Instagram: Instagram + Facebook
And they were wondering how Instagram would make money. A billion dollars? Yeah, that was a worthy venture.
When Mike and I started Instagram nearly two years ago, we set out to change and improve the way the world communicates and shares. We’ve had an amazing time watching Instagram grow into a vibrant community of people from all around the globe. Today, we couldn’t be happier to announce that…
Source: instagram
Paper by Fifty Three
Nearly everyone is reviewing the new app “Paper” by the folks at fifty three. As people get swept up in a wave of enthusiasm, I find myseld interested in it, as I have recently acquired my own stylus, and am doing more work sketches and notes on my iPad. So…this is relevant to my interests.
I have 2 major issues with the app, but I will get to those in a second.
On the surface, it’s a stunning app. The liquid smoothness to which it responds to your finger is nothing short of a joy. Seeing the “ink” trace to “paper” is such an organic experience that surpasses every other free stylus writing/drawing app I have seen. The different brushes all serve a clear purpose, and don’t overlap too much and it would be the first app where I wouldn’t even care to have to think about picking a brush thickness. They all have a fixed thickness, but it makes perfect sense for that brush. Actually…I lie a little, a thinner watercolour brush would not go amiss, but that’s quibbling.
My issues
First, this is going to sound really pedantic, but I have not seen anyone mention it yet. The default free brush, which is meant to be sort of an analogue to a fountain pen…is flawed. First of all, a fountain pen is thicker in certain directions, and thinner in other directions (depending on how you hold it). Paper doesn’t use this model. Ok…so it’s a sort of paint brush? Sure, let’s go with that. However, my big issue is that it paints a thin line if you go slow, and a thick line if you go fast.
This is of course THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what you’d expect, and what your mind is prepared to anticipate. I find it really really disconcerting, and I hope they fix this in an update (if they even recognize it as something that needs fixing).
Second, they are trying to hard to be clever. The whole app is an attempt to hide the tech medium. Your work is grouped in sketch books, which open to pages, which open to your individual images. Fine. Not necessary, but fine, at least that part is clear and easy. However they tried to get to clever with a pointless “Rewind” approach to undoing your work. You do this awkward 2 finger rotation thing to unwind your work. Don’t like your last brush stroke? Put 2 fingers on page, hope you don’t accidentally add another unwanted stroke, twist counter-clockwise, and find the right angle to precisely undo the stroke you want gone, and not the stroke before that. It’s cool, it’s flash, it gets people talking, but it’s not actually useful. It is in fact very hard to use, and often it gets confused between your 2 finger rotation, and a simple pinch which closes your book.
I picked up the new 3rd gen. iPad last Friday, an item that is already too heavily reviewed for me to bother spending much time on it here. However, one of the things I wanted to try is to get a nice stylus, and use it for handwritten note taking. My work has me attending far more meetings now, necessitating me to write notes and comments to myself, and it gets a bit tedious to fuss with an increasingly tattered paper notebook.
So picked up one these at Future Shop…
and this on the app store. I tried it out already, and the writing is very smooth. It’s not as tight as writing with a real pen on paper, but it’s easy, smooth, legible, and of course can be erased, copy and pasted, different colours and pen widths and so forth.
It also syncs to Dropbox and Evernote (though, since my Evernote is personal, and my usage here is work, I am not sure I will connect them in that way).
Who knows, we’ll see if it becomes a thing. It obliges me to remember my iPad when I head to work, something I will forget from time to time, but it could be handy.
Kind of says it all doesn’t it?
Ting - Why has it taken this long for a cell carrier to do this?
I was listening to TWIG, and had one of my strongest reactions to an ad that they’ve ever done.
Ting is a cell phone carrier with an innovation that blows me away. WE NEED THIS IN CANADA! It has 2 major components
- Pick voice plan, text plan, and data plan independently of each other. Each of the plans has a “0” option. Don’t want a voice plan? Pick 0 minutes. This is especially appealing for deaf customers, that often have to fight with their carrier to be exempted from a voice plan that they can’t use.
- If you don’t use very much, and find you would have qualified for a smaller plan, they downgrade your plan AND CREDIT YOU THE DIFFERENCE! (automatically) If you use more than expected and go past your plan, they simply bump you to the next package rather than charge overage fees (unless you are going above the biggest plan they offer). This means the only reason you even care what plan you pick is because you want to track your usage against certain expected metrics.
Take a look.
I can’t believe I am sitting here flogging an American cell phone carrier, but this is a direction that carriers need to go. This is a plan that is not designed to make much money from 1 user, but is designed to appeal so strongly to people that they will make the move to the service.
You might quibble over how much should be charged for an SMS or a minute or talk, but I don’t think anyone can quibble with the overall plan setup being unfair.
I have to say, Windows 8 is the first Microsoft OS that even remotely makes interested. I have been a happy Mac user for many years now, and still love it, but Windows 8 is the first offering from MS that rivals my general interest in sitting and using my computer. Of course, I haven’t actually played with it, so I am conjecturing, but it promises to be a potentially truly pleasant user experience.
I have played with the Metro OS on the phone (a co-worker has one), and it’s a great experience, it really draws you in. On the phone, I would argue it’s possibly the most compelling phone experience I have ever seen. My iPhone is an awesome piece of hardward, but the outside of apps, just in the OS itself, it’s kind of a forgettable experience.
Telephone numbers are a disgrace to our generation.
In a similar line of thought to my recent musings on the antiquity of email and how we need to evolve past it as a textual messaging medium, this is a great article on the antiquity of phone numbers.
They, like email address, are (or should be) a relic.
The best quote?
Telephone numbers need a DNS system!
The article speaks about vox.io a bit as well, which I also spoke about a few weeks back.
The trouble with both address mediums (email address, and phone number) is that they are unbelievably entrenched in our cultural awareness. Even the luddites among us have an understanding of what an email address is, and of course phone numbers have been a part of our daily lives since…well my entire life anyways.
I really hope we can evolve these system. The movement of VOIP services over conventional phone lines is a step in the right direction, it’s an evolution, but they are still too tightly tied to the conventional phone #.
When Steve Jobs introduce the first iPhone, he indicated that the moment you have to open the dial pad on the phone, it’s failed you. We should be grabbing someone’s name in the address book, and not care about the numbers. The problem there still, is that if they have 2 phones, you are still picking one of them, even if you are not forced to remember the digits of the number.
Path: We are sorry.
An honest apology for a mistake that should never have happened, but did. This is the way to handle it though. Don’t backpedal, don’t deflect, just Mea Culpa, and work like hell to fix it.
We made a mistake. Over the last couple of days users brought to light an issue concerning how we handle your personal information on Path, specifically the transmission and storage of your phone contacts.
As our mission is to build the world’s first personal network, a trusted place for you to…
Source: thepersonalnetwork
Silence vs. Communication: a peek into our productiveness | 6Wunderkinder
Musings of 6wunderkinder on the nature of how to be productive, and what works for them.
Wunderkit
The folks over at 6Wunderkinder are in beta with a new product called Wunderkit (click to sign up for beta invite).
6Wunderkinder is know for their task management app Wunderlist, a wildly popular task management app that none the less left me cold. I found it extremely pretty and polished, but overly simplistic. A raw list of to-dos, organized into lists. No sub-tasks, no repeating tasks, no contextual information, etc… I also gravitate to services that can use iCloud for syncing, as this means I can use Siri to enter tasks. For this reason, I never really got into it.
Wunderkit promises to be all that and more. Some are calling this the product that Google Wave was trying to be, but done right. It’s robust task management, but with a social collaboration element to help people work together on tasks and projects.
It looks promising. I am not in the beta yet, but I will have to see if this fills the holes for which I feel that Wunderlist is still burdened. I am certainly eager to try it out, though if I still can’t use Siri to enter tasks, then there will still be one innate limit that I will have to weigh.
Their will be a free version, and some kind of premium version (details still TBD), which is fair; I just wish I knew more.
Welcome. I am a software developer working and living in Ottawa Canada. I am currently employed at 