The Brooks Review

Year: 2012

  • ‘Penny Arcade Sells Out’

    As you probably heard, Penny Arcade started a KickStarter to help fund the site by bringing back and adding new features while removing ads, but what you probably don’t know is that I seriously considered this route (for this site) before I launched the paywall. I was essentially going to start a campaign to fund this site, ad free with perks, for an entire year of my full time writing.

    However, two things held me back:

    1. I believed such a campaign to be against the ToS for a KickStarter campaign — Penny Arcade proves me wrong there.
    2. I didn’t think it would be successful given the size of this site — and seeing how Penny Arcade struggled to get to $500k, I think I was right (I would have needed over $100k).
    3. Future revenue.

    What’s interesting to me is just how many people were willing to pay Penny Arcade to essentially do, well, nothing.

    [As Marco Arment notes](http://www.marco.org/2012/08/15/penny-arcade-kickstarter-ends):

    >Most of the original-content goals were not reached, and they’ll have ads on other pages on the site, just not the front page.

    I really feel like this type of a KickStarter should not have been allowed. This is a “fund my life” type of campaign and if you don’t think that, at the very least you have to agree that it is very much a “start a new business campaign” — both not in compliance with KickStarter, but again they let it through so oh well.

    (What’s funny is that almost every KickStarter campaign is a “start a new business” campaign even though that is prohibited.)

    Honestly I don’t think this should have been allowed because backers get next to nothing for their money — I am strongly in the camp that it should have been all or nothing: remove all ads, or none. This “remove ads on the homepage” is deceptive, and I bet a lot of backers didn’t know it was only for the homepage.

    Beyond all that, though, what the hell happens next year?

    That’s the third reason I held back from KickStarting this site — what happens when the money is gone and I need to find someway to make money again? Penny Arcade will have to either run another campaign in a year, or they will have to put the ads back. If I was a backer that would piss me off. Which is exactly why I avoided such a scenario on this site. I had planned to say that with every ~$100k above the funding goal, I would write the site full-time for another year.

    However, if you consider that I had roughly 8,300 RSS subscribers at the time, to fund the site for two years would have meant that every subscriber would have needed to back the site at a price of at least $25 — that’s without getting any extra perks. That’s highly unlikely to happen for a site like mine — this isn’t a complaint, but I share this data as an eye opener of what things really cost.

    The Penny Arcade campaign feels to me like a bad solution to a tough problem. I have no doubt that Penny Arcade has the best intentions, but I also have no doubt that there are going to be a lot of disappointed backers — now and a year from now.

  • United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10 Year Old Daughter and Didn’t Care

  • ‘Welcome to the New Internet’

    John Herman commenting on new content platforms like Svbtle, Branch, Medium, and App.net thinks that these service are out to *fix* the Internet. Herman:
    >So this is one, if not the, vision for the future of the internet, and a lot of people are dedicated to making it catch on. It’s an internet where every blog is Daring Fireball, where every post looks like Instapaper, where every discussion is led by its rightful leaders, and where ads are considered no better than spam. It’s barren but design-forward, and, at least at the moment, kind of elitist. It’s not clear how it’ll make money. Maybe it won’t! Maybe that’s part of the idea.

    I like every word I hear in that passage. I also think it is pretty damn clear how these sites will make money, by being user supported. It seems to me that Herman has pointed out the most powerful trend on the web right now: ads are evil.

    This is more than just being about blogging too — ads are easy to strip out of blogs and newspaper websites. Step back and think about what such an anti-ad movement means to, oh let’s say, Google. That’s not only a direct threat to ads on Google.com properties, but it’s a direct threat to Android’s developers — many of whom rely heavily on ads. It’s a direct threat to iOS apps too.

    In all the sites mentioned above I see a few common themes, themes that give me great hope for change:

    1. Content is being created by users, not “curated” or some other bullshit.
    2. Ads are seen as not only in poor taste, but seem morally evil to many of the services.
    3. Each are being championed and pushed forward by some of the “tech elite.”

    You can disagree with whether or not these services will succeed — they have an uphill battle — but I think it is pretty hard to argue that they don’t encompass the wishes and ideas of many of the top content providers on the web today.

    And I think that gives all of those services a fighting chance.

  • App.net Usernames

  • An iPad Air

  • Thinking This iPad Mini Thing Even Througher

  • Quote of the Day: Chris Sauve

    “So, my challenge to others would be to stop, think, and make something for the future.”

  • Kickstarter’s Spam Problem

  • Dark Sky Version 2.0

  • Retina Font Choices

    [A really interesting article, and quasi-review, of the retina MacBook Pro from John Gruber](http://daringfireball.net/2012/08/pixel_perfect). In it he dives into why (to his eye and mine) text looks so much better on the retina MacBook Pro than it does on the retina iOS screens — especially given the fact that the retina MacBook Pro has a lower PPI count than its iOS counterparts.

    Gruber also brings up an interesting point about font choices, saying:

    >Regarding font choices, you not only need not choose a font optimized for rendering on screen, but should not. Fonts optimized for screen rendering look cheap on the retina MacBook Pro — sometimes downright cheesy — in the same way they do when printed in a glossy magazine.

    The font I use on this site is FF Meta Web, it has been designed to be used on the web, which means it has been optimized for screen rendering. I personally don’t think it looks “cheap,” but I agree that many fonts (like Lucida Grande) do look rather cheap on such a display.

    More interesting is that during a font change on this site a couple weeks ago, I was toying with a lighter font weight to better accommodate retina displays. What [I found in my testing](http://dev.brooksreview.net/blog/2012/07/the-review-of-the-font-choices/) was that the lighter font weight looked perfect on the iPad (3), difficult to read on the iPhone 4S, nice on non-retina screens, and decent but not highly-comfortable on the retina MacBook Pro.

    It was because of this testing that I only use the lighter weights in navigation menus and block quotes. It is also because of the retina MacBook Pro, that for the first time since switching to FF Meta Web, I am thinking about moving to a new font.

    The problem though: *what font?*

    I need a font that simultaneously looks great on non-retina screens, on retina iOS screens, and on retina Mac screens — and I really don’t think such a font exists. So, for as much as I am against “mobile versions” of sites, I am beginning to wonder if each device should have a font specifically targeted for that device. Right now I don’t think retina displays are prevalent enough to worry about this, but I doubt that will be true come 2013.

  • Amazon Item of the Week: Sunglasses by American Optics

    Even though I live in the rainy Pacific Northwest I still need to wear sunglasses fairly often. As such I am very sensitive to finding a good pair. The last few sunglasses I have owned have all been Rayban sunglasses and before that Persol.

    While I highly recommend the [Persols](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?rh=n%3A1036592%2Cn%3A%211036682%2Cn%3A1040658%2Cp_4%3APersol%2Cn%3A2474937011&bbn=1040658&ie=UTF8&qid=1344970174) — they were simply out of my budget this go around. So I went with some from American Optics, which claim they make the “[original](http://www.aoeyewear.com/index.html)” government issued fighter pilot sunglasses. Let’s face it, Top Gun influences boys that grew up around the time I did.

    I went with the 57mm and the Silver model, and I really like these sunglasses.

    What I like most about them is that they are solidly made — I truly feel like they might even survive being sat on (if left on the car seat). [Be sure to check out AO’s handy guide for choosing the right size for your face](http://www.aoeyewear.com/documents/templeslenses.html), and then [go get a pair](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000XXV7Q0/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20) if they are your style. They are inexpensive and well made.

  • My $4 Worth: The Brooks Review

  • ‘Access All Your iCloud Files From the Finder Sidebar’

    [Since I posted this tip](https://brooksreview.net/2012/08/icloud/), and it has worked its way through the paywall, I have been getting a lot of tips from readers about how to go about adding this folder to the Finder sidebar. The tip I am linking to is one tip I only heard about yesterday, but the tip didn’t work for me.

    Besides it not working for me, the tip really is a messy hack.

    More readers emailed in with a slightly less complicated solution: create an alias to the Mobile Documents folder and add that alias to the sidebar in Finder. That’s pretty good, but I can do you one better.

    Reader Matt H. wrote in with a screenshot of his computer showing the most dumb-foundingly easy solution. Here’s what you do:

    1. [Navigate to the Mobile Documents folder](https://brooksreview.net/2012/08/icloud/) (aka iCloud).
    2. Go to the `File` menu and select the command `Add to Sidebar`.

    You are done. I don’t know why this works and dragging in the folder doesn’t, but I am sure glad it works. Thanks Matt H.

  • Think App.net Is Just a Twitter Clone? Then You’Re Missing the Point

  • The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold

  • Quote of the Day: Guy English

    “I rage read Daring Fireball voraciously.”
    — Guy English (Happy tenth DF.)

  • Today Calendar App

    Interesting new calendar app that was inspired by thoughts that have been circling around the web relating to how crappy most calendar apps are. I really like the underlying idea of the app, but I question the execution.

    Mostly the design of the app is just bad, skeuomorphic, and I loathe the font choice. That’s all I have to complain about though, because the rest of the app is pretty nice.

    I won’t pretend I like the design, but I think that it takes the right approach with how it shows calendar data and that might be more important in the end. Regardless of my thoughts on the design I have moved the app to my home screen to give it a real shot at replacing Agenda.

  • IT HASN’T SHIPPED BUT I KNOW IT TO BE GREAT

    Anil Dash, writing for Wired about Microsoft’s Surface tablet and the company in general:
    >If anyone questioned whether Microsoft could get back in the fight once the cuffs finally came off, Surface should put those doubts to rest. The gorgeous PC/tablet hybrid is the only example in recent memory of a company clearly and emphatically going toe to toe with Apple on the industrial design front. The iPad will have to improve. Android tablets will have to improve. Surface isn’t another me-too device—it moves the entire category forward.

    Of course, Dash, you mean: the “only example in recent memory” of a device that has yet to actually *ship*. I’ll give Microsoft credit for announcing the Surface, but Dash is talking like the Surface is a real shipping product that is currently competing with the iPad and yet it’s not.

    Further: “the iPad will have to improve.” Improve what? You can’t just toss a statement like that out there and not explain what the Surface does better — you especially can’t do that when no consumer has even seen a Surface in real life, because, you know, they aren’t shipping.

    It’s important to remember the scrutiny Microsoft has been under, but it’s a massive overstatement to label the Surface as a game changer — long before Microsoft actually ships the Surface and the general consumer gets to touch it.

  • ‘Banking With Simple’

    James Duncan Davidson’s thoughts on Simple jive with mine. I received my account a month ago and while I won’t be switching from USAA right now, I could see that happening in the next year. The UI for the website and iOS app, the card, and the ethos that surrounds the company really appeal to me.

    It’s a bank, so there isn’t much to say, other than this one important thing: it’s a bank that you won’t hate and that in return, doesn’t hate you for being a customer.

    That’s about the most different a new bank can really be at this point and Simple has achieved that thus far.

  • Happy 10th Birthday, Daring Fireball