Smarterware

New Interview on Triangulation

2012-02-10T10:26:52-08:00

Had the chance to chat at length with my TWiT cohorts Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt on their interview show Triangulation this week. We covered a whole lot of territory, from poetry to code to civil rights. Thanks to them for having me on the show. Listen to it here.

New Version of Todo.txt Touch for Android Now Available

2012-02-06T09:09:22-08:00

Just pushed a new version 0.8 of Todo.txt Touch for Android, which offers a brand spanking new homescreen widget, tappable contact info, better search results, and more. Download it to your Android device now.

In addition to the new homescreen widget pictured here, this release detects email addresses and phone numbers in task text and offers a one-tap shortcut to the dialer or your device's email handler. For example, if you have a task that reads "Email joe@example.com or call 718-555-1212," when you tap on that task, the action menu looks like this. Tap on the email address to compose a message or the phone number to pre-fill your phone's dialer.

Searching todo.txt for keywords now works better, too. If you've got two tasks that read "Process pull requests" and "Request pull on project," in earlier versions if you searched for "pull request" you'd only see the first task. Instead of only displaying exact phrase matches, version 0.8 ORs your terms, so a search for "pull request" returns both tasks.

More interface improvements: when you scroll down your todo.txt file and complete or delete a task, the app remembers your scroll position and keeps you in place. This makes processing consecutive tasks easier. The filter interface has been redesigned to match the rest of the application, in white and green. See it here. Finally, thanks to the latest version of the Dropbox SDK and Android LINT, this release is more secure, more performant, and less buggy.

Thanks to all the Todo.txt community members who make Todo.txt Touch for Android happen.

Version 0.8 has been submitted to the Amazon Appstore for approval, but you can download Todo.txt Touch from the Android Market now.

Designing the Todo.txt Android Widget

2012-02-03T09:51:03-08:00

One of the most-requested features for Todo.txt Touch for Android is a homescreen widget that displays top priority tasks. Android widgets are subject to a set of even stricter visual and functional constraints than full-screen apps, so getting this feature right has been a challenge. Your smartphone's homescreen is meaningful, precious real estate, and this app's widget should treat it that way.

Visual design has never been my strength, so I decided to do this in public and learn from conversations and critiques along the way. On a late night last fall I dove into the widget's design, posting screenshots to Google+ as I went, and iterating based on the critiques and suggestions I got in the comments for each. This is a summary of the progression of that process.

First, our requirements. In priority order, the Todo.txt Android homescreen widget should:

Display a user's top 3 prioritized tasks from todo.txt.
Offer the ability to launch the fullscreen app.
Offer the ability to quickly add a new task from the widget.
Clearly communicate which app the widget is associated with, i.e., include some sort of Todo.txt branding.

Two important things to know: While 2.2 (Froyo) is shown in the screenshots, Todo.txt Touch's target SDK is Android 1.6 (Donut). I approached this using Foursquare's large widget as an example of good widget design.

Alpha 1

This was the first "it's ugly but it it works" implementation, which essentially reuses the fullscreen app's main interface.

Pros: Tasks are listed in priority order, with the right priority letter colors. The Add Task (+) button works. The widget is legible given any kind of wallpaper image, and the rounded corners and background color treatment make it look like the very useful Power Control widget.

Cons: The application logo and title take up way too much space. There's too much unused space next to the + button. The + button also gets lost in the header, and doesn't look like a tap target.

Google+ discussion

Alpha 2

Take two...

Pros: The application title no longer takes up an ungodly amount of space, and it no longer swallows up the the Add Task (+) button. Tasks appear at the top of the widget, flush with the top border, which gives them more visual priority.

Cons: If you read left to right, the application icon is the first thing you see when you look at this widget, which is not our priority. The most important information in this widget is not the application branding or UI, but the contents of the todo.txt itself. Lots of unused negative space here, especially at the bottom.

Google + discussion

Beta 1

Cooking with gas...

Pros: The top 3 items in the todo.txt are the first thing you see when you look at this widget. It has all the functionality it needs (launcher, branding, add task) while prioritizing the user's data over all else.

Cons: There's still a whole lot of unused space between the application icon and the Add Task (+) button. The widget has even more unused space if a user's tasks are not a certain length. The icon and the Add Task (+) button are unbalanced, size-wise.

Google+ discussion

Beta 2

Something worth testing on my actual phone...

Pros: All those of Beta 1, except the icon and Add Task (+) button are the same size and aligned, which is less consternating, visually.

Cons: After using this widget on my phone with my actual todo.txt for four months... Damn this is a big widget. Like the large Foursquare widget, you can't fit much more on the screen this widget appears on. Also, with short tasks, there's lots of wasted space. Wasted space annoys me, because it's a disrespectful use of my precious homescreen real estate.

Release Candidate 1

Size matters...

Pros: Takes up a lot less space on the screen, and uses the space within the widget itself more efficiently. No matter how long or short a task is, it will appear the same in this layout. Cutting off every task at the same point with the ellipsis gives each equal visual weight but still achieves the widget's information display goal; it's still obvious what each task is about. Lengthy tasks don't show up as busy wrapping walls of text.

Cons: The font here is small and may affect legibility. The tap targets are also small—perhaps too small. The + button doesn't look enough like a button. The background color feels dark and depressing.

While I think this version is good enough for v1 release, there's still more work to do. Users should have the ability to choose a light, dark, or transparent background for this widget, depending on their preference and wallpaper choice, and perhaps even a portrait layout. Those are on the roadmap.

In the meantime, a new release of Todo.txt Touch for Android, finally with a homescreen widget, ~~will be available some time next week~~ is available now.

Why I am an atheist

2012-02-02T15:36:56-08:00

Link: Why I am an atheist

The details differ, but the story arc of how Mark Jaquith became an atheist mirrors my own. Raised in a traditional Roman Catholic household, on the best days my religion bored me, on the worst, it made me feel like a terrible sinner. Every day, its contradictions and lack of fact-based logic troubled me. I felt no connection to or appreciation for the culture or community of the Church, especially its patriarchy, homophobia, and focus on sin and repentance. My parents were very religious, so I endured 12 years of Catholic school wearing a pleated plaid skirt and fearing the nuns who were my teachers. Dad was an usher, Mom a Communion minister, my brothers altar boys. In addition to Sundays, I daydreamed through morning Mass every weekday before school with Mom. I studied Latin (the only part I don't regret).

As an adult, after years of alternating between questioning and not caring, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion changed everything. Like Mark, becoming an atheist was an intensely clarifying transition for me. It was as if I put on glasses and saw the world clearly for the first time, after suffering from a severe case of myopia my entire life.

Mark's post is lengthy and not fit for the easily offended, but fully worth the read in a quiet place with an open mind.

Good Tools Have Verb-Based Interfaces

2012-02-01T21:48:07-08:00

I've switched to an iPhone as my primary mobile device because I'm dogfooding my new iOS app. Coming off of three straight years of Android, one of the toughest parts of the transition was losing the applications drawer. My new iPhone had so many screens of icons, all perfectly aligned in a grid, every one with rounded corners, all equal visual weight, nary a widget in site! I got dizzy swiping across the carousel of apps trying to find the one I needed. I decided to get all my apps onto 1 or 2 homescreens using folders that made it obvious what was where.

By default, when you drag one app onto another to create a folder, iOS suggests a folder name based on the apps' category, like "Reference", "Music," or "Productivity." I tried this for awhile, but these category names were so vague they didn't solve my problem, they just gave it a different shape. Instead of hunting for apps across homescreens, I pecked through multiple folders. ("Is Instagr.am in Photography or Social Networking?") I look at my phone's homescreen dozens of times a day, and I'm embarrassed to admit how much not getting it into a usable state bothered me.

Thinking it through, I realized this category-based naming convention just doesn't align with my basic mental construct of what software is. Organizing items by category makes sense in libraries and bookstores, on restaurant menus, in music and movies—but not apps. An app isn't consumable media. An app is a tool. It helps you perform an action, to do something. Modern programming languages and APIs are verb-based (think MyObject->setName() and and HTTP's GET and POST), and the user interface should be, too. That's when I settled on a verb-based folder system.

These tiny touchscreen mobile computers we carry around in our pockets are the ultimate multi-tool. I use my phone to read, shop, watch, listen, cook, play, navigate, share, jot, photograph, and chat, so I organized my apps just like that. The guiding question for where each app went was What do I DO with it? Here's a screenshot of my first pass at a verb-based interface using folders on my iPhone.

I've since learned how to put Newsstand into a folder, so I tucked it away in "Read." I left the four apps I use the most on the Dock for one-tap access.

Dr. Drang says I'm not going to like using folders, but after a couple of weeks and a few tweaks, I feel good about it. My brain has mapped the folder verbs I chose to the apps within much more naturally. I've since moved Instagr.am from "Photograph" to "Share" and that feels smoother than "Social Networking," which makes me think of Jesse Eisenberg. In the end it's all semantics, but simple, present-tense action verbs have a special power that all software designers should respect.

Since organizing my iPhone homescreen this way, I've been taking note of verb-based interfaces done well and not so well.

The new-new Twitter interface revolves around three verbs and two nouns: "Tweet," Connect," "Discover," "Me," and "Home." While I appreciate the attempt at a majority verb-based interface, some of the choices about what goes where aren't intuitive. For example, "Direct Messages" are not under "Connect," they're under "Me."

Virgin America airline's Red system appears on the touchscreen on the back of every seat on their airplanes. The prompt reads "What do you want to do?" and the choices are "watch," "listen," "play," "eat", "shop", and the one that breaks the one-word-verb pattern, "kids play." Expand the quick nav and nouns are listed under each verb. (Under "watch," there's "on demand movies," "foreign films," "satellite tv," etc.) Well done.

While ThinkUp's project page is verb-heavy, its user interface isn't as much as it should be. As we iterate the app, we'll do well to take some of this thinking into its future releases.

Google Going Evil is the Godwin’s Law of Tech Commentary

2012-01-30T12:44:19-08:00

Google going evil has become the Godwin’s Law of tech commentary: "As ~~an online discussion~~ tech commentary about Google grows longer, the probability of ~~a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler~~ calling it evil approaches 1." Let's move beyond the sensationalist "evil" headlines and get clear on what's actually been going on recently.

The privacy policy consolidation was not as big a deal as everyone made it out to be. The Mocality fiasco was terrible, and Google was rightly mortified. We may all agree that Search Plus Your World smacks of AOL and/or Facebook, and that perhaps Google is having its Microsoft Moment, but please stop publishing "turning evil" headlines. It's an overused, scare-mongering hook, people. Instead, criticize what you don't like about what Google's doing using specific examples, and even better, code. If you're not a coder, then just take the time to educate readers about the specific disadvantages of what Google is doing and what the alternatives to their services are really like. We'll all be a lot smarter for it.

Related: The glut of hackneyed zingers about how Android isn't really "open."

One Year at My Standing Desk

2012-01-23T14:20:11-08:00

Last January I took apart my computer desk and rebuilt it at standing height. I've been standing at my desk every workday since. Just in my 2011 travels, I've seen standing desks everywhere from the offices of San Francisco startups to the White House.

Over the past 12 months, standing desks went from popular life hacks meme to eyeroll-inducing sign of a certain type of tightly-wound techie, similar to emptying your email inbox. Several people have asked me if I'm still standing. The answer is yes. Here's what I've learned from 365 days of being a professional stander.

Sitting is essential

My typical workday starts around 8 or 9am and wraps around 5 or 6pm. I don't stand the entire time. I stand all morning till lunchtime, and then stand again for a couple of hours after lunch. By 3 or 4pm, fatigue sets in, and my feet need a break. That's when I sit down at a small table I set up in my office or, if I want to put my feet up, push back in an old recliner I commandeered. I also sit at lunch, often sit during conference calls and TWiG, and sit to do paperwork or work on my iPad.

The point is: a standing desk doesn't mean you're standing for 8 hours a day straight. That's just not healthy. For me, standing a few hours a day has had its benefits and drawbacks.

The upsides of a standing desk

My back feels great. My posture is better than ever. My default work position is standing on flat feet, with my shoulders back, and my back slightly arched. I have a makeshift foot rest (a box of unsold books), and I often shift from one foot to another when my knees feel stiff. I lost 3-5 pounds in the first couple of weeks from standing alone. I'm way more active throughout the day, pacing, dancing, fidgeting. Because I'm used to standing all day at work, standing in line anywhere for long periods of time on weekends doesn't bother me in the least.

Thanks to my standing desk, I began naturally splitting activities up into active work (while standing) and passive work (while sitting). Since my legs and brain are fresh in the morning, I start my day by diving into the most effort-intensive work first, like coding and writing. By the afternoon I'm fatigued and ready to sit, so I use that time to process email, read Instapaper, catch up on Twitter and Facebook. Explicitly shifting gears like that helps my brain tackle the right kind of work given my physical and mental capacity at the moment.

The downsides of a standing desk

Ever since I got used to standing all day, sitting for long periods of time became uncomfortable for me. By the end of cross-country flights and even long movies, my back and backside feel stiff and achy. In the past 12 months I developed a silver dollar-sized case of spider veins on my right calf, just below my knee joint. It's not sexy. These are common for women my age, and both my parents had them, so it's difficult to say if I would have gotten these without the standing desk. Excessive standing (and sitting) are both known causes of spider veins.

The fatigue of a standing workday makes getting to the gym at the end of the day more difficult for me. When I was sitting all day, I'd feel so sluggish and sedentary I'd look forward to getting sweaty and exerting myself at the gym. At the end of a standing workday, you just want to sit down. For me, the gym has to happen in the morning, or it doesn't happen at all. While my daily calorie burn is definitely higher at the standing desk compared to sitting, standing at your desk is not a replacement for a good workout at the gym.

Finally, I work at home, alone in a room. Several people have told me that they don't want to be at the one standing desk in a sea of sitters at their office. I understand that. I'm not sure I'd pull this off in an office where I was surrounded by sitting co-workers and didn't have the luxury of two desks, one sitting, one standing.

That all said, once I got past the first couple of weeks, I haven't once considered switching back to a sitting desk full-time. Honestly, I barely give it a thought at all anymore. If you're considering it, here's how and why I switched to a standing desk.

The Week We Stopped SOPA

2012-01-20T16:38:57-08:00

Anil sums up the history and future of web protest as we wrap up the week we stopped SOPA. I had chills on Wednesday, the day the web went black in protest of SOPA, because we were all witnessing—and more importantly, participating in—history in the making. I'm so very glad to be alive during these exciting times.

The Flip Side of a Big Audience

2012-01-13T13:56:41-08:00

"Bloggers are famous enough to have stalkers, but not famous enough to have bodyguards." —Danny O'Brien

Everyone thinks they want a million Twitter followers and a million pageviews a day on their blog and the incredible high that it must be to walk around in the world knowing you're "internet famous." Yes, being famous among dozens has its privileges, but it also has a flip side netizens rarely discuss.

I passed 200,000 followers on Twitter this week. I'm not a celebrity. I've written books and made apps, but I've never been on primetime TV and I wasn't on Twitter's suggested user list during its heyday. I am an early adopter, a dedicated self-promoter, a daily user, and a leader in two large internet communities. All these things translated into an outsized follower count on both Twitter and Google+. Nowadays, when someone notices my follower count—and many people do, because it's a status symbol which indicates which echelon of web society you belong to—they get wide-eyed. "Wow, you're famous," they say.

Reality check: Lady Gaga is famous. Bloggers are not famous.

I'm not famous, but I have an outsized audience. I can ask a question and get hundreds of replies, reshares, and favorites in a matter of hours. If I want a lot of people to see something, I can make that happen in a few keystrokes without any help from a PR firm or media outlet. I've mentioned my follower counts and blog stats in book deal and paycheck negotiations, because people who hire me are often buying my ability to market my book or project.

But you know what else happens when you have an outsized audience?

You field a weekly flood of pitches.

Having a big audience means you're a commodity, and you get to constantly field pitches from strangers, acquaintances, former co-workers, and distant family members who you never hear from otherwise asking you to mention their new app, book, Kickstarter project, or MySpace page. People decide how important you are by your Klout score and treat you accordingly. Ad agencies look up how much your tweets are worth and recruit you to tweet on behalf of their clients for money. It's a bizarre and sometimes awkward crash course in saying "sorry, no" to the requests that just don't feel right (and most of them don't).

People who don't know you make wildly inaccurate assumptions about things you say.

If you crack a joke, use sarcasm, or don't fully explain your 140-character statement, you will be misunderstood, because most of your followers barely know you. Last week I said I have mixed feelings about lesbian contestants in a beauty pageant. A handful of people tried to explain why lesbians are just as worthy of beauty pageants as heterosexual women. Having to explain stinks.

You forget how to share with people who do know you.

To avoid misunderstandings, you start dumbing down your posts and only writing things which are literal and mostly non-controversial. (At least I do.) But that means your friends don't enjoy the connection that comes with hearing you be you, instead of edited-you. In an attempt to fix this problem, I set my Facebook user profile to friends-only access. But by now I'm so ruined by my addiction to the flood of retweets, favorites, and replies I get from public posts to my big audience, I spend less time sharing privately.

You get addicted to the approval of strangers.

The addiction to the attention you get from a crowd of strangers turns you into a performer instead of a sharer. You look for cheap laughs, stars, retweets, and replies, instead of meaningful conversation with people you actually care about.

Your view of the world gets skewed.

An outsized audience presents problems like the ones listed here that no one else has. When you have a big audience, you're the 1% of the web, and that means your view of the world is skewed. You get paranoid about privacy, cynical about requests from friends, and impatient about misunderstandings. I spent two years building an app that helps people organize and archive hundreds of tweet replies, solving a problem that basically no one else has.

You're a spam magnet and a troll target.

Like mosquitoes to a lightbulb at night, high visibility attracts spammers. Seven percent of the comments I receive on a given post on Google+ can be spam. Seven percent! Not to mention the daily trolling, harassment, and for women, weekly messages from men who feel the need to share their opinion on your physical appearance.

At this point you're wondering, If having a big audience is so bad, why not just shut down your accounts and start fresh under an unknown pseudonym? On more than one occasion, I've considered burning it all down and going back to using these tools for their intended purpose: as a way to keep up with friends.

But ultimately the advantages of an outsized audience outweigh the crappy parts for me. Even when I have a job that pays a salary, I work with a freelancer's mind-set. Employers, projects, and clients will come and go, but I've created an online network under my own name that's helped me a lot more than it's hindered me.

Still, when someone tells me they want more Twitter followers and a highly-trafficked blog and the ability to reach so many people so easily, I usually say, "Be careful what you wish for."

Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail

2012-01-12T10:35:22-08:00

If you're sending Gmail messages from anywhere other than Gmail itself, they may look like they're phishing attempts. Up until today, whenever I sent messages using my Google Apps account with the From: address set to my vanilla Gmail address, my Gmail-using recipients got an alarming, bright red message at the top which said "This message may not have been sent by [who it appears to be from]. Learn more Report phishing." Make sure this doesn't happen to you.

Senders: If messages from your Gmail address look like phishing

If you're sending email with the From: field set to your Gmail email address (that is, username@gmail.com or username@googlemail.com) from any client other than Gmail itself, use Gmail's SMTP servers to send the mail.

The process for setting your email software to use Gmail's SMTP server will vary depending on what email client you're using. If you're like me and using another Gmail or Google Apps account to send custom From: address Gmail, here's how to set the SMTP server.

In your primary Google Apps/Gmail account where you actually send messages from, in Settings > Accounts > Send mail as, click on "edit info" next to your custom Gmail From: address.

Double-check your name and email address listed there, and click on the "Next Step" button. On the "Send mail through your SMTP server?" step, don't use the default SMTP server. Instead, check the "Send through gmail.com SMTP servers" option, and enter your Gmail username and password for the account you want to send From.

If you're using Google's two-step verification for your Gmail account (and you should be), you'll need to generate an application-specific password for the SMTP server use. Click on the "Save Changes" and you're done. Your messages will no longer look like they are phishing attempts.

Senders: If messages from your Google Apps address look like phishing

If messages from your Google Apps domain name are getting the red phishing warning, you've got to tweak a DNS setting to fix it. In short, you've got to add a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record to your domain which verifies that Google Apps' mail servers are authorized to send your messages on your domain's behalf. The exact process for doing this depends on where you registered and administer your domain, but Google Apps Support runs down the general steps to create an SPF record for a domain:

1. Log in to the administrative console for your domain.

2. Locate the page from which you can update the DNS records. You may need to enable advanced settings.

3. Create a TXT record containing this text: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

4. Save your changes. Keep in mind that changes to DNS records may take up to 48 hours to propagate throughout the Internet.

If it's not clear where or how to add an SPF record for your domain, get in touch with your domain registrar support to find out how.

Recipients: If your friends' messages look like phishing

Gmail's phishing alert on messages that look like they came from unauthorized SMTP servers helps recipients identify email scams, but it stinks for senders for using custom From: addresses legitimately, because they don't know it's happening. The only way I knew it was happening to my email is because Adam told me it was!

So, if you're getting this phishing alert on friends' or co-workers' messages that you know are legit, send them a link to this article or to Google's Support page on the subject. They'll appreciate it.

Why am I seeing the error "This message may not have been sent by...."? [Gmail Help]