Giving 500px a try: Uploaded a few shots from our honeymoon in Bali.
For those of you back home just waking up and wondering how Monday will go.. Here is how Monday ended on the other side of the world. #15HoursInTheFuture
Married.
Thanks to Capture Studios for the awesome video they put together of the day.
Putting Together the Read It Later office in 1 Minute
A Few Words on the App Store
There are two articles on major publications covering Apple’s release of new guidelines this morning that quote me/Read It Later (one on the BBC and one on AP).
As both articles mention Read It Later’s recent rejection and my response to it, it does imply that I have a negative view towards the app store. (No fault to the writers of these articles, they only have so much space).
I wanted to make it clear that despite Read It Later and the App Review Team’s up and down past, I still hold both them and the iOS platform in the highest regard.
There is simply no other platform I enjoy developing on more than iOS. Hands down, not even a close second. I owe the app store the very fact that Read It Later supports my livelihood. I’m not sure of any other distribution channel that makes it so easy for me to push a product out to a worldwide audience.
It seems that I’m not the only one that feels this way as there are over 250,000 applications in the App Store today. And despite a few hiccups here and there, if you consider how large a number that is to process, the review team have done a damn fine job.
The release of these guidelines, and all of the other improvements the app store have brought to developers this year shows that Apple is absolutely doing the best they can to listen to us and help us succeed.
The only continual qualm I have is simply the difficulty in reaching anyone at app review. The guidelines mention that it’s possible to appeal to an app review board but make no mention of how to do that. I’ve also found a lot of emails to appreview@apple.com tend to go answered or seem canned in response. I realize the problem has got to be simply handling the sheer volume of emails and I’m confident they are working on a way to help improve developer communication. Today was a big step in that direction.
Dolly Test #2 - Lake Tahoe
Two weeks ago I took the time-lapse dolly up to Lake Tahoe for a weekend. This was the first time I’ve used it in the ‘wild’. It was quite the learning experience. Fought the weather for most of the weekend (50 mph gusts and mixed thunderstorms). The last shot involved following GPS coords to an unmarked trail off the highway, a sketchy hike with all of the equipment, a FIRE on the motor control after a short caused by said rough hike, running out of card space twice (bad planning) and finally ended when the camera battery died. Soooo that said, I had trouble getting enough shots for a decent edit but I took a crack at it anyhow.
Make sure you watch it with HD turned on and in full screen otherwise there are some bit you’ll miss.
First Run with Timelapse Dolly Prototype
This past weekend I built a DIY time-lapse dolly. Here’s an edit containing all of the tests I took while working on it. Still some smoothness/operator-error issues to work out but I’m really excited about the potential.
ShareKit
Overview
ShareKit is an open source framework that can be dropped into any iPhone or iPad app to instantly add full sharing capabilities.How It Works
Integration is super easy. A developer can take a url, image, piece of text, or file and just say “hey ShareKit, share this”. ShareKit will present the user with a list of services that support the content they are sharing, handle logging them into the service, prompt for any additional information such as a caption, and display an activity indicator while uploading. ShareKit makes it easy to access individual services as well. A developer can simply write something like: [SHKTwitter shareURL:@”http://getsharekit.com”]; ShareKit will shorten the URL, present a dialog to let a user write a message, and even hold onto to the message to send later if the user is offline.Features
The initial version of ShareKit already has support for Delicious, Email, Facebook, Google Reader, Pinboard, Read It Later, and Twitter. It supports four types of content: links, images, text, and files. ShareKit even works offline. Users can share items without an internet connection. ShareKit will hold onto the items until a connection is available. The UI is also completely customizable. It is very easy to make ShareKit match the look of your existing application.Developer Benefit
For developers, adding sharing features to an app is a source of dread. It takes a LOT of work for each service that you add. You have to learn each service’s API, probably learn OAuth, design and build UI to handle all the interactions of logging in and collecting information, and write code to make requests and handle all possible errors. You have to do this for every service and every service has a unique API. It makes it very difficult to add all of the services your users request. In the iOS SDK we have access to MFMailComposeViewController. This is an Apple provided view that lets apps present an email dialog to the user. You feed it some starting values like a subject line and body content and it pops over your existing application, lets the user do their thing and goes away when they are done. This is what I wanted in my apps. I wanted the same controller but for Twitter, Delicious, Evernote, and everything else. That’s what ShareKit is.User Benefit
As it exists today, the user experience for sharing is incredibly inconsistent across all apps. Because of the work that goes into adding each service, the services supported in an app are entirely dependent on what the developer has time to implement. Ideally a user should be able to use any app they want and be able to share with all of the services they use. By making sharing features a trivial development step, I’m hoping that we can see movement in a direction where we don’t have to pick our apps based on what services they support.Additional Services and Further Development
ShareKit is completely open source and anyone can contribute patches or additional sharing services. Modules for Evernote, Flickr, and Dropbox are already underway. When new services are added, they can simply be dropped into any existing ShareKit project. If you are a developer and would like to help contribute to ShareKit, a good place to start is the list of issues and feature requests.On Instapaper
As Marco has opened up on the matter, I think it would only be fair to do the same.
Instapaper is a competitor to Read It Later. It launched as a web app few months after I launched my Firefox extension.
If you’ve ever spoken with me about Instapaper, you know that I do not consider Instapaper a competitor. While we certainly attempt to solve the same goal, we take completely two different approaches in doing so. In the last year alone, I think we have done a miraculous job at innovating away from each other in what seemed like a very small space. Depending on your workflow, each offers features that may suit you better.
I have no fear in saying that because I fully believe in the product I’ve built. Moreover, Instapaper’s success vs RIL’s does not matter and let me explain why.
Twitterrific, a Twitter client, recently responded to an RIL user requesting to add RIL support. They responded to say that 95% of their users don’t even use Instapaper. The thing is that 100% of those users probably should be. RIL and IP are services that when you first learn about, just do not seem to be worthwhile. But they solve a problem that EVERYONE has. Once you close the 10484503 browser tabs you have open, clear out the random links in your inbox that you’ve emailed yourself and start finding that they’ve all been culled into one nice little list that follows you everywhere, it starts to make a lot more sense.
It’s this massive group of people (I believe they are called the mainstream) that defines why Instapaper does not matter to Read It Later and Read It Later does not matter to Instapaper.
Let me illustrate this with a trusty pie chart:
The fact of the matter is, RIL and IP are not deadlocked into a fully utilized market (for example like Firefox vs Chrome vs IE). The amount of people that have never heard of either of us is staggering and offers plenty of space for each of us to play in without getting in each others way. And as we both grow, every time someone hears about one of us, they are likely to hear about the other. So until the market is maxed out, the growth of one benefits the other.
The simple fact is, even if RIL claimed 10% of what potential there is out there, I could afford to buy NASA and have them build robots that did my job for me. I’d be okay with that, even if Marco had 15% and was able to afford cooler robots.
From the way I’ve seen people talk about Read It Later and Instapaper, it seems that everyone assumes there is some major bad blood between us and that you have to pick one side and hate the other. This just isn’t the case. Marco and I are just two solo developers trying to make something we think is awesome. At the end of the day, it does not matter which one you pick, all that matters is you supported an indy developer and made it possible for them to make a career out of building things they love. I’ve got nothing but respect for Marco and I’m confident that we’ll continue to ‘compete’ with the same mutual respect till the end. (aka the robots we built turn on us)
Apple’s iPad Video Walkthroughs
Apple has posted a number of videos that walk through each of the default apps for the iPad (via Macstories). They are worth a watch. Being able to see the iPad in action reveals a number of little details.
A nice touch in Safari, when you tap the location bar to start typing, a bookmark bar (like in desktop Safari) pulls down.
The Safari video also answers one question I had long wondered. It looks like you’ll be able to watch embedded videos inline without having it pop open the YouTube application. I’ve always found that flow on the iPhone really disorienting.
Watching the video on Keynote really makes it clear that using a keyboard and mouse to do any type of design work is going to feel incredibly antiquated in the very near future.
I cannot wait to get my hands on one Saturday.
Side note: The icon the iPad displays on screen when you lock the rotation (shown in the iBooks video) looks awfully familiar. I know, but it’s fun to pretend they did ;)
