Category: Links

When Day One, a Mac and iOS journaling app, first launched I gave it a go for a while and quickly dropped it. I was contacted a while ago from the developer to test out a new version of the app (just launched the day of this posting) and I have been using and loving the app quite a bit lately.

[Shawn Blanc has an excellent review of the suite of apps](http://shawnblanc.net/2012/08/day-one-review/), so be sure to check that out if you are interested in it.

What I have to say about the app is this:

– It is damned clever. In Shawn’s review he mentions that if you add a photo to your journal after the fact, the app will ask if you want to back date the entry to the time and location the photo was taken. This is so perfect for me, I don’t want to interrupt an experience as it is happening, but I love logging that experience after the fact. I never did this before because I didn’t want to have to remember dates and locations — now I don’t.
– The app is gorgeous, even for how blue it is.
– The power of the app is in the simplicity of the app. It is just about journalling, not any other social muckery.
– It’s on my home screen. I had used it for about a week before I had to clear off another app from my home screen to get Day One on there. This is big for me, because it really does take a lot to get on my home screen. ((Fun note: since taking this site behind a paywall I ditched having Ego on my home screen and replaced it with the WordPress app for fixing my typos.))

I have never been a person that keeps a journal. I always thought it would be great to be that kind of a person, but I never enjoyed doing it. With Day One I am really enjoying journaling.

One wish: I wish that the app had some sort of analytics that could look for keywords in all my entries and then graph my happiness v. sadness over time — that would be pretty neat.

The headline says it all, and this is likely a response to Craigslist recent spree of trying to lock out others from using Craigslist data (think [PadMapper](https://www.padmapper.com)). I can’t be the only one that thinks Craigslist is ripe for a disruption, because there is so much wrong with it that goes beyond the hideous and user hostile design of the site.

Many have pointed out that Craigslist is secure because they have a huge network of users, both sellers and buyers. That’s true, Craigslist is the second best way to rent apartments in my experience, with a sign in the yard being the best way. That’s how far and fast Craigslist has come for many.

But, I would remind you that no matter the size of your network, if you service becomes too douchey the users will flee for greener pastures. Primes examples: MySpace and Digg — both relics of a different time (though Digg is trying a comeback).

MySpace and Digg both got big fast, but died (or almost died) because they started doing things that users didn’t like, that didn’t help users, and another service popped up that seemingly didn’t do those things.

I for one would love to see someone try to disrupt Craigslist, here’s my suggestions of what to do:

1. Clean, user friendly design.
2. Allow searching of all locales at once.
3. Integrate a payment gateway like Stripe so a secure payment could be made when the item is in hand.
4. Allow the data to be used and viewed through APIs.
5. Charge per listing, like $2 to post an ad. This does two things: removes ads; and helps cut down on SPAM listings.

Those are just a few quick suggestions at the top of my head, but it seems to me the time to strike is now.

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple’s new MagSafe 2 connector, mostly with complaints. Complaints about the width are to be expected, so is the move back to the “T” style connection.

The one complaint I didn’t expect to see if that it doesn’t stay put very well. Lukas Mathis is just the most recent of the lot to complain of this, he even broken his screen because of it (odd).

Personally I have found the MagSafe 2 to be just as strong, if not stronger than, the original MagSafe. This could be chocked up to a Rev A product from Apple — which usually have some issues of some sort — but my real question is this: is this a problem with the Mac side connection, or the MagSafe 2 power adapter itself?

Has anybody gone around and tested the port with various power adapters?

Very curious.

**Update**: I now have two chargers for my retina MacBook Pro, and on both I am able to drag the retina MacBook Pro across the desk by pulling the charger cable. I am going to go ahead and say that those seeing trouble with it should take their machines in to Apple.

Craig Grannell writing about the annoying (greedy?) practice of iOS gaming developers forcing users to continue to buy things via an IAP, in order to continue enjoying the game. He writes:
>They are designed around keeping you hooked through the time investment you’ve put into them, rather than around addictive, exciting, engaging game design. The problem is, money talks, and with top-grossing titles typically being the most exploitative money-gouging games on the App Store, why wouldn’t more developers head in that direction?

I don’t play enough games to notice this, but it shows the bad side of the business model I advocate for: charging for your work. The tough distinction is between a service and an actual app. Instapaper is a service in my mind, and thus I would be willing to pay monthly for it (I pay for the subscription). By that I mean, I would be willing to pay just to use the basic service on the website. Numbers is just an app, not a service, so I feel you should be charged accordingly. This means, charge me enough to fund the next version of the app — how ever far away that might be.

I am not sure where games fit in, they feel more like apps than services, but then some games are really services. Things like *Words with Friends* feels like a service, not a game. Whereas *Tetris* clearly is a game to me.

The real question in my mind right now, is whether this is something that should be regulated by the marketplace (gamers) or by Apple? Should Apple start rejecting apps that can’t be used in a long-term and meaningful way without IAP? Or should Apple continue down the current path and leave it to the gamers to stop buying these IAPs?

I think the latter is the best move, but I also think it is the slowest option.

David Heinemeier Hansson is on a roll — his latest post makes a fantastic point:
>We’re breaking down the stranglehold of formality everywhere. No more personal secretaries, memos on official letterhead, meetings that must happen in person. There’s never been less mental mask switching between work and play. We wear the same clothes, use the same technology. It’s a liberation of the mind and it’s the new world order.

Moreover, business cards are less important, as is the idea one needs separate work and personal cell phones. As you can probably tell from my pictures that I use of myself, I still dress rather “professionally,” but what you may not know is that I am my own boss, which means I dress however I want. I have never had a problem with someone’s dress code, and the points that DHH brings up in this article are fantastic.

The idea does seem to correlate with technology companies well; those that are stuck in formality seem to be dying, while those that focus on the work at hand seem to be thriving. Nothing is more stark than the difference between Apple and RIM.

I wish that more people my age dressed well, but I also recognize that *I* am the one that sticks out, not the other way around.

Andrew Munsell has a pretty funny tale of trying to enter a captcha: those squiggly word-things on signup pages. They have become more and more difficult to solve, because as Munsell notes, computers are getting better and better at being more human with regard to solving these puzzles.

Captchas might be one of the more user-hostile things on the web, but we need them to stop SPAM and AHH, we need them!

The thing is (at the risk of sounding like a broken record) if you just charge every user for a sign up, then you never need to worry about captchas. Because even if a SPAM bot signs up, well, you get paid, and that’s not a sustainable model for spammers.

Stacey Higginbotham:
>Granted, that profit might not be as large as the broadband profits that Comcast or AT&T currently enjoy, but it’s a profit.

Woah, wait — Google is expecting to actually profit from Google Fiber. That *is* impressive, I had assumed that they were doing this as a break-even or small-loss business entity to drive ad viewers, but if they can actually turn a small profit from it, well that is impressive.

Hopefully, buy making it profitable, they will roll it out in more areas. If for no other reason that to put pressure on Comcast. ((Fucking Comcast.))

Interesting post from Ryan Whitwam, arguing that Google as an ISP is actually a very good thing. I’m still skeptical, but Whitwam makes an excellent point with this:
>For Google’s business to remain strong, it needs us to use the services and feed in more data. However, Google knows full well that if it loses the public’s trust, its business goes down the tubes. It simply cannot afford to do anything untoward as an ISP unless it wants to risk its real source of income: our data.

He’s right that it *is* in Google’s best interest to “not be evil” with regards to their ISP service, but I also think there is a secondary problem with this argument. What I, and other geeks, see as “evil” — most users just see as no big deal. If you told my mom she could have free internet, but Google gets more data about her, she wouldn’t even hear the words past “free internet”.

That’s the reality. I think Google will try to be a good, respectful ISP, but I think they also know that they don’t always *have* to be.

Remember that video a while back, the one where you could swipe along the keyboard on an iPad to select text — everyone drooled over it, and it was made for jailbroken devices? Yeah, remember that?

[Version 3.2 of WriteUp now has that](http://writeup.prasannag.com/2012/07/26/writeup-supports-swipe-selection/). Pretty neat stuff.

I don’t use WriteUp regularly, but I just checked out this feature and now I want it for the rest of iOS. It works and it works really well. I don’t know the ramifications of it if you are a fast typist — that is, will it move the cursor accidentally because you type fast? I don’t know, but just moving around the cursor like this is magical.

If you are an iOS dev that has an app where users write chunks of text, you really need to consider this addition.

Joe Macirowski:

>When you think about it, the apps that don’t get along with sandboxing are doing things I now realize I don’t want my apps doing. TextExpander for example works by being a system-wide keylogger. Apps that can use stuff from your iPhoto library do so by just reading it, with or without permission.

Short post, but I think it is clear that sand boxing and the like is a fine restriction for many apps. It’s the edge cases that do odd stuff that really cause problems.

John Eligon for the New York Times reports on Google’s new fiber network:
>The company also has offered people in wired areas the option of obtaining a free 5-megabit-per-second broadband connection, but they will have to pay a $300 construction fee.

The overall pricing on Google Fiber seems cheap to me for the speed they are offering, but I have long been a critic of an ad company being in charge of my access to the internet. I don’t think Google will inject ads, but why wouldn’t they build deep customer profiles based off of what they know about you and your internet activities. Whether you have “nothing to hide” or not, this is a big deal.

Think of it this way, if Google asked to follow you for a day and record everything you did, would you let them? I’m not saying you even get anything for free, just would you let someone follow you all day, record what you did, and potentially — maybe — sell that information to someone else. Would you do it?

Now the free internet access is even more concerning to me than the paid, but I think both would offer such privacy concerns for me that I would feel *better* about staying with Comcast — [and that is saying a lot](https://brooksreview.net/2011/06/comcast/).