The Apps You Will Know
My relationship with a bunch of Apps + a good album name + obligatory something about Coronavirus
Tech/software/SaaS offers us a lot of free tastes, almost in the way that drug dealers we learned about in grade school never actually do. I never met a drug dealer who really gave out anything for free, but I have met Adobe Acrobat DC, who gives you a 14 day trial, attempting to get you hooked on a subscription.
Acrobat is a piece of software that lets you create/edit/manipulate PDFs…everybody’s uh, favorite way to save a document. Just like you need a proprietary piece of software just to write a document, same with PDFs.
I don’t know when Adobe decided to do this but instead of paying like $500 one-time for their suite of apps but now you can purchase them a la cart for a monthly fee. I don’t know if this is *better* for the consumer but I doubt it and it doesn’t feel like it because we don’t get to own anything anymore.
"For companies, it’s a no-brainer. For the consumer, I suspect that in most cases they are paying more than they need to."
When job hunting, I had to do all the tedious hair-pulling things one does when working in a somewhat-creative-show-and-prove-yourself industry by cobbling a ton of work samples together and inevitably ended up having to tweak them and go back to the drawing board when they weren’t getting me closer to gaining employment.
When I had a company issued computer, I had Microsoft Office and Adobe and probably a ton of other stuff I never utilized and when I turned in my gun and badge, they were cool enough to let me buy my laptop since my Macbook bit the dust but of course had to disable it from the org thus removing all the nifty subscriptions.
At my new job, I use a learning enablement platform to help try and teach employees how to do their job well that also sort of tries to become my friend by giving me helpful advice in the place of the ol ‘Lorem Ipsum’ that I’ll splice in throughout the rest of this that look and sound like:
“To spark creativity, feed your brain material like you're cramming for a tough test. Then stop thinking about the problem you want to solve. Go surfing or take a leisurely walk. Research shows that letting your mind wander fosters creativity.”
Microsoft and Google most certainly and definitely want my money but they’ve done a pretty (dare I say benevolent? no, nevermind) decent thing by making web-based versions of their ‘Office Apps’ for free, in a limited-yet-functional capacity.
No creative process is truly complete until it manifests a tangible reality. Whether your idea is an action or a physical creation, bringing it to life will likely involve the hard work of iteration, testing, and refinement.
I mentioned I needed Adobe Acrobat to put together my work samples and when the free trial ran out and I *almost* ponied up the $20 fee just to edit some stuff one more time, I found a free tool online that did exactly what I had needed (putting images together and saving them as a PDF) and you’ll never believe who targeted advertisements there (hint, it was Adobe Acrobat) with banners saying vague shit like “PDF like a BOSS.” I get it’s their job to make money hand over fist but they also are completely morally bankrupt people.
Just be wary of perfectionism. Push yourself to share your creations with others. By maintaining an open stance, you’ll be able to learn from their feedback. Consider their responses new material that you can draw from the next time you’re embarking on a creative endeavor.
I was fortunate to get a new car a few years ago but will be paying it off until I die and it came with a built in Pandora radio button and while I plan on driving it until the wheels fall off it’s hilarious how instantly outdated one of the big buttons on my display has become. I guess Pandora has this partnership with a lot of different car makers and when the fold in like another year or two I will still have to be reminded of them as long as my Honda can survive.
Every creative endeavor requires that you take risks. If you try and don't succeed, you've still learned something. It took Thomas Edison more than 10,000 tries to invent a viable lightbulb. You're not failing. You're discovering what doesn't work.
After losing my job one of the biggest joys of work my team recognized was, well each other and our group chat. To keep it going we made a free Slack channel and one day I got hit with this message across half my screen. It took like 72 hours for it to go away and funny enough the ‘not now’ nor ‘X’ button worked and the only thing that did was the ‘See Upgrade Options’ to a paid plan lol.
Before we got locked (see also, trapped) into a cable-internet bundle, I used to use YouTubeTV for cable access and honestly it kicked ass, I had very few complaints and it was sad but not surprising to see that evil media empire Sinclair (you remember, the ones responsible for this dystopian shit) got into a battle with YouTubeTV over rights and in the end Sinclair gets theirs while YouTubeTV subscribers get shit and don’t get to watch some of their favorite teams play sports which is the reason a lot of us signed up in the first place.
It’s also found that meditation helps you spot and solve problems in creative ways. It promotes divergent thinking that gets novel ideas flowing. According to these studies, meditation also makes you more open to considering new solutions. Time to breathe.
In my times with the ‘Apps’ I’ve found they are sort of like people: pretty essential to survival, some are good, some will sort of be your friend, most of them just want your money and few you will heavily depend on and love.
Substack allows you to comment now, so I encourage you, dear reader, to share your thoughts and relationship with the apps in your life.
I’m definitely late on this one but one of my favorite bands, Black Lips, released a very good album last month. If I had to put their music in a box I guess I’d describe it as a ‘southern punk’ but this one in particular has a huge return to more southern twang-y music but perhaps my favorite part of their album is the title which is something I don’t think has ever been my favorite aspect of an album but it’s “Sing in a World That’s Falling Apart” and while I think about my writing or what it is that I am even doing here, it feels like writing in a world that’s falling apart but at least having some fun doing it.
To close out on a more positive note:
“The spread of coronavirus could be fuelled by patients reluctant to seek care because of the expense of the US healthcare system. Almost 18m Americans did not have insurance in 2018, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a healthcare research organisation.
Even those patients with insurance might struggle to pay their contributions to their care — so-called deductibles or co-pays — as almost 29 per cent were classified as “underinsured” in 2018, according to a Commonwealth Fund survey.”
Stay corona-free and more importantly, sucker-free.