July 2009
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Month July 2009

Entries 5 Total

Mobile Productivity

Pat Dryburgh writes about productivity on the Mac and the iPhone/iPod Touch:

This is where the system begins to fall apart when the iPod touch or iPhone are introduced. While Leopard’s Mail.app utilizes the message URL handlers, Mail.app for iPhone does not. This means that if I am checking my email on my iPod touch and I read one that requires further attention, I need to close Mail, open Things, write down an action that explains in enough detail what the email was referencing, then go back to Mail to continue checking my emails. The other option is less taxing, which is to simply ignore the email on my iPod and address it later when I am on my Mac. However, to me, having to address a dozen or so emails more than once feels very unproductive, and defeats the entire purpose of keeping a clean inbox.

Posted on July 29, ’09

AP goes to war with search engines and blogs

Ed Morrissey writes of the AP’s idiotic plan to limit linking to their pieces:

Let’s just call it the Fast Track to AP Irrelevance.  Without a doubt, the new policy will have a chilling effect on blogs and aggregators who normally link to their content.  Unfortunately for the AP, that won’t result in an increase of revenues, but in having the entire online world ignore the AP.  The Times itself discovered this dynamic when it put its columnists behind the $50 dollar Firewall of Sanity.  Not only did the world fail to beat down their door to regain access to Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert, they also discovered that their columnists became all but invisible in the rapidly-growing and influential New Media.

This just makes no sense to me and I would love to hear how Tom Curley thinks that this actually demonstrates any remote understanding of the web. If this is how the Associated Press thinks that it is going to succeed online and even stay remotely relevant then it will die even faster than we think.

Posted on July 27, ’09

Let Vick Play

The best thing I’ve read all day about the possibility of Michael Vick being suspended from pro football:

And here I really get riled, because what after all is professional football?  Use your imagination a little, and it would be easy to imagine a society – perhaps more civilized than our own – that banned pro football or boxing and that put someone like Goodell or his K Street predecessor Paul Tagliabue, or the various Gucci-clad owners in jail for long stretches for trying to make a profit out of grown men being put on a field to engage in activities that are likely to result in physical harm or even death.  If cock fighting is on the third tier, pro football and boxing are certainly on the fourth.

Posted on July 26, ’09

There are no small changes

Des Traynor on the small things in designing a user experience:

There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly. This is why as a UX designer you need a good understanding of what it takes to implement a feature before you nod your head and write another bullet point.

Posted on July 22, ’09

Is ESPN causing the disaggregation of news content?

Writing at The Daily Dish Conor Friedersdorf writes of the announcement that ESPN will be creating local outlets for sports news:

The disaggregation of newspaper content is an inevitability. Was there civic utility in the fact that a guy going for the sports page happened to see what his local mayor was up to by virtue of flipping through the sections? Sure, but that is a rather small matter. As I see it, “important” news is going to have to stand on its own going forward, and the challenge for those who care about journalism is to nudge the culture toward valuing it properly once the “subsidies” — the advertising and the sports section and style coverage and all the rest — aren’t available anymore. Will citizens appropriately value journalism that adds civic utility? I’m a pessimist, but one who thinks that time is best spent making the case that undervalued journalism is important, rather than trying to preserve a bundle that isn’t going to last much longer.

I think that Conor is right here. As more news organizations focus more heavily upon online distribution I think that they will realize that what draws so many to the internet is the ability to consume only the content that interests you. If a sports fan doesn’t care about the local mayor he can go to ESPN and not be distracted by local political coverage.

Posted on July 20, ’09