Posted on January 16, 2024 by PD

Enclosing shapes

Apple:

Your link must follow the Plain Button style, as specified in the Human Interface Guidelines. It may not be enclosed in a shape that uses a contrasting background fill. The background surrounding the text must match the background of your app’s page. The link out icon provided by Apple must be displayed directly to the right of your website URL. The icon size must visually match the size of the text.

Apple’s new guidance on linking to external sites for payment

Forcing developers into iOS 7 style flat design, so that users will tap the ”real” buttons for in-app purchase. What an endorsement.

Posted on April 10, 2022 by PD

Friday Night Baseball

I watched a bit of the first “Friday Night Baseball” – Mets at Nationals. I’m generally a Tigers fan, but the Mets are my adopted team, as I was taught from a young age to dislike the Yankees.

I gave FNB a short review on Twitter: “Good production value, high quality, but several technical glitches, which is very Apple. I love hearing women’s voices for commentary. I wonder what’s powering the graphics, which are clearly Apple-styled.”

Continue reading →

Posted on March 4, 2017 by PD

Push it Real Good (but with less stuff)

A code post! How novel!

Yesterday I was catching up on my blog reading and I ran across Casey Liss’ Shell → Watch Notifications. I love the idea – but it’s a bit of a kludge to put together as-is.

Continue reading →

Posted on March 3, 2016 by PD

Rise of the Authoritarian

Amanda Taub, writing for Vox:

Even Hetherington was shocked to discover quite how right their theory had been. In the early fall of 2015, as Trump’s rise baffled most American journalists and political scientists, he called Weiler. He asked, over and over, “Can you believe this? Can you believe this?”

Interesting theory on what’s creating the energy for Trump.

Posted on April 5, 2015 by PD

n Degrees of Twitter

This week on ATP (or was it the after show?) the gents accidental discussed Twitter, frustrations with the crowd there, and strategies for dealing with what they politely called “negative feedback”.

It’s a great discussion, and as they spoke my mind wandered to technical solutions to the problem (as a programmer’s mind often does).

I’m calling my solution “n degrees of Twitter” (based on the six degrees of separation theorem). In this solution, I would choose a number (n) that represents the number of degrees of separation that I will allow in my @-replies. Sounds weird, but here’s how it would work:

  • At 1 degree, my @-replies would only be people who I follow.
  • At 2 degrees, my @-replies would only be people followed by people I follow.
  • At 3 degrees, my @-replies would only be people followed by people who are followed by people I follow.

And so on. Presumably, I could select a number 1-5, and then, “anybody”. At each degree, the “sphere” of people that can reach me via @-reply grows significantly.

The important part is the follow chain: you’re essentially using yourself and your choices in who you follow to filter out people who are outside a sphere. When you select a degree above 1, you’re also putting faith in those that you follow to also follow worthwhile people.

It’s also important that it work in that direction: somebody who follows me should not automatically be able to @-reply me. Nor if they follow any of the people I do, or the people at the next level. What’s important is that somebody in my sphere has validated them.

There’s a number of positives to this solution:

  • Assuming you set the degree higher than 1, you’re putting some faith in the people you follow to help you see interesting stuff.
  • You’ll be holding people accountable (and you’ll be accountable yourself) for following interesting people, while hopefully shunning trolls. This gives follows much more meaning than simply “I can hear you now” – you can hear them anyway, if they @-reply you in the current system.
  • You are actively vetting the people who can “drive by your porch and shout stuff” simply by following and unfollowing people.
  • You’re absolutely destroying spam replies. They can @-reply all day; you’ll never see it because junk accounts generally only get followed by other junk accounts (assume that this parenthetical is filled by irrefutable evidence of the above statement).

I would wager that even if you set your degree to 5, you’d rarely – if ever – get spam. Ideally, if Twitter did build this, they’d be able to show you the follower chain for any @-reply, allowing you to know exactly who’s letting the spam in and alert them. Well, if you’re in their sphere, anyway.

There’s also downsides (reminder: it’s opt-in):

  • You’re potentially losing out on serendipity. There’s always the possibility that some really great, smart person out there is going to @-reply you, and their genius never recognized because nobody (in your sphere) follows them.
  • It makes Twitter potentially less interactive for a lot of people. In fact, this would be taking a giant step in the direction of Facebook in terms of personal privacy. (Don’t worry, eventually they’ll merge, right around when iOS X ships on the 0-port MacBook.)
  • If you only follow people that think and talk like you, and share your politics, religion, and worldview, Twitter is just going to be a custom 24-hour news network of stuff you want to hear, and nothing that challenges your assumptions. Yes, that’s bad. Shut up, Donny.
  • There’s a pile of technical edge cases for when somebody @-replies more than one person (and many other situations), that could lead to confusion if not implemented well.
  • It’s probably a major technical challenge (pfft). But they’ve got people, I think they could figure it out.

I don’t have high hopes that Twitter would actually implement something like this. Mostly because I don’t think they care about this problem that much. But even if they left the default setting as it is – anybody can @-reply me – the majority of new and existing users would be unaffected, and folks like John, Casey, and Marco would have a way to shoo people who come by their porch.

Oh, and you can shout at me too if you like. For now.

Posted on July 19, 2014 by PD

A Podcaster is Me

So I’m podcasting much more frequently now – since the original run of I Like Juice I’ve started a fresh podcast with Chris called Montreal Sauce.

For I Like Juice, I posted episodes here on the blog, which for simplicity is using WordPress. For Montreal Sauce, however, I wanted to do some experimentation.

This is going to get technical. Continue reading →

Posted on April 8, 2014 by PD

Define “Web”

John Gruber, in response to Chris Dixon:

It’s possible that the word “web” is too tightly associated with HTML/CSS/JavaScript content rendered in web browsers — that if I want to make a semantic argument, I should be saying it’s the internet that matters, not the web. But I like calling it the web, even as it expands outside the confines of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. The web has always been a nebulous concept, but at its center is the idea that everything can be linked.

This is the important part. Apps aren’t inherently competing with the web, usually they’re complimenting it. If your app can follow – better yet, respond to – a hyperlink then it’s just as much a part of the web as any website.

Apps will, for the foreseeable future, make more efficient and impressive use of the underlying hardware. HTML/CSS/JavaScript are a complicated bag of hurt (it’s OK, I have friend who’s JavaScript), and just because Mobile Safari and Chrome do it well doesn’t mean mobile and responsive websites are going to reverse the trend any time soon.

Posted on January 27, 2014 by PD

Coincidentally Jarvis

From Christopher Mims, writing for Quartz:

The result is a prototype wireless headset called “Jarvis” that sits in the wearer’s ears and connects to his or her smartphone. (Perhaps coincidentally, Jarvis is also the name of the voice recognition and artificial intelligence software in the Iron Man franchise.)

Coincidentally? I’m pretty sure these names get picked by engineers who occasionally get to leave work and see movies.

If I were a super-smart hardware and software engineer, you can bet that I’d build a bunch of voice-activated robots to do my bidding.

Cool stuff, Intel. Here’s hoping it works into our smartphones sooner than later; Siri needs all the help she can get.

Posted on December 20, 2013 by PD

Pesky Freedom of Speech

In my life, I’ve seen maybe one full episode of Duck Dynasty. It’s a well-made show about people I couldn’t give a crap about, doing something I am not interested in, and having fun doing it.

Suffice to say, I didn’t feel compelled to watch it again. I can see how it is entertaining if you either understand them and think their success is compelling, or if you are completely flabbergasted by their way of life and don’t understand their success at all. I think I “get” the show and the people and I don’t find their success surprising or compelling.

So then this whole Phil Robertson thing blows up. Continue reading →

Posted on May 1, 2013 by PD

Web and Native, Sitting in a Tree

Last night I read the delightful “Web Apps vs. Native Apps Is Still a Thing” by my he-doesn’t-know-me internet pal John Gruber. It’s a great piece, in response to this article from Wired.

The most salient point here:

Andreessen does have a solid point in the fact that app stores are in some ways a pain in the ass — particularly Apple’s App Store, with its deliberative and at times opaque approval process. But app stores are mostly only a pain in the ass for developers, not users.

I don’t think this can be overstated. App stores are incredibly convenient as a computer user. Even as a developer, the fact that I don’t have to think about collecting money when I make an app is – for 99% of apps – worth any pain endured in the opaque approval process.

I’ve had the opportunity to develop a large number of apps and websites at my day job. We build custom apps and websites for clients. So we get the “what should we build” question all the time.

Here’s how I break it down for them.

  • Apps are great if you want your customer to take ownership of and be connected with your brand. They are giving you space on their phone. My dead grandfather is always in my heart; your app is always in my pocket. It’s that big a deal.
  • Websites are great if you need a communication platform that can reach the largest number of users at any moment. There are hundreds of tools that let you get in somebody’s inbox, their text messages, their feed reader, and draw them back to your website, where you can communicate whatever you want to them.
  • Apps are an investment in your end user – you’re giving them a tool that is literally a piece of your business, whether it’s a service component, a calculator, a visualizer. You’re giving them the tool and trusting them to use it for something great.
  • Websites are an investment in your public relations and marketing departments. You’re giving them a tool to communicate effectively and play offense.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use apps to communicate marketing messages – and it doesn’t mean you can’t put tools on your website. It’s just where the two platforms shine. Ultimately, they are different things, and I don’t see them converging in the same way that Andreessen does.

Yes, the opaque approval process is a pain in the butt – especially when you are guiding a client through the process, and managing their expectations – but if the problem you’re trying to solve is better solved by a native app than a website, then it’s something you live with so that your users love you.