Kyle Seth Gray

Kyle Seth Gray's blog. Usually writing about tech, personal experience, but now leaning more towards health and fitness.

The Verge and the "Mobile Web"

The Verge (Nilay) love doing negative, bashing, or downright complaining articles. And the latest addition to this collection is super fun.

Yesterday, the 'hot button' article of Nilay Patel bashing some product (which he enjoys way too much)[I still don't know how he found this tweet] was him stating how iOS's browser is slow, outdated, and more companies should "...push their browsers to perform better." And because Apple's platform is so closed down, no one can innovate and the web sucks.

What followed was a bunch of fun regarding how terrible the Verge's site is when it comes to loading on mobile devices.

For example:

Or my personal favorite, after turning off all the content blockers on my browser:

I think Joe Steel summed it up perfectly:

I am disappointed he spilled so much ink only to wind up holding these inconsistent thoughts together like two negative ends of magnets. His site is not remotely streamlined. This rant is 10 MB, kilobytes of which are the actual article, and it’s crammed full of JavaScript and iframes.

It's hilarious when sites like this make complaints about a platform they contribute to and provide content for, and do nothing on their end to help the users. And when you bitch about a problem that your product causes, and want someone to make a engine bigger and more powerful because you're adding on a ton of weight that isn't needed at all, you're the problem. Not WebKit, not the modern web, your crappy site with its 300 requests and 2 minute render time.

What a Week

I’ve always tried my best to stay out of politics. It is one of the discussion topics that can, for whatever reason, cause a lot of strife and immature discussions, full of logical fallacies or issues that don’t usually come up in other conversations. Especially when you may not have a strong opinion and are expected to do so.

But this week has been one hell of a week in America. From tragic, to celebratory, to outright amazing; the events that have happened this week will be in the history books.

And at the end of it all, after two landmark Supreme Court Cases, and a time of mourning for a state and community, we had a beautiful moment from our President.

Barack Obama singing at the funeral for Clementa Pinckney.

Now you can say what you want about religion, political sides, or belief. But with the events that transpired this week, if you can’t watch this video and smile at how lucky we are in this country. Yes, there are times that aren’t so great. There are tragedies and disparities, but I can’t help but feel that all of America smiled yesterday.

And I’m proud to be an American this week.

Google Photos

Since I bought my iPhone 6, I’ve been using Google+ as a bonus backup system. I had a free terabyte in Google Drive, so I thought I might as well put it to use. and Google’s photo features have always been super fun, with things such as Auto Awesome, and the stories and mini movies it creates. Being able to take a series of photos along a coastline or a big view and knowing Google+ will automatically stitch it into a huge panorama is also a big plus (ha) as well.

Google’s photo solution has also always, always, been faster and better than iCloud. I’ve had many times where I’ve taken a photo on my iPhone, and I want to do something with said photo on my Mac or a computer at school, and Google Photos has been way faster than waiting for Photos.app on the Mac or iCloud.com/photos to load.

Now, I am fully invested into Google’s new photo solution: Google Photos. After being renamed/revamped/remade for the umpteenth time, I really think Google has it down. And, since my 1 terabyte of storage has expired and I’m only on the 1.99/month 100 GB plan, I don’t have to worry about paying for more data, since Google is backing up photos up to 16 megapixels, which I think is plenty, for free.

Google Photos isn’t my only solution at the moment, as I use it alongside iCloud Photo Library. But the things Google does with your photos, and the amount of ‘machine learning’ features it has that allows it to do stuff on its own, such as tagging faces automatically, learning locations, making movies (all features of the apps formerly known as iLife, but without the part where you have to manually make them) make it a killer photo solution. And since its free, it’s a product I think a lot of people should use.