A killer little widget to keep your charger cables from dropping off your desk. I so want to back it, but alas I am over budget on the amount of Kickstarter projects I allow myself to fund this month (and it is only 3 days into Feb.). Will you guys please fund it? ((Thanks!))
Just look at this sexiness:
Federico Viticci on The Daily app:
Where The Daily only needs to get a lot better, though, is the app part. Put simply, The Daily as an iPad application is quite terrible. Not the “terrible” you’d expect from a Vietnamese developer who sells manga apps in the App Store, but the terrible you don’t want to see from an app that’s being heavily promoted by Apple, and that has been in the works as a strict collaboration between News Corp and Cupertino for months.
That bit sums up my thoughts on the Daily quite nicely. In fact I think Viticci is spot on in his look at the app. There are a lot of things that I don’t get and putting aside the actual content, the app just isn’t that good. Will it improve? Who knows. Is the content worth it? Depends if you can bother to use it past the 5 infuriating minutes it takes to scroll a couple of stories.
Simplenote is one of the best apps on my iOS devices. It is one of those invaluable tools and this update proves that. Buy the premium membership and thank me later.
What a cool app — I downloaded it this morning and paid the $0.99 to remove the ads. It really is beautiful and does just what you need/want it to do.
Everyday I listen to podcasts during my commute to and from work and while I was listening to some very smart people talk about Mac OS X Lion, I began to think that Lion may be a lot like Windows Vista. A thought I am sure sparks fear in fanboys worldwide, but bear with me because I do see a striking resemblance.
Vista was by all accounts a pretty bad operating system. It was buggy. A lot of Windows apps needed to be re-written or modified to run properly on it. There was no option for a user to ‘upgrade’ to the OS that didn’t involve completely wiping their current data from their machine. It was a huge problem for users upgrading, but by all accounts it was also a necessary evil.
In order for Microsoft to advance the Windows OS platform, they needed to make some major changes to the underlying architecture of Windows itself. All of these changes made Windows 7 possible and Windows 7 by all accounts is a great upgrade for all users — a vast improvement over Vista.
It is in this same respect that I think the forth coming Mac OS 10.7 ‘Lion’ will be the Vista for Mac users. I need to clear up some things before I talk further about this:
What I am saying is that Lion, like Vista, is going to be a stepping stone OS update for the Mac OS X platform. Which is a rather long way of saying 10.8 should be awesome.
I think what we should expect to see in Lion is a lot of core iOS technology making its way into the aging desktop OS, along with some of the iOS philosophy. None of these changes are going to bring forth significantly radical OS changes — meaning Apple is not going to remove Finder. What Lion stands to do is to provide a half way point for OS X and where Apple would like to take OS X in the revisions to follow Lion.
That is (and this is just made up and in no way my actual thinking) if Apple wanted to do something dramatic like removing Finder all together — to obscure the file system in the similar manner that iOS does — Lion would see an inkling of that. That inkling might start by changing the Open/Save dialogs so that they list only files that application can open and only saves those files in a targeted location for each app. Thus removing the Finder view that you get when you go to Open or Save a file.
In this scenario Finder would still be present, but Apple would be steering users away from needing to look at the file system. 10.8 would then take this idea and further advance it — perhaps by removing Finder all together, or relegating it to a hidden part for power users (meaning it’s gone from the Dock, or so I can dream).
I don’t see Lion being a crazy mess like Vista was/is, but I do see it as more of a stepping stone update. Apple really wants to bring some of the ideas and technology that they have learned from making iOS to OS X. What they can’t do is spring that on users all at once — that would truly make Lion a Vista mess. The logical thing is to slowly make the transition — much the same as how nicotine patches work to slowly reduce the craving for nicotine (and therefore cigarettes).
Thus, I have proven Lion is going to be like a nicotine patch. ((In no way did I prove this.))
Nicholas Carlson reporting on the ‘AOL Way’:
AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.
Yeah that sounds like a great way to produce quality content. ((Sarcasm.))
Roger Cheng:
Verizon Wireless adopted a new policy that gives it the right to slow down the data connection of its heaviest bandwidth users, as the No. 1 U.S. carrier began taking advance orders for the Apple Inc. iPhone.
I told you Verizon was evil. Need more proof?
Here ya go:
Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said the introduction of the policy wasn’t related to the coming debut of the iPhone. “This is clearly something we’ve been looking at for some time and introducing now,” he said. “There’s nothing magic about the timing.”
CLEARLY this timing is coincidental.
Cultured Code has a new version of their iOS app out that adds repeating tasks. In looking at the screenshots it looks like a really nice and clean way to implement repeating tasks — especially compared to the way OmniFocus handles them on the iPhone. What should be telling though is that I didn’t know what the repeating task interface looked like for OmniFocus on the iPhone, nor did I know that Things didn’t have one.
I tend to think that people just don’t really need to set that many repeating tasks on their iPhones. Having said that — don’t you think that OTA sync would have been a much more desired update? ((Come on, you saw that coming.))
Matt Brian:
With a number of premium themes becoming available later this year, WordPress.com blog owners will initially be able to install one of two premium themes: Headlines by WooThemes and Shelf by The Theme Foundry. The availability of such themes will enable blog owners to stand out from the millions of other websites on the service, that is of course when more themes become available.
That is great news for WordPress.com users — I really think that you are better off going with a WordPress.com blog right now than you are going with Tumblr — BUT — I think this is only true if you are creating a ton of original content and want to be able to expand the blog in the future. If you just want to post funny pictures of cats and repost quotes you find on other blogs then Tumblr is the way to go. ((I do realize that my personal blog is on Tumblr still. I also still like Tumblr, but I think it is not the platform you should consider if writing is your thing.))
I have read most of the boring reviews — not surprisingly Gruber does the best job. Here’s the thing: if you have no problems with AT&T in your area then the AT&T iPhone is faster. If you need a hotspot right away, then best to get the Verizon phone as AT&T may not get the feature for a couple more weeks and AT&T still needs to support it. ((Remember how long it took them to support tethering?))
After reading all these reviews the only thing I can think of is: it must have sucked not to have lived in Seattle from 2007 until, well, today — Seattle has a damn good AT&T network in my testing.
A great write up of how Google caught Bing! cheating. I am a bit late on this, but it is still humorous.
Amit Singhal for Google:
We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query.
later:
We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.
We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing.
Yesterday I posted about a great Applescript that a Platinum Level reader made for me. Jered gives a link for setting it up in iCal, but that is a rather inelegant solution if you ask me. The last thing I want is some unneeded event in iCal. Instead I use Keyboard Maestro to run the Applescript at any given time that I want, this way the entire process stays hidden.
Here’s what that looks like:
(These times are the times when I am likely to be in front of my computer starting work, or an hour or so before I wrap up work for the day.)
Sean Coleman reacting to the new 37signals mobile app for devices:
The fact that 37signals has decided against native apps puts them one foot into the obsolescence grave. In order to stay competitive, web companies now must provide for all devices.
I don’t agree with this at all, but Coleman brings up some great points in the post.
I just noticed this in TextExpander:
I can’t think of a more compelling reason to use it.
[Updated: 2.2.11 at 9:55 AM]
Also my stats may be broken as I can’t fathom how this is possible. But I’m going with it because I like to think that is true. ((It really is not true as far as I can tell.))
This is hot news — I didn’t watch the press conference nor am I impressed by this. I am happy about the forth coming subscription model. If you want me to shoot from the hip on the new Daily app, here is what it feels like to me: A slightly less annoying Wired app with slightly more annoying moving parts.
[Updated: 2.2.11 at 9:13 AM]
Did they decide that everything needed an animation for this thing — hideous.
To all of my readers and to all makers and seller of products:
You may think that quoting random sales statistics is a great way to share a device’s success with the masses, but in actuality it is a piss poor method. Let me tell you why: “I have sold 100% of all iPad 2s that I have in stock.” Do you get why that is a meaningless statement? Do you get why saying that sales are up 100 fold year over year is stupid? Because if you only had one to sell, or if you sold none the year before, then these relative terms are pretty stupid. Along the same lines saying that ‘we couldn’t make enough’ is a pretty poor statement. What if you were only making 100 iPhones a year — then that changes everything, but if you are making 100 ever half second then that changes the meaning again.
Here is how I gauge if a product is popular and selling well — which in turn means it will survive — I ask myself if I have seen normal people using the device, in the real world. I knew the iPad was a hit the moment I started seeing people that seem like technophobes using the device. The moment grandparents started buying iPads, is the moment I knew that the iPad was a massive hit.
Likewise I know the Tab is a failure because I have yet to see one in public — literally speaking I have never seen one outside of my possession in public. So when I read that 15% of Tab buyers are returning the device — guess what — I am not surprised.
I am fully on the Readability band wagon, they have created a great service for both readers and writers. My goal with this site from day one has been to keep it highly readable and to minimize the distractions. On the local install of this blog that I have on my MacBook Air I am constantly playing with trivial aspects of the site — trying to make it just a touch better each time I push new changes.
Now a day or so removed from the Readability announcement I have received quite a few questions from people and I have read some rather interesting thoughts across the web. A few of which I would like to chime in on.
It seems to me that the sites which I most want my 70% subscription payment to go to are the sites which are already optimized for reading on the web.
While Justin Blanton more directly said:
Relatedly, if the service gets really popular, it’s not hard to imagine authors/publishers making their sites slightly more difficult to read in an effort to compel readers to route their articles through Readability (thereby generating a micropayment).
This presents an interesting problem for the service, the reader, and the publisher. Readability certainly doesn’t want to reward people who are gaming the system by making their backgrounds #FFF and their text #FAFAFA, but how do they separate people gaming the system, from people that just suck at design?
Likewise a reader doesn’t necessarily want to support every site they visit — especially if it is an eye sore — but how do they avoid using Readability to support a site when all they really want is a better way to read the content? That is: if the site is ugly and I still want to read it with Readability or Instapaper, how do I go about that without generating a micro-payment to that site? The reason you might not want to pay the site is infinite, but let’s just assume it appears the site is gaming the system.
Lastly, if I am content provider what constitutes crossing the line and how do I get as much of my cut of the money as possible? Do I make the text low contrast, can I make it small? Is it OK just to have the Readability button on my site, what about a link to Readability, or am I supposed to do nothing?
A lot of questions, none of which I have the answer to right now. Further, I don’t think anybody has the answer to these questions except the last bit. Making your site purposefully more difficult to read in order to generate more Readability hits is wrong no matter how you look at it. In fact when/if sites start doing this I won’t be reading those sites.
Justin Blanton again chimes in saying:
My $5.00/month spread amongst the thousands of articles I read each month isn’t going to amount to much for an individual author, even in the aggregate.
No kidding, in fact the payments you should expect from this service is on par with payments you would get from something like Google AdSense: next to nothing. This is doubly true if your site is actually readable.
The fact is, if you only have $3.50 (after Readability takes their cut) to spread out over 100 sites (my guess as to what a fairly average web savvy reader might read) in a given month then you are only paying each site 3.5 cents a month. Say you have 1000 readability hits in a month at 3.5 cents a hit you will only end up with $35 a month.
I don’t even know if it is likely that TBR will get 1000 hits on Readability in a month. At the end of the day yesterday I had 16. Which if that stays constant I will end the month with just shy of 500 Readability hits, or at the minimum $5/month level I will get $15 or so — in theory.
Is that free money? Yes it is, but it would only pay for the VaultPress on this site. Not to mention the fact that I have decided to put 100% of the money I earn from Readability back into Readability to help fund the sites I read. So no matter what I will get $0 a month, my hope being that I get to support all the sites I love for $0 a month.
There is no way around micro-payments on the web — as bloggers we live off of micro-payments. Sure advertisers and I agree to a sum and there are set rates for RSS sponsorships, but those are all based off of traffic numbers. No matter how you slice it each visitor is given a dollar amount and bloggers are paid based on that. It would actually be more fair to say that each visitor is given a penny amount.
Readability is just another micro-payment stream for bloggers to try and buy some coffee with. It should not be confused with a way to make a substantial sum of money — not in its current form.
All of this takes a rather negative look at the new Readability model, but I don’t actually hold a negative view of it. Personally I think this can only be good, as readers were already choosing to use Instapaper and the like to read this site — I now stand a chance of getting a touch more money from that habit.
What I think all publishers should be smiling about was summed up best by Shawn Blanc:
I’m excited about what users seem to be complaining about. They’re complaining that Readability doesn’t have an even easier way to support and fund the sites they love.
Amen to that.
Sometimes if you throw a question out there on Twitter an awesome person will answer it for you. This time around I asked about getting an Applescript that would tell me if there were items in my OmniFocus inbox at given times. Jered Benoit made the script and showed how to set it as a reminder in iCal so that the script will be run.
This is awesome and just what I needed. I forget to process the inbox regularly and this script will keep me from forgetting to process the inbox. (I have it set for an hour after I get up and an hour before I leave work)
Thanks Jered you get a Platinum TBR membership! ((Again this is a title only membership with only two members so far!))
Mike Vardy was kind enough to interview me for the WorkAwesome podcast — I had a lot of fun so be sure to check it out (if podcasts are your sort of thing).