Dan Lipert.

So I’m a little late, already on my second friday app reviews, but I’ll get on the ball, I swear. I am in Portland again, finally, and I’m so happy, but its been stressful looking for an apartment, as it always is. Anyway, last week I said I would get the paid version of instapaper and write a review so here it is: Also.. keep reading for a review of doodle jump (its annoyingly fun)

Instapaper has really been a godsend, and as I imagined last week, getting the pro version was really just a thin layer of icing on the cake. I feel good that I’ve helped out another independent developer who has made a great product. The added features are ho-hum, I haven’t really used them too much, and when I did try to read a wired article the app crashed. Blech… I sent in a bug report and haven’t heard anything so.. that kind of sucks.

Anyway, the service is still good, if you have extra money I would say get the paid version but you really won’t get anything out of it other than a bit of feel-goodness, which may dissipate quickly when you start seeing some bugs. 3 out of 5 stars for the paid version.

Doodle Jump

Doodle Jump is 99c, tons of fun, and will haunt you when you try to sleep, because you will definitely get a doodle jump effect when you close your eyes after playing for only 20 minutes. So watch out. 4 out of 5 because of the haunting.

I’ve decided that since I’ve been pumping some $$$s into the app store lately, both to check out the competition ;) but mostly to get inspired, I might as well generate some content from it. So I figured I’d reduce my ADD a bit, try to digest the app fully, and then poop out a little review.

This app is very slick. It models a real metronome in terms of the way its controlled, and you get a nice little ‘wow’ factor when you first figure out how to get it going and adjust the tempo. The controls are simple: just interact with it as you would a real metronome, or tap to start and stop the ticking. Also there is a little info button that explains the developer’s intent- apparently he is going to open source the code soon, and it was done as an exercise/demonstration of Adobe’s upcoming Flash CS 5 ‘export to iPhone’ feature. Found via Creative Applications

Instapaper is amazing and I think everyone knows it. The mobile version is great too, and the lite version is maybe-even-too good, in that I don’t feel super inclined to buy the paid version. The author includes a snippet about what features you get when you buy the full version, of which the most compelling feature is to support an independent developer, which is great. In fact, I’m going to buy it this moment. Look for a review of instapaper pro sometime soon.

Anyway, if you aren’t aware, instapaper is like readability combined with an rss reader. I’m all about focus enhancing apps, and I’ve been using readability for awhile now. Instapaper is pretty much readability on the go. This is a killer app for the iPad and I hope that Marco makes a shitton of money off of it, because he deserves it.

I bought Chromixa because it was part of the Indie+Relief charity thing, and I have to say its a really inspiring app. The idea is fresh: take your typical tangrams puzzle and have the user mix colors to fill in the shapes. My only complaint is that some of the color mixing seems non-intuitive? I’ll often be surprised when two colors combine to form white, or don’t combine at all. I guess it doesn’t follow color physics too exactly in order to simplify the puzzle, so what can you do.

I gave all of the apps five stars, and I’m going to post them on the iTunes store. Remember, developers loooove getting 5*s and love getting written comments even more, even if they are negative. I should know ;)

Right now, I am somewhat financially secure. Of course, I don’t think that there are many software developers out there who would say a guaranteed income of $1500/mo is secure. And I supplement this with a good amount of freelance work, but its mostly for the time being as I gather funds to move back to Portland, OR. So what am I doing?

Well, after reading this blog entry on why you shouldn’t become a freelancer, I realized that yes, these are valid reasons why the average person wouldn’t want to become a freelancer. But, if you are an ‘above average person’™*, then most of these negatives are actually positives. Granted, this might be the whole point of the article, but for me, and I suspect a few others, the impact is different. Because, while freelancing is lucrative but time consuming, it is only as lucrative but time consuming as you want it to be.

At this point, I schedule myself to work probably 20 hours/week of coding time. Add this with maybe another 10 hours of administrative junk and it seems like a decent chunk of time, but compared with other developers, freelance and otherwise, its pretty slim. That isn’t to say that I don’t spend a lot of time elsewhere invested, and thats why freelancing is so great for me. I can make money coding, and still have not only time, but energy to work on my personal projects.

Fortunately, my personal projects coincide and enhance long term goals as well, so it all continues to build and build, in a strictly real, and non-financial way (for now). I don’t imagine in the future that I will have gobs of money either. It’s something like when people recommend that you work hard now, make money, and save for your retirement. Except I’m working hard now, for myself, and hoarding my personal stock for a metaphysical payoff.

* ™ is so hot right now.

When I first went on YouTube, it was a revelation. I think it was my senior year of university, and YouTube had probably just launched that month. I was directed to it to watch the latest Naruto episodes (whatever! this is like season 1 alright!), but I stuck around to peruse the ridiculous amount of content that was on it even then. You see, I am of the generation where if we wanted to watch a funny video of “fat people getting hurt”, we’d have to go over to some kind of E/N site, actually download the video, and load it into windows media player. Watching the video stream nearly-flawlessly was at that time incredible, and im still dazed by all the rich content the YouTube model spawned.

But more and more, I hear people complain that YouTube sucks now, and I can see where they are coming from. When I try and find the latest episode of Kenny VS Spenny, it’s already DMCA’d. But there will always be sites like megavideo that don’t have the kind of money worth suing over to host pirated content, and with services like Hulu springing up to host copyrighted content properly, the idea of trying to catch something on TV is almost a thing of the past.

So what’s so great about YouTube? At YouTube, all that matters is content. Sure, there are little things here and there that let you promote your videos. You can comment on others’ uploads, create video responses, and now even pay to have your video show up a little higher in the ranking, albeit marked by a light gray div enclosure. But really, there isn’t the drama-llama userbase on YouTube which bogs down other social sites. Anyone can upload and by-far the biggest traffic generator is search. Thankfully, there are no forums, and therefore no moderators or power-users or elite circles or any of that nonsense.

Nowadays I watch very little television, but spend alot of time watching video nonetheless. It marvels me that things like The Third & The Seventh or Les Dangereux are immediately available, for free, around the globe, to anybody. I remember buying demo reels of MIT computer graphics courses on VHS. We’ve really come a long way as an artistic and creative community because of sites like YouTube that allow us to share both instantly and at no cost.

So next time you get bummed that the newest Naruto or Gossip Girl clips are nowhere to be found on YouTube, why don’t you sit down and watch a google tech talk. Or a video on how to plant a garden. Or a documentary. Or an amazing CG work. Or even, fat people getting hurt.

If you’ve ever been to Tokyo, or seen it in movies, you know that areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya are completely awash in light almost 24/7. There are huge neon structures peddling everything from pachinko and pornography to coffee and the iPhone. One might think that this incredible amount of advertising would be maddening, but for several reasons, Japan has managed to gracefully incorporate new technologies into their advertising while overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.

Many of the signs you see away from the center of the city are strictly rainbow colored neon affairs, with multi-minute long sequences of various elements blinking and following in various rows and columns, often changing the typography and message of the signs in interesting ways. Here’s a music store:

As technology advanced, many stores went for LED matrices, mostly of the plug and play variety. They often had little SD slots to pop in whatever programming you had done up, and would play multi-color, multi-typeface messages with dozens of delightfully cheesy scrolling and flipping effects. Mostly, these are left outside all night, which is amazing because I think here in the US these probably wouldn’t last a few days.

Anyway, what I want to write about is the most inspiring thing I saw in Japan, and perhaps one of the best instances of the new forms of advertising and how effective they are. Outside of Shinjuku station there is an art installation called MYLORD Box, in an alleyway called Mosaic Street. It is a huge array of RGB LED’s combined with some simple infrared sensors to crudely detect touch. It is combined with an amazingly beautiful set of reactive visualizations, updated to reflect the seasons.

What’s amazing about this installation is that it is both truly a work of “new media art”, as well as an amazing advertisement. The name of the nearby department store is ‘MyLord’, and the amount of traffic gained from this thing is incredible. There are 2 or 3 people constantly with their hands all over it, as well as countless onlookers. And there are some small stickers proclaiming the name of the installation, a simple advertisement for the sponsors of the work.

Another release in my series of facebook game utilities, farm clock tracks all of your crops, animals, and tree harvests. Check it out at the Farm Clock tumblr.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication has been around for a long, long time (apparently its over 10 years old), but I have met few people in real life that are big fans of it. Usually it seems like some people (say, your parents) have never heard of it, or other people (like your average web-a-holic) tried it and didn’t like it. The reasons for liking and disliking it are varied, but I have finally come to the conclusion that I really, really like it, and it can actually make you more productive. And what better way to kick off project52 than to get meta and blog about blogging.

For the uninitiated, RSS allows you to take all the content from your favorite blogs and websites, strip the layout, and plop them in one place. Standalone desktop RSS applications used to be the standard but now, with Google Reader combining a simple layout with just a pinch of social salt, getting an RSS client setup takes seconds. The idea is that websites give you a little orange RSS icon to click, which will automatically load the page into your client, and then you don’t have to visit their site anymore.

SO WHATS THE BIG DEAL

This is amazing for so many reasons. First, it saves you time. Secondly, it saves your eyes from looking at tons of ads, although some feeds include the ads in their feed, at which point I promptly drop them. Thirdly, it lets you customize the type of information you consume every day. It becomes a sort of personal newspaper, with numerous articles and rich multimedia content, all created and curated by content providers that you deem worthy. But in my mind, the number one reason to get an RSS reader is to break your addiction to social news sites like digg and reddit.

QUICK LIKE A BANDAID, RIGHT OFF

There have been more than a few commentaries and essays appearing lately decrying the unfortunate effects of crowdsourcing on modern culture. It seems that everyone coming together, voting up and down this and that, doesnt allow for the best material to rise to the top. Instead, a bunch of boring, trolling, flaming shit covers the front of every social news site you can find.

Obama sucks, Glenn Beck rapes, cats are funny, why don’t girls like me, and there is no God. That isn’t some blackhat seo keyword list, that’s the exact same content that is posted day after day. What happened to the internet? Did all of the good content get used up already? What happened to the promise of unlimited education, inspiration, discussion, and enlightenment?

Actually, its still there, and the internet is becoming richer and more amazing every day. But with that comes an amazingly huge group of screaming idiots trying to sell you some product or idea at the top of their lungs. And so, we use RSS to hire our own, personal editors, because in addition to blogs like this one that produce original content, there are millions that post “inspiration”, or “reblogs” or “stuff I like” or “COOL LINKZ” everyday. And if they post something I don’t like, I can drop them and pick up one of the thousands waiting to take their place.

So my new year’s resolution, albeit a bit late: I am never visiting reddit or digg again. Besides, if something really important happens, I’m sure I’ll see it on twitter.

The MCRPv2 is kind of over, and here is my track:

MCRP V2 ayuh aka the easterislandhead - spoiled fruit basket  by  easterislandhead But although it seemed like a good idea to have this available to work on during the holidays since people typically have off and that sort of thing, it turned out nobody had time to work on it after all, so its being extended by a week. I might do some more work on mine but for the most part I think its done. I used completely new production techniques, so while I’m not super thrilled with how it came out, I have lots of ideas for future tracks. I’ll post again when all the tracks are in! Also I’ll do an ‘article’ post later since I am signed up for project52.

Since I started actively posting a few weeks ago, the site has gone through quite a few changes. At first, it was pure XHTML + CSS, and I was updating the front page manually. It was the case of having a design, but not having the skills to create it myself. I could have outsourced it for a few bucks to some entry level Javascripter in the Ukraine or India… or I could take it on myself, learn some jQuery, some Javascript, and learn about the GData APIs!

After watching the movie Objectified last night, I realized how opposing the lifestyle of these designers and the DIY movement are. A good portion of the movie is either designers talking about how important they are, or being a bit bashful about how useless and obsessive they might look to some people. And they deserve this perception! I was kind of shocked that in 2009 they would gloss over sustainability and ethical production issues. These are the greatest themes in cutting edge design today, and if designers want to stay relevant, maybe they should actually solve a problem instead of redesigning hedge clippers and then having Chinese workers pump them out for pennies an hour.

So how does this fit with my webdesign? I think one of the best ways to ‘go green’, ‘stay sustainable’, etc etc… is to do it yourself! The more aspects of your life that you take control of, the higher percentage of your life you will have complete control and knowledge of. When you grow your own vegetables, you don’t have to worry about the exploitation of migrant workers sitting on your plate. When you build your own chair out of sustainable materials, you don’t have to worry about the macroeconomics of importing cheap furniture full of chemicals from Sweden. And when you design your own website instead of outsourcing it to India, you get to display your creativity, you contribute to local economies, and you just might learn something. :)

So, this blog is powered by me. I used a combination of XHTML, CSS, jQuery, Javascript, and curiosity.

I released a new iPhone app recently: it’s called Cafe Clock and it helps you track your cooking on Zynga’s facebook game “Cafe World” . The app is doing fairly well which is good of course, and despite the fact that it isn’t going to earn me a TED talk or anything, I’m kind of proud of it. I initially submitted it to the iTunes store about a month ago, but found some major bugs and decided that I had to reprogram how I was storing information, especially since the Cafe World cookbook updates so frequently.

There is a ridiculous amount of technology under the hood of this thing. What started with a simple NSUserPreferences data storage system evolved into having a full SQLite database with reading and writing capabilities, as well as grabbing XML off the web to update. Thankfully, like with every project, I learned some new tech which I will surely apply to other, more exciting projects. After I do a FarmVille app, of course. And FarmTown. And FishVille. And PetVille.

I hate money. :(

Anyway, check it out at this other tumblr.