September 21, 2018
Dear Everyone:
When did “Tap”
become “Swipe”?
Last June I acquired a new
smartphone,
because I knew the “old” one was getting ready to expire on me at the
most inconvenient of all times possible.
Like the oven that conks out on
Easter Sunday when
you have two dozen people coming for dinner.
A few weeks after I bought the new phone, I received a call from my
personal financial advisor, “Percy”; and I discovered that I didn’t know
how to answer the call. I
kept tapping on the green phone icon, but nothing happened and “Percy”
went to voicemail.
I had already gone online and found the phone’s User Guide and
downloaded it to my
PC.
So I looked up Making and Receiving Calls and discovered that you don’t “tap” the
green phone icon anymore; now you “swipe” it.
Seriously, who thought that was a great idea?
A couple of weeks ago, at the
Martinez
Senior Center, one of the ladies, “Page”, complained that she couldn’t
answer incoming calls anymore.
She had a new phone and it wouldn’t let her answer a call until
she entered her
PIN. By which time, of
course, she had missed the call.
Naturally, I tried to help her.
I can’t stop myself. If I
hear a question, I answer it.
Unless I don’t know the answer, in which case, I get curious and
start doing research. After
all, that’s essentially what I did for a living for nearly 40 years.
I went into my own phone and poked around in various places.
I didn’t find the answer for “Page”, but I did succeed in
screwing my phone up. It
used to be that it would show “Alerts” on the homepage as soon as I
activated it. Now it
doesn’t. It just shows an
icon that indicates “You have ‘Alerts’ waiting for you to look at them.
Probably terribly important!”
Of course, most of the “Alerts” are useless information anyway; like,
“Here’s a
You Tube video
I’m sure you’re just dying to
see…” But every time
something comes in, the phone makes a musical kind of “chirp” to let me
know that something “important” has arrived.
Now I can’t see what’s so important.
However, while poking around some more, I discovered that by “swiping”
down from the screen top, all those “Alerts” show up in a little window
that I never knew was there.
More importantly, the little window has a “Clear” button that I can
“tap” to make all that useless knowledge vanish, just like magic.
Which brings us back to the original question:
When did this switch from “tap” to “swipe” take place?
Obviously, some time between now and three years ago, when I
bought the last smartphone.
And why did it happen?
I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet that some programmer was trying to “fix”
something and replaced “Tap” with “Swipe” to accomplish his objective.
And was so pleased with the result that he just had to use it
again and again.
The thing about programmers is that they love to copy and reuse code.
Honestly, I used to do it myself.
When my boss announced that, “We’re going to have a
website, and you’re
going to do it”, I had to learn how to design web pages.
That meant learning how to code in
HTML (Hypertext Markup
Language).
Once I got a page working, it was always easier to copy it and use that
to start a new page. In
fact, we made up “template” pages that we could quickly copy and reuse
for whatever we needed. Of
course, the downside of that was when you forgot you were using a
“template” and made dozens of changes before you realized it.
Oops! So now you made
a new “template” from a previous one to replace the one you just messed
up.
Before you knew it, you were using a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy
and, ultimately, things got lost in translation.
Some pages would be wider, or narrower, than the others and that
would mean that information that was supposed to be in the same place
each time started to migrate.
Then someone came up with the idea of using what they called “Cascading
Style Sheets”. This was
basically a kind out “outline” that all pages could follow, so you
didn’t have to keep making copies.
All you needed to change was the content within the “outline”
and, just like magic, all the pages were the same.
Such a time saver.
Meanwhile, back at the Senior Center, “Page” found out that her problem
was that she was supposed to “swipe” the green phone icon on her phone,
not “tap” it. Which takes us
back to Step 1.
Love, as always,
Pete
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