Back Into The Swing Of Things

Over the last few months I've been caught up with work, and life, and have neglected posting to this site as often as I've wanted to. I've decided to step it up and update here more often than I've been able to do in recent memory. What does this mean? Well, I'll just keep posting things that I enjoy or want more people to know about. This mainly will focus on software, hardware, cool stuff I find, or politics. I make no promises that it will be in anyway focused, but then again, I never have. Recently I've just gotten home from a long trip that I took for both business and vacation out to San Francisco. For the first 10 days of my trip, I was managing all of the technology setup for a 25,000 attendee conference at Moscone West/South/North in downtown SF as well as the live-streaming of all of our major events at the conference. I do this annually, which involves about 6 weeks of prep work prior to the conference followed by an intense 10 day period of working 12-14 hours a day during the conference. My wife flew out the day after I was done and we stuck around in San Francisco for Thanksgiving with my best friend and his partner. This allowed us to also meet a lot of our "Internet Friends" and see some of them again. I left so soon after the election (on November 8) that I haven't had a lot of time to think about the win for our team and what this means. I'm so relieved that the President was able to win re-election. Also, during my trip, the picture below happened. I can't imagine any photo such as this ever being taken in a Romney White House and it makes me all the more grateful that the election turned out the way it did.

STOP EVERYTHING YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW!

Get out your iPhone or iPad and load this link in Safari. Welcome to Mars. A huge thank you to @DrewMarlowe for tweeting this and @JenSimmons for retweeting him. Update: Several folks have noted that Mount Sharp is missing from the photo and others were wondering how the photo itself was taken. It seems that Talking Points Memo has the answers to your questions, having interviewed the photographer who constructed the 360 degree view. Also, he is waiting on more imagery from NASA in order to clean up the image so as to make it more accurate and include some of the missing landscape features.

Why I Backed App.net And I Hope You Will Too

Lame title, I know, but I wanted to title this very clearly as to what this post is about. As you may well know from talking to me in person, on Twitter, or by reading this site I've been a big advocate over the past year of switching to services that allow you to be the customer and not the product. I came to this decision a year ago when I switched off of Gmail to Fastmail, off of Google Calendar to iCloud, Google Analytics to Mint, Google Reader to Fever to name just a few big ones. I used to be a big advocate and user of Google, but the way the company has been ran over the past 3-4 years has rubbed me the wrong way. I liked Google during the days which they cooperating with Apple and didn't seek to undercut them at every turn.
Turning to Facebook, I was an early user. In college, I signed up when you still had to have an .edu email address to join. It was fun & useful for a few years until Facebook allowed what they call "apps" & then it went to shit. You couldn't log in without being spammed to death with utter crap posts. I began to use it less and less. And then in January 2007 I joined Twitter. Twitter was perfect. The design was clean. The content was simple. I liked the constraint of 140 characters. As time passed, I began to rely on Twitter more and more for everything. As a result of Twitter, I check my RSS reader apps about once a week, now getting most of my daily news through Twitter sources. Many of my local friends are on Twitter and I've met so many wonderful people across the web that I would not have known otherwise because of the service. People that I have great respect for are on Twitter. In short, I really enjoy Twitter. And then came the Dickbar. And the veiled threats against developers to quit making 3rd party Twitter clients. And the design decisions that made Tweetie into an abomination of its former self. And the lack of updates for Twitter for Mac for over a year. These things combined have let me worried about the future of Twitter. The consistent lack of good decision making by the leadership of Twitter leaves me anxious for a Twitter alternative in which users are able to pay the service for access to it so that service can continue to develop the service for the users and not for the advertisers in order to pay for it. And that's the key isn't it? Twitter's bad decisions derive from the need to pay for Twitter. Twitter has taken hundreds of million in venture capital money, and because Twitter is "free", advertisers have to pay Twitter to keep it going. So what is Twitter to do? They must make the advertisers happy. To make more money, they must put more focus on their advertisers needs. Meanwhile the users are the product. That makes me very nervous. I just want to continue to use iPad, iPhone and OS X clients to access the service that I truly love. I do not want to be force fed Twitter's bad UX decisions so that they can monetize their service off of my eyeballs. I've told you all of this in order to explain why I've backed App.net. What is App.net? In short, App.net is a Twitter clone with a classic business model. The users pay a fee (50$ initially) to join the service. Users must pay this fee annually. By doing this, the service is able to pay for itself and focus its development and design resources on the users and not advertisers or what their venture capitalist sugar daddies want them to. Some people have said this idea will fail. Some people have criticized App.net for a few poorly made marketing decisions early on when they first announced their intentions. I've given them a pass on all of these things because I desperately hope they will succeed. If they do not succeed, then who will? If any of this makes sense to you, I suggest you check out join.app.net. App.net is trying to start their initial funding via kickstarter-like campaign. They cannot use Kickstarter because Kickstarter's own terms of service forbid companies from using it to start a new company. So they've setup the equivalent off of their own website. A lot of notable people have gotten on board and contributed their respective $50 as well. App.net already has an early alpha version online for you to take a look at. If you email join@app.net once you've backed the project and ask, they'll go ahead and activate your account which they're doing for people manually. If you back the project and are let in, you can find me there @joel. As of this writing, App.net sits at $325,400 of their $500,000 goal. There are 4 days left to contribute. As of yesterday, it looked as if App.net's campaign would fail miserably short of its goal, sitting at around $245,000 committed. But then, John Gruber posted about this on Daring Fireball yesterday evening. Since then they've picked up over $80,000 since. If this rate of contributions keep up they might just meet their goal by Monday. I hope this succeeds. Update: Less than $60,009 to go! Just over 48 hours to do it.

Complaints About Apple's New Podcasts App

My Podcast Listening History

Going back many years, to early 2005, when I started listening to Podcasts, I've always used iTunes to do so. Apple added the Podcast Directory to iTunes on 28 June, 2005. I honestly don't remember how I listened to Podcasts from March/April until June - I think I downloaded them manually - but from June 2005 until about 2 months ago, I used iTunes exclusively. At first, I used my 3rd generation iPod, then my 4th, then my 5th. In 2008, when I got my first iPhone, the 3G, I abandoned my iPod and switched to using the podcasts section of the music app on the phone instead. When the iPad came out in 2010, I expanded my podcast listening habits to the podcasts portion of the music app on that device as well. Why am I telling you all of this? I wanted to make the point that I am a long-time user of Podcasts in iTunes, from the beginning, and am intimately familiar with how iTunes, iPods, iPhones and iPads have functioned with regards to podcasts. In the last couple years, I have not made the switch to any alternative podcasting apps (until recently). Now that we've established what I hope you will take as my qualifications to bitch about this subject, I shall now lodge my complaints.

Reasons For Wanting To Switch

Over the last couple of years, I have been slightly annoyed that, using the model I've outlined above, in order to receive new episodes of a podcast that come out when I'm not at home, I must go into the iTunes app on my iPhone or iPad, manually search for the podcast, and manually download it. There was not a way within the app to search for new episodes, especially if it is a podcast that I do not keep played versions on my device once listened to. Once an episode gets deleted, the podcast disappears from the Podcasts section of the Music app. This was incredibly frustrating. A month ago, I finally made the decision to stop using iTunes for podcasts and to research both Downcast and Instacast, two of the leading 3rd party iOS podcasting applications. Both are highly rated in the store and very popular. Without going into specifics, and based on Marco Arment's endorsement, I chose Downcast. Now, while Downcast still has its faults, I had been using it fairly well for 2-3 weeks. Then Apple released Podcasts. Because Podcasts was produced by Apple - I assumed it would have superior iCloud features, do everything the Music app did, and had been instilled with features that the Music app did not do previously. I was partially right, but mostly wrong...

The User Experience or The Beginning Of My Ranting

I will now list everything I've found that the application falls short on. When it was built into Music, I could partially understand, which is why I sought out Downcast. But now that Podcasts is separate - I no longer grade it on a curve but expect it to do at least 80% of what Downcast or Instacast do. Sadly, it does not. First of all - the application is limited to downloading files less than 50MB in size. As I understand it, this is a limitation across all iOS applications when on 3G - but as about 1/2 of all podcasts I listen to are greater than 50MB in size…well you can see why this is an issue. Next, whenever the user starts listening to an episode, the album artwork covers up the play/pause/forward/reverse controls for the episode. The user must swipe upward to reveal these controls. In the 7 years I have been listening to podcasts I do not think I have ever cared about the album artwork of a podcast while listening, however, I usually need to access the controls from 0-5 times during an episode. This extra swipe to access them each and every time is tedious, to say the least. Next…reel to reel tape? Are all of the designers that Apple assigned to work on this application over the age of 40? I'm 30 and the last time I recall seeing a reel to reel tape machine in was sometime in elementary school during the 80s when my poor, rural county was still using 20 year old equipment because they couldn't afford to purchase anything better. And yes Apple, I get it…in order to be a designer at Apple one must pass an extensive Dieter Rams fetish test, but enough with the god damned skeumorphism already. The tape deck is beautifully done! Kudos to you! But podcasts are 7 years old. I would wager than 75%+ of all podcast listeners are less than 35 years old. We don't need to be hand-held to explain the UI to us, no matter how cute you think it is. How about you give us controls that makes the forward and reverse buttons not be placed directly next to the play/stop button huh? That is the kind of user interface design I can get behind. While I'm on that subject - why is it that when I try to pause or unpause an episode from the button on my headphones it now works about 50% of the time? The old Music app worked almost 90-100% of the time. As of now, I hit the button and it's as if I am pulling a slot machine lever in order to be able to pause an episode without having to remove my iPhone from my pocket to do so. Lucky me! And when I receive a call or use Siri, the application almost never resumes playing (as the old Music app used to do). Furthermore, when I mark an episode as played….put the phone in my pocket, and then pull it out later - why is it marked as unplayed again? And why do you keep randomly re-downloading episodes I've deleted…and marking them as unplayed too? Also, why is it that I can make a bunch of changes (listen to episodes, delete episodes, download new ones) and then dock it with my computer to sync with iTunes - the application doesn't sync all of my changes back to the computer, but instead, the comptuer overwrites the application. Does your sync workflow not follow chronological order of changes? Do you understand how infuriating this is? And finally - iCloud sync. Or not. Because apparently, the ONLY thing Apple syncs over iCloud is an episode's play-state. To be more specific, if I am listening to Back To Work, and am on minute 35, pause it, pick up my iPad, it will also have Back To Work on minute 35. This is the only thing you sync. C'mon Apple. You're APPLE for pete's sake. Sync my entire list of podcast subscriptions. Sync their play/unplayed state. Sync whether I have the episode still (even though I've listened to it) or deleted it. Downcast does this. Instacast does this. That you do not do this is pathetic. I'll stop ranting here, but I warn you - if you've made the switch to Downcast or Instacast, and are tempted to switch back to using Apple's Podcast app - DON'T. Perhaps Apple will slowly iterate this application into an Apple-like level of quality in 2-3 years, but as of right now, this application behaves like an engineer with a Dieter Rams fetish who works at Google made it.

iOS App Review: Newsify

Finding A Replacement For Reeder

By grouping iOS apps into niche markets, aside from the static categories that Apple defines in the App Store, at the top of any list has to include RSS, To-Do, and Twitter clients. There are many options for these three types of apps to choose from, and everyone has their favorites. To-Do apps in particular seem to be all over the map with no clear favorite (except maybe Clear? Pun intended). However, with Twitter or RSS reading apps - Tweetbot and Reeder seem to be the clear frontrunners.

Recently Reeder pushed out a major update for the iPhone version of its iOS application. Many things have changed about it, the biggest changes being the user interface, and supported services. I didn't like either of these changes, as well as how Reeder seems to be promoting Readability over other offline reading services such as Instapaper or Pocket. My offline reading application of choice is Instapaper, and I dislike Pocket…but I very much dislike Readability due to their ongoing lack of respect for their cusomters and publishers.

Because of these reasons, and a few other minor subjective annoyances I have with the user interface of Reeder, I've been searching for a worthy replacement as my main iOS RSS client for about a year now. Without naming names, I've tried many of Reeder's competitors and not found any that I like sufficiently enough to use instead of Reeder. The last time I searched possible replacements about 6 months ago, I came up short. The other day, however, Reeder pushed out a new update for the iPhone version of their app. This new update shoves the Readability icon onto the top of the UI of every individual post. Even after going into settings and turning off Readability, the icon is still present which links to the mobilizer version of Readability. As I detest Readability, the company, and everything it stands for, this simply will not do. Thus began my search for a replacement once again. As I was writing this review, Reeder has pushed out an update that allows the end user to remove ther Readability mobilizer from view. Regardless of this, the direction the developer is taking this app has lead me to seek out alternatives. After a few searches, I came across Newsify. At first, the preview screenshots within the store did not get my attention, but after browsing a few other apps and then ranking them by high-ranking reviews, I came back to Newsify. Due to its price of $0.99, I threw caution to the wind and bought it.

Visual Design

So far, I couldn't be happier. I'll start with the icon, which you can see a little higher up in this article. I like the design and it looks nice on my homescreen (and for my iPad, on my dock). The icon design is clean and is easy to pick out from the rest of my home screen apps. Also, it is not blue…don't get me wrong, I love blue, but so many apps tend to go with that color. The entire UI of the application uses custom artwork and while some of the icons are similar to the default UIKit artwork, the developer has done a good job of using the same elements users are familiar with, such as the refresh circle, while making custom icons for the 'mark as read' menu or the sharing menu. Within a folder or 'all feeds' sub-menu, the application displays articles in a nice reader-friendly view giving beautifully formatted excerpts of each feed item with a thumbnail image if the article has one. See the below screenshot for an example.

Newsify showing the MacRumors feed view.

Animations

One of the features I liked about Reeder was the ability to pull-down on articles to move on to the next item. Mimicing Loren Brichter's pull-to-refresh idea, Reeder allowed a user o pull-down or pull-up on an article which would scroll down or back up to other feed items. Other Reeder competitors (Newsrack comes to mind) did not allow for this scroll motion, and instead, cramped up and down arrows into the top right corner of the user interface. In effect, this made reading items quite tedious when holding my iPad in portrait mode. I tend to hold my iPad from the bottom, especially when laying on the couch or in bed. Arrow controls in the top right corner caused me to have to constantly move a hand off the iPad to interact with those UI controls, while trying to continue holding the iPad with my other hand. This isn't horrible when reading longer articles but when skimming down a feeds list, it was very tedious. Newsify uses the same pull/push to progress gesture as Reeder, however, the animation that Newsify uses is very satisfying to use. It reminds me a lot of the original pull-to-refresh from Tweetie in its use. There is a suble arrow flip, from down to up or up to down as you pull or push, and beside this arrow, Newsify gives you a preview of the headline of the next or previous feed. It is very nicely done.

Settings

A point that may sometimes make or break an app (if there is a lack-thereof) are the settings. I am happy to report that Newsify offers a ton of custom settings for reading, fonts, sorting, refreshing, visual elements, home-screen options, and the ability to customize your sharing service options. Given that I want to eliminate seeing services I do not use, such as Readability, I greatly appreciate this. Another feature I appreciate is the ability to add, remove, and manage my feeds from within the application. Other competitors do not offer this feature, but instead force the user to log into reader.google.com to manage your subscriptions. Forcing me to log into a Google product never makes me happy.

The Developer

I reached out to the developer, Ben Alexander, to ask him a few questions about his application. Ben made Newsify by himself, doing all development and design. He launched the application on April 22, 2012, and says that it has been very successful so far. Apple even recently featured it in the App Store. When I asked Ben why he decided to develop and release an RRS client in an already crowded market for this particular niche, he said:

"As a Google Reader user, I was looking for a more visually interesting way to read RSS feeds. I couldn't find anything that was satisfying to me and thought others might feel the same way." Ben was also kind enough to talk about some upcoming features for Newsify: The next update will bring night mode, mark read while scrolling, tap and hold to mark read and a few other improvements. As for the previous releases on Newsify, there have been several updates to the app since release. Ben is doing an excellent job staying on top of things as far as updates. It is also one of the top RSS reader clients on the App Store based on positive ratings. I feel fairly confident Ben will continue to activley develop this app for some time which makes me at ease with choosing this as my RSS reader.∗

Readability Calls It Quits On Its Flawed Business Model

CEO of Readability, Richard Ziade, at the Readability Blog:

And the great majority of those publishers never registered. Out of the millions—yes, millions—of domains that flowed through Readability, just over 2,000 registered to claim their money. As a result, most of the money we collected—over 90%—has gone unclaimed. As of today there’s nearly $150,000 in earmarked money sitting in a separate, untouched bank account. Good riddance. I never consented for Readability to collect fees on my behalf. Readability is finally admitting that 90% of the publishers their users read, never signed up for their opt-in service despite the fact that, for years, they used this justification to collect money from users on their behalf. Sleaze. Oh and what are they doing with that $150,000? They're giving it to two charities of their choice, without refunding it to users. Because, you know, Readability knows best…and by giving it to charities of their choice, they prevent you from criticizing that they're too lazy to refund it all individually back to the users who paid them the money in the first place. Sleaze.

The Costa Concordia Sinking: Inside the Epic Fight for Survival

Of course I saw the news when this happened, and I saw whenever there were updates in the news about it, but I didn't pay very close attention to it. In hindsight, I'm glad this article was written, because I had no idea the story was this riveting. Bryan Burrough, at Vanity Fair writes:

Another Night to Remember

When the Costa Concordia, a floating pleasure palace carrying 4,200 people, hit a rock off the Italian coast on January 13, it became the largest passenger ship ever wrecked, supplanting the Titanic in maritime history. From the moments when the captain made the first in a series of incredible blunders, through a harrowing night of mindless panic and deadly peril, in which rescuers and passengers improvised a massive evacuation and ordinary men emerged as heroes, Bryan Burrough reconstructs an epic fight for survival—in which all too many would perish. Instapaper this article, go fix yourself a drink, sit down on the couch and read.

Thoughts on Diablo 3: Part I

Background

Anyone who really knows me, knows that I am a long-time PC Gamer. Somewhere on the top ten list of my most favorite games would have to include Diablo 2. Old hometown friends of mine and I spent hundreds of hours at LAN parties in the late '90s and in early 2000s playing this game for week-long periods together, hold-up in the basement of one of our respective parents' houses on spring break or over Christmas break when home from college. We would play this game from Act I through Act V, starting off with new characters, and by the end of the week, would have beaten it on Normal, then Nightmare and finally Hell. This was the perfect co-op multiplayer game that would support up to 8 people at once. I tell you all of this to give you an appreciation for just how long I have been waiting for Diablo 3 to come out. Blizzard had gotten side-tracked in making the successor to Diablo 2 due to their almost decade-long cash cow escapade that is known as World of Warcraft. Due to WoW's success and its heavily evolved style of gameplay since it's release in 2004, I was afraid a lot of developers and designers who had worked on WoW would be the same ones working on Diablo 3. When World of Warcraft first came out, I played it and enjoyed it but eventually grew tired of the direction that Blizzard had taken the game when most players had hit the level cap and Blizzard put mor emphasis on end-game repeatable raids and not new quests/storyline content. Given that Diablo 2 came out in the summer of 2000, and that many of the Diablo 2 core team have probably moved on to other projects or even left Blizzard, I was afraid Diablo 3 would be taken in a direction that I wouldn't enjoy as well. Now, I am writing this first piece on the game having only played Act I and Act II so far, as the game came out this past Tuesday and my wife and I left Thursday morning on a long road trip to Indiana to visit her family, attend her little sister's graduation party and to attend a wedding. Because of my limited playtime, this can in no way be considered a comprehensive review. Given that so many other people will be writing comprehensive reviews (and will be doing a much better job at it than I could do) I plan for this series of posts to be smaller brain dumps that I will write as I progress through the game. I'm writing Part I having completed 1/2 of the game on Normal difficulty. As any Diablo fan knows, you start off by beating the game on Normal, and then you start over bumping the difficulty up to Nightmare. You do the same for Hell, and now with D3, there is the new Inferno mode. Despite the fact that you "finish" the game by the end of Normal, you keep using the same character to play Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno - keeping the same gear/skills/spells/money etc. As you play it gets harder and harder, the items change, and you continue to level up. Playing D3 through on Normal is a lot different than playing it through on Inferno. Thus the appeal of the Diablo series. Gamers get a lot of playtime out of the game, and at least with D2, Blizzard does an excellent job of writing a compelling story that makes the game interesting to play, no matter how many times you play it. Another benefit is that the areas of the game are dynamically generated, so no two play-throughs will be the same. Other than the quests not changing in content, the game feels different each time through.

Act I & II, Normal

I was familiar with some of Act I's content already when I began playing due to the fact that I was one of the lucky few that Blizzard invited into the closed beta. In the closed beta, Blizzard gave the beta testers a brief taste of the game by letting them complete the first quest or two (I forget how many) but suffice to say it was very short. I remember it taking me about 30 minutes to play through the beta content and my character capped out at level 8-10 after having done so. Because of this, the first little bit of the game was repetitive but it did not take long for me to move past that into new territory. I started off by playing a Barbarian, the same class of character that I thoroughly enjoyed when I played Diablo 2. The D3 dev team has done a wonderful job at making the Barbarian class in D3 feel very powerful. When your character hacks and slashes monsters, the blows feel like they pack a lot of umph. The graphic effects of the hits are well done, and depending on the type of hit, bodies fly across the screen at veloicity in a very satifying way. After having now completed Act I and II, I can say that they feel a lot like Act I and II of Diablo 2. The visual style of Act I is temperate outdoors and ends in an underground gothic/medieval style setting. Act II takes place in a desert setting, also just like D2. Additionally, some of the most annoying mobs encountered (hard to hit + poisoned based) appear in Act II, just as in D2's Act II. While the decision to keep Act I and II so similar to the previous game, I'm glad they did so. They were fun before. They are fun now. The bosses in both Act I and Act II were fun to fight. The Act I boss was very satisying to defeat because her stoyline arc was annoying - it was a pleasure to take her out. The Act II boss was a bit surprising because as you take him down to 1/4 health remaining, he morphs into a much larger form and regains 100% health. His reformed version is much harder to defeat, but fun once you figure out exactly which combination of skills/spells works for him.

Spells & Skills

Blizzard has changed the way skills work, however, I'm not sure the new system is better or worse, just different. It feels like I have a lot less options, but I suspect that is due to the new skill rune system. You may set a skill/spell to your left and right mouse button, and to keyboard buttons 1, 2, 3, and 4. Each skill/spell has a set of different runes you can unlock at various levels. These runes grant different bonuses that add on to the base skill/spell effect, but you may only select one rune at a time. Because there are so many options, and you can only select so many at once, you feel limited. To be fair, when thinking about what my options were in Diablo 2, I think I have more options in Diablo 3. It just "feels" limiting, and I'm not really sure why yet. Once I complete the game I want to revisit this topic. Another change that Blizzard made was potions (mainly health). Mana potions have been eliminated altogether. Each character's "mana" pool is called something different depending on the class, and either generates automatically or you consume it and it has to recharge. I welcome this change. As for health, in D2, you could fill your inventory with health potions and chug them like budweiser at a frat party during boss fights to stay alive. In D3, there is a lot less emphasis on potions, as when you use one you must wait for a timer to tick down before you're able to drink another. You are forced to find other ways to stay healed. As a barbarian, I'm relying on a lot of skills that grant me health back as I do damage. This works okay as long as I have monsters to his (I'm melee, remember) and sometimes gets me in trouble when fighting ranged monsters that I cannot reach.

Class Balance

According to the forums (and I try to not read the forums that much as they're too much like unintelligent blog comments), other classes either have an easier or harder time of this. The consensus is the Monks heals easily, while the Barbarian has a harder time of it. As these complaints seem to be said by much higher level players on Hell and Inferno level difficulty games, I'll withold judgement on this until I've gotten to Nightmare or Hell difficulty myself. Overall, I'm very pleased with the game so far. We leave Indiana tomorrow morning and should be home by tomorrow night. I'll be able to start Act III then, and once I complete the game all the way through on Normal I hope write Part II of this series.