To Beta or Not to Beta?

It happens every year like clockwork: On a warm Monday in June, Apple executives kick off the Worldwide Developers Conference by announcing a slew of new features coming to their products in the fall. And as soon as the keynote is over, countless fans rush to download in-progress versions of the updates to try them out for themselves. Welcome to beta season.

I’ve long been among the rabid nerds who just can’t wait to get my hands on all the latest features. I still remember the days when I had to pay a fee through some sketchy website and submit my IMEI number in order to download an early version of iOS 6. Beta testing has been part of my summer routine for over a decade.

Then last year, something unimaginable happened. I watched the keynote, heard about the new features coming to my favorite devices, and… didn’t download the betas. It’s not that I wasn’t thrilled about the updates. In fact, last year’s additions to iPadOS were the most exciting in years. But I made the decision to stay on the stable, public operating systems rather than spend my summer testing out the new and shiny.

It honestly surprised me that I made it through the whole summer without caving. There were points where I was tempted, for sure. But I survived. Ultimately, I made it to the fall and got to experience the finished updates alongside the general public. After hearing my friends talk about the betas for months, finally getting access to the new features myself felt like Christmas morning.

That experience, along with spending a significant amount of time using TestFlight versions of Mastodon apps early this year during that whole boom, led me to become beta-averse. I’m currently running only public release versions of all the software on my devices, both operating systems and apps. No OS betas. No TestFlight betas. No TestFlight app, even. I’m on the normie train, I guess.

But still, I’m tempted. It feels like everyone I follow on social media is living in the future thanks to beta software, and I’m stuck in the past. That leaves me conflicted.

As I’m going round and round trying to decide whether or not the betas are for me, I figured I might as well write down my thought process and share it. When it comes to the question of whether or not to test beta software, there are several pros and cons on both sides in my mind.

The Pros of Beta Testing

• Fun. Getting to experience the latest and greatest before anyone else is undeniably an enjoyable experience. I know I’m a nerd, but few things beat the thrill of installing a beta one version of iOS for me.

• Being part of the conversation. There’s so much to talk about in these updates, and the chatter goes on all summer long as people form opinions, discover tiny details, and share their experiences. Beta talk dominates my social feeds from June to September.

• Feeling included. While anyone can test out Apple’s beta software with a simple checkbox, a small minority of users actually do. Being part of that group offers a different experience from what most people have with their devices. It’s not an exclusive club, but it is one that feels cool to be in.

• Impacting future updates. Apple is very welcoming of feedback from testers, to the point of including the Feedback app in every beta version of their operating systems. It’s nice to send in bug reports or feature requests and know that you’re helping make the software better in a small way.

The Cons of Beta Testing

• Bugs. Betas are by definition incomplete software, and sometimes—especially in the earliest versions—there can be some glitches that make day-to-day use difficult.

• Battery life. There are few things worse than being stuck with a dead phone when you need to communicate with someone. Beta software typically isn’t focused on optimizing battery life, so it typically suffers until the public release.

• Inaccessible apps. Some apps, like banking apps and games, check your device’s operating system every time you open them and lock out unrecognized versions to prevent fraud and cheating. I’ve never personally lost access to my banking app due to a beta, but I know several people who have, and I’ve definitely spent a whole summer annoyed that I was unable to play Pokémon Go.

• An incomplete experience. Many of the new features that are being tested are social features, which means they require other people to be on the betas as well. Some of the updates I’m looking forward to most like shared password groups and Find My item sharing aren’t useful to me now because the people I want to share with aren’t beta testers. By the time the features are released to everyone, I might have already forgotten about them and moved on. (It’s happened before. 😬)

The Pros of Not Beta Testing

• Stability. No betas means no beta bugs. That’s not to say that every update Apple releases is perfect, but your chances are a lot better with a public release than with a beta one.

• Anticipation. Rather than Apple’s big updates being old news by mid-July, I get to spend the summer looking forward to their release in September. Waiting to experience the new features myself is part of the fun.

• Being on track with the general public. It feels like everyone I interact with online is a beta tester, but the truth is that the majority of the people I know won’t get the latest updates until they’re publicly available. It’s enjoyable getting the chance to see the updates through their eyes.

• Experiencing Apple’s software as intended. As cool as the new features are, they’re often unfinished during the beta cycle. A big part of the reason I didn’t try the betas last year was because I wanted my first run with Stage Manager to be in its completed form. Trying to use incomplete features over the summer can be frustrating and turn people off to them before they’re even fully baked.

The Cons of Not Beta Testing

• FOMO. This is the worst part of not being on the beta train. It feels like my friends are having a fun and totally separate experience without me.

• Less of an opportunity to offer feedback. Apple listens to feedback year-round, but the beta cycle is a critical time and the best chance to have your input heard.

• Not seeing features as they develop. There’s something intriguing about seeing a new feature start from bare bones and grow into its fullest form. Without beta testing, you’re only seeing that through the eyes of others, not your own.

• A less fun summer. By not jumping on the betas, you’re trading exhilaration for stability. Three months of reading other people’s opinions on the updates just isn’t as enjoyable as forming and sharing them yourself.

That’s a lot to consider, and maybe I’m the only one who cares so much about this stuff. But it’s a process I go through every year, and the conclusion I come to isn’t always the same.

Will I stay strong this year and resist the beta temptation? Or will I give in and have fun with my fellow Apple nerds? Only time will tell, but at least I’ve got this handy list to refer back to as I spend my summer sitting uncomfortably on the fence.

Are you testing Apple’s beta software this summer? What are the factors you consider when deciding whether or not to press the install button? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, on Mastodon, or on Threads. Thanks for reading!

Threads

There’s a new social network in town! It’s called Threads, and it comes to us courtesy of Instagram (owned, of course, by Facebook).

This new venture is the company’s take on microblogging (think Twitter, but with slightly longer posts). Threads is primarily text-based and encourages conversation rather than one-way broadcasting. And since it allows users to register their existing Instagram accounts, a lot of people have signed up.

Having used Threads for just a little while, I already get the impression that this has the potential to replace Twitter for the general public in a way no other social network has. It makes me happy to see not only my nerdy friends on there, but also less tech-inclined people whom I’d never expect to see on Mastodon or even Twitter these days. There are lot of celebrities, brands, and public figures there, too. Threads might just be the next big thing.

It still has a ways to go. The app is missing some basic features like hashtags, the ability to see if someone is following you, and a non-algorithmic timeline. Plus it’s not as accessible as it should be by a long shot. But based on the amount of activity and enthusiasm I’m seeing for Threads, I’d say it’s off to a solid start.

The addition I’m looking forward to most is federation. Most users won’t notice or care, but Threads is unlike other social media platforms we’re used to in that it’s built to interconnect with other networks like Mastodon. The promise is that “soon,” users will be able to follow each other across different platforms, which means I’ll get to follow my friends on Threads from my Mastodon account in my preferred app Mona. That’s a dream scenario for me, and I can’t wait for it to become a reality.

In the meantime, I’m having fun trying out Threads and seeing just how many people jump onboard. If you’ve signed up, let’s follow each other and get some threads going!

31

The first year of my 30s is complete! It was a great one, but I have a feeling 31 is going to be even better. This has been a year of preparation: for the future, for the next phase is in the life of our family, for parenthood. And all of that preparation is soon going to pay off.

I can’t wait to see what the next year brings. My life is certainly a blessed one, and I’m so thankful to every one of you for being a part of it.

A New Home for My Domains

One thing I didn’t know before building my first website is that every site is made up of two parts. The first is the content itself, which consists of text, images, and other files that combine to show you what the author published. This blog post is an example of my website’s content, and it comes to you from my web host, Squarespace.

The other key element of a website is its domain name (sometimes just called a domain). That’s the address you type into your browser to get to the content. These usually end in .com, .net, .co.uk, or something similar. For the blog, it’s devondundee.com. In order for a website to be accessible, it needs both content and a domain name.

For years, I’ve purchased all of my domain names through Google Domains. It’s the cheapest option I’ve found, and it comes with a bunch of great features like private registration and email forwarding that other providers charge extra for. Domains is the only Google service that I use other than YouTube, and I’ve never loved running my website through them, but it’s always been the best solution for me.

That is, until Google recently announced that they would be shutting down the service for good and selling their domain name business to none other than Squarespace. I was actually excited by this news. I’ve been hosting websites on Squarespace for eight years years and have had an amazing experience with the company. Plus, this is an opportunity to consolidate all of my web services, both hosting and domain names, into one central place.

So rather than wait around for Google and Squarespace to move my domains for me, I took the initiative and started transitioning them myself. Moving a domain name from one provider to another is a simple process that I’ve done before. But I had never bought one from Squarespace before, and there are some differences between the way the two companies handle them, so I was curious to see how it would go.

It was mostly a smooth experience, but there were a couple of bumps along the way. I started with the domain name for my dad’s company, where I help manage the website. I purchased a year of service for the domain on Squarespace, then I went to Google to approve the transfer. Within a few minutes, everything had moved over.

There was only one problem. I was using Google’s email forwarding feature for that domain, and Squarespace doesn’t currently offer anything equivalent. So all emails being sent to an address at that domain name were being rejected. I ended up solving this by connecting the website to Apple’s iCloud+ service for custom email domains. It’s a better solution anyway, but not as simple as basic email forwarding.

Squarespace has promised to offer “feature continuity” to Google Domains customers when they make the transition this fall, so I’m hopeful that they’ll add an email forwarding option soon. But if they don’t, I imagine a lot of customers will be upset to lose access to it. It’s great to be able to receive emails at a custom domain name without paying extra or going through any setup. Squarespace, and every other domain name provider, should include this feature with every purchase.

I had quite a bit more trouble moving my family website’s domain name to Squarespace. The transfer itself was fine, but once the domain showed up in my Squarespace account, it was listed as insecure. Every time someone visited dundee.me, they were shown a message that the site was potentially malicious. This wasn’t great, especially since it was my primary way of linking people to our baby registry in days leading up to the baby shower.

After two sessions with customer support, my issue was escalated to a senior product specialist who was able to pinpoint the problem. There was a setting in my domain’s backend that I didn’t have access to called DNSSEC that was preventing Squarespace from securing my website. The specialist was able to get the setting changed and fix the security issue, but it wasn’t a quick process.

All in all, my website was insecure—and thus more difficult to access—for a week while all of this was being worked out. It was okay in this instance because my family website doesn’t get a lot of traffic and isn’t something I rely on to make a living, but I can imagine other scenarios where this would be devastating. Squarespace needs to fix whatever went wrong with my domain transfer before moving ten million other domains over later this year.

My final domain transfer, the one for this website, was the easiest of them all. It took less than ten minutes and everything moved over perfectly except for a couple of subdomains (like about.devondundee.com) that I had to recreate. I would have preferred if the subdomains had transferred automatically, but that’s a minor quibble for my use case.

Squarespace still has a few bugs to work out in the transfer process before they’re ready to move over thousands of Google Domains customers. I’m confident that they will. Personally, I’m happy that I’m now able to manage all of my websites in one place and to do so while working with a company that I’m happy to support.

The iPads In My Life

One important note that I left out of my piece last week on improving the iPad hardware line is that I believe the device has never been in a better place than it is today. Despite some quirks that will likely be resolved within the next generation or so, the lineup is solid. There isn’t a bad iPad in the bunch.

I can say that with confidence because I personally use a wide variety of iPads on a regular basis, from entry-level to top-of-the-line, for all kinds of different tasks. Reflecting on this topic, I thought it might be interesting to share the different iPads I use on a day-to-day basis and what I use them for.

12.9” iPad Pro (M1): This is my main computer, and I mostly use it as a laptop in the Magic Keyboard case. I also connect it to an external monitor, keyboard, and trackpad when I’m in my office at work. I use the iPad Pro for all kinds of tasks from updating websites to designing graphics to writing this very blog post. I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it.

iPad mini (6th generation): As much as I love my iPad Pro, the iPad mini is the one that has my heart. I use it as much as I possibly can because it just feels like magic every time I pick it up. It’s ideal for reading, catching up on social media, playing games, and watching videos. It’s also the device I carry with me throughout the day for reference materials and taking notes in meetings.

iPad Air (4th generation): Every time I use my wife’s iPad Air, I’m reminded of how nice the 11” form factor is, and I’m tempted to ditch my big iPad/small iPad setup and go back to a single machine. (But never enough to actually go through with it!) It’s a great all-purpose tablet that Katherine uses as her only computer outside of work, and it gets lots of use in her job at the preschool, too.

two iPads (5th generation): These devices are from the first budget generation when the iPad rejoined the lineup at just $329. I use these as kiosks in our lobby at work for information and event signups. They’re also great for quick plug-and-play videos, slideshows, or music at events. They still run great five years in, and their batteries are rock-solid.

iPad (7th generation): This is the iPad that controls our PTZ camera for event livestreaming. It’s very single-purpose and never leaves its post, but it performs its function flawlessly and has been more than worth the $250 I paid for it on sale.

iPad (9th generation): I use this iPad to control the lights in the auditorium so I’m not stuck sitting behind the lightboard all the time. It can run slide presentations, too. I’m a fan of the taller screen size and the way the device feels in my hand. It might be the final iteration of the original, legendary iPad form factor; if so, it’s a fitting end. This feels like the best possible iteration of that design.

Those are the seven iPads I use on a regular basis. As you can see, they range from outdated base models to much more recent flagships, and I love them all. There’s no such thing as a bad iPad in my book.