How hunting is driving “evolution” in reverse.
Researchers describe what’s happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.
Videos from Singularity Summit 2008.
Speaking of the summit, the SIAI has just posted the first batch of videos from the event.
Review of Singularity Summit 2008.
A great roundup to be sure, but if you keep your finger on the pulse of this sort of thing, you likely won’t learn too much.
This year the summit was literally down the street from me, but I couldn’t bring myself to cough up the $500 price of admission.
J. Tithonus Pednaud herein presents for your edification and enlightenment a curious collection of human marvels. These portent and exceptionally unique human beings stand as uplifting testaments to human spirit and serve as inspiring examples of human tenacity.
This is a two-hour (hour two), unmoderated discussion between Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, where they “trade stories of the public’s reaction to their recent books, their unexpected successes, criticisms and common misrepresentations.”
I could watch this sort of thing all day, every day.
Easiest way to give your Griffin Powermate system-wide control of iTunes
A few months ago I picked up what likely is my favorite computer peripheral of all time, the Griffin Powermate. It has a wonderful, solid feel to it, and looks great to boot (you can’t tell me you don’t like the glowing LED). I had one years ago, but had to give it up when I moved to an Intel-based Mac Pro; turns out there were serious issues with using the device on a MacTel machine (as in crash-your-computer serious). Once I got wind that those issues had been worked out, I quickly bought a new one (they’re currently available through Amazon for $35).
I use the Powermate for two very simple tasks: 1) controlling system volume; and 2) pausing, playing and going to the next track in iTunes. Specifically, I change system volume by rotating the knob, pause/play by quickly pushing down on the knob, and next track by holding down the knob.
As an example of how useful this kind of setup can be, consider the situation where you’re listening to music through iTunes while using your aggregator to catch up on the days’ news. Let’s say you come across a video you’d like to watch. In this circumstance you likely would switch to iTunes, pause the music, switch back to the browser, begin playing the video, and then futz with video and/or system volume. Now, consider my workflow using the Powermate: begin playing video, bop the knob once (to pause iTunes), and rotate the knob as necessary (to adjust system volume). This of course is just one specific example, but just think for a second about how often you pause your music (e.g., when your significant other yells for your attention from the other side of the house, or just comes into the room, or your phone rings, or you just want to focus intently on the sentence you’re writing, etc.). In these situations, all you have to do with the Powermate is bop it. That’s it.
What about when you start a Flash video that the provider has decided will default to full volume? Instead of struggling to find and click on the Flash app’s volume control, all you have to do is give the Powermate a quick turn to the left. It’s pure muscle memory.
Still these examples don’t get into app-specific utilizations, which, as you might imagine, are virtually unlimited (e.g., paddle-based gaming (Arkanoid!), video scrubbing, etc.).
Alright, enough gushing, let’s get to the point of this post. The configuration options for the device are nice, but the Mac OS X global controls are quite limited. In fact, there are just four to choose from: eject and system volume up, down and mute. Given these options, the use-case I described above obviously is impossible; however, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to an action by using “Send Key.”1
Given this ability to map any keyboard shortcut to a Powermate action, all that was needed for my use-case was a system-wide hook into iTunes. After doing a bit of searching, I came across SizzlingKeys, the free version of which gave me exactly what I needed, namely the means to globally pause/play and next track iTunes with keyboard shortcuts (certainly there are many other apps that offer similar functionality). The hard part then was finding a key sequence I wasn’t already using with Quicksilver or any other application. For those wondering (and who isn’t?), I settled on shift-cmd-M for next track, and shift-control-space for play/pause.
Note that if you run into any problems with the actions not “taking” while in a certain application, simply highlight the defiant program in the “Applications” list of the Powermate preferences, right-click and choose “Remove [application]” (assuming, of course, you aren’t using the Powermate to control some aspect of the application). The issue presents itself even if you’ve set every Powermate movement to “No Action” — deleting the delinquent programs from the applications list was the only way I could get the global stuff to work correctly.
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You can choose “increase volume” and “decrease volume” to control system-wide volume, but I prefer to use “Send Key,” and map the actions to the dedicated volume keys on my keyboard, because this causes the semitransparent volume overlay to show. ↑
When you visit a web page that has compatible user scripts on Userscripts.org, this extension will highlight the Greasemonkey icon in the status bar. Right click the Greasemonkey icon and choose the “X scripts available” item to see and install the scripts available for the current page.
Great idea.
Jokes aside, and the recent SNL performances notwithstanding, I can’t stop listening to 808s & Heartbreak.
Unborn baby uses Twitter to announce kicks to the world.
The Kickbee is a wearable device made of a stretchable band and embedded electronics and sensors. Piezo sensors are attached directly to the band, and transmit small but detectable voltages when triggered by movement underneath. An Arduino Mini microcontroller transmits the signals to an accompanying Java application wirelessly via Bluetooth.
The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API. I chose to use Twitter because it is easy to initiate an SMS message to any mobile phone when a kick is detected.
Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research.
Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers’ deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory.
This is a very interesting read, filled with scientific descriptions of how and why certain magic tricks work, but the details are just nerdy enough to probably not ruin any to-be-seen performances. For example, the following is an explanation of why a spoon seems flimsy when it’s held horizontally and moved rapidly up and down:
The neural basis of this illusion lies in the fact that end-stopped neurons (that is, neurons that respond both to motion and to the terminations of a stimulus’ edges, such as corners or the ends of lines) in the primary visual cortex (area V1) and the middle temporal visual area (area MT, also known as area V5) respond differently from non-end-stopped neurons to oscillating stimuli. This differential response results in an apparent spatial mislocalization between the ends of a stimulus and its centre, making a solid object look like it flexes in the middle.
Memories may be stored on your DNA.
[L]ong-term memories may be preserved by a process called DNA methylation — the addition of chemical caps called methyl groups onto our DNA.
BlackRapid R-Strap
A few weeks ago I noted that I had ordered an R-Strap (the RS-1) on the assumption that it would “immediately prove to be indispensable.” My assumption was right.
Before I discuss how well it performed, it’s worth pointing out that I was using it to haul a monster lens — the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM — which weighs in at ~3.5 pounds (with the tripod mount). I should also note that I was shooting in Santa Cruz, where it was 82° in the middle of November!
I know what you’re thinking, you already have a strap and are reluctant to drop $50 on what looks to be just another strap. Understood. But, you have to realize that the obvious simplicity of this strap belies its practical genius. I won’t bore you with a multi-paragraph discussion of how it works (you can see for yourself in the videos; briefly, the strap is worn over your shoulder, and the camera hangs upside-down near your hip and the small of your back), but instead will focus on why it works well.
I appreciate that a strap like this appeals strongly to those who carry two cameras at a time (i.e., you hold the presumably lighter setup in your hand, and then keep the heavier kit cocked and loaded on the R-Strap), but it also is great for people like me who rely on just a single camera.
The first thing I noticed was just how natural it felt to have the camera hanging at my hip and upside down. As previously mentioned, on this particular day I was shooting with the hefty 70-200mm lens; given its size, I attached the R-Strap to the lens’ tripod mount, which allowed it to rest almost parallel to the ground. Very nice.
Despite the great weight of the lens, I quickly became comfortable — both physically and mentally — with the setup. Don’t get me wrong, in the very beginning it took no small amount of courage to put a large amount of faith in the R-Strap’s ability to hold the lens. That’s not to say that I was worried about the build quality of the strap, but rather that I’m anal about my toys and all too aware of their cost. To that end, throughout the day I constantly checked the “Fasten R” mechanism to make sure it was tethered securely to the camera (it always was, but I’m sure, as with any screw-based system, enough movement could persuade the screw to start rotating counter-clockwise).
As the day wore on, I became increasingly comfortable with raising the camera to shoot, and then, when finished, just kind of “dropping” it against the bumper (causing it to rest exactly where it was before the shot). These motions actually are at the heart of why the strap is such a joy to use. Because of the way the connector glides along the strap (and because the camera hangs upside-down), going from not touching the camera to shooting is a quick, easy, and dare I say fun motion.
It was hard to over-appreciate that I was walking along the beach and not thinking about holding the camera or feeling it bounce against me, and all the while knowing that it was there and that I could call on it at a moment’s notice.
The ability to put the camera “behind” you and just kind of forget about it is very liberating. For example, as I was walking along the main pier in Santa Cruz, I decided I wanted some fried calamari and a beer (truth be told, that decision was made long before I got in the car to drive to Santa Cruz). I was able to buy the food, eat it while walking around, and lean forward against the railing of the pier — all without ever having to think about whether the camera was going to hit something. OK, so that example may not blow your mind, but extrapolate the general idea to cover your use-case, and I think you’ll start to understand the strap’s convenience.
As useful as the strap is, there are a few trade-offs. The first is that the camera can no longer sit normally on a surface, because the “Fasten R” mechanism that links the strap to your camera simply won’t allow for it. Given the velvet-glove treatment I afford all my gadgets, I don’t feel too comfortable placing my equipment on surfaces at odd angles (did I really just string those words together?), and so I find this issue a bit annoying.
Another compromise you’ll likely have to make is to keep your backpack-style camera bag at home. I realize that for some this is a deal breaker; indeed, when I first recognized the issue I questioned whether the strap was for me. When I really thought it about though, I was able to convince myself that I usually only use my camera bag when transporting gear between locations; it actually is rare for me to switch lenses when I’m out and about (usually because I just can’t be bothered to do it), and so this is a concession I’m willing (and able) to make. Your mileage obviously may vary.
Finally, the R-Strap may prove to be incompatible with your tripod plate, and so you may have to remove it in order to use the strap. If your plate has a tripod mount, then you likely can use it without issue, but I probably would be weary of anything less secure (e.g., connecting the strap to a plate’s D-ring, etc.).
In my case the good far outweighs the bad. I’m quite pleased with the strap and am very much looking forward to future improvements and modifications — I just can’t see myself using anything else.
Video of a guy beating Guitar Hero 3… using drumsticks.
This will blow your mind (even if you’ve never played GH3). Watch it.
Helvetireader is a “minimal interface theme for Google Reader.”
Be still my beating heart. Hard to believe, but this theme walks all over Jon’s previous effort. I love it. (Please give Gmail the same treatment).
[W]hat do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?
Working Class Heroes may have changed their name to Hard Graft, but that hasn’t stopped them from pumping out cool cases (you’ll remember my ridiculous review of their MacBook Air case). The Kindle case looks pretty nice, but not nice enough to pull me away from Waterfield’s very convenient Slip Case.
Notwithstanding the alarmist and ultimately misguided title, there’s some truth to what Nick is saying in the article, namely that our ability to deep-think is partly a function of our need to deep-think, and in light of the Internet doing a lot of that thinking for us, we’re losing our ability to call on that skill. In fact, I think a lot of the people who linked to this article were perpetuators of the very problem the article highlights: they skimmed the title and came to an automatic conclusion, without even attempting to digest the content.
I hate to say it, but Nick really has just scratched the surface here; I think the issue is bigger than most people realize. Sure, my perspective may be a bit biased in that I’m certainly a crazy edge-case for which this situation hits very close to home, but, and as I’ve said for years, my “edge-caseness” will increasingly become the norm.
Malcolm Gladwell asks is there such a thing as pure genius?
This idea — that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice — surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
A great read — I love poring over the results of these types of pattern-finding endeavors. The piece kind of goes to something I’ve long said, namely that pro athletes, etc. generally don’t impress me (unless they can do something that I think I could never do, no matter how much I practice).
Sure, it’s great that Michael Phelps won all those gold medals — it was fun to watch and to root for — but at the end of the day if anything impresses me, it’s his obsessive-compulsive dedication. In other words, I don’t look at him and think, “Wow, he’s so fast! That’s amazing!” I think, “Wow, this guy was born with an abnormally-proportioned body and he chose to spend every waking moment of his life swimming in a circle.” I admire the journey infinitely more than the result.
My favorite passage (emphasis mine):
We pretend that success is a matter of individual merit. That is not the whole story. These are stories about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society.
A decade of email
Pure curiosity drove me to graph the volume of email I’ve sent and received over the last decade. While I think the more interesting metric would be the average length of the emails, such a thing is impossible to measure accurately.1 That said, I think it’s safe to say that my emails have become increasingly (and significantly) shorter over the years.
Regarding the graph below, the inputs for 1999 and (obviously) 2008 were not complete; I extrapolated the data I did have to come up with numbers for a full year. Also, it’s probably worth mentioning that the volume of email shown includes only personal email (i.e., friend to friend); it does not cover emails from, for example, schools, financial institutions, employers, etc.
In an effort to give some context to the years, I can tell you that I was studying computer engineering from 1999 to 2003, and was in law school from 2003-2006.
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Just think of the myriad mail clients people have used over the last decade, each of which handles replies, etc. differently; there simply is no way to globally sift out just the current body of every email. ↑
Creativity, fulfillment and flow.
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow.”
Yet another TED talk. Deal with it. :)
Jared Diamond’s TED talk on why societies collapse.
While on the topic, you really should pick up Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Actually, I still need to read his Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (I’ll just add that to my ever-increasing Kindle library; while the available selection means it’s taking me longer and longer to finish a book these days, I really can’t over-emphasize how nice it is to be able to quickly and easily jump between so many disparate subjects and interests).
An interesting TED talk from Charlese Elachi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
[Scientists have] discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.
Goosebumps and tears
(Two days later and words still will not capture the feeling; give me time).
Technology might some day enable us to control aspects of evolution, or it may prove to be the ultimate selection regime, culling all of us. Perhaps we already find ourselves wishing we’d lacked the intelligence to monkey with howitzers. Either way, the culture that we’ve created is, strangely, evolution’s most powerful tool and its potential nemesis, the womb of human nature and perhaps its grave. By our own hand: this is how we evolve.
An open letter to the next farmer in chief.
Michael Pollan outlines what the next president can and should do to remake the way we grow and eat our food.
There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.
Required reading as far as I’m concerned (like most of Pollan’s stuff).
Smart amoebas reveal origins of primitive intelligence.
The amoeba’s interior contains a watery sol – a solid suspended in liquid – within a thick viscous gel. The sol flows through the gel like water through a sponge, creating a network of low-viscosity channels. Those channels are strengthened as long as the amoeba continues to respond to a static environment, but if that environment changes the channels gradually break down and a new network appears as the amoeba adapts. For a short while, though, the amoeba retains a “memory” of those earlier conditions.
BlackRapid R-Strap camera strap.
Ordered. I initially was going to ask my readership for first-hand impressions of the strap (before ordering), but after watching this [slightly hokey] video, it’s hard to imagine that this little gadget won’t immediately prove to be indispensable.
Awesome. This reminds me of something my friends and I used to do on our lake. You see, the seat on a three-person Sea-Doo was large enough for a sitting driver and a standing thrill-seeker. Yeah, you probably see where this is going. I’d take off my life jacket so as to not get cut (keep reading), stand on the back of the seat, hold on to the driver’s life jacket, get the vehicle up to 35-40MPH, count down from three, and at one have the driver do a donut, which would throw me fast and far (and water at that speed == concrete).
World’s smallest IR hovercraft.
Pretty cool. Brings back memories of the personal hovercrafts sold through the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs I loved rifling through as a kid. Speaking of kids, if you’re a child of the ’80s and ’90s, then the video of these things in action likely will remind you of F-Zero on the SNES.
Investment FAIL
The graph below illustrates what’s happened to all of my hard-earned money over the course of the last 30 days. I’m fairly well-diversified, but, as you can see, that doesn’t much matter. I fear it’s going to get much worse before it gets any better. Hold on tight.
(Yes, I realize that just about everyone’s portfolio looks like this at the moment — hang in there, especially you baby boomers out there).
Amazon Associates bookmarklet v1.1
I’ve just updated the Amazon Associates bookmarklet to v1.1, which bookmarklet generates an Amazon product page tagged with a specific Amazon Associate ID.
For the past few months, the publicly available version of the bookmarklet has been unusable. The problem was that it was a little too hard-coded and required that Amazon maintain the URI structure that existed when I originally created it. When Amazon changed their URI scheme, the bookmarklet broke. In any event, this latest version is a bit more robust and should work without issue for the foreseeable future.
The bookmarklet can be found on the project page. Enjoy.
Designing the UI of Things for the iPhone.
Speaking of Things, it’s fantastic (save the name). In fact, I actually ditched OmniFocus for Things a couple of months ago. Crazy, right? I know, especially after shelling out $100 for OmniFocus (Mac OS X + iPhone), but, well, I really like Things… and it’s beautiful.
However, it’s not without its faults, and the one that absolutely tears me up is its inability to sort by due date! Huh? This is a to-do application; I should be able to go into the “Next” focus and sort my tasks by the date they’re due. In all seriousness, I spent half a day trying to figure this out, thinking all along that I was doing something wrong, that there was no way this feature had been left out. But, it had been.
Relatedly, this functionality is in the iPhone app.
I know someone at Cultured Code is reading this — please spend the four seconds and three lines of code it’s going to take to give us due-date sorting for, you know, your to-do app. Please. ;)
Update: Cultured Code tweeted the following just eight hours ago: “Things desktop: Added a mechanism to filter and sort by due date.” Nice. Release it!
A tendency to lose perspective
On Saturday the girlfriend and I used the few free hours of my weekend to take in the sights, tastes and sounds of the Santa Clara Art & Wine Festival, which festivals we seem to frequent a lot lately. There’s generally good, eclectic food and entertainment at these types of events, and so they usually make for a fun, simple day out.
Saturday was no different, except that I was repeatedly moved to tears.
It was mid-afternoon, and we were sitting in a large, open-air venue listening to a spot-on Tom Petty cover band. There were quite a few people enjoying the music, but not many were dancing. Before long though, an older, mentally retarded man shimmied up to the stage without a care in the world. He was having the time of his life, ‘dancing’ anywhere he could as the music compelled his thoughtless motion.
I don’t think he could have stopped moving even if he wanted to, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him (and I wasn’t alone). I don’t know what it was about him and his curious obliviousness, but it was quite affecting and enviable.
At some point, a lady whom I presumed was his mother, started dancing with him. She was positively glowing, obviously proud that this was her son; the music and the moment washed over her as she forgot about his next doctor appointment, or what his life might be like once she was out of it.
As far as I was concerned, the scene before me — and the story it told — couldn’t get any more beautiful.
Then, as more people began to get up and dance, an obviously-in-love couple made their way to the edge of the group that had coalesced near the band.
She was able-bodied. He was in an electric wheelchair.
They both pretended that his legs worked, that he wasn’t two feet shorter than her, and that no one was watching as they danced through American Girl.
There was something undeniably pure and true about both couples, and each person’s confidence and pride in the other was manifest. It was a poetic scene for which I felt fortunate to have witnessed, and for whatever reason it had me missing my family, and appreciating more the girl leaning against my shoulder, holding my hand.
If I’m being honest, the whole episode reminded me a lot of my late mother, whose ability to fully and effortlessly live in the moment was something I always admired (even if it sometimes embarrassed me as a kid). I think I’ll forever regret having never truly and completely shared with my mother one of her moments, especially since she always so easily and selflessly shared with me mine.
There’s no doubt that my ‘big law’ job, coupled with my personality, frequently causes me to throw myself into work, sometimes uncontrollably. The combination often makes it all too easy to forget about living. I’m getting better at compartmentalizing my brain, and “letting go” of certain things for brief periods of time, but it’s not easy for me.
Last weekend I found myself truly enjoying the moment, and the person by my side, and I felt closer than I’ve felt in a long time to those no longer by my side.
Anyway, back to work. Immovable deadlines loom.
I’ve been known to do some pretty crazy stuff on a skateboard, but this is just flat-out insane. They’re lucky to be alive.
How much faster could Usain Bolt have gone?
A team of physicists have calculated an answer: the Jamaican gold medallist could have slashed his time from 9.69 seconds to 9.55 seconds.
Ubiquity cracks open personal mashup tinkering.
Nice write-up from Leslie Orchard on Ubiquity, and some of the technology that preceded it. (If interested, Leslie also has put together a fantastic tutorial on writing a Ubiquity command).
I don’t think I’ve been this excited about an application since Quicksilver forever changed the way in which I interface with Mac OS X, by providing essentially an interactive shell that lets you manipulate data in an infinite number of ways; Ubiquity seems poised to bring similar functionality to the browser.
How magicians control your mind.
[V]isual cognition is [now] understood not as a camera but something more like a flashlight beam sweeping a twilit landscape. At any particular instant, we can only see detail and color in the small patch we are concentrating on. The rest we fill in through a combination of memory, prediction and a crude peripheral sight. We don’t take in our surroundings so much as actively and constantly construct them.
Fossil evidence that the researchers uncovered suggests the stocks of these giant clams began crashing some 125,000 years ago, during the last interval between glacial periods. During that time, scientists think modern humans first emerged out of Africa.
I ♥ NetNewsWire (on the iPhone)
Or, How NetNewsWire on the iPhone forced me into using NetNewsWire on the Mac again.
Ever since the introduction of Bloglines, and later, Google Reader, NetNewsWire and I have had an on/off relationship, and by on/off I mean effectively non-existent. Every once in a while I’d fire up NNW to see if it offered the features I currently desired in an aggregator, but it always seemed to come up a bit short. Don’t get me wrong, for the most part it’s pretty good — hell, it used to be the best aggregator out there, no matter the platform — and I used it for quite some time before the big web apps came along, but it’s far from the best now; that title belongs to Google Reader.
Unfortunately, the problems I have with NetNewsWire on the Mac aren’t minor; indeed, they cause the app to completely and continuously get in my way. My two biggest hang-ups are as follows.
You can’t mark an item as read without manually clicking a button or hitting the “k” key. What? This makes me crazy. Google Reader introduced a brilliant method of marking items as read as they are scrolled through. This is great because it requires from the user nothing more than the action he must take to read the item. The absence of this feature becomes doubly annoying when reading a feed with a large unread item count, because you are effectively forced to finish skimming every item, unless you don’t mind re-reading certain items again later (i.e., you have to finish skimming every unread item so that you can confidently hit the “mark all as read” button). Yes, I’m aware that you can go through each item individually using keyboard shortcuts, but that is a terribly inefficient way to work through your unread items, especially when we’re talking about hundreds or even thousands of posts.
You can’t show, in your list of feeds, only those feeds that actually have unread items. What? I just can’t imagine that implementing this would require more than a few lines of code (and maybe just one), yet still we’re required to scroll our entire list of feeds (in my case, ~300). Sure, there is the “Sort by Unread Count” option, but that only really works if you don’t have any folder structure; if you do, then you are still made to scroll through your entire list, else you can’t be sure that there aren’t unread items near the bottom of the list.
Enter the NetNewsWire iPhone application
After not being able to get away from chatter about NNW’s iPhone implementation (mostly on Twitter), I decided to give it a spin, not expecting much. Well, it seems my low expectations were entirely unwarranted. The iPhone application is fantastic. In fact, I dare say I enjoy reading posts on the iPhone app more than the Mac app. I’m serious.
The iPhone app teaches an old dog new tricks
The above complaints I have about the Mac version are nowhere to be found in the iPhone app: when I read an item, it’s automatically marked as unread (and said status is synced with the cloud), and I’m only shown feeds with unread items.
Folders
The iPhone app follows whatever folder structure you’ve laid out in the Mac and/or web clients. Further, you can browse items by folder (instead of just folder→feed), and can mark all items within a folder as read, without actually going into any of the posts (after, say, skimming over the title of every post in the folder).
Built-in browser
I love, love, love this feature. When you are looking at a particular post, you can tap the post’s title and be taken to the post’s web page, from inside NNW — you don’t have to leave the app and open a new tab in Safari. This is indescribably useful, especially for those sites that still refuse to offer full-content feeds.
Ability to filter feeds
If there is a feed you don’t want to see on the iPhone (in my case, I have quite a few, including all of the photoblogs I follow), you simply tap the “edit” button in the feed-list view (or slide your finger horizontally on the feed name, as in Mail), then tap the respective “minus” button, then the “delete” button, and finally choose “Don’t show in iPhone.” Very nice.
Marking items as read
As noted above, as soon as you “open” an item on the iPhone app it’s marked as read, and after reading the item you can either go back to the list of items/feeds, or hit “Next Unread” and be given either the next unread item in the current feed, or, if you are on the last item in the current feed, the next unread item in the next feed with unread items. This is a great, time-saving feature.
Clippings
Like the Mac client, the iPhone app allows you to save any item to your “clippings” folder (NNW’s name for a post you want to save for later use, similar to Google Reader’s “starring”). You can’t yet view your clippings on the iPhone, but they, like everything else, are synced to NewsGator Online. (Relatedly, is there a way to delete a clipping from within NNW on the Mac, or can this only be done through NewsGator Online?).
The experience
We can talk ad nauseam about what features are and are not (see below) in a particular application, but at the end of that day it’s all about the overall experience, and that’s where NNW really shines. It’s just so much fun to use; fun because it’s easy, and fun because it makes me feel like I’m not wasting time. Once a decent number of feeds have been loaded, I can blaze through them without much delay. It’s fantastic.
Since installing the app, I find myself reading news a lot more in bed, before I get up in the morning. I roll over, grab my iPhone (which is sitting on the nightstand because I used a podcast to help me fall asleep) and start rocking and rolling with the days’ news. By the time I actually get out of bed, I’ve already made a sizable dent in my feeds. This works only because the app is not annoying; indeed, it’s quite a joy to use.
Issues with the iPhone app
As far as the interface goes, there isn’t too much I’d change. That said, the following would be nice (and are no doubt being worked on as I type this):
- The ability to sort posts within feeds so that older articles appear first. This is how I prefer to read my news (i.e., in time order), and the Mac app allows it.
- A “Next Unread” button is provided at the bottom of every post, which is a very nice feature and makes going through multiple posts fast and easy. However, I wish it would tell you, when (or before) you click it, whether you will be pushed into a different feed with unread items (which happens when you are at the current feed’s last unread item).
- No “landscape” mode for the built-in browser. Surely it’s coming.
- No “mark as unread” option.
- Images routinely (always?) scale incorrectly, which generally requires you to scroll left/right/up/down to view them.
- No way to set “Don’t show in iPhone” at the folder level (i.e., each feed needs to be configured individually).
- No “pagination” (i.e., a very active feed with, say, 200 unread items, has to be read either all at once, or individually).
To the Google Reader team
As far as I’m concerned, Google Reader’s web-app for the iPhone is second to none, and is damn near as perfect as it can be. It does what it needs to do in the most efficient way possible; however, it’s somewhat held back by the medium. I’ve very few problems with it, but at the end of the day each user operation is, for all intents and purposes, tied to the web, one-to-one (i.e., user chooses something, you download and display it). This is slow (relatively), and can be oh so aggravating.
Accordingly, please, please, please develop a native iPhone app for Google Reader (and model it after NNW). Until then, I think I’m going to have to stick with the original king.
Also, while you’re at it, let’s go ahead and bang out a Gmail app too. ;)
