Linked List: March 5, 2014

Wednesday, 5 March 2014

Putt-Putt Perfection 

“Everybody has their one thing that they’re good at, and if you ever find it, you want to stick with it.” —Rick Baird

Great short film from Grantland.

Typography as Art 

Clever idea for a mural by Dave Heinzel.

Prompting for App Reviews 

Dan Counsell:

There’s nothing wrong in asking for a review, but remember you want to give your users a great experience. You should focus on making your app delightful, not annoying. Pick your moment carefully and you’ll find users are more than happy to leave you a great review.

I’ve put together a basic set of rules I think anyone involved with making apps should follow. It’s nothing fancy, and by no means comprehensive, but it’s a good start:

  1. Don’t ask at launch. Seriously, never do this.
  2. Choose the perfect moment, after a positive interaction is best.
  3. Try not to interrupt the users workflow, don’t be annoying.
  4. Only ask once. If they’ve said no, never ask again.
  5. Ask passively if possible, place it in the app settings or updates notes.

Solid advice.

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel 

“A Tediously Accurate Map of the Solar System”, by Josh Worth. Great fun. (Via Laughing Squid.)

Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale 

Kenneth Tynan’s classic 1978 profile of Johnny Carson for The New Yorker:

“Johnny Carson on TV,” one of his colleagues confided to me, “is the visible eighth of an iceberg called Johnny Carson.” The remark took me back to something that Carson said of himself ten years ago, when, in the course of a question-and-answer session with viewers, he was asked, “What made you a star?” He replied, “I started out in a gaseous state, and then I cooled.” Meeting him tête-à-tête is, as we shall see later, a curious experience. In 1966, writing for Look, Betty Rollin described Carson off camera as “testy, defensive, preoccupied, withdrawn, and wondrously inept and uncomfortable with people.” Nowadays, his off-camera manner is friendly and impeccably diplomatic. Even so, you get the impression that you are addressing an elaborately wired security system. If the conversation edges toward areas in which he feels ill at ease or unwilling to commit himself, burglar alarms are triggered off, defensive reflexes rise around him like an invisible stockade, and you hear the distant baying of guard dogs.