The 3 White Lies Behind Instagram’s Lightning Speed

What Instagram labels as “optimistic actions” really boil down to something far simpler: Always make it look like the service is working, even when it’s not. In your Instagram feed, this idea plays out to the “like” button. Have you noticed that whenever you click it, even deep down in a subway, that like button lights up? If your connection is broken, of course you can’t upload the bits of data to a central server to inform a friend that their photo of last night’s dinner was simply divine. But registering the action gives positive feedback to the user. It’s a lie, sure, but it’s a white lie. No one gets hurt banging their heads in frustration, and the like can always be uploaded later.

All recent hate aside, Instagram got a lot of things right since the very beginning and this is a great insight into how their iOS app feels like a solid, well-performing app.

I know one particular company *cough* Facebook *cough* who could learn a lot from them.

Color schemes for Coda 2

A while ago, I linked to this Specials Board color scheme for Coda. It instantly became my favorite color scheme and I recommended it to anyone who got their hands on Coda. If you haven’t already, check it out.

Coda 2, which shipped earlier today, now comes preinstalled with Specials Board color scheme. But since there, there have been some fantastic new color schemes that have come out and Justin has put them together on one page. My favorite from the list is Solarized.

Go download these.

Coda 2 and Diet Coda for iPad Now Available

Coda 2 has been my most anticipated app release of this year, and they totally surprised me with Diet Coda. I purchased both the apps a while ago and I’m thoroughly impressed with the update. Based on my usage, Diet Coda looks to be a perfect fit for me.

Camera+ Integration brings Filters to Piictu

Piictu is a fantastic little app, that lets you create stories using photos piics and I had a chance to be a part of the early phases of the app when it released in June last year. On Beautiful Pixels, I wrote:

[…] Piictu lets you play with your photos. When a user posts a new photo, a ‘stream’ is created. Others can continue or respond to this stream by their own photos. For example, one of the most popular streams currently is creating alphabets using your fingers. The stream began with someone posting ‘A’ and others followed suit. You’d be surprised how interesting and fun this gets.

The company released a revamped UI a few months ago, that brought more explorability to the app. Unfortunately, Piictu has failed to catch traction in the market. That said, it’s great to see the company still churning out wonderful releases like this.

Stop the Presses

In the Editor’s office of the New York Times.

Invy App — A Beautiful Event Planner for iPhone

Invy is a beautiful & elegant app that lets you quickly and easily schedule a meeting/event/appointment with anyone. The app is perfect for cases where you have to co-ordinate with multiple people and go back and forth with emails and messages trying to fix a specific date and time for the meet.

A really beautiful and well-done app to send out invites to your friends.

Google Introduces Google Drive

We’ve been hearing about this since 2006, and it’s finally here. Storage upgrades and insanely cheap, but there’s no way I’m trusting Google with my data.

Herp Derp YouTube Comments (Browser Extension)

If you spend a fair amount of time watching videos on YouTube, you probably already know about the quality of comments there. At times, the comments on Rediff.com seem better than those on the video site — and that’s saying a lot.

Here’s a browser extension to change all the YouTube comments on a video with random herps and derps. If you still feel the urge to read the original comment, just click on it and you’ll see the original comment.

The Easy Way to Get iOS Screenshots On Your Mac

Just set this up on my Mac. Genius.

Comparing accuracy of the GPS-based running apps

Radiant Tap, the developers of apps like Go Couch to 5k, Banca, FastContact and others have been working on an update to Go Couch to 5k’s GPS-based tracking engine and did a test to find out how other similar apps fared with their GPS tracking capabilities.

On iOS, Core Location is the framework responsible for finding and tracking one’s current location. It uses several different technologies to do that, but the most precise one is based on GPS. This is available since iPhone 3G, although our tests show that GPS is usable for walking/running starting with 3GS and on. Current generation – iPhone 4S – goes one step better then its predecessors since it includes the support for GLONASS, which is similar system developed and maintained by Russia. All together, this makes iPhone 4S the perfect test phone. We used a straight path in the middle of New Belgrade (Serbia’s capitol), exactly 400m long.

Interesting results.