Sponsor: TextExpander  →

The new TextExpander 4 from Smile dramatically increases the options for automating your work with advanced “fill-in” snippet types. They are great for creating form letter templates that can be personalized on the fly. Check out the

(http://syndicateads.net/s/u) and see the new multi-line text fields, multiple choice popups, and optional text blocks in action.

Registered TextExpander users can upgrade for $15. (There’s no charge for the upgrade if you purchased after January 15, 2012.)

Still haven’t tried TextExpander? Download the free demo! There’s even a new Snippet Creation Snippet to get you started.

My thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote TextExpander. This is one of those apps that I’m handicapped on my Mac without. I use TextExpander not just for expanding text but also for fixing common typos, making sure I spell certain people’s names right, powering through emails more efficiently, properly capitalizing certain product names, pasting code, and a whole, whole lot more. They shipped a big update few weeks ago and it’s definitely worth checking out.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

Sponsor: TextExpander

Update Regarding the “Death” of Pageviews as a Metric  →

On Friday I wrote this sentence:

Metrics like pageviews and subscriber counts are a cheap and dying metric.

Re-reading it, it sounds to me like a sensational exaggeration. And that was not my intention. I apologize for that.

My intention was to try and convey that the ratio of pageviews to engaged readers is not as high as it once was.

Perhaps a better analogy would have been to relate pageviews to economic inflation. As pageviews become more common, their overall value decreases. Just as a dollar today doesn’t buy what it used to, so too a pageview isn’t necessarily worth what it used to be.

Update Regarding the “Death” of Pageviews as a Metric

Why Links Matter  →

Mathew Ingram:

One reason people often give for the failure to link (or the “hiding” of links at the bottom of an article, for which some have criticized outlets like The Verge) is that the financial model for digital media — that is, advertising — relies on pageviews, and one of the ways to juice those numbers is to pretend that you broke a story. But whether this inflates reader numbers in the short term, it ultimately depreciates the value of the blog that does it, and that leads to a loss of trust — and trust is far more important than pretending you have a scoop, the half-life of which is now measured in minutes.

Metrics like pageviews and subscriber counts are a cheap and dying metric. As the global user base of the Internet grows, and as more and more millions of people use internet-connected phones we’re finding that 100,000 pageviews today is not the same as 100,000 pageviews was yesterday. The truest metric of a website’s value is found in the amount of trust, attention, and influence it has. But you cannot easily quantify trust, and so most business models are still predominantly based on pageviews.

Marco Arment recently gave a way to help spot a website that is aiming for a business model based on trust versus one based on pageviews:

If you’re truly providing value, you should have the confidence to send your audience away, knowing that they’ll come back to you.

Update: I want to clarify what I mean by pageviews being a cheap and dying metric. Re-reading that statement, it sounds to me like an exaggeration, and that is not what I meant. My apologies for that.

My intention is to try and communicate that the ratio of pageviews to engaged readers is not as high as it once was, and it will continue declining as social networks and active Web users continue to grow.

Perhaps a better analogy is to relate the value of pageviews to economic inflation. As pageviews become more common, their overall value decreases. Just as a dollar today doesn’t buy what it used to, so too a pageview isn’t necessarily worth what it used to be.

Why Links Matter

Apple’s Most Upgradable Laptop  →

With all the hubbub about the non-upgradability and user-fixable parts of Apple’s latest products, Thomas Brand looks back to the 1998 PowerBook G3, codenamed “Wallstreet”, Apple’s most upgradable and “future proof” laptop:

In addition to all of the available built-to-order options, the Wallstreet also offered an impressive array of expandability. The PowerBook G3 Series included two hot swappable docking bays on either side. The left hand bay could accommodate a battery, a 3.5” floppy disk, a Iomega Zip drive, a third-party magnetic optical drive, or even a secondary hard drive. The right hand bay was larger and could accommodate all of the above plus a full size 5.25” optical drive. A small internal nickel-cadmium battery allowed swapping of the main batteries while the computer “slept,” and with two batteries installed at the same time the PowerBook G3 Series could last up to seven hours on a single charge. A maximum of 4 MBs of graphics memory limited the PowerBook G3 Series’ 3D performance, but an optional PCMCIA hardware controller made the Wallstreet the first Apple portable capable of DVD playback.

Sounds like the sorts of machines we now like to make fun of.

Apple’s Most Upgradable Laptop

My Socks Would be Buttery  →

It’s good to be back, and this week’s show was fun. My wife even says so (she always sits upstairs with Noah and listens to the live broadcast). Ben and I talked about several things including writing reviews of beta apps, using Checkmark and how it works alongside other reminder apps on the iPhone, and Belkin’s new WeMo device.

My Socks Would be Buttery

Review: Checkmark for iPhone

Checkmark is an upcoming reminders app for the iPhone. And it is awesome.

For some folks, Apple’s default apps are not powerful enough or feel absent of features. As such, many 3rd-party devs have made a name and a living for themselves by building “pro” versions of the apps that already ship on the iPhone. A few examples:

And now: Reminders → Checkmark

Apple’s Reminders app is relatively simple. Your to-do items (a.k.a. reminders) can be viewed based on the list they are in or the date they are due. These to-dos can be triggered to go off at a particular time or when leaving or arriving at a particular location. Or they can have no trigger and simply be an item which needs to be done.

For me, the Reminders app on my iPhone has but one interface: Siri. Though my go-to to-do app is OmniFocus there are often times when setting a quick and simple reminder via Siri is easier.1 Especially when those reminders are location based, such as: “Remind me to swing by the post office and buy stamps when I leave here.” Or: “Remind me to take out the trash when I get home.”

There are, however, two quibbles I have with Siri and Reminders:

  • Oftentimes I am in a situation where I can’t or don’t want to use Siri. But setting a location-based reminder manually is a surprisingly arduous task. And if it’s for a location other than my current one, then there is much scrolling to find the entry in my contacts list. Not to mention, if the location is not already in my list of contacts then I cannot add a reminder to trigger based on that place.
  • Once a reminder for another location is set, Siri often proves to be unreliable at reminding me. For example, in my contacts I have cards for my local Walmart and Lowe’s, but asking Siri to remind me to buy batteries when I get to Walmart does not always work. The next time I go to Walmart it’s hit or miss that the reminder will actually trigger (why this is, I do not know).

Like Reminders+

Checkmark solves the aforementioned Siri and Reminder shortcomings and then some.

In terms of reliability and ease of use, Checkmark beats the built-in Reminders app in several areas (especially if you are manually tapping in a time or location-based reminder — Checkmark is leaps and bounds faster at this). And, as mentioned above, on more than one occasion the built-in Reminders app has failed to trigger a location-based reminder. With Checkmark, not a single one of my reminders have failed to trigger.

Checkmark’s biggest downside is its current inability to work with Siri.2 Of course Siri and the Reminders app have a few downsides of their own. And so I find myself using a combination of both apps.

What I’m using Siri for:

  • Quick reminders based on “here”. It’s easiest to let the iPhone set a quick geofence around wherever I am and then remind me of something when I leave that fence (“remind me to swing by the grocery store and pick up a gallon of milk when I leave here”).

  • Trivial, time-based reminders (“remind me to check the brisket in 45 minutes”).

What I’m using Checkmark for:

Where Checkmark truly shines is with location-based reminders that trigger on arrival. It’s fast and totally reliable.

This is something that Siri should be able to do, but in practice I’ve found her to be unreliable at reminding me to get AAA batteries next time I’m at Walmart. Which is one reason I’ve found Checkmark to be far superior to the built-in Reminders app for these types of reminders.

When you launch the app there is a “home screen” with icons for each of your saved locations. I have 7 commonly-visited places set up in Checkmark.

Checkmark's Home Screen

Tapping on a pre-saved location takes you to the list of reminders which are set to trigger around that place. From there you can tap to add a reminder. Checkmark gives you options to trigger the reminder or arrival or departure and even to time-delay it.

Checkmark: Add a Reminder

It takes a whopping three taps (one of which is launching the app) to get to the screen for adding a new location-based reminder. Put simply: Checkmark is fast. I use it for all my location-based reminders. I only wish I could set a repeating location-based reminder (such as one that reminded me every time I went to the bank to log the miles in Trip Cubby).

Also notable is Checkmark’s conservative battery usage. Nearly all location-based apps that I try seem to drain my battery like its their job. But I have no qualms letting Checkmark run in the background.

On top of its reliability and ease of use is a pixel-perfect design. Checkmark is, in this writer’s opinion, of the best kind of apps: thoughtful, useful, and attractive.

  1. OmniFocus for iPhone has the clever ability to look at the items in your Reminders list and add them to your OmniFocus inbox. Thus, enabling you to add items to OmniFocus using Siri. You can set this up in OmniFocus’s settings. ↵
  2. Ryan Cash, one of the guys behind Checkmark, told me they are working on the best way to integrate the app with Siri. ↵
Review: Checkmark for iPhone

On Time Management  →

Shawn Adrian:

Every time you say no to spending your time one way, you’re saying yes to spending it a different way.

I couldn’t agree more. One of my favorite quotes about time management is from Robert Louis Stevenson: “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

It’s why I started limiting my time spent doing email rather than continually aiming for an empty inbox.

(Via Chris Bowler.)

On Time Management

Andrew Kim’s Microsoft Brand Update Experiment  →

Andrew Kim:

I decided that Microsoft needs to be a brand that represents the future. Be slightly aggressive unlike Apple and Google’s friendly marketing. Promise to deliver the future today. Be almost science fiction.

It’s a well-done brand proposal and I like Andrew’s premise that Microsoft could use some edge to their brand to accompany their aggressive new hardware/software plans.

Andrew Kim’s Microsoft Brand Update Experiment

Review: Tiny Tower

Rarely do I play games on my iPhone. Over the past four years I can think of only a handful that I’ve played for longer than a few minutes: Orbital, Frenzic, Horror Vacui, and Mage Gauntlet.1 Last week while vacationing in Colorado I decided to give Tiny Tower a try.

Tiny Tower came out over a year ago. It was picked by Apple as the 2011 iPhone Game of the Year, and it has a 4.5-star average rating based on 285,000 ratings. Needless to say, it’s incredibly popular. Chances are you’ve played it.

Anyone who has played Tiny Tower knows it requires no skill or strategy. So long as you check in on the game (or let its push notifications alert you) then you can’t help but progress. There is no goal other than to keep building. And there is very little strategy other than to give your Bitizens a place to work (preferably based on their skill sets).

More or less, Tiny Tower is a digital ant farm.

Anyone can build a gloriously tall tiny tower, it’s just a matter of how long it will take — because the only thing working against you in the game is time. The game requires you to wait a certain period of time between building a new level and opening it for business. You also have to wait for the inventory in your stores to be re-stocked. Even the elevator moves painfully slow if you’re delivering someone beyond the first few floors.

Time, however, can be “traded” for Tower Bux. Or, as we say in the real world, time is money. And the more time you spend in the game the more likely you are to earn a Tower Bux here or there.

  • Spend time manning the elevator and you’ll occasionally get tipped a Tower Bux.
  • Spend time helping a visitor find someone in the tower and they’ll give you a Tower Bux for your time.
  • After you’ve earned enough coins to build a new level you get a Tower Bux as a bonus.
  • If a store is completely stocked you sometimes get a Tower Bux bonus.

Tower Bux can be spent to speed along the game play. You can use your Tower Bux to:

  • speed up the re-stocking process;
  • buy a faster elevator;
  • advertise open apartments and get renters in sooner;
  • speed up construction of a new level; and/or
  • upgrade the amount of inventory a store can hold, allowing it to go longer before needing to be restocked.

The taller your tiny tower gets the longer new levels take to build. And though you’re earning coins faster due to a higher number of shops being open for business, Tower Bux are accumulated very slowly no matter how far you progress in the game. Thus, the longer you play, the more you feel the pain of time with no way of beating it… 2

Or you can cheat. You can use real-life money to load up on Tower Bux via an In App Purchase. $0.99 gets you 10 Tower Bux; $4.99 gets you 100; and $29.99 gets 1,000.

Early on I resolved not to buy any Tower Bux (it seemed like buying cheat codes). It took me two and a half days to organically earn 25 Tower Bux so I could buy a faster elevator. The next elevator upgrade cost 75 Tower Bux. At my current rate that’s at least a week away.

I can’t help but feel that the whole point of Tiny Tower is to bore me or frustrate me to the point of spending real dollars to buy Tower Bux in order to speed up the game play. As cute and clever as Tiny Tower may be, I prefer games with a strategy and a goal.

  1. Which one of these is not like the other? ↵
  2. There are 40 different missions you can complete in order to earn Tower Bux as a reward. However, after a week of play I’ve built a 17-level tower and yet I still only have the proper stores to complete 1 of the 40 missions. Since you cannot chose the actual stores that get built (only the category) the missions are at the mercy of the game itself. ↵
Review: Tiny Tower

Instagram’s Permalinks Got a Sweet Update  →

I just noticed today that Instagram’s permalink pages have received a very nice update. It used to be that all you could do was view the image and its related info. Now you can log in and then “like” an image or post a comment just as if you were in the app itself.

My friends on Twitter tell me that the update rolled out last week while I was vacationing in Colorado (as you may have deduced from my linked-to ‘gram).

Instagram’s Permalinks Got a Sweet Update