Concern

Positive Side Effects

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:15:00 -0800

I have a car, an iPod, and a long commute. I mostly listen to music while driving, and my car (a 2006 Volkswagen GLI) has a useful but quirky way of interfacing with an iPod: the five CD buttons on the radio console are mapped to the first five playlists on the iPod, in alphabetical order, and the sixth button is dedicated to whatever playlist the iPod was currently playing.

The key to making use of this is to use playlists that start with a number 1 through 5, so each button corresponds to a playlist I want to hear. The playlist I use the most, however, is “4 - Haven’t Heard Recently.” It’s a smart playlist, which has the rules:

Match all of the following rules:
Last Played is not in the last 4 weeks
Media Kind is not Podcast
Kind does not contain video
Kind does not contain movie
Last Skipped is not in the last 1 months
Album does not contain Seminars About Long
Time is less than 33:00
Kind does not contain PDF
Genre is not Comedy
Limit to 100 items selected by random

This playlist always contains songs that I haven’t heard in a while, so my music playlist while driving feels fresh (even though there are albums I will play over and over again, but rarely so). I limit the playlist size to 100 items, so when I deplete them, I have to sync my iPod again and “refill” that playlist with more random songs I haven’t listened to recently (either on the iPod, or through iTunes).

One curiosity, though, is that sometimes a song appears again in the playlist, at the very top, even though I definitely listened to it. Why would that happen? It looks like the last-played attribute of those songs wasn’t being updated.

The issue was that duplicate items aren’t updated properly. If a song appears more than once in your library, for some reason the last-played rules from the iPod won’t work because only one of the two items is updated. Find the duplicate item, delete it, and things are back to normal (and you are using less disk space).

See, this side effect acts like a filter on your library. As you listen to music, entries that appear multiple times are caught in this net, and you can deal with them as you find them. Yes, you could write an AppleScript that did the same thing, but that’s not the point: you didn’t start out to filter out duplicates, you started out just listening to music, but filtered out duplicates as a consequence. There must be other examples of this, with greater consequence than compressed music files.

(And, this process also filters out music that I hate, but those songs aren’t quite as well tracked as duplicates)

The Incompetence of American Airlines

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:03:23 -0800

The Incompetence of American Airlines

Video

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:02:43 -0800

Flinging Squirrel

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:27:19 -0800

Flinging Squirrel

WOD for Iphone – CrossFit logging app

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:44:21 -0800

WOD for Iphone – CrossFit logging app:

Great positive review of my app.

Bye-bye beard.

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:45:03 -0700

Bye-bye beard.

Photo

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:06:14 -0700

WOD — the first two weeks

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:15:45 -0700

WOD has been on the app store for two full weeks now. It went up on October 8, after being submitted on September 30.

In the first week, I got lots of great feedback about the app, in email and through ratings on the App Store. The feedback was so good that I submitted version 1.1, which has some bug fixes and additional features, this past Monday (still waiting for approval).

To my surprise, it’s been selling reasonably well: right now, it’s sold 287 copies, most in the United States, with some in Europe, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. This means I’ve personally made about $400 (+/- for exchange rates…). Not bad. It’s beer money. I’m mostly just surprised every morning when I see that it sold a consistent number the previous day. No big jumps, no drop-offs so far.

As far as I know, this has come purely from browsing the App Store or by word-of-mouth, because I don’t see a lot of traffic on my own web server and haven’t found much on the web linking to it (CrossFit West Santa Cruz let me put up a link on their blog, and another CrossFit affiliate picked up the link, but little else). I don’t know how big it will get, or when I’ll saturate the market for people who would want to buy it.

Settings are also in the Settings app

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:51:00 -0700

So I’ve noticed yet more noise recently on the whole iPhone app settings location. Apple recommends that settings go into the global “Settings” application, but just about everyone else seems to think that that’s wrong and confusing, which I mostly agree with. Usually, I never think to go digging in Settings to find out if an application I’m using has any kind of settings I’m interested in changing (it’s also a pretty good testament to the usability of a lot of the apps I have, since they just work, as installed, without me dicking around with knobs).

There is a simple, elegant solution, though:

Put settings in both places.

If you have settings at all, you probably are using NSUserDefaults to store user settings, and so you can control these yourself inside your app, and can add a settings bundle so they are available in the Settings app.

If your settings are complicated, and need custom controls that a settings bundle won’t support (however, you shouldn’t have complicated settings in the first place), you can pare down what goes into the settings bundle to things it supports well.

This should work fine, and it manages conflicting user expectations: users are told that settings are in the settings app, so they should find them there; but it makes sense to have settings available in the app itself, so they should find them there too.

(I did just add two settings for the 1.1 release of WOD, and I only put them in the settings bundle for that release, because it was easy. 1.2 will have settings controllable in both the settings app and the app itself.)

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Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0700

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Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0700

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Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0700

"Disappointed ★★ All it does is keep a log. I’ve already been doing that on google documents..."

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:31:00 -0700

“

Disappointed ★★

All it does is keep a log. I’ve already been doing that on google documents [sic]. There’s no timers nor does it even pull up the wod or have and [sic] demo videos. But timers are the biggest thing. Try doing a tabata with out [sic] timers… Just should have been more involved then [sic] just a log…

”

- “Stefan King”, reviewing WOD.

All I have to say is duh, it’s supposed to do just logging. That’s the purpose of the app. That’s what it’s designed for and described as doing. You have a fucking stopwatch on your phone already.

“It doesn’t include movie reviews. I fucking hate it.”

Photo

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0700

What to Expect: The Third Decade

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:30:39 -0700

What to Expect: The Third Decade:

I guess I’m doing OK for becoming a well developed thirty-something. But it sure doesn’t feel like it sometimes.

Raphaël JavaScript vector graphics library

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:38:22 -0700

Raphaël JavaScript vector graphics library:

Some of the examples are a little buggy in Safari 4, but still, wow. This has the feel of a game-changer.

New Dr. Martens.

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0700

New Dr. Martens.

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Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0700

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Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0700

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Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0700