davidconnell.net

Let me start off by saying this: Hey Samsung, go fuck yourselves. If you made a better phone than the iPhone, people would buy it — I would be the first in line to get it. But, you don’t, so I won’t.

OK, with that out of the way, I have to wonder why Samsung would make such a mean-spirited ad. Do they really think that iPhone users are going to switch to a company that mocks them as obsessed, myopic hipsters?

The worst part is when one of the Apple Fanboys says he can’t’ buy a Samsung, “because I’m creative” and Fanboy #2 turns to him and says, “Dude, you’re a barista.” With this exchange, Samsung is basically saying, “It’s silly and stupid to try to be creative. And if you are a barista — or anything other than a professional designer — than you shouldn’t try to aspire to anything other than being a barista.” Again: GO FUCK YOURSELVES, SAMSUNG. I don’t want to buy any products from a company that thinks this way.

What really strikes me about this campaign is that it’s really bad marketing. Samsung has instantly alienated a large market segment — iPhone users — while at the same time appealing to the viewers’ most base emotion — cynicism. You don’t move people (or move products) with cynicism. You move people and products with inspiration. Compare the Samsung ad to Apple’s latest iPad ad and you’ll see the stark difference between cynicism and inspiration.

Focus— “It means saying no, not saying yes. We do very few things at Apple. We are $100bn in revenue with very few products. There are only so many grade A players. If you spread yourself out over too many things, none of them will be great.”

Greg Joswiak, part of the product marketing team for iPod, iPhone and iOS, speaking at Cambridge University on the four keys to Apple’s success. They are: Focus, Simplicity, Courage, Best.

(Via The Wall Street Journal: Four Keys to Apple’s Success.)

(Found Via Uncrate: PlugBug.)

The PlugBug from Apple accessory shop TwelveSouth is simple, yet ingenious. It snaps onto the standard MaBook power adaptor and gives you an extra USB port to charge up your iPad or iPhone leaving the USBs on the MacBook free for external drives or other devices. Simple genius.

There are lots of reasons — both professional and personal — I’m interested in this question. I won’t go into those now, but I do wonder:

Can mobile apps really change your personal behavior and create meaningful change?

The Eatery: Record what you eat, but don’t bother counting calories
Two new apps (one that includes a cool wrist band) hope to prove that they can. The first is The Eatery, from start-up Massive Health, which asks users to take a photo of everything they eat with their iPhone and then rate their food based on how healthy it is — healthy thumbs up and points for a spinach salad, caloric thumbs down and points for a double cheeseburger. The app allows you to create a community around your food by allowing you to share the photos through social networks and get friends to weigh in on your choices — That “healthy” energy bar? Not so fast, says  Joe, it’s loaded with carbs.

By not forcing users to count calories, the app removes a serious point of friction for these types of apps and, while this sacrifices accuracy, it should bump up usability and long-term adoption. The premise here is not to give users an accurate record of caloric intake, but rather to give them a sense of how they’re eating and to make them accountable for their choices by creating a public record of those choices. Would you rather see a gallery of fruits and vegetables and a health score of 80, or gallery of cheeseburgers and candy bars and a health score of 10?

The premise of the app is sound, but will people really take photos of everything they eat and rate it? More importantly, will they do it for more than a few days or weeks?

Jawbone’s Up: record everything through a wrist band and app
The second, more promising health changer in my view, is Jawbone’s wristband/mobile app combo Up, which combines to track your meals, your activity and your sleep. With Up, users wear a wristband to track activity and monitor sleep — the device can even be set to wake you during optimal, light REM periods — while a mobile app companion can be used to photograph food and guess calorie content based on that photo. I’m assuming this last part has something to do with magical photo-matching software. Up also has the requisite social integrations that allow you to share your progress, issue and enter challenges.

There’s no question that food and exercise journaling can improve health — almost every diet or workout program includes these strategies — but I do wonder if apps can lead to widespread adoption of these habits. As much as the phone is becoming a natural extension of who we are, I haven’t seen a case where this type of behavior change app has really caught on in the same way that, say, check-in app Foursquare has. I’m not sure quite why that is. At their core, these apps and Foursquare are all doing the same thing: asking people to record their behavior — Foursquare, where you visit and these apps, what you eat and how you exercise.

Competition is the thing
My guess is that much of the success Foursquare has seen depends on two factors: The first, which lifestyle change apps can’t replicate, is universality. Unfortunately, there are simply a lot more people going places  and doing things than there are people who are looking to improve their health. The second, which I think these apps could do a better job utilizing, is competition. Too many of these lifestyle apps reward user activity with badges and the like, but fail to put users in direct competition with each other in the way that Foursquare does.

Gamification isn’t just about giving users points and badges, it’s about allowing them to lord those points and badges over other users. What makes Foursquare successful is the competition to accumulate badges and mayorships. You don’t just get rewarded for being the mayor of the local Starbucks, you get oust someone else from that spot. Every Foursquare check-in is accompanied by a leader board, so you can see how you’re doing compared to your friends and followers. Appealing to people’s innate competitiveness and need to brag is what makes Foursquare successful. Giving users personal satisfaction in their accomplishments isn’t enough, you’ve got give them the chance to crush someone else.

Via The iPhone And US Unemployment – The Dish By Andrew Sullivan:

As China and India develop even faster, I see no way American skilled workers can truly compete without CEOs hurting their own shareholders. The prospect of a continued corporate profit boom, higher and higher economic and social inequality and persistently high unemployment is real and probably inevitable, absent brutal protectionism.

Andrew Sullivan offers a sobering look at where the US economy is headed based on two icons of gizmodatry: The iPhone and The Kindle. Both were invented here in the USA, but are manufactured in China. Sullivan notes that the iPhone could not be made in the USA without Apple losing 15 percent of its profit. And the technology to make the Kindle? It doesn’t even exist in the US. There’s literally now where else to make it.

However, I think Sullivan’s point above — that faster development in India and China will increase the skilled jobs drain to those countries needs to be fleshed out a bit more. As the US has developed we’ve shipped these jobs overseas so that technology is invented here and made somewhere else. As China and India develop, the same will happen there. Eventually, Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs will build the next must-have product, or disruptive social network. As they do, the jobs will continue to flow downhill to other developing economies — probably in Asia Pacific and Africa.

Perhaps, eventually the unemployment situation here will get so exacerbated that American workers will be forced to accept decreased wages and standards of living in order to have jobs. We bristle at the conditions at Chinese manufacturing giants like Foxconn, but is that where we need to go if we want manufacturing jobs? Probably yes, eventually.

The bald truth is that the world is experiencing a major economic shift that will likely be more disruptive to our economy, culture and environment than the industrial revolution.

Unfortunately, no one in power, or seeking power, has been honest with the American public about this fact. Nobody is leveling with the American people that we are fucked for “jobs” and there’s no going back. When politicians talk about “jobs” they’re generally talking about manufacturing and other blue collar jobs that pay enough to afford workers a middle class lifestyle and a chance to provide their children with a better shot at the future through education. This is the fundamental narrative the US economy and “the American Dream” are built on. Unfortunately, those days are over and they’re never coming back.

So let’s be honest with ourselves: The days of the noble blue collar worker are over, ok? They’re legend — captured in the time capsule of Bruce Springsteen songs. They are FUCKING OVER and they are never coming back.

No amount of stimulus or green jobs, or infrastructure revitalization, or whatever the hell else you want to trot out is going to change that. You’re talking bandaids on a shotgun wound. It’s over. The days when you could get a high school education and some job training, join the union and earn enough to be middle class and send your kids to college? FUCKING OVER. They’re not coming back.

Today, if you want to be middle class, you need a college degree, at the very least, and you probably need some kind of graduate degree. Which in turn means you need to go into hock to make a decent salary. It’s a trap that is going to mean our generation grows old with a lower standard of living then our parents. But, when we’re old and gray we can tell everyone how we were the first generation of the Technology Revolution and we built the new world order. We can be bigger and just as cloying as The Greatest Generation.

The question is what kind of world are we going to build? Are we going to build a world based on new technology, where American workers are knowledge workers and the “new middle class” are people who can run sysadmin on a bunch of servers, run a content management system, write advertising copy, run an efficient retail operation, or install a home energy production system? Are we going to create a world where homes and businesses are energy self-sufficient and provide abundant energy to our cars, appliances and gadgets without the need for a crappy grid or burning quickly-depleting, earth-killing fossil fuels? Are we going to build a future where not having a college degree (or some future equivalent) makes you a pariah in the same way that not having a high school degree does now? And, importantly, are we going to create a system that ensures everyone has a chance to earn that college degree (or future equivalent)? Are we going to create a future where our dwindling manufacturing plants seem as quaint and old-world as the old New England textile mills do today? Are we going to create a future where broadband access is considered a utility as ubiquitous and necessary as electricity and anyone can start a company from their kitchen table?

Or, are we going to try to hold onto our old way of life and limp along, polluting our planet and dealing with increasingly long power outages due to increasingly strong natural disasters? Are we going to simply accept an ever-increasing divide between the haves and have nots? Are we going to build Foxconn-style plants here in order to provide jobs — under any circumstances — to an increasingly irrelevant work force? Are we going to continue to let our education system slide into disarray and pretend everything is just fine because a teacher can get kids to memorize answers on a standardized test? Are we going to say it’s acceptable that some areas of the country will never get access to the Internet revolution?

To get the former, we need to be honest about the massive changes we are experiencing right now and be honest about the sacrifices we need to make now in order to prepare for a better future. To get the former, we need to invest in infrastructure, education and new energy production — not because it’s going to “create jobs” now, but because it’s going to mean avoiding a dystopian future.

To get the latter, we have to simply keep the blinders on, keep fooling ourselves into believing that we can turn this around with a little old-fashioned American elbow grease and stimulus. To get the latter, we should just keep telling ourselves nothing has changed when in reality, everything has changed.

(Photo: Abandoned marble factory (10) by Flickr user Joelk75. Used under a Creative Commons License.)

Via TechCrunch  ‘ONE’ iPhone App Allows You To Call Your Senators To Instigate Change:
“Launching in the app store today is ONE, an iPhone app that attempts to modernize political call to action, by making it easy to stay up to date on issues and take actions that actually might cause actual social change from within the app itself. The app basically gives you information about various advocacy movements like funding childhood vaccines for kids that can’t afford them and then lets you call a senator, sign a petition or join up with a real life rally for causes in order to raise awareness.”

During my morning surf, these three apps popped up as something I might want to consider:

Week Calendar: A strange name, because this iPhone app seems anything but weak (get it? That’s a pun). It seems to provide a better iCal-like UI than the default calendar app on the iPhone and integrates with Google Calendar, where I keep all of my personal scheduling. Speaking of calendar apps, I’m looking forward to testing out Fantastical and/or Today for the Mac. I’m currently using calendar bar, but that doesn’t give you the option to add events to your calendar.

Shine looks like a weather app that actually has a useful interface. The default weather app on the iPhone doesn’t give me enough information and the Weather Channel App takes too damn long to load. Here’s hoping that Shine will be a weather app worth checking every morning.

UpdateBar: Because I definitely need another way to update my Twitter and Facebook accounts. UpdateBar gives me that right from the ever-popular menu bar.

Since writing my review of the Moleskine iPhone app, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a useful app. For me, a useful app has to do one of three things:

• Solve a problem the user faces at least once a week.
• Provide a creative outlet in an easy and delightful way.
• Provide a temporary escape or release from responsibilities, usually through gaming or music.

In addition to filling these three criteria an app has to be simple and intuitive enough to use that users will know how to use it the instant they open the app on download. Apps don’t come with instruction manuals — and if they do, you’re in trouble. The only guidance you can give the user is the brief text on the app page in the iTunes store and a handful of screen shots. The user typically views this information at the time of purchase and has probably already decided to purchase the app before coming to this page.

Once the user has downloaded the app the app provider is likely to have no contact with that user again, except to push updates. If users don’t understand the app on first open, it’s likely headed for the great shaking X in the sky.

Like Moleskine, lots of apps nail the first part of the equation by solving a problem, providing a creative outlet or providing an escape, but they fumble the second part of the equation badly by burying the apps usefulness in unnecessary UI candy that looks great on paper but provides nothing but a barrier between the use and the service. Or, they refuse to stop at solving one problem and pile on feature after feature until they’ve completely jacked-up the app. That is, they’ve created a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.

Many others, of course, get it right. Here are a few apps that I think have this formula pretty well nailed:

PhotoSync
PhotoSync isn’t the sexiest app around, but until Apple introduces untethered syncing to the iPhone it’s a damn necessary one. PhotoSync allows users to send photos and videos from their phone directly to iTunes between devices sharing the same WiFi network. In other words, it solves a problems users face at least weekly, if not daily.

It has a fairly simple interface — users select photos, press a sync and then decide where they’d like to send the photos, users can also send photos to Facebook if they wish. This last part comes a bit close to feature creep, but the app is still simple and quick to use. I sent a minute-long video from phone to computer last night in about one minute, start to finish.

Feedly
Feedly is by far my favorite RSS reader for phone and computer. The app pulls in your Google Reader account settings and presents articles in a pleasing, browsable format broken down by subject. The magic sauce of Feedly isn’t that it looks incredible, it’s that its algorithmic mumbo-jumbo presents only some of the stories from your reader, based on what you’ve read in the past, what you haven’t been reading lately and what’s popular on your social graph.

For me, it solves the problem of having accumulated far too many RSS feeds in my life and not having the time or energy to deal with them through Google. Feedly just sorts it out for me and tells me what to read.

I also like that Feedly’s iPhone app doesn’t overload the user with social sharing options like some competitors. Instead, it allows you to simply post the story to twitter, email it, open it in a browser or copy the link. Feedly keeps you where the action is — reading your RSS feed.

Instapaper
Speaking of reading, there’s Instapaper — the undisputed king of getting it right on the iPhone and iPad. For those still using a Nokia flip phone, Instapaper is a service that allows you to save articles off the web onto your iPhone in a distraction-free reading environment. It solves two problems: saving articles to read later, and not wanting to read articles in a crapped-up website that isn’t formatted for you phone.

And that used to be all it did. However, Instapaper recently added “Friends” which allows you to see stories saved by people on your social graph and “Editors” which is a content discovery feature. These services sit, somewhat unobtrusively at the top of the user’s saved articles list. To be honest, I haven’t used them yet — I have a hard enough time reading all of the articles I save on Instapaper, let alone what my friends are saving. But I can see how these would be useful for users who spend a lot of time in the app, particularly iPad users.

Angry Birds
I will fully admit that I’m not a gamer. I have a few games on my phone, but they very rarely see action. However, I have to hand it to smash-hit Angry Birds for really capturing this idea of temporary escape and simplicity. I resisted Angry Birds for a long time, but when I finally downloaded it I saw what all the fuss was about. It is really the perfect game for the iPhone, providing 3-5 minutes (for me that’s the limit, at least) of pure escapism through the simplest of mechanisms — flick the bird, knock down the blocks.

Certainly, there are other games that have the simplicity of Angry Birds — paper toss comes to mind — but they don’t have the creative whimsy that makes Angry Birds special. Afterall, if I want toss paper balls into a trash can, I can do that in my cube. If I want to fight nefarious green pigs, well, there’s only one place I can do that.

(Image Genus Aves Iratus (Angry Birds) by Flickr user zero-lives.)

From O'Reilly: A visualization of iPhone location data (ZOMG! You live on the East Coast!)

Have you heard? Your iPhone is tracking your every move and, although the data of where you have been lives deep within the file system of your phone and isn’t transmitted to anyone, the fact that this data exists is a serious violation of your privacy and a danger to your very existence. Except, you know, that it isn’t, at all.

Was it boneheaded for Apple to store this information on the iPhone, unencrypted so that eggheads from O’Reilly could discover it and create a bit of a firestorm around it — absolutely. Should this data, which probably does have a legitimate and benign purpose, be encrypted on the phone for privacy concerns? Yes. Because if it’s not, people will make a big stink. Is it a danger to your very existence? Hardly.

Let’s stop and think rationally about this for a second. Assume someone wanted to stalk me and kill me. That is the fear here of privacy mongers, right? Or is it that marketers will know I went to the Gap? Because if that’s all it is, then I could care less. Here it is folks: I shop at the Gap (but more often Target).

But let’s assume someone wanted to stalk me and kill me. He’s decided that the best way to do this is to get a hold of my iPhone, grab this newly-discovered data file off of my phone, download it and pull the data then stalk me based on where I’ve been in the past. (Never mind that the most reliable data from the past that will predict where I will be in the future are the addresses of my home and workplace — both already publicly available.)

Good plan, brother, let’s see how it plays out:

Step 1: Steal my cell phone from me. Wait, why don’t you just kill me now? Here I am sitting on the metro while you are stealing my phone. Why go through all the trouble of hacking it when you can just kill me now.

Step 2: There is no step 2. The stalker has now smartly killed me without the bother of tracking me through my cell phone.

This is an extreme example of course, but the point is if someone wants data on you (to do something sinister, or something as benign as learning your shopping habits) there are much simpler ways to obtain that data than through iPhone hacking. They can find you in the real world and stalk you there, they can go through your trash, they can buy market research. In short, there are infinite ways people can find our whereabouts and almost every single one of them is much easier to execute than hacking into your phone.

My trash is full of unencrypted data. Should I stop throwing it away because it’s insecure?

What bothers me most about these types of stories is the irrational fear they create in people. Irrational fear usually stoked by 24-hour news channels and — even worse, frankly — local news producers. Take this piece of garbage for instance, which includes every local news trick in the book, including the ambush interview of a startled local mother:

(Note menacing “pedophile-type” used in screen grab above. zOMG! Think of the children!)

The basic implication here is that, if you upload your children’s photos to the internet, pedophiles will steal them and do horrible, horrible things. What a load of garbage. First off, many social networking sites — notably Facebook — strip out location data before posting a photo. Second, what actionable data is a pedophile gaining on your child through that photo that isn’t already available? Nothing. Anything actionable would have to be a fixed address, ie your home, which is already publicly available. Third, is downloading photos and manipulating its data file really the most likely scenario for a pedophile to find and steal children? No. He is much more likely to go and sit at a park to choose a victim. But that fact makes of far less interesting television news.

The fact is, we explode ourselves to potential privacy violations and threats every day just be being out and about. We don’t need our cellphones to do help us with that. Checking into FourSquare and broadcasting our location to the internet is no more “creepy” or “scary” than “broadcasting” your location to everyone who is already there through your actual presence. In fact, being there in real life is actually a greater threat than checking into FourSquare because to do real harm to you they have to be able to touch you, not simply know where you are.

So everyone just relax.

I was really exited yesterday to find out through PSFK that Moleskine had released an official app. for iOS (It’s free, by the way). Unfortunately, when I downloaded the app last night I was much less excited. Make no mistake, the Moleskine app does a lot. You can write notes, draw sketches, categorize your notes, geotag them (ideal for travel) and share them via Twitter and Facebook (I’d like to see them add WordPress to the mix). Unfortunately, the app. is just too clever for it’s own good. It packs too much functionality into the app and users have to navigate that functionality before they can begin actually using that functionality. What’s worse, it hides those functions behind fly-outs and page peel-aways that are difficult to find and decipher. In short, it’s too difficult to understand how you’re supposed to start writing (or drawing) with the app. You start writing and drawing, by the way, by double tapping on the page you want to write on — a fact I could not find anywhere in the app instructions. Also, there is no landscape mode for typing on the iPhone, a huge oversight for an app that is supposed to be about conent creation.

All of his added stuff (which is all beautifully crafted by the way. The app itself is beautiful) meant that after downloading, I spent the first couple of minutes with Moleskine trying to navigate the UI and not writing or recording my thoughts. This is not good. When you create an app for an offline experience that people know and are passionate about, you damn-well better replicate that offline experience. What people love about the Moleskine experience is that they can open one up and begin writing right away on a high-quality notebook — no interference, no mumbo jumbo, just pure thought. That’s what Moleskine is all about. When I open up my Moleskine I don’t want to see this (And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to see it when I open up my Moleskine app.):

Moleskine app instructions

So what’s really going on here? Well, the fact that Moleskine prominently links to its catalog from the app might give you a clue. Perhaps some marketing guys got a hold of this thing, loaded it with unnecessary functionality and turned it into a marketing vehicle.

Despite its short comings, I’m going to try to keep the Moleskine app on my phone for now, but I’m not sure how I’m going to use it. If you’re looking for a pure and quick note taker for iOS that can sync with a desktop client, my suggestion is to go with Simplenote and pair it Notational Velocity on the desktop. I’ve been using these for months  and they’re great — fast and seamless and they get you writing right away.