04.24.12 |
Technology |
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“Save for later” apps – apps like Instapaper that capture and cleanly format text articles for later consumption – are essential to my workflow. I rely on them to read long form content for my job, for blog posts and just for fun almost every night. But last week there was a serious shakeup: Popular app Read It Later reinvented itself as Pocket. It aims to be a save later service for not just text articles but almost anything online, from videos to photos and mp3 clips. That’s ambitious, something I had to investigate further.
Thirty articles and a few days later with the app I’m hooked. Overall Pocket is an awesome app, albeit with a few rough patches. It’s a tool I’d recommend to almost anyone, especially to iOS newbies given its straightforward setup process. There are several things that Pocket does especially well:
A consistent experience across multiple platforms. A lot of other media apps provide a smart UI on both the iPhone and iPad. Yet it’s rare to see an app ecosystem work so consistently on the iPhone, iPad and the desktop. With Pocket there’s a uniform, drop down based navigation on each device that’s easy to use. Its grid based, Flipboard-esque layout works especially well on the iPad or web while remaining fully usable on the iPhone.
Visual design. Many apps dedicated to browsing or media discovery have a color scheme and layout that is heavy on contrast or overly skeuomorphic. It makes a strong first impression but can get a bit boring or distracting when you’re trying to browse through or read individual articles. Pocket avoids these problems by leveraging a light palette with subtle contrast and few gradients to maximize readability. This minimalist design looks borderline “non-native” to the iOS platform, but I think for Pocket it’s a smart move. The look feels fresh and distinctive, much in the same way the Twitter client Tweetbot distinguished itself visually with a chrome, metal and gradient heavy design.
App integration. This is where a lot of competition falls short; you can have an awesome reading experience, but that becomes meaningless if you can’t move articles in and out of your save for later app easily. That’s not a problem with Pocket. It uses the same API as Read it Later which has been around for years and consequently there’s huge app support.
Video integration. I’m a big film nerd, so naturally I capture a lot of clips, video essays and trailers. Pocket has native support for Youtube and Vimeo, which gives each saved video article a proper headline and thumbnail. With two taps I’m watching a video full screen on my device. Instapaper, Readability and other choices either can’t play video at all or add a lot of cruft around the video itself.
The setup process. Pocket goes out its way to make capturing content as easy as possible. On iOS devices it identifies other apps that are Pocket compatible and provides custom setup instructions for each. To add a web bookmarklet, an essential capture tool, its step by step tutorial is best in class.
Nevertheless Pocket isn’t perfect. The app’s filter for switching between text articles, images and videos is occasionally inaccurate; usually the articles view accidentally pulls in a few videos or vice versa. Also Pocket’s web site needs a bit for work on typography; its body text color is too light and it doesn’t offer the same font choices available on its iOS app. Finally while the default sans serif and serif options look nice, text customization (i.e. font choice, line height, margin size) lags behind what Instapaper provides.
So is Pocket better than Instapaper? Yes and no. If you trend toward content that’s graphic heavy, video based, or anything that strays from pure text, Pocket should be your first choice. For die hard readers of news articles, blog posts and other text-heavy content, stick with Instapaper.
I plan on using both: Instapaper for reading, Pocket for videos and everything else. I’ll detail in a future post exactly how I integrate both apps into my daily workflow.
04.24.12 |
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Really excellent overview of how to debug and inspect CSS, HTML and JS code effectively with Chrome. A year or two ago I was a die hard (Firefox) Firebug user, but I’ve come around to the Chrome tools as my preferred toolkit for web development.
Personally my only point of contention is with the author’s support for Chrome Canary as his development platform, of which i’ve run into serious bugs, crashes and rendering problems. Instead I prefer a more moderate approach by running the Chrome Beta as my main browser. I find it’s highly stable yet you still get many of the new development features far ahead of the default Webkit releases.
04.24.12 |
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Spoiler: they really like it. Why can’t Spotify get their UI design act together like the Rdio guys? I’m a total Spotify devotee and love their native app’s speed, high sound quality and great selection. But this “let’s copy iTunes and make it dark” design is getting really old.
04.24.12 |
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I found this extended look by Ars author Ryan Paul a bit overly friendly toward the internet powerhouse. It’s nevertheless pretty essential reading for any web developer. A few key trends of the piece are worth remembering; successful developers iterate often and test religiously. One other point I rarely see emphasized, but apparently critical at Facebook:
Instead of offices, Facebook developers work mostly in open spaces laid out like bullpens. Workstations are lined up along shared tables, with no barriers between individual workers. Each building has meeting rooms where employees can have discussions without disturbing other workers.
That last sentence is key. I’ve personally found development breakthroughs often come from healthy verbal debate in front of a white board, but doing so in the middle of an open plan can (understandably) disturb colleagues. Private spaces are critical.
04.23.12 |
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I liked developer Chris Coyier’s approach here; step back and examine how to serve up responsive imagery from a high level perspective. Chris touches briefly on all the proposed solutions, from creating new elements to client side Javascript.
On the not so cool side, Chris avoids taking a stance on which solution he’s siding with. I personally prefer a new image element or HTML5 based custom data attributes that the browser interprets to render the properly sized image. The other cross browser methods are admirable but ultimately make too many http requests for me to be comfortable with.
04.23.12 |
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On Friday a Kotaku forum member leaked what looks like a legit orientation manual for new employees at Valve, the gaming company behind Half Life, Portal and the Steam network.
Anyone who works at a technical firm should check this out. There’s a lot of philosophies here that are really smart. For instance, keeping a flat corporate hierarchy:
Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily. But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish.
Or on working sensible hours:
While people occasionally choose to push themselves to
work some extra hours at times when something big is
going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected. If you’re looking around wondering why people aren’t in “crunch mode,” the answer’s pretty simple. The thing we work hardest at is hiring good people, so we want them to stick around and have a good balance between work and family and the rest of the important stuff in life.
04.21.12 |
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I appreciate what Alexis Mardigral has to say about startups and lack of originality, especially those without a revenue stream:
But more than the bandwidth or the stagnant hardware, I think the blame should fall squarely on the shoulders of the business model. The dominant idea has been to gather users and get them to pour their friends, photos, writing, information, clicks, and locations into your app. Then you sell them stuff (Amazon.com, One King’s Lane) or you take that data and sell it in one way or another to someone who will sell them stuff (everyone). I return to Jeff Hammerbacher’s awesome line about developers these days: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
Worse yet, all this stuff is dependent on machine learning algorithms that are crude and incredibly difficult to improve. You pour more vast amounts of data in to eke out a bit more efficiency. That’s great and all, but let’s not look at that kind of behavior and call it “disruptive.” That is the opposite of disruptive.
Yet many other arguments offered fall flat. Elsewhere Alexis argues the iPad is basically a large iPhone (judging from the increasingly desktop-like, full featured software jumping on the platform, he’s missing the point) and that “we’re working with the exact same toolset that we had on a 2007 iPhone”. That’s totally false; he’s nuts if he thinks the mobile sector isn’t booming in innovation.
04.20.12 |
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This extended piece by Atlantic writer Stephen Marche is really interesting. However I find it more revelatory as a conversation piece than a convincing argument against Facebook.
The article is at its best arguing for Facebook as a “grind” over a fun, interconnected experience:
What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break.
04.20.12 |
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Kill Screen writers Jamin Warren and Michael Thomsen debate the game review process and the importance of finishing games. I found both sides of their argument strong, especially this point by Mike on why finishing games prior to writing a review is so important:
I compare it to taking an assignment to climb Mount Everest. Nobody wants to read about me getting to the base camp. There’s Into Thin Air; there’s a long history of people writing very well about failure. But if you take the game as Everest, the review should be an account of getting to the top of Everest. What did it cost you; was it an easy hike not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of your own creative endurance? How quickly were you bored with it; how quickly did it become rote and repetitive; how much of a surprise was there in the ending; how much meaning came out of the boredom?