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07
May 10

Improving Instapaper in Fever˚ part deux

I recently wrote about improving the Instapaper function in Fever˚.

It occurred to me that a small pop-up window would be much better than having a full-size browser window come up just for a second. Then I wondered if I could put a javascript: URL into the Fever˚ settings. And whaddya know, it works!

The new link I’m using (wrapped for readability):

javascript:window.open(
  'http://mysite.com/instapaper.php?url=%u&title=%t&selection=%e',
  'instapaper',
  'width=300,height=200,toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,resizable=1'
);

Right-click this link to copy it: Instapaper

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30
Apr 10

THINK BEFORE YOU COSPLAY

On Earth Day, I feel it’s important to note a class of people who so far have gotten a complete pass in their complicity in destroying our environment. Everyone finds them oh-so-bemusing with their top hats and leather trench coats. And no one asks the question…

WHERE DOES ALL THAT STEAM COME FROM?

Yes, I’m talking, of course, about steampunk cosplayers.

THINK BEFORE YOU COSPLAY

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28
Apr 10

Improving Instapaper support in Fever˚

I recently switched from Google Reader to Fever˚. I am happy I switched, but I quickly missed the ease with which I could save articles to Instapaper. The Instapaper bookmarklet has some way of divining which article you’re focused on in Google Reader, so you can add the article right from the feed page, instead of opening the article itself, then adding it to Instapaper. It’s very convenient, and fast.

Fever˚ also has Instapaper support, but it works a little differently. When focused on an article, you tap ‘i’ to open a new window containing a pre-filled Instapaper form, then click the ‘Add’ button. The item is added, and you’re left with a window showing your Instapaper unread items.

That’s not bad, but I didn’t want that window hanging around. I had to wait for it to load, then get rid of it. I had to take my hand off the keyboard to click the ‘Add’ button. It worked, but was less graceful than what I had before.

I spent a few minutes with PHP and came up with a solution. It’s not as pretty as what I had with Google Reader, but it’s just as fast, and works without any mousing, clicking, or lingering windows. I tap ‘i’ on an article, and a window pops up, says ‘Saved,’ and disappears on its own after a second or so. (If there’s a problem, you see an error instead and the window does not go away.)

First, create a script on your site. I named mine instapaper.php and put it at the root of my Fever˚ site. But you can put it anywhere, including on another domain entirely. You just need to know the URL to configure Fever˚ later.

<?php

$api = 'https://www.instapaper.com/api/add';
$close_timer = 750; // how many ms to display 'Saved!'

// Your instapaper.com credentials
$user = 'my_username';
$pass = 'my_password';

$u = urlencode( $_GET[ 'url' ] );
$t = urlencode( $_GET[ 'title' ] );
$s = urlencode( $_GET[ 'selection' ] );

$curl_url = "$api?username=$user&password=$pass&url=$u&title=$t&selection=$s";

$ch = curl_init( $curl_url );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE );
$ret = curl_exec( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );

if ( $ret == '201' ):
?>

<h2>Saved!</h2>
<script language="javascript"> 
setTimeout("self.close();",<?php echo $close_timer ?>) 
</script>

<?php else: ?>

<p>ERROR: instead of response code 201, we got:<br />
<?php echo $ret ?></p>

<?php endif ?>

Now, go into your Fever˚ preferences and click the ‘Sharing’ tab. I suggest removing the ‘i’ key from the Instapaper item, and changing its name (I used ‘ORIGINAL Instapaper’). That way it’s still there if you ever want to switch back.

Click the ‘+’ icon to add a new service. Name it ‘Instapaper,’ set the key to ‘i’ or whatever you prefer, and set the URL as follows. You’ll need to substitute the path to your script.

http://mysite.com/fever/instapaper.php?url=%u&title=%t&selection=%e

Click ‘Save’ and you’re done.

(I’ll write more about Fever˚ itself after I’ve used it for a while longer.)

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25
Apr 10

Porcelain Engineering

Tonight I had dinner at a downtown restaurant called The Greenhouse Tavern. They use locally-sourced ingredients, organic foods, and are into recycling and so on. I can get behind all of that.

But here’s what struck me most: their bathroom. Yes, yes, I know, I’m hopeless. Bear with me.

First, the toilet. As described to the user via a small plaque on the wall, there are two buttons on top. You push the button corresponding to your (ahem) deposit. The toilet will use more or less water to flush depending on your choice. Or, if you don’t want to touch anything, it will attempt to divine which way to go based on how long you took. Here is a toilet that thinks.

Did I mention there’s a solar panel on top? There’s another on top of the sink faucet. I can’t imagine they see much sunlight.

Speaking of light, it’s controlled by a motion sensor, so you can’t forget to turn it off when you leave.

The hand dryer has a spout at the bottom, on which is a sticker reading, “Feel the Power.” I smirked and thought “What idiot decided to put that stupid sticker there?” And then, I put my hands beneath it and felt the power. This machine must have put out three times the air velocity of your typical hand dryer. It was a wall-mounted jet engine.

Bravo, Chef Sawyer. Your staff are great; your food is fantastic; your bathroom, sir, is well-engineered.

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12
Apr 10

Dear Bloggers Who Returned Their iPads

Over the last few days, I’ve read a number of articles and blog posts in which the author details how they bought a shiny new iPad, but later returned it.

A couple of them boiled down to: it just didn’t do what I needed. Alright, I have no problem with that. Doesn’t work for you, don’t keep it. Far be it from me to tell you how to spend your hard-earned dollars.

But over half of them complained about the closed, controlled nature of the device and the App Store model, and cited that as one of the reasons they didn’t keep the iPad.

And to you, dear sirs and madams, I can only say:

You are a sanctimonious asshole.

You heard me. What, do you think I don’t know that you have been well aware for years now how the App Store works? Did you think the iPad was magically going to be different from the iPhone in that respect? Am I supposed to believe that you are clueless about this issue, when you mentioned right in your post that you also own an iPhone?

I’m sure you had some other reason for returning the iPad, and that reason may well be one I have no argument with. But to complain about the software model, which you were fully informed about well before you bought an iPad?

That takes some gall.

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10
Apr 10

An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash

So it’s not just that Apple has refused to support Flash. It cannot, logically, be done. A finger is not a mouse, and Flash sites are designed to require a mouse pointer (and keyboard) in fundamental ways. Someday that may change, and every Flash site could be redesigned with touch-friendly Flash. But that doesn’t make Flash sites work now.

Even if slow performance, battery drain and crashes weren’t problems with Flash (and they truly are), nothing can give users of any touchscreen, from any company, an acceptable experience with today’s Flash sites. The thing so many complainers want is simply an impossibility.

An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash

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09
Apr 10

Eugenics and You

In an effort to curtail the genetic pollution created by “inferior” genes, some governments even enacted laws authorizing the forcible sterilization of the “insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic,” as well as individuals with criminal or promiscuous inclinations. Ultimately hundreds of thousands of people were forced or coerced into sterilization worldwide, over 65,000 of them in the country which pioneered the eugenic effort: The United States of America.

The group also spread their vision of genetic superiority by sponsoring a series of “Fitter Families” contests which were held at state fairs throughout the US. Alongside the state’s portliest pigs, swiftest horses, and most majestic vegetables, American families were judged for their quality of breeding. Entrants’ pedigrees were reviewed, their bodies examined, and their mental capacity measured.

Eugenics and You

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07
Apr 10

Doing Less Stuff Better, Seeing Your Face in the Marble and Making Immigrants Cry

Merlin Mann:

You’re absolutely right. You’re gonna die. You’re gonna die. And nobody’s gonna care which version of the iPhone you used to make something on Twitter, or to go and post about your bowel movement on Facebook. And I’m not even talking about legacy; I’m talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I’m making something, and I feel least alive when I’m being led around by some obnoxious use of my attention that I wasn’t aware of. To me, that’s the thing. You can buy the jogging shoes and you can buy the Runner’s World, but until you put them on and walk out the door every day, you’re just a fat man.

There’s no amount of information that’s going to take the place of putting on the shoes and starting to move a little bit. And you’re not really doing Tae Kwan Do unless you’re kicking people. Reading all the sex manuals in the world is not going to do anything unless you’re touching genitals. Otherwise, you’re just reading. But it’s painful. People get mad when you say that, because we derive a lot of our self-esteem and satisfaction out of these things that we choose to consume. I’m not even talking about Pepsi. I’m talking about blogs, and I’m talking about Facebook. I’m talking about MySpace and what widgets you put where. We form our identity through all these alliances we build, and for a lot of people to say to them, “Well, what are you making as a result of that?”, what they’re making is a different version of their personality every day. That’s fine as long as that’s what they want to do, but when you’re 60, are you going to be happy that that’s where your youth went?

On his essay, Better:

In the “Better” essay, which is just a short kind of rant, I had this thing where I was like, “I want to do less stuff better.” I don’t mean it as a Martin Luther kind of thing. It’s more of a philosophical approach, of saying, “If we all just tried a little bit harder and we thought just a little bit more and we became less obsessed with clicking the buttons that make information move around and thought a little bit more about how our thinking and our cognition and our behavior and our decision-making changes as a result of that information.”

I’ve asked a dozen of my friends, “How many times did you change you mind about who you were going to vote for during the election?” They all say, “Oh, I knew all along.” I was like, “Then why were you reloading Huffington Post 40 times a day?” This is really the crux of where my brain is on this stuff right now. How do you know when you have enough information to do something? I really feel like that combination of little, easy motor skills and clicking combined with feeling a little less bored for a minute is completely addictive to people.

When the main way we communicate with each other is through all these things — and I’m not saying, “Don’t use Facebook, don’t use Twitter.” What I am saying is, if you’re not mindful about the amount of your attention that goes to thinking about and consuming those things, you’re not going to be making good stuff, either for that medium or elsewhere. That’s what I got kind of hung up on, when I finally realized that all I was doing was eating and producing potato chips all day long.

Doing Less Stuff Better, Seeing Your Face in the Marble and Making Immigrants Cry

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06
Apr 10

Alex Payne – The Moderate’s Position on iPad Openness

You can be as cooly aloof as you like about the device, but it won’t change the fact that it’s a fundamental step forward in computing. Many consumers can surely afford to sit this initial release out until the costs come down and the quality goes up. But if you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.

The Moderate’s Position on iPad Openness

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06
Apr 10

Response to “iBooks and private APIs”

I can understand Marco’s frustration with Apple’s use of private APIs. But I think he may be wrong to characterize Apple’s iBooks as a “slap in the face” to third party developers.

iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.

I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my customers will expect them, making my app inferior to Apple’s in key areas.

It’s also a slap in the face that Apple is listing iBooks in the App Store, since they employ technical measures to ensure that every other App Store app doesn’t call any undocumented or private APIs. This app wouldn’t pass the App Store submission process, yet developers need to compete with it for App Store attention. One of the great potential failures of an app-review system is inconsistent or unfair enforcement of the rules.

Why are some APIs private or undocumented? Because they are not ready to be made public. If Apple isn’t sure it can support an API into the future, they aren’t going to make it public. Maybe they’ll make it public someday; maybe they won’t. But as soon as they make it public, they officially support it and therefore can’t change it easily (at least, not the external interface or the way it functions as exposed to the outside).

Example: Developers were originally not permitted to use UIGetScreenImage(), but Apple decided to make it public (sort of).

Imagine the uproar if they made a not-yet-ready API public, it became popular, and then they rearranged it completely, breaking a bunch of apps. Nobody wants that, least of all third party developers.

It only makes sense that Apple would have private APIs in their own apps. What better place to take a test drive and kick the tires?

I feel for Marco, and I’d love to see some of these features make it into Instapaper. But Apple didn’t create the most popular mobile platform in the world by cutting corners and bending their own rules about quality.

(By the way, you should try Instapaper. It’s completely changed how I use the web.)

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