The Brooks Review

Category: Free

  • The B&B Podcast #80: Tips and Tricks: OmniFocus

    >Ben and Shawn share their favorite tips, tricks, and workflows for OmniFocus.

    Fun show, let us know if we missed your favorite OmniFocus tip/trick.

  • The B&B Podcast #79: You Never Need It, Until You Need It

    >Shawn and Ben talk about Ben’s reluctance to use his iPad as a work device even though he says he wants to, our impressions of the Kickstarted Hidden Radio Bluetooth speaker, Shawn’s initial impressions of the new Kindle Paperwhite, and more.

  • Note on RSS Feeds

    After today I will be turning off Feedburner and sticking with just the built in RSS feed system. Most of you that use Google Reader should roll over to the new feed (in theory) without having to do a thing. However if you don’t use Google Reader you will need to replace the Feedburner URL (if you are using it) with https://brooksreview.net/feed

    Let me know if you bump into any issues — member feeds are *not* affected.

  • The B&B Podcast #78: Listener Q&A

    A fun episode of Shawn and I taking questions from readers. Everything from bags to coffee roasting.

  • The B&B Podcast #77: Interview With Ryan Cash

    >Shawn and Ben are joined by Ryan Cash, former marketing director at Marketcircle and founder of Snowman, makers of the iPhone reminders app, Checkmark. We talked with Ryan about his transition and motivation to go from working for a medium-sized company to starting his own indie iOS dev shop, the challenges of building and shipping an iPhone app, and more.

  • The B&B Podcast #76: Pop Open LaunchBar

    Really fun show this week that only runs 30 seconds over the 30 minute mark that Shawn and I want to hit or be under. Shawn and I talk about tips and tricks for LaunchBar, teaching each other some new ones along the way.

    If you’ve given up on our podcast, or podcasts in general, I’d urge you to give this one a listen — we’ve worked hard to try and make the show fit better into busy schedules and I really think this is a fun episode.

    [We also recorded a nice After Dark about switching from AT&T to Verizon](http://5by5.tv/afterdark/231) — for those not familiar an “After Dark” is 5by5 network lingo for the conversations that happen after we stop recording the episode.

  • The B&B Podcast #75: B&B 2.0

    In addition to talking about Kindles and App.net, Shawn and I announce our new show format. I won’t give everything away here except one thing: our new goal is to stay at 30 minutes or less per show. If you haven’t had time to “catch up”, this is one you might move to the top of your podcast queue.

    We are also accepting sponsors for each show, $395 a show. Get in touch with me to book that. ((I know, I know, but how do you paywall a podcast?))

  • The B&B Podcast #74: The Worst, Worst, Worst Case Scenario

    >After a 2-week hiatus, Ben and Shawn are back to talk about touchscreen desktop computers, Twitter, App.net, and Glassboard, and the kitchen sink.

  • CMD+SPACE – 004 – Paywalls with Ben Brooks

    I joined Myke on CMD+Space to talk about paywalls and Twitter. It was a fun show and I loved how Myke decides whether or not to pay for a membership, which I won’t reveal — you’ll have to listen.

  • Twitter’s API Changes

    *(I am pushing this past the paywall, because I believe this to be one of the bigger news items we will see for a while and thus very important.)*

    The changes Twitter made to their API ([as broken down in this post by Marco Arment](http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes)) are both predictable, significant, and dumb-foundingly stupid.

    Essentially, Twitter is making it so that it is nearly impossible to do anything with their service — including make Twitter apps — that Twitter doesn’t like or approve of. If Marco’s reading is correct, it further takes action against any site that doesn’t want to use the native Twitter embed when quoting a Tweet, which is pathetic.

    I’ve worked all my “I told you sos” out on Twitter — I’d link to them but that would mean using their embed code which includes tracking bullshit that I don’t want to subject my readers to, so you’ll have to take my word for it — so now we need to talk about the future of Twitter.

    The changes Twitter just announced remind me very much that Twitter has some massive problems, both at a service, and at a corporate level.

    1. Twitter has stopped caring about the users that made the service popular, and started only to care about the users that can draw in more users.
    2. Twitter has sold out. They not only don’t care about the original users, but they don’t even seem to care much for the current users — there’s a very real sense that Twitter needs to make money, and they need to make that money yesterday.
    3. The people that really cared have moved on — either to new companies (Square and Medium) or simply moved on to something else.

    We like to make analogies to Apple in tech blogging circles, so here goes: this is the moment in Twitter’s life where they kicked Steve Jobs out of the company and told Sculley to run it.

    Facebook works because Zuckerberg has always been in charge and never pretended to care about user privacy — that allows him to do whatever the hell he wants and users always swallow it. This doesn’t work with Twitter because Twitter’s main features were usually built by its main users, and now Twitter bitch-slapped those users that got the company off the ground.

    Those features:

    – Official Twitter iOS app started as a third-party app. In the same vein of those that Twitter now wants to kill.
    – The now well known @reply that not only is prevalent on Twitter, but the generally accepted across the web, [not invented by Twitter](http://log.maniacalrage.net/post/26935842947/the-real-history-of-the-reply-on-twitter).
    – Oh and those Twitter hashtags that, funny enough, Twitter is now using to monetize Twitter with? [Again, not invented by Twitter](http://gigaom.com/2010/04/30/the-short-and-illustrious-history-of-twitter-hashtags/).

    I could go on, but you get the point. Twitter was built as a community with users trying to improve the service the best they could for everyone’s benefit — and that is now gone. Chuck Skoda (on Twitter, so no link, [instead just subscribe to his blog, it’s great](http://chuckskoda.com/)) commented that he can’t remember the last time Twitter innovated — no one can — because the company has only been focused on two things for the last year:

    1. Big media partnerships.
    2. Making money.

    Wait, that actually is just *one* thing.

    When you are focused on just making money you not only end up screwing people over, but you end up gutting your service. Twitter is gutting the soul from itself and that makes me sad.

    I loved Twitter.

    I hope that App.net can replace Twitter, because [I need a place to post stuff like this](https://alpha.app.net/benbrooks/post/77250):

    >All Twitter will be in a few months is Spammers, people following Bieber, and Kardashians. Yuck.

    If you like Twitter just the way it is today, you’re in luck, because that’s likely to be the norm from here on out — assuming that is that you don’t use a non-official Twitter client. If you loved the way Twitter was a year or two ago, you’re in luck, [that’s what App.net is *right now*](https://alpha.app.net/benbrooks).

    Change happens, but the mistake made with Twitter is that we, as users, thought we had a say and thought Twitter had our backs. At least with Apple, we know we don’t have a say.

  • The B&B Podcast #73: Faded Avocado

    >Shawn and Ben talk about fax machines, open source software, the future of the digital landscape and how that affects the apps we use today, and the right and wrong ways to publish a link list-type blog.

  • Quick RSS Feed Note

    Yesterday I deleted access to the ‘articles only’ RSS feed, so if that’s not working for you that’s why. There were about 400 of you using it, sorry for the lack of notice.

    With the increased length of my linked listed posts and the subsequent decrease in post frequency I no longer find it necessary to offer an articles only feed. Also I believe now that it is equally important to read both post types.

    I deleted it yesterday and did not set a forward. The reason there was no forward set was simple: I feel that it is within my rights to remove things without your permission, but not within them to add things to your RSS reader without your permission. Redirecting, forwarding, or changing the RSS feed instead of deleting it would have added things to your feed and I wasn’t ok with doing that.

    This is the main and only (non-member) RSS feed now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBrooksReview

  • The B&B Podcast #72: I Clicked That Ketchup Article

    >Shawn and Ben talk about the new Digg, Cultured Code’s Cloud Sync, the balance of shipping half-finished products early versus taking longer to ship products that are finished, why not being on Facebook may mean you’re a suspicious citizen, and how real-life priorities intersect with “GTD”.

  • The B&B Podcast #71: Edges of the Fiberhood

    Posted: July 26, 2012

    >Shawn and Ben talk about the Kansas City rollout of Google Fiber, the just-announced Google Fiber TV, internet speeds and privacy policies, Mountain Lion, the Mac App Store, Notification Center, Sparrow’s acquisition and email clients in general, and speculations about the future of Apple TV and how that could relate to either Siri and or the theoretical iPad Mini.

  • The B&B Podcast #70: Really Great Frisbee Thrower

    >Shawn and Ben talk about the Nexus 7, Android, the tablet market, the UK ruling for Apple to place ads saying Samsung didn’t copy them, and how to grill a steak.

    [Shawn also *made* me do an After Dark](http://5by5.tv/afterdark/197).

  • Checkmark

    Checkmark made the rounds a couple of weeks ago when it was announced. I have been beta testing the app for a good while now and can say that it is a really solid app. I don’t personally use it, but that has more to do with my love affair with OmniFocus than Checkmark itself.

    [Shawn Blanc uses the app](http://shawnblanc.net/2012/07/review-checkmark-for-iphone/), and after talking with him, I agree that Checkmark is best thought of as a Reminders Pro — that is Apple’s own Reminders app taken to the next level.

    The best explanation I can give as to why you should use Checkmark: if you love location based reminders, but you don’t love having to enter them by hand in Reminders. Checkmark really excels at this and has an added nicety of delaying the reminder when you arrive or leave a place — that’s actually exceedingly helpful.

    It’s $0.99 in the App Store and really worth checking out.

  • Interface Runes

    Rob Walker looking at the odd Graffiti language that Palm use on its Palm Pilot devices:
    >It seems unnatural to have invented symbolic stand-ins for the alphabet. Then again, the alphabet itself is a symbolic stand-in; the word “tree” doesn’t reflect the reality it refers to any more naturally, as it were, than its Graffiti Alphabet equivalent.

    Graffiti was an odd duck, but if you mastered it you could really fly with writing on a Palm device — I know this because I used to take notes on one during class. Walker interestingly started off talking about how silly he feels using gestures on an iPad, and then he found his Graffiti reference card and realized how silly that was, concluding something interesting:

    >Probably what matters more in judging post-language touch-screen navigation — and this can be a little unnerving — is watching a toddler, too young to speak, but evidently hard-wired to swipe and poke, navigate a touch-screen device. No reference card required.

    This is a really interesting difference between mid-90s tech and modern technology. More and more we are creating devices that we interact with in a seemingly natural way — except that none of it is really natural because we’ve never before had to do some of these things before.

    Sure moving content is natural, but why does pinching to zoom seem natural? I mean it’s not like I walk around my house and when I come across a photo I have printed, I then walk up to it and pinch it to make it smaller or bigger… Never before have we used that gesture in this way, yet the first time you do it everything clicks and it makes no sense to do zooming any other way.

  • ‘Sneaker Net’

    Rob-ART Morgan analyzes USB3 thumb drives for new Mac owners and comes to this surprising conclusion:

    >If small size is the priority and you have a 2012 Apple laptop, you should consider using an SD card as your jump drive. That’s because the fastest SDHC card on the newest laptops is more than twice as fast as the same SD card in the SD slot of the 2011 and older Apple laptops.

    I didn’t see that coming. I griped on Twitter a week or so ago that I would really love to get my hands on a Thunderbolt powered thumb drive — something around 100GB — mainly because it would be a great medium to store my current working Aperture and LightRoom libraries on and would be fast as hell. I hadn’t even considered the SD card slot, but I like that solution (not, mind you, for my photo library just yet).

    I keep about 50GB worth of thumb drives in my backpack all the time and I cannot tell you the last time I used a single one. I am now to the point of giving them to people with data on them, and not caring if I get the drive back. SD cards would be even more disposable, and yet even more useful for other things — like my camera.

    Especially when you consider the Lexar 32GB thumb drive is $234 and 128GB Lexar Pro SDXC (they work in the Mac SD card slots on Retina machines) is only [$155 at Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B007BZRXK2/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20).

    Seems like a no brainer to go with an SD card — most Macs have a slot to read them now too. I would love that Thunderbolt thumb drive though if someone wants to build that for me.

    *Side note: I hadn’t heard the term sneaker net before, but I love it.*

  • The B&B Podcast #69: How Dead Was It?

    There were a lot of questions that people have about this transition to a paywall — Shawn does a good job scratching the surface with me on this week’s B&B Podcast. I think it is a really good episode where we talk a lot about the current state of blogging — and Mrs. Shawn Blanc’s lack of an iPad.

    Thanks to our sponsors: [Studio Neat](http://www.studioneat.com/) (and they may have a discount code if you listen to the show) and [Bartender](http://www.macbartender.com/). ((Yep, want to know why there are sponsors on the podcast and not my site? Listen to the podcast.))

  • The New TBR Business Model

    I started writing this long before anyone knew about this change — in fact only a handful of people know about this change as I write this sentence. The change I am making today, has a huge potential to fail and this, I accept.

    Simply put: I hate the business model of this blog, well actually I *hated* the business model of this blog. It was simple, well known, and commonplace. It’s the standard blog business model:

    1. Build a readership.
    2. Sell ads those readers must see.

    In my case, here, I sold two ad spots: one to Fusion and one to RSS Sponsors. Both are very different types of advertisements.

    Before we go any further I want to be clear about something: I have no problem with ad supported websites — they play an important role and both Fusion and the Syndicate were nothing but great to me. Ad supported sites will always be around — and truthfully that is fine.

    But an ad supported site is, ultimately, not the site *I* want to run — so before I go any further I thought it prudent to craft the kind of site that I actually want to run, or as is actually the case: a site much closer to the one I want to run.

    I want a direct relationship with you, my readers.

    So starting today the business model becomes even more clear ((There are still Amazon Affiliate links, but those are still you directly deciding to pay me by using them.)) :

    1. You pay me.
    2. I write.

    Of course this model isn’t new either, we typically just call it a “paywall”. But a paywall in its basic form is ineffectual for what I want, because then it becomes a massive hurdle to gain new readers (since all my content would be hidden out of the public eye) — I don’t want that.

    ### The Challenge

    What I needed to solve was a few issues with a pure paywall model:

    1. How to continue to attract new readers and thus expose my writing to new people.
    2. How to keep my writing quotable and linkable by other sites.
    3. How to keep the current readers I have.
    4. Provide a firm reason why a membership model *is* better than the ad supported model, for those reading the site. (This was something I personally had to answer before I felt good about moving forward.)

    ### New Readers

    The first problem I hit with a paywall model was how I attract new readers. Word of mouth is just too slow, so I needed some way to offer potential new readers a taste of my writing. What I was strongly against doing was:

    – Truncated posts on my site.
    – Trial periods of any kind, or length.
    – Sample writing posts.

    All three of those methods seemed way too crappy for me to put up with and would personally piss me off. I needed something better. In looking at how other sites worked I honed in on *The New York Times*. They have a modified paywall that allows readers to view a certain amount of articles every month. That, I thought, was closer to what I needed, but I could do my readers one better.

    What I have going for me that *The New York Times* doesn’t have, is that I am *not* a news site. And since my opinions should stand the test of time, I do not need to move at the speed of light, therefore: time itself should really not be a big deal to me or the readers of this site.

    All non-members of the site will have access to *every* post that members have access too, with one caveat: non-members won’t see those posts until *seven* days after I posted them.

    Therefore, you can still enjoy this site, in full, without paying a dime or seeing a single ad — you just have to be OK with enjoying it seven days after members enjoy it.

    I realize this isn’t ideal, but being as what I write is not time relevant, I feel that this is a decent tradeoff. If you aren’t a member you won’t be able to see what you are, in fact, missing — thus the content is indeed new to you when it does become “unlocked”. (This is the plan at least.)

    I arrived at seven days because I think that is the minimum point of pain. Meaning I think that anything shorter would be too easy for a reader to decide it’s not worth becoming a member. Anything longer than seven days and I felt that I was being too punitive against readers who simply cannot afford to pay for a membership.

    ### Incoming Links

    This model brought about one other snag that really dumbfounded me: what happens to the readers of my site that want to link to one of my posts on their own site when my post is still behind the paywall? I could have easily forced those members to make their readers wait seven days, but that didn’t seem right to me and it didn’t seem like a site that I would want to link to.

    Again I turned to *The New York Times*.

    I have decided that if you are linking to my site, then a reader that comes here from your site can also view the article you link to, without having to become a member. ((Thus opening up a loophole for less than quality individuals to exploit, but I have provisions in place for this — don’t worry.))

    So if member Jim wants to link to a TBR article from his site, and his reader Bob wants to read my article — he can do so if he follows the link from Jim’s site to my site — even if Bob isn’t a member here.

    It’s not a perfect system, but the very last thing I wanted to do was close my content off from being commented on by other sites and shared around. ((If you notice a bug in this at all, or feel I have unfairly blacklisted your site — just get in touch.))

    ### Current Readers

    I wanted to make sure that what ever changes I made to the site, I made them in such a way that all current readers could continue to enjoy the site without having to pay. That’s why there is the “free after 7 days” mechanism built in.

    No matter if you pay for membership, or not, you can still read everything I write. The only difference now is that it isn’t the very latest thing I wrote, but you get the added benefit of *never* having to see an ad.

    ### The Benefit

    Why go this route? Why not stick with tried and true advertising? Why change? Why is this *better* for readers?

    Lots of good questions, and truthfully this is one big guess, but I do want to share my reasoning.

    No matter if I am the one booking advertising slots, or someone else is booking them: the companies I write about are the ones that must decide to book the spot and pay me (indirectly). Therefore if I write something negative (gasp!) about a company, that company may decide **not** to sponsor the ad network that is powering my site in the future. Likewise if a company is sponsoring the RSS feed in a given week and they do something stupid, I may feel that I need to refrain from making fun of said stupid move — that notion never sat well with me.

    I have always tried to never let this play a role in my writing, but it weighed on me. Even though the issue rarely came up, it always made me feel less genuine. It was upon that realization that I knew something had to change — I couldn’t and shouldn’t be held to worry about advertiser’s feelings when my first (self-imposed) duty is to write with complete honesty.

    That’s part one.

    Part two is that advertising is ugly and distracting on a page. I wanted a pure reading experience, one that is, from the outset, unbiased and direct. Removing all ads and designing a site that need only give room to the pixels I choose ((Because I didn’t get a say in what the square Fusion ads look like.)) : that’s the ultimate goal.

    And that, my friend, is the way it *should* work. It is a simple plan.

    ### Pricing

    The pricing is pretty simple: $4 a month. That gets you everything, ad free, without delay.

    It’s automatically billed through Stripe. Yep, no need to have to deal with PayPal for either of us. You sign up on my site, you get processed by Stripe, and you can cancel your account right here on my site. So you need only to come here if you want to cancel — it’s one click — no trying to figure how to cancel.

    Once you sign up you immediately get login credentials, a unique (to you) RSS feed for all the posts, and you are on your way.

    ### Changes to My Writing

    Before I wrap this up: the writing here is going to change.

    I can’t buy new things to review unless I have the money to do so — so that may taper off for a bit until the membership base (hopefully) grows. Also, since I am not worried about the timeliness of my linked items and articles, I am going to try and write all of them with a lasting and value added motivation (keen readers may have noticed that my commentary has slowly been getting longer on linked list posts — this is what I am talking about).

    Linking to a post and commenting “cool” is now against my own rules. If I can’t add value to a link with thoughtful analysis and opinion, then that post isn’t getting a link on this site.

    If my article or review won’t be as helpful in seven days as it is today, then it’s not worth posting at any point.

    I am going to hold myself to a higher standard. ((Additionally I will not be accepting promo codes for apps any longer either. Again, I want nothing influencing me. I will still be accepting beta invitations, but will always say so when writing about an app. The reason for accepting beta invites is simple: I feel I pay for a beta invite in the form of my direct feedback to the developer.))

    ### That’s a Wrap

    Enjoy the tweaked design. Enjoy the lack of ads. Become a member if you can and want to.

    A big thanks to [JR Tashjian](http://jrtashjian.com) for the coding.

    And a huge thank you to all of you — regardless of whether you become a member or not.

    To join up, [go here](https://brooksreview.net/members).

    #### Programming Note

    Just a heads up on a couple of things:

    1. Because of the new 7-day rule, this site would be a wasteland for the next 7 days if you aren’t a member. Of course that wouldn’t be OK with me, so I will be passing one post a day through the paywall for all to read. It will just be one of the linked list posts that I normally post — no articles. Now, this causes another problem to anyone that reads the site by visiting just the homepage: new posts will be appearing intermixed with the posts I pass through the paywall for a week, meaning the chronology of things will be messed up on the homepage for non-members. Sorry about that, but this is the best, albeit hacky, solution I could think of.
    2. If you use Twitter as your RSS reader, and Twitter is how you look to get updates on new posts, well things are going to be a bit different now. Non-members will still see tweets on the @brooksreview account, but they will show up (hopefully) when the actual posts are available for non-members to read. For members, the best solution I could come up with is a protected Twitter account @TBRmembers — request to follow that and if you are a member I will grant access.