Smarterware

See You on All About Android

2013-01-07T20:35:12-08:00

It's the New Year and for me that means a new show: starting tomorrow, January 8th, I'm the newest co-host of All About Android alongside Jason Howell and Ron Richards. AAA is "your weekly source for the latest news, hardware, and apps for the Android faithful." I should admit upfront: I'm an Android unfaithful.

I started using Android 1.6 on the G1 in 2008, and since then I've owned every Nexus device except for the 4 and the 10. I released an Android app in January of 2011, and I still love firing up Eclipse to stretch my Java muscles and add a new feature or fix a bug. I've suffered through Honeycomb, the Logitech Revue, the Motorola Xoom, the Droid, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and the Nexus Q. I'm holding out (very cautious) hope for Project Glass.

Still, I spent 2012 using an iPhone 4S—for two reasons. My immediate goal was to dogfood my newly-released iOS app. My longterm objective was to get some perspective. Until then I was so ensconced in Android I felt out of touch with what everyone seemed to think was "just better" about the Apple side of things. You can't truly criticize or praise software as intimate as your mobile phone operating system until you live with it day in and day out for months. (This is what's wrong with most assertions in the iOS versus Android debate; they come from people who haven't really lived with one of the candidates. They "test" it.)

2012 was a good year. There are many wonderful things about iOS on an iPhone 4S.

In 2013 I'm back on Android, using Jellybean on my Galaxy Nexus. I miss a couple of things about the iPhone: the camera (so fast, such good photos), certain iOS-only or better-on-iOS apps (Timehop, Lift, Twitter, Flickr), the lack of "Force Close" dialog boxes. But Jellybean is by far the best that Android has ever been. I missed the customizability and configurability, the variety of devices, the community and culture of hackers and tweakers that surround Android. On some level I even miss the ugly, insane, 152-checkbox apps that let you trigger a custom action when you're exactly 17 feet from home, with the handset turned face-down, by saying the words "kangaroo spider"—because they're possible.

I'm not a big hardware enthusiast. At some point a class of devices is good enough and slight upgrades like a faster processor or more storage just doesn't matter to me. As far as I'm concerned, software and services are where it's at, and that's where Android shines. Google's native apps in particular and their tight integration into Android, including the holy-crap-this-is-the-future Google Now, are unbeatable for someone like me, whose life is embedded in Gmail, Calendar, Voice, Docs, Maps, Chrome, etc.

Android and iOS have a whole lot to learn from one another, and I plan to bring that perspective to All About Android. In return, I hope viewers and listeners will shame me into holo-theming Todo.txt for Android once and for all.

All About Android streams live on Tuesday evenings at 5pm Pacific. Subscribe to the audio or video feed in your podcatcher of choice here.

2012 Year in Review: Before and After Baby

2012-12-31T13:02:33-08:00

Few events leave such a big mark on your personal timeline that they split your life story into two parts: before and after. This year, the birth of my daughter Etta did just that.

A year ago I would have said that our long journey to pregnancy made me more than ready for parenthood. What a fool. It would have been impossible to prepare for the intensity of our love for her, as well as the complete upending of our priorities, home, schedule, and identity. It's only been three months, but it's already difficult to remember exactly what we did with ourselves before her dimples and coos, the 4am feedings and afternoon naps, the diapers and bottles and cuddle sessions.

Etta alone made 2012 my best year yet, but behind her there are a few things I want to remember about the past 12 months.

First, the highlight reel. I shipped my first iOS app. I got invited to the White House to meet with the President's Equal Pay committee, and helped launch a Department of Labor app challenge with Narrow the Gapp. I co-founded my first company, ThinkUp, with Anil, and while bootstrapping, we shipped multiple releases of a product with tens of thousands of users. Kevin and I launched our new show on 5by5, In Beta. I got published in The New York Times, on CNN.com, in The Magazine, and interviewed for a book of paintings by Jane Mount. In tiny ways, I helped defeat SOPA and get President Obama re-elected. This Week in Google is still going, 178 episodes strong.

There were also the disappointments, dark moments, and missed marks. I easily aged 10 years during Etta's first week in the world, which she spent in the NICU while my wife recovered from surgery. I wish I'd blogged more. I still need to drop about 20 pounds. The app release cycles have been longer than I want them to be. I've spent too much time worrying about money. I'm still bad at picking up the phone and listening to voicemail, keeping up with paperwork, or keeping in touch with anyone who is not in my social streams. The inbox is far from zero. I still say "I'm sorry" too much and "This is what I want" too little. I let a troll get to me. I've wasted mental bandwidth on bad TV, negativity, jealousy, and pettiness. I've written way too much about my accomplishments and too little about my failures (hence this graf).

I'm looking forward to 2013, which will be an adventure in putting down roots and building up on this year's foundations. Because I like to remember these things, here's a random list of stuff I loved in 2012:

Downton Abbey, The Sessions, Black Mirror, The Hunger Games books and film, The Good Wife, meeting Amber Benson, The President's Speech trailer, Game of Thrones, This American Life's Retraction, The Information Diet, green juice, Smooth Federation, Steve Jobs, Timehop, Travis CI, The Avengers, Gillian Anderson's non-coming-out, The Broad Experience, President Obama's admission that he supports same-sex marriage, The Oatmeal on Nikola Tesla, Community's 8-bit episode, Hands on a Hardbody: The Musical, FOO Camp, the Nexus 7, The Newsroom, Girls, Me at the Zoo, The Dark Knight Rises, and Claire Danes' Homeland cryface.

Happy New Year.

How to Make a Baby

2012-12-30T12:57:56-08:00

This article originally published in issue 2 of The Magazine.

Choosing a sperm donor is a little bit like setting up an Xbox avatar. You begin by deciding on the ethnicity, hair color, and eye color of the fellow whose sperm you’d like to combine with your egg to make your baby. Then you enter that criteria into a sperm-bank search engine, which returns a list of matching anonymous males who passed rigorous genetic tests and filled out detailed questionnaires. Finally, you pore through each donor profile, considering things like his height, weight, build, SAT scores, family medical history, sexual orientation, whether or not he has moles, the shape of his nose and mouth, and in some cases, his baby photo or voice sample.

Our sperm bank has a web-based form to search their database. As a developer, when I use tools like this, I can’t help but think about the coders behind it. Did the people who wrote this HTML really consider their end-users? Did they visualize the lesbians, the single women, the aspiring parents who had everything lined up except viable sperm? Did they imagine the tension, the hope, the bizarre feeling of picking out the genetic material to make your baby online, the same way you’d shop for computer parts?

In my web browser, I scroll down a page of search results, clicking the mouse wheel here and there to open potential donor profiles in background tabs.

My parents, devout Catholics, conceived me by accident. They agreed that they were finished having children after their third, my sister. They got rid of all of the baby clothes, the car seat, the toys, and the crib. Our family was big, the house was full, and they were happy — until seven years later, when the rhythm method failed them. News that Mom was pregnant with me was met with both joy and concern. Dad worried about space, tuition, and parenting stamina. They bought all of the baby stuff anew. Later, they’d tell the story of how I was a surprise, and I heard the undertones. They loved me so much, but my late-in-life arrival was stressful.

My wife and I have been discussing having a child for seven years. Unlike our heterosexual counterparts, the path to parenthood is not straightforward. There are several approaches, each fraught with a lengthy set of questions, and we’re paralyzed. We debate whether or not we’re ready, which one of us should carry, who our donor should be, where we would adopt from. In the meantime, our biological clocks tick and tock in tandem, louder every year. Forty looms. We either have to make a move or get a cat.

I show up at the sperm bank, credit card in hand. We’ve decided on a donor, and my wife is going to carry. She’s older than I am, so she gets first dibs. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try. Redundant uterus backup! I’ve never purchased sperm before and I’m nervous. I try not to think about the men who have come through this place, in the back rooms stocked with sterile cups and pornography.

A vial of sperm, it turns out, costs less than an iPhone. When she sees the donor code, the nurse behind the counter lights up.

“Oh! You picked a good one,” she tells me, winking. “I know him, and I really like him.” Either she’s a great salesperson, or our superior search skills unearthed a gem. I choose to believe the latter. Still, it’s weird that this stranger knows our child’s sperm donor, and we won’t.

The vials of sperm come frozen in a tank, which they roll out on a small hand truck. They tell me to keep it upright during transport. In the parking lot, I strap the tank into the passenger seat of my car with the seatbelt. Driving across town to the fertility center, we get stuck in traffic — me and the sperm that I hope will make my kid. I glance over at it. “You’ve got to swim, baby, swim!” At times like these, I feel like I’m co-starring in a bad sitcom about lesbians having kids.

Almost half a dozen attempts at artificial insemination fail. Every month is a horrible emotional roller coaster. After each procedure we leave the fertility center high on hope. Two weeks later, not pregnant, we’re crushed. I’m ready to bring in our backup uterus, but my wife wants to keep trying. Our doctor upgrades us to in vitro fertilization, which is more expensive, more invasive, and more effective. At home, my wife shoots herself up with hormones and downs prenatal vitamins. At the hospital, they extract her eggs. I’m beside myself. We ferry back and forth from the fertility center to the sperm bank to the pharmacy. I’m in awe of what a good mother my wife already is, enduring endless exams, painful injection bruises, and a collection of daily pills, always calm and without complaint. Every night, I try not to stick her in the wrong place with the needle.

The first “test tube baby” was born in 1978. I was three years old. I can’t believe that within my lifetime, a complex procedure like IVF is available to regular people (with enough savings) like my wife and me. I think about all the scientists and doctors and technologists whose lives’ work might help create my child. I try to focus on my gratitude instead of worry.

At the lab, the embryologist injects the sperm directly into my wife’s eggs.

“The embryos like it dark,” our doctor says, as the nurse dims the lights. I’m not sure how a handful of cells that have just begun to divide could possibly have a lighting preference, but I just nod. The embryologist brings our fertilized egg into the room, which she has loaded from a Petri dish into a syringe. The doctor injects our embryo into my wife. We all hold hands and have a moment of silence, willing the baby to find a place to attach, grow, and thrive.

Our baby girl was born on September 18, 2012. She looks just like my wife, which means I get to fall in love again with a new iteration of the most important person in my life.

My conception was an accident, but my daughter’s was the opposite. When she grows up, she will hear how her Moms conceived her in their minds years before she was conceived in a lab. She will find out that we went to the greatest emotional, financial, and medical lengths possible to bring her into this world. She will learn of the complicated and incredible medical technology that helped make her, and how lucky we were to have access to it.

When she understands all of that, she will be proud to be a test tube baby. She will know how much we wanted her, our precious result of a mad science experiment gone wonderfully right.

Best Launch Ever: Etta Rebecca Bailey

2012-11-17T17:11:03-08:00

My life just got its biggest upgrade yet. My daughter, Etta Rebecca Bailey, was born on September 18th. She is named after five of the most extraordinary women who have ever lived: her Aunt Loretta, Nonna Loretta, Grandma Becky, Great Granny Marcella Etta, and of course, the wonderful Etta James. After a harrowing early delivery and a week in the NICU, Moms and baby arrived home happy and healthy. In just eight weeks, Etta has already grown so much. In between naps, we're just trying to keep up with her.

I don't plan to turn this site into a mommy blog (not that there's anything wrong with that!). But my girl is already making me smarter and more thoughtful as a developer and commentator, and I do hope to write about that. Thanks to her, everything I do—from changing a diaper to planning an app release—has a new gravity to it, because it will affect and reflect on her. I'm still figuring out what that all means, but so far raising her has been the most joyful and exhausting undertaking of my life.

More blogging to come, especially once we're sleeping through the night.

Todo.txt for Android Gets Archiving, Swipe to Complete

2012-08-13T09:15:13-07:00

Just uploaded an extensive update to Todo.txt for Android to the Google Play Store! Todo.txt for Android now archives completed tasks, supports swipe-to-complete, has smarter Dropbox sync, and looks great on the Nexus 7.

Now that the app can archive tasks to done.txt, it's officially feature-complete, version 1.0. You can use it completely independent of the command line interface or any other desktop app or text editor.

Get it in the Google Play Store now:

Here's what's new and different in this version. Todo.txt for Android now:

Archives to done.txt: When you mark tasks on your todo.txt as complete, the app can automatically or manually archive them to a separate done.txt file. In settings, either tap "Archive Now" to do it manually (this is my favorite method, because seeing crossed-off items in my todo list for a little while makes me feel accomplished), or check off "Archive automatically" to make the app clear away tasks as soon as you mark them complete.
Supports swipe to complete: To quickly mark a task complete on your list, swipe your finger from left to right across it. To undo tasks that have already been completed, swipe across them from right to left.
Reduces file conflicts: The app now references Dropbox file revision tags and does more frequent background syncs to reduce file conflicts and avoid overwriting changes on Dropbox or on your device.
Automatically gets back online when your device does: We've completely rejiggered the app's off-then-back online behavior so it never gets stuck in offline mode again. When your device goes offline, Todo.txt for Android keeps working offline, and when you come back online, it automatically syncs your work back to Dropbox, no need to manually turn Work Offline off. For users who want to preserve bandwidth, there is a "Manual Sync" checkbox in Settings you can toggle on and off at will.
Looks great on the Nexus 7: The app now includes an extra high density icon for high-res devices like the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus.
Fixes project parser bug: Fixes bug where words with + in them (like URLs) used to get parsed as projects.
Gets French translation: A new French translation is now available, as well as fixes to the existing German translation.
Has fewer settings: By combining and reducing settings, the app now has 3 fewer checkboxes for users to fiddle with, and all the more reason to just get back to work.

I'm deeply grateful to the tireless contributors who make Todo.txt go, especially the people who created this release: Chuck and Florian for adding smarter syncing and done.txt support, John for creating higher density artwork, Alex for the French translation, and to all the typo-fixers and question-askers and release candidate-testers.

Read more about Todo.txt's philosophy, check out the app, and let us know what you think.

The ‘Busy’ Trap

2012-07-09T10:54:08-07:00

Link: The ‘Busy’ Trap

The NY Times' Tim Kreider's defense of idleness:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Reminded me of my all-time favorite essay on idleness, Quitting the Paint Factory.

From Amateur to Pro with PHP the Right Way

2012-07-08T18:31:48-07:00

At ThinkUp, we've produced a lot of developer documentation on how to write great PHP code, the kind of code that's worthy of acceptance into the project. But if I were to suggest a general list of PHP best practices, I could not have done a better job than Josh Lockhart's PHP (The Right Way). It's a strong collection of generic guidelines and resources, and I'm pleased to see that it describes a lot of what we do at ThinkUp.

PHP is deeply flawed, but it remains the leading "gateway" language for new web developers. Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood wants this to change. He argues that veteran developers should start actively working to end the PHP singularity. The first step, he says, is to stop using it in new projects—something even seasoned developers like Marco Arment have difficulty doing.

I applaud Atwood for kicking off an ambitious cultural shift in the web development world. Good programmers should use great tools, ideally, from the beginning. But, this is a battle I didn't choose to fight quite this way.

PHP is not the best tool to use, but I chose it for ThinkUp for two reasons. First, when you're building a webapp that users run on their servers, PHP is the only reasonable choice, because LAMP is the most widely available web server stack out there. Second, one of ThinkUp's community goals is to bring new coders into open source. PHP is the language of new web developers, so using it in ThinkUp attracts that talent pool.

Staunch anti-PHPers could say that's just perpetuating the problem of encouraging new programmers to start with bad tools. I see it as an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approach. Even in PHP, it is possible to teach new coders best practices like object-oriented programming, test-driven development, design patterns, documentation-driven development, and the importance of consistent code style. If amateur web developers want to level up to pro, a good place to start is in a language they already know.

Cross-posted to the ThinkUp blog.

How to Stop Being Paranoid About App Annie

2012-07-07T17:08:58-07:00

On our third episode of In Beta, Kevin and I discussed webapps that require you to enter your username and password to accounts that can move your money around or purchase items—namely, Mint.com and App Annie. My concern, with App Annie in particular, was that while the app promises to only use your account to read app sales data, in theory it could use your username and password to go on a shopping spree in the iTunes and/or Play Store.

Listener Steve wrote in to suggest creating secondary developer accounts to use with App Annie that don't have purchasing power. Duh! If you log into iTunes Connect, click on "Manage Users" to invite a new user and grant it access to your app's financial information. Similarly, in the Play Store Developer Console, you can also invite a read-financial-data-only account for use with App Annie. These accounts cannot purchase anything, they can only see the financial reports for your apps. Thanks to Steve for pointing this out. I hope that App Annie makes this suggestion more blatantly in its interface to assuage developer fears about sharing sensitive account credentials going forward.

That Old “Design by Committee” Chestnut

2012-06-25T20:27:30-07:00

It bugs me when technologists automatically blame subpar creative work on "design by committee." Individuals can make mediocre stuff just as easily as groups can make mediocre stuff. The effectiveness of a group doing creative work depends on whether or not there's a clear vision and strong leadership. Just because it's a group doesn't mean it's more likely to fail.

Of course, the word "committee" in "design by committee" implies that there is not a clear vision and strong leadership. When you have a group of people with those things, it's not a committee, it's a team.

Still, you rarely hear about great design by team. The myth of the lone genius, the brilliant solo auteur, persists. Lone geniuses do exist, but they're very, very rare. Even Steve Jobs had Woz and Ive.

I don't work well in groups. I work pretty well solo. I'm at my absolute best in a pair. When facing down a difficult problem, I'm likely to be my most open-minded, persistent, and creative riffing and building and even competing with the right person. In a strong pair—preferably a planner/explorer or mentor/mentee matchup—magic can happen.

I'm tired of hearing about lone geniuses and design by committee. Let's recognize more brilliant collaborations.

IFTTT Recipe for Todo.txt

2012-06-25T13:44:11-07:00

Link: IFTTT Recipe for Todo.txt

Nick Barrett's handy If This Then That recipe adds an item to the todo.txt file in your Dropbox via GChat. Clever.