Archive for the ‘Applications’ Category

I have a love/hate relationship with the iPhone version of Google Reader. A little over a week ago, Google launched a beta version of the iPhone interface for Google Reader and tears of joy ran down my face as I leapt through fields of clovers with puppies and bunnies.

Ok, maybe there wasn’t that much fanfare in the Nunemaker household, but it is a killer, I repeat, killer update. I love seeing perfect touches of JavaScript that make web applications more usable, for usability’s sake and not to prove that the developer knows how to read the Script.aculo.us wiki.

The new version (pictured above right) shows a list of items with nice bold headers and faded intro lines of text, which is cool, but that is not where the Reader engineers earn free beer. The perfect touch is literally a touch a way. Tap on an item and it expands, right in line, with the full post. There is a nice big star that is easy to hit if you want to favorite the post and you can do the typical share, keep unread and see original goodness. A few glides of your my mouse-click, strengthened, programmer finger later and I’m down to the next article. From there, I can continue to scan until I see something interesting, or I can touch the item and read another interesting post.

Granted, it’s not my job to create an iPhone interface for Google Reader, but I was so unhappy with the previous one, that I started too. I say that to give props where they are due. I don’t know if I could have come up with such a perfect interface interaction but I’m glad the Reader team did. Once again I love reading my feeds on my iPhone. Thanks Google. Also, I’m wondering how long until there are a crap load of iPhone web apps that use the interaction in a similar fashion.

A few days back Firefox 3 beta 5 was released. I just got around to downloading it and a few things struck me.

The Back Button

The back button is probably the most clicked button in a web browser. I’m amazed when I watch my family and friends that aren’t “webbies” continually hit the back button. I’m more of an “open a new tab” kind of guy, than a “click and wait for something and then it’s not what I want so hit the back button” kind of guy. Anyway, everyone knows the bigger something is, the easier it is to click. Firefox 3 thought about that and made the back button twice the size of the forward button. Really nice touch.

The Address Bar

Another nice touch is when you click in the address bar, it auto-selects the entire url. The Firefox crew probably thought (correctly in my opinion) that people more often replace the entire url than modify the one currently there.

Also, the address bar now is a bit contextual. As you type it searches through your history by url and by page title. This means I could type in ‘addictedtonew’ or ‘about me’ and my about page would likely show up in the results. You can see the example in the screenshot below.

Overall

Overall, it feels a lot faster and lighter. It still doesn’t feel like a Mac application but it seems to be getting better.

Twitter is most likely one of my favorite web applications. The thing that I believe has made Twitter so popular and the thing that will keep it growing is it’s ease of use. It’s one of the first web applications that the majority of it’s requests come not from the actual website.

I’ve been thinking for a while now, “Ok, twitter is great but where to next?” What could they possibly do that would make me want to use it more? Could I use it more is probably a valid question as well. :)

Information Overload

One of the things that is rampant online now, especially in my life, is information overload. I spend most of my days online and I process a butt load of information. Over the past month, I’ve been working to streamline how I receive and partake in this information using services such as del.icio.us (ma.gnolia before that), instapaper and google reader and ideas such as zero inbox, gtd and a few I’ve come up with on my own. This has helped, but since I’ve began to branch out on twitter, I’ve noticed that it takes a lot of time for me to keep up with all the people I follow.

Now, you might say, “Information overload is self-induced” and you would be correct but even still, I’d like to find a better way to process the information rather than cut it out all together. The main reason for this is that though I often am strapped for time and have to really be choosy about what I soak in that day, there are also, occasionally, days that I can’t find something to read if I try. Not sure what brings about those days but it happens.

A Little History

The first place that information overload hit me was Google Reader. My feeds got out of control not too long ago so I started unsubscribing. That helped for a while but I’m creeping back up again. I started to think about how I read my feeds and realized that though it is not documented and exists only in my head, each feed has a rating. Not necessarily a 1-10 rating, but more of a no matter what, when i have time, and when i am bored scale. There are some feeds, like those in the label friends, that I read no matter how busy I am. Likewise, there are others, that even when I have time, I tend to avoid them for whatever reason, but I’m not yet ready to unsubscribe. My coping mechanism in GReader is to label things in particular ways and that helps me process that information more efficiently.

A Few Suggestions

So I say all of that to help twitter how? Well, I’ve noticed that lately I wish I could cluster twitter in the same way I often do other web applications by tags or labels, so that I can better throttle and sort through information on a busy day, and yet still enjoy all those fabulous tweets on a more relaxed day. First off, I was thinking it would be cool to categorize those I follow by entity type. Show me only the tweets from real people. Show me only the tweets from companies. Show me only the tweets from magazines or rss to twitter bots. Those types of classifications would be handy. Twitter is by far the quickest way to get news about anything. Often links, news and such appear on my iphone 30 minutes before they hit Google Reader and other types of media I consume.

Also, just in the twitterers I follow that are people, there are different circles. I have my friends circle, which I follow most closely and even send to my phone. I have my rails circle which I follow for updates on what people in the community are working on or what they think are cool. I have my web dev circle, which is noticeably smaller than I would like it to be, as I don’t want to over commit myself to twitter. Heck, I even am starting to follow those in a higher ed circle. I’d really like to be able to see these groups separately. One reason is, as in google reader’s case, to be able to assign importance (even if it is mentally) to certain followings. Another reason, a bit more important, is that often these groups have conversations amongst themselves and it would just be easier to follow if I could see them separated.

So that is it. My suggestion to twitter is, recognize that you are becoming people’s chat and feed reader and inbox all in one and start working on helping them organically organize that inbox. The end. Oh, and plz give me ridiculous stats about myself based on my twitters along the lines of google reader trends and web history. kthxbai.

So Google Mobile just announced an iPhone specific version. Just two weeks ago I talked about Google’s Mobile reader and that I actually liked it much better than the full web version (known as “scroll”). So what are my thoughts of the update? Suck. I hate it. I almost find it unusable. Here’s why.

Broken Back Button

I understand why Google provides a stripped down version of the site when you click on an item and I like that they provide a ‘See Original’ link. The problem now is when I click the see original, which I often do, I can no longer get back to where I was in my unread items. If I hit the back button, it takes me all the way back to the Google iPhone home and not to where I was in my feeds. I understand that the iPhone is Ajax-capable but that doesn’t mean use it everywhere and if you do, please don’t break the back button in an app as simple as a feed reader.

Width Issues

With this latest update, the stripped down version never seems to be the correct width (as it previously almost always was). I constantly have to scroll left and then back right to read the whole line of a paragraph. For longer articles, I have to do this so much that I tend to just star it and come back to it in the full web version to read later. If you are going to set a width and it’s not correct, don’t turn off the zoom in/out feature of the iphone. I’d rather squint than scroll.

These two issues may not seem huge but they have made it a pain in the butt to read my feeds on the go (or sitting on my couch to lazy to open up my laptop).

On Ajax

I was one of the first people to jump on the Ajax bandwagon. I remember playing with it before there were libraries that did it all for you. Heck, it might not have been officially coined Ajax back then. That said, I’m starting to think it has all been a mistake. Don’t get me wrong. There are times when it is not just ok but actually vastly improves user experience. However, the number of developers who understand when those times are seems to be few.

Next time you go to throw some Ajax in an application or website, be sure to not break expectations (such as the back button) and that it actually improves user experience. Anyway, I’m off the soap box for now. :)

So I have never been one to blog from the desktop. Heck, I’ve never been one to blog from anything but the administration area that comes with the blog software I use. I came across a link to MarsEdit tonight and decided to give it a try. I threw in the settings for this blog, which runs on wordpress and rails tips, which runs on mephisto. The wordpress one, just worked. Simply put in the url and I was good to go. It took a wee bit of research to get mephisto rolling but nothing a few minutes of googling couldn’t solve.

At any rate, I don’t really have anything important to say, I just wanted to try out the software and see what I thought. For the sake of adding some value in this post, I’ll link to a few things I have found interesting the past while.

• ToDoist.com - Simple and fast task management. There are a few things I would improve but these guys nailed the bulk of it on the head.
• Google Chart API - Looks interesting. Haven’t played with it yet, but rest assured that I will.
• Mac OSX Leopard - Several have said that this was not worthy of a major release. I tend to think they haven’t really given Leopard an in depth look. I’m a week in and each day I find a new thing that I really like. I’ll probably collect a list and post an article here before too long. Oh, I’m also digging my iphone.
• Ack - Ack is a tool for programmers similar to grep but designed to search through big source code trees. It is quick and does nice search term highlighting all from the terminal.
• Explosm Comics - These are appalling and hilarious.
• Jake and Amir - Appalling and hilarious as well. My favorite is “The Burp.“

Anyway, that is all for now.

Update: MarsEdit is impressive. Everything worked, even editing to do this update.