Month: July 2013

Gadgets and Moving Targets

What’s my wish for the next iPhone?

I often think about what I use my gadgets for and try to imagine how they could serve me better. But usually I come back to how all I really want is do better creative work every day.

This is one of the moving targets of my life.

It’s the same moving target all makers have. Regardless of our profession or the tools we use, we all just want to get better at doing better.

While my tools do help me accomplish certain things faster and more efficiently — leaving time for me to do other things — they can’t actually do my creative work for me.

Naturally I want the best tools for the job. And I want something faster, thinner, lighter, and cheaper just as much as the next guy.

But tools do not a craftsman make. If what I have right now isn’t enough, then neither will be what I get next.

Gadgets and Moving Targets

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My thanks to HostGator for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Sponsor: HostGator

Shawn Today, Episode 400

Today marks episode 400 of my members-only podcast, Shawn Today.

It’s a good milestone to do something fun, so I thought I’d mix things up from my usual 7-minute show. For one, I’m posting today’s episode here for everyone to listen to. Secondly, I asked my good friend Ben Brooks to be the first-ever guest on the show.

Ben and I talk about iOS 7, the march of technology and our resistance to it at first followed by our love for it later, valuing down time and letting our minds rest, and other fun miscellany.

Download the MP3 (15.7 MB; 43:19)

Links:

A huge thanks to all for your support of the site!

Shawn Today, Episode 400

The Fourth Agenda

Today, Agenda 4 is out. It’s a calendar app for the iPhone and it’s awesome.

The core of Agenda is its gesture-based navigation — something that has gone pretty much unchanged since version 1.0. This navigation style makes it so easy to quickly get between the different calendar views. And once iOS 7 makes its debut this fall, we’ll be pining for gesture-based navigation even more.

Agenda’s “left-most” calendar view shows a high-level look, displaying a traditional calendar view with visibility into 6 months at a time. The “center” view is a one-month calendar with view of today’s events. The right-most view is a running list of all your events in chronological order, with dividers separating each day.

My preferred calendar view is the right-most pane in Agenda: the running list. At a glance I can usually see a quick overview of what I’ve got going on today, tomorrow, and maybe even the next day. And I can quickly scroll down the list to see future events, or scroll up the list to see past events.

But, when setting up an appointment, my visual-thinking brain usually wants to see on a traditional calendar where a date lands. Which is why I love that I can quickly swipe over to the month view and see a particular date, or range of dates, in context to the week and month they’re in.

What’s new in Agenda 4?

I’m glad you asked. For one, the app has a brand-new icon and a fresh coat of interior paint. Giving it a nice iOS 7 vibe that will make it feel right at home this fall.

Also new are some options for how you can create new events. In the settings pane you can chose your preferred method for entering a new event. Agenda gives you 4 options:

  • The new “Agenda Mini” pane which lets you type in the name of an event and then quickly select a start and stop time.
  • The Agenda expanded pane which is an improved version of Agenda’s traditional event creation pane. This view lets you pick different alarm times, add notes, adjust which calendar the event belongs to, and more.
  • The default iOS event entry card.
  • And a text box which you can type in natural language and then send to Fantastical. Using URL-schemes, your text is opened in Fantastical, you can then adjust if you need to, and once the event is added you’re sent back to Agenda 4.

At first consideration, all these event entry options may seem like overkill. But a large part of what makes or breaks a calendar app for people is how it handles event creation. Everyone has different need and different taste when it comes to viewing their calendar and adding events.

I for one never liked Agenda’s previous event creation view. Which is why I would often use Siri or Fantastical to create a new event.

However, the new “Agenda Mini” pane for creating a new event is excellent. Since almost all of my events exist on just one calendar, and a default alarm of 15-minutes works well for me, this quick-entry pane is a breeze to use.

Agenda 4 is two bucks in the App Store, and is a paid upgrade for existing Agenda users.

This app has been my primary iPhone calendar app since the day it launched as a 1.0 back in the summer of 2011, and it just keeps getting better. Which is why, two years later, it continues its reign as the calendar app sitting on my home screen.

The Fourth Agenda

Backblaze 2.3  →

Nice update to the Backblaze app that runs on your Mac (or Windows) machine. It take advantage of your computer’s SSD, assuming you’ve got one, to increase indexing and backup performance. Thing is it’s a manual download and install — you have to grab the Disk Image from here and run the installer yourself.

Backblaze 2.3

“Details a Great Designer Maketh”  →

This afternoon I was interviewing Cameron Moll as part of my upcoming audio book, Delight is in the Details.

During the pre-show conversation we were talking about his old weblog, Authentic Boredom, and Cameron mentioned that he’d been reading an article of his from 2004(!):

If there’s one thing I’ve repeated over the course of my career more than anything else, it’s this simple philosophy: If you have time and talent to care for the smaller details, it almost always means you’ve already cared for the bigger details.

Agreed. Moreover, I would also say details a great product maketh. All the little touches which often go unnoticed, add up to collectively turn something which is pretty good into something fantastic.

“Details a Great Designer Maketh”

Human Authenticity  →

David Barnard:

Many have touted iOS 7 as Apple’s break from skeuomorphism, and that’s true if we apply its strictest definition, but in iOS 7 Apple chose to double down on physicality and the use of real world metaphors. Creating a physics engine for the user interface is most certainly not digital authenticity.

Human Authenticity

Cloud.typography vs. Typekit  →

Chris Bowler wrote a nice overview of the main differences between Typekit and H&FJ’s Cloud.tyography web font service.

I’ve been using Typekit for quite a while to serve up Warnock Pro and Proxima Nova here, and Proxima Nova Condensed and Chaparral Pro on Tools & Toys.

Among my pals on the web, so far Ben Brooks is the only one I know of who has switched from Typekit to Cloud.typography.

Typekit’s pricing is very affordable and the service has been fast and reliable over the years. But Cloud.typography’s Screensmart fonts are a brilliant innovation. And I have a new website project in the pen-and-paper stages right now, which I’m already imagining in Whitney.

As a nerdy sidebar, I use a dns-prefetch link at the very top of my site’s header to help speed up the process of the user’s browser having to downloading the typefaces from Typekit’s servers:

<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="http://use.typekit.com">

 

Cloud.typography vs. Typekit

Here’s to the Future

Recently I was talking with a friend who was considering deleting his weblog and starting all over. Tossing his archives into the trash, changing the domain, and re-focusing on the sort of writing that he most wants to do.

His premise was that a new domain and new “brand” would help set the tone for the new voice he wants to write with. And that by trashing his archives of the work he’s written so far, there will be nothing on his new site which he’s embarrassed about. Nothing juvenile or off topic.

I told him he was being silly and then linked him to this article by Zeldman where he writes: “If your old work doesn’t shame you, you’re not growing.”

Looking back at past work and cringing means you’ve grown since then. (Thank goodness!)

I read through my old software reviews and interviews from time to time and though I’m still very proud of them, I also cringe at my massive lack of a grammatical style and my goofy tone.

And then there’s the super-random posts from when I first started writing here. Like my article about mullets (really, Shawn?). I could take them out because they’re pretty off-topic with the now-established nerdy tone of shawnblanc.net, but I leave them in there because they are a part of this site’s history and who reads the archives anyways?

The desire to “start fresh” and get rid of all your old work so that nothing in your archives is of any embarrassment is to assume that your best work is now at a plateau and that you’ll never move to a different interest or topic to write about.

If you think you’ve reached a point where you can create work that never makes you cringe again, then you’re saying that what you do today will be just as good as what you do next month, next year, and in 5 years from now.

And, well, that’s just not fair to your future self.

Here’s to the Future

The Curse Of Expectation  →

John Carey wrote an excellent post which continues the conversation from my Flickr and Instagram article:

I can not stress how important it is not to let the pressure of posting a photo only to have no one pay it any attention stop you from enjoying what you do.

Agreed. John brings some excellent and thoughtful perspective to this whole conversation, and I love it.

It’s great to hear John’s thoughts on the current state of social networks, faves, likes, comments, page views, and how it all relates to the art and craft of photography. His photographs have been a very positive influence on my own work as I’ve been learning what my own photographic “style” and “voice” are over the past several months shooting with the E-PL5.

I fear my article last Friday came across as to negative and/or self-centered. And for that I am bummed. I am loving shooting with my Olympus, editing in Lightroom, and then seeing the finished product. Photography has become a very enjoyable and rewarding hobby for me over the past several months.

My intent isn’t to communicate that I’m sad as a photographer because I don’t see enough activity on my Flickr shots. Nor do I want to communicate that I dislike Flickr.

The point I am hoping to communicate is that I don’t feel Flickr to be the ideal “final resting place” for my best and favorite photos. The network is great, and I will continue to use it — but I am not satisfied with it alone.

The Curse Of Expectation

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Sponsor: Digg Reader

Flickr and Instagram

It’s been about 9 months since I bought my Olympus E-PL5, and there is still one thing I’m not satisfied with. That is the final step of my photography workflow: posting and sharing pictures.

It was my iPhone that led me to buy a better camera. Nearly all of my “best” and “favorite” shots over the past 9 months have been taken with the Olympus and now reside on my Flickr page. The iPhone, however, is still the clear winner when it comes to sharing and enjoying photographs and moments between friends and family. Primarily this happens through Instagram and iMessage — it’s easy and it’s where everyone already is.

My iPhone photography “workflow” looks mostly like this: Snap a picture → launch VSCO or Instagram → import the image → apply a filter → maybe also apply a blur → share on Instagram → get several “hearts” and maybe a comment or two.

My Olympus photography workflow looks something like this: Snap pictures → import from SD card into Lightroom 4 → delete the blurry ones → pick out my favorites from the bunch → make edits and adjustments → upload to Flickr → cricket noises.

From an artistic standpoint, I am far more satisfied and excited about the photographs I’m taking with the Olympus.

Shots like this one of Noah and Anna reading or this picture of my iPhone taking a picture of Moscone are just two examples of some really great photographs I’ve gotten with my Olympus over the past 9 months.

And I want to share these photographs with people. I am proud of them and I enjoy looking at them, and I want others to see them and appreciate them as well. But unless one of my Flickr images makes it onto Explore (which has happened twice), I get very little feedback or activity.

On Flickr I have 885 contacts following me. On Instagram I have 2,235. Yet my Instagram photos get far more than just 2.5 times the activity than my Flickr photos.

Here’s a shot I posted to Flickr on June 30. As of this writing the photo has been up for 2 weeks and has received 7 Faves and 1 comment. Which is already more than most of my photos on Flickr gets.

As a little experiment, this morning, while writing this article, I posted that same image to Instagram (which is totally cheating, I know). Within 10 minutes it had the same number of likes as its 2-week-old Flickr counterpart, and within 5 hours it had nearly 8 times the “likes” (55) and thrice as many comments (3).

In short, my Instagram snapshots spark far more feedback, interaction, and conversation than my Flickr photos do. And I bet anyone reading this who has an Instagram and a Flickr account would say the same thing.

The conundrum, for me, at least, is that my Flickr photos — my best photos and the ones I am most proud of — are the shots I want to share with people so we can both appreciate them together. These are the ones I most want conversations to spark around, and yet these are the ones which get the least interaction.

One of my favorite parts of editing through a batch of images is at the end. I’ll ask Anna if she wants to come into the office and see all the best shots (usually they’re mostly pictures of Noah). I enjoy looking over the pictures with Anna because it brings a feeling of satisfaction to my photographic work. I feel closure when an image I’ve taken receives feedback and/or accolades from others (especially friends and family members).

Which is why I feel a bit of pain right now as a hobbyist photographer. My best photos all go to Flickr, yet they sit there, unnoticed, slowly collecting imaginary dust.

Fortunately, Flickr has been doing much to increase the vibrancy of their network. Last December they released a awesome update to their iPhone app. And a few months ago they redesigned their website and added new pricing structures.

Though the activity and interaction of Flickr’s network has clearly grown at least a little bit, it hasn’t grown that much (at least from where I’m shooting in my small corner of the network). It’s been an uphill battle.

After the new version of the Flickr iPhone app shipped, Khoi Vinh wrote about Flickr’s long road back to relevancy:

[Flickr is] not just an additional place to post photos, but a different kind of venue for different kinds of expressions and interactions. In fact, it’s a reminder that competition, when it is robust, directly translates into added functionality at the consumer’s disposal.

I agree. Flickr doesn’t need to replace or clone Instagram. But if Flickr is where we’re posting our “best” and “favorite” photos, it can be anticlimactic when those photos go mostly unnoticed and unappreciated.

In short, the activity I see on Flickr is disproportionate compared to that of Instagram when I compare the quality of the images on the two networks.

There are, of course, other outlets I have for my favorite photographs. Around our house we have several picture frames, and every few months we’ll swap out the photos with new prints from Shutterfly. And Apple’s photo book proved to be a fantastic Christmas gift for parents and grandparents last year that we’ll no doubt do again.

While those are both extremely satisfying final steps to my photography, they only consist of a fraction of the photos I shoot throughout the year. I’ve considered building my own website where I can post my favorite images, but I’m not sure that’s the answer either.

At the end of the day, Flickr is the only place I’ve got to put my best photographic work. But it doesn’t feel like the right place. As much as I love the service, it’s just not cutting it. And I suspect I’m not alone.

Flickr and Instagram