Defiant Sloth

I don't normally "link-list" stuff on this blog, but I felt this article hit a nerve for the kind of concerns I typically have for the tech industry.

Two good quotes:

The problem isn’t entrepreneurs.... it’s the venture capitalists who are funding them

And:

...the pursuit of advertising dollars includes about every startup that is going for scale first and says it will figure out how to "monetize" its users "once it has the eyeballs."

As always, there's more than one side to this story, but the more I hear and read about small startups getting insane VC capital, it makes me wonder when this bubble is going to burst worse than the original one back in the early 2000s. And as the article indicates, I'm not necessarily concerned about some of these goofy (Yo app) or bold (Uber) ideas, but rather the valuations these campanies are receiving.

Either way, read it.

A Wallet Reboot of Sorts

Last year, the SnapBack Slim (1.0) was launched as a Kickstarter project. I reviewed it here after receiving an early model, and have been using it frequently to gauge its longevity over time. It’s held up well, and I can attest, several months later, that I stick to my initial impressions about it:

• As an elastic, minimalist wallet, the original Snapback Slim proved superior to other attempts at a similar design by employing an elastic band around the main wallet cavity to hold non-card paraphernalia like cash
• The elastic band doubles as a strap for the wallet while exercising or exerting oneself in such a way that you, well, can’t put your wallet in a pocket
• It felt strong enough to to reassure against any uncertainty regarding sewing quality (and still holds up after several months of frequent use)

The Snapback Slim wasn’t without its faults, though. Namely, I found the elastic strap a bit mellow — it certainly held cash, but it didn’t feel particularly taut for, say, loading it with a small quantity of one or two bills. Additionally, the inseam of the elastic band was off-putting: it was positioned on the inside of one of the wallet’s ends, and it not only interfered with loading cards into the wallet (they would have to be pushed against one side or the other), but it also fattened the look of one side of the wallet. Aesthetically, it just didn’t seem like that should happen.

So when I heard that Nick Augeri, the designer of the Snapback Slim, was working on a revision to his original concept, I was pleased. He had decided, much like the recently kickstarted Baron Fig notebook, to relentless refine his product. The original Snapback Slim was a great product — and, only after a short period of use, it’s clear that the Snapback Slim 2.0 is even better.

Initial Impressions

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First things first: the second revision of this wallet feels much, much stronger (yes, stronger -- when you're using a material like elastic for a wallet, you want it to feel as far from shoddy as it can get). This obviously sturdier build quality to the entire wallet gives me the impression that Nick may have even started from scratch with the design. The material feels denser and tougher than before by an order of magnitude. Perhaps this feel is best exemplified in the new snap band (the outer elastic strip intended for holding your cash and other items separate from your cards). The band hugs the entire wallet like a terrified child to his parent. Oddly, it does this so well that it was a pain to load the wallet for the first time because I idiotically kept the snap band wrapped around the body of the wallet. So a word of advice: don't load the wallet with the band around it -- you'll struggle.

Once I had the wallet loaded, everything felt perfect. My most used cards, positioned on the easily extractable inner sides of the wallet, smoothly slipped in and out. The snap band felt more than adept with just a few small bills, and I have to imagine that confident elasticity won’t diminish any time soon. In short, this 2.0 version of the Snapback Slim fixes the original problem around the looser snap band.

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So, how about that inseam? Happy to say that the gluttonously present stitching in the previous version has been positively refined. While it still sits at the far edge of the main inner compartment, it is more deftly stitched into a tighter wind that rests with the sides of your cards, not separating them as before. This is a notable change in how the wallet operates with several cards installed — whereas it used to fan out at one end (like the thick side of an ax head), it now rests slimmer and more uniform. Again, version 2.0 addressed the only real annoyance I had with the original one.

TL;DR But You’re Already This Far

If you like slim wallets, and would like one with more than just a single compartment to dump everything into (ahem, Supr Slim wallet), you should back this smartly revised iteration of the Snapback Slim. If you have the original Snapback Slim, you’re probably still fine using it. It’s like an iPhone 5s to an iPhone 5 model comparison. Either way, it’s a minimal, slick little wallet that holds cards and cash very well. And it’s priced quite right, especially at the early bird specials. You can find the Snapback Slim 2.0 right here on Kickstarter.

If you’re interested in reading my original impressions of the Snapback Slim 1.0, here’s the review.

Full disclosure: I received an advance build of the Snapback Slim 2.0 ahead of the Kickstarter project launch, so I’m reviewing a 99% completed version of the product. The logo placement in my photos is slightly unjustified in the center of the snap band, but the final builds — as you can see in the Kickstarter project — are perfectly aligned. And as always, I’m keeping my impressions honest.

A recent gift from the brother and sister-in-law prompted me to write a review about it. The Canadiano coffee maker, made in Canada (obviously) and apparently by some loony designers, is one of the more curious pour-over coffee makers I’ve used. Wrought entirely from wood (except for the stainless steel filter cone at its epicenter), the Canadiano promises to assume the flavors of a continually used coffee bean over time. I expect such absorption to enhance future pours, a feat that glass and ceramic vessels simply can’t match. Since I usually stick to similarly roasted beans, it may be good practice to rotate in and out of using the Canadiano depending on the origin of the beans that Tonx drops at my door. (Edit: I now use Yes Plz, the spiritual successory to Tonx, as Tonx was purchased by them in recent years).

After having unpacked the coffee maker (which was tucked into a thin, paper box with stencil cut-outs for the logo), and cleaning it with recommended soap and water, I proceeded to “season” the vessel per the single-page manual’s instructions. This procedure involved:

• Coarsely grinding some coffee beans
• Boiling water
• Tossing the grounds into the bowl of the device
• Setting the Canadiano atop a mug
• Pouring the heated water atop while stirring it about.

It suggests using whatever amount of water you prefer (I usually stick to a 1:16 coffee to water ratio, but it didn’t matter much since all I was doing was seasoning it during this run-through). The basic idea behind seasoning, especially during the first use, is to clean out any additional sawdust that might have lingered in the inner bowl, as well as jumpstart the wood’s absorption of coffee flavor.

Post-seasoning, I dried out the Canadiano whilst setting about 250g of water to boil back on the stovetop. I went about grinding the recommended two tablespoons of beans into a coarse ground (right at the 18th notch on my Baratza), and continuously stirred while pouring over the water. For coffee, I used) Tonx’s latest release, the Gigante from Huila, Colombia. According to Tonx, I was to expect “a delicate combination of raspberry and bing cherry flavors, with sweet notes of molasses, and a floral, minty finish.” Such nuances are never regularly met since my nose and taste buds are terrible at detecting anything short of a habanero pepper (or maybe that’s because I ate stomach-rending roasted habanero wings at Jake Melnick’s last night), so I didn’t know what to expect from the taste of coffee, especially from a new brewer. (To be fair, Tonx’s releases are usually amazing, but I’m undoubtably at the sub-pretentious level of tasting skill.)

I had prepared a few shots of espresso from this release during the past week, and they had been delicious as expected, but I definitely noted the delivery from the Canadiano to favor a woody, nuttier taste than I remembered from the previous instances. This isn’t surprising coming from a coffee maker made entirely from well-oiled wood, and I love when coffee delivers a nutty taste. I’m not sure how much influence the wood has over the the beans, but my guess is it will bond much better with continued use. In this regard, the Canadiano is unlike anything else on the market, especially when compared to other pour-overs like the V60 and Chemex.

There are other long-term benefits from using the Canadiano aside from the inheritance of coffee taste:

• Canadiano has a metal filter instead of paper, which means a reduction in waste and expenses over the paper filters typically needed for the [Chemex](https://amzn.to/3K5Cs9z) and [AeroPress](https://www.amazon.com/Aeropress-Original-Espresso-style-Portable-Espresso/dp/B0047BIWSK?crid=UR134X57EOLL&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.SWLU6PNANx3bMZ0XfcB8hPTmlv3uAZrvbA8o2PKMCGvdAhJ031j8-HLsHZqJcqPwsa-LMICoAbwOMYjfZQHPYa88InLGPS-hrsNZotR9hJ8etbZPhu92xivGnTTnLZbs6cZuYIh8WxxOXzPJ7RXs8dz7wFFI2SUje92CYtg-yWGwmeDYVFJHev1pPyeE0q4v_EiiCuDK0Mq6mRWhF2NQUgLhvdOqPb0f71zg72vTCQ0FI2fkOLEpcTAcpB9idDf5u2SzX2atzXRO7kyY-Kw8EApQeQJm3CS-rw44ikjKGyw.YxdAFN6QxykwAqBdD6hKehEvBnf9ziX0swAT7JdGwzE&dib_tag=se&keywords=aeropress&qid=1716220418&sprefix=aeropress%2Caps%2C591&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=defiantslot02-20&linkId=5b0504af58723fa23f1f52525d4ee564&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl)
• Minimal footprint (it’s a simple wood slab, easily packable and storable)
• It isn’t as fragile or prone to accidental breakage like glass brewers
• Cleaning it is easy — the few times I’ve used it, I just ran hot water into the bowl and poured out the remainder of grounds after banging it a few times over a trash bin

Canadiano offers a few different models of the coffee brewer, and there is a noticeable difference between the two main types: Raw and “not Raw” editions. The raw editions require some additional maintenance after each use; the company recommends applying the Canadiano Conditioning Oil regularly (every 3-4 months), depending on use. According to the company’s site, this “Conditioning Oil is a self-drying natural oil that keeps your Canadiano in a stable condition. The editions will develop cracks if not maintained and cared for properly.” My model isn’t a raw model, so thankfully I don’t need to concern myself with maintaining the integrity of the wood, but for those that do, it’s one extra little thing to do. Not a big deal.

Overall, the Canadiano is a fun, untraditional pour-over experience. I really like the wood build, and coffee grounds look lovely pooled in the bowl when brewing. The 3-5 minute steep time is perfect (about the same range as a Chemex), and clean-up is simple. As I continue to use it, I’ll come back and update this review. The goal is to use the Canadiano with single-origin coffee (so the next Colombia batch from Tonx is getting full-time duty with the Canadiano). Recommended if you’re up for a change in pace from your usual tools, and want to experiment with the unique potential of wood binding flavor over time to enhance the coffee brewing experience.

From a Casual News Observer

Journalism and news have had a rough decade. Everyone has seemingly struggled under the transition to the web (even though it's been more than a decade since news has moved into the digital era). Traditional newspaper institutions have gone in one direction or another, typically involving either a paywall method of siphoning off free article visits after a limitation (like Financial Times and the New York Times) or a free method backed exclusively by advertising (like USA Today). Other niche news sites backed by paid subscriptions have attempted to rise out of the darkness (like NSFWCorp), but have been beaten down by low member numbers or acquisitions (like NSFWCorp's buyout from PandoDaily). News companies' great battle for relevance with loyal readership, subscribers, and attention squares them off against the violent waves of SEO, blogs, social media, and "free news elsewhere."

So what strategy will work now? How can these institutions survive in the modern era?

The New York Times, which has experimented in a number of ways with its subscription services across traditional paper delivery and digital accessibility, have recently released a new product called NYT Now that might be the best solution yet. At first, I wasn't sold on their pitch:

NYT Now includes the top stories from The New York Times, handpicked and summarized by our editors.

The product is basically a selection of the top NYT articles (and continuing stories) of the day, along with another section handled by their editors that "curates a feed of the most talked-about stories from other sources, so you’ll never miss out on what’s interesting." And that's exactly what it is. The kicker is that they're charging $8/month for this, and it primarily exists as an iPhone app. As a bit of a bonus, if you're an NYT Now subscriber and log in to the nytimes.com website, it will feature small green diamonds next to articles that you may read for free (otherwise you're stuck with the same limitations of non-subscribers -- 10 articles/month).

When you read that summary, it sounds like a bizarre product. Yet another curation app of articles around the Internet? Another news app with the focus of summarizing important news of the day? And yet another subscription offering from the New York Times that's even more puzzling and confusing than their current crop of options (weird pairings like Tablet + Website only)? If I already was at a loss of understanding their convoluted digital vs. traditional strategy, this seemed to be horribly ill-advised direction to take.

But I was wrong. NYT Now is actually fantastic.

Okay, So Why is it Fantastic?

Keeping up with the news has always been a laborious exercise if you're a casual observer. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to a number of different news-oriented periodicals over the last decade -- The Economist, The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wallstreet Journal, and Monocle -- hoping that one would stick as my go-to for world and potlical news (typically the stuff I don't follow in my highly customed RSS feedreading or Twitter stream). I also have used and tried a number of apps that attempt to bring you the top news from across the world and Web, including Circa (still the best example of this) and the Quartz morning briefing. While I enjoy the journalistic integrity, detailed stories, and birds-eye view that so many of these purvey, nothing has really stuck with me as part of a daily or weekly exercise in reading (except Monocle's brilliant monthly designs). But there's still an appeal to receive and understand news, even though it's hard to keep up with.

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So why does another potentially divisive app do it better than anything else out there? The Atlantic's assessment of NYT Now sums it up best:

Keeping up with the news is exhausting. NYT Now proposes that the best way to stay on top of the flood isn't a wily and undulating Facebook or Twitter feed. It's a single, holistic, ongoing news package, that tells readers what they want to know and nothing more—unless they specifically want to dive deeper.

There's also a bit of friendly personalization involved. When you wake up for your morning briefing, the NYT Now app greets with you a "Good Morning", the temperature outside, and an easy bulleted list of the things to recap from yesterday and watch out for today. Again around 6pm your local time, there is a "Good Evening" briefing to cap off the day. It's like getting a presidential briefing doc from your secretary. It feels awesome. And nothing beats professionally-written bullet points and headlines to guide you through the mess of a constantly updating news site's home page. The experience with NYT Now feels better than anything before it.

You may be wondering about the limitations in articles for free viewing on nytimes.com. Yes, it's true, you don't get to access every article they publish. Originally, I thought this would be an issue -- sucks I'm paying for a partial subscription to the entire NYT package. Well, after a good week of NYT Now use, I can tell you it isn't an issue at all. Who has time for all these articles anyway? When I was subscribed to the NYT, I feel like I only read some of the top stories anyway, and then entertained myself with Film, Travel, and Science articles when one sounded worth reading. Same gist here -- while it's hard to navigate to sections of the newspaper in-app (note: you can't), it's easy to find the top stories in these sections on nytimes.com. And more than likely, the top couple stories from that section are available for NYT Now subscribers. So instead of wading through a whole section for the probable best article, you'll just get easy, visible access to it. And if you really want to read that off-beat "36 hours in Tokyo" article, you can use one of your free 10 article credits per month.

As a convenience, if you scroll upon an article you'd like to delve into later, you can send it to a Saved section (one of the three main streaming views in the app). This area operates as a sort of Instapaper for reading saved articles at your preferred time. It syncs with your NYT account (which you must create or log into with your NYT Now app subscription), so anything you save for later reading on nytimes.com also shows up here. If you want, you can also send articles to your favorite read later app (like Instapaper or Pocket) via the iOS share panel -- these services can be reached via a forwarded email of the article, and from my tests, it seems to work just fine.

In Summary

Since downloading the app on launch day, I've habitually noticed I've been tapping it open more than Twitter and Circa these days to see the latest headlines and follow their curated stream of hand-picked articles around the web. Sure, I'm likely doing this because it's still a new experience, but I'm also enjoying it because their stream often includes bits from everyone -- especially outside my highly biased, highly curated RSS feeds. You need a break from the same kind of stories, and NYT Now has been (and promises to continue to be) an easily accessible vacation.

You can download the NYT Now app here and try it for free for a month. Subscriptions are handled via iTunes, so you aren't handing over private information to the NYT and you can easily cancel without having to call a 1800 number (like you traditionally do for a regular subscription.

A Review from a Dormant Facebook User

For someone who doesn't regularly use Facebook (as in: next to never), I'm going to proceed to tell you what I think of its recently released app, Paper. The reason I cared anything at all about Paper was because I'd been a fan of its lead designer, Mike Matas, since his days running Push Pop Press. Back then, he was straight out of Apple, building a company that was intended to go on to produce really cool eBooks (but only ended up developing one, Al Gore's Our Choice). As per usual, he was gobbled up by Facebook's deep purse and sent to work on what the social media giant likely hopes is the future of their main app's design.

On a number of levels, this should be exciting -- Facebook uses a great team to develop, in isolation, a new app that is a radical departure from traditional mobile design. It's rare for a company that big to invest significant money and resources into something that may not live long beyond a test. As it ended up, this effort manifested into a kind of hybrid of sorts: a news reader that happens to also present your Facebook news feed. Yeah, one of those news readers. Again.

Everyone seems to want a piece of the news-consuming action, but no one has been able to successfully pull in mainstream audiences to it (the New York Times has recently dipped into this with their new NYT Now product). A few of us had to flock somewhere new after the Google Reader fiasco, but mainstream Internet users probably don't even remember what that was -- or even know what RSS is. So Facebook is trying to tackle challenge no one asked for: bridging Facebook news feeds and regular news feeds into one mega app.

To address this challenge, the app has been designed with a two-panel layout: the upper panel is a large square housing rotating media (mostly photos) from either your Facebook feed or from headlines from one of the news sections. The lower-half of the design is dedicated to a horizontal carousel of updates -- e.g., Facebook posts or news articles. Flick upward on a card, and it zooms into the whole screen for a summary. Flick again on any shared content in the zoomed-in card, and you will pull up the entire referenced content. The animations are smooth, clever, and neat. There is a clear approach to this design that requires very few visual cues. It's intuitive.

But after having popped it open on occasion over the last few weeks, I can say that neither the design nor the intended features have met my satisfaction. And more importantly, I think this new design paradigm is a poor direction for a user interface shake-up (for which it was clearly intended).

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Design & Usability

As with this design team's previous efforts, the design of and interaction with the app is a high-class experience. Everything runs smoothly, including the very impressive zooming, stretching, and flipping that can happen in rapid succession.

But performance is only one part to the whole package -- usability is another thing entirely. And this is the area where Paper falls short: The horizontal slider is the worst idea for Paper's main method of navigating through an endless news stream. By the tenth swipe, my thumb is utterly cramped. You would think this would have been tested time and again by regular users, but I don't believe it. It is not superior to what works right now, and by trying to push a new interaction paradigm, Facebook overstepped their bounds with style over function.

Paper also idiotically handles one of its most commonly shared media types: large-format, widescreen photos. When holding a mobile device vertically, you must tilt the device to "pan and scan" the entire image. This didn't work with VHS's terrible ruination of film in the 80s and 90s, and it still doesn't work in the 21st century. Having to pan across a large photos sucks the life out its composition. Again, this isn't an improvement; it's a side-step to nowhere.

Features

The news feed and "editorial" curation from Facebook's team of -- what, engineers? Curation experts? -- just isn't my thing. I could care less what they think I'm interested in, especially when the content buckets are such lumbering seas like Politics, Tech, and Headlines. I have my own RSS process for curating content I want to read and from whom, and I have never liked anything via Facebook, so they have no idea what I would care about anyway. Again, other folks might find it useful based on their involvement with Facebook, but it seems half-assed and a "has been" compared to other comparable services.

I've also never once posted anything to Facebook -- aside from when it originally came to my college in 2004 and I posted stupid shit on people's walls -- so I can't say much about the posting and editing functionality of the app. It does, however, look to be the best-implemented feature. You simply pull down on the entire canvas of content to view your actions. You have a link to your profile, you can create a post, edit your feed sections, or go directly to the app's settings, which also appear to include privacy settings and shortcuts for your Facebook profile. Flicking up to dismiss this area of the app easily brings back your main two-panel view to get back into things.

In Summary

Paper tries to strike out a new path for app design and interaction, but it seems only surface-thick. With actual usage, I can't imagine anyone preferring the miniscule horizontal swipe carousel over the traditional vertical swipe of every other app. Horizontal carousel work well for small bits of navigation (let's say four to five items in a shopping app, for instance); as the main way to view a constantly updated, infinite stream -- not so much.

Re-engaging with Facebook on these occasional spurts of Paper use also reminded me why I never visit the site other than for "work" -- it is a horrifying place worthy of no one's time.

A smidgeon over a year and a half ago, I finally received my invite to Simple, the self-described “better banking” service that sits on top of Bancorp (and soon, will sit on top of Madrid’s BBVA). Essentially, Simple is an interface and customer support portal for banking. When they say they’ve “reinvented the basics of banking,” they aren’t far from the mark. It’s a digital-only service boasting such features as zero overdraft, minimum, or monthly fees (their network of 55,000 ATMS are free to access, and they never charge a fee on top of out-of-network ATMs, including overseas); automatic budgeting and saving, photo check deposits, free bill pays and check deliveries, instant money transfers between members, fee-free automated clearing house transfers (ACH) between banks, awesome support chat and call features (including real human beings that are approachable, friendly, and most importantly, funny), and an amazing reporting dashboard.

One of the neat approaches to banking that Simple seems to have down that no else has attempted is using all the data associated with a single transaction. Most banks ignore or hide this information from their users, but Simple has built an entire reporting function around it. Data like geographic reference (where did you make that purchase?), categorical alignment (was it fast food?), tips made on top of original restaurant expenses (what is my average gratuity mark-up over time?), exact time of purchase (what the hell was I doing in a McDonalds drive-through at 2am?), and smart grouping of like or same purchase points. While you don’t have to, the Simple interface allows you to add meta data to transactions as well:

• Tags (using the hash mark)
• Photo uploads
• Comments and memos
• Change name of purchase point

This flexibility allows for a lot of interesting ways to view your expenses (expenses in last 45 days? how much do I spend eating around dinner time? how’re my income vs. expenses doing?).

Work Lunch Expenses

My favorite is a #worklunch tag I’ve manually attributed to all at-work expenses, which are mostly my lunches and the occasional afternoon coffee. I check this report every few months to see how it’s going. It reminds me of the days when I obsessively checked NBA team standings throughout the basketball season — tracking which teams have overcome one another in an attempt to clinch for the playoffs. Instead, it’s a demented grown-up version: which embarrassing fast food restaurant still leads my work lunch expenses? What percentage of those lunch expenses happened over the last month? Year? Since I started tracking?

Without the pizazz of a sports reporter, here are the standings as of March 2014 (with considerations for dating back to July 2012, when I joined Simple):

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              <noscript><img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/ec295cb587.jpg" alt="Current Work Lunch Expense Standings" /></noscript><img class="thumb-image" src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/ec295cb587.jpg" data-image="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/ec295cb587.jpg" data-image-dimensions="324x309" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" alt="Current Work Lunch Expense Standings" data-load="false" data-image-id="53248118e4b08fd5fbc3b964" data-type="image" />
            
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It’s amazing that Pret a Manger still leads my consumption habits (though it should be noted that tagging those afternoon coffees has biased this data, seeing as how 4% of my #worklunch tag is under Coffee & Tea), but Chipotle and Mezza are close behind.

As you can imagine, there is a beautiful cadence of expenses in motion. The actual “spending habit graph” (what else would this be called?) shows this rhythm of business day juts and weekend pits, with the intermediate vacations providing gaps every so often.

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              <noscript><img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/d0f85f4a2d.jpg" alt="Lunch Expenses Over Time" /></noscript><img class="thumb-image" src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/d0f85f4a2d.jpg" data-image="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/25423/2023/d0f85f4a2d.jpg" data-image-dimensions="786x215" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" alt="Lunch Expenses Over Time" data-load="false" data-image-id="53248165e4b0c0f6fcfcff3a" data-type="image" />
            
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You can certainly see how there can be some take-aways from these reports:

• Spending habits
• The kinds of food/locations (okay, obviously: how health you’re attempting to be)
• Why don’t you try a new lunch place
• Or bring your own lunch every once and a while
• Or even better, try to lower lunch spending over time
  • My monthly average is $74.28, likely because some weeks I will actually bring lunch from home

If you want to sign up and try it, you can do so through my Simple share link and jettison your way through the waiting line. Otherwise, it still seems like Mint is a decent service that sits on top of your non-Simple banks, but it’s 1) owned by Intuit and 2) seems to have had issues pulling data consistently from certain kinds of accounts (based on comments I’ve read on sites and haven’t bookmarked for linking; oops).

There are some sites I follow via RSS daily, and there are others that I visit every few weeks or months out of neglect.

One of these sites is Colossal, a curation site of massive art installations and, in their words, "visual ingenuity". Just wanted to link to it here in case anyone gives a shit about cool artistic initiatives you won't likely find elsewhere.

Like sculptures incorporating beehives.

Or giant suspended net installations with trippy colors.

Or this, which I don't even know. What.

Expect to lose an afternoon clicking and tapping.

Last week saw the release of a beautiful new RSS feed reader, Unread, from Jared Sinclair. After reading through some initial reviews from the usual suspects (MacStories, 512 Pixels, Building Twenty), it was clear that this was likely the best way to read articles and stories captured in RSS.

Michael Anderson sums up the gist of Unread quite succinctly:

Hype prior to the release pitched Unread somewhere between sliced bread and the wheel on the spectrum of good ideas. In reality it’s a solid, capable app with a few nice touches, some recurrent frustrations and an air of superiority.

There was one problem: ever since Google Reader died a slow, shitty death, I chose NewsBlur over all other upstart RSS services to resume my pitiful, undesirable RSS habit. It is (and has been) a fantastic service -- if you want something that is truly granular in settings and power-user functionality, it's the bomb. But one thing that has severely dragged it down is its API's use in other apps. Hardly anything supports NewsBlur outside of its native apps (ReadKit is a rare example on the Mac). Not that this has been a make it or break it issue -- the native NewsBlur apps are fantastically designed and super fast -- but I get the jealous bug when apps like Unread and Mr. Reader have support deficiences with my RSS service of choice.

So I rashly decided to act an idiot and picked up a FeedWrangler subscription and downloaded Unread immediately.

Good thing I don't regret it.

While I'll always appreciate NewsBlur, Unread and FeedWrangler have really helped me with the weird RSS-reading habits I've developed over the years. Instead of seeing all the unread counts by folder or by feed, FeedWrangler requires you to either dump everything into one massive unread (or all articles) stream, or organize by "smart streams", which basically amount to curated lists of feeds and/or pulling specific keyword content into a single stream. This in itself was a huge change from my aforementioned way of digging through all the content refreshing day-to-day, but the use of Unread had shifted the actual content read and the method of reading it.

Unread's opinionated design wants you to slowly, conscientiously read articles (something I typically have used Instapaper, a read later service, for in the past). Its use of font, color, and lack of distractions (aka, toolbars, back buttons, menus) permits the user a vacation from briskly blowing through articles like the Slayer on a good night. (Yeah, I've been watching too much Buffy.)

So how does one transition from subscribing to nearly 100 feeds into a relaxed method of reading? Unsubscribing from daily bloat is a good start. I went on a feed diet, striking off several sites that published way too frequently (10-15 articles a day is manageable only if you're breezing through the headlines). I didn't want to breeze through anymore. I wanted the time spent reading my feeds -- let's just call them articles at this point -- to be well-spent. The sites that I threw into NewsBlur were just there in case I wanted to rifle through the latest food trends on Chicago Eater, or reference work crap on Search Engine Land. I was using NewsBlur incorrectly, according to the Unread/FeedWrangler mantra; I was, in a sense, using it as a bookmarking tool. Luckily, I had collected a lot of these sites into folders, and two of them -- Core and Important -- housed the sites that I most frequently read. Nixing several other less important folders, and rearranging sites within them, made the transition quite easy.

While it's only been a few days and a weekend, the cleanse has lowered my annoyance and anxiety with reading articles en masse, and has made it much more joyful to sift through the most important authors' writings on a daily basis. Like anything in life, sometimes you have to do some spring cleaning to feel relief from clutter. And damn, has Unread made that worthwhile.

While it may not seem that extraordinary to the average person, my television show watching habits have far exceeded that of my film habits. I used to soak films into my brain several times a week, but over the last couple years, I've switched to a different track. There a number of factors worth exploring for why this has happened, but first, let's look at the data.

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This chart shows my watching habits over the past four years. I’ve done my best to record every movie and TV show season I watched, but I’m sure I missed a few here and there. Still, the data good enough in the aggregate to analyze. The green line represents TV shows (quantity is actual episodes viewed, not number of seasons), and the blue line represents films viewed (across iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, MUBI, and in theaters).

While my film watching habits have remained fairly constant, my TV viewing has spiked incredibly (more than three times the amount over the course of 2010-2013). Why is that? And how the hell do I have so much time on my hands? Here are a few of my theories:

• No Longer Subscribed to Netflix DVD
• TV Shows are Finally Equaling the Quality of Film
• TV Episodes Easier to Watch in Shorter (or Super Long) Sittings

No Longer Subscribed to Netflix DVD

I ditched the DVD subscription in 2010, and have been using Netflix steaming only for my viewing habits there. While the streaming service has been spotty this past month (as in: barely watchable due to constant buffering over Comcast), it has worked wonderfully in the past, and has curated some really deep finds that I otherwise would have struggled to unearth. Not only did I get around to watching some films I’d been putting off (like Time Crimes and Donnie Darko), I also watched TV shows that weren’t always as accessible in the past (such as Twin Peaks and the amazing Buffy the Vampire Slayer). But not having the DVD subscription meant I was cut off from several new releases and being able to venture down the deep, dark shelves of film history across the world. It’s been a drag not having access to nearly every film ever made, and I suspect this has impacted my film-watching.

Since dumping Netflix DVD, though, I’ve subscribed to MUBI, a limited film curation site that runs only $35/year. It curates some refreshingly esoteric foreign flicks, shorts, and hard-to-find films (some of which I doubt would even be available on Netflix DVD). The films are available for 30 days and each day a new film is introduced (the oldest is knocked off as unavailable). It’s been great, but I find a lot of the films in rotation are the same and I typically only watch a couple every 30-day refresh period.

TV Shows are Finally Equaling the Quality of Film

This reason seems to me the most reasonable. Television shows have become amazing vehicles of entertainment and art. Sure, there were great shows in the 80s and 90s, but nothing has reached the highs of the past fifteen years. In the past four years, I’ve slinked through greats like The Wire, Deadwood, Carnivale, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, Fringe, Orange is the New Black, The Shield, Sherlock, American Horror Story, and obviously several others. But even this short list highlights some of the best genre television ever produced. Each season is anywhere from 10-22 episodes in length (most average around 13), and the majority of the shows I’ve watched have adhered to an over-arching storyline per season (or across a series). And nearly every one of these shows is 40-60 minutes in length.

So perhaps my viewing habits have leaned heavily towards shows because of the episodic nature of their design. Seems obvious. But I never used to watch so many shows. So perhaps I’ve grown a new inclination towards long-form, character-building experiences.

Watching shows have also been more rewarding than watching films — oftentimes I’m watching them with the girlfriend or with friends (either at the same time or separately), and they offer on-going rich conversations and speculation. My experience with films hasn’t been as great — there are certainly times when the discussion arises, but television seems like a more appropriate reference point — at least these days.

TV Episodes Easier to Watch in Shorter (or Super Long) Sittings

This is straightforward. Never before has it been so easy to get to a season of a show, hit play for the first episode, and just marathon the fuck through the rest of the season in one or two sittings. Netflix’s studies have proven that binge watching shows is definitely a modern human behavior. And I’m fine with that. I remember burning through The Wire and Battlestar Galactica. It’s so easy when they’re readily available. Watching shows as they air, however, is an endurance in pain I’d prefer to only experience a few times a year. Alas, that isn’t the case for some really great shows currently airing (hello True Detective, Game of Thrones). Netflix also gets this, and they release their self-produced shows with every episode of a season available to watch on day one (I’m pretty sure the rate at which folks devoured House of Cards single-handedly proved their binge-watching hypothesis).

But shows also aren’t as long as films. It’s easier to sit down and watch a 40-minute Buffy episode than get your mind in the right spot to endure a 3-hour film (like Betty Blue, a French flick I watched on MUBI — after having not seen a long film like that in a while, it took a couple sittings). With an oftentimes brutal schedule during the week, watching an episode during some downtime is sometimes just easier.

In Conclusion

I don’t have anything else to say. Thanks for reading. Keep watching great films and shows.

I have a new logo up on the site, if you didn’t notice. It cost me hardly any time at all. It’s simple, it’s effective, it’s bright. And it was free to make with a Squarespace account (you know, the fantastic website tool company that single-handedly keeps the podcast community in business).

I’ve been wanting to move away from my nebulous (but consistent) avatar image for a while. The ambiguous, pixelated “walking hot dog man” has been a fun representation of my digital presence, but it’s been more of a personal thing than branding for a site. And I felt that Defiant Sloth needed something different. But like many projects, the onerous task of recreating a logo kept getting pushed to the side.

Designing and creating a logo is no simple task. For Defiant Sloth, I wanted sloth imagery, for obvious reasons, and my initial sketches drew on warpaint inspirations (mostly because of the animal’s characteristic eyes and my “defiant” adjective), but I wasn’t up to the task of firing up Acorn or investing in an Adobe Illustrator-like program such as Sketch to hammer it out as a vector image.

Then a very curious announcement was made: Squarespace launched an easy logo editor for the masses. Squarespace Logo was designed to help the small business, the logo-making deficient writer, the mom and pop shop, fast, quickly, and cheaply. After all, the company claims “logos can be comprised of a few basic elements: text, a tagline, and an icon.” And that’s exactly the editor canvas you get.

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How is making a logo so easy? Let’s go back a year and a half or so to my digital marketing job, at which I still currently work. My responsibilities fall mainly in new business and current client growth, and as anyone who is familiar with meetings, pitches, and proposals, PowerPoint is your best friend (as unfortunate a reality as that may ring in your ears). Prettifying and simplifying presentations is sometimes a challenge, given color palettes and “loose” style guides directed by the company, so I began remodeling the visual representation of our services. To aid this redesign, I wanted to draw upon a library of well-articulated, simple icons. Around this time, an ambitious site was beginning to curate a massive catalog of professional, designer-backed icons to represent a breadth of worldly objects. The was (and still is) called The Noun Project.

The Noun Project is sublime. Type in an object in its search bar (even intangible ones, like “success”), and you’ll be returned a dozen or more monochrome icons that have been titled or tagged with success. You find one you like, and can choose to either pay for it (if it’s attached to a monetary value), or use it free under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Naturally, the choice of download/use format is dictated by the designer submitting to The Noun Project. Only recently has The Noun Project began offering a Premium license for agencies, users, and companies of various sizes — and, apparently to some degree, Squarespace.

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So it was with silent appreciation that I finally understood the simplicity of Squarespace’s logo creation tool. You weren’t wrangling with vector tools, you were simply picking colors, resizing and aligning fonts and type, and searching for the one great icon via The Noun Project’s catalog to complete your logo. And so, that’s exactly what I did.

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Surprisingly, there has been unwarranted criticism towards Squarespace Logo from designers and technology writers since its introduction this past week. Many claim that Squarespace is discrediting the merits of hiring a professional logo designer by merely providing access to thousands of monochrome, simple, crisp icons. Nowhere in this move do I see an attack on the art form, and it’s ludicrous to assume that a top-tier brand (or even small business) would opt for using Squarespace Logo instead of a professional designer. Why is it designers feel threatened by this? Is it because any idiot can type in the name of their company, search for a cool or related icon, find a nice color, and then pay the $10 (or sign up for Squarespace) to get a copy of it?

Squarespace Logo isn’t out to rob designers. It exists as another ancillary product to Squarespace’s existing website-building ecosystem. They are trying to making the web a prettier, smoother experience for everyone, and ridding the world of hideous logos is an appreciated next step. High-brow designers should get their heads out of their asses and thank Squarespace for urging logo-needing folks to take better care in the logos they choose to represent themselves, and, if anything, prompt them to take logo design more seriously. After all, Squarespace Logo is a limiting and simple affair — anyone can see that, and I speculate the majority of initial users actually needing a good logo will understand the only way to get one is through a professional.

Meteor App (iOS) Review

(May 2024 Update: The app is no longer available in the App Store)

With the proliferation of badass mobile devices rocking both front- and back-facing cameras, we've naturally made the transition from text messaging to photo messaging. Photography has always been an amazing way of communicating ideas and art throughout its history, and so, too, have words (obviously). So it's inevitable that both of these have found an intersection on mobile devices we carry every day. And while text messages are the reigning champion, photos by themselves, or their use as supplements to text, have seen a significant increase over the last couple years (based on good old empirical evidence.)

Photos seem to be catching on as a fast communication medium because it's oftentimes easier to communicate a thought or physical situation with a visual. It also trumps tapping out a long messages while squished between fat people in a crowded train. Photos are also easier on the brain. But, as it so happens, they also infest your Photos app with implacable, storage-eating fervor.

How are we to combat such unmanageable madness? How do we keep our Photos app from overfilling with temporal imagery that is rendered meaningless after use? Since we don't need those photos gnawing at our limited Photo Streams, it's an admirable thing the folks at Stay Kids did: they built Meteor, a "photo memo" app designed to solve this tragic first world problem.

Single-Serving Goodness

Purpose-built and shy of features, Meteor has two primary views: photo-taking and photo-viewing. In the photo view mode, you can do a couple of things:

• Turn the flash on or off
• Flip to either the front or rear camera
• Tap to focus
• Take a photo
• Switch to the current photo collection in Meteor

Photo-taking is simple. You have fewer options than even the main Camera app in iOS7, which is a good thing, because remember: the purpose of an app like Meteor is to quickly take a photo, share it, and forget it. The candid design of Meteor allows you to do just. In the photo-viewing area, you have a few more options, but the main interface is largely uncomplicated. Huge cropped photos occupy the main window; you scroll to view them, and tap to expand them. The reason you can only see two per scroll is likely because you won't have many photos gathered here over time (more on that in a bit). Of course, you can easily switch to the camera mode again in the upper left corner (located where the system-wide back buttons are), or to Settings, in the upper-right. The Settings view has only two very clear options:

• Set an expiration period for photos via a scroll selector (this is the timeframe you'd like a photo to be deleted from the app after it's been taken)
• Erase all photos and reset settings to default

Super slick. Like I said -- this app is for taking ephemeral photos and then deleting them for you in a few days' time, just like an AI maid. It's a fretless way of managing quickly usable photos.

The last area to tackle is the individual photo options. When you're in the photo view, you'll see the date stamp at the top, a share button, an option to view the photo's EXIF (location) data, and its expiration timeframe. These are all pretty straightforward actions, but it's important to note some interesting use-case scenarios for them. I do quite a bit of occasional life-logging with Day One, and after extensive use, I've come to appreciate taking or using photos in Meteor that I may have thought ephemeral just two days ago, but now actually would like to use as a visual reminder of that particular day. It's as easy as firing up Meteor, initiating the share screen on a photo, and opening the photo with Day One. Easy. Just dial your auto-delete setting back a bit to give yourself some room if you ever want to revisit a particular photo.

The worst part about this app is the pre-loaded text it associates with a photo when triggering the sharing screen. This happens for all available actions, including sending a photo to Messages, email, or a social media account. Next to the photo, Meteor will place the day of the week and the date it was taken, as well as appending #meteor. This is, unfortunately, bullshit. If there were one feature I'd recommend to the developer it would be to offer a toggle for this. Sure, it might be nice to have a reminder of the day a photo was taken, but in no context would anyone I know use that in a message or tweet. And sorry, but I paid for your app -- I don't need to advertise it via a nonsensical hashtag while messaging my girlfriend a photo of a burrito.

So aside from this flagrant misuse of text clippings, Meteor is a wonderful solution to the issue we all have of the cluttered Camera Rolls and potbellied Photos app. Meteor attempts to arrive at the very acceptable intersection of Messages and Snapchat, and succeeds. Take a photo, share it, forget it.

Right now, it's a dollar on the App Store, so grab it.

Developer: Stay Kids

Originally Released: Nov 20, 2013

Version Reviewed: 1.01

The sorry state of the RSS ecosystem since Google Reader's fallout has left bloggers and news sites in a bit of disarray. As such, most folks who write frequently (and would like to track the number of subscribers to their work) have become wary of Google's Feedburner RSS tracking platform. While I've been using it for Defiant Sloth, I finally decided to cast away from it, and made the move to FeedPress this week.

Since migrating, FeedPress has made it easy to manage my account and view analytics. It also seems more and more like the preferred platform by most writers and companies for their future RSS feed management. Here are a few reasons why I was compelled to switch (other than the fear of Feedburner sunsetting in the near future):

1. They're an actual company built around RSS feed management (not Google's abandoned step-child)
2. They offer a premium option that likely provides them enough cost coverage to retain feed management [indefinitely].
3. They're actively developing new tools and integrations with other online services, like MailChimp and Dropbox.

All my RSS feed links are updated, and while current subscribers should still see posts with the feed link with which they originally subscribed, you may want to double-check and just update to the new one for certainty:

Defiant Sloth RSS

Thanks for sticking around.

Every day, billions of human beings poop -- unless, of course, you're this guy (apparently). As most of us know, there are few things more self-deprecating than dragging your ass into a stall, dropping your pants, and letting loose a day's worth of stool. If you happen to take light of this awkward situation, you might find it -- of all things -- humorous. I count myself among those that do, and as I expected, so, too, does a whole community of folks on the social network called LogBlog. So come along for a journey through the Willy Wonka design of a poop enthusiast's wet dream. You'll be surprised to find a first-class app that offers a very fine experience far from what I'd call a turd.

The Chicago-based Janitor, Ltd.'s freshman app, LogBlog, is what happens when you have an adolescent appetite for sharing those private memories of spending time by yourself, secluded from the outside world, in a stall or bathroom somewhere, anywhere -- at home, at the office, at a restaurant, in an airport, at school, in an outhouse. Doesn't really matter -- what does matter is that you have an irresistible desire to share with the world that you just took a shit and it was a glorious affair.

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The app is well designed. It merely requires you to use an email, pick a clever username, and set password to sign-up. If you desire, you may sync with your Twitter and/or Facebook account to discover other friends on the network (and add your avatar image). Alas, there isn't a way to customize your avatar image other than selecting from the app's pre-established icons or syncing with one of those two social accounts. I'm sure this is a deliberate decision made by the developers -- they tend to keep the interface classy.

Navigation is straightforward, sharing several similar design principles between Twitter and Instagram. The first tab features your personal Roll, a recounting of all the times you've recording pooping in the past. Think of it as a vanity reference to show off to friends and family.

Next is the Public log, which as you can guess, is a refreshable feed of the entire community. It reminds me of Twitter in the early days when they actually let you just stare at the firehose of activity across the world. Only LogBlog isn't quite the same size of Twitter (at least not yet), and so this feed is actually readable. And it's fantastic. You get to unroll some really inspired usernames as well (2stainz, RunsDMC, and FiberMoves are my favorites).

A third tab, titled Me, is more or less your profile section. Settings can be edited (notifications, invite/follow other users, share activity on social networks, edit accounts, and support), historical posts can be viewed, and information about followers and those you follow can be viewed.

Finally, the fourth tab, News, is like the Following/News tab in Instagram, showing you the latest external activity (other people's liking of or comments on your posts) and your own activity (your posts, comments, and likes).

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There is no feature bloat here -- most everything has its role and place within the app's structure. If anything, there may be too many ways to view your own roll -- perhaps this app could be even leaner and refrain from keeping the Roll tab at all (but I do love that icon). And the ability to post is omnipresent from tab to tab: there is a pretty, teal "flush" icon in the upper-right corner of every screen. Yep, that leads to the compose screen to flush away a post. You can only share text posts, as I'm sure the restraint of permitting images is to keep with the clean approach the developers have taken. (And don't forget to add a colon tag and keep it under 222 characters in length.)

As the "#1 app for #2 news," I'd go so far as to say that, sure, LogBlog could be interpreted as a self-serving mecca for poop enthusiasts to share their most sacred moments, but it also is a harrowing critique of the social networking industry and its participants. We're an unabashedly conceited society who share everything we do and like and want that we might as well have a whole social network dedicated to those magical times on the toilet. Bravo, Janitor, Ltd.

Grab It & Get Poopin'

LogBlog is available on the App Store for a mere dollar. Don't be a pussy -- just fucking buy this. It's what Twitter and Facebook should have done all along -- charge for service. Keep it classy. And think -- several hundred people have already dropped their spare change on an app to discuss their turds. The greatest mistake (or perhaps classiest gesture) Janitor, Ltd. made was resisting the marketing narcissism of pricing their app at $2.

And once you've downloaded it, you can find and follow me on LogBlog with username CustersLastCrap, where I recount the historical movements of Commander George Armstrong Custer with much-needed reporting of his often-overlooked moments in the Montana mountains, relieving himself of several days' build up in excrement.

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I remember long weekends in ‘96 at my neighbor’s house, swapping turns comandeering the three-pronged monstrosity to collect stars in Super Mario 64. The objective of this seminal 3D platforming game was to move throughout the main hub world, slowly unlocking its connected stages to finally face off against the infamous villain. To proceed to new stages in the hub world, you had to collect Power Stars; once you collected 70 stars, you could access this final arena. There were, however, more than 70 stars available to find and collect in the game (almost twice as many at 120 total). If you wanted to be a game completionist, you did things like spend your entire summer vacation finding and collecting all 120 of those stars. Collecting all of them was considered an achievement, but Nintendo didn’t beat you over the head with a victory badge for it — you proudly internalized that achievement on your own, maybe sharing it with friends, and toasting with a cup of Tang). You tried collecting all those extra stars because it was fun; it was a goal outside of the main game that kept you extending its $60 value.

Gamers back then did all kinds of crazy things to prove their prowess. Gaming magazines like GamePro and EGM featured VHS tapes people had sent showcasing ludicrous run-throughs of Goldeneye or verifying high scores across a variety of score-based games (I mean just look at the laundry list of score submission requirements for Crazy Taxi 2 back in 2001). Gamers took pride in these kinds of achievements. An accomplished method that lets you bend the defined set of rules in a videogame’s self-contained environment is something you can take pride in as a personal or competitive accomplishment. And sure, people like to brag.

This trackable, competitive spirit was first enabled with game scoring measureability in Midway's Sea Wolf back in 1976:

The player would attempt to reach a pre-determined high score within an allotted time period, after which they would win bonus playing time, since it was not possible to save the top score.

Scoring systems were ubiquitous in many early games thereafter — notably Space Invaders — and even transcended to the first console iteration of Super Mario Bros. (though to this day I still have no idea how that score is calculated). Coin-op arcades thrived off the competitiveness of strangers — pinball machines, fighting games, racing games. Tracking your high score and your competition across leaderboards was worth the jaunt alone to an arcade (or so I’m envisioning back in the 1980s, when I was but a wee little boy… Megatouch’s Erotic Photo Hunt at Webster's Pub in Chicago is my modern equivalent from which to draw comparison).

But then something happened with this last generation of consoles: Today, you’ll find nearly every videogame platform require its games to feature something called “achievements” or “trophies” to back-pat its players through the process of merely progressing in-game. This has become a travesty of what was once sacred ground. Sure, high scores and leadership tracking still largely exist across all kinds of games, but the emergence of task-specific achievement systems has cast a dark shadow on gameplay immersion and, more severely, how players behave with their games.

The Nature of Achievements

Let’s not get things confused before I go down the path of this criticism. High scores are one thing; achievements and trophies are another monstrosity entirely. Here’s how each of the main platforms handles these kinds of things:

• Steam Achievements: “Various individual player statistics will be tracked by Steam while you play games, such as the amount of time you have spent playing. Stats are also collected for individual games like Team Fortress 2, Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. You can find achievements under the stats for your games as well.”
• Xbox Gamerscore/achievements: “ Achievements system that measures the number of Achievement points accumulated by a user with a LIVE profile. These Achievement points are awarded for the completion of game-specific challenges, such as beating a level or amassing a specified number of wins against other players in online matches.”
• Playstation Trophies: “Trophies are in-game rewards that recognize substantial gaming accomplishments made while playing your favorite games.”
• iOS Game Center Achievements: “An achievement represents a quantitative goal that the player can accomplish in your game. As the local player plays your game, he or she makes progress towards completing the achievement. When the player meets or exceeds the goal, the achievement is considered earned, and the player is rewarded. Your game defines the goal and the game mechanics that describe how a player earns the achievement.”

It should also be noted that Steam recently evolved their achievements feature to include Steam Trading Cards — digital cards earned for doing arbitrary things like playing Portal 2 for a period of an hour that, once acquired, can then be traded or sold via the Steam platform. I think I made a solid $7 in Steam credit for playing Portal 2 and Civilization V for a period of a couple hours. It's hard to understand who paid money for five bio cards and a few wallpapers, but at least Shadowrun Returns was cheaper.

So with all these methods of delivering feedback to players on their mundane accomplishments in-game, what, exactly, is the point? How do in-game notifications motivate a player? Does the addition of notification-driven achievements change or manipulate the player’s behavior more so than simply beating the game, achieving a high score, or accomplishing a difficult challenge?

There are divisive opinions on the role and functionality of achievements in modern gaming. IGN’s harles Onyett points out that “despite the fact that all you're doing is bumping up a number total that you can show off to your friends, the fact that getting Achievements can actually cause you to play games you normally wouldn't or behave in different ways – sometime to the detriment of those around you – drives these kind of meta-reward mechanics further into the core of what we have come to think of the modern gaming experience.” His co-conspirer, Greg Miller, has other a rather different perspective: “Achievement and Trophies are pointless. These are meaningless numbers and digital trinkets that give us nothing, cost us hours of our lives, and might not even carry over to the next wave of consoles.”

An example? Let’s take an Xbox game, Guitar Hero III, and one its its lousiest achievements: Buy a Guitar Already, worth 15 Gamer Points.¹ If you didn’t already know, Guitar Hero was a popular series of games that were packaged with musical instruments that connected into the game environment so that multiple players could karaoke songs. Strangely enough, this particular achievement requires you to the play the game for a period of time without the guitar, a presumably infuriating experience. As GameSpy points out, “if you're that good with your hands you could have spent those last few hours jerking off and still achieved more. You'd be much more honest with yourself, your role in life, and exactly how much you contribute to society.” Does this achievement make you enjoy the game or challenge you any more than actually pulling off a song? No, it doesn’t. But it influences your behavior to do stupid shit to crank up your Gamerscore.

The Importance of Immersion

My critique isn’t squarely aimed at discrediting the intent behind achievement systems, but rather their delivery. While high scores, speed runs, and in-game collectables are something to strive for as an end-goal, achievement tasks and alerts can be a deviation from those goals, and at their worst, a jarring distraction. Remember VH1’s pop-up music video series? If you couldn’t stand that constant vitriol of interruptions bombarding you every few seconds, why would you possibly tolerate modern videogames’ achievement notifications? Gameplay immersion is an absolutely critical part of the experience, so why do certain game developers dare to interrupt this magical spell cast on the gamer? I sink into a state of melancholia if I suffered through films with alerts telling me that I'd achieved “75% completion of watching film.”

I clap developers on the back like Naughty Dog who avoid beating players over the head with Playstation Trophies. Their recent release, The Last of Us, eschews micro-goal pedantry. I can’t imagine moving through a tense sequence only to be pulled out of it by an alert proclaiming I dispatched a difficult in-game enemy. If I feel inclined, I can quietly internalize that victory and move on. The art of suspense and environmental design is an incredible victory for The Last of Us — notifications have no place here. And the same goes for many other games of the same caliber and ambition.

When I was talking to my brother for the Whalenought Studios interview, he mentioned the annoyance in playing the much-lauded Bethesda game, Fallout 3:

After a few hours of being stuck underground in tight corridors, I finally open the iconic vault door to a beautifully rendered landscape, mountains and wasteland as far as the computer can render. Then it happens, a sight to behold in this fantastically and intricately designed moment, and the Xbox UI vomits across my screen: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: YOU LEFT THE VAULT. Maybe they thought I was blinded by the mere sight of the outdoors.

Or maybe they thought every fucking new scene you see needs some kind of indication that hey, congratulations, it looks like you progressed a little bit farther in the game.

Game achievements and trophies also can damage the attitude and behavior of gamers, further removing them from the experience of the game (unless, of course, the experience is all about chasing numbers, like the idiotic Candy Crush). Cameron Gidari has a great write-up on this. Speaking about finding that fourth bottle in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:

I never got the fourth bottle in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the one you earn by riding around Hyrule Field shooting big Poes with arrows from horseback. The big Poes would always disappear too quickly, and my aim was never very good, so I left it alone and went along my way. I already had three bottles anyways, why did I need another one? Back before I discovered achievements, I played games because I liked them. I didn’t care that I had left certain games half-finished, or didn’t get X number of headshots with a certain weapon. If a game was fun, I played it. If it wasn’t, I stopped. So simple.

Gaming culture, or at the very worst, casual gaming culture, shouldn't turn players into zombie completionists. We shouldn't be tapping our fingers into bloody messes over achieving Tee Hee Two in Jetpack Joyride or flushing 250+ hours of your life into the Secret Achievement in Lost Planet 2. It's like being forced to watch one television show, start another midway through, and then another, and another until you haven't completed any of them but they're all nagging you to Resume on Netflix.

My plea: Put an end to this madness and offer a “deactive Achievements & Alerts” in every platform's settings. Please.

Here we are, back to wallets. Another minimal, thin, elastic-binding money dumpster. The Snapback Slim. There are nearly as many wallet projects on Kickstarter¹ as there are accessories for iOS devices. And this is probably a good thing. Look what Google Reader's death did to the RSS services market -- we have more options than you can add feeds to. But not everyone uses an RSS reader; everyone I know uses a wallet.

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While I respect the mission for a slimmer, more minimal wallet (I did, after all, review Supr's Slim wallet), I was at first apprehensive with Nick Augeri's approach to the same market of minimized, "hardly-anything-there" design. He was kind enough to send me his wallet for early testing and impressions, and I happily gave it a try. After having spent more than half a year with Supr's Slim, I certainly have a similar product with which to compare.

Snapback Slim's Design

The Supr Slim was ordinarily designed (it's a stitched piece of eslastic with an "X" branded onto it), so it's welcome to see that the Snapback Slim has more panache. The Floridian creator calls it a "slim wallet [that] can handle your cards, cash and receipts", and as you can imagine, it'll hold all those items with the added benefit of separating them -- something the Slim and other cards-only wallets can't do. I know, it's like going backwards to go forwards with wallet design, but bear with me. From just looking at it, you'll notice the Snapback's biggest improvement in design over Supr's simple elastic body is the colored strap attached to its side for wrapping around the wallet itself (measuring 2.5cm in width against the entire wallet's 5cm x 8.5cm size). This, strangely enough, is exactly what I found the design of Supr's needed after a few months of use, especially after having seen the recently successful Kickstarter project for Capsule. And so I did actually modify it with a Field Notes rubber band, which separates my cash and creates friction for any wannabe Apollo Robbins pickpocket. While the Snapback Slim's money band doesn't offer any friction, it does add a useful feature to the political problem of separation between money and card. Its wide strap grips enough surface area to hold contents tightly, regardless of how many cards you have in the main hold. It even doubles as a connected wristband or loop (for a keychain or bag). This is fantastic.

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The only slight annoyance I have with the design of the Snapback Slim's design is the inseam of the elastic band. Whereas Supr slyly hid it by splitting and situating it in the middle of the body, Snackback Slim positioned it on its side. In loading the wallet with cards, the creator calls it a "safety tab," but I'd regard it as more of a misplaced stub. Once you have a couple cards inside the wallet it isn't much of a problem, although I have found its placement causes a bit of resistance extracting and depositing a card on the side that the safety tab rests. If anything, I recommend using the clean side to keep your most used card.

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Initial Impressions in Daily Use

I've only just begun to use the Snapback Slim Wallet, so of course I'll update this review in a few months to weigh in on the longer term durability of its build, but as of now, the wallet's elastic material feels crisply taut, sturdily adhering to any number of cards you load into it. It also feels strong enough to reassure against any uncertainty regarding sewing quality. And the product is manufactured in the USA. Hurrah.

While material is important, my bigger concern with elastic-band wallets is the lack of reinforcement for stored items. While I haven't sat awkwardly or violently enough to irrevocably bend my cards, it's still a possibility with any of these kinds of wallets. If you wear it in your front pocket, of course, there are no worries about this (just this). The elastic used for this wallet seems durable, but I'm no materials expert. My other elastic wallet has lasted in perfectly good shape for over seven months, and still flexes perfectly with the number of items held -- the most negative aspect of slim, leather-bound wallets. Perhaps the only risk of bending or crippling your cards is if you only pack one or two in there -- with at least four or five, the wallet as a whole seems more than sturdy enough to ward against mishaps.

Using the additional colored band to store loose cash has been more than helpful. I only ever have a single bill or two at a time (until I break that twenty with a cup of coffee), and so my time with the Snapback Slim has mostly been with a $20 bill and a couple singles, all folded together into fourths. This method tucks the bills neatly under the colored band and they sit flush with the height of the wallet itself. It looks neato.

The Kickstarter Project

There are few things I appreciate about the way Nick Augeri set up his Kickstarter project for the Snapback Slim.

1. Prototypes
2. Detailed production schedule post-project success with risks and challenges
3. Pricing and reward tiers are practical and efficient

Tracing the history of a product’s development helps put the final product into context. The creator shares how the wallet evolved from an iteration with a much smaller, secondary elastic band, to several versions of a thicker, wider one. It’s a good thing he went with wider, because the Field Notes rubberband I jerry-rigged on my other wallet is way too small to securely hold cash without it flopping about. It also appears that he had tested out different material lengths, likely testing the elasticity of having a different number of cards inside. With this kind of backstory, the Snapback Slim’s quality is reinforced to prospective investors.

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Likewise, providing a comprehensive post-project schedule of how he plans on handling production and delivery gauges the complexity of the product, the thought and resources behind manufacturers, and risks associated therein. There have been several Kickstarter projects that stumbled after enormously successful investment runs, and Nick Augeri acknowledges that he has established a close relationship with his manufacturer to assure a speedy run of the now-completed and tested product. I know Kickstarter requires a delivery date for submission of any project, so at least he’s kind enough to warn against a few weeks’ delay if indeed there is a higher quantity ordered than hedged against.

Finally, the pricing and reward tiers are straightforward. You’re investing in a product line, not a series of distractions (for both you and the creator). I’ve never been swayed to invest in a higher tier to spend an evening at a fancy dinner with the creator, or to wear a t-shirt that says I backed a project, or to don a few branded stickers on my notebook. I’m investing in your product because I want to see that product line successfully manufactured and sold, along with owning one myself. Snapback Slim’s sane four options for investment should be the standard moving forward.

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Elasticity in the Year of Wallets

Does the Snapback Slim set itself apart? I won't hold back from comparing it to Supr's Slim wallet or the British elastic wallet, Flip, but I'll do so in a progressive way: the Snapback Slim evolves minimized wallet design with the addition of a functional colored strap, improving the thinnest wallet you can own. If that appeals to you, it's an obvious choice to invest in the project on Kickstarter. I wish the best for the Snapback Slim -- it'll round out the Year of Wallets quite well.

You can view and fund the Kickstarter project, or follow the company's updates on Twitter

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I've consistently stopped into Pret a few times a week since it opened at the base of our building complex last year. The coffee isn't half bad, the yogurts are great in the morning, and the lines are way more welcome than the intolerable ones at Starbucks next door. They also have a nearly monotone outfit of juices for purchase: honey tangerine juice, lemonade, orange juice, orange & pineapple juice, and, what we've come here for, grapefruit juice. When I say to the friendliest manager this side of your industry job fantasy, "just the juice, here", he says: "that'll be $3.30, please". This guy, whoever he is, runs an amazing check-out experience, always jumping in to ring folks when the other clerks are overwhelmed by a rush of customers. And he always thanks you, wishes you a good day, and welcomes you back the next.

So I've got this grapefruit juice in my hands, avoiding the outside world on a steamy 84-degree day, ready to march back upstairs and sit at my desk and type more stuff on the computer and do this and do that while trying to savor this delicate reminder of childhood under a warm, tender sun. And then I think about all those breakfasts and afternoon snacks where my mother prepared her two sons' grapefruit bowls the only way I'll ever know: halved with each half's fruit segments lightly propped out of their uterine cavities, membrane-free with a dash of powdered sugar.

Does Pret's grapefruit juice always send me down memory lane? Probably not. But shake that bottle well and you, too, will be tugged back to a cheery memory at least once. Few things other than a really good IPA could beat the strikingly tart and pulpy thirty-sip seranade of Pret's American Grapefruit Juice nirvana on a hot day (even if I wasn't ever outside). I know, it's 100% pure Florida grapefruit juice, so it's really just the product of a damn good juicing machine with a competent driver, but pure juice can be brilliantly rich, and in my mind, this one definitely fills a hole in my stomach.

Is Pret's masterpiece the juice-making apogee of all human sweat, blood, and agony? I can't say for certain, but I will admit it's a pretty good 430 mL plastic bottle of GFJ. Seeing as how it's 100% juice (and "nothing else"), pulp to juice ratio is the game to play here. There is a low-level of grapefruit pulp that gracefully clumps together at the bottom fifth of an unshaken bottle. Once shaken (note: shake carefully, the zip-tops have been known to weep sticky leakage from aggressive forearms), the pulp disperses evenly and stays put. If you like a little fruit flesh in your juice, you'll like this. If you despise anything floating around in your liquids, stay away. (Pret neglects to mention the presence of pulp anywhere on the bottle, an unfortunately poor and unfriendly design decision, so this is your warning, trepid buyer.) Regardless, the pulp isn't overwhelming, the tartness of the grapefruit feels like a 7 on a scale of 10, and the volume (14.5 fl oz if you didn't convert earlier) is just enough to hold you back until your next meal.

What have we learned today? Grapefruit juice is a good choice of beverage, especially in the summer, and especially as a stand-alone snack at mid-day. Pret's take on the classic (which, let me remind you, is just pure juice) is an overwhelmingly intelligent choice. You may wonder -- my, there are a lot of juices and beverages to choose from at 3:00pm on any given day, so why grapefruit? Besides it simply tasting better than other, lesser reincarnations of citrus fruits, grapefruit has gnarly benefits as a vessel for orally-taken drugs -- like alcohol. What? Yeah. Not only is the juice great for you (a delicious source of vitamin C, A, B complex, E, and K), but according to a Group of Canadian researchers, grapefruit juice interferes with an enzyme that "metabolizes many drugs, and toxins as well, into substances that are less potent or more easily excreted." So if you want to tastefully disguise a few shots of vodka or gin with that bottle of grapefruit juice, you'll likely get the funnies before 5:00.

Find your nearest Pret a Manger and enjoy.

A few things discovered or linked to across the Internet the past couple of weeks that I've either saved for later reading or pinned to my Pinboard account.

• We Never Look Up
  • Photo blog that focuses on people in public places that are constantly looking at their phone, tablet, etc.
• Calca App for iOS
  • Modern calculator and text editor merged into one (ala Soulver, but more powerful)
• Practical Typography
  • Fantastic resource for typography education and rationale. As Erik Spiekermann states in his foreward: "A few hun­dred years of type and ty­pog­ra­phy have es­tab­lished rules that only a fool would ig­nore."
• Beer Labels in Motion
  • I don't know what's more impressive - the animations themselves, or the effort it took to make them all GIFs after cleverly animating them (via Daring Fireball)
• Frietag
  • Interesting bags and accessories reincarnated from an annual scrounge and repurposing of "390 tons of well-traveled truck tarps, 36,000 worn-out bicycle inner tubes, 22,000 discarded seatbelts and 1400 sq yds of recycled airbags"
• International Space Station in Transit
  • Just what it sounds like. (via Kottke)
• Authentic Design
  • Great write-up on designing for the medium of delivery.
• True-ish Grit
  • Tom Bissell's review of his experience with Naughty Dog's latest game, The Last of Us (on PS3).
• Brian K. Vaughan's The Private Eye is a Bold Move Forward for Digital Comics
  • Been enjoying this one (only three issues thus far), and AV Club has a write-up on it, proclaiming the digital-only distribution of the new IP is paving an interesting way forward for the comics book industry. Of course, Panel Syndicate (the "publishing" company run by artist Marcos Martin and writer Brian K. Vaughan) is likely only successful because of the built-in fanbase of their work, much akin to the popularizing of the self-published music album from Radiohead, (arguably one of the most popular bands on the planet)
• Through a Glass Darkly
  • The Magazine's Nate Berg takes a look into the Museum of Jurassic Technology and its "realities" and "fictions"

An easy guess would be to assume there will be an outcry over the big change when iOS 7 hits Apple devices in a few months. But anyone paying attention to the challenging states of designing for digital canvases should know that this was inevitable. Skeumorphism (digital assets that draw likeness to real-world counterparts) was a decided method in the early days of iOS to guide people into using a device that was so digitally malleable it could manifest into nearly any kind of object or operation -- many of which had physical equivalents (like a calculator or notebook). Sure, we've had digital representaions of calculators and notebooks before, but we've never been able to interact with them through a sophisticated touch interface.

While digital skeumorphism is top of mind right now, Smashing Magazine takes a look back at the history of design ornamentations across mediums in their essay, Authentic Design. I remember when I first bought my way into the iOS ecosystem with an iPod touch in the fall of 2007. I'd grown accostomed to Apple's flourishes with photorealistic icon design in Mac OS X (which still holds up functionally and appropriately today), so the Braun-inspired calculator definitely looked and felt good to use on the iPod touch's surface. We all have to remember that iOS (or iPhone OS back then) was a magical thing -- a multi-touch interface on a powerful, pocket computer was way ahead of its time. And maybe, as an unexpected side effect, no one cared that the applications we were using on it ludicrously mimicked physical world objects. I mean, the Notes app is a damn tacky looking thing (and was even worse when it used the Marker Felt typeface by default).¹

If you TLDR-the-article, let me take you through the motions, starting with the beginning: the history of mass-produced ornamentation can be blamed on over-zealous capitalists using steam-powered manufacturing to their impulsive fantasies.

Historically, handcrafted decoration has been expensive to produce, serving as a symbol of wealth and luxury. With the advent of mechanization, imitations of those same sought-after ornaments could be stamped out cheaply and quickly. Rather than stop and think about what sort of design would be best suited for mass production, manufacturers jumped at the opportunity to copy historicized styles at low cost. The result was the flood of garish, low-quality products that Adolf Loos, along with other pioneers of modern design, railed against.

Makes you think twice about that Braun-inspired iOS calculator app.

Instead of attacking ornament, other pioneers of modern design focused on elevating functional form on a pedestal. In 1934, an exhibition curated by modernist architect Philip Johnson was held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, titled Machine Art. On display were various pieces of mechanical equipment, such as airplane propellers and industrial insulators. The idea was to highlight beauty of form in objects that were purely functional. For the modern design movement, decoration was not necessary. Beauty and elegance were to emerge from the design of the content itself, not from a superficial coat of decoration.

The transition into digital canvases afforded designers to do whatever they wanted. Rendering ornamentation back in the early days of Windows and Mac OS was possible, and "real-world metaphors were used where they could be, such as for images of folders to denote file directories and buttons with bevels to let the user know they could click on them -- But the overall aesthetic was fairly flat and restrained." The strange transition into full-on skeumorphism in iOS was a curious choice, likely stemming from Jobs's wish to showcase the fun mechanics of operating a touch device.

So, the real kicker of the article: while skeumorphic designs "provide visual interest, they are also relics of another time, relics that tie an interface to static real-life objects that are incompatible with the fluidity and dynamism of digital interfaces". Drenching iOS in a new coat of paint and under-the-hood mechanics will enable designers to continue shedding ornamentation and focus on the content of their apps. This fall's release of iOS 7 is going to be grand.

An informed follow-up piece to the Verge's article prematurely proclaiming Pocket as the victor and future of "Internet DVR" by The Magazine's Glenn Fleishman.

I don’t see how [Pocket's] current situation with 9m free users is “beating” anyone. If Instapaper has millions of free users and 100,000s of who have paid for the app or for a Web subscription, has it been “beaten”? And if so, is it “beaten” at this point in time when it is cash-flow positive and Pocket is not? These questions aren’t asked nor answered in the Pocket profile.

Devir Kahan evaluates the merits of pricing digital services with free and paid options, using Dropbox as the evaluative lens. While Dropbox is a private company and does not release financial information, he's pieced together what has been made publicly available (e.g., "Dropbox manages to bring in upwards of $500 million in revenue a year, no doubt from their Pro accounts", and "96% of Dropbox users stick with the free account") and makes the following assessment:

"Dropbox seems to be doing fine financially bringing in half a billion dollars every year, but most people are not paying anything at all. Most people are using the product for free, just as they would any other free product. And yet the company is chugging along just fine. They might not be making as much money as they could if they charged every costumer, but as a whole, they are bringing in cash and are doing just fine. But again, to their average customer, they are a free product. And this makes Dropbox a rather interesting example."

Doing it Right

Would other services -- could other services -- do the same? Why doesn't Instagram do this, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Flipboard, or __? Dropbox has positioned itself as an exemplary product that exhibits a model of free and pro/paid versions, existing and working well (or so we can assume based on the revenue number unearthed by GigaOm; revenue of $2mm per employee isn't shabby). Following the 96/4 logic of Dropbox's reported paid userbase, other services could assess a monthly or yearly subscription fee for pro users that earns them "more" or "better" of something, incentivizing them to stay within the ecosystem (after all, they would be helping fund it). If only other companies that current do this would come out and state (I'd hope) successful numbers, we'd have a genuine case for larger companies to do the same (and perhaps pull back from their reliance on advertising). Additionally, services (or products -- because let's face it, the news industry could really use a rejuvenation shock with compelling paid subscriptions) could establish a baseline expectation of worth instead of offering everything perceptively free.

A few examples of other companies that, I'll assume, do this well and successfully:

• Checkvist (free service and pro version at $20/6 months)
• Simplenote (free service with ads and pro version at $20/year)
• Instapaper (free service with paid app and pro version at $1/month)
• Letterboxd (free service with paid version at $19/year)
• Rdio (limited free service with paid version at $10/month)
  • Same goes for Spotify and Pandora

These services all allow free usage of their products for anyone willing to sign up. While some of the free versions of the service are limited (Rdio has limited play sessions per month, and Checkvist doesn't allow for automatic backups of outlines, for instance), they are still very functional variations of the full product. Dropbox is aligned in a similar way -- it allows for full functionality and usage of its service for free but has a limited amount of space available for free users: 2GB. The paid service is priced at $99/year for 100GB (a massive hike in storage). Apparently there are enough paying users for Dropbox to sustain its service for the non-paying userbase.

So what would the revenue numbers look like if Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr would have charged for a pro version beginning today? I've compiled a little table showcasing this based on the Dropbox 96/4 model, and assuming a relatively nominal charge of $1/month for a pro version for each service.

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As you can see, both Twitter and Tumblr would exceed their current annual revenues by successfully charging for a pro version of their services. Sure, they could charge more (or less), or even offer tiered pricing. If the need is only for 4% of the userbase to pay, I'm sure these numbers are absolutely achievable. For some users, a meatier version of a service they use everyday or rely on is worth the cost.

Doing it Wrong

There are ways to do this model wrong, however. Apple's iCloud service is one such example. Since launching iCloud, most users have unknowingly relied on the service to backup their data every night, as well as sync various data between apps and servers. The storage available for free (5GB and the ambiguously free Photo Stream of 1,000 photos) to iOS users is paltry for 2013 standards, especially when you consider that many Apple users own more than one iOS device (say, an iPhone and iPad). Pricing for "pro" versions of iCloud are as follows:

• 10GB: $20/year
• 20GB: $40/year
• 50GB: $100/year

Not only are these prices absurd, they also grind against the goodwill of Apple customers purchasing and relying on the iOS device software ecosystem. They're taking photos and videos as part of their expectation of the device, and little do they perhaps know that the Photos app is weighing heavily on their iCloud storage at 4.8GB alone. And let's not forget that the use of Apple's @me/@icloud mail service is also tied to iCloud storage. So 5GB can fuck itself -- my iPhone alone has a 7.5GB backup.

The reason Apple is perceivably doing this wrong is because of the intrinsic nature of iCloud and its oblivious reliance by owners. If several iOS owners have Gmail -- and let's assume a great number use Google's mail service -- they know never have to worry about space (Google offers 15GB+ of free space across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google+ Photos). But to be harassed by the device you bought because you're creeping on the backup limit that you may not even know how to deactivate is a frustrating friction that is a dangerous misstep. If you're using Dropbox to backup all your photos and videos, you are well aware you're a freeloader riding on 2GB. If you value the service that you chose to sign up for, and begin to rely on it, you'll likely upgrade to a paying user for more space. iCloud was never positioned this way.

The Way Forward

While I doubt many, if any, of the social platforms will offer a paid tier to their service anytime soon, it's worth contemplating for smaller products moving forward. There is no harm in offering a better version of your service for a price, especially if you can garner a large enough percentage of users to pay and sustain your entire business (including the free users). Some products, like Basecamp, probably don't work well enough to permit a free and paid option (their free option is ludicrously limited). Then again, they really aren't appealing to freeloaders to begin with -- it's positioned as a paid SaaS, and the owners won't let you argue about it. But other services most certainly should offer something compelling (hello IFTTT?).

What happens when you start paying for too many things and can't reasonably afford it? Pay for the services with the best paid options and use the other ones for free. Someone else out there will value each service in their own way and likely pick up your slack.

Sources

• Tumblr active users
• Tumblr estimated 2012 revenue
• Facebook active users
• Facebook revenue
• Instagram active users
• Twitter active users and revenue

Updated: Sept. 25, 2013

--> Jump to Scorecard

Bookmarking has been part of Internet browsing since nearly the beginning of the browser. For a long while, bookmarking was tied to client-side storage in the application, and could only be accessed at a user's computer. As technology advanced, services like Yahoo's Delicious caught on to the idea of enabling pages on the Internet to be saved server-side, therefore being accessible wherever you could reach the bookmarking website.

But circa 2007, in the booming age of mobile devices and the changing behaviors of readers, bookmarking a full web page and loading it up on the train into work isn't as convenient a reading experience as it could have been. So, in the year of the iPhone, this whole "read it later" thing began. Pocket (formerly known as Read It Later) started life as a single-platform Firefox extension that didn't do much beyond saving articles for later (without device sync); Instapaper, a bookmarklet and text parser for the iPhone (which had just debuted), focused on parsing article text and having a synchronized list between platforms (the app launched when the App Store did in 2008). Both have evolved into more realized products of their original visions, and have refined their services and ecosystems. Today, the read-it-later economy is strong, and even traditional bookmarking/note-taking services like Delicious and Evernote have attempted to enter it.

What I hope to do with this evaluation is score each service on several integral components of what a read later service should ideally comprise. Obviously both of these services are self-referential for the read later service, and so they've helped shape what a service like this should look like (in addition to how it should function). But there are several other considerations that can be included as well -- expectations of a multi-platform user, design philosophies of servicing websites and apps in 2013, the speed and ease of use of a product. I've grouped these evaluations into the following:

• Speed
• Website Design
• Text Parser Quality
• Mobile App Design & Functionality
• App Ecosystem Integration
• Desktop App Design & Functionality
• Ease of Use

These are weighted in no particular order, with several evaluated subjectively on a scale of Poor, Okay, Good, Great, and Excellent, other binarily as Yes/No. The full scorecard is located at the tail-end of this evaluation.

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A Quick Bit of History

Pocket

Originally intended only for desktop computers (as a browser extension for Firefox), Read It Later was first started in August 2007 by Nathan Weiner. It ran alonside Instapaper in the early days as an alternative once it had its app and syncing service up and running. In its more mature days, Read It Later earned venture capital investments) of $2.5 million in 2011, and in 2012, an additional round of $5.0 million. To put all that money to use, I suppose Read It Later needed to be renamed Pocket (which happened in 2012) to shed its one-trick name to accommodate a larger spread of users by aiming to be the premier Internet collection service.

Today, Pocket is available for free on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry OS, as well as multiple web browsers (with official, smart extensions) and on desktop OSes.

Instapaper

Humbly founded by Marco Arment in 2008 to scratch his itch for an easier way to save and read articles while commuting, Instapaper never received any rounds of investment and was completely self-funded. Instapaper as an app launched at the commencement of the Apple App Store with two options: one Pro version at $10, another free version with a limitation on the number of articles a user could save.

Now, Instapaper has switched ownership -- Marco sold Instapaper to Betaworks in April 2013 -- and app prices/have changed. Instapaper is now a $4.99 iOS app with an optional $1.00/month subscription for advanced features such as full-text search, API hook-up with third-party apps, better Kindle article integration (like higher Kindle article limits and a “Send to Kindle” bookmarklet), and the ability to disable ads on the instapaper.com site. It is also available on Android, and can be accessed through various apps on desktop computers like ReadKit (subscription required).

Saving Articles for Reading Later

When we want to read something, we want the experience to be distraction-free. The traditional book format is a fine example of this. You are given text, you read that text -- no fuss. Some periodicals are great examples of this, too -- The New Yorker, for instance, has clean typographic layouts that focus on the body of text for a given article, and sprinkle in relatively dsitractionless column ads and cartoon panels. The Internet, however, is a minefield. If you read anything I've written in the past, you know my stance on it. For instance: just gawk at the hostile reading experiences exhibit I've been building. It isn't pretty reading things on websites, and it's even harder to read things when you have several other tasks to complete at any given moment you've accidentally stumbled upon something great. In these circumstances, a read-it-later service is undeniably useful.

When you come to an article you'd like to save, both Instapaper and Pocket have several options for triggering their services' text parsers to crawl it (or a paginated series of pages). These parsers will scrape the page's code and pull out only the text pertinent to the article, eschewing ads/navigation/miscellaneous media/etc., and bring that text into your user account for storage (and, obviously, reading later when you when the time). Triggers and places for parsing include:

• Bookmarklets for Desktop and Mobile Browsers
• Browser Extensions (Pocket has an official one, Instapaper unofficial ones)
• Send Link Via Email (by which both services will then go out and capture the page's article relatively quickly -- usually within a few minutes)
• In-App Browser (only via Instapaper can you navigate in an in-app browser to then save articles for later)
• Via Other Apps (both Instapaper and Pocket have rich app ecosystem integrations, whereby you can save a shared link in a Twitter app, for instance, with either service -- Pocket has a public list available)
• Built-in on Websites (certain websites leverage the APIs for one or both services, like qz.com and thefeature.net)

By having so many seamless options to save articles, neither service has an upperhand. While there are some minor advantages to Pocket's current capabilities in this area, like its official extension that does a great job of identifying certain websites -- like Twitter and Hacker News -- and adding a "save to pocket" link next to identified articles, it isn't strong enough to vouch entirely for Pocket. Since Marco's sale of Instapaper, perhaps we'll see feature parity between them in this area soon.

The quality of the parsed text, however, is still uneven. Instapaper has historically done a fantastic job with pagination, but I've seen it fail on a few complicated websites. It also struggles with login/paywall sites like NSFWCorp. Pocket handles this kind of thing elegantly by acknowledging the presence of a paywall and prompting for a username/password. This kind of smart integration gives Pocket an edge in accessibility to certain kinds of sites -- certainly worth consideration in your choice of service use.

Functionality & Aesthetics

I'll break this down into two sections, as most users will likely engage with the services on their websites and apps:

Apps (iOS)

Instapaper has historically had a spartan, clean interface, and to this day it still is succinct and functional -- it focuses on the text, and that's it. Its 4.0 version in 2012 was a big update adding new functionality and menus, but the app usage was never negatively impacted. Pocket is equally as clean, though, and visually it identifies different media better (videos are indicated with overlay icon). Instapaper infrequently will correctly identify video and do something similar, but it was never designed to filter precisely for videos like Pocket can.

Reading is the big draw for these apps, and while both services tend to match one another for options, there are glaring differences in crucial areas like fonts. Instapaper's reading canvas has a default setting of black text on white with text rendered in left-aligned only. You can set spacing and margin/width customizations as you see fit, though (which is especially nice on the iPad), and text colors can vary between dark, sepia, light, as well as an intelligent function for auto-detecting sunset based on location to dim from light to sepia to dark (and vice versa) at the right time of day. Pocket has these same tonal options (sans the "change of day" feature), and both services allow for text sizing to be scaled as well as access to the brightness controls.

Instapaper, however, has the upper-hand for customization. For instance, how you actually read an article can be switched from page-flipping to tilt-scrolling, and regular scrolling (tilt-scrolling, which has been around for years in Instapaper, permits you to literally tilt the device to cascade the text like an inverse waterfall; While it seems like a neat idea, in practice I find normal scrolling the best method of reading). Pocket can only scroll and page flip, and the latter is strangely designed -- there is no activation for it, you just perform a "flip" finger gesture against the screen and it turns on, but scrolling vertically again turns it off. (While this seems nice and simple, being in page-flipping doesn't lock you into the method of reading, so it seems flimsy.) Additionally, while Instapaper offers several fonts from which to choose -- including the beautiful, default Elena by Process Type Foundry, and even a Dyslexia-formatted font called Dyslexie -- Pocket is limited to a sans-serif and serif font selection.

Users tend to take action with their reading materials after they're done -- Sharing on a social platform or via email may be one such action, or perhaps saving quotes from an article into another app. Neither service misses in this department. Both Instapaper and Pocket allow a user to favorite an article, archive it, or organize it either by folder (Instapaper) or tag (Pocket). Sharing is extensive, with Instapaper edging out Pocket on the quality and variety of actions. In Instapaper, you can email an article to someone (either an email link or full text -- it uses the original article URL but does provide a "via Instapaper" in the email template); take actions to post to the usual suspects of social platforms; take actions to copy an article link, full article text, and/or post or create an item to several different apps, including Tweetbot, OmniFocus, Due, Drafts, and Simplenote (it will auto-detect which apps you have that are compatible). Pocket similarly shares many of these functions albeit with small differences, like missing out on the full article shares.

Interacting with articles in-app is also a bit different between the services. Both apps use the Tweetbot-inspired (or was it original Loren Brichter Tweetie?) item-swipe for performing actions like adding tags/adding to folder, archiving, favoriting (Pocket-only), trashing, or sharing. Pocket may be a bit assumptive in allowing you to favorite an article without even reading it, but it's a minor design fallacy. Favoriting in Instapaper allows for some permutations aside from merely having a "folder" for your prized collection. In version 4.0, Instapaper added a subtle social network feature that allows its users to anonymously (and secretly) follow friends' or other users' favorites (called "Liked") collections. It also pulls in shared links from Twitter users you follow and curates them in the same section in the app, called Friends. It's a neat function that isn't distracting or too entrenched in social media (you can't comment or like what yours friends are reading, it's simply a straight-forward curation service). Instapaper also has a section called The Feature that updates frequently with the most Instapapered articles across all its users. Pocket misses out on these added features, and while it doesn't impact the overall product's purpose, it does feel inadequate next to Instapaper's rich ecosystem.

Lastly: article state sync. I forget when Instapaper introduced this, but it's fantastic. While it currently only works on across apps, Instapaper will remember where you are in any saved article and sync that state between devices (but not the website). Surprisingly, Pocket does not yet do this. The holy grail is getting that sync up to the website-level (for both services), so we'll see what happens as they continue to evolve the products.

Overall, Instapaper provides a more compelling app and reading experience.

Websites

While the apps are an integral part of the reading wherever experience, reading and managing your account at the website-level still needs to be a suitable option. Pocket has a much stronger design and functionality for its website than Instapaper offers (note as of August 2013: Instapaper is undergoing a website update currently available for beta use; this evaluation will be updated to reflect the new site design). Pocket has a flexible grid that allows articles to be viewed as a list or summary card, with sorting options for article type and switching between lists/tags. It'll even animate GIFs in the preview cards if it is contained within the article. Whereas Pocket's site design seems roomier, crisper, and fluid, Instapaper's still seems stuck in a design that would've been antiquated even five years ago. Folder settings are clumsy, the article list is very static, and there are inconsistencies in button styles, layout, and pop-up tools that distract. At least both services' reading component on-site is minimal and distraction-free.

Searching articles is also slightly different between services. On Pocket, search is surprisingly slow for what it ought to be -- testing a two-article inbox with contextual search (I'd presume?) of a single word found in one of the article's titles took over five seconds. The same thing re-enacted in Instapaper took only two. Granted, Instapaper's full-text search functionality is only available to paying subscribers, so Pocket does do a better job with its accessibility.

Overall, Pocket is better at the website stuff thus far.

In Summary

I can't readily recommend one service over another by suggesting you try both -- Instapaper has a $4.99 entry fee whereas Pocket does not -- but my evaluation and experience using both of these services suggests that Instapaper is the superior service as of today. Its terrific apps, tight article syncing, breadth of article actions, and external app integrations make it the smartest choice. You also pay for the app and can support it via a subscription which -- while not entirely a guarantee of sustained business -- is at least indicative of long-term viability. While it's anyone's guess how Betaworks will handle the ownership transition, I trust Mr. Arment made an informed decision.

Either service is worth using, and they both far exceed other read-it-later solutions out there (nice try with the Reading List, Apple). If you're looking for something specific between the two feature-wise, reference the scorecard that follows.

iOS 7 Updates

Sept. 25, 2013

September 18 brought a new version of iOS to Apple devices, heralding a drastically different direction in design and functionality. As such, both Instapaper and Pocket updated their app versions (5.0 and 4.6 respectively) to accommodate.

These changes do not impact my original review of the two apps back in June, but features and UI direction are worth noting:

• New, subtly-changed icons have replaced the old ones. Instapaper's is notably brighter and leaner, Pocket's looks slightly less dimensional but retains much of its original design
• Both now support iOS 7's background sync, a notably awesome addition for not having to worry about launching the app to sync (or setting a location trigger to sync)
• Adjustments to reading views (Pocket made the most progress here, only because they had -- and still have -- catching up to do with Instapaper's numerous reading options; fonts are still limited in Pocket)
• Swipe from left-to-right to return to list view (both apps have this now, even though Instapaper had this option from previous incarnations); this is a great move for consistency and to oblige Apple's lead on the new gesture as standard fare

There are new features Instapaper added to earn that 5.0 mark, which are worth pointing out here. As these are new features for read-it-later apps, I've actually gone ahead and updated the Scorecard to accommodate a few of them as new checkpoints (because, yes, they are fabulously useful).

• Sorting/Filtering: You can now sort by newest, oldest, longest, shortest, popularity, and shuffle. Additionally, you may filter by reading time (e.g., "less than 5 minutes" or "over an hour")
• InstaRank: The popularity sort mentioned above is powered by InstaRank, an algorithmic ranking and sorting system to filter articles according to various attributes. According to their blog post on this, some of these attributes include the number of overall saves/reads/likes, age of the link, popularity of the domain compared to other domains in the Instapaper world, and so forth.
• Separate video category: Pocket was the first to identify and separate videos saved for later, and Instapaper has finally caught up.
• Language translations: Instapaper now supports 13 languages

Scorecard: Instapaper vs. Pocket

Updated Sept 25, 2013

Grainy, misty monolithic landmasses hovering in a field of white. Ethereal music droning like a waterfall sucked into the vacuum of space. You're alone. You don't know who you are, or where you are. The only gameplay prompt is another island of stone in the distance. Your movements are limited. There is no narrative, no introduction, and no weapon.

This is how the computer and iOS game, Kairo, begins.

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Game developer Locked Door Puzzle (run by Richard Perrin in London) cunningly forges stark, minimalist canvases upon which sounds, music, and visuals coerce you to apply a haunting narrative. It's a game you experience on your own, justifying what you see around you with your imagination until some carefully planted cue suggests otherwise. Very few gaming experiences permit you to draw upon blank environments to summon your own narrative -- not even the “anti-game” Dear Esther does this, for its insufferable narrator blathers throughout the experience. Kairo offers no clear answers. One area, for instance, encourages you to slowly trot along a winding, concrete stairwell that hovers ominously amid black infinite. While you continue downward (although why you'd want to do this is somwhat suspect, seeing as how it is just floating there in total darkness...), you hear a broken radio frequency flicker beneath the bellowing sounds of Wounds’ impressive, glacial soundtrack. You soon realize the radio is emanating from a white obelisk, splintering through the black sky. You can't make out the transmission, and you don't see any discernable antenna, so nothing of meaning can be derived from this. You aren't certain if you should stay there a while longer to see if the transmission clears, or if you ought to continue forward (obviously, you have to continue forward). But there is never a sense of urgency in Kairo -- it is a place out of time, out of context.

Where narrative reinforcement may be missing, moving through and exploring the world of Kairo is stunning with rich -- if, in actuality, stark -- world-building. Soon after the first minor puzzle of the game, you proceed along a bridge that tapers off into darkness. As you move across it, bracing for some ghastly surprise, the scarce sound effects dim as great pillars slice through the underground sky and bury their endpoints into the unseen ground. This effect implies your movement across the bridge is actively morphing the landscape, bringing structure to the bridge as you proceed to the other side. It's a beautifully scripted sequence -- the kind of thing that burrows in your consciousness and creeps back out in dreams. Furthermore, soundscapes and environmental elements are oftentimes mystically disconnected to your expectations that add to the game’s intrigue. At one point, I found myself entering a room with what sounded like a waterfall echoing along stone somewhere around the bend in a corridor. Upon turning and entering the cavern of this sound's origin, the environment betrayed my expectation of water. Instead, I found a high stone edifice with cascading rectangular sheets. As an experience that builds upon its foundation of simple geometric designs, I continued to enjoy these optical-audial tricks.

At its heart, Kairo is a first-person puzzle game. As the game progresses, you pass through several puzzles, none of which are game-breakingly obtuse like the classic series Myst (for which I absolutely needed the hand-holding of a game guide). With the suggestion of mechanics involved in Kairo’s strange world, I began to understand the world it presented to me as some kind of infrastructure for awaking... Something. Sparks spill out from an illuminating panel high above my field of view, tiles on the ground “ding” with life as I pass over them, movable lanterns active beams of energy when positioned just right -- these operational components kept me interested. So only after meandering through the first leg of puzzles does the game begin to reveal itself, and as you complete them, the game continues to quench your thirst for answers. (It also helps that the completion animations and sound verifications for completing these puzzles is very self-aggrandizing -- so of course that makes you feel good).

If you're at all interested in puzzle games, Kairo is a terrific experience. But it really shines as a game stripped down to its essence, allowing the player to move freely and unburdened with excessive gameplay baggage. The visuals, the sounds, and the music -- as bare as they are -- help you imagine and place your importance in this world. Perhaps it's best to understand the game behind the name's meaning -- likely derived from the Greek word kairos, which implies "the right, opportune moment". In the word's context of time, Kairo is a theater designed for the player to perform an action at the right time to initaite something special. On a high level, every game designed is like this, but in Kairo's world, you believe you're really contributing to something grand, something that, in the end, may reward your efforts in bringing meaning to it.

If you grew up reading newspapers and magazines in their analog formats, you know quite well the picnic is over and the only place to subscribe and read them will be online in the next few years. We all hoped publishers could transition to the digital age with elegance, but they instead chose to arrive to the party overdosed on Google AdSense and drunk off Flash banners. Typical of major industry shifts, it's been a horrific ordeal for the incumbents, and we -- their customers -- have suffered as a result of their obtuse efforts. With the advertising industry and content management systems of the Internet simultaneously changing alongside this movement from ink to pixel, we've been left with an exercise in frustration over what should be a simple operation: reading words.

As such, I'm introducing an on-going project that curates the worst, most hostile reading experiences on the Internet: Hostile Reading Experiences: A Public Exhibit. It'll permanently reside under the Projects section.

While online publications are often hit or miss in areas of layout, distraction, and readability, these sites' ill-advised designs will most likely discourage you from attempting to read any more than the headline -- if you can even locate it.

In our trendy era of animated display banners, social media buttons, Google AdSense links, related story widgets, scrolling navigation bars, and amateur typeface settings, it's no wonder people prefer watching videos. I've compiled a list of sites that currently violate reasonable reading expectations online, and will continue to add examples as I cruise the net.

I mean, really: Large publishers can meet a reasonable balance between ad-generating revenue and readable content. They have all along with their print product -- why does the digital version fall so far from the tree? In lieu of these publishers' oversights, smaller, leaner content foundries (like The Magazine, NSFWCorp, Svbtle, The Morning News, The Bygone Bureau, and The Brief), have grasped the opportunity to improve reading experiences for their own subscribers while shaming the treachery of their elders. Designing and providing great reading experiences shouldn't be a trend with the nerd periodicals -- it should be the expectation. It's dispiriting to know that so few of the major publishers realize this.

"NSFWCorp is the future of journalism with jokes, which basically means we tell you what's going on in the world in a way that makes you actually give a fuck about what's going on in the world. Everybody is building an app that is making news smaller and smaller and smaller. What we're trying to do is make news big again. And what that means is we're hiring really, really good journalists -- supernaturally good journalists -- and sending them out into the world to find really big stories. And then we're making the job even harder by insisting that when they come back, they make those stories funny."

Paul Carr, editor in chief, nsfwcorp (from the NSFWCorp Movie)

NSFWCorp is a relatively new journalism shop testing the future of the business with new monetary solutions. Slugging it out in Las Vegas, these guys have hired great writers, encouraged travel budgets, afforded fact checkers, and never forget their editors. They hope by generating quality content and charging money (!) for their efforts, NSFWCorp will operate a sustainable business in an increasingly hostile world for news and journalism.

While NSFWCorp has been digital-only since I've joined, they've recently sold out of their new print run of an ancillary magazine being released March 25th. That's right -- they have the balls to publish a printed product in 2013. The plan calls for a monthly periodical that rides alongside digital content, featuring two 10-12 thousand word "A-side" stories sandwiching a set of unique interior features. (It's been revealed that the first featured story is called “Iraqipedia”, an illustrated A-Z guide to the war in Iraq.) Their rationale? "Not only does print provide a far better experience for reading long form but it also offers true platform agnosticism (available to anyone with v1 of “eyes”) and for a variety of complicated human reasons, it improves data retention and adds more credibility and heft to serious reporting." How are they going to sustain such a bold initiative when they only make three bucks a month for their online journalism from memberS? Charge a few bills more: $7/month for both the print and digital editions whilst keeping the option for digital-only at $3/month.

The print edition's first issue, limited to 5,000 copies, hasn't been without hurdles, though. The outfit planned on distributing 1,000 issues in Vegas, but the distributers outright banned it from sale. I don't know what kind of inane bullshit is fueling this publishing doctrine, but it sounds as if distributers are the ones adding gasoline the burning hand that feeds them. It sounds like NSFWCorp will offer a backup eBook in any event, but my fingers are tingling for something physical after having taken my reading habits into the pixel age.

If you're interested in perusing NSFWCorp's back-catalog of essays before subscribing, a few recommendations:

• The Kissing Bug: Eating Your Blood, Pooping On Your Face
• The Famous Mr Edible: How Exactly Do You Test For Horsemeat?
• Wrongful Termination: Chris Dorner’s Terrifyingly Banal Killing Spree
• Oxytocin: Doesn't Stop Prairie Voles From Cheating