I have been meaning to learn and use some sort of version control system in my routine. At a previous job I used SVN daily, but never for my own stuff. I tried to use Black Pixel’s Versions (prevously owned by Sofa) but I could not for the life of me figure out how to use it. I have been messing with GitHub for Mac this week and it was super easy to learn. While I have a GitHub account, I am just using their application to do local version control of some projects I am working on. Congratulations to the GitHub team for making a version control system even I can understand.
While most of this article feels like it was written for people who have been in a coma for the last twenty years, it is cool to see that there is a whole community of book cover designers. Granted, I do not feel good about their attempt to add animation and audio to digital book covers.
This MetaFilter article was such a joy to read and it really brought me back to why I started designing. When I was 11 years old I was knee deep in this world. It is why I learned how Windows worked. It is why I learned Linux. It is why I ultimately switched back to the Mac when I was 15.
When I got my Kindle for Christmas so long ago I was, almost immediately, greeted with the most horrifying author photo of Emily Dickinson. Absolutely horrible. Horrible for me, who is afraid to turn off my Kindle. Horrible for Emily Dickinson. Did she know this would be how people would be introduced to her and her work? I think so, otherwise that creepy picture would not look so mad.
Amazon, a few months later, released an ad-supported Kindle. It was not only $30 cheaper, but it would show you ads instead of Creepy Emily. In reality I do not want ads or Creepy Emily. The Kindle supports the display on photos you put on the device by using the USB cable. You would think you could go to settings and make these photos the screensaver. That is not an option, unless you hack your device. There is no way I am going to be the guy who hacked a book.
With newer Kindles Amazon has replaced the creepy author pictures with artistic photos of writing utensils. I think the real missed opportunity is to make the screensaver be the covers of the books you bought. As of right now in order to see the cover of a book you bought you have to open the book, which will automatically open to the first page of chapter one, and hit the previous page button twenty or so times. Let’s fix that by making the covers the screensaver.
I have a handful of books I have bought but have yet to read. If the screensaver of my Kindle when it was off showed the cover of the book, I might remember I have the book and think, “Hey, I should read that.”
I like book covers and my Kindle does not really care if I do or not. I like seeing a cover as I open and close a book. It sets a tone. When I started reading The Hunger Games I was robbed of it’s nice cover. So I made it a wallpaper for my retina iPad, a place where the Amazon peacekeepers couldn’t get to. It is also in sizes for your future Retina Mac (maybe) and your retina iPhone. I hope you like it!
Today Readability got in a lot of trouble for hijacking the links that people and publishers assumed should go to an article, but instead went to Readability’s website where the publisher could not track page views or serve ads. That is a problem for Readability because they need the publishers or there is no reason to use their service. I think about this a lot when working on Fire Casting.
You see, right now, Fire Casting is curating content from a community of podcasters. In return the site aims to get them subscribers in iTunes and listens. All the while, they get to maintain their current way of doing things and the features that go along with that. If Fire Casting did not link to the podcast’s website or anything like that I would feel like I was cheating them. I do not want to steal traffic from these podcasts. I do not want to steal subscribers. Sure, it limits the amount of applications I can build on the Fire Casting platform. That said, if a podcaster is looking at his statistics and sees subscribers or listens are down this week because of something I did, then I am not doing them any favors. Fire Casting is about helping the community, not hurting it.
There have been a few ideas people have sent me that, on the surface, are great ideas. Some ideas are things I had thought about while building Fire Casting. I need to make sure that they do no harm before I implement them. Ultimately, the community has the final say. Without them there is no Fire Casting.
Yesterday I launched Fire Casting, a community of podcasters geared towards making podcasting easier among friends. It had a huge launch, and for that I am so grateful to everyone who helped and visited the site. It was a smooth launch, despite having to swap servers at the last minute. When I started working on Fire Casting, I made many long lists of features that I wanted to have done before launch, after launch, and down the road. Last week I decided to throw all that out and just ship.
I started asking myself why I should delay? I have friends who need some of the features1 that Fire Casting has today, not tomorrow. Launching early gives me a deadline to fix only the important stuff and helps me find all those errors I never would have noticed2 otherwise that would not turn up while in private beta.
Fire Casting is powered by the podcasters. It is easier to approach podcasters with a product that they can use to get a feel for how it really works. Mockups and test code are just wishful thinking. Fire Casting needs to come off as a solid project that will not just fade away after a month.
I was lucky enough to work with some amazing podcasters to have something to show on the launch. Fire Casting will continue to grow and be a big part in helping podcasters get started, get better, and get noticed. I have so many index cards full of things that need to be done.
Some podcasts ship before they have a RSS feed. I wanted to make it so that they have an RSS feed without having to go knee deep in learning XML. ↩
For example, in Angry Birds only 20 per cent is used to display and run the game, while 45 per cent is spent finding and uploading the user’s location with GPS then downloading location-appropriate ads over a 3G connection.
Here is a good rule of thumb on iOS when presented with the “Give this application your location?” dialog: stop and think. Is this application a maps application? No? Then why does it need to know where I am? For the most part no game ever needs to know your location. Ever. It’s not just good for your privacy, it’s good for your battery.
I went to MaxFunCon for the first time last year. Any worries I had about flying across the country and paying for a ticket to MaxFunCon were gone from the moment I met the people I was carpooling with. This year? I am extremely excited. I know people in the Maximum Fun community, I know what to expect1, and I just cannot wait to go back.
I am anticipating this year’s MaxFunCon so much that I made an unofficial web app for iPhone and iPad. It is, essentially, a giant countdown clock with the gorgeous MaxFunCon logo. It also contains essential links for someone attending the conference. I did not ask permission before making this, but if anyone from Maximum Fun has absolutely any issues I will take it down. I love those guys and would never mean to cause any complications.
Tonight I accidentally installed iMovie on a first generation iPad. I did it by syncing the application on to the iPad with iTunes. This works because the only limitation that Apple has put on the application in the App Store is that it should only work on iOS devices with a front-facing camera, which the first iPad does not have. iTunes does not check for that, so it will allow iMovie to be installed on the device. Performance-wise the application does run smoothly. I have tried this on two different OS X machines and a few iPads and it has installed iMovie successfully every time.
This morning I was reading about another nice simple music playing application that uses your library from iTunes, called Sonora. It is very similar to another application, Ecoute. Their selling point is that you can listen to your music from iTunes without having to open up the bulky application that has become iTunes.
I would like an application like Sonora and Ecoute that is not for music, but for podcasts. It does not even need to check for new episodes, it just needs to keep their play position like iTunes and the iPod, and whether or not I have listened to the episode or not. It would also need play-pause button support on the Mac’s keyboard. Take Five support is not essential, but would be nice.
“Everything has been updated, but as you remember when the iPhone 4 went to the retina display, developers didn’t have to do anything and their apps looked better.” (via Engadget)
Is this supposed to tell developers not to worry about updating their applications for the retina display? Because that is a horrible thing to imply and just flat out wrong. I get what he is saying: native application user interface elements, that are provided by Apple, and fonts will look nice, but an application’s icon and default.png image will not. In fact, they will look worse than they did on a non-retina screen.
Tonight you can see five planets at the same time. If you, like me, have very little skill at finding things in the sky, Sky View for iPhone is for you. It uses your iPhone’s GPS, compass, and camera to show you where in the sky things are at. It even goes as far as to show you where they were and where they are going at different times. A lot of sky map applications are complicated and take time to learn, I like Sky View because it keeps it simple.
Facebook, like Google, uses the Jabber chat protocol for their instant messaging system. This means that you can send messages to your Facebook friends from most any chat client, like the one built in to OS X.
Just go to preferences in iChat (or Messages), click on the Accounts tab, and click on the plus button at the bottom of the list on the left-hand side. Choose the Account Type “Jabber” and type Your-Facebook-Username@chat.facebook.com in the username field.1 Type in your password and click on the Server Options triangle to expand more options. For the server, type in chat.facebook.com, and for the port type in 5222. Make sure you leave “Use SSL” turned off. That is it! You can now chat with your Facebook friends.
You set this username in Account Settings under Username. You can use this name to log in to Facebook instead of typing out your email address. ↩
