Chrome and Alphabear
Two distinct categories.
Two distinct version number strategies.
Two distinct release notes styles.
Chrome and Alphabear Release Notes.
Overcast’s Release Notes
Overcast, must have learned time travel
You look nice today!
Swarm's message when it does not have anything else to say about your checkin
A Warm Message From Hangouts
The Hangouts app will display the following warm message when the initial loading is too slow:
Warm, welcome, and makes me a little bit happier even though my phone’s reception was so bad at that moment.
∞ Twitter Needs New Leadership
A very good read on what Twitter should do instead:
Specifically, Twitter should dramatically increase the number of applications — and thus the number of potential reasons — a potential user might create and maintain an active user account. For example, Twitter could follow the Facebook strategy and build out a family of apps — one for messaging, another for news, others for specific events — and enhance the ways one could interact with Twitter content, whether that be through comments, private communities, etc. It’s ok that this is aping Facebook; what differentiates social networks is not their feature set but rather their organizing principle. Facebook is about people you know, and Twitter about those that share your interests. Everything else — including all the quixotic features that Twitter holds dear — are implementation details.3
Alternatively, Twitter could empower third-party developers to build these sorts of applications that feed back information into the Twitter interest graph. An application like Nuzzel, for example, which uses your Twitter graph to create a news app, has much more of a one-way relationship with the social network: Nuzzel is getting all the benefit, and not sending much information back to Twitter. Twitter would be better off retooling their API and developer agreements to ensure they are learning from every application they interact with, and in return sharing their graph along with advertising in the form of their MoPub or Namo Media-derived offerings. The advantage of this approach is that the imagination and ingenuity of a massive developer ecosystem will always be far faster and more innovative than anything any one company can do on its own — just ask Apple.
As an aside, something that has hurt Twitter on the public markets has been the expectation/hope that the social network would follow Facebook’s path with regards to user numbers and monetization. Clearly the company as presently constructed isn’t anything close to that; however, the open approach that I’m advocating could in fact become something exponentially larger. Last week I wrote about Facebook’s AOL-like dominance and concluded, “What might be the broadband to Facebook’s dial-up?” The answer, I think, is this open Twitter: an identity system for the rest of the web that connects people and apps according to interests, not just superficial relationships, and monetizes accordingly.
∞ Instapaper on Apple Watch
I’m finally sold on a watch after seeing this. This is exactly what I wanted after using Instapaper’s text-to-speech feature during my commute. It is so inconvenient to operate Instapaper on my phone while I am standing in a terrible terrible Path train.
Another thing I wanted is to use the watch to control Overcast, although I don’t quite need it since I usually don’t need to do anything while I’m listening my podcasts.
Google introduces Project Fi, looking forward to either using it, or seeing competitors introducing something similar, or maybe both.
∞ Marco's Definition of Success
After the self-employment penalties in taxes and benefits, I’m probably coming in under what I could get at a good full-time job in the city, but I don’t have to actually work for someone else on something I don’t care about. I can work in my nice home office, drink my fussy coffee, take a nap after lunch if I want to, and be present for my family as my kid grows up. That’s my definition of success.
Probably lots of indies share this same definition of success, though some started from an overnight multi-million dollar dream.
My Story with Mailbox
Dropbox is promoting Mailbox, so I thought, why not give it a try. At least I could earn the extra 1GB.
I downloaded and opened the app, first step was to sign in with Dropbox (to get the 1GB space). After tapping the Sign in button, I got a nice little notification from Dropbox saying my space was increased 1GB. Good news!
Then, however, this happened:
Tried again, same. Then I had to tap Cancel. It started to Unlinking:
Why did it try to unlink if the link was not successful at the first place? And of course it failed:
The End.
∞ A Game Usability Review of Triple town
Triple town is a mobile puzzle game by Spryfox that has kept me addicted for quite a while, despite the free to play time limiting features. In this article, I will introduce the game’s strength, then walk you through some of the usability issues that would be worth fixing to make the experience even more enjoyable.
A great review.