"Stop Covering Sinatra and Write Ten Songs!"

John Roderick reviews the latest Michael Bublé album from the perspective of someone who grew up listening to big-band music, and somehow weaves a Jennifer Anniston backstory into the mix:

“The arrangement is massive, full of stadium-filling electric guitars but brimming over with swirling orchestra too, like Journey teamed up with the Moody Blues. Jennifer Aniston is literally crying now, standing in her kitchen, a dropped milk carton splattered at her feet, all her fame and money no comfort to her in the absence of ever having found her true love.”

I've really been digging John's writings on music lately, particularly his other popular piece, Punk Rock is Bullshit.

'The iOS7 Power User Challenge'

Frasier Spiers looks at the history of iOS:

“Three times in my career, Apple has shipped software that conventional wisdom said basically couldn't be done. The first was the Carbon layer of Mac OS X: most of the Mac toolbox running on a preemptively multitasking, protected memory Unix kernel. The second was Rosetta: PowerPC apps running unmodified and, for the most part, perfectly well on Intel processors.

iOS was the third. Conventional wisdom said that you couldn't possibly get a desktop OS running on a phone. Conventional wisdom said that you couldn't get rid of a user-visible filesystem. Conventional wisdom said you couldn't require all software on the platform to come through a first-party app store.

Right now, just before WWDC 2013, I think it's important to take time to appreciate exactly what iOS has achieved.”

He presents some fantastic data points, then delves into items he believes iOS should improve on for power users. Highly recommended reading, so grab a cup of coffee and go check it out.

My Writing Setup

Iain Broome was nice enough to let me ramble a little about my writing setup on his blog. Go check it out and peruse his other work because there's great stuff to be found.

Using What's Already There

Chris Bowler:

“My confidence and trust in free services is at an all time low. [...] So in the arena of read-it-later services, I've been thinking about options where I would be considered the customer.

I realized that one company that I do trust, for whom I am the customer, offers such a service. But it's one I never gave any consideration since it launched, I suppose because I was already enjoying some other service at the time. This company is Apple and the tool is Reading List.”

Chris makes some excellent points in this piece. I will remain an avid Instapaper user for the foreseeable future, but if the service were to ever shut down, I would probably give Reading List a shot over something like Pocket.

"Very, Very Flat"

I don't typically dabble in Apple rumors around here, but this one makes me very excited, with only a slight tinge of worry:

“According to multiple people who have either seen or have been briefed on the upcoming iOS 7, the operating system sports a redesigned user-interface that will be attractive to new iOS users, but potentially unsettling for those who are long-accustomed to the platform...”

'George W. Bush is Smarter Than You'

Keith Hennessey, former advisor on economic policy to George W. Bush, explains to his Stanford students that GWB is actually quite an intelligent man despite the public caricature of him.

“President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.

I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.”

I'll be honest, my opinion of Bush's intelligence was likely shaped early on by the combination of his gaffes and his political choices, along with an assumption that he only got into office thanks to his father.

Then again, I was in 10th grade when 9/11 happened, and like other teenagers, I was much quicker to judge somebody's character based on little information back then. My opinion of Bush was formed rather prematurely and calcified that way throughout his presidency, especially as the Iraq War continued unabated. In my mind, he never really had a chance at redemption.

Reading this article was eye-opening though. I still vehemently disagree with much of Bush's politics, but perhaps a reassessment of his intelligence is in order. If anybody reading this knows about any good sources on the subject, I'm all ears.

Instapaper Acquired by Betaworks

In a surprising move (to me at least), Marco Arment has sold his majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks.

“Instapaper is much bigger today than I could have predicted in 2008, and it has simply grown far beyond what one person can do. To really shine, it needs a full-time staff of at least a few people. But I wouldn’t be very good at hiring and leading a staff, and after more than five years, I’d like an opportunity to try other apps and creative projects. Instapaper needs a new home where it can be staffed and grown, but I didn’t want to give it to a big company that would probably just shut it down in six months.”

This seems like a bittersweet deal to me. While I don't doubt that Betaworks can do well with Instapaper, I've always enjoyed the fact that it was always a one-man operation that could go toe-to-toe with the big guys.

I was a fan of the service anyway, but I got a certain enjoyment from rooting for the underdog. And I only say 'underdog' because of the huge explosion in popularity for Pocket, which not only has a staff that outnumbers Marco 9-to-1, but also seems to have become the market dominator, if the anecdotes I've read all over the web are any indicator.

Still, I congratulate Marco on his years of success (4 or 5 of which I've been a customer for), and I'm thankful to him for making such a fantastic utility. Instapaper literally changed the way I interact with the web, and the ideas behind its text-formatter likely encouraged many websites to adopt a cleaner experience.

I think the web would be a very different place without Instapaper, and Marco should be proud of what he accomplished with it. I look forward to whatever he comes up with next.

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.

Roger Ebert

“We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.”

― Roger Ebert

As you probably know, famous movie critic Roger Ebert passed away yesterday at 70 years of age, after a long and arduous battle with cancer. There have been (and will continue to be) many great things written about him, but I think the Chicago Tribune summed it up perfectly in their piece, "Roger Ebert: Quintessential Chicagoan":

“People of Ebert's generation aren't supposed to cotton to new technology. He was named 2010's Person of the Year by the Webby Awards, the online world's Oscars. Three years earlier, Forbes magazine declared him the Top Pundit in America.

Did I mention he was a film critic?

Well, who you are is and isn't what you officially do for a living. Ebert wasn't working so hard to prove a point. He worked so hard because that's who he was. Writing was like breathing to him.

No wonder this Champaign-Urbana transplant was the quintessential Chicagoan. We like to think of Chicago as the city that gets things done.

Ebert got things done. He got a whole hell of a lot of things done.”

I'm greatly saddened by this loss, but honestly a bit relieved for his sake, due to the deterioration of his physical condition over the last decade. He probably would have eschewed such pity but I can't help it. For god's sake, the man lost his entire lower jaw and his ability to eat and speak for the last seven years of his life.

And yet, he never gave up on writing. In fact, it became his only true outlet, and a fire inside him was ignited for those last few years. He produced what is probably his best writing during a time when most people would have gone into quiet retreat, and I admire him greatly for that. I fully intend to go back and re-read a lot of this work in upcoming days, and I hope you'll do the same.

The world has lost a great mind, a fantastic writer, and a truly passionate spirit. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the world won't be the same without him. Rest in peace, Roger.

New RSS Feed

Hey guys, just a quick update about the Unretrofied RSS feed. I've set up a new feed over at URI.LV, an awesome service that was built as an alternative to Feedburner (which is likely to die soon, if Google Reader is any indication). Here's the new feed url:

http://unretrofied.com/feed

Why do this? A few reasons:

• Squarespace still has yet to re-implement RSS tracking. I say 're-implement' because it was a supported feature during the Squarespace 6 beta (and also existed in Squarespace 5) before being dropped.
• The old feed URL was ugly and more difficult to remember (http://unretrofied.com/blog?format=rss)
• I want a feed I can control, not one provided by my webhost.

I would appreciate it if you would update your RSS reader to use this new feed, although you don't necessarily have to at the moment. As long as I'm on Squarespace 6, the previous feed will work as it always has. But I may decide to move this site elsewhere someday, and if you update to the new feed now, any future transitions should hopefully be smoother for you as a reader.

Thanks!

'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.