It’s baseball season again, and in downtown Denver that means traffic and bad cell phone connections. We can’t do much about the latter, but be sure to use GameTonight for warning about potential traffic concerns.

GameTonight is a single-serving site that answers “is there a game tonight?” and tracks the major sports teams in 1516 metro areas:

• Atlanta
• Bay Area
• Boston
• Chicago
• Cincinnati
• Dallas
• Denver
• Los Angeles
• Minneapolis
• Oakland
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix
• San Francisco
• San Jose
• Seattle
• Washington DC

If you live in one of these areas, check it out.

Now that I’m back to using a laptop full time, I’m right back to the old hassle of having my windows scatter all over the place when I connect and disconnect an external display. It looks like this is an annoyance I share with others, as there are a bunch of utilities out there that hope to solve this problem:

I evaluated a variety of options:

• Stay
• Optimal Layout
• Size-Up
• Display Maid

I can’t remember the details of each at this point, but I tried a couple of them for a week or so each (pretty sure I did both Stay and Display Maid, can’t recall on Size-Up or Optimal Layout).

After evaluating a few options, I saw the same problems consistently:

1. While windows would be restored most of the time, they wouldn’t be restored all of the time. The difference here was better than default OS X window handling, but not that much better.
2. There was no option to pull all apps to one desktop when plugged in to a monitor, then distribute them again when unplugged. I’m assuming this is an API/SDK limitation as this seems like a pretty obvious feature idea.

The solution I ended up with is less than ideal: let OS X handle the window distribution and learn to work on a laptop with only a single desktop. I still go back to multiple desktops if I’m going to be unplugged for a long stretch of time, but moving things back and forth between desktops is way too fiddly.

I’m certainly open to better solutions (or new ones that have come out in the last six months) – suggest away in the comments.

For example, my terminal often goes from this:

to this:

I found that in BBEdit you can hit Cmd+/ to restore a window to it’s expected size. I then discovered that Terminal.app has a “Return to Default Size” item under the Window menu. A quick addition in the Keyboard prefs:

and I can now use Cmd+/ to fix my Terminal.app window size as well.

I believe the crux of the problem with Readability stems from their famous 70%/30% revenue split.

When Readability came on the scene as a commercial product/service after previously existing as a tool (via bookmarklet), they did so with an interesting pitch:

Give us money, and we will pass 70% of that along to the people who create the sites you love to read.

Readability had a small following in the tech community, but it didn’t have significant distribution, name recognition, or reputation. Instead of trying to build this up organically while pitching their product/service as something you should buy directly (a process which can be slow and difficult), they chose to position themselves as a partner of the websites you already have goodwill towards.

This is a very clever approach. People want to support sites they care about, and they typically have few options through which to do so. Many technical folks (the same audience that Readability and similar services are currently reaching) browse with ad blocking extensions, a choice that brings a bit of guilt along with it. Even though this audience is unlikely to click on an ad, we know that the ads provide the revenue for these sites and we want to support them (we just don’t want to see the ads). Readability offered an intriguing alternative. No ads and no guilt: a mechanism through which we can support the publishers we like.

The problem is that 70%/30% split. By giving the 70% share to the publishers, people see their Readability subscription primarily as a way to support the publishers they read. The 30% share to Readability is the now-standard cut of the middle man (I believe the 30% number is directly inspired by the iOS App Store).

This choice fundamentally devalues the Readability product/service and equates it with a storefront. Readability’s customers don’t feel they are paying for Readability; they feel they are paying for the content. Just as people don’t feel they are paying Apple for the service of providing apps for sale – they feel they are buying an app (with the 70% revenue share going to the developer).

Since Readability has positioned itself as an agent and devalued their product/service accordingly, it’s hardly surprising that their customers are unhappy to learn that the money they have been paying isn’t actually making it to the publishers they thought they were supporting. Readability traded on their customers’ feelings of guilt and goodwill towards the publishers they already liked, and they are now seeing the ramifications of failing to deliver on their promise to pass along that 70%.¹

Conversely, a product/service like Instapaper has always made the value proposition clear: you are buying a product/service from Instapaper for X dollar amount that you can choose to consume content with. Instapaper doesn’t get to benefit from the fringe goodwill you have towards the publishers you read, but it doesn’t position itself to have an obligation to them either.

Something to keep in mind when you’re thinking about how to position your product or service with your customers.

Over the last six months I’ve been using paper sketches more and more to capture and communicate ideas; it’s been working really well. What hasn’t been working well is how I integrate these into my digital workflow.² I’m hoping that Paper will be my answer.

For as good as Paper is now, there are still some pretty obvious areas in which it can expand – here’s a short list of things I’d dearly love to see.

1. Re-ordering of books – This is going to become more and more important to me over time. I’ll want my “active” books towards the front, etc. along with my “random ideas” book. Related: the ability to re-order pages within a book.
2. Export page to photo roll – Badly needed. I have a variety of tools that integrate with the photo roll, this is an easy stop-gap to allow other apps/services to interact with the content I create in Paper.
3. Mirror books to Dropbox – Allow me to specify a folder in Dropbox to use as my “Paper” folder, then create folders within that for each book and save a flattened export of each page into the appropriate book folders. I’m going to need my sketches on my laptop too. A similar approach could store the images in Evernote as well.
4. Portrait orientation support – Some ideas are vertical.
5. Setting for screen orientation when locked – This is a bit of a nit pick, but I prefer having the home button on my right since I’m right handed. When I have it on the left (in landscape mode), I inadvertently hit it with my left thumb while holding the iPad. I know it rotates when the screen orientation isn’t locked, but I use my iPad with the screen orientation locked much of the time.
6. iCloud sync – Lower priority, but even if it was just iPad to iPad sync I could see getting a second iPad to have at work just for Paper and as a test device.

Most of these are pretty obvious requests, so I’m sure the smart folks at FiftyThree are already considering them in one form or another. I’m really excited to have a really good digital notebook and can’t wait to see what comes in future releases.

I also love the way they decided to sell the app. You can download and use the app for free with no limitations on the number of books, pages, etc. you create. Instead, you have in-app purchases for different drawing tools (with the ability to test out each tool before you purchase). This is by far the best trial experience I’ve had on an iOS app and I bought all but one of the brushes within 5 minutes of launching the app for the first time.

I have a Pogo sketch stylus that I got a few years ago to use with my iPad. I’ve never really liked it, and the results with Paper are “just OK”. It looks like they are recommending the Wacom Bamboo stylus, so Amazon will be delivering one of those to me this week. I’m optimistic that this will make a noticeable difference in consistency of the stylus performance.

So when I saw chatter about it last night, I went ahead and purchased right away. I don’t use GMail, but that shouldn’t be a problem since it has:

Full IMAP support:
Use your Gmail, Google Apps, iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, Mobile Me and custom IMAP accounts.

When I launched the app, this is what I saw:

Ok, that’s not what I need. I need a way to enter in my IMAP server and account details. But this isn’t too uncommon with a mail app. I’ll just enter in my details and wait for it to fail, then it will show me an “advanced” button or something to let me enter the server settings directly.

Hmm, that’s not helpful. I’m not even trying to connect to Gmail.

I tried adding a Gmail account and going into the settings to see if I could adjust the mail server addresses manually from the account settings screen – no can do.

It appears that Sparrow’s only set-up path is to be clever and try to guess at what I need. Like most software with this approach, it fails in real world situations. It may be a great mobile mail app, but if I can’t get it to connect to my account it’s completely useless to me.

Sparrow isn’t the only app that fails like this. The WordPress for iOS app fails in the same way. I believe the WordPress app tries to load an HTML page and look for some specific information (the XMLRPC URL) that it needs for communication (perhaps with a few guesses as well).

If you have a WordPress site that requires a login, your results to add that site to the WordPress iOS app will likely look something like this:

“Need Help?”

No, I need a damn text field!

I’m quite capable of typing in the XMLRPC URL myself (like I’ve done for other apps that post to my WordPress site) and I have no problem with that being an extra, manual step since my WordPress site is a little non-standard. However, that’s not an option.

I grow weary of people holding up Apple as an ideal of simplicity, trying to follow that model, but failing to properly account for real world usage in their clever user friendly designs. When you place “simple” ahead of “functional”, you’ve failed.

Turns out if you don’t have Pages installed, a .pages file will open up pretty nicely in Preview. Handy!

I was one of the folks who had previously used MobileMe (it was the best solution I found for contact sync). I also had a separate Apple account, with a different login. Inspired by the promise of unified messaging on my phone and my computer, I started digging into who this wasn’t working for me.

As I’d suspected, the problem seems to have been related to the different “Apple” accounts I had. I had “upgraded” my MobileMe (me.com) account to iCloud, but I hadn’t “upgraded” my other Apple ID to iCloud. My iPhone, iPad and the Messages beta on my laptop were all initially using my non-MobileMe Apple ID. This likely would have worked if I had “upgraded” that account to iCloud, but I choose to take the easier route: sign-out of all devices and sign-in under my iCloud “upgraded” MobileMe account.

With this change, everything is finally working as expected – I get messages on all of my devices and can reply from whichever is most convenient.

The only additional item worth noting is that I’d associated an email address with my Apple ID that I now wanted to connect to my iCloud/MobileMe account instead. My initial attempts to do this resulted in an error message indicating that the email address was already in use by another account. It was not readily apparent how to disassociate the email address with the Apple ID; turns out you can do this by logging in to your account on apple.com.

I know how to go into the Settings and see what servies are using Location (look for the purple arrow next to the items in the list), but every time I checked there was no active app using Location. This evening I figured it out. Turns out there is another set of services that use Location – helpfully hidden under the System Services button.

Once I finally clicked tapped through that item, I saw that Compass Calibration was actively using Location Services. Sonofa… so that’s the service that has been eating my battery for the last few months.

It’s a useful service to be sure, but for now I’ve disabled it and am enjoying being able to blissfully launch apps like Maps (then hop back out of them) without having Location Services stay active and drain my battery down to zero.

I saw this the other day when I loaded up the store – looks like a classic “CSS not loaded” view to me. Quitting and re-launching returned things to normal. I found this interesting because I remembered that iTunes didn’t use Webkit; however that seems to have changed.

pf () { open -a "Path Finder.app" $1; }

It’s the equivalent to the open command that will open a Finder window to the current location in the terminal, but this will open that location in PathFinder instead.

Enjoy.

When Apple launched iChat, it was at a time when compatibility was Apple’s friend. Apple didn’t have the market share to make a proprietary platform play in the space.

Now Apple is the 800 pound gorilla and I’m guessing they want the ability to innovate with their communications tools. Since they don’t control the protocols used by iChat, they can’t make changes they might want to in order to enable new features, architecture changes for mobile, etc.

By creating iMessages and FaceTime they now have their own toolset that they can build on, extend, etc. as they desire. The strength of iOS is really what enables them to do this. They don’t need compatibility anymore.

I expect we’ll see iChat go away in the future. Shipping 2 sets of tools that do the same thing is really not the “Apple way”, and it’s a no-brainer they will favor the tools they’ve just developed and can control.

It’s blindingly obvious that this sort of feature should be part of iMessages as an extension of iCloud. I hope it gets here soon.

Here we have two screenshots from the built-in iOS settings screens. In this one, you see a Back button and a Save button in the toolbar. Clicking Save will apply changes, while clicking Back will act as a Cancel button.

In this example you see the same button layout, but a different UI interaction. Here the button in the upper right will clear the field. As there is no Save button, changes are automatically applied by hitting the Back button (there is no Cancel option).

So on one screen we have the Back arrow acting as Save and in the other it acts as Cancel.

That’s exactly the kind of thing that iOS fans make fun of Android about.

The way the Conflict Resolver dialog appears and acts is a nightmare. When it appears, it hangs for a good 30 seconds, spiking the CPU and not allowing itself to be clicked on or dismissed. Then when you do tell it to go away (Resolve Later), it pops up again in the same infuriating state a few minutes later.

With the conflicts failing to resolve and this appearing every few minutes, my machine was completely unusable.

The solution to this (according to my experience and everything I found in my web searches) is to go into MobileMe and reset sync data. Pretty simple, except that feature is no longer available once you migrate to iCloud.

I tried rebooting, etc. to no avail.

Ultimately I dug into my Library/Preferences folder and looked for anything with ‘sync’ in the name. I could see in Activity Monitor that there was an iCalExternalSync process (I didn’t write down the name, it was close to that if not exact) working hard, so I manually trashed the following files:

• iCalExternalSync.plist
• iCalExternalSync.plist.lockfile

That did the trick.

Hopefully of use to the next person who runs into this issue.