My first major update will be that as of January 1st, 2013 I will no longer be doing cheap one-off email newsletters.

What are cheap one-off email newsletter?:

A cheap one-off email newsletter is a simple, single newsletter that a client has me build from scratch, but only wants to spend around $150 for everything.

Reason for this change:

The main reason for dropping the cheap one-off email newsletters is because it is not cost effective for either me or the client. Cheap one-off email newsletters are great for small companies to get the word out, but as a developer, this is something that comes at a loss for me. Each email design has to be coded then tested on various email clients: Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple’s Mail, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com (use to be Hotmail.com). The more complex the design, the more testing that is required.

Continued support for Email Newsletter Campaigns:

Even though I will be dropping support for the cheap email newsletters, I will still continue to work on email newsletter campaigns. Email newsletter campaigns are projects where I can work closely with the client to come up with a design and code that we create once and work together to continually improve over time.

If you have any questions about this change, please feel free to contact me on Google+, Twitter, Facebook or via Email.

I will be getting married to my wonderful fiancée Whitney Phu.

I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you Whitney. I love you and here is to our big day!

I’m finally settling into my new job and getting back into working on my personal projects, and the one that I have been wanting to tackle for a while was the layout for the books that I read on my site.

Goals with the New Layout:

• Easier to scan books that I have read
• Use modern CSS3 for added visuals
• Hide content until the user wants to see it
• Tablet and phone friendly

Books Layout Before:

Books Layout After:

Check out the new section yourself: http://www.andrewcmaxwell.com/books

Let me know what you think about the updated layout and if you have any suggestions on how I could make it better.

Also, if you are curious on how I did this, feel free to ask, I am more than happy to share the code and help out if you get stuck.

My First Impressions:

The device is very responsive and is a wonderful addition to have between my smart phone and desktop computer.

While I played around with the Xoom at the Verizon store I was pretty sceptical. The first couple of minutes I had to figure out the device, it came with a bit of a learning curve and a few apps forced closed on me. After a fresh restart the thing was running perfectly. After the restart I was hooked, and so I bought one.

The Xoom Back Home:

As soon as I got the Xoom back home I started to load my apps on it, and thanks to the apps on my phone being synced to my Google account, those apps downloaded and installed once I logged in.

Not all apps were downloaded from my account, some did not support the Xoom which is understandable. Some of the apps that did download did not scale to full screen just like what happens with iPhone apps on a iPad so that I wasn’t too worried with that.

The apps that did scale worked perfectly and have even made me use them more thanks to the added real estate.

The Bad:

All devices have their quirks and this one has its own.

• I have had a few force close on a few phone apps running on the device
• The volume buttons are tiny and take a bit to get use to
• It is hard to paste items at the beginning of a line (far left) if the apps text field is on the edge of the screen
• Limited tablet specific apps – Over 100 apps at the time of writing with more coming out everyday
• No Flash – It will come on March 18th, 2011

The Good:

• Notifications – This may sound like a simple feature but the way that Google has this work on a tablet is well crafted and beautifully done
• True multi-tasking
• Amazing battery life – I have been able to use my device heavily for 10 hours on numerous occasions with no problem
• Multiple keyboards – switching keyboards couldn’t be easier, I now have 2 keyboards that I use all of the time, one for full keyboard functionality and the other for thumb typing
• Almost all phone apps scale by default, giving you more selection for apps that work on a tablet
• Transferring files to the Xoom is super simple, even easier than on an Android phone. They have gone away with the USB selection and pop up model and made it just work exactly like a flash drive, plug n play
• The cameras are awesome and pick up a lot of light thanks to the 2mp front camera and 5mp rear camera with flash
• 2 speakers for great sound, you can hear it perfectly no matter how you hold the device
• Fast browser – Going to any web page loads fast like it should and how it does on a desktop computer
• Full 3D games with PS2/3 graphic – the tablet specific apps look and play beautifully, I am very impressed at the frame rate
• Real HD Video
• 16×10 ratio – this means movies will fit better and books will look more like printed books now

Conclusion:

This is one of the best deviced that I have ever owned, and I can say that apps will run on par with the iPad in terms of stability and though the iPad has more tablet specific apps(which it should, it has been out for a year) the Xoom is a much better device in every other way.

Many people will answer yes, especially large companies and established bloggers and I do agree to some point, but the way that we currently have to develop HTML newsletters feels like something out of the stone age.

Why I think the current model of Newsletters will Change:

Current Email newsletters are an ancient model in terms of the web. The current model was built in the late 90′s and early 2000′s and has yet to really change. We are still building email newsletters with table layouts. By being limited to table layouts, coding emails takes hours longer than it really should.

What We Should Use For a Simple Header:

<div id=”header><img scr=”header.jpg” /></div>

What we have to write:

<table><tbody><tr><td><img src=”header.jpg” /></td></tr></tbody></table>

Now if you want to change the height of the table model, you have to adjust the height on not only the main <table> element, but every element inside, causing you to change 5 elements instead of 1 or 2. This may not sound like a lot at first but time adds up, and when, invasis on when you run into a bug, you have to trouble shoot multiple items instead of just adjusting what needs to change.

Some Support, But NOT Enough:

Some email clients do support the use of DIV’s for structure and CSS for layout, but the problem is that not all of them do, causing us to use legacy code that we know works. Take a look at this list of CSS that is supported in current email clients, you can see that the supported elements are spotty, some email clients such as Yahoo Mail support many elements, but then other clients don’t, so instead of using the method that we should use, we have to use something that will work in all clients.

Email Clients Need To Update As Fast As Browsers:

Since Google Chrome came out in September of 2008 we have seen a rapid pace of innovation by the browser makers, including Microsoft’s internet Explorer. We have seen things such as HTML5, CSS3, and even hardware acceleration being added to browsers with something new coming out each month, yet email clients still use the same code from the late nineties? Do you see the problem here?

What Needs Can Change This:

There isn’t a lot that any one person can do, we need to get the big 3 companies; Microsoft, Yahoo and Google to update their email clients using modern standards. The biggest hurdle will be for Microsoft to update their client since it is built around large companies who use Outlook (Microsoft Word) as their email client, which accounts for hundreds of millions of people.

If you know someone who works at Yahoo, Microsoft or Google who works on the email clients please pass this on.

In the previous version of Evernote on Android and all other mobile platforms you can only edit simple text notes or append notes with advanced styling. With the new version for Android you can edit every note, even the ones with advanced styling, making Evernote truly useful on the go.

What Changed:

This may sound like a weird way of working, but instead of editing a full note, you will now select the sentence/paragraph that you want to work on and edit that portion directly, this does a few things:

• It allows you to use styles that are already in your note
• It eliminates the evil jumping around that happens while editing long notes.

If you are using another note service for Android note, I would suggest giving Evernote another try.

What is Google One Pass:

“It offers purchase-once, view-anywhere functionality, so users can view the content they buy across all of their devices.”

Basically this is a subscription service that let’s you use Google Checkout as the payment backbone and allows Book, Magazine and Music companies to offer a subscription fee to their services and users can use that subscription system to view, read or listen to their content anywhere.

How is this Different than Apple’s iOS Subscription Model?:

Google One Pass is different in many ways:

• New revenue stream – Apple forces Publishers to choose Apple’s way or no way, at a higher cost
• Purchase-once, view-anywhere functionality – Apple’s model is only available on iOS
• Ability to give access to existing subscribers – Apple only allows for new subscribers using their system
• Business model flexibility (e.g., subscriptions, day passes, metered access, pay-per-article, multi-issue packages) – Apple’s subscription model is currently limited to monthly subscriptions but this may change quickly
• Publishers set the price of Content - This is exactly the opposite of Apple’s model since Apple is forcing content to be the same price or cheaper than if it was purchased else where

Which would you choose?

The Curve Ball:

If you read the quotes below carefully, it means that you can no longer let a user subscribe to your service from within an app, without giving Apple 30% of the profits and you can’t give users an alternative method of payment from within the app, even a link to the website.

“Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app. In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.“

and

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing”

Why This is Bad:

This may make sense for news papers since they are gaining subscribers via the iOS and have a larger profit margin, but for companies like Amazon (Kindle, Audible.com), Pandora, and Rhapsody there is no way that they can give away 30% of their profits since their profit margin is already so low and now they can’t even offer a link to purchase the subscription outside of the app, basically killing the apps effectiveness for most companies.

What this means for Developers:

This change will and has already pushed developers away. Rhapsody has already made it clear that they will no longer be able to provide their service on the iOS under these new rules in a public statement.

“Our philosophy is simple too – an Apple-imposed arrangement that requires us to pay 30 percent of our revenue to Apple, in addition to content fees that we pay to the music labels, publishers and artists, is economically untenable. The bottom line is we would not be able to offer our service through the iTunes store if subjected to Apple’s 30 percent monthly fee vs. a typical 2.5 percent credit card fee.“

If Apple wants to keep its developers happy, they are going to have to add the ability to link to external sources to pay for a subscription or change their percentage, if they don’t, the developers will move to a more profitable and reasonable platform… ie. Android or Windows Phone 7, I’m sure many companies are already started looking for a way out.

What This Means for iOS Users:

It’s simple, if the developers leave or if they charge more, customers won’t be happy, which means the customers also will go where their app/services are.

Conclusion:

If Apple doesn’t change this, and change this fast, iOS may be a thing of the past and will no longer have the cutting edge apps and services that it has today.

Photo By: _Tawcan

More on this Topic:

• Apple Offers Subscriptions for Apps
• Apples New Subscription Model is Evil
• Apple’s New Subscription Model & What it Means for Publishers
• Rhapsody Slams New Apple Subscription Rules
• Rhapsody won’t bow to Apple’s subscription policy, issues statement

I know that the TV/larger display market isn’t as popular for most people as the smart phone market but I think that we should start moving in the direction that websites will be viewed in our living rooms on our big screens since the progression is inevitable.

Websites That I Want Optimized For TV’s or Larger Screens:

1. Google Buzz
2. Google Reader
3. Mashable
4. Android and Me
5. My own website (will come at a later date)
6. Audible.com
7. and More…

What websites would you like optimized for larger screens?