This one will be quick since I haven’t had a ton of time to play on the iPad this week :(. NewsRack is a new RSS reader, fairly bare bones, but has excellent google reader support. The feature set for exporting things is great though, and it has Instapaper support so I’m good to go. I was a Feeddler user, but it’s sloooow, and NewsRack caches and is pretty quick, so I’m happy. I tend to prefer a more minimal, spaced out, comfy layout, but what can you do. I’m eyeing Headline HARRRD, because the UI looks beautiful, but the initial reviews aren’t too promising, and theres no instapaper support, so I’m gonna wait a bit.
Anyway, 3 out of 5 stars for NewsRack!
This week, I’m gonna mix it up a bit and focus on two great music apps, one for iPad and one for iPhone. There has been a lot of hype over apps like mixr and similar DJ emulations, and I can totally see why. Everyone wants to be a DJ right? But they don’t appreciate that DJing is some seriously hard work. So on that note, on to the reviews.
The iElectribe, at $9.99, is one of the more expensive apps I’ve bought, but consider that the real version of this amazing groovebox/drum machine is hundreds of dollars… this app is a complete steal. I definitely give it 5 out of 5 stars. Instead of writing a ton about the app, I’ll just share some little beats I’ve done on it.
While music production is not neccessarily the realm of every DJ, track selection is. One thing I heard at the beginning of my DJ career is that anyone can learn to mix well, but developing taste, track selection, and just the knowledge to rock a party is the real difficulty. Now that the age of digital DJing and online music purchases is here, anyone can see whats hot. On the converse though, finding those hidden gems and breaking new tracks has become even harder.
Enter the Beatport app. Beatport is an online music store for DJs, which I use fairly often. Add the fact that you can now, from anywhere, preview hundreds of thousands of tracks… its truly, truly amazing. Beatport took their amazing website, and compressed it into a very well designed iPhone app, that runs quickly and without memory issues. Another 5 star.
Ok, ok, if you are one of my clients, then please calm down and read a few paragraphs and then if you are still freaking out you can fire me.
I sit at a computer of some sort almost all day. When I wake up, I bring my iPad downstairs, make coffee, and check my e-mail. After breakfast, accompanied by some RSS-reading and twitter tweeting, I head up to the ‘work computer’, an old Macbook Pro with a huge HD monitor hooked up. At lunch I catch up on e-mail again, then I might do some reading on the iPad, or if I have a deadline coming up, it’s back to work. Some more coffee, some more work, some dinner, some work, maybe relax and play some PS3, write some music on the laptop, or watch youtube or a movie. So, it’s pretty ridiculous the amount of time I spend staring at a screen.
Enter the bicycle. The value of being carless and riding a bike everywhere has been retold over and over, so I won’t repeat the standard earth-day arguments here, although they are compelling to say the least. I would say, if you are a technonerd like I am, riding a bike could be the best decision you make if you are looking for positive lifestyle change. You gotta go to the store anyway, so why not get your exercise in, absorb some vitamins from the sun’s rays, go out and interact with real people in real life, and above all, meditate.
Now, I’m not saying that you should zone out entirely while riding a bike. I always ride earbud free, and I make sure to ride the road fairly and pay attention to my surroundings. But I come up with some of the best ideas for designs and projects while riding. If I get code blind, or if I have designer’s block, taking that ride over to New Seasons to pick up tonight’s tempeh and broccoli ingredients is amazingly enlightening. You know that feeling you get when you’ve been in the shower for five minutes, and you are full of amazing ideas and you can’t wait to finish brushing your beard so you can jump back on the computer? Add the endorphin rush from peddling a few miles, dodging cars and jumping curbs. You can’t buy that kind of inspiration, unless you have some hippie friends with a sugar cube collection.
Yes, I went early on a Saturday morning and waited in line and was thoroughly embarrassed by the Apple retail workers’ insane enthusiasm for the iPad. As soon as I exited the store with my $499 iPad, I got interviewed by @donpdonp and then went home and watched it on the iPad. So it was a surreal day to say the least.
First, lets get the iPad review out of the way. I love it, my girlfriend loves it, its super handy, the games are fun, iBooks are cool, loading pdfs on it is great, and I especially love the feature that lets you load files to individual app folders. This thing is going to get better and better now that some devs have their hands on it.
So, app reviews:
Goodreader is a multi-document-format reader for the iPhone/iPad, and it filled the main niche that I think alot of people were thinking when they got this thing. How can I put pdfs on it and read them comfortably? iBooks doesn’t have this functionality, and I suppose you could e-mail yourself a pdf and read it in the mail.app. But otherwise, you are stuck. Along comes Goodreader, which can handle a ton of formats, slog through giant pdfs with ease, and my favorite feature: reflow text. It can take the text from a pdf and reformat it for comfortable reading. Feature packed, easy to sync files with, and bug free! 5 out of 5 stars.
Feeddler was a breakout hit, mostly because it was a free RSS reader, worked well with google reader, and was out on day one. Now there is a pro version which supports offline viewing, which I may pick up because unfortunately, there is no caching of the feeds. When you click a new entry, it takes a while to load up the article. On that front it is pretty slow. But, its free! And I have yet to hit any bugs, but I did hit a weird bug in another app where I was trying to load a web view and my last Feeddler article was mysteriously being displayed. I will assume THAT is some sort of Apple bug. Also, the interface is pretty plain and boring, using totally stock UI elements. I give Feeddler a 5 out of 5, because its free. I don’t know if I’ll purchase the pro version though, as there is going to be a lot of choice of RSS readers in the near future.
I, like many nerd/creative types, can easily get caught in the foggy netherworld of organization. I’m not a particularly neat person, but I do spend a lot of time mentally reordering my thoughts and prioritizing my todos. So of course, the ideal thing to do is to get some sort of productivity system in place and mentally unload all these small and large stresses onto a physical or digital medium. But, this presents a huge string of todo items in itself. I have to decide on a platform, a software suite, or a particular type of stationary. I then have to invest, on a time, money and emotional basis in my choice. And what if i’m wrong and it doesn’t work out, or I lose the info somehow and blah blah blah holy crap now I’m even more stressed out.
I think the key to getting away from being obsessed with so called “Productivity Porn”, is to stick with least complexity possible, and organically grow your system from that. If you are stressing about your productivity system, you probably aren’t busy enough to need one.
A few years ago, I was getting into all of the productivity stuff via 43folders, and I adopted the famed ‘hipster pda’. Now, at the time, I was anything but a hipster. I was working a 9-5 in Washington DC for the DoD, but at the same time, I just read Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week and was trying to figure a way to organize and automate and all that good stuff. So I had this little system with index cards sitting in an inbox, and I would clip up all the cards at the end of the day and take them home with me. When I was sitting there at work, e-mail at zero, I would shuffle the cards and grab one and rock it out. Afterwards I tore that card up with so much satisfaction and then went on a coffee break, came back and did another one.
This really worked out for me- I got a commendation from my boss’s boss’s boss, a navy admiral. And my coworkers were super impressed with how productive I was being. So this system was perfect, right?
Well it turns out that I wasn’t super happy with what I was doing and a combination of reading Four Hour Work Week, Walden, and hanging out with some way more hippie friends convinced me to quit my job. I sat on my ass in sunny San Diego, became vegan and cooked all day, rode my bike to the indie movie rental shop, and chilled HARD. At first I wrote things like “rent Le Samourai” on the cards, but, because I wasn’t actually busy, it wasn’t working out. I ended up chucking the hipster pda because I didn’t actually have anything that I HAD to do.
Fast forward about two years. I’m starting my own software development company. I have multiple apps on the store that constantly need content updates. I write for three blogs and am considering adding a fourth video blog. I work on open source new media art and submit work to shows. I’m promoting new apps and hunting for new clients. I DJ shows here in Portland, OR and write my own music for two separate projects.
And so, I use iCal. And I have a moleskine, plus two mini-moleskines. I have an Action Book from Behance. I use the amazing teuxdeux.com. And I am happy. All of these things actually make me MORE PRODUCTIVE! Imagine that.
You can check out my latest project, Chromocam over here, and be sure to check the blog and gallery which are both powered by tumblr. I am really excited about the app, and having the webpage up, the twitter up, and a new youtube video up is really inspiring to see. On this project I am a one man band, doing the web design, the iphone development, video editing, and graphic design. Phew… I have been putting in alot of time, but it has been worth it, and I find the inertia on this project overwhelming! I’m not the type to usually put in all-nighters, but I rocked out the youtube video for an entry in the Appsfire Appstar awards in a 10 hour video editing session. :)
Anyway, I can’t wait to share this project with everyone. It’s been really fun to work on, play with, and now promote, and I can’t wait to start work on the next iteration.
I’m working on some new projects lately, so I haven’t been posting too much. Or actually, I’ve been posting on other blogs readying content for when sites go live. So, I really am alive, I swear.
My latest project is a series of iPhone photography, or iPhoneography apps. I’m really surprised how awful alot of the apps out there are, given that the iPhone is such a fun little camera, and Apple actually gives us decent control to mess with it. I’m planning on entering it into the Appsfire Appstar awards, so I’ll post here with that progress :)
Over at the iPhoneography blog, as well as at Life in LoFi, the authors are lamenting the fact that many iPhone apps save at a low resolution. And they are puzzled, as they should be. Why would some apps like CameraBag or MonoPhix save at nice resolutions, and yet others save at 320 x 480, the iPhone screen resolution? Well, the answer is… lazy programmers.
I can’t say that I blame the programmers though. Apple has not made it particularly easy to play with large image buffers in memory. Actually, they’ve made working with images extraordinarily easy, as long as you are just displaying them and maybe moving them here and there. But rotating, applying filters, working byte by byte with them gets a little trickier. I blame a particularly enticing line of code:
[view.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()];
What this does, in one shot, is take whatever view and dump its display to a coregraphics context. Then, you can use UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext() and you have a UIImage of whatever view you want. The problem with this, is that the maximum view size on the iphone is… 320 x 480. So that’s why you have tons of apps saving at that low resolution.
I will cover how to efficiently and safely deal with large images in another entry, but suffice it to say, it is hundreds of times more complex, and rotating, translating, and eating bytes of an image is pretty memory intensive, so special care must be taken not to crash your app. Interested developers should check out all the great info out there on coregraphics contexts. Or just wait for an upcoming entry…
