The iPhone is Still a Poor Phone

Today I started with several meetings. Normally I would take them at home and use my home Internet connection. However I had a short break between my two morning meetings and my afternoon one and I wanted to get some exercise. My favorite winter exercise is skiing and so I drove the 25 minutes to Alta and used my phone for the meetings. I also had my computer if I needed it but I wanted to try something new to see if it would work.

My company uses Microsoft Teams for all of our meetings. Fortunately you can install Teams on your mobile phone for free. Yes, they want you to have an account with them but they also allow you to log in with just a meeting ID and password. I copied the information for my meetings onto a PostIt note and stuck it to the back of an Android phone I got to replace my home land line. When I got to Alta, I didn't bother getting out of my car and just logged into the first meeting.

I never really carry my Android phone anywhere because it is so large. That one quality made it perfect for my meeting this morning. Looking at a tiny screen can be tough for meetings and I wanted the largest one possible without having to pull out my laptop. The meeting went well as did the one after it. Then I could go ski for an hour before having to head home before my next meeting.

My experience this morning reminded me how poor my iPhone is as a phone or in this case how poor it is as an Internet connection. Lately my iPhone has lagged significantly with presentations to the point my view has lagged by several slides. That was not the case this morning. When I carried 2 phones it never was a contest as to which phone performed better. If I actually needed to talk with someone, I preferred anything other than my iPhone. I thought 5G would fix that for Internet connections but discovered that isn't the case.

Now in all fairness to Apple, my current iPhone is a 12-mini and needs to be replaced. I hope that Apple has spent some time improving their phone capabilities. Unfortunately given their past track record, I doubt that is the case but am hopeful. 

Internet on a Plane

I have been traveling a lot with recent trips to Alaska, Mexico, and Hawaii. This has given me the chance to test Internet conditions for a lot of different environments including on a cruise ship. I spend all day working in front of a computer and while the device is important, an Internet connection is usually required to remain effective.

So why do I need an Internet connection? I spend a lot of time communicating with my fellow employees. E-mail is good for this but I also use Microsoft Teams and the messaging included with it. I can live without those connections for only a short amount of time before people begin to worry. I also spend a lot of time working on shared documents. While I may have a local copy that I can edit on a plane, it sure is nice to have my changes seen immediately by others working on the document also.

Delta Airlines has started offering free Internet connections to all of the passengers that are members of their frequent flyer program. You don't have be any special status to use the service, just a member of the program. I gave it a try on a recent trip and discovered it works well. Unfortunately you cannot make voice or video calls but you can use it for e-mail, instant messaging, and editing shared documents. Delta claims that it is fast enough to watch a streaming movie and so I don't see why one wouldn't be able to use it for video calls other than the FAA regulation that prohibits it. I did notice the service felt choppy in some instances and I am not sure how the upload speed is so it may be a prohibiting factor.

I also had the chance to check out Alaska Airline's Internet service on my recent trip to Hawaii. While I flew out on a Sunday, I returned on a Thursday and worked on the plane as I flew home. I made sure to let my boss know I wouldn't be available for a meeting during my flight time. Unfortunately the service is not free for everyone. As a T-mobile customer, I had an hour of free Internet service which I never tried. However I did set up texting from my phone and remained in contact with people during the flight.

The overall lesson learned from using Internet on a plane is that as long as I don't have any meetings, it is a viable option to remain productive. Unfortunately for me, I generally have meetings daily and so it is probably impossible to take a day to fly somewhere and count it as a work day. That is something I will need to remember as I make plans for future travel.

Multitasking in Microsoft Teams is Painful

I have spent time working on multiple projects for my employer today and one of the tools we use is Microsoft Teams. I discovered a serious flaw when it comes to multitasking with it. The interface does not lend itself to switching between multiple projects as easily as a web browser. It cost me a lot of productivity today and I need to remember that in the future.

When you are in a browser you can open up multiple tabs for different websites and keep them all open at the same time. If you see a link that you want to visit but don't want to navigate away from your existing site, right-click on the link and it pulls up another tab. I generally only have 5 tabs open at a time. After that it gets too confusing. I wish Microsoft Teams had something similar.

We store a lot of files in Microsoft Teams so that we can share them easily instead of passing them around in e-mail. They are stored in OneDrive but most people share the link in the chat feature. Today I had two different presentations I started working on within Teams. When I needed to make an update in the other presentation, I would go look for it and lose my place in the first presentation. Then to make matters worse, I would get a chat message and lose both presentations.

There are some workarounds that would have allowed me to keep both presentations open in different windows and still be able to answer chat messages. Unfortunately that requires a bit of preparation before starting to work on the presentations in Teams. By the time I figured out I tried to do too many things at once, I had already wasted a lot of time. In the future, when I go to work on a presentation found in Microsoft Teams, I will be sure to open it in the stand-alone PowerPoint application so I don't have to keep searching for it after interruptions. Hopefully this tip helps you if you are a Microsoft Teams user.

My New Work Laptop

I have been at my current company for 2 months now and that has given me plenty of time to run my new work-provided laptop through its paces. It is a Dell Latitude 5320 and nothing special. It has an Intel i5 processor with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB hard drive. A simple description would be that it works for my daily activities as the director of software engineering.

Earlier in my career I did a lot of software development and this machine would not be nearly powerful enough. Now I do a lot of management tasks and that doesn't require a powerful machine. Truth be told, I could probably get by with a powerful Chromebook but I do like having a full-functioning computer. I do a lot of Microsoft Teams meetings and I use the camera a lot. I also use the computer for e-mail and I like having a full Microsoft Outlook client on my machine. That gives me the option to compose responses to e-mail while I am not connected to the Internet even though I have never had the need to do so.

That last sentence is very common when we think about what we want in a computer. While we may never use a feature, we want that option. Unfortunately it leads to wanting a machine that is more expensive than what we really need. Understanding that and being able to recognize it can ultimately save some serious money.

Another shift that has happened in the last few years is the idea of creating a document and storing it on your own computer. Now I am more apt to store a document on Google Drive or Microsoft's OneDrive as it is significantly easier to share. A document can be either a spreadsheet, word processing document, or presentation file. As they are stored somewhere other than my local machine, I don't need a large hard drive. If I did, I could always add an external drive and I have several laying around my office.

Honestly I never would have thought such a low-end laptop would work for me but I have to admit that it is. Should I need something a little more powerful, I can always go to our IT department and request it. For now that isn't necessary.

Bad User Interface Design

I just got off a Microsoft Teams meeting with one of my co-workers where we saw a good example of bad user interface design. Fortunately only the two of us attended the meeting and I had seen the flaw before. Otherwise it could have been more embarrassing to my co-worker.

In Microsoft Teams, the button to share or stop sharing your screen is located directly next to the button to leave the meeting. My co-worker was sharing his screen and then went to click the "un-share" button. Instead he clicked the "Leave Meeting" button. When I found myself as the only one in the meeting, I knew what had happened because I have done it as well. I patiently waited for my co-worker to rejoin and then we finished up the meeting.

 Many years ago I worked on creating training for a phone user interface. Basically the service would call you and have you respond to questions using the dial-pad on the phone. When you had a question with "yes" or "no" answers we recommended that you use the number 1 to indicate a "yes" response and the number 9 to indicate "no." The idea is that you didn't want someone to mash the wrong number because the buttons were too close together. Microsoft should have placed the "Leave Meeting" button far away from all other buttons. If both my co-worker and I had the same problem, I wonder how many other users have made the same mistake? Let me know if you have too.

My Favorite Video Conference Application

I have not been to my office since March 7 of this year. Fortunately I still have a job but not going to the office because of COVID-19 means that I have to do all of my meetings using video conferencing applications. While it would be nice to take my meetings outside using my smartphone, I do 100% of my meetings using my laptop computer. For this reason, my favorite app is based on features available for the computer and not the smartphone. Furthermore it is important to know that I use my MacBook Pro and not a Windows laptop.

There are 3 major video conferencing applications: Zoom, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams. If Microsoft Teams sounds like a new product, it is based on their acquisition of Skype and leverages many years of experience doing video calls.

Unfortunately Zoom got a black-eye with a security breech early in the COVID-19 days. Because of that, my company does not allow anyone to use it for meetings. My understanding is that Zoom did a great job getting a fix in place and has gotten a lot of users with their free product which limits meeting times to only 40 minutes and have less than 100 people. My wife holds a weekly Zoom meeting on Emergency Preparedness for people in our community. She likes the 40-minute time limit as it keeps her meetings short and they can't run long.

WebEx has been around for a long time and is the video conference application I have used the longest. Recently I had a company-wide conference hosted on WebEx with around 200 participants. I recorded the conference and then sent people in my company links to the videos. That allowed people to view the conference even though they couldn't attend in person. Some of the presentations contained videos and WebEx has the ability to optimize for presentation text or multimedia (video and audio). That came in very handy. I also recently attended a company-wide WebEx meeting with 1000 people, which is the upper limit for the tool.

Finally there is Microsoft Teams and it seems to be the application of choice that my company is gravitating towards. One reason is that we use Office 365 applications and that means Outlook is our e-mail and scheduling program. When you want to schedule a video conference, you just click a button in the calendar program and a Teams meeting is automatically created. With WebEx, you have an extra step of logging into WebEx and setting up the meeting. My personal observation is that the quality of Teams is better than the other two video conferencing applications. The audio seems to be more clear and the video is equally impressive. Finally my favorite feature of Teams is the ability to use a virtual background. I took a picture of Snowbird and use it as my background, hiding the ugly gray walls and whiteboard in my home office. It does have the added conversation starter as people continually ask me if there is snow still in Utah.

So what is my favorite video conferencing application? It depends. If you are looking for a free solution, I think Zoom is probably your best bet. Unfortunately I don't have much experience with it. I also like WebEx for large meetings as they seem to have the better solution. Ultimately my workhorse for small group meetings is Microsoft Teams and I probably use it the most. All 3 solutions are full featured and differ only slightly in capabilities.

One final note is that I never see the bill for any of the video conferencing applications I use and so I have no idea on how much any of them cost. If cost is an issue for you, then you may rank the solutions differently.