11 Digit Prime

Courtesy of my friend Mike. “Give your daughter nostalgia...

Sat, 26 May 2012 13:08:43 -0700

Courtesy of my friend Mike. “Give your daughter nostalgia for an aesthetic she’s never even experienced.”

Waiting For Coffee (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 26 May 2012 12:27:23 -0700

Waiting For Coffee (Taken with instagram)

Why my brother-in-law is my best friend (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 26 May 2012 11:11:15 -0700

Why my brother-in-law is my best friend (Taken with instagram)

think-progress: There are exactly three countries on Earth...

Fri, 25 May 2012 10:35:40 -0700

think-progress:

There are exactly three countries on Earth that do not provide guarantees for paid maternity leave. Papua New Guinea and Swaziland are two of them. Care to guess the third?

Read the article here.

You-Es-Ay! You-Es-Ay!

"Arc90/Readability isn’t selling the ebooks, so they’re not profiting from it at least, but Readlists..."

Tue, 22 May 2012 20:28:26 -0700

“Arc90/Readability isn’t selling the ebooks, so they’re not profiting from it at least, but Readlists is effectively a distribution system for other people’s content, taken without their permission and distributed in a new medium.”

- Ben Brooks on Readlists | TightWind

While Arc90 might not be profiting (yet) from the redistributed content, what they are doing is potentially robbing some writers of ad revenue.

I find ads annoying, but right now, that’s the only viable method of compensation available to some writers. Ads might suck, but it’s what we’ve got. If Arc90 takes money away from writers—any money at all—isn’t that reason for concern?

But never mind all that; redistributing other people’s content without permission is overt theft. Saying you’re doing it in the name of curation just puts a fancy-sounding label on it.

"With Readlists you are essentially publicly sharing an eBook that contains a writer’s content —..."

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:35:53 -0700

“With Readlists you are essentially publicly sharing an eBook that contains a writer’s content — content that was never granted permission to be redistributed.”

- A New Service to Take Writer’s Content and Redistribute it as an eBook to the Web, Thus Avoiding Visiting the Writer’s Site — The Brooks Review

By using Readlists, you aren’t “essentially” doing this—it’s exactly what you’re doing. This is even more unconscionable than the link-jacking Readability was doing a few weeks ago. Shameful.

Box Props (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:00:23 -0700

Box Props (Taken with instagram)

I continue to love this utterly ridiculous blog more than...

Sun, 20 May 2012 03:36:02 -0700

I continue to love this utterly ridiculous blog more than anything on the Internet.

Cafe Dog (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 12 May 2012 17:36:16 -0700

Cafe Dog (Taken with instagram)

"So here I am at Dell’s huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from..."

Sat, 12 May 2012 12:52:21 -0700

“So here I am at Dell’s huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the – by Dell chosen – moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room. “The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room.”

- Dresscode: Blue tie and male

Hard to believe that anyone could say such things in public without it being intentionally farcical. Sounds like the kind of thing you’d hear from a Colbert-like satirist.

Current Status (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:34:26 -0700

Current Status (Taken with instagram)

You Don’t Say (Taken with instagram)

Fri, 11 May 2012 05:03:36 -0700

You Don’t Say (Taken with instagram)

(Taken with instagram)

Wed, 02 May 2012 18:05:36 -0700

(Taken with instagram)

"The oft-repeated fallacy that the iPad isn’t a tool for productivity and creation has no credibility..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 17:13:19 -0700

“The oft-repeated fallacy that the iPad isn’t a tool for productivity and creation has no credibility whatsoever. Anyone trotting out that old chestnut is either labouring under some astonishingly wrong-headed preconceptions, or is making excuses for their own failings.”

- iPad productivity apps - Matt Gemmell

Scone and a Coffee (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:45:58 -0700

Scone and a Coffee (Taken with instagram)

Pocket vs. Instapaper

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:32:00 -0700

Make a product that’s good enough, and competitors will go to insane lengths to steal your crown. That’s what we have here with Pocket (née, Read It Later), a competitor to Instapaper that has abandoned its business model, opting to give away it’s entire product for free in order to—as far as I can tell—be declared the winner.¹ Surprisingly, it gets a few things right along the way. I spent the last week trying out Pocket. Here’s what I found.

What’s to Like

Pocket has a very pretty face. The UI and branding are consistent throughout, the colors they’ve chosen are cheerful, and the icon is cute. Plus, the name is almost Apple-like; it’s succinct and appropriate.

Pocket allows you to filter your list of bookmarks based on media type (text, videos, audio), which is a nice touch. I tend to bookmark a lot of screencasts, and it’s helpful to be able to filter them out.

In Instapaper, if you want to archive an article (that is, mark it as read), you tap a trash can icon, which presents you with the option to archive or delete. It’s a two-step process. Pocket uses a check mark icon to indicate archiving. You can archive the article while viewing it, or you can swipe it in the list view to reveal a set of actions, including a trash can icon that can be tapped to delete the article. I think this interaction model works better than Instapaper’s; it presents the best option at the best time, and it buries the lesser used option—deleting—in an action menu.

Pocket’s action menu (left) and in-article toolbar (right).

I absolutely love the context provided at the top of articles that I bookmarked through Twitter (and I bookmark a lot of things through Twitter). Pocket shows the source tweet, who said it, and it gives you the option to quickly retweet the source tweet. It’s beautifully laid out.

Pocket shows you where the bookmark came from.

What’s Not So Great

Tagging feels a bit bolted on. The tagging interface is—for the most part—pretty slick, but as far as I could tell, removing a tag from an article requires a trip to the Web interface.

Speaking of, visiting getpocket.com on my laptop while logged in results in a bunch of typical homepage material; visiting instapaper.com results in my list of unread articles, which is far less clunky.

Also, clicking a bookmark on getpocket.com often results in viewing a copy of the content hosted on Pocket’s servers as opposed to visiting the original source. This is the same misstep that got Readability into a lot of hot water a couple weeks ago, so I was surprised to see them using the same technique.

Pocket scrapes content and hosts it on their own servers.

Pocket’s text parser isn’t as good as Instapaper’s, occasionally dropping paragraphs. Sharing to Tumblr is much more robust in Instapaper as well, allowing you to post quotes from whatever you’re reading (Pocket only allows you to post links).

Most importantly, both of these apps are built for reading, which Instapaper excels at by providing a wider variety of fonts and formatting options. Both apps offer a nighttime mode where the colors are inverted to white text on a black background, but only Instapaper will use your location to flip the switch automatically. This feature’s far more useful than it sounds.

Finally—and this is a personal nitpick—neither app handles formatting of code blocks properly. I tend to read a lot of articles about programming, and both text parsers choked on blocks of code (sometimes removing them entirely).

In the End

Pocket was a nice diversion, but I’ll be sticking with Instapaper.

I suspect that, in the short term, Pocket will pick up the crowd that strives for cheap or free software, and there’s no shortage of those folks on the App Store. However, that’s not a great crowd to lure. They’re demanding with a sense of entitlement, and Pocket’s success will be gauged on how many of these freeloaders they can attract. It’s not hard to imagine the service cratering under the weight of a hoard of free users.

Meanwhile, I pay for Instapaper. I know how Marco makes money, and I know how he keeps the lights on. I feel like I can trust his service as a result.

The things I enjoyed about Pocket are—sadly for Pocket—minor UI features that can be borrowed or stolen outright (and, if we Instapaper users are lucky, improved upon along the way). There’s nothing groundbreaking, nothing inventive enough in Pocket to separate it from Instapaper. Ultimately, I felt much the same way about Pocket that I felt about Path: it’s pretty but derivative.

Winner of what, exactly? Let me know if you find out. ↩

Eventful Saturday (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 20:10:15 -0700

Eventful Saturday (Taken with instagram)

A Duncan Meter (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:43:47 -0700

A Duncan Meter (Taken with instagram)

"The thunderstorm that blew through the Bay Area Thursday night was one for the books - it shattered..."

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:06:40 -0700

“The thunderstorm that blew through the Bay Area Thursday night was one for the books - it shattered rainfall records in four cities and produced more lightning strikes than any storm in years.”

- A night to remember: Thunderstorm shatters records - SFGate

I’m going to be that guy for a second: even the Bay Area’s thunderstorms are California-mellow. That storm was pretty tame. Relaxing, even. I grew up in tornado alley, though, so my perspective is skewed a bit.

Still, it was fun. Wish we got them more often.

"PHP is an embarrassment, a blight upon my craft. It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered..."

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:49:25 -0700

“PHP is an embarrassment, a blight upon my craft. It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered amateur who’s yet to learn anything else, as to be maddening.”

- PHP: a fractal of bad design - fuzzy notepad

Wow. The description he provides to Mel is an excellent metaphor and a sentiment that I’ve tried to convey to people repeatedly.