Following on from my recent slightly (OK, very) sarcastic blog post about a developer charging for an update (THE HORROR!), Stuff asked me to write  about the subject. The result is Apps are brilliant, so stop moaning about paying for them. Within, I explore how developers ended up in a race to the bottom and how Apple and Google obliterated the value of software, setting many people’s entitlement dial to 11.

Really, it’s all about this:

… without apps providing income, the alternatives are grim, because developers would have to find other ways of making a living. This could be free apps with intrusive advertising or privacy implications, products packed with sneaky in-app purchases, or simply shifting apps to spare-time pursuits, thereby reducing the likelihood of focus, quality and regular updates.

The conclusion is in the title, but please read the article anyway!

This isn’t the first time I’ve written this kind of article, but I’m again seeing people screaming that their hard drives exploded on installing OS X Mavericks, thereby costing them all their data. This isn’t a good thing. But the facts are the same as ever: hard drives are rubbish; installs don’t always work out; data is fragile. It’s bad luck if it happens to you, but your own fault if you haven’t prepared for possibly losing all your movies/music/photos/email/documents before tapping that tempting INSTALL NOW button.

So: back-up and/or clone your Mac! Each data copy reduces the likelihood of permanent data loss. And another: doing so is relatively inexpensive and not that difficult.

My advice when it comes to a new version of OS X is the same as it ever was: buy an external hard drive (which can cost as little as £40) and ensure you at the very least have a full back-up of your Mac before upgrading to OS X Mavericks. If possible, I recommend using software that clones your Mac’s hard drive rather than simply backing up the data, because that leaves you with a bootable drive if something goes very wrong. (Time Machine does enable data restoration, but the back-up drive itself is not bootable.) The steps are:

1. Format your drive using Disk Utility

Launch Disk Utility and select the back-up drive from the sidebar. At the foot of the window, check its Partition Map Scheme is GUID Partition Table, which will enable you to use the disk to start-up an Intel Mac. If it shows something else, click ‘Partition’, select ‘1 Partition’ from the ‘Volume Scheme’ menu, click ‘Options’ and select ‘GUID Partition Table’. Click ‘OK’. Name the volume using the ‘Name’ field and then click ‘Apply’ to reformat your disk.

Use either SuperDuper! ($27.95) or Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.95) to clone your Mac. If using SuperDuper!, select your Mac’s hard drive from the ‘Copy’ menu and your back-up drive from the ‘to’ menu. Select ‘Backup – all files’ from the ‘using’ menu. Click ‘Copy Now’. If using Carbon Copy Cloner, select your Mac’s drive from the ‘Source Disk’ menu and the back-up drive from the ‘Target Disk’ menu. Click ‘Clone’. The process may take several hours and it’s best to not have any active apps running (i.e. do not work on projects and save things, nor download anything while the initial clone is being made).

3. Reboot and test

Once the clone is complete, restart your Mac while holding the Option key (also labelled ‘Alt’) and choose your back-up drive as the boot volume. It will take longer than usual for your Mac to start from this external drive. Ensure the back-up works: test some apps and launch some files. Once you’re done, reboot back into your Mac’s drive.

Should your OS X Mavericks install not work, you now have a bootable clone that will enable you to continue working, or from which you can clone everything back to your Mac. However, once you have a clone, you should continue safeguarding your data daily by using incremental updating (whereby only files that have changed are cloned to the external volume). SuperDuper! refers to this feature as ‘Smart Update’, accessed in the main pane’s ‘Options’ button; Carbon Copy Cloner has an ‘Incremental backup of selected items’ setting within ‘Cloning options’. Both apps have automated scheduling capabilities.

As noted earlier, more back-ups and clones reduce risk, and so if you can afford it, use multiple cloning drives and switch them regularly. Add a Time Machine back-up alongside your clones. Also consider online back-up services such as CrashPlan. This might all seem a little paranoid, but for the sake of a couple of hard drives, a piece of OS X software, an online back-up service and a few hours of your time, your data will be as safe as it’s ever going to be. Really, that’s not paranoia, but common sense.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been writing about Apple and balance accessibility for a couple of years now. Ever since I first realised OS X Lion’s full-screen transitions were making me dizzy, I’ve asked why Apple hasn’t done anything to cater for users with such problems. This was especially surprising given the company’s excellent work in vision, motor and hearing accessibility.

Everything came to a head with iOS 7, which led to me writing about the subject for Stuff and then The Guardian. With its latest mobile OS, Apple had ‘gamified’ the user interface. For many people, this provided an exciting animated experience, with a great sense of space in a virtual world. But for anyone with a balance disorder, the zooms, slides and bounces were too much, in some cases making the devices literally unusable. Several people told me they’d replaced their devices with models running iOS 6; many wrote to Apple, begging them for an off switch.

Such pleas were largely answered with Apple’s iOS 7.0.3 update, which I’ve today covered in a new article for Stuff. The update adjusts the Reduce Motion capabilities in the Accessibility section of the Settings app. Rather than just disabling parallax, it now also turns off some (not all) zoom effects, such as those that occur on opening or closing a home screen folder, or when launching or closing an app.

This is extremely welcome. People had asked me what sort of timescale I was hoping for regarding balance issues, and I generally said three-to-six months. Instead, this first major update arrived about a month after iOS 7, and judging by responses I’ve had on Twitter and elsewhere, it makes iOS devices usable for the majority of people who suffer from balance and related disorders.

I say first major update quite deliberately, on the basis I’m optimistic this will not be a full stop. My hope is that this is merely an initial step for iOS 7 and Apple regarding this area of accessibility and that other updates will be forthcoming. Here’s what I’d like to see in future versions of iOS 7:

More triggers addressed and made possible to disable

Zooms were the biggest, most widespread balance problem in iOS, but other triggers remain. Perhaps the most notable is the app switcher, with has a zoom-and-slide entry/exit animation and retains the subsequent zoom when selecting an app. Other triggers include full-screen slide transitions (which were also common in iOS 6 and earlier), bouncing UI elements (notably in Messages) and the Safari tab switcher.

Granular controls in Settings

With other fields of accessibility, you don’t just get a single switch. For example, people with limited vision aren’t forced to turn on every piece of vision-related accessibility in iOS—they can choose what they need. By comparison, Reduce Motion is currently all-or-nothing. If you’re fine with parallax but not zooms (or vice-versa), that’s too bad. Given the speed with which Apple responded, I think this is a suitable compromise for now, but I do hope future versions of iOS 7 will allow users to choose which types of animation they’d like disabled.

Developer hooks

I’ve spoken to a number of developers about balance accessibility, and without exception, all were keen on Apple providing the means to hook into user-definable settings. Right now, they must roll their own. Their hope: if someone turns on certain settings in Reduce Motion, related animations in their own apps would be disabled or altered accordingly.

My other hope is that Apple’s accessibility team starts addressing issues beyond iOS. The latest version of OS X, Mavericks, recently arrived and it does nothing to deal with the issue I first raised with Apple two major releases ago. Full-screen transitions on large screens are major vertigo triggers, placing an big part of OS X off limits to certain users, primarily for the sake of aesthetics. That the animations can be overridden by TotalSpaces shows the code for doing so must be lurking somewhere, and it can’t be too much to ask for Apple to add a section to System Preferences for this problem.

Still, for the first time since I started writing about this subject, I feel truly positive, rather than like I’m just yelling into the wind (albeit more recently yelling into the wind with plenty of support). iOS 7.0.3 proved that Apple can make changes to cater for users with vertigo and balance issues, and so here’s hoping for more over the coming months.

The sheer outrage was palpable across the internet today as iOS developer Tapbots announced a refreshed version of its Twitter client Tweetbot, and charged users for it. As The Verge pointed out:

Tweetbot 3 for iPhone gets a fresh new design, but at a price

That price was a shocking $2.99, enough, according to ‘back of an envelope’ calculations to feed a family of four for a month. It’s no wonder The Verge then continued:

Tweetbot 3’s new design will be controversial, but so will its price.

Everyone has reason to be disgusted. It’s a well known fact that iOS developers don’t have expenses and in fact survive solely on a diet of unicorns and Jony Ive’s tears, living in houses powered by rainbows. And if you’ve owned the old version of Tweetbot since its original release in August 2011, it will have so far cost you a penny a week, which is enough to stretch the budget of any typical consumer.

That Tapbots is now charging for an update shows how little the company thinks of its audience, and is entirely unacceptable. The only logical response is for everyone to smash their iPhones to pieces in a rage or, alternatively, whine on Twitter about how unfair it is to pay $2.99 for an app they’ll use daily for many months on a $500+ iPhone.

Following my previous work on iOS 7 and balance/motion issues, I was asked to write about the subject for The Guardian. My article  Why iOS 7 is making some users sick talks to developers (one of whom suffers from motion sickness), vestibular disorder experts, and John Golding, professor of applied psychology at the University of Westminster. The article provides, I believe, a succinct and thorough overview of the problem and what Apple can do to fix it, and yet still there are doubters and naysayers. Therefore, I’d like to address a few comments I’ve been repeatedly receiving or seeing over the past week:

The Reduce Motion option fixes the problem. Actually, it does very little—it merely turns off the parallax effect on home screens, and not zooms/slide transitions. It does help some people but not others.

Not everyone with motion sickness is affected, and so those who claim they are must be lying. Nope. These disorders affect people very differently. Just because you can’t read in a car and yet iOS 7 doesn’t affect you, that doesn’t mean others will have the same experience. Also, just because you aren’t affected, that doesn’t mean countless others won’t be. Just be thankful—not a troll.

Screen-based motion/balance problems cannot happen because of small screens. This is something I’ve seen in the recent glut of US-based articles. If this were the case, no-one would be suffering. (My own theory is that devices are bright and tend to be used fairly close to your face, and so although peripheral vision exists to anchor you, the screen overrides that.)

The slide transitions were never a problem before, so they can’t be now. Actually, they always were, and they continue to be in Windows 8, Android and other operating systems. The problem with iOS 7 is the overall effect is worse. Also, Apple usually does better when it comes to accessibility. Here, it’s dropped the ball.

This story only exists because the press needs to bash Apple again and again. I don’t doubt there’s going to be an element of that. Apple stories get page views. An Apple problem gets more. But this is about accessibility and disability. I didn’t really care about the iPhone 4 antenna. It was a mild issue with a product that could be dealt with easily. I do care about people who are adversely affected by using their devices.

I’m some kind of Apple hater. This one’s particularly fun, because I’m usually accused of being an Apple fan-boy. If I’m a hater, that comes as quite a surprise, what with me being a contributor to a bunch of Mac mags and owning a reasonably diverse selection of Apple kit.

People are idiots for upgrading. Not everyone reads tech blogs. Almost no-one reads upgrade notes. Most people see an upgrade button and tap or click it without thinking. Importantly, even those who do might not have had any motion/balance problems before iOS 7. I knew what I was potentially letting myself in for, being a tech journo, although the end result was actually worse than I’d feared it would be—at least on the iPad. But I’d say a tech journo is rather more of an outlier than a typical consumer!

If you are having issues with iOS 7, please share the stories I’ve written, and write your own. Most importantly, tell Apple by emailing a succinct explanation of your problems to accessibility@apple.com, and request the means to disable relevant features.

If you’re not having issues with iOS 7, please just have a little empathy. I realise it’s hard to understand invisible conditions if you don’t suffer from them, but they are very real, and they affect many millions of people daily.