January 2012
9 posts
iOS search fields as buttons
Searching in iOS apps typically works one of two ways: you either have a dedicated Search tab, or the table view in some other tab includes a search field at the top. In both cases, the field is at the top for a good reason: as you start typing, it’s useful to see search suggestions or quick results in a list below.
Not every app is made up of stock table-views and tab bars. Getting a bit...
Jerusalem
My platonic/intellectual love affair with Alan Moore began on my first visit to Buzz’s LES apartment. Scanning his bookshelf - as I am wont to do, as I will do with your shelves when I visit your home - I noticed a number of personal favorites. Knowing already that Buzz was a man whose tastes I trusted, I then noted that he had a nice run of Alan Moore’s graphic novels squeezed in next...
My blog traffic in 2011
Somehow, mrgan.tumblr.com has become de facto my only web home. I feel weird about this fact from a theoretical perspective, but in practice, it seems to work.
This blog had 679,521 page views in 2011. Browser-wise, 38% of my visitor used Safari, 27% used Chrome, and 18% Firefox. Nearly a third were on Windows, which frankly shocks me.
Here are my most popular posts for the year:
Pixelfari. I...
My favorite albums of 2011
I’ll be honest: 2011 was not the best year in music for me. I typically listen to albums more than five years old, but even so, I don’t remember ever buying so little new music. That said, here’s a top-4 list of what I bought and liked last year.
4. Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two
It’s not the greatest album in the world, and it’s not close to the...
The books I read in 2011
This is my second year of consistent book-tracking using Goodreads. Anything that has an ISBN gets added to Goodreads when I place it on my to-read shelf.
The best book I read in 2011 was Clay Christensen’s 1997 classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s a humble and powerful book. I also enjoyed, to the extent that this is possible with his books, Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty...
2011 Weight report
I’m still a fan of the Withings Wifi scale. By simply stepping on and off a very attractive piece of glass in our bedroom every morning, I can check my weight stats on my computer or phone. Nothing to manually enter, nothing to manage.
Here’s the graph of my weight over the course of 2011. Note that I’m 6’2”, with sedentary physical activity, BMI of 21.8.
A wash,...
My favorite things in 2011
1. Olive Mrgan
Ten months old now, she’s a stellar baby. Her current repertoire includes lightning-speed crawling, confident assisted walking, occasional freestanding, eating small bits of fruit and cheese, iPad use, the early stages of dancing and clapping, and the syllables “na”, “da”, “ba”, and “la”, infinitely repeated. In a year of...
What iMessage did to my text-messaging usage
iOS 5 introduced iMessage, a service that seeks to replace text messaging. Carriers view text messaging as a special, astronomically priced type of data - iMessage undoes this madness and uses your dumb data pipe to send text, pictures, and videos to users identified by their email or phone number. It cleverly falls back to text messaging if the recipient isn’t on iOS 5.
Since most of my...
Alan Moore's alternative Thought for the Day →
If you’ve got a spare two minutes, give this a spin: Alan Moore succinctly explains his made-up religion on BBC Radio 4. Or, check out this transcript from the Forbidden Planet blog:
“Hello everybody, my name’s Alan Moore, and I earn a living by making up stories about things that have never actually happened.
When it comes to my spiritual beliefs that’s perhaps why I worship a second...
December 2011
19 posts
Focused dabbling
Dan Benjamin on Back to Work:
“I don’t believe it’s possible to have a side business. I don’t think you can have a business on the side. I don’t think you can go to work and have a job and then come home and run a business. I believe that both the job and the side business… you will never reach your potential in either of them, *and* it will affect your personal life as well. Now, it might be...
Murder stats
Crime is fascinating, and murder is the most fascinating crime. Every night, millions of Americans watch fictionalized accounts of the most violent act of all, followed by fictionalized attempts to discover, solve, and punish it. Here are some raw numbers to go with our intuitions and popular depictions. (Figures not specified as percentages are per 100,000 people.)
In 2005, the homicide rate in...
Masters
Two masters at the top of their craft, doing audience-control humor:
1. Bobby McFerrin plays the audience like a piano.
2. Horse_ebooks
Constant spoonerizing
I spoonerize words all the time. All. The. Time. Good spoonerisms and bad. In my head. (I worderize spoons all the time. Tall. The Lime. Spoon Gooderisms band ad. Hin my ed.)
The earliest memory I have of doing this is in my teens, spoonerizing movie titles on posters at the nearby theatre. Lindler’s Schist. Gorrest Fump. Lue Tries. Hi Dard. Parkassic Jure. For a while I thought it was...
Quick inflation calculation using Siri
Update: People are reporting all sorts of weird interpretations by Siri; read the note below.
This morning I needed to look up what the most expensive-to-produce album of all time was. (It’s For A Tweet™.) Then, I had to convert that to today’s dollars - a good idea whenever you’re looking at prices of anything older than a few years. My usual method is to google...
“How many times have you been to a product website and seen big bold letters...”
– Brent Simmons on Twitter’s new nomenclature. Spot-on.
“My grandfather used to say: “Life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it...”
– Franz Kafka, ‘The Next Village’. This is the entire text of the story. It’s really a fragment rescued by his friend Max Brod, but like many of these it’s usually published on its own. As a paragraph in a larger work it could be funny; as a standalone piece it is haunting.
“An often-overlooked feature the Lisa system used is its early harnessing of...”
– Wikipedia entry on the Apple Lisa
I’m not sure if iOS’s reversal of this principle is, on balance, good or bad. I’m happy that I know where to find my Pages documents on my iPad, but I can’t do any of my “real work” in any single app. Even if I could,...
iOS grippers
iOS 5 added two large-ish new features with prominent “gripper” controls: the Notification Center, and the split keyboard (iPad only). To clarify what a gripper is: a UI element you can drag to resize or reposition a larger element. Some examples include window corners before OS X Lion, iChat’s sidebar resizer in the tabbed chat view, and the resizing stripe between the two...
November 2011
5 posts
iTunes Match status
iTunes Match is out. For $25 a year, you get to “match” your music library against Apple’s servers, upgrade to Apple’s high-fidelity, 256 kbps copies, upload anything you have and they don’t, and see your whole music library on any Apple device. It’s super convenient. It’s a great value.
It’s kind of wonky.
Which is fine - it’s the early...
Tweetbot adds "Last Photo Taken" feature
A week ago I tweeted a quick idea for iOS apps that let the user select a photo from the device:
Today, a new version of Tapbots’ popular twitter client Tweetbot added this very option. You have to hand it to them for just going with a good idea. And yes, they let me know before they implemented this; it’s a very nice gesture, though not exactly mandatory. I certainly wasn’t...
Apple TV with Siri
Apple TV came out almost five years ago. Since then, it has become a moderately successful product; not a failure the iPod Hi-Fi was, but not an industry-shattering success like the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
Apple doesn’t have to cause a revolution with every product it makes. But the living room, the TV set, and the television industry all crave upheaval. As Asymco’s Horace Dediu...
My week seen through my Wikipedia browsing history
The Thief and the Cobbler - The Wikipedia entry kept me entertained throughout this mess of a movie.
Sambal
Filk music
Pandanus - Don’t miss the awesome list of selected species.
Solanacae - the Nightshade family, famous for including basically every vegetable
Coriolanus - I had never even heard of this Shakespeare play until I saw a trailer for the screen adaptation.
Seven Wonders of...
@Horse_ebooks →
There’s no putting this horse back in the bag, so I’m just going to make sure you hear about it from me rather than from someone else: the best Twitter account of 2011 - arguably the year’s crowning achievement in comedy overall - is @Horse_ebooks. Almost certainly an unintentionally hilarious spambot, tweeting random bits of publicly searchable books, it creates the wide-eyed,...
Boxer Briefs, Part II: The Briefening
Earlier this year I shared with you, dear fan of Apple products and parbaked design-opinions, some thoughts on ideal nethergarments for men. (For all I know, my advice may be helpful to women as well. However, given the significant differences in pertinent anatomy, I wouldn’t bet on it.) I asked for recommendations and opinions. I was showered with applause mixed with boos mixed with...
October 2011
4 posts
iOS on the desktop
The overwhelming majority of Apple’s earnings, product sales, and new customers are now based on the iOS platform, which consists of:
A 3.5”-display pocket computer/phone
A 3.5”-display pocket computer
A 9.7”-display computer
These are excellent and wildly successful products. They cover a wide range of use cases, including many we never even predicted. These devices...
Steve
On January 9, 2007, I took the day off from work to watch Steve Jobs’ keynote. I stayed off iChat, and I told the people who were likely to contact me that day to please refrain from feeding me any info on what Apple announces that morning. I waited for the video feed to become available, which happened later that afternoon. Away from my fabric-cube, Windows-based, business-software job, I...
September 2011
11 posts
More stats about books
According to Goodreads, in 2010 I read:
89 books, containing…
20,637 pages, or about…
4-7 million words
This only includes books: novels, short stories, nonfiction, technical books, comics, ebooks. It excludes other hard-to-track writing: news websites, blogs, magazines, etc. (I can safely say I’ve read fewer than one total page of printed newspaper last year.)
The page count is actual,...
The Innocence Project →
My good pal Paul was as outraged about the Troy Davis execution as any other decent person. Instead of dwelling on it, he turned his angry energy into a good deed: he linked to The Innocence Project, an organization that works hard to exonerate wrongfully jailed individuals. On top of it, Paul promised to match each retweet of the link with a donation (on top of his own donation).
Take a minute...
Discount Cheese
If you ever find yourself visiting one of those quaint establishments that sell books - so-called “book stores” - try this hobby: locate a popular book in the Business Inspirational category, then find as many cheap faux-sequels, title piggybackers, and other knockoffs as you can. I call these discount cheese after the cottage industry created by that indelible classic of...
SEO for nice people →
Matt Gemmell shares some commonsensical advice on how to do SEO you can live with, and opines on why the other kind sucks. Don’t miss the big-boy comments below, telling Matt he don’t know what it’s like in the real world, the wolf is at old Gil’s door.
My blog is far less popular than Matt’s, but even I managed to score the #1 Google spot for “ios back”...
Labeling the Back button
Most “deep” apps require some amount of navigation, moving the user deeper into child views and then back out to the parent view. That navigational backtracking is typically done with a “Back” button, positioned in the top-left corner, and denoted by a pointed left side. You’ve all seen it:
The title of the entire bar is the title of this view; the Back button...
Amerikanac
I never woke up that early. I worked a late shift and followed it with a three-hour computer stretch starting at midnight, so eleven was an appropriate time for me to start the day. But that day, I had to wake up early to drive my dad to a job interview.
His English was pretty rocky (still is) and he relied on us kids to begrudgingly accompany him to such meetings. The interviewer would ask my...
The Movie
Alright, alright, I’m going to talk fast and I’m going to talk loud. You ready? Here we go.
A thirty-something dude who’s just been dumped by his longtime girlfriend reflects on the relationship as he rearranges his storage unit. Oh and the boxes in the unit are anthropomorphic. That’s my elevator right there, but this baby’s going up to the stratosphere, so...
Every Presidential speech ever
dwineman:
“Hey there. I like you. I really like you. Actually, strike that. I love you. I love you SO much. I really, really, love the heck out of you. You’re just completely awesome and perfect. Completely. Not a single flaw. But you know, it wouldn’t hurt if you picked up your laundry off the floor once in a while. That’s OK though, because you’re so fantastic and good at doing things. Again,...
Movies that 'Blade Runner' would've been a better...
Rambo
The Omega Man
Blow
Escape from New York
Slap Shot
Blade
Run Lola Run
Die Hard
The Terminator
The Running Man
‘Crocodile’ Dundee
August 2011
12 posts
The Apple Logo
The logo of Apple Inc. is among the best-known and best-designed in the world. It has lasted thirty-four years, and we have little reason to think it’ll be replaced any time soon.
It wasn’t designed by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Paul Rand, or Jonathan Ive. It was designed by an advertising man called Rob Janoff. You’ve likely never seen any other work by Mr. Janoff.
...
What They're "Protecting" Us From →
There’s almost no chance that you haven’t already read Anil Dash’s brilliant insight regarding Steve Jobs’ background and values. But just in case, I am linking to it here.