pocket debris like some elastic wallets do. And overall construction is durable enough for any amount of beating (I'll remind you that they state it's been crash-tested). In summary, the SlimFold Wallet functions as it should -- use it for commuting and paying for things, otherwise keep it in your pocket.

Closing Thoughts

The Soft Shell SlimFold Wallet is available on their website’s store for $45; paying $3 more will get you an RFID-enabled version. You can also purhcase it on Amazon.

Pros:

• Waterproof
• One of — if not the — slimmest bi-fold wallet available
• Extremely lightweight
• Easy on the eyes
• Sleek, black, minimal design effortlessly eludes judgement

Cons

• Plastic inserts in the rear make the wallet feel jankier than it is
• With both inserts or with fully loaded slots, the wallet does not open as naturally (or wide) as you’d expect for bill extraction
• Wallet must be opened completely to extract cards in from panel slots, slowing down a daily task

The SlimFold Wallet is the right choice if you're looking for a slim, tightly constructed wallet with waterproofing and tear-resistant design. If you're looking for sleek, fast management of cards, I still recommend the Trove as the go-to slim wallet.

Update (April 11, 2016)

I received word from the manufacturer that they are planning to revamp the packaging, addressing my initial concerns regarding first impressions with basic plastic wrapping.

They also have been sampling a version of the black wallet with black stitches, which they plan. To introduce soon. This will alleviate visual distinction of the stitches, contributing to an overall seamless integrity.

Lastly, I misspoke about the material used in mine (and have subsequently updated my review accordingly). SlimFold wallets come two different materials:

1. Soft Shell
2. Tyvek

The one I reviewed was the Soft Shell, which is the thicker of the two but provides more durability.

Lastly, while the one I reviewed does feature the inside slots open towards the center (making them more secure, as I had mentioned), there is also a model that features vertically open slots to slide cards out the top.

Full disclosure: I was given a review model of the MICRO Size Soft Shell model from the manufacturer; this gesture did not impact my perspective on the wallet in this review.

Revisiting the advertising industry of yesteryear in shows like Mad Men feels quaint when you realize how far we’ve come from the days of single-platform advertising dominance. Print, radio, and television were the harbingers of new ways for advertisers and companies to connect with potential audiences with the hopes of converting them into paying customers. In 2016, this is no longer the case. Those channels exists in some form, but they hold neither the same attention nor weight as they once did; instead, a myriad of platforms have manifested and taken hold across audiences and users that have avoided consolidation and technological limitations like their predecessors once did. But with this proliferation of platforms and marketplaces came supportive, connective technologies that reach beyond anything the 1960s masterminds in the pitch room could ever have dreamed up. And with those connective technologies comes one critical decision that must be made by each and every participant on these platforms: how much do I value my privacy?

My guess is the eventual convergence of millennials coming to fruition, and baby boomers slowly fading, will demonstrate how the question of privacy, technology, and advertising pans out. But even before that happens, anyone who browses the Internet with a web browser, or uses a mobile device, or makes a purchase online, or conducts a search on Google, or clicks on an ad must take account of whether or not they value the inherently private right to those choices without submitting to the data aggregation overlords (and whether we have a right to question what companies do with their own platforms and services).

Why should we care about the data aggregation happening at the search, browse, click, and engage levels? If you aren’t cognizant of what is happening when you choose to load a given web page‚ or take a particular action in a browser, you are likely permitting dozens of services to track your behavior, align you to an ID, and connect your engagement with look-a-like modeling to better inform advertising, spending, and customization decisions for advertisers and brands across the world. (On the contrary, this data also helps designers and technologists create more personalized, better experiences and services to serve you based on your behavior.) Either way, you are inadvertently telling advertisers and a slew of other companies what you do, how you interact, and how you spend your money so they can customize messaging and content to your liking to encourage more spending and more engagement with brand assets.

If you like the notion of ads aligning to your interests, or have little care for companies bending your behavioral metrics to marketers’ and brands’ visions of perfect content resonance, then forget this entire editorial. Receiving more relevant ads or highly customized, purposefully tweaked content to adhere to your interests is the endgame for so much of what’s happening in the technology and advertising industry that if no one notices what’s happening on the backend — if no one cares — then we as audiences, attention centers, and customers lose some of our right to discern, decide, and demonstrate our free will. If we can’t choose to shell out money or click our way through a conversion funnel to arrive at a purchase, a sign-up, or an end point without being manipulated or steered by invisible forces, then this kind of technology could be exponentially built to influence us beyond just advertising.

But… Perhaps This Isn’t All Such a Bad Thing

You know what? Maybe this is okay after all. Very few users have activated mobile Safari’s content/ad blocker in iOS 9 when it was released in the fall of 2015 on iPhones and iPads. Maybe no one cares to use the private mode in their browser. Or perhaps no one is interested in using the highly private, highly secure Apple Pay to avoid being tracked upon every transaction you make. Maybe no one gives much weight to digital privacy, and everyone would rather software and services better serve their needs, their attention, and their wallet. You can’t have both, but perhaps you can have a balance.

While tracking, customization, and connecting user information across sources to power ad campaigns and content is the hot new frontier, there have been several subtle yet successful underground advertising strategies in place for years that don’t require invasiveness or big, expensive technology. I’d like to call these methods bespoke ad targeting.

The best examples of this are The Deck, an advertising network for creatives, web, and design culture, and the entire podcast industry.

For many, The Deck (powered by the Chicago-based design and interactive studio, Coudal Partners) has been a bastion of hope for non-intrusive advertising tied to a curated, human-approved ad network featuring such luminaries as John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, web community mainstay MetaFilter, the publishing world’s darling McSweeney’s, and long-form pioneer The Morning News.

Having established a quality, editorially-related group of sites and authors permits The Deck to run an equally curated and selected group of advertisers to appeal to the perceived needs, interests, and attentions of such audiences. Sure, data informs these decisions, but The Deck does not track or use data from third-party aggregators — instead, they understand the audiences’ interests based on their network sites and align advertisers (or permit advertisers) to run ads inside their program; which, as they describe, is “not about ‘cost-per-thousand’ it’s about ‘cost-per-influence’.” This methodology is unlike most ad or display networks, which consider impressions but make most of their revenue off cost-per-click. This approach is summarized best by The Deck:

The loyal, regular readers of the network’s sites and services consist of web publishers, writers, developers, editors, reporters and bloggers as well as influential designers and art directors. Plus, the aggregate audience is made up of writers, photographers, illustrators, students, filmmakers, typographers, artists, animators, musicians, coders, designers and many other creative professionals.

This methodology could be repeated ad nauseum across any fields, interests, or publishing networks, but since The Deck is such an indie game, it would likely be hard to convince major agencies, advertisers, and publishers to get onboard (Big Data drives everything in terms of quantitative business investment rationales).

Another advertising anomaly is the wrapper around the podcasting industry. Long has this industry been around (really, since the boom years of the iPod over a decade ago), but never has its advertising implications been treated with the same kind of sophistication found in other mediums and channels. Since there is no common platform for podcasts (they are essentially audio files that can be published via RSS for feed processing), there has not been a common way of inserting advertisements into them.

A recent Wall Street Journal article about podcasts facing advertising hurdles summarizes this best (via a quote from Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at ZenithOptimedia):

“Podcast ads can't be targeted in the way other digital media can be, and there's no immediate metric of success - like impression served or links clicked - to allow advertisers to evaluate return on investment"

Regardless of these hurdles or concessions, some advertisers continue to invest significant money into podcasting because of the same kind of bespoke reach that The Deck famously claims. The Atlantic investigated this, particularly through the humorous lens of Squarespace (a website CMS service), which seemingly advertises on nearly every podcast.

Essentially, podcast advertisers needed to come up with a method for enabling a call to action in their audio spots. In almost every instance, this comes in the form of a promotional code or website link. As reported by the Atlantic, now that podcasts are reaching “17 percent of Americans age 13 and up (that’s almost 50 million people)”, we’re seeing more of this approach by advertisers:

Instead of pursuing signups and orders, companies—especially larger ones—are increasingly hoping that podcast advertisements create positive associations for their brand. “We select a property like This American Life not because we expect it to increase sales the next day, but because … we know our target values the content,” says Nancy Hubbell, the communications manager for Scion. Some advertisers trawl Facebook and Twitter to see how their ads are being received.

To summarize, both non-invasive advertising methods - bespoke networks and podcasts - rely less on user behavior tracking and data aggregation, and more human-picked selections that aim to provide less direct calls to action and drive positive brand associations. If this sounds familiar, it’s a call back to the era of analog television, analog billboards, and analog in-theatre ad reels (or event present-day sponsoring of sports functions, television shows, and physical events). Less invasive, but likely just as impactful in terms of impressions and brand association/reinforcement.

The Important Elements of Connected Experiences

Bespoke or not‚ with all these new digital advertising strategies come more and more tech stacks, which in turn can actually impact more than just privacy considerations. In particular, we are talking about the overall user experience of accessing content. It's been quite clear over the past 12-18 months that the web (and its content ecosystem) has become clunky again, like the days of dial-up:

• Site speed has been a massive issue for several large brand and publication websites over the last several years, with third-party scripts contributing heavily to lag time in loading in a browser
• Newsrooms have seen a proliferation of speedy publication choices on OSes and platforms attempting to wrest control of the content floodgates: Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, and Google AMP
• Website design norms have caved to accommodate responsive design, oftentimes executed in ways that aren't entirely mobile-friendly, bringing resource clutter, inefficient load times, and the slew of tracking mechanisms from the desktop era to mobile (the days of simple, fast mobile sites circa 2010 is over)

While this has been beat over the head this past year, speed implications are worth demonstrating again. Below, you'll see a list of big brand mobile sites (homepage URL) suffering from script-related slowdowns, identified as “render-blocking JavaScript”, and their total site speed as calculated by Google, which also includes other factors like CSS minifying, image compression, etc.):

• Target: 44/100
• Best Buy: 53/100
• Amazon: 72/100 (render-blocking JavaScript is primarily contributing to this score)
• Beats By Dre: 44/100 (curious to see if Apple will curtail use of certain ad and content platforms now that they own Beats)
• Apple: 61/100
• New York Times: 62/100
• The Verge: 13/100
• Slate: 58/100
• Microsoft: 53/100

Dean Murphy demonstrates how much better the mobile web experience is with the iOS9 content-blocking feature, describing the following impact it had for one site he loves to visit but which suffers significantly from site slowdown:

With no content blocked, there are 38 3rd party scripts (scripts not hosted on the host domain) running when the homepage is opened, which takes a total of 11 seconds. Some of these scripts are hosted by companies I know, Google, Amazon, Twitter and lots from companies I don't know. Most of which I assume are used to display adverts or track my activity, as the network activity was still active after a minute of leaving the page dormant. I decided to turn them all off all 3rd party scripts and see what would happen.

Even with the benefits of perceptively better content or ads geared to the user, there is an adverse effect:

• Slower accessibility to services, apps, and sites
• More expensive data plans (accommodate unchecked ad networks required bandwidths)
• Exposure of personal information, even if anonymized

Advertising Isn't the Only Industry

The permeation of data tracking and data-driven decision-making is not just trending through the advertising industry. It is everywhere. Most notably, though, is its involvement in the health industry. This is a critical are for data precision, and the more information available about patients, prospects, and conditions, the better the decisions become for health organizations and insurance companies.

Similar to how web behavior data is curated by third party companies and aggregated in commercial databases for sale to advertisers and agencies, so too is the data for health. As Scientific American reports, however, these databases aren’t quite as easy to orchestrate:

By law, the identities of everyone found in these commercial databases are supposed to be kept secret. Indeed, the organizations that sell medical information to data-mining companies strip their records of Social Security numbers, names and detailed addresses to protect people's privacy. But the data brokers also add unique numbers to the records they collect that allow them to match disparate pieces of information to the same individual—even if they do not know that person's name

For most industries, this should be typical of best practices for anonymizing data. But they continue to report that the clarity around data collection (and from whence the data is entered or stored) confounds many industry participants:

…the system is so opaque that many doctors, nurses and patients are unaware that the information they record or divulge in an electronic health record or the results from lab tests they request or consent to may be anonymized and sold.

Big surprise there.

Where We Go From Here

For some companies, like the aforementioned iMore, or heavyweights New York Times, Slate, and The Verge, advertising is an integral part of how they pay the bills (and journalists). Is there a better way to evolve advertising without sacrificing the inherent privacies of participants in ancillary activities (such as reading a publication online, or watching a video on YouTube)?

Advertising is a massive, $500BN industry. The medical industry is even bigger. Neither is going away, and ad-blocking or a handful of privacy advocates won’t change the face of the business any time soon. Sure, Apple can advocate for device-specific privacy against the FBI and potentially the federal government, but that doesn’t have any effect on the data users are willing (or unknowingly) contributing to forms, subscriptions, browser histories, and clicks/taps throughout the Internet.

The game could change — for users, experiences, and privacy — in a meaningful way if we decide to move a dialogue down that route. But as companies continue to build useful services around data for their users, the reliance and convenience of those services may eventually outweigh the privacy concerns of the data begin recorded, submitted, analyzed, and used to create them. And for us, there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong way to move forward from here, but there are liberties around the nature of privacy that will forever be changed to accommodate the digital ecosystems of the future.

How do we deal with the fragility of life? How do we cope with lost love and lost family? How do we contend with the forces of nature, the forces of mortality? It took some patience, and some diligence, but I powered through the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers through all the perceptively melancholy, depressing episodes to get here: season 2.

If you for some reason don’t know, HBO endorsed and funded the creation of a series based on American author Tom Perrotta’s novel about the sudden disappearance of two percent of the world’s population, and the events that followed in a small town. That’s actually all you need to know. This series isn’t necessarily about a post-apocalyptic struggle for characters traumatized by a single, life-defining moment; rather, the series in an introspection on pathos and how to interpret the unknowable: through theological or logical reasoning. To build a show respectful of both disciplines of thinking, whilst furthering the development of characters and theme, is quite an accomplishment for show runner Damon Lindelof (yes, the same Damon Lindelof who brought us Lost).

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And this is coming from a guy who drops more shows than I’ve finished based one or two perceptively poor episodes, never to return or give it a second chance. Oddly enough, I made it through the entire first season of HBO’s The Leftovers without giving up, even though I came close to ditching after season one’s relentless string of depressing narratives. And I’m really glad I stuck it out: Season two is an incredible ten episode arc that rivals the best shows I’ve ever seen.

The first season of Damon Lindelof’s mystery box series needed to set the tone and stage for the myriad of themes it sought to explore: foremost grief, but also love, pain, family, loss, connection, spirituality, and religion. And while packaged well, the first season seems disjointed — there wasn’t an underlining narrative arc that binds the story from episode one to episode 10. This is partly why season two was such a shocking experience. From the rebooted credit sequence (absolutely astounding in its simple artistic design with a meta song mockingly drumming in the background) to the wild opening segment of a cavewoman’s struggle in episode one, to the beautiful round-table close, the narrative arc is perfect and the execution extraordinary. My love for this season could also stem from my soft spot for transcending narratives that explore human existence, rationale, and being, but even without that as a reason to explore its story, The Leftovers is a spectacle to behold, albeit its composition in subtle strokes.

Season two also solidified an expectation for the show, and fulfilled an achievement Lindelof had been seeking ever since embarking on Lost back in 2004: this show (and that one) seeks to explore the nature of our connectedness with each other here on earth, even through the unexplained phenomena of life, death, dreams, and the spiritual realm. When JJ Abrams and Lindelof first explored this notion in Lost, they built a complex, overbearing mess of mysteries conjured along the way, and were never able to satisfactorily pay it off. For all its dramatic heaviness, Lost was predicated on its mysteries — a trickling of questions, clues, and cliffhangers stringing one episode to the next with a slow burn of answers over 121 forty-five minute segments. But even Lindelof admits that the audience was too smart for this underpinning of the series, and eventually Lost disappointed because it actually wanted to focus on something other than the jumbled mess of plot holes and mysteries that gradually were shat on by ambiguous (or non-ambiguous) answers and revelations. On the other hand, The Leftovers has proven that it is not predicated on its greatest mystery (why and what happened to millions of the world population, who seemingly vanished all at once at the same time on October 14); rather, it is predicated on the underlying relationships and questions of being through thematic explorations of the struggle of life.

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Sure, you could argue Lost attempted to do this the entire time, but that’s not the reason any of us were watching the show. We wanted to know what happened next in the unfolding of the overall mystery of the island and its supernatural impact on all the primary characters. But not once during season two of The Leftovers did I feel I needed a clue or answer to its stage-setting mystery; neither did I feel the need to necessarily receive an answer for all the other narrative arc questions that cropped up (mostly because season one set the expectation that I oughtn’t get an answer), so it was delightful to see the narrative threads (even the foreshadowing of episode one) perfectly ladder into the final few episodes to complete the story. There are still unanswered questions, but they don’t matter nearly as much. Now that the ground rules have been written, they are fully explored and enriched in season two: you care more about the characters, the balance of interpretation between the spiritual and the pragmatic, and the delicateness of life as we perceive it.

Are there forces moving us through life? Do we believe in them to reassure ourselves, to justify our actions? Do we not because it’s illogical? And does it matter? In some ways, the answer to these thoughts about ourselves and about the world of The Leftovers is perfectly colored during every Season Two episode by the new credits sequence — and the spectacularly chosen theme song “Let the Mystery Be” by Iris Dement. The refrain rattles thus:

“Everybody's wonderin' what and where

They all came from

Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go

When the whole thing's done

But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me

I think I'll just let the mystery be”

Our characters travel through misplacement, abandonment, death, purgatory, revenge, misunderstanding, assumption, psychosis, and, through it all, familial love. The Leftovers has become a thesis statement on spirituality — can we rationalize tragedy, loss, and love through theology, or through the explicit actions of humans beings and their impact on one another, regardless of supernatural divination? Can anything truly be explained?

The Leftovers season two’s greatest ally in its conviction is its open-mindedness: there isn’t a right or wrong, true or false binary explanation for any of the events that transpire. You watch characters do awful things to remind the rest of the population that they are not safe regardless of the mathematical perception of safety based on what we think we know about the Departed; you watch characters seemingly die and resolve their purgatorial predicaments; you watch as the world burns and family perseveres. There are no easy answers with The Leftovers (or questions, for that matter). But if you watch both of the series’ current seasons, you will have a more informed lens through which to gaze at life's tectonic shifts of emotion and tragedy.

An Attempt to Change Typing Across iOS

Back in February, I backed a Kickstarter project with a mission to remake the iOS keyboard. Unlike other third-party keyboards, this one specifically was taking charge for Apple devices only. When I gave them the five bucks or so it cost to back the project, I felt that this was a unique proposition, and was excited by the notion of a focused keyboard replacement (so many other third-party keyboards were and continue to be built for all operating systems, you'd think a focused app would take advantage of its core system better than one that wasn't).

And so the year went by until right around June when they offered a beta download for backers of the Next Keyboard project. I usually don’t test or run betas in lieu of a near-delivered product, but I was excited to try it out (I haven’t tried any other third-party keyboards on any of my devices before). Installation of Next (and any other keyboard) is a bit wonky. For the beta, they essentially provided instructions in the app proper, and the functioning keyboard wasn’t activated until you went into the Settings app > General > Keyboard and added it manually. (Apple could definitely improve this process in the future — it’s not a fault of the developers.)

Once installed, I gave it a whirl. That whirl lasted about five minutes as it was completely breaking the iOS experience with blank keyboards, preventing spotlight usage, etc. I uninstalled it immediately and decided to wait until the newer version came out.

And then the newer version came out a few months later. Went ahead and downloaded the app again. Same instructions, more or less. Did that. Added it. Wah-la. Much better already. The app transforms into a marketplace and provides all the settings for configuring your keyboard. Something I wasn’t anticipating (probably because I stopped following updates) was the ability to change the theme of the keyboard so fluidly. Nearly a dozen themes exist today, and I’m sure more are planned for the future. They all look great.

In addition to themes are stickers. If you’re familiar with Line or WhatsApp or apparently now Facebook Messenger, stickers are larger-than-emoji sized images that can be used when communicating with others — which is probably only done in a messaging or social media app. These stickers were free, but I’m assuming this is a marketing arena made to generate revenue, so the more sticker packs they come out with in the future, the more they’ll likely have the propensity to charge for them.

With all this being said — how does the actual keyboard function now that it’s been officially released? (That is, of course, the most important component of arguably one of the most important functionalities of a mobile device). To be honest, it’s a mixed bag. Here’s the rundown the of things Next does right, and where it has some misses.

What Next Does Right

• The themes are beautiful, so pulling up that keyboard in any context is a delight
• The emoji picker is brilliantly integrated into the keyboard pane, and it’s easily scrollable
• Stickers are easily accessible as well, and Next makes it easy to paste them into conversations (unfortunately, due to technical obstacles, you can’t just tap a sticker and assume it will populate in the Messages app — it must be copy and pasted. Next copies it for you, and simply suggests you tap the text field to paste)
• Text navigating is done in a wonderful way (even ahead of the changes Apple is making in iOS 9 for iPad). Essentially, you tap and hold on the spacebar, and slide left or right to weave the cursor through the text on the screen. Simple, intuitive, and functionally sound. I really like this.
• iOS/Apple device only. This helps limit the resources and improves the focus on the software moving forward.

Where Next Falls Short

Unfortunately, for all the great things Next does right, it has some major shortfalls:

• They removed the microphone shortcut in their keyboard design. Not sure if this is a limitation imposed by Apple or not, but I actually find myself using it on occasion, especially if I’m doing the walk-and-text thing around Chicago — way easier to just tap that microphone button and say what I need to type and send away.
• They have access to everything you type, apparently. I’m assuming they’re classy and not tracking this stuff, but you can never be sure. (And to note, all third-party keyboards have this same caveat.)
• There’s a lag in pulling up Next keyboard. This is usually always the case, and that one or so extra second of lag is really annoying, especially if you’re used to the speed at which iOS keyboard pulls up (immediately). This is part of the deal breaker for me. Again, this may be a limitation caused by Apple’s SDK component for third-party keyboards, but either way, it renders this keyboard that much more unusable on a daily basis.
• It still doesn’t activate all the time. This is the other deal breaker for me, and the reason I removed Next again from my device. Sometime I’ll pull down on the home screen to get to Spotlight, or open Messages to resume a conversation, and the keyboard won’t roll up (the cursor will just sit in the text field). This requires a force-quit of the app, which usually fixes it, but that doesn’t solve the Spotlight issue. Regardless of what the problem is, this is unacceptable for any third-party keyboard software.

Wrap-Up

Overall, the Next keyboard is a tremendous effort in squeezing a lot of functionality in a great, well-designed keyboard. Whether by its manufacture or through limitations in the iOS SDK, however, its problems outweigh its benefits and I can’t rightly recommend it until those technicalities are dealt with.

Let’s hope that the incremental improvements in iOS 9’s keyboard for iPad reinvigorate the third-party keyboard market to improve designs and functionalities (and prompt Apple to fix issues inherent in their SDK) so that we can continue to see improvements to the way we interact with our devices.

Thoroughly-written post at Monday Note, detailing the woes and triumphs of the advertising industry amidst critical changes in iOS 9 and OS X regarding ad content blocking technology. It's not a one-sided debate, if you're at all familiar with the matter, and the fact that so many businesses (on both sides -- ad and content) are affected by it, this should be a good indication of how important ad blocking will become moving forward.

Jean-Louis Gassée's article distills most of the debate down to improved user experiences for certain device owners (ahem, Apple users) -- enough research has already proven that the content-blocking technology reduces load times and data usage during its beta run, improving a number of experiences for owners of iOS and Mac products. But I'm more interested in how many people will actually be aware of this new feature and will actually use it when it comes out. My guess: only those who know it exists, which is the usual niche tech-savvy userbase.

The whole thing was a gamble. We¹ had both mentioned our curiosity and disdain for the Apple Watch when it was first given its overly glamorous introduction last fall. We both have iPhones and Macs and iPads and, more or less, are Apple enthusiasts, but here the company goes, introducing yet another new product line that begs daily attention. Another product to charge every night at your bedside with a wholly different cable. Another device that seemingly does what your other device does, but not quite (it isn’t nearly as redundant as the iPad’s existence), and with signficantly less power. Since neither of us had the ability to demo it before ordering it, we didn’t know what to expect from the new device and its technologies — which seemed crucial for an accessory that was to be worn on your wrist as an extension of your phone and as a fashion piece aligning to the wearer’s taste. It also had new hardware features that the industry had never seen in a product before -- the Taptic engine and the ForceTouch screen.

But we ordered two of them anyway. They arrived a few days apart, and it wasn't until we had both of them, using them every day, that the device’s role became apparent. The Apple Watch works as advertised. It’s really well designed. It looks and functions great. What else do you want to know? This isn’t the next big thing — but it certainly could be the precursor to the next big things. If you want an everyday watch that has the capability for a lot of personality and flexibility, this is it. It’s more functional than those trendy Michael Kors watches, and it’s way more powerful than that Casio watch you’ve had since elementary school. It’s a sign of things to come: the useful accessorization of technology, starting with the revolution of a fundamental, practical need: telling the time.

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So… Why

You’re wary of Apple always hyping up their next thing. Or their latest thing. Or their updated thing.

Yes, this is their latest thing. It’s mostly a souped up watch, and this is how it works: You strap it to one of your wrists, you pair it with your iPhone, you unlock it for the day, and it connects to the Internet by staying in sync via Bluetooth until you take it off. If you get a notification via your iPhone, your watch will lightly tap you on the wrist instead of your phone bleeping obnoxiously or vibrating in your pocket. You want to check the time? You raise or twist your wrist and the watchface activates to tell you the time. You want to check the weather? If set accordingly, you can check it the same way. You want to know what’s next on your calendar? Same thing. You want to know much you’ve moved around all day? Same. Essentially, the watch is like a dashboard for your everyday, need-to-know functions. It respects the watch heritage by being a glanceable device you wear for function and style, but adds a roster of modern conveniences. It begins to fall short when it tries to do anything beyond at-a-glance information (such as hosting an ecosystem of apps that are not as intuitive as their iPhone counterparts). But most importantly, the Apple Watch also hints at at a future state that exceeds mere software interfaces — it gravitates towards this just as the iPhone attempted to do a short 6 months before it, but in a way that the watch may prove being better at: interacting with a connected world via hardware (and without an interface at all).

So it tells the time and lets you know about a few other easily viewable stats about the environment you live in — what else? Why spend $350+ on this? How about we break this down into three different areas, and you decide for yourself:

1. Customization
2. Communication
3. Fitness

Everything the watch does falls into one of these disciplinary areas. Apple is hedging its bets that the watch does all three mostly better than the iPhone, but more importantly, easier than any other device. There are intrinsic benefits for simply having a watch in lieu of a phone for many of these areas, too — it’s far easier to check a watch for the time than pull out your phone and press a button to check it. Same goes for tracking fitness - the latest iPhones track steps and trajectories, but what if you leave it at your desk and walk to grab a coffee?

To execute well on these disciplines, the watch tries to excel in convenience, personality, and flexibilty. These concepts run thick through each of its core disciplines, and will contribute heavily in justifying its existence over the next several years.

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Customization

If we know anything about fashion, it tends to be about preference. Watches tend to fall into this area — they are, and have traditionally functioned as, an accessory. They tell time. But when you’ve bought a watch in the past, you’ve had to decide on a very specific configuration — digital/analog, colors, chronograph, placement, things called “complications” (that the rest of us only know because Apple pushed that term into the mainstream), strap types, and a few other things we’re probably missing. Customization is important. Apple gets that, which is why their watch is unlike any device they’ve made thus far — it’s heavily focused on transforming based on the user.

There are a few ways the Apple Watch is customizable, and they all make the device more fun to use in a way that previous Apple products failed to do — it conforms to the user’s personal style. You get to choose how the watch tells time — there are a myriad of watch faces that can be selected and heavily customized with additional info panels (called complications) by Force Touch presses on the watchface (literally pushing harder on the screen initiates Apple’s latest technology). This feature was by far the most used in the first few weeks we owned them — every day, we’d tweak our complications, reposition data, change the color, change the face. We both eventually settled on a variant of Modular, which is the digital-heavy watch face with the most flexibility in complications.

Customization carries through on the hardware side as well. Apple engineered the watch itself to interface with a variety of straps, designed both by Apple and by third parties. They designed a simple system for swapping out straps: you press in a button on both ends of the watch’s underside and slide the strap through its track, simply sliding another one in its place to change the arrangement. While we don’t own the link bracelet, apparently they also made adjusting this popular but notoriously annoying style an easy affair — no jeweler required.

With these two options, Apple has made its watch design hugely configurable, allowing for personalization that you can only do via cases for their other products. The neutrality of the core Apple Watch device lends well to this philosophy — it’s so well designed in its minimalism that any customization transforms it entirely.

Communication

Early on, we found that the Apple Watch shines as a communicator. It may not be apparent in the ads or walkthrough videos, but the ‘side button’ does more than allow for gimmicks -- it permits a wholly new way of earning someone’s attention: lightly tapping them from a distance, and sending brief thoughts or messages directly to them, is a new kind of communication method. If you are using the Apple Watch solo, you're missing out. Or at least for a while. After the first month, we’ve seen a decrease in sketch and tap usage, but it is delightful on occasion.

Communication is one of the primary purposes of the watch, or so we gather from Apple’s blatant use of the communication function by its positioning of one of only two buttons for such a usage. The ‘side button’ launches you into a radial presentation of your favorite contacts, any one of which you can tap and send a finger-drawn sketch, emoji, tap, or text/audio message to. The watch makes it somewhat easy to do this, though the radial interface is finicky, and demands precise use of the Digital Crown (Apple’s modern riff on the traditional crown mechanism of watches before it).

But the watch communicates in more ways than just through the ‘side button’. It is, as we mentioned, a direct recipient of all notifications that funnel through your iPhone. Being able to glance at texts to see if you need to respond is an example of the fluidity in its design to provide a reasonable solution to first world problems like having your phone inconveniently in your pocket. But it really is useful in practice. And so is Siri — possibly the most important component of the watch’s communication ecosystem. Apple has made Siri faster and less obtrusive (e.g., no sound feedback), seamlessly integrating its functionality into a long-press of the Digital Crown to navigate all digital instructions with your voice. We haven’t arrived at the movie Her’s possibly inevitable future, but we’re getting closer. Apple is realizing that future interface design isn’t always going to be about interacting with software — it’ll be about talking to AI. And this is where the Apple Watch begins to show its cards.

You can use Siri on the watch in all the ways that you can via iPhone, but there is something slightly more intuitive about using it on your wrist than on your phone — you can, for instance, raise your wrist and say “Hey Siri” to prompt a dialogue of instructions, which works exceptionally well. It also doesn’t chatter back to you, like on the iPhone, so this is slightly less conspicuous than when you start a similar track with Siri on the iPhone and that voice banters back to you at speaker-volume (never really understood that functionality choice).

The Watch also has NFC and Bluetooth, which provides it with interesting flexibility. The watch has Apple Pay functionality built in (which doesn’t require an iPhone present), which means that you can go out for a run and pay for a water on the way back without having to carry your wallet with you. WHile it may sound trivial, that’s a game changer. That’s actually badass. You can pay for whatever you want without your wallet. Think about it. And that’s only the beginning — the watch having NFC and Bluetooth opens up its functionality beyond just paying for things — Starwood hotels is one of the first hospitality companies to integrate the Apple Watch into its ecosystem for opening hotel room doors, and Tesla allows you to remote start and open its cars for use. Now apply that to HomeKit (Apple’s software development kit for the home) and multiply the functionality even further — watch into a room and have the house set the mood with lighting, or adjust the temperature, or start the oven, or whatever the hell you want. The watch is about to become your key to the digital environment. And in that respect, Apple Watch exists a few too many years soon — but eventually, the environent will catch up, and we’ll all be living in the future we thought we would be back in the 90s.

Fitness: Slave to the Watch

The most impactful part of the Apple Watch has, surprisingly, been its fitness tracking. The watch’s sensors are able to track a number of activities, including movement, heartbeat, standing, and skin connectivity (for locking the device). It compiles the critical components into its Activity app, which tracks three primary data via colored concentric circles — Move, Exercise, and Stand. Little did we know, activity on the watch would become the bane of our foreseeable existence — getting those circle metrics to complete everyday is a kind of gamification of daily life we never thought we’d care much about, but its design and rewarding implementation is addicting.

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The fitness aspect of the Apple Watch has already made us better functioning humans — as frivolous as it sounds, we’ve been taking extra walks, reducing the number of shortcuts, and avoiding stagnation in the apartment. We’ve even cut it close on some nights, embarassing ourselves and others around us by flailing our hands in wild attempts to raise our heartbeats in the hopes of closing the Move and Exercise goals. It works.

Calculating activity performance is beyond our expertise, but we’ve noticed that by having your iPhone with you, and frequently using the Exercise app (to specify a session of Walking Outdoors, Running, etc.), the watch learns your activity and improves its calculations. For instance, it smartly guesses how much we’re moving and exercising without having to run its heartbeat monitor constantly when we pick up pace via its pedometer tracking. This is a huge win for accuracy and battery life, things that could have severely limited the watch if Apple hadn’t taken the right kind of precautions and planning to guarantee adaptability for improvements.

For now, the watch is configured in a way that calculates daily activity well enough without resorting to some kind of futuristic body implant. And by understanding your daily activity, we become more conscious of living and operating under our everyday conditions. Do I walk enough to the bus and office every day to justify that heavy breakfast? Do I move enough while at work to burn off those drinks? The role of supportive fitness apps comes into play only as a means to manually track caloric intake and weigh against the data the watch tracks — again, the system hasn’t been as accurate as it is now with the watch balancing data against whatever you are able to input into a consumption system. But even if you aren’t doing that, it’s rewarding to know that you’ve completed your goals to feel good about your activity by the time you hit the sack.

A Reference for Living Life

If there’s one thing that the Apple Watch does better than traditional watches, it’s providing an advanced window into your awareness of reality. Beyond just telling the time, the Apple Watch can successfully present upcoming events, outside temperature, your current daily activity, inbound notifications, and human outreach. It’s symbolic of the evolution of everyday equipment we use to accessorize and refine daily existence. The Apple Watch isn’t a half-assed iPhone you wear on your wrist — it’s modern timepiece that goes beyond simply telling the “time” — it’s a device that gauges your daily trudge through life.

My new go-to, English-made wallet Trove has released a few more products over the past month, adding to their ecosystem of mostly integrated hardware. Since I had the equivalent of 20 GBP taunting me in my debit account, I bought both. A mere five days later, Royal Mail delivered them to my Chicago doorstep¹.

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So what’re the latest products? The Trove Cable Clip, a fairly straightforward leather product for clipping things together and the Trove TAG, a more complicated product that has three specific wallet-enhancing features.

The Trove Cable Clip

As the name suggests, this is a clip. It costs £5.00, which seems perfectly reasonable for the build quality if you live in England, but it comes out feeling overpriced when you order with US dollars. Here’s a quick rundown of my initial thoughts:

Sizing

Compact size that could be a good or poor choice for use depending on your other hardware. The Cable Clip fits snugly into the housing of the Trove wallet, but it would have been nice to see the dimensions on the product page — I wasn’t thinking very clearly when I ordered it (probably a drunk purchase), and it ends up that it does not clamp together the way I hoped it would around my RHA headphones. This is probably because the RHA earphones I use comprise thicker, stiffer cabling than the example Apple Earbuds used in Trove’s marketing. When I tried fitting the Apple Earbuds in the clip, it worked perfectly (I didn’t need to clip a half of the loop as I did with the RHA’s — see image above).

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While the size is nice — it appears much smaller than competitor cable clips (due it needing to fit into the Trove wallet for storage, as needed) — it also could be seen as a hinderance. As mentioned above, it won’t work with larger earbuds or thicker cables, but most cables like short USB and Lightning ones, should be fine inside its clamp.

Functionality

The Trove Cable Clip functions exactly like you’d image it to. As noted about its size, you just need to slip whatever clump of wound cable (or anything else you want to clip, for that matter) into its Veg-tanned Italian leather and clamp down the buttons. That’s it. That’s all it does. It’s a cable clip.

Since it's sized for the wallet, there’s the option of slipping it into your wallet to store while you’re using your earphones or other cable. In practice, however, I noticed that you need to have a smaller inventory of cards in the wallet because — depending on your setup — the Trove Cable Clip can cause some pressure against the other cards, bending the overall wallet to its will. This isn’t a problem if you only use a couple of the slots (configured so that there are three proper “slots”), but if you have a lot of cards in there, say six or seven, the thickness of the cable clip’s buttons widen the wallet considerably. It also doesn’t align with Trove’s role in minimizing your wallet and inventory, but then again, you don’t need to put the thing in your wallet when you’re not using it.

Build Quality

Like with the Trove wallet, the clip is made using the same kind of leather that’s found in the squared leather portion of their main product — the part that holds everything together. And as with the wallet’s leather, it’s genuine and solidly wrought. Though I’ve had the clip a short while, I imagine its longevity to be in line with any pure leather product: quite a while.

The product has a few adornments to note: the Trove branding is visible on the outside of the clip design, subtly embossed into the leather, and their “Reverse the Rules” tagline, along with a link to their site, adorns in the inside (which is never visible when you’re using the clip. It comes in a variety of colors, including black, blue, brown, green, grey, lime, orange, and a smattering of others. I’ve only seen one in person, and it matched my expectations of the colors seen on the site.

Trove TAG

When I received Trove’s email announcing the Trove TAG, it took me a while to actually understand what they were peddling. Recognizing the increased technological complexity of the world around us when it comes to using debit and credit cards — contactless payments, card skimming technology — the company has attempted to add flexible intelligence to analog hardware. The Trove TAG is marketed as three products in one, and does, in practice, solve the issues that can stem from these real-world issues.

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What Trove TAG Is

The leather-wrapped, card-sized slab does the following:

• Operates as a guard (the ‘G’ in the name) in two ways:
  • Mitigating its user from becoming a victim of contactless card theft (whereby a malicious person uses card-skimming technology in passing you by on the street and swiping your card details from the contactless tech inside it)
  • Removing worries of multiple contactless cards being activated at the same time when used inside the wallet (for instance, you use your transport card in your wallet, without extracting it, but that card gets charged along with another contactless debit or credit card also sitting in your wallet nearby)
  • For both of the features above to work properly with the RFID card inside the TAG, you need to slide the two target cards against each side of the TAG (in my case, my debit and credit cards site on either end of the TAG inside one of the Trove’s slots)
• Includes an anchor (the ‘A’) in the form of a triangular tab that sits at one corner of the TAG. It comes with a small attachment cord that can easily be taken off, but if you are so inclined, may use it to attach the entire wallet to your keys, accessories, luggage, etc. You may also decide to just use the TAG on luggage without the wallet for the final feature:
• Comprises a tracking ID (the ’T’) on one side of the TAG that, upon registration with Trove’s subscription service (first year free with purchase of a TAG), allows the TAG (and whatever you’ve attached or slipped it into) to be tracked if someone finds and reports it online via Trove’s Report TAG Serial Number page.

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Trove TAG Build Quality

Specifics about the actual materials used in the Trove TAG are oddly omitted from the site, but it’s apparent that they are using some kind of vegetable-tanned leather (similar to the wallet and cable clip material) around the hidden, interior RFID-blocking card. The design is classically analog, with stitching around the border, and gold-stamped branding on one side, and embossed instructions (for TAG discovery) on the other.

I picked up a yellow and black one to match my Factory Edition Trove Wallet, but it comes in a slew of colors that match with the other wallets and cable clips in their current hardware line, including embossed text colors of aqua, blue, orange, pink, purple, and red. Each model will run you £15.00.

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Overall Impressions of the Trove TAG & Cable Clip

These are two unnecessary additions to the already fantastic Trove Wallet, but if you’re looking for added usability, they both are well-built products that perform exactly as intended.

The Cable Clip is a great little investment if you need something like it. My only caution is make sure you have an understanding of its dimensions (it’s about 5 x 8 cm) and how that will wrap around whatever cable you plan on using it with — it has a fairly small loop.

The Trove TAG is a new kind of product that has great benefits if you need them. For me, using the Chicago CTA everyday for commuting, it’s an easy purchase — I have a debit and credit card in my wallet along with the Ventra transportation card, and putting my two payments cards against each side of the TAG prevents them from accidentally getting charged when I lazily press my whole wallet against the bus or train contactless payment machine. In this case, it’s convenient to be able to do this knowing only your transport card will be used. The TAG also wards off any fear that card-skimming assholes can’t extract your precious bodily card data. If you carry around more than two cards you’d like to target with the TAG, you will have to buy another TAG for every one or two additional cards beyond your first pair.

The tracking ID feature and the anchor are less interesting to me. For tracking to work, you need to subscribe to Trove’s service at £5.00/year (after the first year being free), and rely on whoever finds your wallet or luggage or whatever you attach it to actually report it in. The Trove tracking subscription sign-up isn’t as intuitive as it ought to be, either, and it’s actually very hard to find on the site (it’s linked to through a simple blue, in-text link instead of a masthead navigation link). And the anchoring thing just isn’t something I’d use unless I had an extra TAG to attach to my backpack in case it was left somewhere.

Overall, Trove continues to impress with a cool set of products all tied to its ecosystem around its minimal, functional, and what I’ve called The Best Slim Wallet, with the benefit of each product working perfectly in isolation as well. If they sound like something you need, they come recommended.

I was three hours from wrapping up a ridiculously long week of work, adjusting my posture in the seat of my chair, when I really started feeling like seeing a movie after shutting off the computer and saying “fuck it” to a dozen outstanding to-dos. My girlfriend was working the evening shift, so the gameplan was to tell her I was seeing either one of two movies out of the sorry-ass selection in theaters this month, and that — I hoped — neither one would be too extraordinary so as not to ruin the notion that we only see good movies together. (I already biffed on this last year when I saw both Birdman and Boyhood without her.)

At the time of checking, I had Kingsmen and It Follows to choose from, because, honestly, there seemed to be nothing else worth dropping $12 on. A cursory glance at Metacritic put them both around the same temperature from critics (70-80), which was good enough for me. I’d seen a few trailers for Kingsmen, and both of them were so different from one another it was hard to gauge exactly what kind of film it would be — somewhat serious action film, or goofy/spoof take on James Bondish British espionage? I hadn’t seen the trailer for It Follows, but assumed it was some kind of American teen horror flick with a guy stalking some innocent person (with fairly high praise from the few snippets I’d glanced through). The poster was refreshing (no red text used!), but still I didn’t read a proper description of its plot or watch the trailer. Both were queued up for around similar times at 7:00, so I returned to work, waiting for the day to end.

After trying to trudge through the rest of my work, I ended up staying later than I should have. Now the options changed — only It Follows was available for viewing at 8:20, the most practical time at this point, so I decided to do that. I made a quick stop for reasonably priced water and a chocolate bar at Whole Foods, then lugged my laptop-ridden backpack up the AMC River East stairway and bought a ticket and medium popcorn for a movie from which I had no idea what to expect.

The opening shot was enough to sell me on the next hour and a half: A young woman bursts out of a Michigan suburb home along a quiet neighborhood street in some kind of lunatic hurry, clacking along in heels across the street, abruptly saying something to her dad, who meets her at the entrance of another house, running back out, leaping into a car, and furiously driving off. All one long, somehow claustrophobic shot. And it wouldn’t be the last of this kind of marauding, dreadful camerawork.

It was at about 15 minutes in when I realized my girlfriend was going to be annoyed — this was clearly a great film already, and she was missing out. But I kept stuffing buttered popcorn in my mouth and stressfully enduring minute after minute of the film until at about 10:15 when I was finally relieved to see the credits commence.

No, this isn’t a review of It Follows. But if you want the short of it, I highly recommend seeing the film. My favorite of the year so far. Instead, I want to say a little something about the joy of seeing a film without having subjected yourself to any kind of information about it. There are a rare few times when this has happened in the past. Most recently, we saw St. Vincent in a last-minute film switch at the theater, and neither of us knew what the film was about, aside from the assumption that it starred an old cranky Bill Murray. It ended up being quaintly entertaining, and destroyed the film we piggy-backed off it (the horrible Mockingjay). Aside from that, it’s usually random picks on MUBI that I find myself flipping on a film without any preconceived knowledge. Rather than having an idea of what the film may be about or what its tone may be like, you watch it unravel with unspoiled anticipation.

Just think about it. You don’t know who any of the protagonists are, what environments they will at one point encounter, no sense of music — which can drastically alter the timbre of the film’s feel and movement — and you certainly, most importantly, don’t have a sense of what the film is even about. Going into a horror film, of all genres, without knowing what to expect was rewarding in a way most of the films I’ve seen on MUBI haven’t been. It Follows wasn’t some foreign indie film that took a strange direction (like Kim Ki-duk’s 2006 Korean film, Time — wow: weird and recommended, too). It Follows an American-made horror flick hidden in the outskirts of Detroit, an unnerving score by Disasterpeace (whose work spans synthy-electronic videogame OSTs), and an unsettling sense of time-space discontinuity (it’s hard to reference any props in the film as an indication of when this film actually takes place).

So yes, I recommend seeing It Follows. I’d also recommend seeing more films without watching their trailers. The spoiler-laden fad of showing two and a half minutes of film is, unfortunately, the state of the film industry right now, and it’s hard to avoid accidentally seeing a trailer when they pin twenty minutes of them before your screening at the theater. But, perhaps, you can try this at home. Perusing Netflix. Or iTunes, or whatever. Watch an old flick without reading its description. Or one that you’ve heard of but know nothing about. It’s refreshing. It’s surprising. And even it’s a terrible movie, you at least didn’t have a sense of what you’d be in for until after a few hours of unblemished time passes.

And seriously, don’t watch the trailer for It Follows. It ruins part of the fun of the film, and certainly doesn’t set the tone right at all for what you’re about to end up of loving.

I've finally found it. After years of seeking the most minimal, functional, and succinctly designed wallet for everyday use, a team of masterclass manufacturers in England delivered. That wallet is called Trove.

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What sets the Trove apart from its predecessors and competitors is its versatility. While others have set out to design very minimal wallets, they all typically follow the same set of rules: thin, monotone materials that feature one slot into which you dump all your cards. That’s it, right? That’s apparently how everyone who got into manufacturing wallets decided to execute the minimal concept. Perhaps after several years of backing these endeavors on Kickstarter, reading others’ experiences with wallets, and actually using them daily, folks are starting to realize this isn’t the best design. If you’re going to use a wallet like this every day in every circumstance, it’s helpful to be able to organize the kinds of things you put in it. And that’s not just me trying to be classy — functional design for something like a wallet should really come down to these two things:

• The ease of use in grabbing an often-used item that is separate from transactions (such as a transit card) without having to extract a stack of cards to find it is a daily benefit in both speed and ease of use
• The ability to store loose cash and/or important receipts or certificates in way that doesn’t grind against the primary stack of cards (or painfully seeing that cash rip due to the tightness of the package during extraction) is useful in that it respects your inventory

The other wallets don’t allow for these kinds of luxuries (and I mean luxuries in the ludicrous sense that most all wallets up to this “minimal revolution” have featured these kinds of things as defaults). So let me break down why I think the Trove is the best of its class:

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Utility:

• The Trove is primarily configured to feature one big slot with either:
  • A band-like design for accommodating smaller items (like quad-folded currency or tightly wound earphones)
  • Two more card-sized slots on the reverse side of the primary one that can accommodate more cards or thrice-folded currency
• The wallet can also transform into a mobile device stand (either horizontal or vertical), ideal for conveniently setting up a phone to watch movies at an angle on an airplane’s seat tray, for instance
• The manufacturing and quality of the product is fairly high for this kind of thing. While I haven’t owned and used it as long as my Saddleback sleeve wallet (which also claims to use leather and a manufacturing process destined to last 100 years), I will make the assumption today that:
  • The elastic used should last at least as long as a similar product, the Supr Slim Wallet
  • The leather “patches” employed in the design are a high enough quality that they won’t be compromised any time soon

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Usage

It's a slim wallet. If you've been playing this game for a while, you know what to expect. The biggest differentiator here, however, is the versatility (and dare I say customization) of the Trove’s dividable design.

Instead of retracting a block of stacked cards every time you need to dig for a card that isn't easily available on either end of the group, you can selectively position your most-used cards on the ends of the main compartment as well as the dual slots made available when the wallet is configured with two main slots (inner leather strap tucked in).

It’s small, it’s convenient, it works.

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Configurability Beyond Mechanics

At the time of purchase, the Trove is featured in several different color configurations. While this isn’t unique to the Trove, it does seem to have a much larger selection of colors and tones than its competitors. If this kind of thing is important to you, by all means it’s another reason to take make the purchase.

I decided to go with a limited edition version (number 378 of 500) that they dubbed the “Factory Edition”. There were a few other color combinations I liked, but the yellow, gray, and black is a killer look for its design.

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Where to Get It

As of January 2015, the Trove is only available for purchase on their website shop. The basic models retail for £30, while the Factory Edition is currently priced at £35. It ships from England, so there is an international shipping fee if you’re from the States or elsewhere. I was lucky enough to catch their free holiday shipping, which extended a bit past the New Year.

If this review wasn’t effective enough to incentivize you to make the purchase — or at least sock it away on a wish list — then keep using whatever you’re used to and try, try so very hard to forget the incredibly functional design benefits of the Trove while you wither away in misery with torn currencies and daily card extraction embarrassments by way of unorganized single-slot wallets for the rest of your life.

Fyi Update - October 2017

Trove ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to promote their latest wallet iteration, the Trove Swift. I was lucky to get a review unit and have assessed the Swift product here.

Product Review

For the longest time, I've distanced myself from big phones and phone cases, but last year I decided to order the iPhone 6 Plus, a 5.5" behemoth that quickly won me over. Having used it daily for the last several months, it does indeed continue to delight. But as I put it through its paces, my daily use of the device unearthed an unforeseen problem: the phone is one slick device. And I mean that literally -- when extracted from a pocket, the thing unconsciously attempts to slip out of your hands and commit hardware suicide against the ground.

I had two choices, apparently: Handle with obsessive delicacy, or buy a case with less of a slick surface.

While I’ve never cracked or damaged any iPhone I’ve owned, one day in December I opted for buying a case while I was shopping with my girlfriend and her sister at Target. While they were off shopping for gifts, I jaunted towards the electronics section. Initially, I hoped to find some decent PS3 games on post-holiday sale, but the leftover stock wasn’t worth picking over. What other purchases had been nagging at me? That damn case.

Up to this moment, I had been debating getting a case — ever since the first couple weeks of my iPhone 6 Plus use. And so I wandered over to Target’s pitiful mobile section, eyes darting through peg after peg of over-designed car chargers, chunky plastic cases plastered with flowers and sports logos, strange car-mounting solutions, and a jungle of cables. Target is probably the last place I’d look for something to outfit an Apple-designed product, but I’d been doing research on basic cases, and the Apple-branded leather case had received fairly wide-spread approval from the network of bloggers and reviewers I respect. I figured they’d at least carry a few colors of the Apple-made one. At this Grand Rapids, Michigan location, they only had two cases for the iPhone 6 Plus left in stock, and in only one variant: black. I was hoping to snag the dark-navy blue one, but black would have to do — especially since I’d convinced myself I was going to buy this that day.

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So what’s it like in action? After wresting it open from its super slim packaging, putting it on was as easy as aligning the edges of the case against the back of the phone and pressing the two together. It softly absorbs the device with more of a sigh than the usual plasticky click, and the iPhone just sits snug in the case’s real-leather cradle. That’s it.

Here’s my rundown of the device, to save you paragraphs of a typical review:

Pros:

• The real leather feels wonderful
• Improves aforementioned "slickness" by providing sturdier gripping surface
• Permits phone to be placed completely flat on a surface (the camera bulge is covered by about a millimeter of leather material)
• Allows the iPhone to be placed face (screen) down on a surface without permitting the screen to touch (there's a nice leather rim raised about a millimeter from the screen that rests on the surface first)

Cons:

• Due to the material, where the leather rim meets the screen a small trench is created that tends to route dust and other small particles into its maw. Granted, this is a very minor trench, but I would be remiss not to mention this since I've had to take the case off a few times a week to clean out these little pieces.
• The clearance on the bottom of the phone, where the headphone, lightning cable I/O, and speaker/microphone are located, is a bit tight on the headphone jack side. If you have a non-typical headphone plug (such as with a thicker base around the jack, and an L-shaped one), it may not click all the way into the iPhone. This reminds me of the issues with the original iPhone’s concave headphone jack, which ostracized the same kinds of headphones. Luckily, my ten-year old Etymotics (which do have a thick plug base) do fit in fine, but it seems as if half a millimeter is sticking out, and doesn’t completely click in.
• Miss the sturdy buttons for volume and sleep/wake — the case does not have cut-outs for these, and instead has built-in leather bumps that you press (which in turn press the buttons they lay against). It’s a minor complaint (ever notice how physical Apple buttons are really nice to press?), but to turn a subjective preference into a positive, I’ve noticed that I don’t accidentally press the volume button instead of the sleep button when quickly putting my phone away anymore. (If you don’t know, the asinine new location of the sleep/wake button is on the right-side of the iPhone, opposite the volume increase button — when gripped in one hand, it’s possible to press both of these buttons at the same time, and the aftermath of this does not always yield the initial intention) .

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In short, the Apple iPhone Plus Leather Case works honorably as both a protective wrap for the very large phone, and as a way to more confidently handle the device.

→ Get it on Amazon

The last few months have seen an enormous amount of activity around mobile payments. This has mostly stemmed from the launch of Apple's new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models, both featuring NFC (near field communication), a wireless contact mechanism for interacting and executing payments with retail hardware. And, of course, the payment service (for which that NFC technology is integral) they've dubbed Apple Pay.

As one of many early adopters, I was excited to try this out. Sure, while the hardware and feature has been around for a few years -- primarily employed by Google Wallet and Android devices -- I've never seen one actually used (except very embarrassingly in an episode of Fringe), and I haven't owned an Android device. So it was high time I gave it a whirl with my new iPhone. Besides, after having read enough to feel informed about the technology behind Apple Pay, it appears that it is the most secure way available to normal users to make transactions either online or in-store. So there was really nothing stopping me from heading downstairs in my office building to the frighteningly close McDonald's to buy myself an afternoon coffee.

My experience was delightful. Aside from having to waft in the microwave airs of the fast food kitchen, the whole thing went without a hitch. I ordered my coffee, watched as the payment terminal on the counter in front of me glowed blue, and simply held my iPhone within an inch or so of it. I didn't even push the home button to initiate it; rather, I instictively had my thumb resting on its surface (e.g., the TouchID surface), and the terminal communicated immediately with the iPhone. The screen lights up, shows your credit card on file with Apple Pay, and a small TouchID logo with a fingerprint is visbile, promptly capturing your finger's unique signature. Once it's done (and if you have a new iPhone, you know how quickly this actually happens), a little check mark animates and that's it. Payment complete.

It took me a paragraph to write that, but the whole experience takes less than a couple seconds. My experience at McDonald's has been the fastest -- there aren't any PINs to punch in or signatures to be etched; just hold the phone up with your finger on the home button. My experience at Walgreens has been similarly quick, but they do prompt you with a donation option on the payment terminal's screen. Not a huge deal since I've been used to this (having shopped there a number of times before), but Apple Pay makes the process much faster. (I recall before there were about three to four screens you had get through to completely check out.)

Overall, Apple Pay has been a wonderful feature of the new iPhones. While it's nowhere near ready to replace a wallet, it does make the experience of shopping in the few stores that support NFC terminals better than anything before it (shame on retailers like CVS who actively shut off their NFC terminals because of the MCX/CurrentC kerfluffle, screwing over both Apple Pay and Google Wallet users). With pending Apple Watch support for early 2015, the process of paying for things while out on a run or a quick jaunt down the street will be exceptionally secure and enjoyable moving into the future.

On a last note, it seems that there isn't a very good canonical source for all the retailers who can support (or who will support) Apple Pay and Google Wallet. As such, I've compiled a separate page -- Apple Pay Retailer List -- for your reference. I'll try to update it moving forward until, hopefully, enough stores support it that it won't be an issue. If you're looking for a terrific overview of Apple Pay, MacRumors has an extensive reference guide.

Leaving a movie theater thoroughly entertained is usually rare. Or perhaps my opinionated tendencies have gotten the best of me. I’ve been let down more than often than not over the past few years, and it has cost me far too many buttered popcorn bowls. I can happily say, however, that 2014 hit the mark on several occasions, and most notably with Edge of Tomorrow, a film that was unfortunately marred by horrible marketing and tragic failure at the domestic box office. But Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt’s sci-fi foray joins the ranks of other hugely enjoyable, critically- and fan-loved vehicles that fell short only in making money in theaters. You could lump in there such flicks as the recent Dredd 3D and canonized classics like The Shawshank Redemption and Blade Runner. Yes, that’s good company — and rightfully so.

Having arrived on video and DVD/Blu-Ray just this past month, Edge of Tomorrow (or as Warner Bros. recently decided to mutilate further, Live, Die, Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow) stands as one of the few movies I’ve added to my personal collection amidst the infinite libraries of video streaming services. But back at the beginning of this year, when I saw the original trailer (and subsequent trailers), I wanted nothing to do with the film. It came off having the same tired aesthetic of every other heavily-saturated action movie trailer, and the plot concept of “live, die, repeat” was thwacked over your head with smarmy text and thudding music. Not the kind of trailer to pique your curiosity, but for all that is holy, this movie should have been marketed to pique your curiosity. It’s too damn clever and enjoyable in execution to have a studio obfuscate it, especially when no other action film released this year can steadily stand against it in execution.

But one look at its box office performance and you would guess that poor marketing killed it commercially. Netting a paltry $100 million domestically against its $178 million budget isn’t going to please Warner Bros. much. Granted, it earned over $269 million in foreign box office receipts, but that’s not the story we usually hear. Advertising for off-beat movies can be tricky, but it can be done (just usually not well with big studio stakeholders). What actually turned around my perception of the film (which was badly bruised by trailers) was the phenomenal reception from critics and fans. Rotten Tomatoes had an aggregated 90%, and Metacritic reported a 71% — neither are poor numbers, especially for a purely action film, and it’s remarkable the positive momentum couldn’t keep filmgoers getting into theaters and going back.

Sure, Tom Cruise has been battered around publicly for years, but when has his film performances ever disappointed you? Exactly. He’s perfect for the role of Major William Cage, an officer in a near-future army who has never experienced live combat. He’s forced into a mission against an alien invasion that ends in catastrophe — killed within minutes of making his landing on a beachfront against the enemy, and soon finds himself in a time loop that initiates after death. Compare it to Groundhog Day all you want, but it shares little in common with that movie’s shtick and more in common with some of the the best-paced comedies and action films of all time.

You’d think the concept of living, dying, and repeating would get old, but director Doug Liman edited the film to near perfection. He builds on every repeated sequence, coloring in Tom’s and Emily Blunt’s characters, time-leaping through narratives at just the right moment so as not to tire the concept, and crescendoing in a finale sequence that culminates in dread and fear after having suppressed those emotions throughout the first two-thirds of the film.

If you have yet to see this film, I encourage you to do so. It’s available on Amazon and iTunes for renting and purchase.

I made a huge, last minute decision at the crack of 2am Sept 12 -- I decided to shrug off years of antipathy toward larger-screened phones and pre-ordered the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple's behemoth 5.5" revision to the previous generations' agile 4" designs. I figured:

• My hands are big
• A bigger screen is almost always going to be better for viewing and reading and scrolling (most of what I do on these things)
• Reminded myself that a micro-screen Apple wearable was coming early next year.

I've had several years of using a 3.5-4" screen Apple device, pulling it out of my pocket, pouring over its contents, putting it back in my pocket, laying it on a desk, tapping, swiping, putting it to sleep. After half a decade, you crave something new. And the fantasy of using a daily device the size of the iPhone 6 Plus struck me as I managed to break through the Apple server congestion via the Apple Store app and was able to select my iPhone of choice mere minutes past my alarm's horrible awakening.

And contrary to what half the Internet thinks, the device is amazing. Hard to hold in your puny hands? What did you expect? The thing measures 6.22" by 3.06" -- yes, that's probably the largest thing you're going to carry in your pocket, and yes, if you don't have the genetics to casually grip it in one hand, it's going to be uncomfortable. But you knew this going into it. So why the surprise? Why all the whining? I read this asinine anecdote about trying to take back the iPhone 6 Plus and just wonder at the banality of our first-world problems.

The size complaint seems to be the most flagrant accusation against the iPhone 6 Plus -- but is its size really that big of a deal? What do the majority of people use a device like that for, anyway? Reading? Checking updates? Communicating? The iPhone 6 Plus makes all these activities more enjoyable because there is much more room and flexibility on-screen than ever before. Do you use a Kindle or iPad Mini? Yes, also large devices that need to be held in one (or two hands), that typically are whipped out on a train or bus or couch, and that clearly have been bought by you to make reading or watching a video more enjoyable with a larger size screen. The iPhone 6 Plus? Same thing. Sure, it should probably fit into your pocket for convenience (and that sweet pedometer movement tracking), but why would you complain about the size of its screen?

Only now, after having switched to the larger screen, can I appreciate the beneficial movement towards this kind of device-size future. The iPhone 4s, which I have as a work phone, is ludicrously small in comparison. And I don't think I could go back to using it with as much enjoyment or efficiency after having made the transition to 5.5" -- and that statement is made after having used the iPhone 6 Plus for a mere six days.

Sure, the iPhone 6 Plus isn't without its pitfalls:

• Whether it actually is due to the screen size or not, I find myself having to readjust the screen to its upright UI by tilting the device when extracting it from my pocket more than I ever have before (I usually put the phone in my pocket "upside down" with the camera side pointing down and the glass against my leg; perhaps it's an iOS 8 glitch or just reorientation lag, but this is a bit annoying)
• Reachability (light-tapping the home screen twice to bring the top of the UI to the midway point on the screen) has failed to work a few times, though a restart fixes this; again, likely an iOS 8 glitch. Apparently the now available iOS 8 update fixes this
• One-handed operation isn't as easy as it has been in the past, but it may eventually be a matter of adjusting to new holding habits. Again, I knew this coming into it. And I do most of my typing with two thumbs anyway, so most one-handed arguments are mute in my case

That's about it for complaints. If the aforementioned items are merely glitches, there isn't much to find annoying with this device size. I would assume the transition to the smaller iPhone 6 (4.7" display) will be easier for most people, but small hands will always struggle with one-handed operation. Until we see the long roadmap of new iPhone models slowly reveal itself over the coming years, we won't know if Apple decides to stick with these size options, but if the sales figures from this past week are any indication, they likely will continue with these lines for a while. All we can do now is adjust our daily rhythms, enjoy the extra real estate, and look forward to the super small Apple Watch approaching next year.

When I originally saw the pre-release poster for the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune on a February visit to the Music Box theater in Chicago, I was excited. The prominant visual -- a colorful, wildly insectoid starship design -- immediately captured my interest. The subject matter, paired with a director with whom I've only once been aquainted via Holy Mountain, intrigued me all the more. I didn't even know anyone else had attempted to bring Dune to the big screen, let alone failed. I made a note to see the film in theaters, but alas, didn't get around to seeing it until a few days ago. But even several months post-release, the film satisfied most of my appetite for what it had teased earlier this year.

But let me back up a bit here. First things first: Dune). Written in 1965 by American author Frank Herbet, Dune is often claimed (and probably statistically so) as the world's bestselling science fiction novel. Though I'd retrospectively consider myself fairly well-read in science fiction, I actually did not read Dune growing up. I remember buying a copy of it when I was in high school at the Ridgedale Barnes & Noble, which was my suburban destination for collecting all my books when I lived in Minnesota. I'm sure I bought it alongside a few other novels that, for whatever reason, took precedence. Ever since, it fell by the wayside, traveling with me to college in Chicago, sitting smugly on that black little bookshelf, and subsequently making its way to each and every apartment thereafter. I remember reading through a few chapters on a number of occasions over the years, but kept putting it down in lieu of something else. Perhaps I just didn't want to delve into something I anticipated to be overly complex and challenging, or perhaps it just wasn't the right time. So I kept putting it off.

Until I saw the poster for Jodorowsky's Dune. Why that set me off on scouring through my bookshelf and diving right into the first book (of the canonical six), I'll never quite know, but I tore through it I did. Up to that point, the only exposure I had with Dune was David Lynch's much-derided adaptation from 1984, and this was probably more than fifteen years ago. I saw it with no context and as much as I can remember, it was awful — especially compared to the popcorn sci-fi of Star Wars. The book, however, is turned out to be phenomenal, and as you can imagine, I immediately continued reading through the subsequent books in the series. It's one of those tales that grows better with its sequels, both holistically and individually (yes, I think some of the sequels are better than the first one, which, in retrospect, is really just a prologue to a grander story). My memory tells me that David Lynch's film is a loose, semi-unfaithful adaptation of the book, but I'm definitely going to re-watch it now with more informed context. Knowing the complexities of the book, I see why cinematically adapting it, or its sequels, is a monumental challenge.

All the more reason I came to watch the documentary, Jodorowsky's Dune, with enthusiastic optimism. If there's one guy that actually could pull off the more spiritual, metaphysical elements of the book, it's Alejandro Jodorowsky. A Chilean-French filmmaker and, let's be honest, all-around artist (he acts, he writes, he conducts music, he even produces comics), Jodorowsky is best known for his surreal films El Topo and The Holy Mountain. Like reading Dune, it took me a few tries to get through The Holy Mountain. Surreal is definitely the right way to describe it -- watching that film gives you the impression Jodorowsky never really understood the norms of film language (e.g., how to build cohesive sentences like other filmmakers). Instead, he created experiences to be felt through film -- like the poetry-version of stringing together words. The most similar experience I've had in watching a film in recent years is Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (highly recommended, one of the best of 2014), which follows a flowing, experiential pace of visuals and light storytelling. The Holy Mountain moves at a bizarre pace, throwing colorful scenes, characters, and situations for you to mull over for weeks after watching (a footless, handless dwarf, flies covering a face, a man pooping gold, a wax statue sent into the sky with balloons). Fun, memorable stuff.

So again, this is the guy who apparently wanted to tackle science fiction's biggest story. But rather than focusing on the heart of what makes Dune so visceral in the telling, it instead rewards audiences by unexpectedly capturing the beautiful plight of a dedicated artist who loves his craft and has unbridled enthusiam for film. He states early on in the film that he never read Dune before deciding on doing the film (he said a friend told him the book was fantastic and that was all it took -- that would be his next film!). I'm not sure if he actually ended up reading even after he started production on it, but I can say this: he had a propensity to identify an amazing cast of actors, producers, and artists to contribute to the film. Salividor Dali, Orsen Welles, Mick Jagger, H.R. Giger. You can see where this is going.

And as you'd expect, he had high hopes for his version of Dune, regardless of how much or how little it connected to Frank Herbert's original story. After a while, I gave up on caring how far from the original story he drifted and instead just sat back to enjoy the unwavering dedication to his fantasy. In doing so, it's clear that he seems to have captured the spirit of Dune on a visually astounding level. In his own words, he wanted to create "a film that gives LSD hallucinations -- without taking LSD"; after seeing the proof across 3,000 illustrations, storyboards, reference materials, and script snippets, I have no doubt this film would have felt like a jolt of something ethereal. He tasked his carefully curated artists with the creation of ships and landscapes that, while never featured or alluded to in the book, capture a creative depth beyond Herbert's original universe-building. In a sense, this is what every author secretly hopes a cinematic adaptation of his or her novel amounts to: inventively taken in a direction suitable for film. This one in particular was so and so dramatically different from the source material, it would have been like seeing Dune written by another dimension’s Frank Herbert.

But there were some truly remarkable concepts Jodorowsky attempted to pull off in addition to the radical interpretation — things that film enthusiasts will greedily enjoy seeing unfold via storyboards. Take, for instance, the opening sequence that he wanted to achieve: a continuous shot longer than Orson Welles' Touch of Evil sequence; a shot that by the looks of the original storyboard would have been nearly impossible to pull off in the 70s. It's a shot that essentially traverses an entire galaxy, flying by battles, pirate raids on spice transport ships, asteroid fields, eventually leading all the way to a close-up on two figures. Ambitous stuff -- only recently have films attempted to create something like this, and, of course, they rely entirely on computer generated imagery.

While the film is a terrific homage to artistry and the madness that drives it, its commentary on the influence of Jodorowsky's work on the Dune production is presumptuos. Towards the end of the documentary, its creators -- not Jodorowsky -- make bold assertions about the work on Dune influencing nearly everything that followed it, including Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Contact. While I'm sure the production book made its rounds in Hollywood, it likely didn't have that great an influence over the visual direction of what we now know as classic blockbuster pictures.And especially the integrity of equally imaginative creators. If anything, it helped ground some of the bolder ideas that folks like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg struggled to convey in those early years of selling their ideas to studios.

As it stands as a documentary and an homage to the filmmaking process, Jodorowsky's Dune is still an exceptional achievement. I have newfound respect for the director as an artist, as well as for the creators of the actual documentary -- the film has great rhythm, and does a fine job bringing old production illustrations to life in attempting to convery the imaginative reaches of Jodorowsky's grandest vision. We can only hope that someone picks up the spiritual torch and shepherds something akin to taking LSD to the big screen in the near future.

Every time I write about a game it seems like I'm pulling out a dusty box of memories and reminiscing like scratched vinyl. But unless you’re the God Emperor of Dune (sorry, been marathoning through these novels), we look to the past to contextualize the present. Older, canonized games have inextricably become reference anchors for so many of the new ones we play today — So much so that they have become ever more relevant with the direction the industry is tracking towards. Just like cinema, we have a lot to appreciate from the generations before us.

My gaming reverie started earlier this month when I finally completed an apartment move to yet another neighborhood in Chicago. Packing your entire life into boxes and plastic bins, stacking carefully padded glassware, and knocking on wood that nothing goes wrong over the course of 24 hours is an exercise in stress no one should submit themselves to more that once every few years. But rediscovering older gaming consoles you have lying around? That's satisfying.

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I actually had just brought the Super Nintendo to Chicago after my most recent holiday visit to Minnesota. While I hadn't kept a ton of cartridges from that era, all of my favorites are with me now. Unfortunately, one of the two controllers didn't make it, so I had to order a new one off eBay for the girlfriend. But having everything set up at our new apartment has us itching to play some retro titles.

But it wasn't just packing and unpacking the Super Nintendo that had me clamoring for a return to 1990s gaming -- it was that expected blip in Internet service from Comcast (until a rep came out to "properly install" things) that had us removed entirely from connecting the various devices like Apple TV and PS3 to their digital ecosystems. So it was a nice, quiet lull that brought out the analog devices for a good time: the record player, iTunes libraries, books, Super Nintendo.

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Luckily, my Super Nintendo had been cared for kindly over the last decade. I remember when I first purchased it, eager to own my first console through cold, hard saved cash from the piggy bank. (It was also a way to play some single player games without having to visit my neighbor’s house.) And so I made the investment back in 1994 as a nine year old kid. With the console all set up and Zelda: A Link to the Past sticking out of the top of the cartridge bay, I was ready to burn a hole into the couch that summer.

From the sizzling sounds of rain pattering on Link’s ludicrously small house to the heroic MIDI score infusing my sword twirls and dashes across the plains of Hyrule, the game would be one of many that captured my imagination. Revisiting the game today, its world(s) still feels huge and dense, its story every bit as poignant a fairy tale, and its challenge an escalating symphony. As you can already guess, I consider this game —among other genre-defining titles from that era — as the best kind of game experience you can have. And why is that?

The Pinnacle of 2D Imagination

Most of us can remember screaming at the screen when having steered Mario into one of the many deadly hazards along his single-plane universe in the original Super Mario Bros. on the first Nintendo console. The same challenges arrived with his newest outing (circa 1991), Super Mario World, the premiere release title for the Super Nintendo. But something had changed. While Super Mario 3 for NES, the last game from the first Nintendo era, was superbly imaginative and broad in scope, Super Mario World took things in an optically different direction. Something about the graphics, colors, and level depth gave the impression of playing something very different from its predecessors. It was also the first leap into a new generation of consoles, and so the expectation of something incredible and new was front and center in our minds.

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In actuality, the console was more than just optically more powerful than its predecessor, but it was the small things that made the most immediate impact. Notably, the original Nintendo console had an available color palette of just 48 colors and 6 grays. This severely limited what developers could paint on the screen. When 1991 came around, the Super Nintendo was able to pull colors from the 15-bit RGB color space, which meant a total of 32,768 possible colors could be represented on-screen. This change alone allowed for a shocking leap in terms of character sprite depth and environment variation. Microprocessors and RAM aside, the other biggest optical change was the resolution: the NES could output 256 by 240 pixels, but the SNES supported a number of resolutions, most notably 512 × 448 and 512 × 478. Obviously, the colors and resolution were significant enough to make the Super Nintendo era of gaming remarkably more detailed than that of the previous generation of consoles, and, leaping forward to now, became the reference point for so many of the “retro”-styled indie games on mobile, PC, and download centers of current generation consoles.

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The emergence (and solidification) of genres was also an important development during this era of gaming. Sure, genres were dappled in prior to this, but the following games gave definition to them more so than any other period (and yes, I’m skipping over the parallel evolution of PC games):

• Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (action RPG/adventuring)
• Super Metroid; Castlevania IV (adventure platforming)
• Final Fantasy VI ("III"); Chrono Trigger; Mario RPG (RPG)
• Super Mario World; Donkey Kong Country (platforming)
• Super Star Wars series (movie tie-ins done right)
• Turtles in Time; R-Type III (home arcarde ports)
• Street Fighter II Turbo; Killer Instinct (fighting)
• Starfox (simulated 3D flight gaming)

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Sure, the list isn't exhaustive, but you get the idea. And if you take a look at the inventory of indie games modeled in the retro fashion of parallax scrolling, character sprites, and MIDI musical scores, so many of them borrow designs and aesthetics from these games. The recently released Shovel Knight is a great example. Even though it was actually modeled off NES, albeit with a much larger color palette, it far exceeds other efforts in this scene and unequivocally captures the magic of old school platforming. But its basis is grounded in the foundation that games like Super Mario World, Mega Man, and Super Metroid set forth before it: We recognize elements like world maps, item collection/usage, and level progressing because they've been imbedded into gaming culture as jazz standards to structure.

Another example of this is Braid, an indie game that was released several years ago. Aside from its pedantic storyline, the game revisited the platforming genre so many of us were familiar with, but twisted its notable elements (e.g., the ability to unwind your actions and scroll backwards in time). It also approached retro gaming with a bit of a deconstructionist lens (ahem, the ending). The graphical approach with this game was, as you'd expect, very much rooted in the styling of so many Super Nintendo era games. Sprites, color palette, two dimensional scrolling, basic control schemes. It's all there, and it's all easily accessible. Thus, the recognizable elements were in place for us to calibrate certain expectations, and our surprise and enjoyment stemmed mostly from the way the game approached those elements.

Accessibility & Enjoyment

Now that I bring it up, perhaps accessibility is one of huge defining characteristics of this era in gaming as well. Most Super Nintendo games, along with its straightforward controller, can pipe picked up and played by just about anyone (based on my limited empirical evidence and general assumptions). The same can’t be said of what I'd consider a modern-era genre: first-person shooters. Two analog sticks controlling two different axis in a three-dimensional space? Not going to happen for some people. It's also an incredibly different control scheme for mobile touch devices, which is one of the reasons so many developers design games in the mostly 2D space -- easy for folks to control with essentially two inputs (your thumbs). Any game or classic title port that requires a virtual gamepad be embedded in the lower part of your touchscreen immediately complicates things. A modern-day console genre is going to be so much more difficult to implement and play that it confounds me that so many developers try.

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My last remark on this whole thing is budget. While this can be argued ad nauseum, I believe it is likely much cheaper (and more developer friendly) to create a game styled in the Super Nintendo era than it is to build something on a three-dimensional scale with a modern game engine. The expectations of graphics, sounds, physics, and interactivity are so much more relaxed with most 2D gaming configurations that I believe we will continue to see games modeled after the classic era for years to come.

So. With booting up that old console comes more than just a nostalgic session of gaming. It opens up colorful, genuinely fun and accessible games that you have to physically clamp down into a bay inside an old beige box and flick to power on; it removes you from all the modern distractions (notifications, online buddy lists, co-op matches with assholes half a world away); it requires you to sit a little bit closer to the screen so that the the controller cord isn't stretched too far to rip the consoles out of your media center; and it beckons you to sit next to another human being, trading turns or competing against one another, in the same room, on the same couch, for hours into the night.