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Commented Out

Last week I had to shut down the comment thread for a post I wrote about The Daily when it turned into an unexpectedly snarky exchange on the merits of various approaches to iPad publishing. To look at the twenty comments that were published before I shut it off you’d think the discourse wasn’t that bad, but I had to filter out several fairly nasty and thoroughly unconstructive comments that some less diplomatic readers tried to post.

I don’t mind debate and disagreement and even outright refutation of my opinions, but I really do mean it when I implore commenters to “Please be nice.” In fact, that’s the only instruction I offer in my comments form, simply because I feel like it’s short and simple enough to set the right tone for 99% percent of the people who comment here. When commenters don’t adhere to that, the fun of running a site with open comments is drained away for me.

Luckily, this hasn’t happened very often. In fact I can’t remember the last time it did, and I doubt I’ve had to take this measure more than two or three times in the decade or so I’ve been running this blog. So I’m very grateful to the vast majority of the readership here who have had the decency to be nice in the comments.

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The Silver Computer Screen

If you can’t tell already I’m a fan of the movies, pretty much all kinds of movies. From art house fare to popcorn flicks, I’m pretty confident I can find something interesting in just about every film I watch, and so I try to watch as much as I can of as many different genres as I can. This requires a well-practiced suspension of disbelief, of course, which is not hard to muster if you are passionate about films in general.

But one thing that almost always breaks me out of any movie’s spell is the on-screen appearance of any kind of computing technology — specifically the appearance of interfaces for computing technology. The reason is obvious: they’re almost always completely phony, designed not so much to reflect what the movie’s characters are supposed to be doing with a computer as to reflect what the movie’s producers want us to understand about what the character is doing with a computer.

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The Enduring Value of Netflix by Mail

I’ve been thinking about Netflix’s Instant Watch service lately, how it’s fueled such tremendous growth for the company, and how it’s no secret that the company’s future lies in streaming on-demand content and not in its traditional business of delivering content on disc via the postal service. In fact, new customers looking to sign up today might be forgiven for thinking that Netflix is primarily a streaming service and that its mail delivery service is just an afterthought, so strong is the company’s marketing emphasis on the former.

At what point will Netflix stop delivering discs by mail and focus solely on streaming? For a lot of us who have been Netflix subscribers since the time when discs-by-mail was its only service, the assumption is that the company won’t make this definitive switch until such time as they can stream about as many titles as they can deliver by mail. I couldn’t find definitive numbers, but it seems generally accepted that the company currently streams somewhere around 20,000 titles from the 90,000 or so that it claims to carry. By any measure, its streaming catalog is currently just a fraction of its disc catalog.

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Basic Maths Now for WordPress.com

I have some great news for those interested in using Basic Maths, the WordPress theme that I developed with Allan Cole. Where previously the theme required that users run their own instances of the WordPress publishing system on their own server — still a daunting task for most people — starting today, that’s no longer the case.

As just announced, users of the hosted blogging service WordPress.com can now purchase Basic Maths as a premium theme, complete with support direct from the WP Theme Team, for US$75. No more server administration or tricky technical hurdles; WordPress.com now lets you install this theme quickly and easily and with no fuss. This has been the number one query that Allan and I have gotten from the public since we first launched Basic Maths in November of 2009, so we’ve very happy that now it’s easier than ever to get up and running with our creation. Get started with it in the WordPress.com Theme Showcase.

Of course, users who prefer to run WordPress on their own can still purchase the theme direct from us for just US$45. Get your copy or find out more over at the Basic Maths site.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who took part in last week’s Basic Maths sale, in which all of the proceeds went to disaster relief in Japan. We managed to raise over US$1,500, an amazing sum. I’m incredibly grateful that people were able to contribute and that we were able to help in some small way.

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An Illustration for Stack America

Stack America is a neat service in which subscribers get a curated bundle of independent magazines sent to them every other month. The titles change with each delivery, but all are selected by editor Andrew Losowsky from among the best of the many eclectic, hard-to-find titles produced by the independent press.

The subscription also includes bi-monthly installments from what Stack America calls “The Designers Series”: graphic prints created exclusively for Stack America by invited designers. Andrew asked me last year to create something for this series, but I was reluctant to say yes for lack of a good idea.

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Multiple User Account Disorder

Somehow I ended up creating multiple user accounts (under separate email addresses) over at TripIt (which is probably my favorite travel tool of the past decade). For a recent trip, I had stashed some data in one account and other bits in another. But thankfully TripIt made it relatively easy to consolidate these accounts together; after some simple email verification, I had a single user account that recognized both email addresses.

It made me wish that Apple would allow me to do the same thing, but alas they don’t. For a few years now, I’ve had two separate Appe IDs where I would very much like to have just one. Though I’ve tried to be conscientious about using only the one that I prefer, once in a while I’ll accidentally make purchases on the App Store or in iTunes with the wrong one. So now I have some digital purchases under one account and others under the other, which can make for a frustrating experience when I have to update or re-authorize any of them.

This seems especially egregious for Apple, as their suite of products creates so many opportunities — iTunes, MobileMe, iChat, FaceTime, even registering a new Mac, to name a few — where a user might inadvertently create multiple accounts. Allowing users to merge accounts, preferably through a simple, self-service Web tool, strikes me as a fundamental requirement for good customer management. This would seem especially true when your ecosystem is as large as Apple’s, when the company serves as the gateway to so many purchases, and when it stores so many credit card numbers.

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The Other Kind of iPad Magazines

For the past few days I’ve been using and enjoying TweetMag on my iPad, a new app from the smart folks at Toronto design studio Teehan + Lax. It’s a beautifully designed reader-style application that “uses your Twitter account to create simple magazines.” It’s very much in the mode of Flipboard, which also transforms your social media stream into magazine-like presentations of eclectic content.

I’ve often spoken of Flipboard as a promising hint at a truly new kind of reading experience, one that employs the power of social graphs and the magic of superior user experience design to present users with a coherent view of the world. Flipboard, in my opinion, is the first step on what will either be a long road or a steep climb towards a new way of interfacing with written content. Unfortunately TweetMag, as nice as it is, isn’t quite that second step. It’s an attractive refinement with merits of its own, but it’s still not the breakthrough that this genre of software is looking for.

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Basic Maths for Japan

Basic Maths for JapanA very brief announcement: starting today, Basic Maths, the WordPress theme that I developed with Allan Cole, is on sale for US$30. Even better, all proceeds from this sale will go to benefit disaster relief in Japan via The Red Cross. So now’s your chance to get a hold of this awesome, grid-based blog theme for one-third off the normal price of US$45 while also doing a bit of good for the unfortunate victims of Japan’s recent earthquake. The sale runs through 27 Mar. Get your copy here and tell a friend.

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What the NYT Pay Wall Really Costs

The New York TimesFinally delivering on a long held promise, The New York Times announced yesterday that it would debut a ‘pay wall’ around its digital products, first immediately for users in Canada and then at the end of the month for the U.S. and other countries. This is the culmination of a process that began in the dark days of the so-called Great Recession; I remember first hearing of it while employed at The Times in late 2008, I believe. There was much debate about it the next year, and an exploratory team, including myself, began putting together plans for it in the summer of 2009. By the time I left my job there in July 2010, the project was still evolving, and lots and lots of work remained to be done.

Whether the pay wall succeeds or not is an open question and I won’t pretend to know the answer. To be completely frank I was never a proponent of this concept and it was among the reasons I decided to leave my job there last year. Now that it’s upon us I hope it does succeed, actually, because The Times generates tremendous value for the public good and it would be terrific if we could find a way to continue to reward its talented journalists and staff for their hard work. Still, I can’t help but look at the effort that went into constructing this new revenue model and think that it has exacted an unfortunate opportunity cost on the company.

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Life in a Solid State

The MacBook Air that I bought in late 2009 was never much of a speed demon, but by the end of last year it was operating so slowly that it was nearly unusable. Startup times, application launch times, even accessing open and save dialog boxes all seemed interminable, due mostly to the lamentably poky hard drive that shipped with the laptop.

I finally did something about that earlier this week when I pried open up the laptop casing, removed the hard drive and replaced it with a brand new solid state drive that I ordered from Other World Computing. Even for someone like myself who has very limited experience and comfort with the innards of delicate machinery, the installation process was fairly straightforward, especially with the aid of OWC’s handy installation videos.

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