Linked List: July 21, 2014

Monday, 21 July 2014

‘Count to Ten When a Plane Goes Down’ ★

John C. Beck:

Just a little under 31 years ago, I played a key role in a conspiracy theory that grew up around a passenger plane downed by a Russian missile. Trust me, I did not mean to be involved.

Great story.

Podcast Players: The New UI Design Playground ★

Nice post from Supertop, the duo behind the excellent Castro:

By making Overcast free with in app purchase, Marco has lowered the barrier to trying a third party app. From our perspective, a user trying any third party app is good for all third party apps. If a user is persuaded to download one alternative they should be more likely to consider others in the future, especially given the variety of apps that are available. Marco referred to this diversity in his Macstories interview:

With a podcast app […] there are tons of big and small design and priority decisions that each developer makes along the way. These decisions add up to radically different apps — I can’t point to any two podcast apps in the store today that are very similar to each other in actual use.

I encourage you to try Overcast. In fact, if you really love podcasts, I encourage you to try all the others too. If you spend hours listening to podcasts every week, it’s going to be worth your while to find the app that suits you best.

Back in 2009 I wrote a piece titled “Twitter Clients Are a UI Design Playground”:

There are several factors that make Twitter a nearly ideal playground for UI design. The obvious ones are the growing popularity of the service itself and the relatively small scope of a Twitter client. Twitter is such a simple service overall, but look at a few screenshots of these apps, especially the recent ones, and you will see some very different UI designs, not only in terms of visual style but in terms of layout, structure, and flow. I’m not saying it’s easy to write a good Twitter client. In fact, that’s the point — that it is not easy to write a good client for something as small in scope as Twitter hints at just how hard it is to write a good app for anything, let alone something truly complex.

Less obvious is the fact that different people seek very different things from a Twitter client. TweetDeck, for example, is clearly about showing more at once. Tweetie is about showing less. That I prefer apps like Tweetie and Twitterrific doesn’t mean I think they’re better. There is so much variety because various clients are trying to do very different things. Asking for the “best Twitter client” is like asking for the “best shirt”.

I think the same is true of podcast players today.

Mocast 1.0 ★

New $2.99 iPhone podcast player by Frank Krueger. By bizarre coincidence, it launched the same day as Overcast, so it might have gotten lost in the Overcast shuffle. It’s a different take. Krueger writes:

I wrote Mocast because I was unhappy with the iOS podcast app selection. While there are almost as many iPhone podcast players as there are weather apps, I find that they all have two fatal flaws.

First, they take downloads way too seriously. Most UIs differentiate downloaded vs. not downloaded episodes and bifurcate their interface along those lines. This is silly to us podcastistas who aren’t the greatest at planning ahead.

Second, they take new episodes too seriously. Whole apps seem built with only new episodes in mind as they hide away the back catalog. I don’t know why this is. My favorite podcast, The Incomparable has an amazingly rich back catalog of episodes that I love to listen to. It’s nice when a new episode arrives but there’s no need over-emphasize them at the cost of the full catalog.

Interesting technical note, too:

As with all my apps, I wrote Mocast in C# using Xamarin.iOS. She came out to be about 8,000 LOC with about 60% of that code lying in the UI layer.

George Orwell: ‘Politics and the English Language’ ★

One more follow-up regarding the connection between clear thinking and clear writing: Orwell’s famous essay, Politics and the English Language:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

I’ve read this essay numerous times, and it never gets old.

‘Mission Statement’ ★

As if right on cue given my aside last week on Satya Nadella’s business-jargon-laden company-wide memo, here’s a new song (and cool video) from Weird Al Yankovic.

(Another new song from Yankovic, “Word Crimes”, is also apt.)