Seeing for the First Time

io9 has a fascinating piece that takes a look (pardon the expression) at what it's like for blind people to suddenly gain their sense of sight during adulthood. Rather than being the joyous miracle you'd expect, it can become more of a burden on their mind than anything else.

“Spatial distance is often the primary problem they run into. One man saw people walking away from him as inexplicably shrinking. Another would practice spatial recognition by going out in a field and throwing his boot as far as he could. He’d hold out his hand to grab it, and if it wasn’t in reach, step forward before trying again.”

'The Story of Ridiculous Fishing'

Polygon put together a nice profile of Vlambeer, the two-man design studio behind Ridiculous Fishing, and the struggle they faced after having their game idea cloned. I enjoyed learning that their relationship mirrors that of The Odd Couple.

“Vlambeer's origin story sounds like the start of a romantic comedy. They met on a train, hated each other instantly, then, over the course of a slow and argumentative year at school together, came around.”

Go read the story, then buy the game if you haven't already. You're a crazy person if you don't.

Viticci's Review of Drafts 3.0

“Drafts 3.0, released today, is a major update that refines several aspects of version 2.5 and brings powerful new features such as Evernote and Message actions, better action and draft management, tighter Reminders integration, and a way to backup and restore entire sets of actions.”

Drafts 3.0 has been released for both iPhone and iPad, and of course Federico Viticci already has a comprehensive review up on MacStories. I'm super excited to try some of this stuff out.

Audience Quality > Audience Quantity

Myke Hurley, filling in for Stephen over at 512pixels, explains why he stopped paying attention to stats and numbers:

“At one point, 70Decibels had 12 active shows. At the time, I was checking performance for each one – logging into separate hosting accounts – multiple times per day. I was consumed by the numbers. I obsessed daily, weekly and monthly—desperately trying to find some sort of formula or correlation to achieving success.

Even after we were able to get long-term sponsors on board, I was still meticulously checking these numbers—it became a habit. I wanted to ensure that I was doing the right thing and I felt like I could only find vindication and answers in the graphs.

But then something changed. After listening to that SXSW talk earlier this year I started to consider things differently.”

I've been quite guilty of this same behavior. Always checking my page views, seeing how many people have faved that tweet I'm proud of, worrying about how many subscribers/followers I've got at any given time...none of this is healthy behavior (ahem, sorry Myke, behaviour).

In the last couple of months, I've quickly learned that having thousands of page views doesn't necessarily equate to gaining legions of new, loyal readers. Only a tiny percent of these are what I would call quality page views, and that's been a valuable lesson for me to learn.

Thanks to some much-needed perspective, I feel like I've broken out of some kind of deranged fever. I hardly worry about the stats anymore, and simply try to do good work as often as I'm able. It's good to hear that someone like Myke, a guy I hold in high regard whether he knows it or not, has had the same revelation.

'How To Add iOS Touch Icons to a Squarespace 6 Website'

Will Kujawa put together an awesome little walkthrough and code snippet for changing a Squarespace 6 website's bookmark icon (the one that gets saved to the iOS home screen) from an ugly screenshot to something nicer. Preferably a logo but you could technically use anything you want.

I just went through the process myself and it worked perfectly.

Stephen Hackett Reviews the Pebble

"It’s clunky, and made worse but the fact that when the Pebble and iPhone lose connection, the Pebble has to be re-setup.

This means turning off the iPhone, flipping it to Airplane Mode or simply leaving it on your desk when you go to lunch means your phone will forget what its supposed to do. Or leaving your watch inside when you mow the grass. Or leaving your phone in your bag when you workout. Or do anything a normal human does, really. It blows.”

Yikes. Glad I didn't hop on the Kickstarter bandwagon with this one.

"Magic is Hard"

Khoi Vinh:

“To simplify is huge, but what matters just as much is the end result, what the user gets out of the simplification. If the simplified process produces satisfactory results, great. But it’s magic when the software generates a disproportionately meaningful output from that minimized input.”

The Verge Interviews the Man Behind Flickr

Markus Spiering, Head of Product at Flickr:

“I can’t talk about the things that are coming up. But if you think 2012 was a big year, 2013 will be bigger.”

As I discussed not long ago, I'm excited that Flickr is making its way back into the web photography discussion, and it looks like Yahoo feels the same way now that Marissa Mayer has become CEO. I'm looking forward to what they've got in store.

Feedbin

Another great-looking alternative to Google Reader, and only costs $2/mo (or $20/year, as stated in this recent blog post). I'm excited to check it out, although I'd prefer if they had an actual iOS app rather than just a mobile website.

Quicksilver is Finally Leaving Beta Status

Now they just need to find a way to bring back all the users who have moved on to greener pastures.

'Delicate Balance'

Gruber:

“The last thing Apple should do is ignore Samsung, to just sit there and take it, stoically. I think Microsoft took that stance against Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign and it hurt them. When you’re the market leader, you do need to be more graceful, it’s harder, but you still need to fight. That’s why Pepsi will trash Coke by name, but Coke will never mention Pepsi. ”

Couldn't agree more. It's kind of hard to believe that, despite the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign from only a few years ago, people thought Apple wouldn't be the type to directly respond to Samsung's recent (and popular) attack ads.

Apple is a company with plenty of fight in it, don't worry.

'Free Works'

Marco Arment makes some more excellent points about the Google Reader shutdown:

“And we lucked out with Reader — imagine how much worse it would be if website owners weren’t publishing open RSS feeds for anyone to fetch and process, but were instead posting each item to a proprietary Google API. We’d have almost no chance of building a successful alternative.

That’s Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. (Does the shutdown make more sense now?)”

While I agree with Marco that the internet is generally better off for having had Reader around, and I'm also optimistic that a fine solution will someday replace it, I think the way Google handled this was a bit dickish.

They swept in with a free product, practically took over the RSS industry with it (which likely put some other developers out of work), never bothered to monetize the product, then unceremoniously dropped it years later like a bad habit.

I would say it's analagous to Starbucks single-handedly snuffing out thousands of smaller coffee chains around the world, but at least they had the sense to charge for their product and are so far sticking around as a result.

'Play By Your Own Rules'

Josh Williams, former CEO of Gowalla:

“We were the younger, prettier, but less popular sister of Foursquare. And even that had changed. In time, Foursquare had dramatically improved the design and experience of its service. This was no longer a defensible platform for us as a company.

Around this time we knew that our path was in trouble. We would have to pull out the stops to change our game.”

Fascinating look at what happened behind the scenes during the Gowalla-vs-Foursquare race that seemed like a big deal only a few years ago, and the hard lessons Gowalla had to learn.

'Three Months to Scale NewsBlur'

The last few days have been pretty intense for Samuel Clay, developer of NewsBlur. 60,000 new people have signed up for his service, 5,000 of which have become premium subscribers. This is more than double the previous number of 50,000 users. Incredible.

I've been checking out NewsBlur myself (using the live demo at the link above), and it looks fantastic. Once he has the scaling issue figured out, it might just be amongst the next group of killer RSS services.

'Why I Love RSS and You Do Too'

Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, lists some reasons why RSS is still so great even today. You should head over there and read all of it, but I especially thought the two items concerning "Twitter as RSS" were great:

• There are no user caps. No company can tell your favorite app how many users it can have. (Twitter does this.)

• Nobody can tell you how to display an article from an RSS feed. (Twitter does this with tweets.)

'Baby Steps Toward Replacing Google Reader'

Marco Arment wants someone to get another solid RSS syncing backend going before Google shuts down in a few months:

“We need to start simple. We don’t have much time. And if we don’t do it this way, the likely alternative is that a few major clients will make their own custom sync solutions that won’t work with any other company’s clients, which won’t bring them nearly as much value as it will remove from their users.”

The idea he lays out in the rest of his article seems feasible enough to me.

This is one of those times I wish I had the programming chops to take advantage of a huge opportunity like this, but like Marco says, there's just not enough time. We'll have to rely on someone who already knows this stuff in and out to get the job done. And who better than the devs behind NetNewsWire and Reeder, right?

70Decibels Joins the 5by5 Network

Myke Hurley:

“As the network continues to grow, our ambitions grow with it. Our hosts put out shows that deserve a larger audience, and my dream of a career in podcasting is within reach. To get to the next level, we need help. We need a better infrastructure and even more great people to support the network we have created. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that 70Decibels is going to be moving to the 5by5 Podcasting Network.”

Congratulations to Myke, Dan, and everyone else involved. I love many shows from both podcast networks, so this is pretty exciting.

'The Good, Racist People'

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in an NYT op-ed:

“I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.”

It's disheartening to know that racism is still this prevalent in our society. As a white male and lifelong Oklahoman, I've never been the direct target of racism but I've been a witness to more of it than I care to remember.

I grew up around the kinds of rednecks who proudly displayed the Confederate flag on their trucks, or went into the military so they could exact revenge on "towel-heads" after the events of 9/11. There are still parts of town white people won't venture into at night, assuming they'll be instantly mugged at gunpoint.

A friend of our family, who happens to live in an upper-class area, once had the misfortune of attending a neighborhood meeting where people were upset about the black family that had just moved in. Apparently they thought the family was bringing down the property value of the area.

My own grandfather—who was a great man in other respects—was always extremely prejudiced towards black people. The best compliment I ever heard him give to a black person went something like, "At least he ain't lazy like other [n-word]s." When he found out that I had a crush on a black girl in high school, he told me matter-of-factly that I wouldn't be allowed to bring her over to visit. I never asked her out.

The realist in me understands that these kinds of racial prejudices will be around for many more generations, but the idealist in me yearns to see the day where they are a thing of the past.

'Breaking Down Amazon's Mega Dropdown'

Developer Ben Kamens analyzes the dropdown menu behavior on Amazon, revealing the clever design trick that makes it so pleasant to navigate compared to other dropdowns on the web.

'Open and Shut'

"This was the most open decision — in Wu’s sense of the word open — in the entire history of Apple Computer Inc.

And it nearly bankrupted the company."

Gruber doing excellent work, as always.