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Sanspoint.

Essays on Technology and Culture

How To Stand Out In a Crowded Market

I’ve written on here before about the futility of adding social features to apps, specifically calendar apps. Fact of the matter is, as I addressed in the previously referenced essay, adding social features is an easy way to differentiate your product in an increasingly crowded market space. We’re seeing this sort of thing a lot in what I will call, for lack of a better term, commodity applications. See, for example, the latest gushing and gnashing about Haze, which amazes everyone with its ability to display a small amount of information in a very simple way. I give it a month before the imitators flood the space, and we all get burned out. [1]

This is not to question the intentions of the people behind these apps. I’m sure the folks who made Tempo thought they were really on to something when they decided to integrate a calendar with Facebook and LinkedIn, and put it on the iPhone. What I’m saying is that to properly differentiate an application, you need to do something that won’t be so easily done by others. This is hard. This is mind-bogglingly, brain-shakingly, hypenated-adverbially hard. This is also why we don’t see it terribly much.

There are two classes of differentiating features: doing a simple thing incredibly well, and doing something truly new. For an example of the former, let’s look at the little ten-inch sheet of glass I’m typing this on. Apple’s iPad was not the first tablet, and the pundits won’t let you forget it. Microsoft had been pushing the idea of tablet computing for the better part of a decade before Apple revealed the iPhone, let alone the iPad. There had been touchscreen devices with grids of application icons before iOS ever happened. What Apple did, and what everyone’s been trying to catch up with, is taking something like touch computing and a “grid-of-icons” based UI, and making it a smooth, polished, and intuitive experience. Microsoft, on the other hand, insisted that a user should use a stylus as a mouse surrogate, rather than rethink the Windows UI.

But, let’s look again at Microsoft. Windows 8 is something new. Well, Metro is something new. Erm, Modern UI. Whatever the hell they’re calling it. It’s different, it’s pretty, and it’s a reinvention of the desktop that is distinctive and hasn’t really been done before. I don’t like it, but I’ve also not tried to live with it. Five minutes playing with a Surface RT demo unit alone does not a podcast guest spot make. [2] Point is, props do need to go to Microsoft for trying to do something new and unique. Some props also need to be taken away for not following through all the way, but the net number of props left is still a positive integer. Someone has the potential to take what Microsoft did, and run the rest of the way with it. Hopefully, it’ll be Microsoft, and it’ll hopefully be before Ballmer finishes piloting the ship into the ground. But, I digress.

The truly earth-shaking products, the ones that actually have a lasting impact, don’t just cram in whatever new, cool, shiny feature that’s the buzzword of the month, like “social.” They rethink the way someone actually uses something. It happens on an interaction level. As I mentioned with Fantastical, the brilliance of the app is in how a user puts data into it with natural language processing. The love people have for OmniFocus comes from, again, the myriad ways there are to put data into it, and to pull data out of it. A remarkable, ground-breaking product does something a person wanted to do, but does it easier, and better. That’s all there is to it, short of actually figuring out how. That’s a longer process, and one that doesn’t lend it self to making a quick buck on the App Store or being bought out by some big technology company before the venture funding runs out.


  1. A month, I figure, is enough time to code a basic weather app, apply “minimalist design” to it, and get it past the App Store approval process.  ↩

  2. Except when it does.  ↩

Writing on the Subway: The Ultimate Distraction-Free Environment

I’m writing this essay on the subway, while on my way in to work. It’s a surprisingly great place to write, if you can get a seat. The one flaw I’ve found to the setup is that if you’re clinging to the poles, it’s a lot harder to type. You need both hands free. One can make it work if you wrap your arm around the pole, but this is an egregious breach of subway etiquette.

All you do is sit down, whip out your smartphone, and start typing into your off-line text editor of choice. (I recommend using Drafts for iPhone.) Owners of an iPad mini may find that to be a good tool as well, but full-size iPads are a bit too large for subway typing. Laptops are right out.

The advantages of the subway as a writing space are myriad. There’s no cellular service, no Wi-Fi, and only minimal non-digital distractions. Pop a pair of headphones on, and you can ignore almost anything—you don’t even need to turn on the music player.

In the space of a thirty minute commute, a good iPhone typist can write almost 500 words, and with periodic rerouting, train traffic, signal trouble, and unexplained slowdowns, you’ll find you have more time to write than you expected. A lot more. You’ll almost not want to get where you’re going. Almost.

For a fiction writer, a writing session on the subway is typically loaded with potential inspiration for characters and situations. There’s the teenage lovers clearly playing hooky from school, the homeless guy sleeping across some seats, and the asshole with the acoustic guitar busking for tips an he’s shoving his hat in my face despite the fact that I wasn’t listening or watching his terrible performance anyway.

Sorry.

Distraction-Free may not be an entirely accurate description of the subway as a writing—for God’s sake, you just tried asking me for money, and I said no!

Ahem. Distraction-Free may not be the best description of the subway as a writing environment, but it’s close. The mental shift that comes from relocating, the huge block of unallocated, Internet-free time, and our ubiquitous portable computing devices make it possible to get some real work done during a period of time we would have only wasted reading books and newspapers, listening to music, or interacting with our fellow city-dwellers. Just try not to get so deep into your work that you miss your stop.

And if this guy doesn’t stop playing guitar, I will go all Animal House on him. No, I don’t have any cash. Go away!

* Above post was written only partially in jest.

App.net is Choosing to Survive

App.net has gone Freemium. The service that had been slagged off as Twitter for people who have fifty dollars now has thrown the gates open wide, though not wide enough for everyone to come in at once. Free users need to be invited by an existing, paid user, and are limited to following 40 people, and to 500 MB of storage, with a per-file limit of 10 MB. [1]

I’ve written about App.net before, and how unimpressed I am with the service. It’s great for certain things. The community is still small enough that a user’s post can be spotted on the global public timeline, and get a response. People on App.net that would drown in Twitter @-replies will actually @-reply you back. It’s conversational.

If Twitter is Times Square—a comparison that is increasingly apt—App.net is the prototypical small town square, for good and for ill. These are comparisons made before, and by better writers, but they bear repeating. The paid barrier to entry has, however, kept App.net from reaching critical mass. Marco Arment has noted that this may be the reason for the new direction. I’m inclined to agree, and that was the crux of my previous post on the service.

I’m glad to see App.net taking the service more open, and I hope the Freemium model works for them. It’s to everyone’s benefit for the service to get more users and have more engagement. On the adoption curve, App.net has most of the early adopter crowd. Though they probably don’t aspire to a large-scale, or at least a Twitter-scale network, they do need to do whatever has to be done to keep moving along that curve. It’s a question of survival. They need users, they need users to stick around, and they need users to pay to move to premium, which is more likely to happen when the service provides them more value.

Yet, I know that people are going to raise a bit of hell. As a paid service, App.net has the “geek elite” credibility that Twitter no longer has. Part of the motivation for its existence was, and I read this from multiple technology writers, that Twitter was being taken over by the “normals.” Problem is, that’s an inevitability of any technology or service, whether they’re a large-scale service or otherwise. If you really want a small network, free from the riff-raff, there’s always tent.io.

Good luck, App.net, and Godspeed.


  1. Paid users get 10GB, though hell if I know how to use it.  ↩

A Statement of Focus

The name of this site implies a distinct lack of topical focus, and that is by design. I have a ADHD mindset, and rarely can stay interested in one topic for long. At one point in the site’s storied history, my focus was on books, writing and literature. It lasted about three months.

Since taking the site daily, I’ve found the lack of focus to be a mixed blessing. On one hand, I have the freedom to post whatever I like on here, but on the other hand, I often find myself sitting, directionless, at a blank screen trying to figure out a topic—any topic. Sometimes the results of that are great, and sometimes the results are extremely subpar. Still, up they go, the better to keep the streak alive.

If you, the reader, are concerned, I’m not giving up the daily posting thing. What I am doing is refactoring, and honing in on a focal point for Sanspoint. Like everything I write, it’s based on what’s occupying my thoughts, and what I read. The main focus on Sanspoint is going to be technology, culture, the technology of culture, and the culture of technology.

It sounds a bit pretentious, I’m sure, but I think a lot about culture. Music especially, and so much that I started a podcast just to talk records and music with equally passionate friends. I also think about books, and about TV and movies, though I don’t watch either terribly often. I also think a lot about technology, not just in the sense of what neat new gadgets are out there, but what software and hardware can do for me. This includes, of course, accessing, buying, and making culture.

Then there’s that intersection. The technology of culture, the culture of technology. That’s where things get really interesting, and that’s where I want to probe. I hope you’re willing to come with.

Dropbox Sync vs The Bad Old Days

The other day, I ran into a bit of difficulty with getting my daily blog post up. I’d written the start of a post on my iPad, with the intention of finishing and polishing it up in the morning, possibly on the subway on the way to work. Imagine my surprise when the file, which was stored on Dropbox, utterly failed to appear on my phone. And on my work computer. And everywhere else. I addressed this problem by simply writing the rest of the post in Drafts, which synced back to my iPad, copy and pasting the text into the document there, and proceeding with my typical blog workflow. [1] Nothing was lost, thankfully, but the sinking sensation of knowing that something isn’t where I thought it would be brought back a lot of bad memories from the bad days of syncing across devices.

Back in the day when I had a desktop and a laptop, and Dropbox but a gleam in some developer’s eye, I tried syncing a Yojimbo database between two machines. The only supported way to accomplish this was to use .Mac [1], which cost the princely sum of $99 a year. My poor college student self couldn’t afford that. It was expensive enough buying the Mac mini and the iBook G4. So, I found a workaround—an app called SyncTogether, that promised to be a surrogate .Mac for my local network. For a while, it worked, but then it didn’t. Synchronizing became a pain, with pop ups asking me which of two seemingly identical items I wished to keep in Yojimbo. Somewhere along the line, the synchronization database became completely fouled up. Wanting to start from scratch, I dove into the terminal and tried to rm -rf my way out.

The result permanently fouled up any attempt at future synchronization between my mini and my iBook forever. After trying a tool that allowed me to access the desktop Yojimbo database via the web, I gave up on the app entirely.

Comparatively speaking, Dropbox farting and failing to move files around was a mere annoyance. After all, I got my blog post finished and out the door. It was a bigger annoyance the first time it happened, trying to share an important work-related file with my bosses, falling back to e-mailing the file as an attachment. Dropbox usually works so well and so seamlessly that when it fails, it feels like a betrayal. Meanwhile, when the various Apple sync services fail to work, we brush it off as “Well, what did you expect. This is the company that gave us iTools/.Mac/MobileMe.” For what it’s worth, iCloud hasn’t failed me yet, but I don’t use it for document sync. That’s what Dropbox is for. It syncs the text files I live in, the TextExapnder snippets that help me work faster, and the 1Password database that I can’t do anything without. [2]

The more reliable something is, the more we come to rely upon it, and the more frustrated we get when it fails, even in a minor way. It’s a danger of this modern, connected life, the digital equivalent of the dog eating your homework. [3] And, that does happen—John Steinbeck’s first draft of Of Mice and Men was eaten by his dog, and he had to rewrite the entire novel from scratch. While writing a fiction piece a few years ago, TextMate, my text editor at the time, crashed before I could save. Attempting to use an iOS note-taking app on my phone nuked my entire Notational Data folder. At least I was able to restore everything from Dropbox’s backup when that happened.

And, thinking about it, with Dropbox letting me recover three years worth of text files makes me a little more inclined to forgive it for failing to synchronize now and then. It really could be much, much worse.


  1. Copy HTML from Byword, paste into WordPress.  ↩

  2. Note to self: Start backing up your 1Password database on your thumb drive.  ↩

  3. I actually used various “computer failure” excuses when I didn’t have homework on time in college. To any of my former professors who may read this, I am sorry.  ↩