There have always been those few apps that insist on looking like their physical, real world, equivalent. Calculator apps, date books, calendars, note taking apps, “stickies” — you know what I am talking about. Despite there being better options out there, better ways of displaying the data, designers stick with the known representation of the tool.
Now, though, Apple is taking it too far.
If you have seen any of the screenshots linked across the web about the new iCal interface you know what I am talking about. If you haven’t seen those, iCal is looking a lot like it does on the iPad right now in Lion’s developer preview. It’s ugly, and we should be way past this style by now.
Ugly and harder to use than it should be. Designers need to focus on how to allow the user to fluidly access and manipulate their data not slavishly stick to the limitations of physical items.
Another dimension of this is how poorly developers/designers have approached the touch interface. The industry seems to be mired in button-driven-pull-a-menu-to-do-anything paradigm. Interfaces really need to take better advantage of long-tap context options and gestures to make the interactions more fluid. This is one of the things that drives me bonkers about the iPad – it is so modal; I have to close one app to do something in another. I guess I have gotten used to how easy it is in Android to just share data between apps without having to change apps.
Speaking of Android apps, I think that Feedly is the first really usable news reader that I have encountered on Android. I subscribe to a lot of feeds and that seems to be the death of most readers on mobile devices because the developers thought it would be a good idea to download all your feed updates at once. This typically results in the app going away for a long time. Feedly does it more on demand. And they are clever about using gestures in the app – swipe down and to the left and I have marked that page of articles read and moved on to the next. Brilliant. Much better than 'pull menu, select mark read, select next page, close menu' annoyance of other apps.
So
I spent a little time this morning browsing the blogs of people who live in downtown Cincinnati. After about 10 minutes I had to stop. Why do they all seem so bitter and angry? On one hand, they spent a fair amount of time talking about how great it is to live downtown, then turn and belittle people who come down from the (evil) suburbs to partake of the urban greatness. Leaves me wondering why I should hang out downtown with such cliquish bitter crowd.
They also seem to love to hate on people who have chosen to live in the 'burbs (apparently all they we do is drive SUVs and go to the mall). We have nothing entertaining to do, nothing interesting to eat and nothing worthy to see. Look, downtown folks, it is all about choices; I made mine and you made yours – it doesn't make either one of us right or wrong.
Does the anger and bitterness come from a perceived lack of awe at the downtown living decision? Should there be weekly articles in the local press about how wonderful the people who live downtown are? Do they not feel vindicated by their decision, don't feel revered enough that they chose to live downtown? And where is the line? I am sure it exists. That is, the line beyond which you are no longer 'downtown' enough to be part of the in-crowd. Yikes, now I am doing it to. Downtown folks, here is what I have for you: respect. Care to share?
Don't get me wrong, I would love to live downtown; especially if I worked downtown. But I don't. I work in the evil suburbs (Blue Ash) and live in the even more evil exurbs (Union Township). I enjoy being able to commute to work on my Vespa. I enjoy being a few miles from the fantastic Little Miami Bike trail; my wife and I love to cycle down to Loveland for brunch on sunny Sundays. I am sure I enjoy a pint at the Brazenhead just as much as I would at the Lackman. I like that my daughter has a fantastic school system to attend. I enjoy having the largest YMCA in the country a few mile from my home. I enjoy not being able to see my neighbor's houses. I enjoy having a large vegetable garden that feeds us through part of the year. Besides, looking at what condos are going for downtown I would pay about twice as much for what amounts to a two bedroom apartment as I paid for my three bedroom house on five acres of land here in the heart of evil-dom.
So
I was a little surprised to see Cincinnati ranked so high as it is in some ways such a backwater in other regards. Still, it is good to see the city get even an occasional positive mention. I have certainly been doing my small part in the last 10 years to contribute to Cincy online presence.
So
If you are looking for instructions on how to update your AT&T Samsung Captivate to the latest version (2.2 aka Froyo) of the Android OS look no further than Samsung's site. And, please, avoid all of the sites out there that what you to register before they will give you this same link.
The process takes about 20-30 minutes to complete. After the update, all of your wallpapers and launch page layouts will be gone. No apps or data is lost, just the layouts, so you will need to recreate those.
Other than that little annoyance, I am noticing snappier performance overall from the phone so it is definitely worth the time to update.
So
Found a little time to clean up my Internet Footprint – that is all the sites that I have tinkered around with in the past and for whatever reason, never really found any value in them to keep me coming back. So I have gone back and delete my accounts; though I am sure the info will live on in Google for quite some time to come. Here is this weekend's harvest:
BrightKite – first location-based service I tried out. They've gotten out of that (crowded) space. 43Places – I found that I got a lot of people asking for advice about places I'd been but no one answering questions about places I wanted to go. 43People – This was an interesting thought experiment – for about a week. GetGlue – Hunch-wannabe without the correlations and meaningful recommendations. No thanks, I don't need any more virtual stickers. SCVNGR – Another twist on location-based services swizzled with a sort of treasure hunt vibe. Not really enough going on with this to try out or keep me coming back. Also, no option to delete your account. Abandoned. Box.net – this was kind of cool when it first came out; especially being able to access files from my mobile phone. Now Dropbox and Google Docs have taken over for this. Ning – they kind of shot themselves in the head when they switched to a all pay model – that made jumping ship an easy decision. check.in – promised to provide unified 'check ins' for all location-based services. Never really worked that well and probably won't make it out of beta. twine – crashed and burned on its own; morphed into evri which doesn't seem to have a point with all of the twitter search engines out there plancast – recommends all sorts of interesting sounding events – in Austin, Paris, and NYC. Not terribly useful if you aren't in those places. task.fm – reminders; except you need to remember to do to that site to get them – easily replaced this with google calendar and as a bonus automatically gets synced to my mobile phone.
And as previously mentioned – Gowalla is gone and FourSquare is now an entropy exercise.
So
It is kind of fun to listen to the 'pundits' slobber over the rumored iPad 2. They seem to not have a very long memories when they criticize (with a barely masked worried tone in their voices) the emerging Android tablets.
“There aren't many apps written specifically for the Android tablet” – yes, and this was very much true with all of the iPhone apps when the iPad came out.
“iPad has more business adoption than Android tablets” – um, which Android tablets? Most of them will be released in the next six months – businesses typically find it hard to adopt technology that doesn't exist.
Personally I find the walled off nature of iOS a hindrance for any serious use of the iPad. As I have said before, we travel with both the iPad and a cheap netbook and the netbook is the device that gets used most often. Android just provided a better fit for the way I want to use a computer and it looks like the tablet-specific Honeycomb version of the Android OS is just going to make that even better.
So
I decided that in 2011 I am going to conduct an experiment in location-based entropy. That is, I am no longer going to update my Gowalla and Foursquare accounts and have already removed the apps from my phone.
I currently have 15 Foursquare mayorships (several of them in other countries!) – let's see how long it takes for someone to 'oust' me from all of those locations. I didn't use Gowalla as much, largely due to its clunky interface and lack of any real incentives so I have no ground to give there.
Foursquare is growing rapidly, but I have not found any real value in continuing to participate. I have also noticed that with Foursquare becoming more popular, a lot of locations have employees as the 'mayor' – not exactly what was intended, I am sure. In fact, Foursquare recently provided the means for owners of locations to kick employee 'mayors' out so that actual customers have a shot.
So
What a disaster Mozy's recent decision has been. They are switching away from unlimited storage and charging rapacious rates for the new capped plans that replace them. 3 times the cost for infinitely less service – brilliant! First of all, I am not sure they can just change the terms of service and not honor the terms of the previous legally binding contracts. I suspect at some point there will be a class action lawsuit against Mozy from existing customers. If that comes to pass, I will happily join it.
In my case, in December of 2010 I created a new Mozy account for my wife's Mac and committed to a 2 year unlimited storage contract. Mozy is now telling me that on October of 2011 that 2 year unlimited commitment converts to the capped storage scheme – not even 11 months into a 24 month agreement! Further, I was paying less than $300USD for unlimited backup on three computers for a 2 year contract. Mozy now wants to force re-up me for nearly $1000USD per year.
No thanks.
Right now, Crashplan is looking like the best alternative – they offer unlimited backup, a much more efficient and feature-rich client and I can get a household plan that covers backing-up up to 10 computers for four years for less than what I am paying now for three computers under Mozy. Crashplan is even offering a 15% discount to users switching from Mozy. Here is the URL for the Crashplan discount: http://www.crashplan.com/mozyonover .
My initial testing of the CrashPlan Mac client shows it transferring data at about 5x faster than the Mozy client (that is uploading to CrashPlan Central over my crappy DSL). I also have the option of backing up data to a folder on a local (or external drive), to another computer on my LAN or even a friend's computer across the Interwebs.
It is probably going to take a few weeks to get my base data uploaded to CrashPlan so I can then go back to smaller incremental backups, but there is no way on this earth that I am staying with Mozy and their insane pricing. If you are a current Mozy customer, give CrashPlan a look (and even a free 30 day trial). If you are considering Mozy: don't – run away from that train wreck and spend your money with a less greedy and ethically challenged business.
So
I think this post on Why More Americans Don't Travel Abroad gets it partially right. As a person who has been fortunate to have traveled to a fair bit of the world, I have my thoughts on this and I think it comes down to three things really: 1) Ignorance 2) Laziness 3) Cost Misperception .
Ignorance – I've seen and heard this one a lot. Here is a sampling of what I have been asked: “Why would you ever want to leave the US – it is the best place in the world!” “Do they even celebrate Christmas in Spain?” “What are you going to eat in Thailand?” “Doesn't everyone ride elephants in South Africa?” People really think that Spain is just like Mexico – um, yes, in the same way that England is just like Canada or the US.
Laziness – Apparently it just takes too much effort to get a passport and deal with money that doesn't look like the good ole 'merican greenback. Heaven forbid you have to deal with people who don't speak English and that you might have to learn a few words of a foreign language. Here is a secret folks: any place you go in the world, there are people who want to take your money from you and they are more than happy to speak your language (and are amazed if you even make the effort to speak theirs!).
Cost Misperception – Maybe this is an excuse more than anything but apparently people believe that it is really expensive to travel to Europe. Most every time that I have looked, it is the same cost or cheaper to fly to Europe that it is to the west coast. Frankly, I am amazed at the coin that people will drop to go on a cruise or to some barfhole like Disneyland (or even a cruise at Disney). Those costs would more than accommodate a trip out of the country.
I guess I am lucky that traveling is something that my family loves to do, so we save up for a trip once a year. And kids don't have to be an obstacle. My daughter has been traveling since she was six months old. At the tender age of ten, she has been to 17 countries (some of them multiple times). I am willing to bet that she has seen more of the world in her first decade than most Americans will see in their entire lives.