Archives

Goodbye to Two Greats

The world has been mourning Roger Ebert, who passed away last week, and I join them. I learned a lot about watching movies from the man, but as I observed from afar as he struggled valiantly with disease I learned a lot more about what it means to fully become a person. His film criticism was always commendable, but the way he used it to undergird a life of great curiosity and thoughtfulness was remarkable. He’ll be greatly missed.

I won’t try to write any more than this about Ebert, since so much has already been written about him just in the past two days. Not as much will probably be written about the passing of longtime comics great Carmine Infantino, though, but that doesn’t take anything away from his own remarkable life.

Continue Reading …

+

Facebook Home at First Glance

Somehow last year I ended up owning an HTC One X in addition to my iPhone. It’s never been particularly useful (AT&T has stranded it with an older version of Android) but now it has a purpose in life: the One X is among a few of the first phones that will run Facebook Home, just announced yesterday with much fanfare. I will definitely be installing Home on my One X when it launches on April 12.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about Facebook, most of them negative. But I do respect what they’ve done. You’ve got to; awful as it is in so many ways, it’s too massive, and too difficult to ignore.

Facebook Home, at least at first blush, only gives me more reason to respect them. I see at least two reasons to believe that the company may have pulled off things that other, similarly massive companies have tried and failed at.

First, Facebook Home seems to be a genuinely fresh approach to what a phone operating system can be (whether it really qualifies as an OS or not is debatable). Its conceit is that it eschews the ‘app-centric’ approach that almost every other smartphone OS takes, preferring instead a ‘people-centric’ approach. If it works, it will be a meaningful differentiator in the market, and more or less exactly what I criticized Blackberry for failing to do with their newest phone products.

Second, Facebook Home aims to wholly subvert the resident operating system on the Android phones on which it runs with Facebook’s own ecosystem. I think mostly of Adobe in this regard; for years, they’ve taken an insurrectionist approach with their Creative Suite software, piggybacking what amounts to an entire, largely unwanted operating system’s worth of code (if not features) along with Adobe’s otherwise useful applications. It’s always been a bear for end users, and it has hardly succeeded in establishing CS as a beachhead for doing anything other than what you would have turned to Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator for without it.

If Facebook Home sees wide adoption among both users and developers, it will achieve exactly what Adobe strove for: supplanting the OS that came preinstalled on your hardware (unless of course you buy the HTC First) with something entirely different, effectively stealing customers away from Google. That’s incredibly bold, and if they pull it off, wow. I won’t like them any more for it, but I will respect them more.

One more begrudging note of appreciation, offered again with the caveat “if Facebook Home succeeds”: this could be the definitive contribution to the argument that Mark Zuckerberg is the most talented product designer since Steve Jobs.

Continue Reading …

+

Magic and Mobile Apps

Apple long ago abandoned its original “Magical and Revolutionary” tagline for the iPad, probably out of some embarrassment at how the word ‘magical’ made so many of us groan. But the more I use, build and learn about touch-based software, the more I think magic is really a key component of this stuff, even if it’s not exclusive to the iPad.

I thought about this recently when a co-worker introduced me to Moves, an iPhone app that tracks the number of steps you take, with the aim of getting you to be more physically active from day to day. Once downloaded, you use Moves by doing… well, almost nothing. The app does everything for you, recording and parsing out your steps by mapping where you’ve traveled over the course of the day, how far and how fast, all with no user intervention required. All you have to do is the walking part, and the app quite literally does the rest, generating a complete, metered itinerary for all the walking and (most of) the places you visited in a given day.

Continue Reading …

+

The Race for Mobile News

Here is a quick list I made of some of the many mobile news apps that have entered the market over the past few years: Prismatic, Circa, Pulse, News 360, Summly, and Zite. These are all serious, well-funded and/or well-staffed entrepreneurial attempts at building the next great news brands. You can probably name at least a few others.

To some degree or another, they all propose to define a new kind of news reading experience that lies at the intersection of mobile access and customizable headlines. Some of them are pretty good at it, too. But none of them have truly come to own this category, and similarly none of them have become indispensable mobile brands the way that say Instagram has.

This situation puzzles me, because reading the news is one of the core use cases on a mobile phone — just about everyone does it. It surprises me that we’re almost six years into the iPhone-fueled smartphone era, and we don’t yet have a commonly agreed upon winner among news apps. Not just a clear leader in downloads, installs and active users, but an outright brand leader, an approximate equivalent to what CNN was in the first decades of cable news.

There is a distinction, of course, between producing original news, like CNN does, and aggregating or repackaging it, like almost all of these apps do. And maybe the fact that these brands have already come up against the limits of their popularity suggests that aggregation will always be inferior to original news.

I wouldn’t be surprised if in the long run that turns out to be the case; research suggests that legacy news brands enjoy an advantage in mobile (at least for now).

Still, I highly doubt that the combination of mobile access and customized headlines has already played itself out fully. While I take nothing away from what these apps have done so far, it strikes me that we are still just learning what mobile news consumption means, and how it’s very different from traditional or even desktop media models. As our understanding matures, new apps and brands will enter the market with radically different interaction models.

If you also have a little bit of faith that technology will continue its heretofore unceasing forward march, then it becomes quite reasonable to expect that we are due for huge innovations in relevance and automated customization sometime in the next decade, which will benefit this category of software immensely. That is, solutions to the challenge of creating a news experience tailored just for your interests (explicit and implicit) are bound to get more and more sophisticated — and accurate. The company that is the first to combine such technology with a truly advanced understanding of mobile news consumption will become the next great news brand.

Continue Reading …

+

Reading into Google Reader’s Story

A lot has been written already about Google’s announcement that it will shutter its Google Reader product on 1 July. It’s a decision that has infuriated many, partly because when the company launched Google Reader in 2005, its free price tag undercut and then virtually destroyed the market for competitive products.

Soon enough, Google Reader had become a de facto industry standard, even as it became more and more apparent over the years that the company cared little for the market that it had come to own. As its hegemony endured, an ecosystem of Google Reader-based feed reading clients came into being, like a city that builds itself on an earthquake fault line. If you were in the market for an RSS client at any time in the past three or four years, you’d have been hard-pressed to find one that wasn’t based on Google Reader. So once it passes into the next world, Google Reader will leave in its wake few if any robust alternatives for consumers to choose from.

There are some important takeaways from this unfortunate history. First in my mind is the fact that Google Reader didn’t beat every other feed reader purely because it was free. Google Reader won because it was an extremely well-executed example of interaction design.

Continue Reading …

+

Back to Blogging

It’s no secret that this blog has been operating at a reduced pace for some time now. I’m struggling to post much of anything, and I’m utterly failing in writing the kind of stuff I would like to be writing: longer and (hopefully) more substantive essays than what’s been posted recently, the kind that I used to turn out regularly.

And it’s hardly the case that I’ve been stumped for topics to post about, either. To the contrary, all sorts of blog post ideas continue to occur to me at all times. Often I’ll start mentally drafting them, anticipating a free moment when I can type them out and turn them into real posts that get published on this site — you know, like a blogger would do. But then a very busy day goes by, and two or three more, and before long the post no longer seems timely or unique and the moment is gone.

Continue Reading …

+

The Post-Posterous World

Posterous, which was my favorite among the many hosted blogging platforms of the past few years, recently announced that it will shut down on 30 Apr, a little over a year after the company was acquired by Twitter. If you’ve got any blogs running on the service, there are instructions on requesting archives here, though be forewarned that the process of generating the archives may take several hours or more.

Also included at that link are instructions on moving your Posterous content to both WordPress and Squarespace. Either of these options are more than capable substitutes for Posterous’ functionality. But for me, the demise of Posterous means there’s really no reason to continue avoiding Tumblr.

(To be clear, this blog you’re reading is run on ExpressionEngine. I’ve been using services like Posterous for peripheral blogs that I keep mostly for my own amusement. More in this blog post from last year.)

Unfortunately, Posterous conspicuously omitted notes on how to move your blogs to Tumblr. Given the past rivalry between the two services, that’s probably understandable. Thankfully, the folks at Indian startup 3crumbs have put together Just Migrate, a simple Web-based tool that will copy all of your Posterous content to a Tumblr blog more or less effortlessly. Tumblr places some restrictions on how much content can be imported at once, and the demand on Just Migrate is already so great that the service is currently maxed out. I was lucky enough to get my migration done over the weekend, but if you get into their queue today, yours should be done well before Posterous’ 30 Apr shutdown date.

Continue Reading …

+

2013 Expansion Plans

When Mister President passed away in December, it made for a very rough end to the year. But one thing that got me through it all was remembering how much I still have to be grateful for. For instance, Laura has been pregnant since late spring — with twins. Twins! Pure craziness.

For various reasons, I haven’t talked about it publicly yet, but the time to do so is now. With twins, doctors tend to want them to come out before they reach the full nine-month mark, so in just a little while we’re going into the hospital where her doctors will induce labor. If everything goes well, sometime in the next day or two we’ll add an ‘identical’ pair of baby boys to our family.

Baby A

Here’s a picture of one of them — “Baby A” — from just a few days ago. “Baby B” was camera shy that day, and they couldn’t get a good shot of him — but they’re twins, so you can imagine what he looks like, right?

That’s all for now. Wish us luck.

Continue Reading …

+

Corporations Are People Too

To those uninitiated in the vagaries of medical care for pets, suffice it to say that veterinarians’ bills can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. So for years I’ve paid for a pet medical insurance policy for my dog, Mister President. It sounds a little silly, I know, but it’s been worth the money.

After my dog, Mister President, passed away last month, and after I picked myself up off the floor, I somehow found the wherewithal to submit insurance claims for all of the bills we incurred in diagnosing and treating his cancer, and for the euthanasia and cremation processes too.

Continue Reading …

+