Constant & Endless

↗ 10 great free monospaced fonts for programming

Joe Ross — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:30:54 +0000

I can understand why programmers may want to consider using a decent font, but it’s worth noting that writers, particularly those who prefer plain text, should also pay attention to the fonts they’re using.

I like to write with a monospace font for two reasons. First, there’s nostalgia in using a monospace font that connects me to the days I spent in college writing on a typewriter. Second, I find them easier to look at for long periods of time than standard serif or sans serif fonts.

If you write often on a computer, you owe it to yourself to be a little picky about the fonts you use.

Should I merge

Joe Ross — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:06:59 +0000

Should I merge Geekeries with this blog?

↗ Evernote's desktop apps get integrated reminders and a task list, no love for mobile yet

Joe Ross — Fri, 24 May 2013 05:50:12 +0000

Evernote’s reminders are great news, and something I’ve been waiting for since at least February, but here’s all that matters to me:

We have big plans to expand the functionality, and to bring it to more platforms in the very (very) near future.

I can’t wait to get this on mobile. I’ve long hoped that some day Evernote would become the one-app-to-rule-them-all for me. I already use it as a data archive, storage for manuals, occasional journal, research tool, and songwriting management tool. True, cross-platform task management would supercharge the service for me, and may even end my Any.do versus Wunderlist problem.

In related news, Wunderlist has added hashtag support in its web incarnation, and so far I’m actually finding it’s very useful.

↗ Version 1.0 of Twitter's defense-only Innovator's Patent Agreement

Joe Ross — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:39:30 +0000

The Innovator’s Patent Agreement, developed by Twitter attorney Ben Lee in conjunction with Twitter engineers and outside stakeholders, limits how Twitter can use patents in litigation. While it’s broader than its elevator pitch makes it sound - “Twitter can only use patents defensively” - it’s a brilliant way to rein in the onerous patent litigation miring much of modern technology, and particularly software.

↗ Strongbox and Aaron Swartz: Open source, anonymous tips

Joe Ross — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:21:43 +0000

There is plenty of Google news today coming out of their annual I/O conference, but this looks far more important and big-picture, if it actually gets used.

↗ Minnesota governor signs same-sex marriage bill into law

Joe Ross — Wed, 15 May 2013 01:23:31 +0000

Number twelve and counting; this looks to be a big year for marriage equality in the United States.

↗ The pressing need for hospital pricing regulation

Joe Ross — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:31:07 +0000

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published data on what hospitals charge for the most common procedures. There is much to look at, and other have done good reporting on it, notably Sarah Kliff and Dan Keating at the Washington Post and Barry Meier, Jo Craven McGinty and Julie Creswell at the New York Times.

The bottom line is that hospital pricing practices appear from this data to be arbitray. I wouldn’t be surprised if pricing flucutated from year to year based on what revenue each hospital brings in. That’s unconscionable, and a failure of the free market in arguably the most important industry. Hospitals would do well to get together and establish transparent and ethical best practices for pricing, because the alternative is onerous regluation to ensure they are not gouging insurance companies, government agencies, and individual patients without regard to actual costs.

↗ DARPA and deep learning

Joe Ross — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:01:44 +0000

This article by Daniela Hernandez at Wired is well-done and fascinating. However, this bit most caught my eye:

Half of the $100 million in federal funding allotted to this program will come from Darpa — more than the amount coming from the National Institutes of Health — and the Defense Department’s research arm hopes the project will “inspire new information processing architectures or new computing approaches.”

Make no mistake: the US military wants intelligent killing machines.

↗ Delaware becomes eleventh state to approve same-sex marriage

Joe Ross — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:30:51 +0000

And the steady march continues, as Delaware joins their ten predecessors in granting gay couples the basic American right to marry.

↗ Obama May Back F.B.I. Plan to Wiretap Web Users

Joe Ross — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:42:20 +0000

Charlie Savage of The New York Times:

the new proposal focuses on strengthening wiretap orders issued by judges. Currently, such orders instruct recipients to provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, leaving wiggle room for companies to say they tried but could not make the technology work. Under the new proposal, providers could be ordered to comply, and judges could impose fines if they did not.

Concerns that this would prompt similar measures from repressive governments abroad are not overblown. If we expect foreign companies to submit to these procedures, their governments will expect US companies to do the same. I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention anything about what the Obama administration’s diplomats and international law folks think about all of this.

↗ Air Force sexual assault prevention officer charged with sexual battery

Joe Ross — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:30:52 +0000

Disgusting. Anything less than dishonorable discharge and jail time will be an insult to victims and to this country.

↗ Now you can 3D-print a gun.

Joe Ross — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:30:55 +0000

Andy Greenberg at Forbes:

Once the file is online, anyone will be able to download and print the gun in the privacy of their garage, legally or not, with no serial number, background check, or other regulatory hurdles. “You can print a lethal device,” Wilson told me last summer. “It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.”

Law student Cody Wilson has added some steel to make it detectable and lawful, and gotten the appropriate firearms manufacturing license. But that doesn’t mean the world at large will do the same when Wilson uploads the files needed to print the gun to the internet.

I often write about how technology has made the cost of copying trivial, while the laws on the books still hail from a time when the cost of copying was non-trivial. When it comes to audio and video copyright, that triviality can be economically disruptive at best, and can disturb entire industries at worst. But when it comes to weapons, that triviality to copy is downright dangerous.

↗ Netflix launch reduces BitTorrent use

Joe Ross — Fri, 03 May 2013 19:50:54 +0000

Joe Hanlon of TechRadar:

Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos says that there is a correlation between the Netflix launching in a country and BitTorrent traffic slowing down in the same region.

If you stream it, they will pay.

↗ Rhode Island legalizes same-sex marriage

Joe Ross — Thu, 02 May 2013 23:15:00 +0000

The inexorable march of time sees a tenth state grant gay and lesbian people the statutory right to marry.

Those states who have yet to get on board would do well to hurry: you’re quickly running out of time to look like you were ahead of the curve in the common sense of twenty-first century civil rights.

↗ The Perfect Empty Vessel

Joe Ross — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:25:00 +0000

This is a good piece on how hard Facebook tries to keep the social juices flowing. Alexis Madrigal, commenting on Facebook’s designer-hiring spree:

As all these designers vanish into the bowels of the company, so, too, does their work. Facebook wants to create design that both allows and guides behavior without calling attention to itself. And what works in the Deep South must also work in southern India and South America. It must work for 16-year-olds and 86-year-olds.

I think this is the primary reason Facebook makes me uncomfortable: it’s too generic. Sometimes I want a service to be just a little in my way. I realize that you can’t generalize my preferences to hundreds of millions of people, but that just means I’ll never really feel awesome about using Facebook.

It feels like it’s been crafted as simply the most efficient way for me to send targeting data to advertisers…

…because it has.

↗ Path is still spamming your contacts

Joe Ross — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:30:57 +0000

If you’re a Path user, consider, er, reconsidering. This is apparently the best they can do in response.

CNET’s Jennifer Van Grove was told that he #1 request from users is to find friends on Path, hence the aggressive “new-user flow.”

Why does “find my friends on Path” translate to the app’s creators as “invite everyone in my phone’s address book to use Path, without explaining that the message is automated and being sent because I opted in” ?

I would be happy to advise Path on acceptable, reasonable on-boarding and invitation flows for a modest fee. I can be reached at JoeHelpsPath ( @ ) joeross ( . ) me.

↗ NBA player Jason Collins comes out as gay

Joe Ross — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:51:21 +0000

I don’t usually cover sports here, but Collins’ coming out is a very important moment in a broader and permanent change in what it means to be and to accept LGBTQ folks. It’s a well-expressed and bold piece, and I applaud him.

↗ The next generation of Instapaper

Joe Ross — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:24:26 +0000

Marco Arment has turned control of his read-it-later service, Instapaper, over to incubator-turned-company-in-its-own-right Betaworks:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.

What’s really intriguing about this is that the Betaworks website includes the following teaser:

Want early access to the new Instapaper and other products we build and invest in? Join Openbeta.

I wonder whether the “new Instapaper” is already in the works, or this is just a clever marketing ploy to get Instapaper fans signed up for Betaworks’ Openbeta mailing list.

All in all, Instapaper is an amazing product, and if Betaworks’ reanimation of Digg is any indication, they’re a good custodian.

↗ Not a Bad Quarter

Joe Ross — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:07:28 +0000

Marco Arment, he of Instapaper, and of excellent commentary:

If you sell a 99-cent app to just 1% of the people who bought new iOS devices in the 2012 holiday quarter alone, you’ll clear about $519,750. Not a bad quarter.

Not bad indeed.

↗ Why carriers should be more worried than Google about Facebook Home

Joe Ross — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:02:00 +0000

Ellis Hamburger, writing at The Verge:

Mirroring its rollout of free VoIP calling for iOS, Facebook has updated its Messenger app for Android to allow free calling for users in the US.

I think this is Facebook’s true sleight of hand: everyone is looking at Home and how they’re taking over the launcher and Android. Meanwhile they’re backdooring this VoIP technology that lets you call people using only wifi.

Facebook is asserting its primacy in the minds of millions of mobile users not only to dominate Android, but to put itself in a solid position to dominate carriers as well. Simple, user-friendly VoIP: one of the biggest and potentially most profound opportunities Google ever missed with Android.

↗ Sad but true: your dog's life probably isn't worth anything

Joe Ross — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:15:11 +0000

Okay, I admit going overboard with the headline, but it’s accurate, at least in the majority of US jurisdictions. Animals are property, and the types of animals not frequently appraised, like your standard family dog, probably won’t be considered as having any monetary value at all. That makes suing for negligent euthanasia a long shot that may only add insult to injury.

How to add tasks to Any.do or Wunderlist via SMS

Joe Ross — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:30:37 +0000

This post is exactly what it says on the tin: I’ll share two recipes from if this then that (IFTTT), the service that connects otherwise unconnected pieces of the internet together in epic productivity bliss.

Did I oversell that? IFTTT is truly amazing. One of its most useful functionalities is the ability to send an SMS to the service that triggers IFTTT to do something else. So, you can create a “recipe” that will forward all text messages in which you include a “#t” to another internet service, like an email address. Email addresses are particularly handy because many other services use them, everything from Evernote to Tumblr assigns users an email address so you can send stuff into your account right from your email provider of choice.

That way, an IFTTT recipe can receive a text message and, as long as “#t” appears somewhere in the message (without the quotes), it will send an email to anyone I ask. Some services that let you add content via email assign unique email addresses that can receive email from anyone. They’re secure from spam because the email address is nonsense. Evernote does this.

Others, however, use a universal email address and whitelist each user’s own email as the only one allowed to send stuff to that account. Task management services Any.do and Wunderlist both use this method, allowing registered users to send email to do@any.do and me@wunderlist.com, respectively. If the address you use to send the message is registered, the message subject is added to your account as a task, and the body is included as a note.

Any.do is dedicated to creating the best task management experience on a mobile device, and they’re doing a great job. Wunderlist, while they have great mobile apps, is more focused on combining them with solid native desktop apps on all platforms. While I watch them add and refine features, I’m using them both.

I know, I need to get a life.

Anyway, this IFTTT recipe adds a task to Any.do via SMS. And this IFTTT recipe adds a task to Wunderlist via SMS. You should be able to edit the tag if you want, but I find “#t” is conveniently short, and the recipe will remove it from the final task anyway.

I have a couple more IFTTT recipes to share, so if you’re interested in this stuff, stay tuned.

Why I Chose Temple Law

Joe Ross — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:03:00 +0000

I originally posted this to one of my old blogs, The Rotten Word, in April 2009. I wanted to publish it here as well because I plan to write a follow-up soon, having graduated in January of this year. Many thanks to Philadelphia litigator Max Kennerly for his advice and kind words about this post when it first ran. Also, this post by my Temple law classmate and friend Kishwer Vikaas Barrica was humbling, so thanks to her too!

In the Beginning…

It’s not a choice easily made. First of all, just the decision to take the LSAT is a journey in itself. It requires research, asking the right questions of the right people, preparing for failure and, perhaps most importantly, preparing for success. It’s the success that can be most confusing. After all, if you do poorly on the test the first time, you resolve that you probably didn’t take it seriously enough, or that it was just a bad day. There’s a “choose your own adventure” feel to it. The first time I took the LSAT, my score was embarrassing. The only saving grace was that the average friend and family member has never had any reason to learn the how the test is scored, so they don’t know how poorly I did.

I could have gotten off the train right there. I almost did. I almost decided that maybe it isn’t meant to be. But then I thought about it, and remembered that I don’t think anything is meant to be. That’s the great liberating foundation of my personal moral value system: freedom at the cost of accountability. Things happen to me because (a) I have made a decision that caused them or (b) someone else has made a decision that caused them. Thus, I can decide that I’m not cut out for lawyering, or I can decide that I am, and then act.

So I took it again. And I did better. Much better. Suffice it to say that I am no longer embarrassed, even by my first score, because my second vindicated me. I studied harder, focused more deliberately, and made executive decisions about which questions I could answer well and which ones I could not.

But getting a score you can respect yourself for is only the beginning.

Decisions, Decisions

Will you devote all of your time to your studies, subsidizing your living expenses as well as the cost of your education? Or will you retain your current employment, making the (in my opinion) far more daunting commitment to maintain your financial standing and continue to accrue work experience while you submit to the rigor of a legal education?

On the one hand, going to school full time looks like the most sensible decision. Everything you have heard about law school is true: it’s hard. It’s not an afterthought, or a hobby. It’s at least as mentally stressful as your job, and probably more. Like any graduate school, every hour of class time requires at least an hour outside the classroom. So, the ability to go to class all day and devote your evenings to study and work is a precious resource.

On the other hand, the economy is (still) bad, and even if previously borrowed loans are deferred while you are in graduate school, there are bills and rent to be paid, not to mention food and (dare I say) the occasional drink. Borrowing money for these expenditures is inadvisable at best. Working through law school is difficult, but, since the evening division is a part-time program, credit requirements are flexible: you must complete a certain amount, but you have summer sessions during which you can earn credit, as well. You can keep earning money, and producing promotable deliverables. But you’ll be spending a few hours a night, a few nights a week, in a classroom. And that’s before you even start your homework. It may be a part-time education, but it’s a second full-time job.

So why did I choose Temple Law?

Well, even taking into account the (generous) aid package Drexel offered me, I would have had to borrow more money to cover living expenses than I’ll likely need to borrow to go to Temple. Also, my 401(k) account makes me smile, and cutting it off for a few years would mean less smiles. Finally, I’ve got a good thing going at my current job: good work, good people, good benefits. These are not things to be taken lightly in today’s job market. For every lawyer making $80k right out of school, there are three more at the unemployment office. And we’re talking partners here. People with experience.

I made the commitment to work and go to school at the same time. I want to be confident about it, even arrogant. But the truth is that it’s terrifying. After all, I might not be able to do it. Then what? I don’t know. But I know that it’s what I want, and people do it every day. People with more stressful jobs, people with children. There are really no excuses.

Classes are technically from 6pm to 10pm. I’m going to be in danger of succumbing to my burgeoning caffeine addiction. I’m going to be in danger of burning out. I’m going to be in danger of driving the girlfriend (more) insane (than usual).

But maybe I’ll quit caffeine and start meditating. Or running. Maybe I’ll apply my work ethic to my studies, and develop a schedule that includes class time, study time, and mental stability time. Maybe I’ll do well.

Closing Argument

This absurdly long post has served primarily as a “thinking out loud” session for me, in which I’ve tried to express what has been going on in my head as I near the next and most important part of my journey: actually going to law school. But this is the tip of the iceberg. This stuff takes me away mid-conversation at work, puts blank stares on my face while Meg’s talking to me, and keeps me wide awake in bed. It worries me, aggravates me, scares me. This is the stuff I always thought adults had to deal with, the stuff that I got to watch other people figure out while I wrote stories or played my guitar.

Now I’m one of those people. I have a job, investments, credit cards, an actual (and good) credit score. I don’t think I could afford to work a side job and go to school. So it might take me longer to finish, while I take fewer classes. But my sense of financial security is young and, with the exception of some indinspensable help (for which I’ll always be grateful), largely self-wrought. Risking it doesn’t seem right. So wish me luck.

I’m going to need it.

Draft, web app for writers, gets publishing, Chrome extension in recent update

Joe Ross — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:07:00 +0000

Draft can now publish to your blog — that’s how I published this post. It also has a new Chrome extension that makes version-controlling and saving your writing on the web even easier.

This is big. I’ve mentioned Draft before and it’s already my favorite way to compose text on the web. Developer Nate Kontny has even open-sourced the Chrome extension so anyone with the chops can modify it. If you haven’t check it out, give it a go at draftin.com.

You can save notes to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.com, Evernote, or your local hard drive, not to mention publish directly to a Tumblr or Wordpress blog. It’s a wonderful experience from the first draft to hitting “Publish” and I look forward to future updates.

Google Keep isn't an Evernote killer

Joe Ross — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:19:00 +0000

Evernote will be just fine, despite Google’s recent announcement of a new note-taking app called Google Keep, currently available for the web and Android. Keep allows for text, audio, and images to be added to a single notebook and synced between the web and Android devices. You can even add stuff via Google Now. It’s neat, but it’s no Evernote killer.

The two products cater to very different use cases, and Keep will not be able to replace Evernote for its core customers Evernote had 1.5 million premium subscribers in November 2012. At 45$/year, that’s around $67 million annually, and the number of subscribers has been rising for years.

It doesn’t make them profitable, at least at the moment, but it helps. Coupled with Business accounts and other endeavors, Evernote isn’t worried. For those premium users, who pay because they make the most of Evernote’s vast feature set, Keep won’t be good enough. And I suspect that even if every user of Evernote’s free tier left the product, Evernote would hardly notice from an operational standpoint (if anything, operational costs would decrease).

Instead, makers of task management apps should be concerned. Google Tasks is as neglected as Google Reader was, and we all know what happened to Reader. Keep looks like an elegant upgrade to Google Tasks, and while Evernote has hinted at its own task management solution, I don’t think the future of their business will depend on it.

It’s worth remembering: there just aren’t as many zero-sum games in the apps and services spaces as many, especially in the tech press, would have us believe. Design, feature set nuance, and adaptability to users’ current workflow all allow for multiple apps to be successful in the same space. The Keep/Evernote dichotomy is no different.

This article was adapted from a comment I left on The Next Web’s post about Keep.

Questions?

Joe Ross — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:36:26 +0000

Now that Constant & Endless is up to a staggering 26 Tumblr followers, I’ve enabled the ability for signed-in Tumblr users to ask questions on this site. Just click the “?” in the links menu at the top of the page, or visit this link.

Nate Kontny's Draft: web-based collaboration, plaint text, and version control for writers

Joe Ross — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:12:00 +0000

I’ve tried almost every plain text writing environment out there. I use native applications to write long pieces on desktop or laptop computers, but I often long for a great web experience for those times when I’m away from a Mac, or at a friend’s house or something.

Now, I’ve found one. Today, Nate Kontney officially announced Draft. It’s a web-based plaint text writing environment, and anyone who frequently finds themselves writing in a web browser will love it.

I’ve tried a couple of web-based text editors, and even one that can save to Dropbox. I’m not going to link to it here, but it’s easy enough to find. Instead, I’m going to encourage anyone who writes in plain text and wants a clean environment in which to do it on the web to check out Draft.

I’ve been beta testing it for a couple of weeks and Nate has been impressive in his responsiveness to suggestions, especially considering that I’m one of 1,500 people who had been helping him with the beta. Draft supports Markdown, export as HTML, and file management using Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Box, and local storage. Add to those built-in dead-simple version control, collaboration, and the option to drop a few dollars for a professional review, and you’ve got the best web-based writing environment I’ve seen.

Again, you just have to try it. The design here is wonderful, with plenty of white space drawing your eyes and your cursor to the functional bits. Bold colors and crisp typography make it easy and pleasant to use.

I’m not a designer, but I like to write about the topic here, and I think it’s worth saying that my personal position on design is that it should be delightful and useful. One without the other risks either silliness or ugliness. But apps that both delight and prove useful are compelling in the proper sense of that word, in that they compel people to keep using them. Nate nailed that on Draft, and the best part is that he says this is just the beginning.

Draft is an example of my favorite kind of tool, something built:

for one primary purpose, and
because it enables the builder to do something they really want to do

Tools built this way and for this reason tend to remain focused on fine-tuning and usability far longer than average because the builder has some genuine non-economic skin in the game. In other words, people make good tools when they think they’re going to make some money, but people make great tools when they need something they’ll enjoy using every day.

It’s why I love Marco Arment’s Instapaper, far and away my favorite reading app, and it’s why I love Draft, now far and away my favorite writing app.

How to Export Your Last.fm Listening History on a Mac

Joe Ross — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:31:00 +0000

My goal was simple: I wanted to export all of the tracks I’ve listened and stored in my Last.fm account. I don’t have any real experience working with APIs, but thanks to Jeroen Baert’s post, which I found via this StackExchange thread, I found a handy Python script that even a newb can run.

The script was originally written for use in moving your Last.fm data to Libre.fm, but it works just as well as a standalone backup.

I saved lastexport.py to my home folder (the one with your Mac username) and opened up a Terminal window. Then, I just pasted the following command into the Terminal prompt and pressed Enter:

python lastexport.py -u last.fm_user_name

Make sure you replace last.fm_user_name with your own Last.fm user name. The script will store the results in a text file called exported_tracks.txt, located in your Home folder or whatever other folder you saved the script in. The data in the text file is a little messy, but it’s all there.

If you know how to make the data prettier, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

How to Roll Your Own Multireddit

Joe Ross — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:09:00 +0000

This is probably so awesome to me because only recently have I dusted off my Reddit account and started using the internet’s greatest link-sharing site in earnest.

Reddit is divided into “subreddits.” These are topic-based, like /r/Gaming and /r/Tumblr. It allows the growth of communities based on shared interests or disinterests.

Now all of that I knew, and you probably did, too. But what I recently found out is that you can append multiple subreddits to a URL to open them in a cocktail of sorts. So, if you want to view a mashup of Reddit entries about Philadelphia, technology, and burritos, just go to /r/philadelphia+technology+burritos.

The possibilities are endless, so use /r/Multireddit to browse what your fellow redditors have posted.

How to view the Any.DO Chrome extension in a full browser window

Joe Ross — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:55:38 +0000

I complained (okay, more like whined…) in December that Any.DO was rejecting user requests for auto-sync with Google Tasks. I’ve since come to use Any.DO full time, after trying it a while ago, loving it, being distracted by Astrid and Wunderlist, and coming back for the simultaneously unique and intuitive user interface.

I signed up a while ago to be notified when Any.DO launches their web interface. While their Chrome extension is robust, I don’t really enjoy poking around in a pop-up that truncates most of my task names. Both Astrid and Wunderlist already have web interfaces, but I’ve always preferred Any.DO.

That’s why I decided to poke around in the code behind Any.DO’s Chrome extension. I’m not an expert, but I’m knowledgeable enough to go in and pull out the Chrome address for the extension itself. If you have already installed the extension, this link will open it in a full browser tab of its own, thus eliminating the truncated-tasks problem.

It’s not a proper web interface, since it doesn’t work unless the extension is installed, but feels close enough to hold me over until they release the real deal.

Site Design as Context: An Amateur's Perspective

Joe Ross — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:48:28 +0000

Introduction

I hesitated to change themes because, well, it’s one of those things people do instead of writing. But while my customized version of Quite Big by George Dunkley has treated me very well, I hate using Tumblr’s default mobile theme on phones, or seeing my desktop-optimized layout on a tablet. I also had modified Quite Big so much that it started to look a little off to me. I know enough HTML and CSS to avoid breaking sites altogether, but over time my changes had started to give the theme a clunky look. I decided that I needed to find the ultimate theme for me: minimal, useful, and responsive.

Minimal, Useful, and Responsive

Some people use minimal themes to keep the focus on their content. Others use minimal themes because they think any content placed within a minimal theme will appear great. I think of myself as the former, and it’s why I’ve been personally trending to more minimal site designs for a long time. I consider the use of a minimal site design focused on content to be a commitment. It commits me to quality, and that’s a great thing.

I also want my website’s design to be useful. I’m particularly annoyed when a theme requires me to scroll down to the footer to see how the author describes the site, what other pages are on it, or how you might contact the site’s purveyor. Give me the things I expect when and where I expect them. Yes, it is absolutely a sense of entitlement, but when you’re writing at a blog, you’re writing for whomever is reading. If most people expect things in a certain place, put them there and get to writing the real stuff.

Finally, most free blogging platforms have automatic mobile layouts, but they’re often global, meaning that all sites on the platform end up looking the same on a phone or whatever device the reader is using. This site is on Tumblr because I got tired of maintaining Wordpress and other self-managed CMS installations. I love Tumblr for its simplicity and its Markdown support, as well as its truly beautiful apps. But their “optimized mobile layout,” while minimal and designed for clarity, feels far too cookie-cutter.

Vision Quest

After all, a theme, however minimal, does more than determine post width and font face. It sets the tone for the site. It provides a context in which all of your content is going to be experienced. I think of site design, whether for a blog or a corporate portal, as a form of self-expression. Many people get enough self-expression out of being able to share whatever they want, or looking “professional” or “enterprise,” and to them the theme of their site isn’t important. But I take pride in:

having a vision for how my content should be presented to readers;
seeking out well-made themes as starting points for that, and
being able to make customizations that bring the theme I found and the vision I have together

If you can find a theme or site design that fits your vision out of the box, that’s great. Nothing beats just applying a new theme and getting to the writing part of it all. But if you do need to modify someone else’s design work, it’s important to leave credit somewhere in the theme. I credit Idraki Muhamad’s MNML in the footer as well as on my About page. The changes I’ve made fit the design into my vision, but Mr. Muhamad created the theme, which broadly was exactly what I was looking for.

Conclusion

Most people use blogs as a means to an end, usually to share opinions or showcase work. But geeks often see their blog as an end in itself. If your site is a book, its aesthetic and layout are the cover, and unlike many authors, bloggers have full control over it. I take advantage of that, and I encourage others to do the same. In a world of cloned “default” themes, a site design with a little bit of personal nuance will stick in someone’s mind. You don’t need to use design to scream “I’m DIFFERENT!” but you should use it to politely remind visitors that, you know, you’re different. Then, all you have to do is write amazing content.

I only read stuff that plays nicely with Instapaper

Joe Ross — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:04:00 +0000

Well, I only read stuff published online, that I don’t want to or can’t read the moment I come across it, that plays nicely with Instapaper. But that sentence doesn’t make a very good headline.

The Tool and its Critics

Instapaper is one of several services that will save articles you find online for you to read later, even if you’re not connected to the internet when you finally have a moment to read. Instapaper is by Marco Arment, a developer who wanted a way to save articles to read later. This motivation by personal use case, coupled with a reasonable revenue model, assure me that Instapaper isn’t going to “pivot” or go away or otherwise change in pursuit of survival.

Some publishers, however, object to services like Instapaper because its success as a business, or even as a free app, as in the case of Instapaper’s many competitors, is predicated on enabling the large-scale time shifting of reading material produced by other businesses, without their permission. This is done by “scraping,” which just means copying the article text into an ad-free format on the reading service’s own servers.

User Experience is Everything

It’s an experience worth paying for from a reader’s perspective though, and one of the major reasons behind that is that many digital content publishers don’t design their sites to optimize the reading experience.

Even my favorite sites fail the content/non-content page space ratio test, perhaps best described by Ben Brooks in his post The Design of a Site Meant to be Read. My own site here at Constant & Endless is a conscious overreaction to the clutter-happy design aesthetic that permeates the modern web. I started with a minimal Tumblr template, and then modified it extensively to maximize readability.

Some sites have no clutter at all, but their use of really tiny font size makes them, at least for me, difficult to read. For example, one of my favorite daily reads is John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, but I need to use an RSS reader to peruse his posts because the font on the website itself is a couple of sizes too small for me to sit back and enjoy.

The Purpose and the Problem

The primary reason that I pay for Instapaper is that it gives me things I want to read at a time and in a manner in which I actually want to read them. I would happily pay for a “reader’s edition” of any number of popular news sites and blogs if it meant a lack of ads and a minimal, readable design aesthetic. I will never find a pay-wall that grants nothing but access to a still-shitty reading experience a compelling proposition.

Mr. Arment’s text parser is so effective that I am always a little surprised when I come across an article it can’t digest. So, when I encountered a maimed version of a Scientific American article in my Instapaper queue, I wasn’t mad at Marco Arment for failing to compensate for the innumerable ways in which publishers can format content for the web. I was mad at Scientific American because they have not yet complied with my preferred mode of consumption.

My Shameless Reading-Related Irrationality

In fact, there is now a voice in my mind that declares that a web publication that does not care how its content looks in Instapaper isn’t nearly as worth my time as it was in a pre-Instapaper world.

This includes The New York Times, whose articles frequently fail to play nicely with Instapaper. For example, on one of the days I spent revising this article, both the most-emailed and the most-viewed articles on NYTimes.com loaded only one paragraph in Instapaper, and the most-blogged article didn’t parse at all—it forwarded me back out to the NYTimes.com website to fetch the original web page. This happens all the time.

What does that mean?

It means I probably won’t read much web content by The New York Times. And I think that’s a totally crazy and even intellectually indefensible position for me to take. It’s not rational and I’m almost certain that I miss out on some amazing reading material because of it, but it’s there, and I heed it despite my better judgement.

A Reader’s Future

I suspect that the future will only produce more people like me. There is a focus on apps and services that can sort through all of our preferred sources and inboxes and show us what we most want or need to see. Many of those apps and services provide a better reading experience than the sources through which they’re sorting. But it is very difficult to sort to any (let alone every) user’s consistent satisfaction. So, for those apps and services, reading will always be a secondary functionality. Instapaper and its competitors (to varying degrees), on the other hand, usually leave it to us to find what we like, and they instead focus on the best possible reading experience.

I think reading experience will matter more with every passing financial quarter, as tablet (let’s be honest, really just iPad) sales continue and people consume more and more web content from a device that is made for comfortable reading. Maybe it won’t be Instapaper, and maybe it won’t be Scientific American, but people will increasingly demand that publishers comply with their preferred modes of consumption. And those who get it right, like Mr. Arment, will achieve what a multitude of designers, editors, and publishers have not been able to: a reading experience worth paying for.

Any.DO declines Google Tasks auto-sync request

Joe Ross — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:02:16 +0000

I got a depressing email this morning from one of my favorite task managers on Android, Any.DO. The feature request “Auto sync all changes with Google tasks” was marked by Any.DO staff as “declined” this morning, despite having over 1,000 user votes. The next-most-voted-for feature is “Sync with Google Calendar” and that only has 660 votes. People clearly want auto-sync.

Any.DO’s reason for declining auto-sync?

Google Tasks API is not very reliable. You can use Any.DO for Chrome instead (there’s an amazing Gmail integration you have to try!)

My absolute favorite task manager on Android is Tasks (no, they’re not affiliated with Google). Tasks has an Android-native design aesthetic that is just as pleasing as Any.DO’s, but for different reasons. The app has had auto-sync with Google Tasks for a while. It was unreliable during their beta implementation, but now it’s very reliable.

Tasks auto-syncs to and from my Google Tasks every six hours (it can do 1, 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours). Any.DO’s manual Google Tasks sync is four taps into the menu, when a minor change would place it at two taps. One is still better, and auto-sync is still best, but I suppose I need to accept that they’re not interested in being a pretty front-end for Google Tasks.

Any.DO has a wonderful design team. The app is beautiful. And I go back once in a while to play with it, but, without that auto-sync, I’m always digging into menus to make sure my tasks show up in Gmail and Calendar, where I spend much of my time while on a computer.

The simple conclusion is that if you want seamless, fire-and-forget Google Tasks integration on Android, you should drop 99 cents and get Tasks without the ads. If you don’t use Google Tasks or are considering alternatives and auto-sync is not on your list of deal-breakers, try Any.DO.

Thoughts on the new Engadget design

Joe Ross — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:04:38 +0000

INTRODUCTION

Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about design. I’m a user, and design work on websites made for frequent article consumption should be tailored to user experience. I may come off as arrogant, ignorant, or petty. That’s not my intention. I’m being honest about my thoughts.

Engadget has launched a full re-design, something we’ve seen recently with sites like The Next Web and Read Write. Like those, Engadget’s new look focuses on cross-platform responsiveness, with a bias for tablets. I don’t write about every redesign I see, but Engadget was the first blog I read with dedication, so it has a special place in my geek heart.

Engadget’s previous design was, as even Editor-in-Chief Tim Stevens puts it, “heavy.” A better description would be clunky, crufty, and stale. I’m only going to mention a few details that are very important to me, instead of describing to you a website that you can just go see for yourself.

TYPOGRAPHY

The new Engadget uses the free Google Web Font Oswald for headlines. It feels too narrow, but Engadget is prone to information-rich headlines, so I can understand why they chose it. Full-width article images get a headline overlay on top of the image. Opacity of the overlay increases to 1 when you hover your cursor over the headline text. I wish it went to 1 on hover over the image itself, making it easier to get that readable opaque background behind the article title.

The body font is Georgia (same as this blog you’re reading now). It seems almost too pedestrian for a blog of Engadget’s means, as does the Google Web Font. After all, Engadget has a budget and a design staff. I find it hard to believe that the best they could do font-wise was a free Google font and Georgia.

Then again, The Verge uses Helvetica or Arial, and Read Write uses mere “sans serif.” These blogs often cater to dedicated fan bases, so page loading speed is important: many readers click between multiple articles in one sitting.

I wish font was larger in articles themselves. Yes, it’s easy to increase the size of the page with a quick CMD + (or CTRL + on Windows), but I definitely consider most of the web just a little small as far as font size. People should be able to sit back and read comfortably.

Maybe it’s just me (although I’m told my reading vision is fine), but if I have to lean forward to read a website, I’m having a bad reading experience. This is why I’m a frequent Daring Fireball reader but I can’t remember the last time I visited the website itself.

MENUS AND UI

I like the topics bar at the top of the site and the placement of the search field immediately beneath it. Expand the “Topics” item on the far right of the top bar to reveal more specific categories. The spacing is touch target friendly, and I appreciate the lack of some fancy separator character.

I like the banner at the top of the site. I like the loading bar that shows the time-to-change from one featured story to the next. I like the persistent table of contents on longer articles, like the redesign announcement.

Share buttons are well-placed on both the front page and article pages. Pinterest is an interesting addition to sharing options and one that I don’t see very often on sites of Engadget’s type. I occasionally dive into Pinterest myself to pepper my friends with gadget posts. Maybe Engadget can read my mind…

Probably not, though, otherwise the “Via” and “Source” links would be internalized instead of placed in article footers. I don’t go to Engadget because I think they break every tech news story ever, I go because their opinions on the news interest me. Thus, in-line source linking wouldn’t risk losing me to the source. I’m not sure if I’m the exception or the rule, but something about placing source links in the footer has always bugged me.

I don’t like the sidebar with the headline-over-dimmed-image motif. It works in the main body of the site, but in the sidebar it’s cluttered and incredibly difficult to scan. I want to see “Recent Reviews” and other site content placed above links to the podcasts and other supplementary media. The “Quoted” section includes recent tweets from Engadget authors, but I think this space would be better used for pull-quotes from high-traffic or recent articles.

CONCLUSION

Engadget’s new design is an improvement over the old one, and they plan still more changes as they settle into the new look. Generally, I think their design direction and that of the big-name tech blogs as a whole is great. Tablet-optimized design built for fingertips instead of cursors leads to less clutter and more negative space. In case you haven’t noticed, that aesthetic tracks well with my own preferences, so it’s encouraging to me and hope it continues. I know these websites are businesses, but at the end of the day the reading experience is absolutely everything, and if things continue down this path, I expect to see even more improvements in the future.

Another Note to RSS Subscribers

Joe Ross — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:33:39 +0000

Those who subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/byjoeross only have a few more days to subscribe to the new feed. Please make the change so you can keep reading my priceless insights.

Do it for your friends. Do it for yourself.

The New Feed!

Tim Cook's Maps mea culpa

Joe Ross — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:08:00 +0000

Apple CEO Tim Cook:

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

This surprised me at first. It didn’t surprise me that Cook would suggest users find a better experience elsewhere while Apple gets Maps to where they probably wanted it pre-launch anyway.

It surprised me that:

he listed so many alternatives, and
he included Google at all.

Item 1 suggests that Cook is so confident in the updates Apple is working on for Maps for iOS that he doesn’t expect generously name-dropping the competition will hurt Maps usage in the long-term. If you’re working on a merely equivalent experience, you don’t send people away to so many other options, because people don’t come back to you for an equivalent experience. They come back to you for the best experience. So, if my logic holds, Maps will eventually become the best navigation experience available on any iOS device. And Tim Cook knows that everyone he sends to Waze or Nokia will eagerly give Maps a second chance when the time comes.

Item 2 is born of the narrative in the tech press about how Apple and Google are mortal enemies. Matt Cuts, chief spam ninja at Google, recently made it clear on This Week in Google that, at least from his perspective, Google loves Apple experiences and products. He is usually the only one in a meeting without an Apple laptop.

And then I remembered reading this article from the Korea Times yesterday by Cho Mu-hyun, quoting Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt as saying:

Apple “is actually a very good partner. Our two companies are literally talking all the time about everything.”

Now, that doesn’t mean they’re best friends. But the popular image of Cook and Schmidt each throwing darts at a photo of the other whilst drinking liberally from a bottle of fermented haterade seems, well, made up. What about the “patent wars?” Cho’s article quotes Schmidt on that topic, as well, and those statements aren’t as warm-and-fuzzy as the quote above. But remember: these are huge companies. Apple engineers, working all the time, as Schmidt implied, with Google engineers, aren’t beholden to the late Steve Jobs’ scorched earth patent policy. They’re beholden to making money by building great user experiences (more on that below).

They are competitors not in the biblical sense, but in the business sense, and it makes business sense for competitors to pick their battles. The maps battle, it would seem, is a battle at least one of these companies picked.

Google is in the business of selling ads, and they sell more ads by collecting more data, and they collect more data by making more compelling user experiences.

Apple is in the business of selling proprietary hardware/software combinations, and they sell more proprietary hardware/software combinations by making more compelling user experiences.

The last clause in each of those sentences, “by making more compelling user experiences,” gives Apple and Google far more in common than the press narrative would have us believe.

Twitter replies and Instapaper integration

Joe Ross — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 18:17:00 +0000

I wanted to post something brief to let you know I made a few small but (I think) useful additions to this site.

First, I’ve added a button to the bottom of all posts letting Twitter users reply or ask questions directly from the post. Thanks to the purveyor of kaos.am for unknowingly alerting me to this classy and subtle way to allow some direct communication without resorting to comments. Find more info on my no-comments policy here.

Second, all of my article posts now include a “Read Later” button that will send that post to your Instapaper account. If you don’t have an Instapaper account, you should consider getting one. It’s not free, but it’s worth paying for the knowledge that it won’t “pivot” or become ad-ridden sometime down the road. Instapaper also innovates frequently, doing things like Kindle integration and fonts for vision-impaired readers before anyone else.

Third, I’ve added some more feed options to the site. The original Tumblr feed is still available. However, you can now choose between a master feed including all updates, a links-only feed that only includes the links I share (updated at least once a day), or an articles-only feed that includes only longer articles (updated at least once a week). Find more information here.

That’s it. I hope you find at least one of these additions useful. I don’t plan to add to this site very often, as part of the goal in building it was to keep it clean and content-focused.

Temple Law Profs Feed

Joe Ross — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 19:13:04 +0000

I used Yahoo Pipes to make a feed that unites all posts by Temple profs writing at their various law blogs. The feed still needs some work, specifically to ensure that the author name, and preferably the name of the blog at which they’re writing, is published in every entry. But overall I’m very happy with it.

I didn’t get permission from them or from their respective blogs, but since the stuff is posted publicly, all the content in my united feed is available freely in each separate feed, and all the entries in my united feed link directly out to the source posts, I don’t see why anyone would object.

But, of course, if anyone does object, I’ll remove them from the feed immediately. In fact, at any point in time, and without warning, I may need to delete the feed altogether, so consider yourselves warned.

For now, though, it’s a convenient way to follow what interests Temple Law professors on a day-to-day basis, particularly with regard to current events in their respective areas of expertise.

So, here’s the feed, and here’s the Yahoo Pipes URL so you can see how I did it.

NYT quote approval policy is (only) a good start

Joe Ross — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 17:51:00 +0000

The new quote approval policy at The New York Times, as quoted by Times opinion writer Margaret Sullivan:

So starting now, we want to draw a clear line on this. Citing Times policy, reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to the source or a press aide to review, approve or edit.

I first wrote about the quote approval problem when I linked to David Carr’s piece on it. Then I expressed my agreement with Temple Law professor David Hoffman, who wrote at Concurring Opinions about the frequency with which experts such as himself are misquoted or taken out of context.

I’m not sure the Times policy does a very good job of distinguishing between approval by PR folks and approval by subject-matter experts. The former try to approve quotes to control messaging, while the latter try to approve quotes to ensure their opinions on a given issue aren’t manipulated to further a skewed narrative.

I don’t think those two cases can be dealt with in the same policy without explicitly pointing them out and setting up a framework for each one. The Times policy allows for exceptions with senior editorial approval, and that may allow experts like Professor Hoffman to explain that they want to ensure their comments are presented in the manner in which they intend them to be presented. Or, it may not.

Marco Arment suggested disclosing when quotes have been approved for an article, instead of calling for an unqualified end to the practice. I’m not sure that’s the perfect solution, but I think I prefer Mr. Arment’s policy to the Times policy.

Disclosure makes sense and would show great respect to readers by allowing them to decide whether the reliability of a particular quote is or is not affected by its pre-approval by the source. Experts could ensure accurate representation of their opinions, and readers could be kept in the loop when a communications department has manufactured the CEO’s statement to the paper.

In short, the Times quote policy is nothing less than a good start, but it’s also nothing more.

Twitter changes force removal of related IFTTT triggers

Joe Ross — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 21:23:00 +0000

IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets, in an email to users today:

[ … ] on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed.

IFTTT is everything Yahoo Pipes could have been and I’ve been using several Twitter triggers for a long time, to do things like save my tweets to Evernote and add favorite tweets to Instapaper.

My “Twitter” tag is becoming so littered with the company’s user-hostile decisions and their unfortunate consequences that, soon, it will make more sense to post something when and if they ever put users first again.

Here’s the full email from IFTTT’s Linden:

Dear joeross,

In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.

At IFTTT, first and foremost, we want to empower anyone to create connections between literally anything. We’ve still got a long way to go, and to get there we need to make sure that the types of connections that IFTTT enables are aligned with how the original creators want their tools and services to be used.

We at IFTTT are big Twitter fans and, like yourself, we’ve gotten a lot of value out of the Recipes that use Twitter Triggers. We’re sad to see them go, but remain excited to build features that work within Twitter’s new policy. Thank you for your support and for understanding these upcoming changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@ifttt.com.

Linden Tibbets IFTTT CEO

*These Twitter policy changes specifically disallow uploading Twitter Content to a “cloud based service” (Section 4A https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms) and include stricter enforcement of the Developer Display Requirements (https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements).