
Whatever works for you - tbassetto
http://www.marco.org/2011/11/28/whatever-works-for-you
======
yock
I've started adopting a similar soft approach along these lines myself. My
wife and I are Ubuntu Linux users at home, but our families know us as simply
computer savvy. Often enough someone will call us with Windows-specific
questions, which I'll try and answer to the best of my ability; however, when
faced with what sounds like a research project I err on the side of stupidity.

"No, I don't know why your new smartphone won't sync with all three of your
business accounts as well as your personal email."

So far, this kind of answer has been far better received than spending hours
troubleshooting frustrating corner cases from trying to shoehorn off-the-shelf
gadgets into situations they probably weren't meant for anyway. At worst, that
makes me lazy, but I'm okay with that as long as I'm not known as the ill-
tempered son-in-law who won't just help out his aunt and uncle without coping
an attitude.

------
Tashtego
This post demonstrated a sense of humility ("I probably don't know how to
solve your problem") and empathy ("I recognize that your problem is not the
same as my problem") that are often sorely lacking in the community of
software geeks talking about software. Great stuff.

------
srl
Slightly tangential, but it seems to be popular to assume that fanboyism is
universally a bad thing. Which makes sense intuitively, but here's the thing:
I _like_ fanboys.

When I meet a fanboy of something I don't tend to use or like, I make a point
to talk to them as much as possible. It starts off rocky - after all, I'm
coming from a completely different perspective, and to me, everything they're
saying is obviously idiotic. But I persist. I try to get them to convince me
however they can, that they are right. And very frequently, I learn a whole of
new _something_, if I'm not introduced to an entire new way of doing and/or
thinking about things. Worst case is I hone my debating skills. Best case, my
life significantly improves.

Not that fanboyism is always, or even usually, a good thing. In most cases,
it's politest (and easiest!) to stop the argument before it gets to the point
of calling into question the other person's expectations (and I find myself
doing that alot, especially with relatively nontechnical folk). But for me - I
_want_ my expectations to be called into question. And nobody forces me to
refine - and trash - my own ideas as well as the most hard-headed of fanboys.

~~~
daleharvey
I at least, and I think most people, have a distinction between 'fan of' and
'fanboy'

Where the line is that a fan of a something can talk about its virtues and
concede its limits, but a fanboy will gloss over any limitations as irrelevant
/ wrong "its not a bug its a feature"

~~~
dasil003
I have a real problem with the word fanboy because this distinction is rarely
made well in practice. 95% of the time it's hurled as an epithet by someone
who simply disagrees. Even worse, the word is disproportionately used by
people who do not have particularly well-reasoned opinions. So for me, non-
ironic use of the word fanboy flips the bozo bit.

~~~
CausticMango
Agreed; I have long since given up caring about being called a fanboy. I like
what I like and I make no apologies for it.

That's one reason I prefer Apple kit -- I am no longer fascinated by twiddling
with things to get them to work. Apple gear tends to work without twiddling
more than the other crap (though not always). I'm not interested in trying to
get stuff to work that doesn't.

------
luigi
There's a difference between trying to help a guy solve a specific problem and
trying to evangelize him to switch to your preferred platform.

There are tons of resources on the Web devoted to syncing Outlook with the
iPhone. Maybe someone more tech savvy (like Marco) could have helped. Instead
he said he "couldn't help him". He really meant "I don't want to try to help
you".

~~~
voxmatt
I think you're misreading the whole thrust of the article. What Marco was
getting at was that he can't help him in light of his (Outlook user's)
expectations. The article is saying (1) Marco has a use pattern that works
well for Marco, (2) that use pattern could be pushed on someone else in a way
that fixes the user's problem as Marco sees it, (3) but Marco has come to the
realization that the problem lies with the user's personal use pattern
combined with his expectations for the technology. I think that's really
insightful.

If you let go of the idea that you can change (or that it's worth the effort
to change) everyone's use patterns, then you have to accept that some use
patterns simply don't have solutions that meet the user's expectations. And in
those situations, it's best not to fight the user--let them work it out.
Hopefully, in the end, they find something that works for them.

~~~
luriel
> but Marco has come to the realization that the problem lies with the user's
> personal use pattern combined with his expectations for the technology. I
> think that's really insightful.

No, the real problem lies with the technology over-promising and under-
delivering.

There is no reason why the problems the user was experiencing should exist,
other than that software quality is appalling.

------
orenmazor
adding my ten-ish year history of supporting other people (I'm also pushing
30), I've learned this one fact: trying to help other people will frequently
result in my taking ownership of ALL of their problems in their eyes.

which seems like a really jerk-like perspective to take, and it is a little
bit.

~~~
greggman
This is why I no longer fix most of my family's computer problems. My dad pays
some guy to re-install windows about once every 18 months or so. I don't
really know how to help him without becoming his personal IT slave so I just
politely say "I don't know"

~~~
orenmazor
My dad luckily takes care of his own computer problems. I used to support my
grandmother.

You learn a great deal about yourself and technology after you spend 15
minutes trying to explain the concept of scrollbars to an 80 year old.

------
JoelMcCracken
This is important.

We are all different. Human life is full of tradeoffs, and some of those
tradeoffs lead to exclusions, and some of those exclusions may be untenable to
some, etc.

I like and use Apple, Emacs, etc, but I can certainly see why others might
choose not to use them. They aren't wrong. They're just different.

------
toddheasley
My wife's friend recently moved from a large city, where she didn't have a
car, to live with her boyfriend in a smaller town. It's a smaller town without
much public transit. My wife's friend knows how to drive, but her boyfriend's
car has a manual transmission. On a recent visit, the friend is complaining
that her boyfriend won't teach her how to drive his car. Being proud of the
fact that I (barely) know how to drive a stick, I volunteer to teach her. Her
boyfriend doesn't object, so out to the car we go. I drive to a nearby empty
parking lot and trade seats with my wife's friend. She's ready to learn.

"The pedal to the left of the brake is the clutch. Push it all the way to the
floor," I begin. She takes her left foot off the brake and pushes in the
clutch...

~~~
WildUtah
Wait, why was her left foot on the brake? Is she a leg amputee? Are you in
Ireland or Japan or some other tiny island where everything is on the wrong
side?

~~~
nl
_Are you in Ireland or Japan or some other tiny island where everything is on
the wrong side?_

Australia is pretty large...

78 countries (28% of the worlds traffic) drive on the left [1]. These include
countries like India, Pakistan and Indonesia with fairly significant
populations.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-
hand_traffic#Ju...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-
hand_traffic#Jurisdictions_with_left-hand_traffic)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> 78 countries (28% of the worlds traffic) drive on the left.

Thanks for data, I didn't realize how many left-driving countries were there;
I thought it was only UK and Australia.

Still, they don't drive on the _right_ side. :).

~~~
toddheasley
I can assure you that this was in the United States.

------
pacomerh
That's fine I hope other people adopt this mentality, and I'm talking fanboys
for whatever platform. Whatever works for you applies to everything, I use the
computer to make music and I know other people who also do the same and use
different platforms and I always see people saying "Oh you should use pro-
tools to really make good music" Can you believe that?, hehe. The operator is
what matters.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
We need to create communities where loud-mouthed, snarky individuals do not
feel welcome. As it is, they're on a great majority of the Internet.

It gets very tiring.

------
barumrho
I agree, but it is good to notice that many people are simply afraid (and not
aware) of alternative solutions. If you can afford to, informing them won't
hurt.

~~~
randomdata
I get a little uncomfortable suggesting technology options to others because
they will often take what I use as the one true option.

I try to choose the technologies that best fit my requirements and workflow,
but that does not necessarily mean it is best for anyone else.

------
allbutlost
Strange. This post was submitted, reached the top and then deleted a couple of
hours ago - I'm not sure if it was deleted by the submitter or not.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3286531>

~~~
MaxGabriel
Quite possibly--as per your link the submitter didn't think the article
represented HN-quality-material, and was 'testing' HN

------
pnathan
The flip side to this is as computer professionals, what we do with a computer
and how we have built our workflow significantly accelerates our work with a
computer.

E.g., easy file versioning and sync is fundamentally a solved problem, if you
are willing to take the initial hit of workflow modification (git, sftp, etc).

So it's okay to teach people how to do it faster and better.

~~~
alextp
This suggests that it's worthwhile to educate the young in not just doing the
same things with computers that everybody knows how to do (Office-style and
web browsing) but inculcating habits (versioning, say) which will make life
much easier in the long run.

This, however, would make the education system not agnostic, and drastically
favor some companies.

~~~
JadeNB
> This, however, would make the education system not agnostic, and drastically
> favor some companies.

Why? Perhaps you mean that there is versioning software, like git, that is so
prevalent that it may be regarded as having dominated the ecosystem, so that
that's what we have to teach; but that seems no different from teaching Java
or, for an even more extreme example, the RSA cryptosystem.

(I know that there are objections to teaching Java, but I've never heard—which
is not to say it doesn't exist!—the complaint that it favours Oracle.)

------
adamio
There's a difference between evangelizing a setup to someone for selfish
reasons (to bring more users hoping developers follow, to make it easier to
troubleshoot), and for reasons the other person just doesn't know or grasp yet
(using POP instead of IMAP is causing your phone and pc to be out of sync)

~~~
Splines
Just to add, I don't mind someone evangelizing their setup, since they may
have solved a problem that I didn't know there was a solution for.

Anything that reduces the "don't know what I don't know" bucket is a good
thing.

------
ishbits
I've been using OpenBSD or FreeBSD or Linux as my primary desktop OS since
about 1996.. As of last week, all my laptop/desktop usage is now Mac OS.

The Linux desktop experience really isn't that much better than it was in the
Helix Gnome days and as I get older I want to fiddle less with my OS, and just
work on some ideas I have brewing.

I should point out that back then I was a kernel hacker type, and my ideas
were kernel based (for work and play). But now they are userland based, and
Mac provides an awesome platform for that without getting in the way.

------
ggwicz
If you're arguing with people over a computer operating system...

...just stop it.

~~~
robryan
It depends if you are arguing with someone like your parents who want to use
Facebook, send email and manage their photos or with someone else who spends
all day using an operating system.

~~~
ggwicz
It just seems like, of all possible things to concern yourself with, what OS
someone is using is like way down the list.

------
xarien
Maybe I'm not reading it correctly, but it seems like a pretty simple issue to
resolve by syncing outlook to gmail / google calendar along with an android
phone... The current email host should be set to forward to gmail and outlook
repointed to gmail as well. If the user wants access to email offline, they
can just enable POP.

Syncing the calendar is even easier...

It seems like he's more interested in working with his preferred tool set than
the best tool set for the job.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Except that syncing anything to Android phones is broken beyond repair (try
syncing an repetitive task with hours specified, e.g. "Every Monday,
18:00-20:00" with Google Calendar app...), as will probably be many things on
the way.

The point (or at least, one of them) of the post is that sometimes user has
constrains coming from his job, personality, or preferred mode of operations,
that will make it impossible to use your particular preferred solution in that
context. It takes some humility to notice that and not evangelize your
particular working habits too much. Also, our technology _is_ broken on that
angle; things simply are not expected to work well with each other from the
start.

~~~
luriel
Syncing anything to anything seems to almost be invariably broken beyond
repair, specially between products made by different companies.

Interoperativity among syncing systems, even following the myriad of
'standards' for this seems to be hopeless.

> Also, our technology is broken on that angle; things simply are not expected
> to work well with each other from the start.

I think this is the core root of the problem, which it seems everyone in this
discussion is ignoring. If Syncing was not so badly broken we wouldn't have
this discussion to begin with (and same goes for most other common problems of
this kind, this is simple stuff that should have worked without a hitch for
ages).

------
gwillen
An important and related issue: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0la5DBtOVNI>

------
Raphael
If all you care about is using Microsoft's contact system (Outlook), then
perhaps you should get a Windows phone. Surely those would sync.

~~~
TeMPOraL
In principle, you should be able to make anything work with anything. Failure
to do that is the problem of our current technology.

People sometimes have strange syncing needs. Example: I spent some time (and
failed, ultimately, due to broken Google Calendar) trying to sync Emacs Org
Mode with Android phone. No, I won't switch from Org Mode to anything web-
based, Emacs is just too convenient for me. No, I won't switch from
SlideScreen to a homescreen with widgets - I love the former and hate the
latter. So I need to accept that, right now, I don't have any working solution
to sync my phone calendar with Org Mode.

------
wisetech
I share the same feelings for this guy.

Recently, I had an argument with my father about uploading photos efficiently:
He got an iPhone4s and took pictures with it. Now my father uses Windows and
does not know much about transferring pictures the right way, instead he does
what he knows–email the picture to yourself. My mother who uses a mac, but
still computer illiterate, wanted to get pictures off his iPhone so she can
post it to her Facebook album. So he goes to his iPhone, selects the picture
and emails it to her gmail account, and does this same process per picture.
After that mom, logs in to her email, clicks on the new message, clicks on
view, then drags the picture from the browser to the desktop. She does this
same process to the rest of the messages.

Now I was there, watching in agony (–_–") (I was called up earlier to find out
how to transfer photos from her cellphone using bluetooth to the Mac. But
unfortunately the cellphone did not allow file transfer using internal memory
unless using a microSD card.)

So back to mom, she noticed that the pics were too small to edit (about 30kb
200x200px). So my dad was about to do the same process again on his iPhone.
Me=Facepalm

To my reaction I said "You are using iCloud are you? Then why don't you just
use Photostream? Whatever pictures you taken automatically syncs with the
computer, no fussing with files/transfers, just select the picture in iPhoto,
edit exposure, then upload to Facebook." I'm not sure if my father was
listening, as he was still selecting and emailing the photos.

I proceeded with setting up with iCloud syncing on the Mac to activate
Photostream, asked for the password, (he didn't say anything, but mom knew
what it was). I then launched iPhoto, clicked on Photostream and pictures
started to come in. "See, isn't that easy. Now mom, pick what picture you
want. You can drag the picture out to the desktop like you always do, or just
use the upload to Facebook button in iPhoto.

Then the internet just halted for a bit, and the 19 of 72 some photos were
only downloaded. My dad said: "I don't like this, you are overcomplicating
this simple task." I was like "WHAT! How on earth am I complicating this, I am
making this simple for you, its less repetitive and more time efficient than
what you are both doing!"

Then I go on about the benefits of Photostream to talking about analogies
regarding data capture/logging pool, Film/Photographer's DSLR workflow, to
data pool auditing workflow.

He said: "What you find simple, is complicated for us. We can work in a linear
fashion however long it can take, and you can work autonomously. Anyway, this
is only a one time thing, I don't need to use Photostream. If I need to use
this everyday, maybe I might but today its not necessary."

~~~

So lesson learned. You can't just force anyone using your methods. It may or
may not work for them even if it sounds stupid to you.

Whatever works for you indeed.

~~~
tuananh
Unlike your father, my dad is really excited about that Photostream feature :)

------
SonicSoul
why is this random post about letting me use whatever setup i want from a guy
i've never heard of on top of HN front page?

although it was written in entertaining fashion, i am still somewhat puzzled.

~~~
MaxGabriel
Marco Arment is from my understanding a leading iOS developer, and a paragon
of what it means to be an iOS developer (His app, Instapaper, has tasteful
design, is easy to use despite offering many features over multiple platforms,
it just works, etc). He also releases a lot of information about instapaper
which yields insights into the iOS market in general (versions of iOS used,
sales by device).

He's become an important tech blogger, too, with several recent front page HN
posts (recently, his review of the Kindle Fire). Given his general support for
Apple products, this post represents an important shift in his perspective.
Maybe its not front-page HN worthy, but you should probably know him.

------
Yhippa
What was the point of this rant? He's going to stop telling people to go all-
Apple and boast his Apple-ness?

~~~
tomstuart
The point is that it's important to realise that not everyone has the same
priorities, or the same constraints, as you do. Marco says he's happy to
relinquish some control in order to have things work the way they're supposed
to, but he recognises that other people may not have the freedom or the desire
to make the same trade-off.

This recognition is called empathy, and it's a useful trait for people
involved in product design, online discussions &c.

~~~
Kylekramer
And I'd buy it more if his actions followed his words. I listened to his
podcast once, and the Android/Google bashing was so pervasive it continued
even to the point they were making fun of it during an ad that mentioned a
company had an Android app (something to the effect of "They even have an
Android app, if you are stuck with an Android"). An ad! People paid money to
his show to have their work/customers belittled.

~~~
endlessvoid94
> People paid money to his show to have their work/customers belittled.

From another perspective, people paid money to his show to hear his opinions.
If he said something you didn't like, I'd hope you decided to stop listening
(or take his opinions into account when choosing technology).

Why else did people pay his show?

------
MatthewPhillips
tldr; it took Marco 30 years to realize some people don't want to only use
Apple.

~~~
fredoliveira
I believe you and I read different articles.

I also believe the best summary for the post is its title: "Whatever works for
you", and a slightly longer version might be "Use whatever works for you, my
advice is meaningless because we're different people". This was more about
_people_ than it is about a specific brand.

------
mthreat
One word: AMEN

