Why do we drop $20+, $50+, $100+ on some software updates without flinching – software updates containing features we already paid for – but an independent developer is trying to stay alive in a niche category and suddenly we’re Norma Rae-ing over $2?

Ridiculously low prices and lack of upgrades in the app store creates real problems for developers who want to build and maintain high quality apps.

✦

Developer Jonathan Rentzsch had slightly more cynical advice for developers considering breaking in to the iOS market. Instead of going into business for yourself, consider contracting out work to larger companies with big budgets.

“It’s no secret that the money in the App Store is the contracts writing the apps, not in selling the apps themselves,” he said.

✦

The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.

Seems to me that only one of these mistakes should be enough to end America’s so-called War on Terror. But of course it will continue, and more innocent people will be killed.

✦

When it comes to self-development, programmers can often be illogical.

They spend thousands on conferences, hundreds on books and many hours coding late into the night learning about exciting new technologies. They do all of this to try and improve their brain’s ability to program. However, they manage to neglect one of the most significant factors to their brain’s performance: exercise.

This describes me. I’m putting in lots of hours learning iOS development, and cutting just about everything else I can from my schedule — including exercise. I know it’s a mistake, but I can’t quite make the exercise equals better programming connection in my head — as illogical as that may be.

✦

What a difference! I’ve found I can barely tolerate reading Twitter on my phone now because I see all the crap that gets blocked when I’m on my Mac.

Hibari isn’t perfect — there are a lot of things the official Twitter app does better — but used with a single Twitter account where you actually want to read most of the content you follow it works quite nicely (and the keyword block feature makes it my current Twitter client of choice).

→ Hibari for Twitter (on the Mac App Store)

It’s funny how many people seemed to be quitting their jobs (or talking about the idea) while I was working through the decision myself. I think the first (recent) one that came across my radar was this post from Jeff Atwood — Farewell Stack Exchange — a great post, if you haven’t read it yet. He quoted a post from Deliberatism — Not Like Steve. After reading that, I had to stick around for a while and read everything else on the site.

Here are a few of my favorites from Deliberatism:
The Hamster Wheel:

I’ve noticed that there’s also a fourth state that a very small group of people arrive at. It involves realizing that the whole thing is a kind of hamster wheel, and that although the busy-making can be gratifying, it doesn’t—in the grand scheme of things—lead to all that much.

Life is a Laughing Matter: I’m not going to quote from this one, just read the whole thing.

Forget Self-Improvement:

Maybe you aren’t supposed to bother with the tedious stuff. Perhaps the reason you haven’t done it yet, is that you weren’t meant to. Might achievement, as a goal unto itself, be pointless? Could this need to have done something notable, simply be greed in a more socially-acceptable form?

It’s nice to find a blog exploring deeper topics and not pushing more 5,000 tips you need to do today nonsense. Needless to say, I’d recommend adding this site to your must-read RSS lineup.

It’s a strange thing, leaving the regular working world — most people find it shocking — yet I see it as my only option if I want to create the life I want for myself and my family.

The most important thing to me is to be here for my daughter whenever she needs me. I refuse to accept a reality where I must spend 50 – 60 hours a week, in an office, on someone else’s schedule, to provide for my family. All I need is my laptop and an Internet connection and I can do my work and earn a living. It was only the fear of taking responsibility for making that living myself that kept me in a dead-end job for so long.

So that’s why I had to take the plunge — the responsibility is all mine now. I’ll either succeed and live the life of my dreams or fail and go back to a regular job and a regular life. Only time will tell if I made the right decision or not — and if I fail, at least I’ll have failed trying to make the life I want to be living.

Here’s one gem of a quote:

I’ll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn’t clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga’s games.

Be sure to read the whole piece. I’m eagerly anticipating the complete issue in March.

This is another excellent book from A Book Apart. I’m not a content strategist, but dealing with content is obviously a big part of any web designer’s job and it’s something I’d like to get better at. I think this book is a great starting point, sort of an overview and introduction to content strategy. The Book Apart series are brief books, which I think is a great idea, but frankly I would have liked this book to be a bit longer; not too suggest I didn’t get a lot of value from it—I did a lot of highlighting and took a lot of notes. Below are some of my favorite parts.

What is Content Strategy?

“Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” —RACHEL LOVINGER
“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” —KRISTINA HALVORSON
—pg. 1

Understanding content:

There’s really only one central principle of good content: it should be appropriate for your business, for your users, and for its context. Appropriate in its method of delivery, in its style and structure, and above all in its substance. —pg. 4

Define a clear, specific purpose for each piece of content; evaluate content against this purpose —pg. 7

Publishing content that is self-absorbed in substance or style alienates readers. —pg. 9

publishing everything often means “publishing everything we can,” rather than “publishing everything we’ve learned that our users really need.” —pg. 11

About the importance of editors:

Great writers know what their readers want and need to hear. But the responsibility for validating assumptions about the audience and tuning the content to suit that audience remains with the editors —pg. 18

At the end of the day, we and our clients must remember [that] content is created (and revised and maintained) only when a human being is assigned and paid to do so. —pg. 23

Content and design:

In addition to attending to design considerations like whitespace and typesetting, we can act as user advocates by advising our clients and employers to reduce distractions in sidebars, fight ads that obstruct content, and give readers the equivalent of good light and a quiet room. This is one of the reasons that a multidisciplinary approach can potentially produce better results than content-only gigs for some kinds of projects—when content specialists can weigh in on presentation and design, readers benefit. —pg. 26

For medium-sized and large projects, you’ll want to document the publishing workflow: how content is planned, created, approved, produced, and maintained. —pg. 54

Once you have a sitemap and wireframes to work with you’ll be able to return to the business goals and user needs you collected at the beginning of the project and begin fleshing out the details of your content plan. —pg. 59

High-level content recommendations typically include some or all of the following:

• Primary and secondary messages to be communicated in each section’s content
• Primary (and sometimes secondary) audiences to be served by each section’s content
• Notes on the integration of major new content-related features into the site
• Early recommendations on voice and tone
• Recommendations on integrating community features (comments, forums, etc.)
• A discussion of how each of the site’s major audiences will be served by its content
• Recommendations on delivery channels for the various kinds of content you’re working with (website vs. email vs. social networks, etc.)

—pg. 60

One of the great challenges of content strategy—and especially of content production—is getting ideas from the heads of experts into the heads of content producers. If you rely on internal experts without a dedicated editor and approval process, you’re courting trouble. —pg. 66

A bit about the content strategy career field:

Here’s a little secret about content strategy: very few people got here on purpose. We mostly wandered in from one related field or another, found ourselves unable to stop fiddling with bad content, and decided to stick around and try to make things better.

Paradoxically, the best way to “get into content strategy” is to begin doing content strategy, whatever your job description currently is.

No matter where you come from, a few characteristics seem to be requisite. You can’t be ambivalent about the web. You might hate it sometimes, but it has to be in your blood. You have to care about getting things right, while understanding that “right” is something that constantly changes. You have to be reasonably good with people and exceptionally good at high-speed synthesis and pattern recognition. You need to have a solid grasp of the basics of information architecture. You need to care about design and front-end programming, which means you need to know enough about both to be able to care.
—pg. 73

Books listed in the resources section:

• Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (New Rules Social Media Series), by C.C. Chapman
• Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson
• Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content, by Colleen Jones
• Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, by Ann Rockley
• The Web Content Strategist’s Bible: The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds, by Richard G. Sheffield
• Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, by Daniel M. Brown
• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, by Jesse James Garrett
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, by Steve Krug
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites, by Louis Rosenfeld
• Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, by Janice Redish
• Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman

This book is a great, brief intro to some changes coming in HTML5 and what we should be aware of during the transition.

One thing I’m a big fan of is the new, short doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html>

Unlike XHTML, anything goes for HTML5 syntax—you don’t need to be case-sensitive, though I expect I will maintain that habit. Code is easier to read when it’s written uniformly.

Nice to see these elements becoming obsolete:

<frame>, <frameset>, <noframes>, <acronym>, <font>, <big>, <center>, <strike>

But take note of the word obsolete. We’re not talking about deprecated elements like we were before. Obsolete elements will still be fully supported by browsers for backwards compatibility, but we shouldn’t be using them going forward (and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to).

Some changing elements:

• Probably the biggest change for me, the <a> element can now wrap other elements, block or inline, only not other <a> elements
• With the dropping of <acronym>, <abbr> will be the one choice for all abbreviations and acronyms.
• <small> is no longer for presentational meaning, but is used to communicate “this is the fine print”
• <b> no longer means render as bold text, but stylistically different without conveying extra importance; you would still use <strong> if you want to add extra emphasis
• <i> and <em> have changed much the same way as <b> and <strong>

There’s a lot to learn about the <canvas>, <audio>, and <video> elements. They are covered in the book, but I suspect we’re still going to see a lot change in these areas so I’m not digging in too deeply yet.

Web forms in HTML5 are becoming much smarter than ever before. Of course, you have to see which browser supports which change so while you can begin using the new form features you’re still going to have to write fall-back code for various browsers.

There’s plenty more to learn in the book. I think it’s a must-read for any professional web designers/developers. It’s a quick way to get up to speed with HTML5 and get you started on what to explore next.