Fine, My Brief Thoughts on the iPad

JANUARY 29, 2010

Here's how Apple wants us to buy computers.

Typical consumer family:
1 iMac for everyone, 1 MacBook for travel, 1 iPad for the couch and 2 iPhones

Professional user family:
1 Mac Pro for home/office, 1 Macbook Pro for the road, 1 iPad for the couch and/or clients and 2 iPhones

And when they're better, an AppleTV in every room.

My friend Adam, and others I'm sure, are concerned about this being a peripheral. While you clearly need a computer to sync the devlice, but I don't think there's reason for concern. If it's not true already, most homes will have one computer that acts as home base. You'll keep your music, movies, contacts, etc. stored there and everything else will sync with it. If you already have a laptop and a desktop, the laptop is as much a peripheral as an iPad would be.

Sure, the iPad is more geared towards consumption, but so what? As I've read a few times lately, the vast majority of time that most users spend on a computer is consumption, so it only makes sense to optimize towards that. If you don't want a consumption device, there are plenty of other options at your disposal.

Sidenote: I tried to keep this short, since I've already complained about the amount of interesting content being produced. My apologies if I added to your pile.

Posted in Technology\Web at 3:39 pm.
2 Comments |

Digging a Tunnel Below NYC

JANUARY 29, 2010

The MTA has been building a tunnel to bring the LIRR into Grand Central. They're expecting it to be complete by 2016. The photo above is from a slideshow on WNYC.org showing some of the images of the dig. Ron Cohen, who is pictured, has been a foreman on this project for a year. If sees it to fruition, he will have worked underground for 9 years. That's insane.

Also worth noting, the workers have a choice of Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks coffee. According to the caption (Image #4), the workers prefer Dunkin Donuts.

Slideshow via Sean and you can read more about this on Gothamist

Posted in New York at 2:02 pm.
0 Comments |

More Tablet Conjecture

JANUARY 12, 2010

After outlining my thoughts on the tablet, a few folks have noted that Apple has never made a modular device because they're clunky and harder to produce, but I don't think that means they never would. While I'm not positive it will be a laptop, I am quite confident the tablet will act differently in different environments (see Pogue's explanation of Droid docks).

After writing the last post, I found some examples, new and old, that showed similar ideas.

Two years ago, Popular Mechanics envisioned a truly modular tablet. I think this is further than Apple would go, but is most similar to what I discussed above.

I couldn't find the source of this image, but I see something like this as a distinct possibility. Tim Van Damme posted a thoughtful piece yesterday that struck a similar cord. "Combine this 'shell' with our tablet, and you get a fully functional desktop computer".

Finally, here's a real product. Lenovo is coming out with a hybrid laptop/tablet that is pretty ugly, but is theoretically identical to what I proposed.

I think I'm done prognosticating (for now), but I'm growing more and more excited about this device. I've also started thinking more about how content will be displayed. More to come on that later.

Posted in Technology\Web at 12:28 pm.
1 Comment |

Roger Ebert on Blogging and Dining

JANUARY 7, 2010

After several surgeries following a bout with cancer, Roger Ebert cannot talk or eat. He posted about the experience on his blog. The end is the best.

So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for me, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking...Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now.

For whatever reason, I had never put two and two together. I couldn't believe how long his blog posts were, but now it makes a lot of sense. These stories make me happy to work for a blogging company.

Posted in Culture\Politics\Law at 5:52 pm.
1 Comment |

The Apple Tablet Will Be a Laptop

JANUARY 4, 2010

Sippey believes the iTabletSlateTab will be a laptop with a touchscreen where the screen can fully wrap around. I almost agree, which means it's time for me to stake my claim in the tablet sweepstakes.

The Apple Tablet will actually be the second generation of the MacBook Air. The screen will be 10" (as predicted by many), touchscreen, have very high contrast and will be detachable. That is right friends, the screen will be attached by a magsafe-like connector that keeps the screen attached to the keyboard.

The last time I blogged about the tablet, I thought there'd be some docking station so you can use it as a computer at home. Instead, it will just be half of the computer. I could imagine some kind of stand for watching on the plane or just for around the house, as well.

As for price-point, I think it will indeed be $800-1000. I think they'll add editorial content to the iTunes store using web technology similar to the iTunes LP format (as John Siracusa has predicted). I think it will be based on OS X and not another new operating system, but it will likely require a new 10.6.x version to operate properly. I also think it will be awesome.

Further Reading

Gruber's take on the Tablet
Nick Bilton's take
Marco's take
David's take, which is similar to mine (I think)

Posted in Technology\Web at 5:01 pm.
0 Comments |

What's Not to Like?

DECEMBER 23, 2009

There a number of gestural ways for readers to indicate interest in content on the web. They all go by different names and representations, which makes it difficult to determine the right solution for your community. Below is an examination of the available options and, hopefully, answers to all of your burning questions.

Earlier this week, I was reading Gothamist and became engulfed in an article about EMTs letting a pregnant lady die. It’s an insane story and there are a ton of comments. There are also three “likes”. This disparity—one amongst many that exist on the internet—shows that there’s something broken with “liking” content.

When you find a piece of content that excites you, you probably want to do one of these things:

• Respond to the article with a comment of your own
• Bookmark the article for later
• Share the article with someone else
• Let the author know that you enjoyed the content

When a user “likes” a piece of content, they could be doing any of the final three actions, depending on the service. In the case of Gothamist, my instinct is that people “like” content because they want to tell the author and other readers that it was interesting and that they’d like to see more like it. Assuming this, why didn’t more people “like” this entry?

Before I answer that question, it’s worth noting that these gestural responses are very different from other reactions to content. Commenting, replying, sharing and even reblogging all involve content creation, which is a higher level of engagement and worthy of its own discussion. I also won’t really touch on flagging (e.g., spam, offensive content) or ratings.

Language Matters

Gothamist, as well as another small site called Facebook, use the word “like” as a way to note enjoyment, but it’s conflicting for a person to “like” an article that’s about a pregnant lady dying. Am I saying I like the article or that I like killing pregnant women and their fetuses? It’s clearly not the best phrase here, even though it works in most contexts.

There are certainly other options. Here are the ones I’ve seen the most and what they might imply. These are illustrative examples that cover many, but certainly not all, use cases (if a service has a word and a symbol, I just mentioned the word).

Type	Services	Definition
Like	Facebook, Vimeo, Google Reader	As discussed, it can either mean I liked reading the content or I agree with the content. Essentially, I feel happy after reading this. It’s more often used as encouragement than as a bookmark.
Favorite	YouTube, TypePad, Posterous	Similarly, this is something I enjoyed reading, but it tends to lean more towards a bookmark.
Recommend	Movable Type, NYT	I enjoyed reading this and I think you should enjoy reading it too.
[Up/Down]	Reddit	This is essentially recommend and not recommend.
[Star]	Twitter, Google Reader	This is mostly synonymous with “favorite”, but because there are no words it’s more open to interpretation.
This is good	Vox	I’ve only seen this on Vox, but I love it so I’m including it. This is back to a happy feeling and closest to “like”.
[Heart]	Tumblr	Very similar to “This is Good”.

The interpretations may give you some insight into what is appropriate for your context. In the case of the Gothamist article, “recommend” may be the best phrase since they use this data to calculate their popular article rankings. This isn’t everyone’s goal, though.

What To Do

There’s certainly no magic bullet, but how you implement this feature should depend on what you want to get out of the data. In the end, most publishers are looking for increased page views, but the path there relies on added value for the site’s community. If you’re keeping them engaged, they’ll keep coming back, which leads us to our final list. These are the benefits of using favorites:

• A list of popular content: In addition to comments, page views, etc., you can use this to determine what content is most read on your site. This is an example of data that the publisher parses to add extra value (as opposed to the user).
• A measure for the success of your articles: You can use this metric to refine the type of content on your site and gauge the success of your writers. This is another example of publisher-driven data.
• A curation tool for users: People often just want a way to bookmark content, but it’s more often used as a way to represent who you are. There are millions of Facebook users whose identity is based solely on the items they “like” and share. This is an example where the community is making use of the data.

Really, all three use cases are valuable to publishers and users, just in different ways. The first and third are most valuable to sites that rely on user-generated content and the first two are more valuable for editorially-driven content. In the end, you should focus your efforts on what will improve the quality of and access to your content, because that’s why people visit your site.

Some Additional Notes

If your site is very upfront about its purpose, the language becomes less important. For sites where the homepage is a list of most popular content (e.g., Digg, Reddit), most users will click the button with the intention of promoting content to that list.

It’s also worth mentioning that sites often have two ways to provide gestural feedback, which can cause confusion and frustration. If you look at Twitter’s new retweet functionality, the inability to add your own comment essentially turns this into another way to favorite. It may show up in your user stream instead of a separate page, but it’s the same feature. Google Reader has two gestural responses: like and star (in addition to share and share with note). It seems like they’re just throwing the kitchen sink at the problem.

Finally, there’s the issue of site-specific jargon. Digg is the only site I can think of that does this with any success. Creating a new verb is not worth the overhead I would never recommend this unless your name is Kevin Rose.

I encourage you to comment with additional use cases and examples of usage in various services. I’d love to see as many examples as possible.

Posted in Design, Technology\Web at 3:10 pm.
9 Comments |

Canabalt Scoreboard Upgrades: User Scores, Historical Data

DECEMBER 4, 2009

Remember the Canabalt Scoreboard I built a while ago? I decided to add a couple things. Semisecret, the game's creator, is going to be adding a global leaderboard in the next update, so I thought I'd some things that will remain useful and parse some of the data.

Historical Data

Since I started tracking data on October 4th, I've captured 25k scores. As of today, the average score is 3965m. When you break it down by the type of death, it's 3728m (fine mist), 4082m (hit wall) and 3686m (fell). I think it does a decent job of showing what obstacle is hardest to avoid (hitting a building above or below the window).

If you go to the site and click on the stats tab, you can also see a list of the highest score for each day since I've tracked scores and a pretty graph of how people are dying, broken down by day (seen to the right). It's also an interesting look into how often people are posting their scores to Twitter which I imagine correlates closely to total usage.

User Scores

You can also now look at all of the scores you've submitted. For example, here are mine and here's iSpacemanSpiff, who has the highest score right now. If you want to look up the scores of anyone else, just go to the main page and do a search.

More Information

I have other data I'd like to get up there, specifically the average score per day, to see if people are improving overall. And if any of you like the graph, I built it using the Javascript library, Bluff. I like it a lot and have also been interested in using High Charts, but that's fodder for another post.

The more I build this out, the more I think this would be a useful tool for developers. I know many collaborative FPS and MMPORG games use stats to change how the game works and I think iPhone developers with global leaderboards could learn from this data too.

Posted in My Life, Video Games at 3:08 pm.
2 Comments |

I'm with Team Outside

DECEMBER 3, 2009

There was a raging debate on Twitter yesterday about punctuation and quotations. Most people came down on the side of putting punctuation inside the closing quotation mark and that's how American English does it. Quoth Wikipedia:

American English places commas and periods inside the quotation almost all of the time, making exceptions only for parenthetical citation and cases in which the addition of a period or comma would create confusion, such as when quoting a keyboard entry or a web address.

I get that, but I respectfully disagree. I prefer the British style:

The British style places them inside or outside the quotation marks according to whether or not the punctuation is part of the quoted material.

Maybe it's from reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves or maybe it's from my life as a programmer, but I think only the quoted material should be inside the marks.

We could debate this at length (and I'm happy to hear your thoughts in the comments), but I think if we just choose a style and stick to it, that should do the trick. Of course, if I got a gig writing for a publication, I'd happily comply with whatever style guide they prefer.

Posted in Music\TV\Film\Media at 11:52 am.
0 Comments |

Wizard Smoke

DECEMBER 3, 2009

You should watch it in HD (via @AdaptivePath).

Posted in Music\TV\Film\Media at 1:46 am.
0 Comments |

Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

To quote my wife after I sent her the link to this song, "it sounds kind of 80s / i mean like 80s power ballads / which i LUUUURVE". Yes, you are right, wife. This song is awesome. [thanks chris]

Posted in Music\TV\Film\Media at 5:14 pm.
0 Comments |