iApp Review – Popular Mechanics Does it Right
Posted on | July 14, 2010 | 1 Comment
I’m a sucker for giving publishing a chance. I don’t know why, they fail more often than not. Just look at Wired (iTunes Link), and Men’s Health (iTunes Link).
Popular Mechanics (iTunes Link), might be the exception for many reasons.
1. They priced the app right. 1.99. It’s a beta, so I hope they see that the price is a huge deal and keep it at something reasonable, and below the dead tree edition.
2. They don’t go rich media crazy like Wired did. There’s plenty of pages of simple text for reading. Maybe a nice transition of a graphic element sliding in slightly after the page transition finishes, but every page isn’t a multimedia orgy.
3. They started slow. Both Men’s Health and Wired, dove right in with high priced, “billed as complete” as far as I know offerings. It’s nice to see Pop. Mech. admit they’re testing the waters.
4. They valued consumer feedback. The app asks you (sadly it doesn’t seem to know that I’ve already done the survey, which is a might annoying) to fill out a survey about your experience with the app. The content, the ads, etc. Neither Wired nor MH, seem to care. In fact I had trouble with the MH app (It ate my $5 issue) and it took me hours to find an email to ask for help, and the email bounced. The support site, is only for subscribers. FAIL on so many levels, the app is deleted from my iPad.
5. don’t waste space. Honestly I’m not sure how big the PM app is, but I don’t think it was as big as Wired. I don’t want my magazines to take up so much space I’m debating what to sync and not sync, video or magazine. etc. Bloat is overrated.
I’m really digging the Pop. Mech. issue so far. As always great content, but also a pleasing experience. I’m not taping, swiping, and pinching every element to see if there’s something hidden like in other magazine apps. I’m very hopeful that they learn the right lessons from this beta, and create a digital magazine worth subscribing too.
For me that would be.
- Not $5 an issue. between $2 and $3 i think is the sweet spot. I don’t want to pay as much or more than the dead tree edition costs.
- Subscription price that makes sense. Not more than the dead tree, and not (digital) cover price X 12
- Leave the multi media orgy for others. Every issue should be just interactive enough to make sure I don’t think they simply uploaded a PDF of the print issue. I don’t need that much interactivity, it takes away from the content.
Tags: Apple > Books > Business > iPad > Technology
How does iThoughtsHD have this and Apple doesn’t?
Posted on | July 12, 2010 | 3 Comments
One of my biggest complaints with the iPad is it’s complete lack of usefulness for content creators. I understand, creators are not Apple’s biggest market, or even a group the ever seem to care about, Shoot, they make “Consumer electronics” LOL.
Still there’s so little that would have to be done to make the iPad SO incredibly awesome for creators, and open doors left and right. I know it’s possible, iThoughtsHD (iTunes Link), a great mind mapping app has already done it!
When building a mind map, like many tools on the iPad, you can save off to the cloud somewhere, box.net, dropbox,etc. Unlike many apps, and all Apple apps. You can load from cloud.
It’s that easy. They did why didn’t/hasn’t Apple?
I caved, and paid $10 for Pages. Complete waste of money. I edit a lot of pages files. Sponsor packets,etc. All the time. I’d love to pull one up on my iPad, edit, and without having to think about plugging into iTunes, copying the files out of iTunes back to my iDisk where they live, overwriting the old one.
Pages, and most apps, come kinda close, you can access the file, pull it in locally, make edits, but then you’re stuck, the document is trapped in the iPad and iTunes.
Why not make the iPad apps (at least the Apple ones) more connected to Oh I dunno, say Apple’s own cloud services. iWork.com and mobileMe. Some of us (still) pay for mobileMe hoping it’ll mature and actually be useful. I have no idea what iWork.com is for, but it seems like it’d make perfect sense to tie the iWork iPad apps (maybe the new iLife ones too) to Apple’s own (though dropbox, et. al. would be nice too) services to extend their usefulness.
Please Apple here my plea! The iPad is great for games and consumer shit, hook those of us who create up! It can’t be hard, a third party did it! You can too!
Tags: Apple > Business > Conferences > Ignite Denver > iPad > Mac > Technology > Work > Writing
iApp Review – Landformer
Posted on | July 2, 2010 | No Comments
I met Owen Goss at the first 360|iDev I organized, and instantly liked him. If nothing else he takes my polar bear jokes in stride, that’s pretty big :)
He’s an awesome developer, great speaker, and his latest game LandFormer (iTunes Link) is an awesome time suck! That’s a good thing :)
Owen’s not new to games, but I think this latest release is his coming out game. This is the game that’s the start of truly awesome things for Owen.
Ok enough gushing!
LandFormer is a straightforward puzzle game, you don’t really need instructions or tutorials, pick it up, try it out and away you go.
The objective is to make the ground perfectly flat; raising and lowering the terrain in patterns to accomplish your goal.
You’ve got 6 patterns and 2 choices of terraforming; Up or down. Each level has a number of moves it should take to clear the level. Some are pretty straightforward, but the game quickly moves into, “hmm well maybe this, then this… nope, undo!” Which is good. I’m usually pretty quickly turned off by games that start too hard, or don’t progress past easy.
It’s very addictive, sitting there staring at the terrain, thinking through permutations.
Graphics wise the game is stunning, a perfect match to the game play. Ditto on the sound, the effects and background music are incredible and all blend together for a calming, tho sometimes frustrating brain game.
As if all that wasn’t enough, Owen has not just made the game expandable with In App Purchase, but also for free, you can exchange levels. You can email a level, heck you can tweet a level. People can follow your URL and add the level to their game to play. It’s easy to create levels, it’s basically solving a map, backwards :) just start arranging the terrain, when you’re done, save and share.
The IAP is awesome, I’m really glad he went this route. I think IAP is one of the best features for game devs, to make money with their hard work.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want useless crapware that I can’t use without purchasing something. Quite the contrary with LandFormer, you can go (I assume) forever without ever buying any of Owen’s premium content, getting levels from friends and the internet, but why? Sure that’s fun and I hope we’ll see more and more tweets with levels in them, but Owen has put together a shit ton of levels for purchase, why not get those and test your abilities. And test them they will!
Oh and the game itself is skinnable, how awesome is that!?
If you haven’t already grabbed LandFormer, go get it! Heck even Apple likes it.
My only complaint (and I know Owen started this before the iPad was announced, at least I think so) is that it’d kick ass on the iPad. Either more complex patterns, or larger maps, etc. I think it’d be awesome. I’d suggest that be his next project, but he owe me bacon farmer!
hulu +, Not the Droids I was looking for
Posted on | June 30, 2010 | No Comments
I hope for many, hulu + is a huge WIN. For me, in the short term, it’s not.
When I heard the announcement, my first thought was, “ok this is the final nail in Cable’s coffin for our house”
Very quickly though the coffin shrugged the nail off.
What would make hulu + the killer app for me? Not a lot above what they’re offering, but enough that I’ll be waiting before switching our family over.
1. The Archive. That’s a nice feature. Nicole decided to watch Angel, yet currently hulu only has like 1 season, or part of 1 season. So when we find programs we’d like to explore from the beginning, the archive is a good option, assuming the show is in there.
2. We watch a lot of Discovery and History channel, which don’t seem to be available on hulu. Bummer, will have to wait and see if they get that content or if there’s another avenue for it’s consumption.
3. iPad and iPhone apps are awesome (and the quality is insane!), but much like the Netflix app, when I’m in the mood to use those apps is when I’m traveling. hulu and Netflix really should allow the apps to cache content. It’s all DRM protected by the apps, etc, so caching shouldn’t be an issue. Putting in hard restrictions shouldn’t be hard either, like 3 shows, for 2 days, etc. Frankly when I’m at home wanting to watch something I have a really big TV with Netflix and hulu on it, I’m not reaching for my iPad.
Sure if I’m in a hotel room, I could stream content and watch on my iPad, and that’s a valid example and a use I’d likely engage in, but for me, and I assume a lot of other travelers, the bigger need is in the air. Unfortunately I don’t see Frontier adding in flight wifi anytime soon, and when they do it’ll be too expensive. Plus if Wil‘s experience is an indicator, as more and more people start to stream content, inflight wifi is likely to break down. I suspect it’s not that fat of a pipe to begin with.
4. This is kind of a “good to have” it sounds as if hulu plus doesn’t reduce the number of ads I have to see. Don’t get me wrong, i pay for cable, and without TiVo I’d see far more ads than on hulu, but it feels weird to move to a premium model, and not at least reduce the number of ads + users will see. Shoot, just go from 3-4 to 2-3 during a show. Something to make me feel like my $10 is buying something more than archive access.
I think the reason hulu + wasn’t a home run for me is because we’re fairly casual watchers. Access to the archive, while nice isn’t huge for us. We have a small number of shows we watch on hulu and we’re pretty good at watching them before they expire. The lack of caching content for air travel, or say, camping or other off the grid activities, makes hulu + even less interesting. I have a ton of content in the “videos” app on my iPad, it’s available whenever, whereever. hulu + didn’t come close enough to beating that for me.
I hope as they roll the service out, they add some features. I really do want to support hulu and stop paying for cable service, but that doesn’t appear to be today.
Bikes, cars, and pedestrians – Can’t we all get along?
Posted on | June 25, 2010 | 1 Comment
I figure as a downtown dweller I have a moderately unique point of view on this. I walk a lot. In the colder months, though it takes longer it’s more comfortable than riding. In the warmer months I ride my bike everywhere. All over downtown. When i leave downtown I drive.
Just last night a drive nearly killed me so he could pull into the parking lot for the rockies game. I was right there, he passed me, then cut me off. As a driver, I’ve had to swerve as I come around a blind corner to face bicyclists who don’t grasp what “shoulder” means and ride in the center of the road. As a pedestrian I’ve been nearly run down on more than one occasion by bikers on the sidewalk. Conversely I’ve been “That” biker 2x. Both in cases where cars parked on the side of the road blocked my view and I thought it was clear to pull out, when it wasn’t. It goes both ways and I get that.
I had heard that DPD was cracking down on sidewalk riding, which in general I completely agree with. The problem, as mentioned in this examiner piece is that the three groups can’t get along. I take to the sidewalks in extreme cases, when the road isn’t wide enough for me to feel safe with the cars. I ride slowly, and try to not disturb the peds.
Jake and I were talking about this a bit a while back, that even when we’re driving, we’re more aware than most drivers we see. Because we’re used to being aware. On our bikes is a true safety matter to know what’s going on around you.
I think Denver is doing an awesome job of making the city more and more bike friendly. New bike lanes north of Broadway are great steps in that direction! I hope motorists try to think a little outside the box though, and I equally hope bikers try to not be so douchey. Yeah as a whole I despise most other bikers.
If everyone followed the rules a bit more I think all three groups could share the city with fewer problems.
If it looks easy, it’s not
Posted on | June 17, 2010 | 1 Comment
It’s weird (both flattering and a little insulting) when people look at what you do, and think, “well if he’s doing it, I can do it” vs. possible partnership, etc.
Sure there’s a part of all of us that wants to do things on our own, or own way. But in business especially I think that’s a kiss of death more often than not.
In particular I’m talking about conferences. I’m pretty good at it. I find interesting people, technical experts, etc and get all together under one roof. It’s a ton of fun, I wake up every day loving it. The actual days of the event, I’m moderately calm and collected, because I have my shit together. I obsess, and freak out up until the first day, after that I’m reasonably sure I’m good to go.
So yeah, the days that people actually see me, I’m happy, I’m talking to people, hanging out an joking. That doesn’t in any way shape or form, mean the 6 or so months leading up to that aren’t full of stress, craziness, and working my ass off.
Yet somehow it’s caused at least a few folks I know of to decide they want in on the action. Fair enough, after all, it’s business.
It’s business!
You don’t go into business without a plan. Heck, the first 360|Flex, wasn’t a business, it was a one off, a completely lark. After that Tom and I realized it was fun and we enjoyed it, and other people seemed to like the event. THEN it became a business. A not profitable business the first few events.
This ain’t the field of dreams!
You can’t just say, “Hey everyone! I just made up a new event, come on out” and expect to be a success. Well if you live in Boulder that seems to work ok, otherwise not really. You have to get people involved, wrangle speakers and sponsors, etc. I’ve seen one event almost implode costing the organizer a buttload of money because it seemed they thought, that just organizing the event was enough. That people would flock from near and far to attend. I’ve also seen a recent event (most likely, sadly I’m the only conference organizer that believes in transparency as far as I know) lose a ton of money because the organizer didn’t realize how much everything costs, didn’t realize how much to charge attendees, etc.
I’m no expert, I don’t intend to stop learning, but I did learn the hard way, what works and what doesn’t. I’m still learning that.
What really irks me about this “problem” is that not only does it impact my business in the short term, people choosing that event over mine (when they’re in the same space) but it hurts consumers/attendees, and even sponsors. They waste their money on what turns out to be a less than awesome event, with little chance of repeating, and are now jaded.
Thankfully I have a history of success now, but still, kinda bums me out.
Oh and if someone tries to tell you conferences are dead, just turn around and walk away. They’re either an online event snake oil peddler, or out of touch with the realities of business and events.
Just sayin.
Tags: 360Flex > Business > community > Conferences > Ignite Denver > Technology
So the ATT caps don’t affect you huh?
Posted on | June 4, 2010 | No Comments
I was watching all the tweets about “looks like I only use 400mb so AT&T’s new caps won’t affect me.” earlier this week, and got to thinking.
I’m wondering how much all these folks are considering the future. Not 2044 when we have iPhones in our heads, but a 2 months from now, maybe 3. Clearly AT&T had a plan beyond “Making data plans more affordable and available for all. 98% of our users don’t even use close to 2g” and all. I mean we’ve met AT&T right? When have they done something for their customers, beyond send cease and desist letters when we email them.
So here’s what I’m wondering..
Skype on 3G… how much are we gonna use that? How much will that impact data use? I can see 2gb going fast with a couple business calls a week.
Front facing camera and some sort of iChat for iPhone… Will we get it? Who knows, rumors (again) say yes. How much will video chatting use up your data use?
Backgrounding of Pandora? How much data do you think you’ll use streaming pandora at work every day? On your jog? at the gym? at your desk?
There’s a lot (possibly) coming soon that will hugely impact data usage. Surprised AT&T pre-empted all that with a change in rates?
A change that by next week we’ll have mostly forgotten in the euphoria of a steve-note, new devices, and mac pros, and robot unicorns. AT&T for their cluelessness in dealing with customers, isn’t stupid, and they just roped a ton of schmoes into very restrictive plans.
Take a long the view… it’s a different picture. I’ll be keeping my unlimited plan thank you.
Tags: Apple > community > iPhone > Mac > Steve Jobs > Technology
Dropbox as Anecdotal evidence of Mobile platform strength?
Posted on | May 28, 2010 | No Comments
I was cruising around the dropbox blog and saw that they have a public voting site for feature requests. As I scrolled through the list, I noticed the mobile device requests.
It pretty much supports my assumptions on the mobile platform space right now.
iPhone, iPad, and Android are all already supported, WinMo (unclear, but I assume phone 7, but it was 6 months ago) is the next highest demanded platform, by a large margin. Pre and Crackberry bring up the final two spots.
Sure it’s anecdotal, but I can’t help but wonder if dropbox doesn’t serve as a microcosm of the mobile space? Clearly with their business on the line dropbox is pursuing the most demanded platforms first, sorry Pre folks, I know you love your phones, but you bet a lame horse.
Tags: Apple > Business > iPhone > Mac > Technology
Amazon and Publishing are killing eBooks with 1000 cuts.
Posted on | May 5, 2010 | 3 Comments
My Kindle, which I love and carry with me everywhere I’m likely to be reading, is dying. It’s dying a slow death from a thousand cuts. I used to buy a new eBook from Amazon almost weekly. Sometimes I’d buy 3-4 at a time to have at the ready. Now I look thru the $0.00 section, and the $.99 self publish section (Shout out to Christian Cantrell. Go read his stuff. Yes, that Christian Cantrell from Adobe, LOL. He writes awesome Sci Fi Short stories)
Looking at these screen shots, what incentive is there for me to buy the eBook version. Bear in mind, I have free shipping with Amazon prime. Though even with shipping, if I wasn’t in a hurry, regular shipping doesn’t cost much, and is often free if I’m in no hurry.
So really where’s the benefit of buying an eBook? Less than $3 dollars savings? Really? Over a paperback in two cases?! The middle book isn’t released yet, should we guess how it’s paperback price will look compared to the Kindle price?
This is such a huge fail, and it’s Amazon, and the Publishing Industries’ to share. They’ve both taken what was IMO a promising start to revolutionizing publishing, and forced it back into 1980.
I know Amazon lost (way to stick to your guns and fight for your customers) and caved to the publishers, but now rather than use their new found power (i’m talking about the publishing companies) to find a reasonable balance in price and deliverable, they’ve run the price right back up to where it makes no sense at all for the consumer.
It feels like they’re trying to kill ebooks, by making them not worth the price. Way to be green publishers.
Green? Yeah green. By making eBooks so unattractively priced, the Publishing industry in encouraging our continued attack on the environment. Maybe they hope earth will choke on green house gasses before they have to come to terms with technology and the changing landscape of publishing? If we’re all too busy gasping for air, we won’t notice that books are to blame. (Yes that’s over the top, but illustrated my point)
On top of this completely retarded pricing, that more or less incentivizes me to purchase a dead tree copy of all three books, each eBook is DRM’ed. Each of these are listed with Text-Speach disabled. So not only am I paying an outrageous price for my eBook, but the publishers are telling me to fuck off, I get no actual features that make an eBook great. And of course, I can’t use the eVersion outside the kindle.
So I pay pretty much the same price for paper or eBook. Yet with paper I can sell the book to a used book store, loan it to n number of friends, give it away, keep it for the next 30 years, etc. Where as with the Kindle version (this is aimed at you completely Amazon) I can’t loan it out, I can’t sell it, I can’t gift it, I can’t have my Kindle read it to me while I fold clothes, and should the Kindle platform die, I can’t even re-read it. Where’s the incentive in buying the eBook version?
Amazon, you came so close to crushing it. Really, you were right there. the Nook, sucks, IMO. Most of the other craptastic devices being crapped out every other day, by mostly no name vendors stand no chance at ever being anything more than Marginal. You were the market leader. Now… my Kindle is full of things I’ve downloaded off the web. Not pirated content, tho that’s an option, but content i can get from free from sites like instapaper, the Calibre desktop app, etc.
Sorry Amazon, I’m not giving you or these lame ass publishers money. It only encourages this terrible anti-consumer behavior. One of both of you will learn, and it appears it’s gonna have to be the hard way, for you and consumers. Way to go.
Authors; Tery Brooks, John Scalzi, George RR Martin, Jessica Livingston, John Birmingham, et. al. Stand up, you’re impacted just as much as consumers. It’s not 1980 any more, times change, help your publishers figure that out. If I could pay you all directly, for an open, DRM-free eBook file, I’d do it in a heartbeat!
Tags: Books > Business > Kindle > Mac > Technology > Writing
Open Letter to Apple? Come on
Posted on | April 26, 2010 | 2 Comments
So I just finished reading the “Open Letter to Apple” penned by John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly. The self serving nature is a bit over the top for my tastes. “Please come to our exclusive, invite only, outrageously expensive summit, that has been seeing lower and lower (I assume) attendance. You’d be a really big draw.”
Here’s my thoughts on the whole thing (the open letter, Flash, Apple Culture)
1. It’s Apple’s phone. I don’t want Flash on the iPhone because it often has trouble enough running native apps. I haven’t missed flash once on my iPhone. i DO want Flash on the iPad. I think it makes way more sense. The CPU is faster, the screen is bigger. I’d watch hulu, CBS, NBC, etc on my iPad. I love Adobe, I love Flex and Flash (like any programming language, the shitty apps, are written by shitty developers. To say there aren’t stinkers in the app store would be an outright lie), but it’s Apple’s toy.
I’m glad Adobe finally decided to move on!
Rather than see Apple go to an exclusive event for executives who don’t want to touch the unwashed masses, I’d love to see Apple support the developer community. Hey Steve, Phil, et. al. Come to the next 360|iDev. Meet the people writing the apps, meet the developers who bought 4 iPads. After all, they (IMHO) more than any one in attendance at Web 2.0 Summit, are the people important to Apple. The Developer community is buying iPads like their going out of style, buying each other’s apps/games, etc. They’re the early adopters, the strongest pro-Apple voices, etc.
I do agree with the letter in so far as the Apple of Today isn’t the Apple I fell in love with. It’s not the Apple of the Powerbook, the Newton, the Performa. Times change, and (as many do) if you argue bank accounts as an indicator, Apple is doing something right. I’m tickled pink (I’d be more tickled if I owned Apple stock) that Apple isn’t $8/share. I remember when it was. As a kid in school, I checked the price daily in the paper before I left the house. I saved and saved and bought a Newton, I bought a powerbook 510 for College (ok well my folks did). But I’d love to see that Apple (tempered by age, fine) come back. The Apple of “Think Different”, the Apple of Ellen Feiss.
Embrace the community that loves and supports you. Embrace the community that was there before the iPhone, before Unibody macs, etc. Embrace the community writing the apps that make the devices awesome.
What’s the future hold for Apple, who knows. I’d love to see them take a more active, supportive role in the community that exists around them though.
Tags: Apple > Business > community > Conferences > iPhone > Mac > Macbook > Technology > Work
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