The Brooks Review

Month: April 2011

  • A Feature

    It would — perhaps — be egotistical to assume that above was about, or directed at, me. Perhaps, but I am going to assume that this is at least directed at me in some small way and I want to address two things about this statement.

    First: Yes, UI and UX can be a differentiating feature. It just so happens that I believe that not to be the case in Tweetbot — you may not agree and that is fine. For UI or UX to be differentiating in the way that @tapbot_paul is speaking, is to mean that you are adding value through UI and UX ((This is my assumption of what he means.)) and I don’t think Tweetbot adds any value through that.

    Second: Perhaps most importantly it feels like the maker of an app — that I gave an honest and well thought out opinion about — is now telling me to get off their lawn because that opinion (seemingly) doesn’t suit them. I criticized Obama the other day too when talking with co-workers, should I then leave the U.S.? It feels like he doesn’t think I should be an iOS user because I don’t love what Tapbots have done.

  • Businessweek for iPad

    I have to admit that I have been a long time fan and reader of Businessweek ((I refuse to add that Bloomberg bit, I didn’t add McGraw-Hill when they owned the publication.)) . When I saw that they had an iPad app out, well, I shuddered to think what it would be like. There are just no good apps where a publisher takes a popular periodical and ports it to the iPad — they are either overpriced, or just don’t have some of the more obvious features (like selecting text). Imagine my surprise then when I downloaded this app and found out that it really is not *that* bad.

    This is no great app, this is not the model that all other publishers should follow on the iPad. What it is, is a very good app and one that lays good framework for apps to build off of. More importantly it is probably the best magazine app on the iPad right now.

    The key it would seem is to not think about how you would port a magazine to the iPad, but how you would view the same type of content on the iPad. It is an important difference and one that I think Businessweek at least thought about, though this approach feels more like a hybrid — porting and re-thinking. There are some good bits and some head scratchers.

    ### The Text ###

    One thing that immediately caught my attention about this app is the text is not an image. So often you get PDF images of actual magazine pages, with this app you get real text. Real text that you can select, and copy and paste elsewhere. One of those things that you would think would be an obvious addition to such an app, so it is nice to see that it as actually available in the app.

    Even better, you can increase and decrease the size of the text — again seems novel, but not standard issue in many of these apps. Nice to see that in there for people who actually want to read and use the app.

    ### Download & Price ###

    Like most magazine apps the app is actually free to download — once you get in the app you will have to cough up some money before you get any content. Where Businessweek differs for everyone though is on the pricing model: just $2.99 a month for weekly editions of the publication (I actually believe you get 54 issues in a full year). That’s a killer price, but not better than a paper subscription — for an iOS magazine it is a steal. It is $4 an issue for back issues, which isn’t great, but given the news nature of the articles there will hardly be a time when you want back issues. Unless you want to read about potential out-dated and often very wrong opinions. ((I saw often wrong because it is more likely that people can’t predict the future, then it is that people can see the future.))

    The downloads are also significantly faster than most apps — I hear they weigh in around 100 MB — not great, but not the 500-600mb that Wired has. This is going to be a major concern for apps like this as users are not likely to want to try and download this over their 3G connections. Therefore I probably wouldn’t be able to use this app on an airplane unless I thought about downloading the current issue in advance. In all likelyhood these magazines could shave a lot of space off if they streamed the videos instead of embedded them. This would be a negative when you are on WiFi, but I would guess that most users would be fine with that as it would allow for smaller downloads.

    ### Navigation ###

    The navigation isn’t at first obvious and at times it is hard to know if you skipped over an article. If you start by swiping right to left to advance the view, you feel as though you are thumbing through the articles. Once you get out of the “opening remarks” section though you stop moving between articles and start jumping through sections. This I still find rather confusing and often forget that I need to click and article to enter into that viewport.

    What is neat though is that the navigation isn’t linear. You can skip to different sections which are conveniently listed along the top as tabs. Once in a section you can view the articles, and skip between them. Of course you can also just move through the entire issue page by page if you want (works best in portrait view), but as I said above you need to make an extra click at the start of each new section. Again the navigation isn’t always obvious, but they added nice arrows everywhere to help direct you around the app — these arrows are both obvious to see and not distracting, rather well done.

    One thing that I really do like is that the app shows you how many pages an article is and what page you are on — the app also shows how many articles are in a section and which article you are on (1/9 or 3/5 articles). Things like that show that the developers looked at how people like to read things, and showing these status updates is very nice when you are trying to figure out if you actually have time to read an article.

    ### Readability ###

    The body copy isn’t set in Helvetica, which means that overall the text is pretty readable ((I find small Helvetica print on the iPad to be less that desirable from a readability standpoint.)) . It isn’t perfect, there isn’t a font that has been designed for iPad use — but it does a great job at keeping the text from being cluttered and unreadable.

    One thing that I wish the app did is change the column width when you increase and decrease the font size. The column widths are very comfortable on the smallest font size — go any larger and things start to look a bit comical. On the largest font size the average line (in landscape) holds between 5-6 words. If you need larger text you would be better suited to the portrait reading orientation as it looks better in the single column view.

    A note about using the app in portrait: articles are no longer paginated and instead scroll.

    To my eye the line-height could be a bit larger, but it is not uncomfortable to read. I do like the mix of Helvetica and (what seems to be) Georgia, it is nice to see the two classics paired with each other. It is also nice that they are both reserved for special roles (where Helvetica seems to be more informational and navigational and Georgia is set where you need to stop and read things).

    ### Social Crap ###

    You can share snippets and stories by email, Twitter, or Facebook — nothing special here, but again very nice to see these options in the app from day one. Having said that, the Twitter integration has yet to work for me.

    My biggest complaint here is the layout of the email text. You send an email and it looks like this by default:

    The problem here is that the biggest and most obvious link will cause you to download the app, instead of taking you to the story being shared. The small link almost forgotten at the bottom will pop the story open in the browser. What if I have the app installed on my iPad already, and I open the email on the iPad — you mean to tell me I can’t just open that link in the app, instead I have to read it in Safari? That’s kind of lame.

    Luckily you can edit this text and help delete the irrelevant crap they add in — still that should be the default, putting that obligation on the user. Is the goal to get more readers, or more downloads of your app in iTunes?

    ### Missing ###

    One thing that still kills me is that app supports swiping gestures, but not pinch-to-zoom gestures. I would love to be able to zoom in and out of text with multi-touch instead of having to select from three different font sizes. This is a minor annoyance, but I find it silly that it is not in there given the multi-touch nature of the iPad itself.

    ### Overall ###

    Overall I really do like this app — in part I think that has to do with my long term readership of the publication. It is also just a great little app to sit down with and peruse through. All the content is available on the web, so it’s not that special, but there are some nice things about the app. Not the least of which is a nice forward thinking pricing model. Here’s hoping they start a trend of periodicals for $2.99 a month on the iPad.

  • Quote of the Day: Chuck Skoda

    “It seems like a significant amount of mindshare keeps solving the same problems over and over again.”

  • I Swear I Just Saw This

    Amber Nettles Eric Fadden (sorry for the wrong attribution):
    > But developers must not lose sight of functionality. A Ferrari that lacks an engine is, for all intents and purposes, useless. The same goes for applications.

    I had no knowledge of this post when I used the analogy in my post. Please do not associate me with this drivel.

    >Running it the first time was like finally going to that new restaurant you’ve been wanting to try only to realize that the food is no better than what you’d make in your own kitchen.

    She must either be a) a great chef, or b) going to some pretty crappy restaurants. If b), try Urbanspoon.

  • It’s Not the Size of Your Chip…

    Ian King and Ari Levy reporting on a new chip from Tilera that puts 100 cores on one small chip:

    >Simply increasing the speed at which a processor handles instructions from software has its limits. That approach generates a lot of heat and requires expensive cooling systems. “Turning up the clock frequency has given us a great couple of decades, but it’s run out of juice,” says Tahernia, who joined the San Jose company in 2007 after a career at Motorola and Xilinx (XLNX). “For the first time, the semi industry is in the way of progress.”
    >Tilera is creating grids of relatively simple processors on a piece of silicon. They can handle huge numbers of Web requests simultaneously without needing to run so fast that they overheat. The company is targeting the cloud computing market, where the ability to cram thousands of processors has become as important as the high-level data crunching and calculations needed to run, say, an Oracle (ORCL) database.

  • UI, UX — Style

    Sean Sperte takes exception to my views on Tweetbot:
    > The problem I now have with Ben’s perspective is that he’s confusing UI style for UX style. For instance he’s quick to dismiss some of Tweetbot’s features (like swipe to view conversations or list-as-timeline) as “a wrapper”, but I think those are true features – original functionality, unique to the app.

    I almost wrote the entire article Sperte is referencing without mentioning Tweetbot, because honestly I didn’t want to have to defend my lack of love for Tweetbot — in the end the article was better with a concrete running example, so I left Tweetbot in. I stand by what I say, but I want to address a couple of points that Sperte and others have brought up.

    >But a Kia? Come on, that’s just mean-spirited.

    Not my intention at all, it’s just that Kia is as generic of a car as you can get here in the U.S. and Ferrari is just about as unique as you can get. Saying that the style of a Ferrari is unique to a Ferrari is simply not true — [Pininfarina](http://www.pininfarina.com/index.html) does much of the body work, as does air forces around the car. What I am saying is that the official Twitter client is the Kia and Tweetbot is the Pininfarina wrapper around the Kia to make it look better.

    #### The Gestures ####

    The fact of the matter isn’t that pull to refresh is unique, or anything else about the official Twitter app. In fact the official Twitter app, right now, is about as bland as you can get. You can call gestures a unique feature if you invent using gestures — the iPhone did that for smartphones, Tweetbot didn’t. Tweetbot just came up for more things to remember — essentially taking Twitter for the iPhone and adding movements previously only seen in Rubik’s Cubes.

    *Jog this way, swipe here, tap fifteen times there and viola.*

    Gestures in the case of Tweetbot aren’t adding anything to the all important UX — in fact I would think they are detracting from it by straying so far from conventional iOS norms. Most apps recognize one swipe per table view item (the Tweet itself in this case), Tweetbots breaks that convention and recognizes two: both left to right and right to left. That’s not bad, or good — it is unique — but there is no way you can call that a feature when other apps achieve the same end result with less moves.

    The best argument I have seen to the Tweetbot having no unique features stance that I take is that you can grab related tweets. For the life of me I don’t know how, or if, you can do that in the official Twitter app. That may be a unique feature, but I would guess that other Twitter apps implement this as well — it’s not something that Tapbots invented.

    Sean’s right that I didn’t make a clear distinction between UI styling and UX style — but I don’t think those two things are as important to users as designers think they are. The thing that is most important is how well, and the enjoyment derived, from interacting with the app and my willingness to want to keep using the app.

    Right now, for me, Tweetbot is only being kept on my phone so that I can easily see when it gets updated.

  • AppSuration and Unique Traits

    #### App Saturation and the Lack of Unique Features ####

    On [episode #8 of the B&B Podcast](http://thebbpodcast.com/2011/04/episode-8/) Shawn Blanc and I discussed the hottest new Twitter client: [Tweetbot](http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/). While I have yet to decide if I like Tweetbot any more, or less, than I like the official Twitter app — I did note two annoying things:

    1. The app doesn’t have the “one” single feature that is unique to it.
    2. The app feels like a nice wrapper of eye candy applied over the existing apps out there (mainly the official Twitter app).

    This though is a very common problem that I see over and over in the App Store and I think it comes from the amount of saturation that app categories like RSS feed readers, note taking apps, and Twitter apps are experiencing. It’s not a factor of bad development — it’s [groupthink](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink), or perhaps more accurately lack of innovation.

    ### Being Unique ###

    I don’t want to pick on Tweetbot, but it is one of the best examples of what I am referring to, it enters a very well populated landscape — Twitter apps for iPhones. What is fascinating is that if you really boil an app like Tweetbot down, there is no innovative feature — there is not a single feature that you can point to and say: “yeah you only get that on Tweetbot”. Yes there are uniques gestures, and taps, but those are all performing the same basic actions as other Twitter apps.

    It is not that Tweetbot is the same as every other app, its just that Tweetbot is like a new Honda Civic — it’s new, but it’s not really *new*. Still a great car, but hard to say if it really is any better than the last model.

    You could also argue that the ability to set a list in place of your timeline is just such a unique feature, but I would argue that it is just a different way of showing the lists (instead of making me drill through a menu like the official app does, I can view these lists on the main screen — even though you still view them relatively the same once you find the lists). The two examples I gave in the podcast of good, unique, features was for [Twitterrific](http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific) and [Echofon](http://www.echofon.com/).

    The former has a unified timeline where you see mentions and DMs all in the timeline with your ‘normal’ tweets. That is something that (as far as I know) is only done in Twitterrific and while I don’t care for that feature, it is compelling to many users — it is a reason to buy the app — a way to differentiate itself from other Twitter apps.

    Echofon has a similar feature (one that it alone does not have) which is to sync the place of your timeline across all other Echofon apps that you are using (iOS and Mac). That’s a fantastic feature and one that has made me wish that the rest of the app was better so that I could use it. That’s a feature that is incredible compelling compared to the rest of the Twitter apps out there, it is more unique than it is common.

    Too often though — as I believe the case may be with Tweetbot — we get a new app in a crowded category that offers no unique feature, thus they just serve as more clutter. They may still be good and still look better than other apps, perhaps even they are cheaper, but if they weren’t in the store it wouldn’t be a huge loss, because they aren’t offering features that can’t be found in other apps.

    This type of problem is seriously apparent in the note taking app market where every app seems to sync with Dropbox and there is really very little difference between the apps out there. Writer for Information Architects differentiates itself with a crazy 3-line-only view and a custom designed, iPad optimized, font. Notesy gives the user the ability to switch between fixed width and variable width fonts. The built in Notes app gives you the ability to sync with iTunes…

    Why release an app if you aren’t going to *add* to the existing offerings something that will be truly useful to ,at least, a select few users?

    ### A Wrapper ###

    The last complaint I lodged against Tweetbot was that it just seemed like an incredibly beautiful wrapper that was put over the official Twitter app. That is, everything is too similar in layout and functionality ((Again, excluding those fancy gestures and tap controls.)) that it just seems like you are using the same old app with a lovely new theme applied.

    This all sounds rather horrible, like I am accusing people of swiping someone else’s work — that’s not what I am saying. It’s no different than if someone built another WordPress theme with the text down the left and a small menu on the right, but different colors and fonts — they aren’t copying the theme I use, they just employed a similar layout without a slightly different wrapper.

    The more likely cause is that they chose a similar layout because they liked the way it worked and the user familiarity with that layout. Nothing wrong with that — except that I have to again ask where they are adding value that didn’t already exist?

    We all like to theme things, but is such a theme really needed in a crowded marketplace?

    Is a Kia automatically better if it is made to look like a Ferrari? Perhaps to a few people who want a slow Ferrari, but to most I would guess they wouldn’t care all that much — most are buying a Kia for reasons other than looks. ((Over generalization perhaps, but they have killer warrantees with very low prices. I would think that this is the main reason people buy Kia’s, and not performance or looks.)) Especially if the one that looked like a Ferrari is a more expensive option.

    ### The Question ###

    Is your app a Ferrari, or does it just *look* like one?

    If you found yourself reading this wondering what compelling features a Twitter app could add, or that a note taking app could add — then you are asking the right questions. The questions that need to be asked before a developer starts coding a new app. This isn’t saying that Tweetbot is bad, or that it isn’t worth the $2 — all I am saying is that time and time again it seems I am testing the same app with an improved color scheme.

  • Save Drive Space, Banish Old Email

    Mr. Blanc pointed out this tip that saved him 25GB of space, I got back about 5GB — be sure to check it out.

  • The Case for An Apple TV…Set

    MG Siegler makes a nice case for Apple building a TV set.
    >It certainly would be. Conventional wisdom says that Apple cannot build a television. The same conventional wisdom also said that no one wants a tablet computer. Apple thrives by defying conventional wisdom.

  • Quick Takes on Five Apps #9

    This is the ninth [installment](https://brooksreview.net/tag/quick/) of the Quick Takes series, where I look at five apps and tell you my thoughts on them.

    ### [Atari Greatest Hits](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ataris-greatest-hits/id422966028?mt=8) (iOS Universal) ###

    It’s junk. You can download it for free, but then you have to use in-app purchase to buy any of the good games. I bought Asteroids because I used to love that game ((My Uncle had the arcade game at his house and I remember spending hours playing with with my cousins. It’s a great game that this app ruins.)) and it is utter crap to the point of being unplayable. Not to mention the game doesn’t even take up the full screen, or in any way look like it has been optimized for the high resolution iPhone screen. The objects are tiny and the controls are non-sensical.

    ### [Prompt](http://panic.com/blog/2011/04/introducing-prompt-ssh-for-ios/) (iOS universal) ###

    The app icon is not blue and makes good sense, so right away this app has my attention. Overall I don’t have much use for a SSH app for iOS, but being that Panic made it, I had to try it. The app is well done and has an awesome feature: passcode lock. I don’t know why more developers don’t take the time to implement this option, but it is killer. I can store my SSH passwords in the app for quick logon, but make sure that most other people can’t access the app.

    Overall I don’t use SSH much, but with the recent server troubles I have been having it has been nice to have this app so that I can ‘check-in’ on my server. It doesn’t seem like there would be much that would make an SSH app good or bad, but Panic has done a great job with this app by adding terminal specific controls at the top of the keyboard. If SSH is your thing, then I recommend you take a look at this.

    ### [Moleskin](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moleskine/id429657255?mt=8) (iOS Universal) ###

    So the people that make the wonderful Moleskin notebooks have been adding a lot of crap to their offerings lately (things like bags and laptop cases) — this is another in that long line. I was excited to see the app as it allows you to add images to the notes, type text, and doodle. That sounds pretty neat for a free app, alas it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to draw on the page.

    In looking at this offering and all the stuff you have to enter before you get a note page open — well you are better off with many of the other free notebook apps, actually you would be better off paying for an app. One better implementation in this same style that I can think of is the Muji notebook app.

    ### [Blogsy](http://blogsyapp.com/) (iPad) ###

    I was excited to try this app after I saw some decent comments about it. It is a blogging app for the iPad, one of the rarer apps in the iPad store. Unfortunately it really isn’t that good. It is poorly designed, has a terrible icon and doesn’t give power users any of the features they would want.

    If the most important thing to you in a blogging app is being able to layout and style your post, then maybe you will like this app. Especially if you want to create media rich apps from the iPad. However, if you want to set the post slug, or even just add a custom field — then you are SOL. It feels like an app built by someone who doesn’t blog, but that wanted to build an app to suit what they *think* a blogger does.

    ### [It’s Friday](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/its-friday/id427931660?mt=8) (Who Cares) ###

    A terrible, utter crap, misogynistic app. Made for a terrible, horrible song — that has an even worse music video. I feel so incredible bad for the app reviewer of this app. Please don’t download this — even as far as sound boards go it does a poor job. The audio sounds terrible and it is not faded in or out — just all around not good. I am so happy I can delete this now.

    *If you liked this installment be sure to check out the [other](https://brooksreview.net/tag/quick/) installments.*

  • Outlook with Metro UI

    I really hope that Microsoft keeps putting the Metro UI to work on their apps, this is probably the best looking Outlook there has ever been. Who knows if it is good — what matters most is that it doesn’t look like a cluttered mess.

  • B&B Episode #8

    Have you been wondering what my thoughts on Tweetbot are? Well you are in luck because that’s what Shawn and I talked about on the latest episode of the B&B Podcast. We also threw in some weather talk for good measure.

  • Massive Shut Down of Online Poker Sites

    Jacqui Cheng:
    >As a result, the 11 individuals behind the three poker sites now face “at least” $3 billion—you read that correctly, billion—in money laundering penalties, in addition to the shut-down of 76 bank accounts in 14 countries.

    That is a lot of money, a lot of money. Also be sure to read the second to last paragraph for quotes from FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Janice Fedarcyk — who must have had CSI write the statements for her.

  • Are We Over Simplifying the Secure Password Debate?

    Dr. Drang:
    >A cracking program trying to hack my GMail account has no idea how long the password is, nor does it know the character set I’m using. Does it start with a dictionary attack? If so, does it try multiple words before moving on to random strings? Does it try lowercase passwords before moving on to the full character set? If so, at what length does it stop trying lowercase passwords?

    That’s a pretty good set of questions — hard to say what password will be most secure unless we know the method a potential attacker is going to use against us and the sophistication that the cracking software has.

  • Password Security

    Thomas Baekdal:
    >It is 10 times more secure to use “this is fun” as your password, than “J4fS<2".

  • Quote of the Day: Eric D. Snider

    “We were like stewardesses handing out peanuts on the Hindenburg.”

    I loved his post so much I had to post about it twice.

  • Great Account of This AOL/HuffPo Mess

    Eric D. Snider:

    > It’s the old “I like you, I’ll kill you last” routine.

    The whole thing is pretty great.

  • Amazon’s Appstore Sets Off Alarms

    IGDA Board of Directors:
    >Many journalists have noted the unusual nature of Amazon’s current store terms, but little has been said about the potential implications of those terms. In brief: Amazon reserves the right to control the price of your games, as well as the right to pay you “the greater of 70% of the purchase price or 20% of the List Price.” While many other retailers, both physical and digital, also exert control over the price of products in their markets, we are not aware of any other retailer having a formal policy of paying a supplier just 20% of the supplier’s minimum list price without the supplier’s permission.

    They don’t provide any source links to the Amazon information, but if this is true I can’t imagine why you would want to be in the Amazon store. Especially given this:

    >And if you ever conduct even a temporary price promotion in another market, you must permanently lower your list price in Amazon’s market.

    Yikes.

  • Why No Company That Values Their Data Should EVER “Go Google”

    Colin on e1ven.com:

    >The problem is, Google is entirely useless whenever there finally *IS* a flaw.

    After all the stuff I have been posting about why free is not good, and about Google support — this is yet another example of why using Google apps costs a lot more than the $50/user charges.

  • Quote of the Day: Jessica Hische

    “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”