byJoeyBaker » Reviews

Why I Love MyNews From NewsTrust

Joey — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:36:54 +0000

I’m a news junkie. And I don’t do that Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, or Paris Hilton crap either. I only do the hard stuff – elections, Iranian nuclear weapons, health care reform.

If you’re my kind of junkie, then NewsTrust’s new MyNews is a must have. I’m pretty much in love with the webapp, so what follows is a mixture of praise, reasons to use, and suggestions.

Aggregators to the rescue

There are too many niche and mainstream news sites to follow. While we all have our favorites, but it’s just not feasible to check only a few sites that are either too niche, too sparsely updated to warrant checking constantly, or so full of frequently updated content that you’re sure to miss something important. The natural solution is an aggregator, of which there are really two different types: those that collect content from everywhere and attempt to show you the best stuff (think: Google News), and curated aggregators that look at a ton of hand picked sources – including other aggregators – and only show you the best of the best (think: Memeorandum). The Google News variety of aggregator is great for diving deep into a particular topic. Put another way: they’re really good at search. However, they don’t do a good job of promoting the best stories and ensuring that nothing important gets past you. Curated aggregators pick up that slack, excelling at discovery and browsing. This is easy to see: Google News is great for research, but if you want to read the tech news of the day, you’re better off at Slashdot.

Why trust NewsTrust?

My preferred aggregator until two weeks ago was newser.com which I like for its UI. Newser showed me a wide variety of hard news in a format that was really easy to digest. And then MyNews, which I was beta testing at the time, became awesome. It has replaced Newser in a coveted spot in my bookmarks bar. (I still really like the UI of Newser, but content is king, and MyNews wins.) The idea that became MyNews has been around for at least a year that I’m aware of, and likely longer than that. While working for NewsTrust, I was a part of the internal testing process for SmartFeeds which has become the backend for MyNews. SmartFeeds is really nothing more than an automatically curated aggregator that collected stories based a complex editorial review of sources. Initially, SmartFeeds most practical application was pre-populating the NewsTrust review form with metadata because the algorithm wasn’t very good at predicting relevance. The implementation in MyNews shows a much evolved algorithm.

How MyNews Works

The reason MyNews is so cool, is that it takes the best features of the best aggregators, marinates, and serves with a side of quality. Think of it as:

Editorial curated stream of stories (like Newser)
Crowdsourced story gathering with a ranking system for quality (like Hacker News)
Automated web scraping for the latest stories (like Memeorandum)
Personalized rankings based on user preference (Google Reader‘s “Sort by Magic”)

MyNews decides what articles to serve up to you based on three categories:

Your social graph: Connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts and MyNews will pull in the links that your friends share. The algorithm doesn’t appear to rank these stories too highly though. NewsTrust seems to have made the conscious choice to rank the sources they know to trust higher. I think that is a mistake. If I take the time to link my accounts, I’d really like to see NewsTrust put a lot of weight behind what my friends say I should read.
Trusted sources: The whole point of NewsTrust is to determine which articles and news organizations are trustworthy. Based on the wisdom of the crowds and editorial review you’re nearly guaranteed to see only high quality stories.
Topics you’ve selected: one downside to MyNews is the effort it takes to setup. You don’t have to, but putting a bit of effort toward telling the system what you like to read and who you trust, will create a highly customized experience.

The Content

I only want to see info about politics, technology, and media. That’s all MyNews shows me. Tiger Woods is there because he’s talked about on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, but he’s buried – I rarely have to look at his headlines. MyNews has a heavy focus on Political news, with a bit of tech and media thrown in. That’s just how the algorithm is weighted. This is not for you if you like sports, entertainment, fashion, or local. Though it’s possible that in the future, NewsTrust will upgrade the algorithm to be able to deal with a wider variety of topics.

Trial Run

Last Sunday was a perfect storm for us news junkies.

It was a Sunday so the weekly editions with long form journalism were coming out.
The House was passing Health Care Reform and breaking news was coming in left and right.
HCR finally passing meant that there were many cool interactive graphics and longer articles that newsorgs had been sitting on were finally released.

Through all of this NewsTrust performed admirably. I constantly found great content at the top of my page and really enjoyed following the story throughout the day using MyNews as my only aggregator. Putting in the effort to setup MyNews turns NewsTrust into a niche, curated, aggregator that is best thought of as a combination of Memeorandum, Mediagazer, and Techmeme – only personalized.

Now I see…

The perfect news aggregator should keep a high signal to noise ratio. Show a wide enough variety to enable the user to discover new topics of interest, but rarely show irrelevant topics. For the longest time, NewsTrust has hovering between acting as an aggregator and a Digg-esque, social bookmarking, service. MyNews ties these two functions together very nicely and gives NewsTrust a solid purpose. All startups struggle to find the right way to present their idea. I’m fairly certain that NewsTrust has found theirs.

Disclosure: I worked NewsTrust, and left my internship in August 2009. I still converse with the folks there and think they’re a great team.

Thank you to Rachel Fus and Fabrice Florin for assisting with this post.

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A Web Design Critique of Google News

Joey — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:49:53 +0000

I recently critiqued the redesign of Newsweek, and was pleased to see the positive response. I sorta promised that this would become a regular feature for me, so I’ll try to hold to that. I’m only looking at homepages. Critiquing a whole site is a lot of work. I’ll do it someone wants to pay me though :] After leading a webinar for CoPress on homepage design, I’ve done a lot of research into mainstream homepages – what works and what doesn’t. For the second go at this, let’s look at Google News. Google has an … involved … relationship with the media industry. Newspapers have accused Google of stealing their content, rumors say Google thought about buying a newspaper, and much to the chagrin of journalists everywhere, Google started linking to Wikipedia in the Google News results. With all the hype, you’d think Google News was an incredible product that attracted a ton of pageviews. (Actually, Yahoo News gets more hits) In truth, Google News reveals itself to have many poor design principals, and, despite some good ideas, to be an eyesore that is really designed for one purpose: act as a search engine for news articles.

Highly customizable: Easily the best part about the design is the amount of control given to the user over the content they want to see. Google throws out the idea that every user needs to see political and world news. You can setup search modules to show very customized content too.
Color coded: it’s trivial, but an important visual cue. This works pretty well in the nav bar, but the execution on the rest of the site is poor. They take a strong visual cue, and tone it way down.
Google Juice: the site is really geared to be used as a search engine, and it shows. From the wonky side navigation, to the really cool “recommended for you” section that uses your search history to find you news, Google News is clearly designed to search your news, not browse to it.
Art? What art? OK, there is some art, but its really small. Visually impressive, this site is not.
Link List: Can you avoid the impression that the page is just a huge list of links? I can’t. It would be nice to have some attempt at styling, design, etc…
Summaries: Google News works because of automation, but the lack of hand-crafted summaries really limits the usability.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Illustrations & Maps online New Media

Overall, Google News design gets a 2/5. It’s got customization, but it’s really not a friendly UI. The site clearly uses a grid style design, but there’s too many eyelines – I can’t decide where to look. As an execution of the ‘river of news‘ concept, gNews misses one key aspect – you can only have one river at a time, or else, the eye gets lost. Google gets this right with search results, but somehow that design philosphy didn’t carry over to gNews. Perhaps my best suggestion for Google: bigger images. Much bigger. Draw the eye in.

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Newspapers Should Repurpose Craigslist to Save Their Classifieds

Joey — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:20:52 +0000

Craigslist has totally changed the way customers approach classifieds. We now expect to get free ads with an unlimited runtime. They must be searchable, and easily browsable. Print newspapers can’t hold an candle to the easy of use, or the price. RevenueTwoPointZero, a new consortium (@rev2oh) that aims to invent new business models for the news industry has stated that one of their goals is to “build a better Craigslist.” I suggest that this is an exercise in futility. Craigslist is an established social network. Trying to take them on is a bit like saying you want to build a better facebook. The idea that you can build a website, no matter how much better that doesn’t use the old social paradigm is ludicrous. No one is going to use both sites, and no one is going to move to a new site that doesn’t have all their friends on it. Same applies to a new craigslist. But, in looking at newspapers as a platform, a portal to their community, there becomes an obvious way to utilize Craigslist to the mutual benefit of the customer, newsorg, and Craigslist. Craigslist offers an RSS feed of every location they provide service, drilling down to particular categories. A newsorg could easily take the data off these feeds and repost it on their own classifieds site. Put some nice styling on it, and you could make a site that was a lot more attractive, and easier to use that craigslist itself. Ease-of-use alone, would encourage people to visit your site over Craigslist. Monetizing The next step, is to offer ‘sponsored listings’ for craigslist ads. Charge a nominal fee, and the listing can be pinned to the top of the list, made a different color, bolded, or given a picture. Naturally, a revenue sharing deal would have to be worked out with craigslist – who should gladly assent. Ideally, the ad would get greater visibility on both sites.

Craigslist would get more eyeballs on their ads, and could get additional revenue from sponsored listings.
The newsorg get access to the most popular classifieds network on the web, and has the opportunity to earn revenue from a source that has been largely lost.
The customer gets a better interface for their classifieds, as well as being able to access the information through their community portal as opposed to an outside site.

Phase two of this plan sees the classifieds being integrated with the newsorgs own social media platform – allowing customers to know who they are buying from. But wait, isn’t this stealing? It’s not really stealing content. This is deep-linking. A mind-set of bloggers that newspapers are only just beginning to utliize. Newspaper content gets posted on aggregators all the time, with no compensation. This proposal intends to do same thing with craigslist, only better; and more fair. Offering craigslist a part of the cut from ‘sponsored listings,’ and both parties are going to see increased revenue. This sort of deep linking is what the web is built on. You’re not stealing craigslist content, you’re saying: “we like it so much, we want more people to see it.” Further, unlike newspaper websites, craigslist doesn’t make its money off display ads. They really don’t need the pageviews to generate revenue. That makes the reposting of their content a very different thing than an aggregator reposting a newsorg’s content. Besides, Craig Newmark has said, his company has had an impact on the news industry. He wants to help. Suggesting a mutually beneficial relationship between craigslist and newspapers might very well be met with graciousness and excitement.

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Lightroom or Aperture?

Joey — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:51:51 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

This gets filed under the old news category, but I thought I’d share a demo I did on Lightroom several months ago. (oh, and that’s my first submission to slideshare!)

Lightroom Workflow Intro

View more presentations from jbaker071. (tags: photography software)

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Why the Nikon D3 Sucks (and What the D4 Oughta Be)

Joey — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:27:55 +0000

I love me the Nikon D3. It’s the first camera that I’ve used where I feel confident going into any situation. The high ISO performance, huge LCD, dual CF card slots, 9 FPS, and 12MP files are amazing. Safe to say, Nikon hit a home run with this camera. That said, I’ve got some complaints. Call it a wish list if you will. But after using this camera for about 6 months in a wide variety of situations, it’s pretty safe to say that the tool isn’t perfect. With the release of the D3x, I’ve come to realize that Nikon is advancing technology, but is clearly holding out for the next release to do anything drastic. I might/probably am too late to get into the D4 product cycle, but nonetheless…

What could be fixed for the Nikon D4

The D90 gets the OK button right. Why can

The OK button is useless. There are two ways to confirm a command in the menu system: hit OK, or hit the center of the 4-way dial. However, most things only require you to hit the ‘right’ button on the 4-way dial. The OK button, aside from being repetitive, is out of the wa I’d like to see a repeat of the D90′s solution. Replace the ‘push the center to confirm’ option of the 4-way control with the OK button. This reduces clutter and makes menu navigating a more one-handed operation.

Small ISO button

ISO input isn’t always visible. God love ‘em, Nikon has made the ISO on this camera kick-ass. I’ve got no problem instantly turning the D3 up to 3200 ISO. The issue is that I’ve got to take my eyes away from the viewfinder to do that. Oh, and I can’t see that change on the top LCD like I can see shutter speed and aperture. I’ve got to go down to the bottom LCD. Now, this sorta makes sense because the small *hinthint* ISO button is right next to the bottom LCD. But, use the camera for just a few hours, and reaching for that button is as intuitive as looking at the top LCD to see what setting you’re changing. Looking at the bottom LCD is not. The D4 oughta have a bigger ISO button and have changes visible on the top LCD — perhaps in addition to in the viewfinder would be fantastic. Movie mode. Yes, this is sorta cheating. No camera did movies when the D3 came out. But I fully expect video on the D4. It better. :) ← Now on the D3s!

Lack of pop-up flash to be a commander unit.

No i-TTL built in. Okay, I get it. Pop-up flashes suck. And the Japanese think it’s the mark of an amateur camera. Fine. I don’t need a pop-up flash. What I do want, is a built in iTTL commander unit. Like an SU-800 built in. It would mean not having to carry a flash unit just to be a commander. That slims down on weight and makes the camera less bulking during use.

Looks like the M setting is further apart right? It

The focus switch isn’t eyes free. Not a huge pet-peeve of mine; I can find the switch on the front of the camera to switch focus modes between Manual, Single, and Continuous pretty easily. Perhaps spacing out the settings (sorta like the markings would make you believe the switch is doing) so that we can feel when we go to manual.

credit: Moose Peterson

GPS. This is a really old technology now. Nikon’s even built it in to point and shoots. Why do we have to deal with this annoying dongle to get GPS on the high end cameras. Can we get something built in please? Even if the radio defaults to ‘off’ to save battery, it sure would be nice to have geo-tagging become standard meta-data that all cameras provide. (Let’s go EXIF, you can update!)

Face recognition and tracking. This one should be a no-brainer. Consumers like to take pictures of people, so Nikon et al has given them a focus mode that fines faces. The camera can then follow that face across the frame to keep it in focus and determine the correct exposure to make sure the people in the shot are what come out. What about this sounds like something professionals wouldn’t want?

The vertical grip needs a revamp. Maybe I hold my camera vertically more than other people do, but I’m sure the vertical grip isn’t as comfortable as the horizontal one. The big difference is the ridges on the bottom of the camera, which are meant to give some grip on a tripod head, and the back-end controls.

The ridges: Who uses a tripod head that’s the size of the entire base of the camera? Really? Isn’t it more important to have the grip be comfortable when you’re holding it — a far more frequent occurrence than putting it on a tripod — believe me. I’d like to some some texturing on the bottom, similar to the horizontal grip.
The controls: There’s an AF button nicely placed for vertical grip use. But there’s no AF/AE-L button. To use that functionality, you’ve got to use the one intended for the horizontal grip — impossible to do with one hand. (Oh, and while we’re here, that AF/AE-L button is quite a reach even on the horizontal grip, even for my large~ish hands.)

Seems like there might be some room for a bigger screen here :)

Bigger screen. OK, I’ve bought into the hype. Big screens are really cool. They let us actually examine the shot in the field — turns out that’s pretty valuable. I don’t know how much larger you can get the screen without cramping the buttons or the innards or the battery life, but … I promise to buy it a screen cover for Christmas!

Previews have compression!? Riddle me this batman: when you zoom into a RAW photo on the camera’s (very large-sized) screen, you see jpeg compression if you get too far in. I presume this is because the camera isn’t actually showing you the RAW file, but the jpeg preview embedded in the file. I’m not sure what amount of engineering is required to get around of this problem — I imagine a lot — but it sure is annoying to zoom in to check detail only to have it obfuscated by the compression. Don’t have a photo of this (yet)

Don’t up the megapixel count! Weird right? Don’t increase something? Coming from me? I understand this is a pretty controversial view, but I’m a photojournalist. I do my photography light-and-fast. Quite frankly, a 12MP file is just perfect for my needs. It gets me plenty of resolution, but doesn’t slow down my post-processing much. I just don’t have the storage space/processor cycles to deal with say… 24MP images of the D3x at the rate I need to work. If a photog wants more resolution, then the D4x/D3x is where to look. Instead, how about keeping the D4 below 14MP and putting the engineering effort into bumping the ISO performance again? Think about this folks: a camera that goes into boost mode after ISO 25,600. Now, that, would change my photography a lot more than a few megapixels.

ISO settings are confusing. Further on ISO: when the bottom LCD tells me that I’m on ISO “Hi 1.0”, I’ve got to stop a second and do the math — I’m actually at ISO 12,800. Why do you do this to me Nikon!? I just want to know the ISO! I get the fact that you want to emphasize we’re in “boost mode,” but on the huge back LCD that has tons of horizontal real estate, why are we conserving space? Can’t it read “12,800 boost.”

Small complaint about the menu system. Nikon’s menu system has gotten much better over the years, it’s mostly logical, and despite the expanded number of options, it’s still pretty easy to find what you want. That said, there’s one command that Nikon buries: time-lapse. This admittedly, infrequently used option, is placed with the play controls — under an entirely different portion of the menu from everything else like it. Could it hurt to put it in a more logical place?

How the D300 handles metering.

Switch to control the metering mode is in an odd place. I struggled to on wether to write this one up, because, I don’t find it to be a problem so much as an oddity. The switch to set the metering mode is located on the side of the prism, on the top of the camera. It’s an okay place to put it, because it’s something that’s infrequently fiddled with, but it’s not the only place Nikon’s ever put that control. Instead of hiding it away on a surface used by no other controls and requiring you to bring the camera down from eye-level to make an adjustment, why not do like the D300, and have a dial around the AE/AF-L button? It’s not quite as easy to switch modes due to the dial’s stiffness, but that’s alright; at least then metering could join the big boys on the back of the camera.

My laptop (same battery type) gives a percentage, most phones do as well.

A battery % meter. I gather the determining the actual % of charge a battery has remaining is a hard thing to do, prone to inaccuracy and a quick drop at the end of the charge. Nonetheless, we’ve seen it done often enough that it’s time for DSLRs to join up.

Built in dust reduction. The D700 has it. ‘nough said. ← Now on the D3s!

In camera VR. I promise, no puppies will die if Nikon caves and puts sensor-based VR inside the camera.

Thoughts?

I think, that’s my whole list of notes, any thoughts/annoyances of your own?

A quick note: The Nikon D3s has been released since the writing of this post. It does fix a few issues (video, dust reduction, and awesome ISO performance), but much of this article is still relevant.

Update: In the comments, pjadams brings up the point that the AF coverage area is smaller on the D3 than on the DX sized D300. It’s a good addition, not because 51 AF points don’t give us enough coverage, but because it sucks to have 3D AF tracking loose the subject when they get too close to the edge of the frame.

Rumor: The Nikon D4 might make a secret, gaffers-taped, appearance at the Vancouver Olympics.

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MobileMe Reviewed

Joey — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:25:33 +0000

I’ve just gotten my hands on a full MobileMe account (thanks Ramon!) and I thought I’d take the opportunity to compliment and complain.

Features Not Working

As of this writing, the following features of me.com are not working.

Backup software (download link redirects)
According to the System Status: Homepage & Groups is currently not operating
Still experiencing system slow downs, especially when accessing account settings.

MobileMe got off to a rocky start. The dotmac website stated that they system would be offline from 8pm-2am beginning Wednesday evening (Jul 9) to facilitate the transition. The presumption was that me.com would go live at 2am, which did not happen. Me.com went through periods of service and through Friday (the day of the iPhone 3G launch). The system became fast enough to be usable on Saturday (Jul 12, the date

It’s so shiiiinyyy

Let’s get this clear, me.com is pretty. Really, really pretty. It almost feels like a desktop app. You can use keyboard shortcuts just like a desktop app (replace ⌘ key with the ctrl key and you already know the keyboard shortcuts). You can drag and drop just like a desktop app. Windows slide down just like a desktop app. In case you didn’t get it, it feels like a desktop app! Switching between modules requires a load time, but actions within any one of the modules doesn’t seem to incur a load time at all (very cool). Based on SproutCore, MobileMe feels quick. Yet, there are still a few remaining speed issues. I’ve tried to upload over 5GB of photos to my iDisk via the desktop interface and the transfer has taken 9+ hours to get half way; reading another 9 hours to complete. (This upload later failed; twice.) Accessing the ‘account settings’ section of the web interface is hit or miss. Sometimes it pops right up, sometimes it just displays “loading” for eternity. No doubt, these are both symptoms of a freshly launched app, nonetheless, they are annoying.

iDisk

iDisk web interface. The iDisk webapp works much as you’d expect. It’s the same column interface that Finder has. Clicking on a folder reveals the files and directories contained. I haven’t figured out the pattern yet, but sometimes the app displays a loading icon you click on a folder, and sometimes it doesn’t. Also, the app gives no indication that you’ve clicked on an empty folder. In contrast, Finder tells the user that a directory has “0 items,” the iDisk webapp has no visual indication, and frequently left me watching the computer screen hoping something would load. The interface does not allow for previewing of files. Click on a jpg and the app will tell you that it’s a jpg, but it doesn’t display a thumbnail. The system also does not recognize RAW files. It would be nice to have a ‘quicklook’ like functionality so that a user didn’t have to download a file to see what it is.


.jpg: no preview	.nef: not recognized

Preferences for iDisk are extremely simple. You have the choice of displaying a ‘Simple Folder Layout’ – only Documents, Public and Movies are shown in iDisk home. The app behaves as you’d expect it too, and in someways is more responsive than the desktop plugin. Which is continually having connection issues. It seems that my iDisk can’t stay connect for more than several hours at a time – no big deal until I try to transfer several gigabytes of files. Deleting files on the iDisk via the desktop takes a very long time. But, the process is fast on the web app, and the changes are reflected nearly instantaneously on the desktop side. In addition, I was surprised to see the webapp lacking two key features. 1) It is not capable of uploading directories, even though it can upload multiple files. The help instructs users to compress (zip) their directories first – what a poor solution. 2) Even though Contacts and Mail have instant search, iDisk does not. erm… makers of Spotlight – HELLO! I’d like to be able to search my files online too please. K, thanks. I was impressed at the integration, but constantly frustrated by webapp limitations and the glacial communications times when using the desktop interface. iDisk is not ready for large file transfers but with luck, Apple will fix the bugs and speed will increase in the near future.

Gallery

Gallery web interface Gallery is the me.com interface for hosting your photos. Think of it as the web based iPhoto. The frontend is the same that users have come to know and love. It’s extremely fast, good looking and offers a variety of options to viewers.

Uploading to Gallery

Uploads are very quick and the interface not only allows the user to upload multiple files at once, but has the option to add more files while an upload is in progress – nifty! It’s possible to sync Gallery with either Aperture or iPhoto but, in my opinion, there is one glaring sync error. Apple gives MobileMe users 20GB of storage to divide between email, iDisk, Gallery, and Backup. 20GB may seem like a lot but when all of these services are taken into account, the space goes fast. Ideally, MobileMe could offer users a complete cloud storage solution for all data. 20GB is simply not enough to accomplish that. Following that logic, Apple should allow Gallery to use photos placed in the Pictures folder of iDisk. Not only would this ease the storage constraints, but it would simplify the interface between the two apps. It’s worth noting that Gallery has no photo editing capabilities or instant search. I don’t think these are features that many users will miss, but as search is a key Apple technology and web-based photo editing is becoming more popular, it would have been nice for Apple to through those features in. And that is as far as my complaints with Gallery go. It is otherwise and extremely well designed and extremely responsive app.

Calendar

Calendar web interface

Entering info into an event is a bit different on the web than in iCal.

Calendar isn’t quite as slick as iCal, but it’s still the slickest calendar interface I’ve seen to date. It has all the simplicity of gCal with fewer pages loads. (Less pages loaded means the app is faster.) Notably, Calendar falls into the class of MobileMe apps that could use instant search and curiously doesn’t have it. While Calendar has no trouble syncing your iCal calendars, it does not import your subscription calendars. I can’t fathom why this is, but it sure is annoying to not have holidays visible. Aside from the different info panel (see photo, right), Calendar does maintain an interface virtually identical to iCal. This means that Calendar shares the same flaw that I find with iCal – it has poor support for ToDo items. As a simple list, ToDo is horribly uncomplicated and hard to use. There’s no way to attach a todo to an event, one can’t postpone todo items, and there is no method to group tasks with multiple calendars. Nonetheless, Calendar does what it’s supposed to do elegantly and without trouble.

Contacts

Contacts web interface Contacts should be the simplest app in the suite. Or at least, it makes sense to me that a simple database interface would be ease to do. …so of course, it fell to the bottom of the maintenance list. My first sync (on Friday) caused some of my contacts to duplicate. I’m not sure why some duplicated and some didn’t, but it was sure annoying and not what I expected from a first class sync app. Once I got that problem taken care of, I headed over to the webapp and tried dealing with my contacts there. As with the rest of the me.com apps, Contacts online is very similar to contacts on the desktop. One glaring thing that is missing the smart contact groups. Normal groups show up online fine, but it’s a strange thing to be missing when the instant search works so well. (whoohooo! instant search!) One strange bug I encountered was that editing a contact name didn’t always update the name in the contact list. I won’t say that Contacts is bad, far from it – it looks to be a promising web interface. But, it sure is buggy.

Mail

Mail web interface Let me start by saying this. I really prefer desktop apps for email – I want the ability to search and write messages while offline. To accomplish this, I use Apple’s Mail.app. But, I’ve used Yahoo, AOL, gmail, Comcast, squirrel mail, and a host (20+?) of other email webapps. Let me say this, for all it’s simplicity and flash, the new MoblieMe email app sucks. I like the instant search, but aside from that, there are a lot of serious flaws. Mail doesn’t import other email accounts. The reason I so like Mail.app is that I can have a ton of email accounts in it. I’ve got 6 active right now. They all do different things and I don’t want them confused. Now maybe I’m unique in that respect, but I still want Mail’s web interface to show those other accounts. I was quite surprised to find that it didn’t. After all, gmail does it. Mail doesn’t support smart folders. Not too much of a surprise in light of Contacts not supporting smart groups, but very disappointing. But, Mail has instant search! New Message opens a popup. Really Apple? really? Didn’t you learn anything from AOL’s mistakes and Gmail’s success? Lets keep everything in one window, mhhhkay? New Message doesn’t auto-complete the “To:” field. Granted, I ran into this problem when I clicked on the address book, but that doesn’t indicate that auot-complete wasn’t working. This seems to be an obvious feature that everybody uses. I count myself lucky that I don’t depend on me.com as my primary email. The webapp is easily the weakest in the suite, and needs quick updating.

Other nifty things

In general, the help provided is very good. Clicking on a help link or pressing [ctrl+?] launches a new popup (appropriate in this case) which loads faster than OSX help windows do! I did all of my testing in Safari Version 3.1.1 (5525.20), so your mileage in a different browser may vary. I’m very interested to know how IE deals with me.com. You can set me.com to remember who you are for 2 weeks at a time, a good security measure. This is way improved over dotmac. It’s possible to setup your own domain name to point to your homepage. That means you can get your iWeb site to live at its own URL. Users can set how they divide storage between their email and their iDisk –very handy! Aside from where I specifically mentioned, the me.com is fast. Load times are negligible and speed should only increase as Apple works out the kinks. Syncing a computer with MobileMe is similarly speedy, I could be mistaken, but it seemed snappier than the dotmac sync.

What I really think…

I’m horribly disappointed with iDisk. I really expected better from a cloud storage solution. For now, I’m sticking with Wua.la. I don’t doubt that Apple will work out the kinks, but right now, it’s broken. Gallery, Contacts and Calendar are really nifty apps that are well done, but have several bugs. Though usable, Mail needs a lot of work. Stick with gmail, Yahoo, or a desktop client. Now for the million dollar question. Is it worth $100 a year?

Do you need to host a website or share you pictures online, but have little technical know-how?
Do you already have a dotmac email address?
Do you want a really slick way of showing off your photos and videos?
Do you need a really simple way to sync two computers?
Do you want a set-it-and-forget-it strategy to get an offsite backup of your most essential data?

If you answered yes to any of the above, give me.com a serious think. Note I didn’t ask if you need a way to get your calendar, or contacts, or email, or photos, or data, online. There are free solutions for all of these, they’re just far more manual than MobileMe. I really appreciate the approach of MobileMe. And incase you didn’t catch it, the interface is slick! I trust that once all of the bugs are worked out, life @me will be really sweet. A totally arbitrary rating, for those that need a number: 7.45/10

Update

AppleInsider raises an interesting point that I completely missed. MobileMe is marketed as a push solution for all your devices, and it fails at this goal. Though changes made on an iPhone are apparently recognized instantly by the cloud, changes made on a Mac still need to be synced. That is not a push solution, not at all. I suspect that the next version of OSX aliviate, if not fix this issue with support for exchange built into all the necessary apps. Nonetheless, it is a severe disappointment to not have push now – as was promised. Syncing is a 2nd class solution, especially when it duplicates my contacts!

Update 2

Check out this for a great look at how Apple is fixing the problem.

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Make Money by Removing Ads

Joey — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:38:57 +0000

The TrustE numbers cited by eMarketer said that only 12.6 percent of respondents said that more than a quarter of the targeted ads they were delivered were relevant. Ouch.

-Survey: Advertisers should acknowledge targeted ad concerns | The Social – CNET News.com

I was on facebook today (a rarity for me) and I happened to notice the ad to the right. Yes, it’s fairly creepy, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. Notice the links below the ad? That “Advertise’ link is fairly commonly found on sites, if you want to advertise through Facebook, click that and off you go. (By the way, Facebook makes it insanely simple to do that.) But, the other links are, in my experience, rather unique. The “More Ads” link gets you to the full listing of ads that Facebook might provide you. Users can pick their own advertising. Nifty.

But wait, there’s more!

Facebook also has those two nifty thumbs up/thumbs down buttons. Unfortunately I couldn’t get them to work. I clicked on them multiple times on multiple browsers and nothing happened. But… I really like the idea. Imagine a site (newspapers, listen up!) that targets advertising to users, in part, based directly on what they decide they want. The links should be simple and unobtrusive like Facebook’s example. Why would anybody bother to spend the time telling a site which ads they like (or more likely, which ads they don’t like)? Simple. The site can give them the reward of removing the ads they don’t like — completely. If a user clicks on the ‘thumbs down’ button, the site shouldn’t simply replace that ad with another. Give the user the incentive – remove the ad; remove the hole on the page that was made for it. Get rid of it completely, make it a sort of “sorry to bother you with that trash” message to the user.

Design

As a sidenote of sorts: Facebook’s ads are great in part because they all conform to a similar design standard that in turn conforms with the rest of the site. Facebook insures ads are un-obtrusive. One common complaint about online ads that they are not nearly as “informative” as print ads are.

a recent survey of American consumers which found that more than three-quarters of respondents said online ads were more annoying than those in print.

-Hard sell – The Economist.com

In general people don’t like flashy moving ads and prefer smaller, Google-like, text ads.

“Ironically, the one type of ads that really work on the Web are the small, text-only ads on search engines.

-New online ads squeeze news pages – CNet.com

Make online ads more like print

Therefore, online ads should be made to looks more like print ads. In my own, non-scientific observations of print newspaper ads, there’s an obvious pattern that appears in print that does not appear online. Print ads, generally, list prices, provide coupons, or tell the consumer when a sale is going to be. In contrast, online ads try to get you to make ‘free money.’ No wonder people prefer print. The ads newspapers carry are necessarily focused on a local market. Fortunately, this is easy to replicate online.

Faulty logic

I recall watching a video (I can’t remember where, otherwise I’d link to it), where an expert explained the newspaper advertising is struggling because of the way advertisers determine the total percentage of the site’s visitors that might be interested in their ads. The gentleman presented the following logic: if the San Francisco Chronicle has an online readership of 1 million, but only half live in the SF Bay Area, then a car dealership that wants to advertise on the paper’s site assumes that their ads are only applicable to half of the paper’s audience and therefore worth half as much. This is ludicrous! If the car dealership has places a print ad, it misses out on the the half million people who visit the site, but have no chance of seeing the print edition. The dealership has effectively doubled its audience. Not only can the Newspaper offer a greater audience, but technology allows it to localize ads – automatically. If that dealership doesn’t want to pay for ads that don’t effect users outside the Bay Area, then the newspaper doesn’t have to show that ad to the irrelevant users. Instead, they can find car dealerships that are applicable to their non-local users.

A theoretical step

I have no idea how much of the above is already done (or not done), but I here is a proposition for something that surely is not occuring. A way to solve this problem: Newspapers need to team up. Not in the media conglomeration sense, but in the Ohio sense. If national newspapers cooperated on advertising, a user from San Francisco visiting the NY Times site could still see advertising from that car dealership near San Francisco. The NY Times can pocket the revenue and pay a small commission to The Chronicle for arranging the whole deal. The user gets relevant ads that are informative. The key here is to provide relevant, local, ads that users find helpful, not gaudy.

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I Know What I Want!

Joey — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:28:37 +0000

attn: John Nack

Black Stroke!

Oh, and by the way, lest I forget: yes, we’re changing the default stroke color to black. Just thought you’d want to know.

-Photoshop Insider » It’s Guest Blog Wednesday Featuring: Photoshop Senior Product Manager, John Nack

Thank god! That red stroke is just plain annoying. (Yes, that is a forum topic about the stupid red stroke default on a site dedicated to people who typically complain about broadband speeds. That choice is clearly unpopular.) The quote ends an article that is an interesting read if you’re curious about the direction Photoshop is developing. It’s written by one of the top dogs in the Adobe world, John Nack (sorry couldn’t find a wikipedia page), who has a blog of his own, which is interesting reading in its own right. Nack’s article argues that Photoshop developers know what users want better than themselves. He uses the classic example of the history palette and history brush coming out of the comparatively simple user request for multiple undos.

Adobe, what’s wrong? You sick?

Yet, he also protests Adobe’s finite set of resources,

Much to my eternal frustration (and probably yours), we’ll never have enough time to implement even 10% of the good ideas that come our way.

…and that his team puts in a lot of backend work which doesn’t immediately benefit the average user.

These things take a while. (I’m reminded of the line, “It might look like I’m doing nothing, but at the cellular level, I’m really quite busy.”)

I’m perfectly willing to grant that Adobe can’t hire every developer in the world. I also grant that backend coding is a lot of hard work. And, I certainly am not going to argue that, “what customers say they want and what they actually need often differ.” (By the way Mr. Nack, that “cellular level” line is used to refer to lazy people who actually are doing nothing.) Yet, Adobe should be leading the image editing development sphere, not slowly adopting it’s technology. 64-bit apps are not a new thing, Apple’s Aperture has had the ability to leverage the GPU from it’s first launch, Carbon is on it’s way out, and Photoshop is facing all sorts of problems because Adobe hasn’t ported it over yet. What happened to the desire to lead the way? Remember when the Healing Brush was introduced in Photoshop 7? That was an awesome new feature. It also came with the shiny new file browser. …Which is where we start to get into trouble, the file browser was poorly implemented, and its successor, Bridge, is still slow. And, It’s not like a file browser is a radical new idea. It’s a pretty basic thing that Adobe has only managed to get right with Lightroom. It seems like every creative I know is on a Mac or, like most people I know, switching to one. I can’t remember the last time I even saw Photoshop on a Windows box. If you’re spending so much time under the hood, why can’t Photoshop CS4 be 64-bit on the Mac?

Some Cough Medicine

My complaint is this: Adobe, I don’t care what resources aren’t available to you. You’re the top dog in this market by a long shot. If you don’t have resources, get them. Not having competition seems to have made you lazy, and operating at the cellular level isn’t enough. Enough with the excuses, you’ve proven that you can produce a great 64-bit, Cocoa, app that intelligently employs Smart Layers, utilizes the GPU, has a fast file browser, and is capable of implementing user feedback. Lightroom. Your ability to improve upon user feedback is important, keep that up. Yet, the following disturbs me a bit:

It’s interesting that faster performance didn’t rate higher on the list. [of top ten requests] On the one hand, I’d like to take this as a good sign that our work in CS3 to speed up Photoshop’s launch time, take advantage of multi-core systems, etc. has paid off & that people are happy. On the other, there’s no such thing as “too fast,” and quicker performance is the best possible feature: there’s nothing to learn. Therefore I think all the muscle we’re pouring into R&D to leverage graphics hardware acceleration & 64-bit computing will make folks happy.

Mr. Nack, I do indeed want Photoshop to be as fast as possible. It does need to go 64-bit, it should be able to use the GPU, it should be a Cocoa app. But I expect all of this to happen without a cost to the user. Adobe via Mr. Nack seems to be resistant to adopting all of these technologies. I hesitate to say that Photoshop is ‘fast enough,’ but if you’re creating a list of priorities, speed isn’t in the top 10. Lightroom’s technologies are (7 of the 10 features in the top 10 list). A real noise filter is. Oh sure, I want speed. I want the 3.5 gig RAM limit removed (you need 64-bit for that), but these are all things that I expect from any company that is keeping pace with technology. I also expect that once you’ve developed technology for one application, it can appear across all of your apps. Don’t sacrifice one expectation in the name of another. They both need to happen concurrently. Go back to surprising us with cool new features. Stay ahead of the curve instead of slightly behind. We want more surprises like the Healing Brush. We don’t want to be told why waiting to get what we want is a good thing. Adobe, you’re doing better now than you ever have before. Just because you have a virtual monopoly, you don’t get to slack off. There are companies biting at your heels.

Things aren’t that bad…

Sure, that top 10 list wasn’t a scientific sampling. Yea, it was probably weighted down by non-profesional users of Photoshop. Still, it’s sampling of the market, and Adobe attention is warranted. Photoshop is still best in class software. I still prefer Lightroom for my photo workflow needs. Adobe’s efforts with Flash are highly appreciated. InDesign is my goto app for all layout work. I’ll even use Bridge in a pinch. Adobe products are fantastic, but I’m discouraged. I feel like Adobe needs a Canon.

Update:

It seems that Adobe’s Acrobat Reader 9, which has just hit the wild, is a good example of Adobe getting lazy.Similar Posts:

How I Want My Data: Locality & Cloud Aware

Joey — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 05:02:15 +0000

Boy, do I wish I had written this down first. The op-ed talks about ‘syncing.’ Or more appropriately, dealing with getting your data on any of your devices (smartphone, laptops, desktops, DVRs, etc…) whenever you want without any hassle. This is something that I (and I’m sure many others) have been struggling with for a while. I personally own a boatload of devices; several computers, portable devices, and such; all of which I want to stay in sync. I’ve got a theoretical solution to the problem which I’ll detail below. Jon Stoke’s article points out several obvious problems: there is currently no easy way to sync your data, the stop-gap solutions that exist now are poorly done and anything but set-and-forget, and that computers should be very good at performing a simple repetitive task (just like syncing files). However, Stokes forgets to tackle on important issue. Yes, I want my data to be the synced across all my devices. It’s horribly inconvenient to have to deal with multiple versions of files and its a tragedy when I realize that the file that I need is not on the machine that I’m working on right now. Yet, the data that I want on each device is not identical.

The bigger issue

For instance, I’ve got a rather large iTunes library. Last I checked, it’s over 115GB. It lives happily on my desktop which has more than enough storage available to handle that amount of frivolous data happily. The obvious problem is that I do not want all that music on my laptop which only has a 80GB hard drive, and it certainly won’t all fit on my iPod Nano. Or, take my photo library. It’s as large as my music library and then some. I do want some of it on my laptop: current work, my portfolio, the images I have up on my site; but some random shoot from 3 years ago? There’s no need to carry that with me (at least until SSD reach multi-terabyte capacities).

Solution

The problem is not that I need a solution to have all my data all the time. If I did or could, the solution would be fairly easy – the technology to sync two equally sized devices together already exists. No, the problem is that I want certain data to go to certain devices and not to others. My solution, and suggestion for those that can make this happen is this:

Time Machine by Apple is a ready-made solution for syncing to devices. It already syncs one hard drive with versions itself. It can even do it across a network. All that needs to be done is to transition it from a backup utility to a sync utility. I’m no engineer, but I don’t imagine it would be a very hard task to accomplish. Especially if you consider the underling technology behind time machine.
As Stokes suggests, the ‘drive’ paradigm is very cumbersome once you get more than a couple of hard drives floating around. Changing this to the ‘cloud‘ paradigm would be fantastic.Think about it like this: Google has tons (literally) of hard drives in their servers which provide the space for them to provide all their services to their millions of users. But as a user, you have no idea where your data is actually physically stored. It’s somewhere, but you don’t actually know where your gmail emails are stored, nor do you care.Introducing a similar solution at the personal level is a logical evolution. No, it’s not really applicable to the ‘average user’ who only has a laptop and perhaps one external hard drive, but for small businesses or power users it could be a god-send.Again, I’m no engineer, but I imagine it working something like this: You’re home has a network setup, or at least one computer that is ‘cloud-aware.’ When you plug a drive into the system for the first time, it will ask you if you’d like to make this disk a part of the cloud – akin to the way Time Machine asks if you’d like to make a new disk a time machine backup drive. This is to ensure that portable storage (like a hard drive that’s meant to travel with your laptop, or a flash card) won’t get data stored on them that belongs in the cloud. Once configured, the cloud would be just be similar to a RAID 5 array. It handles all of your backup for you, it presents itself as one drive, if you unplug a drive from the system, or one dies, the cloud automatically compensates – all without you worrying about it. Furthermore, the cloud is accessible to all of your devices. It’s online, so if you have a password, you can get your data anywhere. Think, Back to My Mac, but simpler. If your device is connected to the internet, it automatically connects to your cloud. Not into dealing with a mess of hard drives? Perhaps third-party companies can offer cloud storage for a price. Amazon and Google (among others) are already perfectly positioned to do this. Apple’s iDisk already offers an omni-present storage space, and approaches this paradigm. Cloud storage can help to solve many of the syncing problems, your data is always accessible, no matter where you are.
There is one glaring disadvantage though – what if you’re offline? Or what if the files are huge and would take too long (even over broadband) to access remotely?Here’s where my solution gets a new twist.I propose a new kind of metadata that I’ll call ‘Locality.’
This is what I Imagine the interface looking like. Click for a large view.
Every file has metadata attached to it. It’s how the computer knows what date it was created, who last opened it, etc… What I’m proposing is an addition that keeps track of what devices a file is supposed to be stored on. All of your devices will know about all of your other devices. Your smartphone, iPod, laptop, DVR, desktop, and so on, will all know that each other exist. That way, they will be able to automatically keep track of what data is supposed to be on each device – automatically. The ‘Save’ dialog in every OS functions basically the same. It asks you what you want to name the file, where you want to put it, and the file type. A system that is ‘locality-aware,’ would ask you one more thing: which devices you want your data on. It could for instance, default to storing everything on your cloud. If you’re offline, then it stores the file locally, until you can connect. However, the user can also decide which other devices get the data stored locally – in other words – you can decide right in a save dialog where you want to always access your data. For example, If you’re saving a new Word (or Pages) document, you can set it to save on your cloud and also go to your smartphone. The next time your computer comes in to contact with either your smartphone or your cloud, it sends that file off. That way if your smartphone contacts your cloud (more likely that it contacting your laptop) it gets the file right away. The advantage to this system is that you can decide to keep a huge library of pictures safely on your cloud. Where it can be accessed by any of your devices, but isn’t stored on them, so space isn’t an issue. If you choose, however, you can tell any of your locality-aware devices to set the locality of a file however you choose. You can set some songs to go to your desktop and your iPod, but not to your smartphone.

Apple is most likely going to rebrand .Mac, mostly likely calling it “mobile me.” In theory, it will tie the iPhone more closely to Mac computers via a cloud interface. Who knows, maybe Apple is on the right track. I seriously doubt that Apple will present a solution as complete as what I’ve just suggested. I’m certain that my solution requires a re-wiring of an OS. Nonetheless, here’s hoping that it’s a step in the right direction.Similar Posts:

TIME.Com: Cheers

Joey — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:38:48 +0000

In reviewing my previous posts in the last month or so, I’ve noticed that TIME.com has frequently been the starting point for many of my posts. I remember filling out a survey that TIME had on their website back in either October or November 2007 (thereabouts), which said that TIME was attempting to drastically change their online content – for the better. I faithfully filled out the survey which asked real questions like: rate the site’s multimedia content, timeliness of content, and so on. Lo and behold, it appears that they’ve been good to their word. Content in the last couple of months has been fantastic. Multimedia has been very well done and timely. So, TIME – here’s to a job well done. Good on you for following through.Similar Posts: