Category Archives: Software

A Bookmarklet to End All Bookmarklets

Thank goodness for bookmarklets. I have at least a dozen that I use regularly; one that lets me perform a Google search for text within the site I’m currently visiting, another to submit a publish action within a web app I use (whose own publish button is inconveniently placed), another to generate a Bit.ly link from the current URL, and so on. They’re clever, simple add-ons that are usually too niche-oriented to become a standard part of any Web browser, so for me at least they’re an indispensable complement to the browsing experience.

In the past few years I’ve found myself acquiring bookmarklets whose principal purpose is to send a piece of content to another service. This is the way Instapaper works, of course; if I want to read the contents of a Web page later, I just invoke my Instapaper bookmarklet, which then stores that page on the server for me to pick up from a different device, at a more convenient time. This is also basically the way my bookmarklets work for Posterous, Pinterest, Tumblr, Delicious and so many others — the user invokes the bookmarklet, specifies the content to be transmitted, and it’s sent to the service.

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An Address Book for Twitter

Yesterday I tweeted that “Twitter needs an address book. Finding users is harder than it should be.” It was a sort of a throwaway tweet, one that I didn’t expect to think about a second time after it was out there, but I was surprised to find that it was re-tweeted at least a few dozen times throughout the day.

We could actually all spend an afternoon making a list of the many things that Twitter needs, but if the service added every single one of them, the end result would be its ruination, I’m sure. Still it really does feel to me that a more robust address book is a serious omission, and now I realize I’m not alone in thinking that. People really want some kind of address book on Twitter.

Some people took my tweet to mean that I wanted some central way of browsing for people that I don’t already follow, but in actuality what I mean is that I want to be able to sort through my current contacts with greater flexibility than is currently possible. Twitter’s current method sorts people I follow in reverse chronological order based on the date that I started following them. That’s moderately useful, but it would be even more useful to me if I could sort that list alphabetically. Or, even better, if this hypothetical address book could translate Twitter handles into real names too, which I’m often (though not always) more apt to remember than the obscure monikers that people often have to adopt when they join the service. I’d also like to see only the people I’ve corresponded with — via both mentions and direct messages — and sort those names by frequency and recency of correspondence, as well as alphabetically. And if these same added capabilities could be applied to the list of people who follow me, as well, that would be great.

That᾿s all I want, really. Otherwise Twitter is just perfect.

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Someone Could Make a Lot of Money with Personal Finance Software

Mark Hedlund, the founder of shuttered personal finance Web app Wesabe, has written a fantastic post-mortem on his experience entitled “Why Wesabe Lost to Mint.” It offers tremendously candid insight into what they did wrong at Wesabe, what Mint did right, and the surprisingly persistent myths around failures and successes in both camps.

This is a story that is of course full of valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and anyone trying to create a product in a competitive marketplace. What’s even more interesting for me is that the last chapter has hardly been written in this category of software. This is not a case where Wesabe lost and Mint took the market, lock, stock and barrel. There’s still tremendous opportunity in personal finance software, mostly because, in its current state ca. 2010, most of these applications don’t fulfill their true purpose.

This is a point that’s very fresh in my mind. Having recently left a job with a healthy salary to hobble together income from multiple smaller sources while raising a young family, personal finance software has, unsurprisingly, become much, much more critical to me, and its failures much, much more evident.

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Time Tracking Tweets

Last week I asked my followers on Twitter if they could recommend a good application to help me track the billable time I’m spending on various client projects. Reaffirming the power of tens of thousands of similarly geeky compatriots, I was quickly deluged with answers, for which I’m very grateful.

I had originally asked for suggestions for software both on the desktop and on the Web, but most of the replies focused on the latter. Which is kind of amazing to me. I remember entering work hours in a hoary old package called Timeslips when I started working as a designer; it ran on one Macintosh in the design studio where I was employed, and the staff had to take turns with it to enter our project hours. It was poorly designed and really painful. Of course that was a long time ago but even five or six years ago, when I was researching time tracking solutions for my old design studio, the pickings were slim.

Now time tracking software is available pretty much anywhere and at any time; a number of the packages suggested to me have iPhone components as well. That’s a lot of progress.

In my cursory review of the links sent to me, I definitely feel that I’m more attracted to a Web-based app, mostly because I think the short-term economics are better for me. I haven’t really settled on which is the best fit, but several folks on Twitter asked me to reflect back on the suggestions I came across, so here we go in no particular order.

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iPad Gripe Session

After a few months of owing it, I keep finding more and more uses for my iPad, many of them not possible on my Mac or my iPhone, and my affection for it keeps ratcheting up accordingly. At the same time, there are at least a handful of irritating shortcomings on the platform that I’m impatiently waiting for Apple to address. I know it’s been less than a full year since the iPad debuted, and perhaps there’s a significant upgrade due soon, but for now, I find that using the iPad is more frustrating than it needs to be.

In large part this is owing to the fact that iOS 4 is so good, making its current unavailability for the iPad feel particularly vexing. In the few short months since I’ve owned my iPhone 4, I’ve become thoroughly reliant on the iOS 4 unified inbox within Mail, for instance — I’m amazed that I ever lived without it on my iPhone and annoyed that I have to live without it still on my iPad. Also, the major efficiency gains that iOS 4’s multitasking makes possible have become second nature to me on the iPhone. Meanwhile, switching between apps on the iPad and having to wait for each app to load from scratch every time I access it seems like an archaic custom leftover from the first decade of the century.

Among features that the iPad does share with the iPhone, the ability to undo actions seems more rote than useful. As a gesture to invoke the Undo command, shaking a handheld device the size of an iPhone is clever and workable. Shaking a much larger device like the iPad is awkward at best and violates one infrequently violated but nevertheless important law of good user interface design: don’t force the user to look like a fool [original euphemism deleted in deference to British sensitivities] in order to use any given feature.

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Settling Scores with MLB At Bat

MLB At BatOne of my favorite uses for my increasingly useful iPad is to keep current with The New York Yankees, an activity made possible — and enjoyable — with the outstanding MLB At Bat app. For baseball fans like myself who have canceled their cable service and therefore have little access to regular gameday broadcasts, paying just a fraction of the cost of a ballpark ticket once for an app that gives this kind of access for the full season is a bargain: it offers of course a full box score, an excellent complement of statistics, play-by-play summaries, radio simulcasting and, most importantly for me, a healthy trove of after-the-fact video.

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