A Critique of the Jawbone UP App User Interface

The Jawbone UP is a great device and I've really enjoyed using it the past few months. The data collection is impressive and it's a well designed band for comfortable usability. However, there are some pretty obvious issues with the UP app (the iPhone version) UI that I think really need to be addressed.¹

The app's navigation is based on a sliding panel. Swiping right from most screens reveals the top level navigation.² However, users will be spending most of their time on the Home screen and because this is where the UP displays its collected data and allows the user to edit the settings for the band itself. On this screen, the sliding panel goes in both diresctions. Swiping right will reveal the main navigation, but swiping left reveals the alarm(s), Idle Alert, Power Nap, and stopwatch settings for the band.

This app is a great example of good sliding panel design. You want to have your band plugged in as briefly as possible and the sliding panels allow you full access to all band-related functionality quickly and easily. Here's the problem: in addition to swiping to reveal these settings, there are also buttons in the top corners. Now, an argument can be made that this is to aid discoverability, but the issue is magnified by the icon choices for the buttons. The left settings are indicated by the standard hamburger button (hotdog button?). However, the right side uses a '+' button to indicate the sliding panel. Arguments about the design utility of the hamburger button aside, that plus sign really fails to communicate the functionality to the user. But, what else could be used there? A second hamburger button?

How about no hamburger buttons? I'm a proponent of the idea that users really don't need buttons to understand and navigate sliding panel based apps. Once we know that an app works this way, the buttons and the bar housing them become wasted space. A great example of how space really opens up one you assume that people can figure out sliding panels is Riposte, for App.net. This kind of design also solves the problem of dealing with the second button in the UP app. If going this far just is not an option for some reason, look at how The Magazine deals with it. Sure, it's effectively a hamburger in a bar but at least it's a less obtrusive hamburger in a less obtrusive bar.

The other great offender in the app is the Notifications screen. You won't really use this screen much unless you have what Jawbone calls Teammates, but there is a button in Notifications that doesn't appear to do anything like what its icon indicates. I'm referring to the button with the standard 'compose' icon in the top right of the screen. When tapped, it changes to a check mark. When you tap it again, it changes back to a compose button.

That's all it does when there are no notifications. Now, I don't get any notifications in this box because I have no teammates, so this button's functionality may be evident to people who receive notifications, but there is no communication to the user what this button does other than toggle its display. Also, swiping left to reveal the top level settings does not work from the Notifications screen. You must use the UI button, which is very confusing for the user and breaks the flow of the app entirely. I imagine that this is particularly frustrating for people with large Teams and many notifications.

As you've seen from these images, most of the UI of this app is beautifully designed. The animations add a little bit of joy to the interface and the data presentation is some of the best in the business. The app is very impressive, but these few problems with the interface really stand out among such great graphical design. Luckily for Jawbone, these issues I've pointed out can be fixed relatively easily. The data collection and presentation that is the core of the app really shine and the UP band itself impresses me every day.

1. I'd also like to talk about the UX, but that'll have to be another post. ↩
2. I say most because this is not the case for the "Notifications" screen, which is an issue in itself. ↩

Get Podcast Subscribers and Podcatcher Numbers

I have a podcast with some friends of mine from App.net called BookBytes. I host this podcast and manage a large portion of the site manually (for now) and I wanted to be able to get subscriber and podcatcher data. Marco Arment posted about his own bash script that he uses to get subscriber data on his RSS feeds. After a little input from Dr. Drang, the script looks like this. That’s what I started with.

I edited the script to work with the log structure on my server and then modified it rather significantly to wind up with my own version. It ignores Google Reader entirely (weird that it appears on a podcast feed anyway) and returns a total number of unique subscribers. It tries to ignore things like bots, iTunes and Instacast indexers in its total subscriber count, but does determine whether the feed is being indexed as well as the number of subscribers using Downcast, Instacast and Apple’s Podcasts. I’ll add other podcatchers as they appear in my log.

That’s it! Feel free to fork or comment if you notice anything that could be done better!

Accessibility as an Aspect of Responsive Design

When web designers discuss accessibility, WCAG, ARIA and other similar systems are often the focal point of the conversation. Increasingly, responsive design is creeping into these discussions, further complicating the issue with dynamically changing layouts and hidden elements. Accessibility and responsive design are becoming the next big projects for many of us on the web and it’s important to ensure that we approach them properly.

The necessity of good responsive design on the web is hardly an issue that needs me as an advocate. There are plenty of places to find comprehensive arguments on the benefits of responsive.[1] However, I think that it’s important that the responsive web be thought of as more than a way to increase readability or SEO. Properly executed it is one of the most beneficial accessibility features you can build into a site or app. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it a feature.

We focus a lot on devices when we think about responsive design, but the idea behind responsive design is to serve up content in the ideal format for every user. Thus, truly responsive design includes accessibility, not the other way around. If we start to think about responsive as including accessibility, then we can work on one front instead of two. The work we would have to do as designers and developers wouldn’t change much, but we would be focusing our efforts on the actual problem rather than unnecessarily fragmenting the issue in our minds.

We’re creating content for humans, not devices. Keeping that in mind will help us identify the real issues that need to be addressed in our projects and focus the development of the web as a whole as we move toward true content ubiquity.

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1. If you’re unconvinced of the necesity of resposnive design you can read this great article by Drew Thomas at Smashing Magazine. Brad Frost also has some great things to say on the subject.  ↩

Git in a Mobile Workflow

Git is a great tool for development. I’ve been using it on the command line in my work flow for about a year and it has worked wonderfully. However, a few months ago I decided to get everything set up to allow me to work on mobile devices without editing the live code on any of my sites. If you haven’t ever used a version control system and are looking to get started, this setup may be a bit difficult to get going. GitHub hosts some great resources and they can really help you get started.

I tried working with Git in several GUIs and ran into so many problems with the added level of abstraction that I gave up and switched to the command line. I had some experience with the command line beforehand, but I am still by no means a ninja. I think that if you know enough to want to use Git, you know enough to dive in and learn how to use it in the command line. In addition to speed advantages, using the command line makes your knowledge of Git OS agnostic. You can hop on any machine with Git installed and know your way around without having to download software or learn a new interface. Good stuff.

Okay, so Git is awesome. How do we use it on mobile devices? I’m working on iOS, but I’m sure that there are comparable apps on other platforms that will allow you to do the same thing I’m doing. If I get any messages or run across any comparable apps I will update.

I have a lot of my sites hosted with DreamHost and I have Git set up there. Each site has a .git folder at the top level and I have corresponding site folders in a folder called “Sites” (shocker) on all of my Macs. I do not sync this folder with Dropbox. I don’t know if that would cause an issue, but I haven’t had time to test it (If you know, please shoot me a message). I work locally and push up to the server into a holding branch which ultimately gets merged to a live branch.

This will not work with iOS (or other mobile devices, to my knowledge). You can’t run Git locally on iOS, so your only option in this initial workflow is to pull down and edit the live code, which I want to avoid. Instead, I started up another server that is bare bones Ubuntu (I used another server with a another host just to avoid having all of my eggs in one basket. You could probably just do it in another file on the same server.) and created files identical to those on my Macs and set them up to push and pull to and from the main, live server. So we have two servers with the same files that should be kept in sync. One is live online, and the other is a staging area. That’s the remote setup.

Thanks to the Noun Project for some of the images. Specifically, Ken Hawkins and Daniel Shannon.

Now all we have to do is pull the files from the staging server to edit them, and then push them back up to the live server. I use Textastic to make the actual edits on iOS. It’s really the best app for the job and it’s so straightforward I don’t think it needs much more explanation. Use it.

Prompt is a magnificent SHH app for both iPhone and iPad. Without it, we would not be able to sync up everything on the two servers at all. I have both the live server and the secondary server set up for SSH with Prompt so that I can merge any changes on the live server after they have been pushed to non-live branch of the live server. That merge has to happen to take changes live on a site and I like being able to do it from any device.

That's it! I’ve been using this setup for months without issue. At first, I thought it would be tedious. It seems like you have to keep 5 devices in sync at all times. However, if you have all of your SSH paths and passwords in something like TextExpander, a quick pull before you begin working isn't a big deal. It's far better than editing live code, or having to juggle different versions of files through multiple apps or email on mobile devices.

This really works well for me. It's amazing that this kind of thing is possible on our little iOS devices. With a slightly more complicated folder system (or multiple servers) you can probably expand this workflow to include multiple people. Does this system work for you? Have you improved on it? I’d love to hear about it. Email me!

Origami Beta Review

Disclaimer:

This is the first BETA version of Origami. The iPhone app isn’t even in the app store. You download it by going to your site and accepting a download prompt. This will undoubtedly change.

Origami hasn’t had the best marketing campaign, but here’s what I’ve been able to piece together. Think of it as a totally private social network. Google does something similar with circles on Google+. There are things that you don’t want to share with the whole world. Origami offers a private social site where your family (and close friends) can share private content.

During the beta sign up, you choose a URL where your family’s social network will live. This is pretty cool![1] They’re clearly going web first, and I can’t commend them highly enough for it. While I really want an easy way to get my pictures onto the system from my iPhone (a feature which is surely coming), I understand we can’t have it all at once. Remember, this is a beta. Here’s the feature list:

Web App

Features:

• Image upload
• Album Creation
• You have to add photos to the album upon creation or after. You cannot retroactively add photos to an album.
• Text Post
• Love a post
• Share a Video

iOS App

Features:

• Read-only, but you can post from the web.

I’m pretty excited about the launch of this system. I used Path for a while, but there are people in family without smart phones, and even I want to see stuff on the web from time to time. I didn’t have a lot of time or energy dedicated to it when I first heard about Origami, so I bailed and went without this kind of network for a while. Needless to say, I was delighted to get my Origami beta invite. I think this is going to be a great system, if they follow through with their vision. They’re still taking sign-ups, so give them your email to get onto the early access list. It's free!

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1. The Smiths need to get on now to reserve SmithFamily.info!  ↩

Declaring Email Bankruptcy: One Benefit of a Serious Approach

Today I spent a good couple of hours getting my email back in order. I achieved Inbox Zero without having to decalre email bankrupty. That's partially becasue I don't get near the volume that some people get on a daily basis, but I also atribute it to my extrme desire to not have to decalre bankruptcy. I think that's part of the benefit of the idea. If you're serious about staying on top of messages and are ready to go bankrupt when necessary, I think you'll be less likely both to let messages pile up too high and to just mass archive/delete. People tend to let things get out of hand when they don't know what to do with all of the messages, but if you know that much more and you'll have to nuke the inbox and start over you'll be less likely to let that happen. Some people say that it's freeing to just start fresh, and I'm sure that's often the case the first couple of times. However, regular failure can't feel good and that's exactly what decalring inbox bankruptcy is. Whether or not I ever actually have to do it, knowing that I will if I must really incentivizes me to stay on the ball.

On the Future of App.net

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of App.net [1]. Dalton, in the latest ADN podcast said that they will not be resting on their laurels, but are continuingto push hard to make the network an even greater success. I was pleased and relieved to hear this.

I was really worried about the state of things because we hadn’t heard a whole lot from Dalton et al about where things are going in some time. So far, all of their features have been done before, but this is to be expected as they build up the foundations of the system. In the podcast, Dalton didn’t give a long term plan (though he did allude to a new feature), but he did make it clear that new things are coming. This has me excited again.

I would love to know the more long-term goals of ADN, but I understand why they’re keeping things under wraps. As long as I know that they don’t see ADN as anywhere near a finished product I am reassured and glad that I’ve given them my money. I have hope for the service and look forward to the day that it develops into more than a Twitter clone (I have confidence that day will come). If you’re a subscriber and are starting to become worried about the apparent stagnation in the development process, make sure to listen to the latest podcast.

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1. A new paid social network.  ↩

Getting CBR Files into ComicZeal Wirelessly (Also CBZ)

I've been trying more and more to avoid using iTunes to manage the files on my iOS devices. One of the biggest challenges has been adding new content to my iPhone and iPad without plugging in and going through the whole sync process. Earlier this month I needed to to get a .CBR file into ComicZeal, which I remembered had a syncing utility last time I looked. I guess that was a while ago (I checked up and it was last updated in 2009), because the utility no longer works on the latest version of OS X Mountain Lion. After a little work I figured something out that has a few more steps than I'd like, but that keeps me from having to plug in.

First, let me say that if this is a stolen comic file, go buy a legitimate copy. Support the authors and artists!

What You'll Need

• ComicZeal
• Transmit (or comparable other)
• Goodreader

How To Do It

1. Open GoodReader and tap the WiFi symbol in the bottom right toolbar.
2. Open Transmit and go to the Bonjour tab.
3. You should see your device in the list that appears (if you don't make sure you're on the same network with both devices.
4. Double click the iOS device when it appears in the list and it will open up a list of your GoodReader folders. Drag your comic files into one of them.
5. Once the transfer completes, stop the connection.
6. Now select the comic file you want in ComicZeal and choose "Manage Files" from the list of options on the right in GoodReader.
7. Select the tiny "Open In" choice and open the file in ComicZeal.
8. There is no Step 8.

That should do it. I didn't encounter any problems despite the workound method and I'm sure there's some optimization that could be done, but it worked for me and I couldn't find a better solution despite looking for some time.

I'm Giving Instacast Another Chance

In my last post I discussed my frustration with Instacast and their decision to charge for their update to “iOS 6 technology”. I stand by what I said about it being bad form to leave an old, non-functioning app broken and charging for a fix. However, I recently had an experience with Vemedio that has persuaded me to give them another chance.

This week I released a podcast with some guys I met on App.net called BookByes. Of course, we wanted to make sure that the podcast was available on iTunes as well as all of the major podcatchers. During our test, all of the podcatchers but Instacast worked flawlessly.

I contacted the guys at Vemedio and immediately after I sent the email the podcast downloaded fine. I’m sure that they didn’t do anything at Vemedio to fix it. I suspect that the app has some server side caching component that had to reset. Still, I heard back from Vemedio after just a couple of hours. The guy who contacted me said it was working fine for him and that I should authenticate the file.

The matter sorted itself out, but I was really happy to see that the people at Vemedio care enough to reply to a message from a podcasting nobody like me with a problem that isn’t even real. Their response would have been helpful if the issue had persisted and they were nothing but friendly.

I purchased the new Instacast 3 and am using it exclusively again to see if it meets my needs. I’ve been unhappy with one feature in Downcast anyway (iOS screen lock controls don’t work as I would like). I’m not sure where I’ll end up, but I thought I should mention that I’m giving Instacast and Vemedio another chance.

Charge What It Costs

All things considered, I have spent around $12 on Vemedio’s podcatcher. This includes the iPhone and iPad versions as well as the last paid upgrade.

About a month ago, Instacast started to become buggy. Slow downloads and glitches in certain views became a daily occurrence. A little over a week ago the app froze upon loading and then crashed. I redownloaded, it and got the same result. The app is broken.

As the app had received no updates for some time, I decided to give Downcast a try. I’ve been pleased.

The other day, Instacast released a new app with what I can only assume are bug fixes for the numerous issues I was having with the app. There was not a free update and the release notes promise vague improvements. This is the worst way they could have possibly dealt with the situation.

They released an iPhone and iPad app separately to maximize revenue. I can’t complain about that. Then, they upgraded and charged me a second time. I was frustrated, but paid my money and excused the fee based on their need to make a profit. App Store pricing, blah blah blah…I think that was reasonable. However, the decision to charge me a third time for fixes without significant added features is too much.

The app that I’ve paid $12 for to date (Getting into OmniGroup territory) is now broken. Rather than fix their broken app, Vemedio is holding functionality I already paid for hostage for an additional $5. The new app is great for the people who are getting a podcatcher for the first time. They get a universal app for less than half of what I paid. For those of us who have been users the longest, this is a violation of trust.

This is the second time that Vemedio has held functionality captive from paying users and I won’t play into their hands again. Give me an app that works and charge me what it costs. I may well have paid $20 for the original app (I own apps by Omni, after all), but I won’t be strung along and nickel and dimed by a company who it seems would rather trick me out of my money than tell me what their app costs and charge me that.

This is a perfect example of the wrong way to deal with the problem of App Store pricing and I won’t help perpetuate it. Want to fix the problem? Charge me what it costs and give me the product I’m paying for. Then leave me alone.

Maybe We Don't Need Longer Battery Life

I've been thinking a lot about battery life ever since John Siracusa began mentioning it periodically on Hypercritical. I started dwelling on it again recently since iOS updates have been apparently causing my battery to drain unusually quickly. However, I've noticed another change in my iPhone 4S recently that, if I'm right, could indicate that Apple may be moving in a very interesting direction. My phone has been charging very quickly.

I know that the iPhone battery has been hailed for its quick charge time for a while, but it recently seems to be even faster. I don't have enough devices with enough iOS versions to test this, but I think that charge time has decreased by a noticeable percentage in recent weeks. What if we're not going to be getting batteries that last days and days in our iPhones. What if we're going to get a battery that may go from 100% to 10% in 10 hours, but goes from 10% to 100% in 15 minutes...or 45 seconds?

There may be outlet limitations that would be restrictive of these kinds of speeds (I think this unlikely), but it would drastically change our attitudes toward our iPhone batteries. Imagine if our phones could charge Wall-E style and be ready to go for hours with only a brief charge.

I'm not a battery expert by any means, but I think that this doesn't sound totally outlandish, especially considering the leaps in battery technology that have occurred in the last 10-20 years. It seems to me that a quick charge could be far more important going forward than the extra 1 or 2 hours that we can squeeze out of a tiny battery.

BeadsApp 1.7

The newest version of the app has some very small User Interface changes, but under the hood it has been completely redesigned. The changes, most importantly allow for full iPhone 5 compatibility. The downside of this update is that I absolutely had to require iOS 6 for it to be possible. However, it has been widely reported that the adoption rate for iOS 6 has been staggering.[1] iOS 6 will run on every mobile device that Apple is currently selling, as well as most devices sold in the last year or so. If you don’t have it, I highly recommend that you update.

I want to provide the highest quality experience for my users and think that compatibility with the iPhone 5 is an absolute necessity. Apple is racing forward technologically and the work that had to be done to update this (admittedly simple) app will prove to be well worth it. If you’re an iPhone 5 user and experience any kind of issues, please email me and let me know.

Pax!

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1. Over 61% adoption in 1 month  ↩

Timbuk2 Saved My Tech

I took my bike in for its first tune up in over a year. I’ve been riding it regularly since then. A few days ago, I threw my DSLR into my Timbuk2 messenger and brought it with me. I briefly considered putting the camera in something else, but thought better of it. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I stuck with the messenger.

A little less than an hour into my ride, it started to rain. When I say rain, I mean a torrential downpour. As soon as it started I threw my iPhone into the bag as well as the camera and stopped under a tree, hoping that it would pass quickly. No such luck. After about 10 minutes with minimal protection, I flipped the bag over (exposing the other side to the water) and went looking for an empty house in the area with a decent sized overhang. It took a few minutes, but I found one. This is what the weather looked like when I got there.

The weather was abysmal, but my Timbuk2 bag kept my camera and my iPhone safe. They were both completely dry. I know that the bag isn’t designed to be waterproof, and I’m sure that it would have been drenched through and through given enough time. However, it kept everything perfectly dry long enough to escape the rain.

I was a fan of Timbuk2 before, but this just reaffirmed me in my belief that these guys make some of the best bags around. The messengers do a great job at everything that they’re designed for and are of such quality that they even do a good job of things that they weren’t specifically designed for. If you’re looking for a hard core bag, look no further.

Twitter Again

Twitter is continuing to frustrate me, but the marketing opportunities they will provide will be vast.

Twitter's behavior over the last few months has been frustrating to those of us who really want to be able to communicate and broadcast without having ads shoved in front of us. However, Facebook has made it clear that ads sell and that targeted ads sell even better. I'm staggered by the amount of money that I see thrown into Facebook ads. Twitter is more than aware of the situation.

As they develop and change over the coming months, I imagine that Twitter will become even more of a marketing must than it already is. I remember when a company having an active Twitter account would be a major factor in my decision to become a customer. I wasn't interested in their Tweets, not really. I was impressed by the initiative and dedication to good customer service that it showed to have a real-time response to users. It was a mark of quality. While a large amount of that remains true, ads in Tweets and constant retweeting of other company accounts has become tedious and I find that I'm not as interested as I used to be in the state of a company's Twitter account as a user.

However, as someone who has to stay abreast of marketing trends, Twitter is opening up a whole new realm for themselves and for potential customers. Peoples' Twitter accounts are even more well-suited to customized ads than Facebook. A 'Following' list basically a fully custom list of things the user likes, and if you can tap into that information you could create highly customized ad content. It has great potential for advertisers, even if it does drive me elsewhere for some of my own content creation.

Finished Reading "The Silent Life"

The Silent Life was an interesting read. Worth reading for anyone considering the cloistered life. Merton critiques several orders and discusses the nature of the life of the monk. He says little that is applicable to laymen, but it's interesting nonetheless.

BeadsApp

I’ve wanted an app on the App Store since it first opened back in 2008. Since then I’ve graduated from university and started a small business, but only now am I getting around to publishing one of my ideas as an iOS App. You can find it here.

It’s called BeadsApp and it was designed to help make praying and meditating easier. I find that I’m constantly breaking, losing, or leaving behind my prayer beads. As I’ve watched the App Store over the last few years, I’ve seen a fair number of apps crop up that try to solve this issue. However, they regularly use unintuitive interfaces which fail to capture the simplicity of prayer and meditation. I think that I’ve captured that simplicity.

Of course, no 1.0 app is perfect. I have many additions to the app that I’m currently working on. However, I don’t want to flood the app with features in an attempt to grow the feature set and impress potential buyers. I want the simplicity of the program to be its draw. All of the features that I add will maintain that simplicity and respect the boundaries of an app such as this.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, you can email me. Otherwise, my Twitter and my App.net accounts can be accessed by the links above.

Customize Apple Touch Icon Text

There’s no way to make an Apple Touch Icon’s text be independent from the Title of a page. However, you can change the title of the page that people should add to their home screens. This is simple if your site is simple, but it can be complicated if you’re dealing with a CMS like Wordpress. Here’s how I managed to dynamically customize the title of the Blog page on a Wordpress site without having to force the titles for all of the pages to change.

To clarify, this will change the way the Wordpress system displays titles, but it could also be augmented to write custom titles to other types of sites.

Everything you need to do here will need to be done in the Header.php of the Wordpress site or in the head of any other site that you try to use. This first section is just some PHP that doesn’t effect the site. It just saves the current URL as the variable curPageURL(), which you will use to selectively change the Title of pages on your site:

<?php function curPageURL()

{$pageURL = 'http';

if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on")

{$pageURL .= "s";} $pageURL .= "://";

if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80")

{ $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]; }

else { $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]; }

return $pageURL; } ?>

Now, get the URL of the page whose title you want to change. This next script will check the URL of the current page based on the the first script, above. If the current URL is the same as the URL you gave it, then it will display the first result. A bit of Wordpress shorthand code is in that section now. All I wanted to do was keep Wordpress from adding its “Blog | ” to the page title. You can put whatever you want here.

<title><?php

if (curPageURL() == 'http://www.yourURL.com/full_page_URL')

{ bloginfo('name'); }

else { wp_title('|', true, 'right'); bloginfo('name'); } ?>

</title>

If the URL is not the one you specified, then it will display the alternate title.

That’s it! It’s not complete control of the Apple Touch Icon text, but it’s a great way to get a little bit of control.

Apple Touch Icons with Wordpress Child Theme

Apple touch icons are the images that display when you tap “Add to Home Screen” from a website. Sites that don’t have anything to display show a tiny screen shot of the site. There are plenty of tutorials online for setting these things up on your site, but sites using a custom Child Theme based on another Wordpress theme make it slightly more difficult.1

Once you’ve made the images, you need to put them somewhere on the server that won’t be affected if there is an update to the Parent Theme. This means that you should probably place it in the child theme’s folder (or elsewhere if you’re not in control of the Child Theme).

Now, Wordpress uses <?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?> to load the URL of the current theme. However, this will pull up the URL of the Parent Theme. Instead, use <?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?> to pull up the base url of the site and then add the directory of the files to that.

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/wp-content/themes/child_theme/containing_folder/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png">

Do this for each of the 4 image sizes and it should work fine. This is a pretty easy fix, but I couldn’t find any reference to the situation in any of my searches. If you need a reference for the retina sizes necessary for these images, look here.

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1. The Child Theme I’m dealing with is something that was made specifically for this project. If you don’t have direct control over your child theme, then you might want to alter this method a bit.  ↩

Loving App.net

App.net is now live and I finally received my Alpha invite! I’ve been on for a couple of hours talking to people and enjoying the high quality dialogues. There are definitely some flame wars going on, but overall the quality of the interaction is definitely blowing Twitter out of the water. I can only hope that it can maintain the quality as it (hopefully) grows. I wasn’t around in the very early days of Twitter, but I remember hearing about what a great social network it was. I imagine that it was much like App.net is now, so here’s hoping that it holds on to its quality in the weeks and months ahead.

Anyway, I’m having a great time and think that this network has great potential. I’m proud to be among the first 8,000 users.

ThinkUp: Almost Like Twitter Analytics

ThinkUp is an open source social network monitor that watches your social networks and creates beautiful statistics and graphs based on the data it collects. The install and implementation require a server and some steps that are above novice level. However, if you know what you’re doing, take a minute and check it out.

With just a few minutes of setup and a couple of wily uses of the Twitter and Facebook developer pages, the system can crawl the networks and provide very useful data that can be used to track ad campaign success and the growth of your social presence. The Analytics provided by Facebook are probably a bit more robust, but Twitter sorely lacks this kind of system. It’s worth it for that alone. Also, it outputs data in a very simple UI that is not as overwhelming as the Facebook analytics can seem to some. There’s even great documentation that makes any kind of step-by-step tutorial by me redundant.

Check it out!