I am regularly amused by how small things can be which triggers setting of the "Oh, that seems difficult"-flag in my mind.

Yesterday and today, I spent a very small amount of time breaking through a whole collection of such things, and now my Jolla phone should suddenly be able to be my main phone for a day away from home.

Well, as soon as I pop in a SIM card of course. Being limited to wifi would feel a bit too limiting.

There were three main triggers raising the difficult flag, in quickly descending order of perceived challenge:

• Getting Bankid set up
• Getting Android apps installed
• Pairing some headphones

Yes, a huge drop in difficulty from first to last, but since my main headphones are my airpods I did not dare assume it would just work, and so I was half wondering if there would be a need for me to find some other solution.

That was a complete non-issue, they paired and worked just like Bluetooth headphones should. On with the larger hurdles:

Getting Android apps installed

Bankid is a Android app, so this step had come first. During initial setup, Jolla helpfully ask if you want to install Android support and some associated tools for accessing stores and updating and such. I said yes, so everything was ready for me. However, the Aurora store failed to log me in when I used my Google account, and in anonymous mode all apps I tried to download produced error messages about APK:s being broken or something along similar lines.

The solution was simply to update Aurora (and Fdroid too, although I am not sure if that bit was necessary), after which I could log in and get Bankid, Pocket casts, and a few other things without issue. More on running those apps later, first the main event:

Getting Bankid set up

Bankid is pretty much the app you need to live in Sweden if you have any need to access government services or - even more important for daily life - many kinds of online payments and banking. I had done some research beforehand so I knew it was supposed to work, but the forum posts I found made it sound various levels of fiddly and uncertain. However, since I have another working phone with Bankid and my banking apps up and running I was probably in the ideal situation. I used the completely standard way of activating Bankid on a new device from a current one, where the old device shows a QR code for the new to scan, and a bunch of handshaking and data transfer is done right away.

There are two things which can trip things up: * High precision location services need to be enabled * Bluetooth needs to be enabled

I had already enabled location services, so that part was no problem for me. But no matter how enabled Bluetooth was in the menu bar and system settings, Bankid kept complaining that it was not, trying and failing to activate it.

This turned out to be because of a very sneaky edge case: The Bluetooth for Android support was also installed for me when I first set up my phone. That meant I never saw its information in Jolla's store until I went there for troubleshooting and discovered that it clearly stated you need to restart your phone in order for the Bluetooth support to start working.

I rebooted my Jolla for the first time, and then Bankid setup flew through like the most natural thing in the world.

Running Android apps

Running Android apps feels about as fun as using web apps instead of native ones on a computer, but it has worked surprisingly well in my brief experience so far. The exception is Google maps freezing and being completely unusable, but some forum posts point at it being a known issue and something which has not always been the case, so I am hopeful that can change. Pocket casts asked very nicely for permission to run in the background, and even shows a nice widget on the lock screen when it is playing.

In all, it is great how well it all works, not least with permissions to access information and hardware, and there is no way I could use my Jolla very extensively without the support.

But even with my limited Jolla total time, I immediately start to wish both it and the other apps were native. I miss the standard swipe gestures, I find the back button at the bottom clunkier, and the fact that moving back one step too many immediately quits the app something of a booby trap in the middle of the UI. Plus, native apps can show some useful and even slightly interactive information in the app switcher rather than just a still image or zoomed out UI. Oh, and they follow the UI theme colors as well.

Which is just the way it should be.

How hard can it be to write a decent podcast app for Sailfish OS anyway … ?

Today, I picked up my Jolla phone, after more weeks of checking tracking apps much more often than I care to admit.

This will be very unsorted, but I want to try and keep track of how my impressions evolve.

So far, I have played around with what comes in the box (plus the Jolla apps they suggested installing when I logged into my account) and a single third-party app: the Mastodon app Tooter.

It feels … like a fresh blast from the past. When phones were a bit more different from each other. Things were still being figured out.

A while back, it struck me as I was using my max-sixed Iphone that I was missing just having a phone with a different feel in the hand.

The Jolla delivers that difference in a great way. Because it is mainly plastic rather than metal and glass, it feels warmer and friendlier to the touch. Side by side with my Iphone, they are surprisingly close in all dimensions, but the Jolla somehow feels a lot nimbler to hold. I guess that comes down to the weight difference, while the dimensions are very close the Jolla is 32 grams lighter (208 versus 240).

It does not feel premium the way a brand new Iphone or Samsung device does. I would say it feels … approachable. And durable. The back cover is meant to come off, just a thing like that! I bought a protective cover, but I am not sure I will use it much when the hand feel is this nice and there is no dumb glass on the back to crack.

The whole interface of Sailfish OS is also nicely different. A lot of stuff can be done using swipes anywhere on the screen, which is great. The first time after I had got the hang of back and forward swipes and a button needed tapping in the top right of the screen, I almost felt frustrated at having to move a finger up there. One gesture I really like but that also takes some getting used to is being able to pull down in apps to drag down a menu of actions from the top of the screen. You just keep dragging to select the option you want and activate it when you lift your finger. A bit of evolution over pull to refresh, but it also requires a bit more precision. I have activated things by mistake when I intended to just scroll.

The keyboard and autocomplete/suggestions feel better than on Iphone. It has much saner suggestions, fits more of them on screen, and I feel a little bit more accurate without being able to explain why. It has only been a day, so it will be fun to see how my impression evolves.

Oh, and speaking of text: Remember cutting and pasting? On Ios, you select text, then awkwardly tap and hold to get a menu up to select copy from, sometimes getting out of sync with it popping up and stuff? Then find a place to paste and repeat the tap and hold to get the paste menu option without accidentally selecting anything.

Jolla gives you a copy button on the keyboard when you have text selected. Tap it again to paste. So straightforward everyone should steal it, yesterday.

Update: I got it wrong, copying and pasting takes even less tapping. Selected text is automatically placed on the clipboard, the button is for pasting only. Feels a little scary to me to be able to overwrite the clipboard so easily. But A: I will get used to it, and B: If it really irks me I can probably find or even create a different clipboard manager.

This is my first experience of a phone with a fingerprint-reading power button. The button is perhaps best placed for your thumb if you hold the phone in your right hand, but adding more fingers lets left-handed unlocking work just fine too.

The first banner I saw when I opened Jolla's own app store was for a tracker app. It did not attempt to sell me smurf berries.

Initial setup was very quick. Set up unlocking and encryption, optional login and app downloads (pragmatically including Android app support stuff) which I did, and then a quick introduction to the swipe-based workings of Sailfish OS.

I have not figured out my needs yet. I have not installed Bankid and other necessities for daily driving a phone. I have not figured out how I want to get text and images and other stuff between it and the rest of my technology life. I have no idea if an how much I will try to use it as my full-time phone.

I have not, in fact, even put a SIM card in yet.

In other words: so much exciting stuff left to figure out. I can not wait to see what I do with it!

Writing is at least as fun as programming.

After writing the last post, I felt a part was missing.

What I wanted to underscore from the start - and somehow lost while explaining the background - was how interesting it is to be moving toward the line of understanding.

How everything feels uncertain and risky, and even though you believe you are approaching the line you have little idea of how close or far you are, and whether you are approaching in the best way.

And then, you suddenly find yourself on the other side of the line, relieved and excited and already somewhat unable to understand what was so difficult in the first place.

(Resolve's manual is a PDF of 4444 pages, by the way.)

Several times over the past year, I have been encouraged to learn the video and audio editor (IDE? IME? Integrated media editor?) Davinci Resolve. After stewing on a particularly powerful pitch from Harald Achitz after the recording of Kodsnack 703, I eventually got around to downloading the whole package. It took me a while longer to read up on features, and finally decide to buy the studio version before I actually got around to learning to do anything.

Why so many steps before starting? I had a very particular target in mind: being able to ditch Descript for creating clips of Kodsnack. Descript is a completely web-based editor as a service. It keeps creeping up in monthly cost, sometimes forcing me to update, sometimes leaving me behind with fewer features as it goes.

(Oh, and they are AI everything, around every corner, and want you to pay for tokens.)

I do very simple things with my clips, but the one feature I needed and required to be reasonably simple was the creation of captions. I want my clips to have captions moving along with the speech, and that is nothing I want to create by hand.

In Resolve, this turned out to be nice and simple, once you found it. Resolve decided to bundle transcription and caption creation under "AI" features and only enable it in the for-pay studio version. Happily, the studio is a prodly advertised one-time purchase, and a quite affordable one at that. So this is why I did not start actually editing anything before buying.

Studio installed, it was time to set off! Starting to fumble around in Resolve felt … strange and awkward in a good way, if that makes any sense. It was a long time since I felt so lost in a new app, but it felt great to be figuring out something which is completely made for professional use. Things may not be easy to find, but everything is set up with the goal of being efficient.

As usual when learning something new, it felt very intimidating and slow at first. I made very strange mistakes, the kind which feel completely baffling as they happen. The kind you stop making after learning just a little bit more. And once you have done that little bit of learning, it becomes hard to understand what you even did wrong in the first place.

The key for me was watching a few videos, first a general walkthrough of pretty much the whole app, then a few on specific topics as they came up. I found a video specifically on creating clips for Tiktok which really clicked for me. It both answered the main questions I had at the moment, and showed me a bunch of power user setup. Got to love a fifteen-minute video which still spends a minute or two at the start showing you how to set up some useful keyboard shortcuts.

Somewhere soon after watching that video, I stumbled out of the forest of total confusion and into the plain of things starting to make sense. I have created my first clip which looks and feels the way I want it, and I know the steps I want to do and their order so that it feels repeatable. From here, it is just a matter of building habit and speed, and adding new knowledge if and when I want it. There is a whole universe of extra things to learn, and I am excited about the thought of possibly having my own library of effects and setups and things.

We will see where it goes from here, but the initial stage of confusion is definitely over.

(I can leave Descript behind for editing, but annoyingly they also provide the recording solution I use at the moment. They are in the process of enshittifying that, too, so my motivation is high, I just need to figure out to what first …)