When Good Apps Go Bad [Development]

In precisely a couple of short years we’ve almost forgotten the concept that of ” saving” a document. Close an app? It’s just there. Until it isn’t.

I just got back from a manic 48-hour mental assault to select up the used Land Cruiser I’ll be driving up and down the hemisphere next summer. (More on that later!) It was a last-second decision with little room for bags, so I didn’t even take my iPad-just my trusty Apple Bluetooth Keyboard.

A few hours later, smokily ensconced in a Motel 6, I leaned over the Elements text editor app I’ve been using on both my iPhone and iPad lately. It syncs up with Dropbox, making it-in theory-impervious to accidental deletes, even though you lose your phone. To never worry about losing files is a writer’s dream.

I had my contacts out soaking, so even leaned over the screen with the text jacked the entire technique to Old Man 24 Point and even then i’ll barely make it out. It turned out to be a pleasing approach to write, less fascinated about the screen than…anyway, you get the postulate. I poured a pleasant little bit of words about Montana, the road, and letting things go onto the phone. I was pretty pleased to send it out so anyone who was interested could read it, especially those of you who sent me well wishes and advice.

I attached it to an email, looking forward to the trademark iPhone whoooosh. I didn’t hear it, but I was on a crappy Edge connection, so I just set it aside and passed right out.

The next day Joe Brown texted me to envision in and I asked him if he’d posted the story yet. ” I didn’t get anything,” he texted back. Stupid Mail.app, I assumed.

But after I went back into Elements and saw just more than one lines at the pinnacle-notes I had added hours before I wrote the story about an asshole hotel operator in Oregon-my heart sank. Maybe it was in Dropbox? Nope. Same version. (I later checked after I got home to look if Dropbox had cached a previous version. No dice.)

I went through every setting I may find in Elements hoping there was some kind of version control inside the app. No dice. 800 words of confidence-restoring road diary gone. And not even a filesystem to find out.

I don’t wish to rail too hard on Elements. I sent a support email noting the bug-” Your app ate my story ” -and I’m sure the developer will fix it soon. Mistakes happen.

But there was a selected feeling of helplessness when the computer that I depend upon to just work just didn’t. When a computer application crashes and loses your work, there’s somewhat component to yourself which you can blame. I must have saved. When an app that doesn’t even find a way of saving-nor an area filesystem to work with notwithstanding you wanted to-it should leave you feeling stranded. With a closed system like the iPhone, the one options I had besides hoping-and-praying were hyper-technical attempts to dig through an image of the phone’s flash memory for a previous state or some other fantasy that’s completely beyond my ken within the first place.

One of the things that the closed iPhone makes possible is a undeniable level of bullet-proofing against bugs and errors. Not that it’s bug-free-it’s still software made by humans driven by a dying martinet-but one of the crucial complicating factors were smoothed out by stricture.

It’s why I really like the iPhone and its attendant software. It feels more tangible than most software, not just physically, but in responsiveness and persistence. I really like not concerned with saving.

But the alternative side of that knife is that after an app dies, loses your data, you’re really just out of luck. There’s no troubleshooting, no rip-off $50 data recovery indulgence, no asking a wiser friend to make the bad bug depart.

So I assume if I’m writing to anyone, it’s not to other users, but to the developers of those apps you’re asking us to trust. When you’re writing software we’re being trained to treat as omnipotent, the margin for error is readily diminishing.

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This post is tagged: hemisphere, hotel operator, land cruiser, little-bit, previous version, stupid mail