August 26, 2010 Canned
A few weeks ago I called an emergency meeting at Sky Balloon HQ. The problem was I needed an app for a particular task, but all of the options available on the App Store at the time were … lacking.
I wanted a text message template app; something with which I could quickly launch, and send a text to my wife to let her know I was driving or in a meeting.
The men of the Balloon took up the cause, and today we have Canned, a light weight iPhone app for precomposed messages and pre-selected recipients.
Despite the heavy recommendations, I don’t use Simplenote on my iPhone. If I did, though, I reckon I’d love Nottingham for Mac.
If for no other reason, to launch via LaunchBar like: Command+Space > N > O > Return. ✓
Ultimate Status Bar extension for Safari looks nice. And how can you argue with “80% more unicorns”? ✓
Windows Phone 7 is looking really good. It looks like they have their own strategy for avoiding an ‘antennagate’:
that same area up top is used to show your signal, battery, and WiFi status, but it only drops down if you touch or swipe the upper part of the screen. And in some apps (like pictures) it doesn’t appear at all.
Just don’t show the bars at all! ✓
The latest article on Doxopolis, Improving the User Experience, is yet another in a string of excellent pieces about church and technology. The heart of UX is explained here:
If we’re expecting people to show up and use our application, or site, or product, we will need to understand the people we are trying to serve. Expecting them (or worse, forcing them) to use it because they’re paid staff isn’t enough; for real long-term adoption, these people will need to voluntarily use it because it serves their needs and interests. They’ll need to enjoy it. They’ll need to believe that we built it for them. The easiest way to convince them of that is to do it: build it for the people who use it.
Keep it coming, Zondervan team. ✓
This is great:
Filmmaking has just been placed in the hands of anyone who owns an Apple iPhone 4. Now it’s up to you.
—iphone4filming.com ✓
So we’re all agreed, the iPad is just for consumption, not creation, right? Someone tell this guy, because I don’t think he got the memo.
Update: Looks like Gruber beat me to linking to this, using the same wording no less. ✓
The Notes app on the iPhone is darn near perfect — and about to get a whole lot better with over the air syncing via MobileMe in iOS 4. My only gripe is the use of Marker Felt. I know I’m not alone.
There are ways to hack the Notes app to use Helvetica, but they all require SSH access, or, in other words, a jailbroken iPhone. I just discovered an easier way that doesn’t require hackery and takes just a few seconds to set up.
Open the Settings app and tap on General.
Then tap on Keyboard.
Then tap International Keyboards.
Then tap on Chinese - Simplified (Handwriting).
Now go back to your home screen and open the Notes app. Select a note, and tap anywhere to bring up the keyboard. Now tap on the International Keyboards key to bring up the character drawing interface.
Draw a line, and the font your note uses will change to Helvetica.
Tap Done. Hello, Helvetica.
The obvious drawbacks to this method are that (1) you have to repeat the last few steps for every note you edit or start, and (2) you now have another key taking up space in your keyboard, which effectively halves the size of the Number/Symbol key.
Still, Helvetica.
Some good observations for online content publishers regarding Safari Reader from Lukas Mathis:
If your users are activating Safari Reader on your site, this means that the default user experience of your site is so bad that your users first consciously notice that they have trouble reading an article on your site, then remember that they might be able to fix it using Safari Reader, and then actually activate that feature.
His suggestion:
Don’t fight Safari Reader. Instead, make it obsolete. ✓
Smart proposal from Marco Arment for a new multitasking type:
[A ‘periodic network request’] would allow Instapaper to download updates in the background, and would also greatly benefit RSS readers, Twitter clients, chat programs, weather and news widgets, and a huge number of other applications that currently can’t get much benefit from iOS’ multitasking.
I like this idea better than background notifications because it doesn’t require user interaction via a modal-type popup that interrupts everything. ✓
Why We Built Readability
Beyond just a “clean” reading view, Readability has proven invaluable for people with vision problems and cognitive difficulties. We’ve received countless emails from users thanking us for making the Web usable again for them.
Excellent. ✓