holloway.me

"Of course, you don’t have to go far on the internet, much less in gaming, to encounter..."

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:08:23 -0600

“Of course, you don’t have to go far on the internet, much less in gaming, to encounter egregious displays of self-entitlement. That particular mixture of naivety and self-absorption is the principle feature of an X-Factor generation, regularly flattered into thinking their views are of vital importance by cheap marketing initiatives to “drive engagement” - rhetorical questions on Facebook; the Like button; text to vote now! Why not get on YouTube and unload your soul into the digital ether? You are worth it, you beautiful snowflake.”

- Why Devs Owe You Nothing • Opinions • Eurogamer.net

Dr. Drang: Stop using shortened URLs in tweets

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:21:26 -0500

Dr. Drang: Stop using shortened URLs in tweets:

The venerable Dr. Drang agrees with me — now that Twitter is forcing t.co shortening on all links, short URL services like bit.ly are not only unnecessary, but at some level they harm the Twitter ecosystem.

Windows Explorer interface in Windows 8. It’s almost like...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:53:20 -0500

Windows Explorer interface in Windows 8. It’s almost like Microsoft is trying so hard to not copy Apple that they think their only choice is to do a complete 180º.

Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff on Steve Jobs. I won’t spoil...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:26:26 -0500

Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff on Steve Jobs. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s an awesome story.

Grant Alan Tummins was born last night at 9:05 PM, on the same day that Steve Jobs resigned as CEO...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:15:00 -0500

Grant Alan Tummins was born last night at 9:05 PM, on the same day that Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple Inc. Though the two have little to do with each other, Grant’s birth and the photo above taught me a lot about the world that Jobs has helped create.

Apple didn’t invent personal computers or screens or keyboards, but they always strived to be better at making them, and they pushed others to be better as well.

We can’t say what would or would not have happened if Apple hadn’t created the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad. But I think it’s safe to say that the world is a better place because of the technology Apple has created and inspired.

I’m talking about technology that lets us create works of art.

Technology that connects us with people across the world.

Technology that leaves this world better than when we found it.

Technology that allows us to see the face of a newborn baby even if we can’t touch him or hold him.

Steve Jobs built a company that has invented a future worthy of our wildest imaginations. And you know what that is?

Magical.

—via parislemon

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:14:05 -0500

—via parislemon

This is only a test.

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:07:21 -0500

This is only a test.

I wrote a tiny, elegant program in Ruby. It presents a prompt where you can enter any number of...

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 23:52:47 -0500

I wrote a tiny, elegant program in Ruby. It presents a prompt where you can enter any number of strings, and when you’re done it returns those strings back to you in alphabetical order.

    array = []
    item = nil

    while item != ''
        item = gets.chomp
        array.push item
    end

    puts array.sort

Hey, it’s not much, but it’s progress. Anyone know how to make this code more efficient?

"In English, we often use “or” to mean “one or the other, but not both.” For..."

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:34:48 -0500

“In English, we often use “or” to mean “one or the other, but not both.” For example, your mom might say, “For dessert, you can have pie or cake.” She did not mean you could have them both! A computer, on the other hand, uses || to mean “one or the other, or both.” (Another way of saying it is “at least one of these is true.”) This is why computers are more fun than moms.”

- Chris Pine, “Learn to Program”

We’re all born to broken people on their most honest day of living. And since that first breath,...

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 17:51:00 -0500

We’re all born to broken people on their most honest day of living.

And since that first breath, we’ll need grace that we’ve never given.

I’ve been haunted by standard red devils and white ghosts, and it’s not only when these eyes are closed.

These lies are ropes that I tie down in my stomach, but they hold this ship together, tossed like leaves in this weather.

And my dreams are sails that I point towards my true north, stretched thin over my rib bones, and pray that it gets better — but it won’t, at least I don’t believe it will…

So I’ve built a wooden heart inside this iron ship, to sail these blood-red seas and find your coasts. Don’t let these waves wash away your hopes.

This warship is sinking, and I still believe in anchors.

Pulling fistfuls of rotten wood from my heart, I still believe in saviors, but I know that we are all made out of shipwrecks, every single board, washed and bound like crooked teeth on these rocky shores.

So come on and let’s wash each other with tears of joy and tears of grief and fold our lives like crashing waves and run up on this beach.

Come on and sew us together, tattered rags stained forever.

We only have what we remember.

I am the barely-living son of a woman and man who barely made it, but we’re making it taped together on borrowed crutches and new starts.

We all have the same holes in our hearts… everything falls apart at the exact same time that it all comes together perfectly for the next step.

But my fear is this prison that I keep locked below the main deck. I keep a key under my pillow, it’s quiet and it’s hidden.

And my hopes are weapons that I’m still learning how to use right, but they’re heavy and I’m awkward… always running out of fight.

So I’ve carved a wooden heart, put it in this sinking ship, hoping it would help me float for just a few more weeks, because I am made out of shipwrecks, every twisted beam, lost and found like you and me scattered out on the sea.

So come on and let’s wash each other with tears of joy and tears of grief and fold our lives like crashing waves and run up on this beach.

Come on and sew us together, just some tattered rags stained forever.

We only have what we remember.

My throat, it still tastes like house fire and salt water.

I wear this tide like loose skin, rock me to sea.

If we hold on tight we’ll hold each other together and not just be some fools rushing to die in our sleep.

All these machines will rust, I promise, but we’ll still be electric, shocking each other back to life.

Your hand in mine, my fingers in your veins connected, our bones grown together inside, our hands entwined, your fingers in my veins braided, our spines grown stronger in time.

Because our church is made out of shipwrecks from every hull these rocks have claimed, but we pick ourselves up, and try and grow better through the change.

So come on and let’s wash each other with tears of joy and tears of grief and fold our lives like crashing waves and run up on this beach.

Come on and sew us together, we’re just tattered rags stained forever.

We only have what we remember.

— Listener, “Wooden Heart”

If someone you look up to gives you a book or tells you about one, read it. They’re trying to...

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 12:05:26 -0500

If someone you look up to gives you a book or tells you about one, read it. They’re trying to tell you something, whether it’s a personal message or something they think everyone in the world should learn.

"This is America. Pick a job and then become the person who does it."

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:30:53 -0500

“This is America. Pick a job and then become the person who does it.”

- Mad Men, “The New Girl”

I’ve never thought about this until just now — why...

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:29:00 -0500

I’ve never thought about this until just now — why does the iPad keyboard have virtual bumps on the F and J keys?

The Next iPhone

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 06:56:00 -0500

Over the last few years, somehow I’ve become the expert within my circle of friends and acquaintances about when the next iPhone is coming out. Seriously, this is probably the number one question I get asked. The odd thing is people ask me as if I know for certain what the next iPhone is going to be and when it’s going to come out.

I don’t usually like to feed into the incessant rumor mill surrounding Apple products, and when asked, I usually just say, “I’m not sure. We’ll find out.” But enough people have asked me this time around that it’s probably worth summarizing my thoughts in one place just to make it easy for everyone.

Please note that I don’t have any insider information. All of this is speculation, however well-educated it may be. Without further ado, here is what I believe about the next iPhone:

Design

I believe the next iPhone will feature an all-new industrial design that marries the best of the iPhone 4 with the rounded back and sides of previous generations. Expect to see something thinner and lighter than the iPhone 4, while being perhaps a little taller and wider. It probably looks something like this.

Screen

Based on leaked case specifications, it’s likely that the next iPhone will have a physically larger screen measuring somewhere between 3.7 and 4 inches. The screens on all previous iPhones have been 3.5 inches.

Despite a physically larger screen, it would be foolish for Apple to change the resolution from the 960 x 640 pixels that is used on the iPhone 4. Exactly doubling the iPhone’s resolution for the Retina Display was the only way for Apple to maintain a bit of uniformity while still making a nicer screen. I seriously doubt that we’ll ever see an iPhone or iPod touch with a resolution that doesn’t map to the general dimensions of the current one.

Under the Hood

It would come as no surprise to anyone if the next iPhone ships with the same Apple A5 system on a chip that powers the iPad 2. And despite that chip being a few months old, it would be a welcome addition to the next iPhone. It’s dual core design and new GPU give it at least double the performance and much faster 3D rendering. No surprises, but exciting nonetheless.

Camera

Rumor has it that the next iPhone will come with an 8 megapixel camera. Considering that every iteration has received a progressively better camera upgrade, this is another no-brainer. But yet again, if you consider the quality of the iPhone 4 camera, an upgrade to anything even slightly better will be astounding.

There’s also mild speculation that the next iPhone will feature a dual-LED flash. I really don’t have an opinion either way on this matter. I think the flash on the iPhone 4 works great, and I don’t see any reason for Apple to change it.

Home Button

One of the biggest rumors surrounding the release of the next iPhone is a wider, touch-sensitive home button. Based on the amount of information from all different sources, I’d say this is probably likely. I expect the home button to still be physical and clicky, but will also act as a gesture area meant primarily for switching between apps.

Wireless and Communications

I don’t think much is going to change here. The new iPhone will come in separate CDMA and GSM versions for Verizon and AT&T in the US, respectively. It will have an 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi chip. It will have Bluetooth, probably fitting the new 4.0 spec. What I don’t think it will have? A 4G cellular radio and Near Field Communications (NFC) chip. Neither technology is proven and widespread. I would not be surprised if we saw both of these in the next next iPhone in 2012, however.

Announcement and Release

This is the big question, isn’t it? Apple surprised many people when they didn’t announce a new iPhone in June of this year like they have every other year previously. But their reasons for not doing that make a lot of sense. John Gruber has been very vocal about the idea that Apple wants to line up all of their iDevice release cycles — and I agree.

For the past 10 years or so, Apple has held a special event in September to announce the new iPods for the holiday season. It’s been like clockwork. It only makes sense for Apple to bring the iPhone into that fold and get everything out of the way all at once. Plus, it would be difficult for them to start selling a brand-new iPhone in July when the Verizon iPhone 4 came out just six months earlier.

The trick with product announcements in the fall is that if you’re too early, people will forget about the product by the time Christmas shopping rolls around, and if you’re too late, there won’t be enough product in the channel to fulfill demand. There’s no way that Apple would wait until November to release their biggest product, and August is a notoriously bad month for announcing or releasing anything.

So that leaves us with September and October. We’ve already heard many rumored dates, the most recent one being an announcement on September 7th. But Jim Dalrymple, famous for his inside sources and spot-on predictions, says it’s not happening.

So here’s my guess — Apple will hold a special media event sometime late in September to announce new iPods, iPhones, and perhaps a new Apple TV. The new iPods will be available the next day or by the end of that week. The new iPhone will be available three to four weeks later, putting it sometime in October. And it seems extremely likely that models for Verizon and AT&T will be out on the same day.

The Mythical “Cheap iPhone”

I firmly believe that a big component of the iPhone’s success is that every year when it comes out, there is always one flagship model — just “the iPhone”. There’s not “iPhone mini” and “iPhone Plus” and “iPhone HD” and “iPhone Bionic”. Just iPhone. And despite every year’s model being a new iteration, all you really have to choose is what color and how big.

I think it would be foolish for Apple to change this model and split the iPhone into multiple tracks. There is a lot of talk that Apple might release a cheaper version that is crippled in some ways, that’s missing capabilities. I just don’t see this happening.

Come fall, if you want a cheap iPhone, you’ll be able to buy the previous generation iPhone 4, which, 14 months after its release, is still one of the best cell phones on the market.

The Name

My final prediction? Don’t expect this thing to be called the “iPhone 5” or the “iPhone 4S”. I really have no idea what they will call it, but I really don’t think it’s either of these. Slapping a higher number on the end of each new iPhone is going to get unwieldy soon — are we going to have the iPhone 13 some day? And I think that this phone is going to be a much bigger leap than the 3G to the 3GS was. I think it deserves its own name, and I think it will get a good one.

If you understand this video, we need to be friends. via Pat

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:28:21 -0500

If you understand this video, we need to be friends.

via Pat

"The major motivating factor for me at the time was making sure I had something full-time before my..."

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 06:42:00 -0500

“The major motivating factor for me at the time was making sure I had something full-time before my Unemployment ran out. I made the buzzer shot, but it wasn’t anything special. I was motivated enough to get the necessary stuff done, but not motivated to get the cool stuff, the creative stuff done. Fear, it seems, is only enough of a motivator to end the fear.”

- Richard A.

Two things about this song: It sounds great blasting from my...

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:48:22 -0500

Two things about this song:

It sounds great blasting from my little Saturn.
You will probably hate it.

So an Android developer walks into a bar.

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 11:42:36 -0500

The bartender asks, “What’ll it be?”

The Android developer answers, “Just a beer, anything is fine.”

The Android developer finishes his beer and, fishing around in his pockets, asks, “How much do I owe you?”

The bartender says, “That’ll be four bucks.”

“Hang on,” says the Android developer as he walks away, “I’ll be back in a month.”

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Posting Links on Twitter

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:31:00 -0500

NOTE: I have updated this article as of August 13, 2011 to reflect changes in Twitter’s policies. Please see below.

The other day I was having a conversation on Twitter with a few friends about URLs, discussing their length and how the user experience of links could be improved on the service. This conversation was eye-opening because it made me realize that all three of us thought we knew how links on Twitter worked, and as it turns out, each of us only had one piece of the puzzle at best.

Since that day, I’ve made it a mission to try to figure out the one true answer for how links on Twitter work. As it turns out, Twitter themselves are not all that helpful on the matter, so I’ve had to do a lot of testing on my own. Allow me to take a short detour and then explain what I’ve found.

Bits and Bobs

If you’re a regular user of Twitter, you’re probably accustomed by now to seeing bit.ly, goo.gl, owl.ly, deck.ly, and other shortened URLs. While services like TinyURL and SnipURL existed long before Twitter, I think it’s fair to say that the service popularized the idea of short URLs.

There is certainly a huge value to short URLs on Twitter; on a medium where you only get to use 140 characters at a time, brevity is king. It’s no wonder that Twitter welcomed URL shortening services — in fact, they integrated both TinyURL and bit.ly directly into their web interface for some time.

More recently there has been a trend emerging of vanity URL shorteners — that is, instead of using bit.ly, a company will use a custom short domain name that is more strongly associated with their brand. TechCrunch uses tcrn.ch; Foursquare users tweet with 4sq.com; Flickr has the very convenient flic.kr; Mashable uses the incomprehensible on.mash.to

T.co Supreme

Late last year, Twitter made a bold move and introduced their own URL shortener, t.co. However, they didn’t implement it in quite the way anyone expected. Their eventual goal was that users would never have to actually see “http://t.co/…” Instead, every link of any kind posted to Twitter would get “wrapped” in a t.co link, but the original would still be displayed. If you posted a link, long or short, it would still appear intact to the end user, but behind the scenes, it would actually be a t.co link.

The reasons behind this move were good. It improved security and readability on the service when it worked. Unfortunately that hasn’t been the case until recently. On top of that, when Twitter announced the t.co service, they were not very clear about how it was being used, and many users assumed that they were attempting to replace services like bit.ly.

Over time, Twitter has implemented t.co into its own official apps as well as API features like the share button. Today, many of the most popular posting methods already use the t.co link wrapper.

Bringing It All Together

Just within the past week Twitter opened up to third-party developers the Tweet Entities API that does all the magic for t.co behind the scenes. On top of that, yesterday they unified their user experience by announcing t.co shortening in Twitter on the web. Sounds great! Now you can just drop any link you want into Twitter on the web and you’re all set, right?

Not exactly. In fact, let me get right down to the real statement I wanted to make with this post: It’s time to rethink your entire link posting strategy on Twitter.

You might be thinking right now, “I don’t even have a ‘link posting strategy’.” Well, you should. It’s imperative, especially for businesses, to meticulously craft the entire experience for readers from top to bottom with excellence. That will probably sound crazy to some of you, but I really believe it. That means that everything from obvious points like spelling and grammar to finer points like your Twitter background and, yes, the way you post links, should be stellar. For every detail you think readers don’t care about, someone does.

In short, you wouldn’t stand for a bad user experience on your own website, so why should you stand for a bad user experience (within the realm of what you can control) on the social media services you use?

Fortunately, I think that with a little effort, you can polish the links you post to Twitter to improve readability, context, and overall experience. You can do it while keeping your analytics, and you can do it today.

The Magic Number

As of this writing, when you post a link to Twitter using any official method — that is, Twitter.com, the official Twitter apps, and certain API elements — Twitter captures the original URL, replaces it with a t.co link, and displays the link as a shortened version of the original in supported clients. This is all a bit confusing, so let me give you an example.

Let’s say that you work for Widgetz Inc., and you want to post links from your company blog to Twitter. Your raw blog links probably look something like this:

http://widgetzinc.com/blog/2011/06/how-we-make-our-widgets

That URL is 58 characters on its own, or almost half of a tweet. You definitely don’t want to post something like that directly to Twitter. So today, you probably use a tool like bit.ly to come up with a link like this:

http://bit.ly/louLpf

Only 20 characters, great! Plenty of room to fit all that fancy marketing copy into your tweet. But what if you want to brand your short URLs for stronger identity? Sure, we can do that:

http://wdg.tz/hz9Btf

Again, just 20 characters, and you have arguably just given your link a stronger brand identity. Not only will your tweets to this blog post be branded, but other people can use the wdg.tz short URL as well.

So we have our tweet written, and we’d like to post it out. Here’s what we want it to look like:

We've just posted a great new article on our company blog about how we make our awesome widgets. Check it out! http://wdg.tz/hz9Btf

Assuming you’ve posted the link using Twitter.com or an official app, what you’re actually posting is this:

We've just posted a great new article on our company blog about how we make our awesome widgets. Check it out! http://t.co/XYnToGu

But what your readers will actually see in most clients is this:

We've just posted a great new article on our company blog about how we make our awesome widgets. Check it out! wdg.tz/hz9Btf

So what just happened? Three different ways of displaying the same tweet… pretty confusing, isn’t it? To recap, any time you post a URL in a tweet now, Twitter encapsulates that link inside a t.co URL, and posts it. Supported clients will be able to view the original URL. Clients that haven’t been modernized display the t.co link. To give you an example, check out this tweet.

On the Twitter website, it looks like this:

In Twitter for Mac, like this:

So far so good. But let’s take a look at it in Twitterrific, another popular client for Mac and iOS:

What the heck? Two different ways of displaying the same tweet. How did that happen? The answer lies in the aforementioned Tweet Entities feature, which allows far more data than just a simple 140 characters to be embedded in a tweet. It’s how links, location, photos, and more are stored in individual tweets. For each tweet with a t.co URL, Twitter embeds the full original URL along with the shortened version, and provides an API so clients can display the original URL if they’d like. Otherwise, they get the t.co link. Many clients have already been updated to properly support t.co, but a handful have not.

It’s great that Twitter has included a built-in URL shortener, but because of the way it expands URLs back out fully, it allows us to play around with the reader experience in some interesting ways. Remember before how we used wdg.tz to post links to our site on Twitter? While some people might associate that URL with your brand, some people might not be familiar with that domain and may avoid clicking it out of fear or mistrust. And while most regular Twitter users understand what a bit.ly link is, it’s not tied to our brand at all. But we also don’t want to post direct links to Twitter, even if they get shortened, because we want real-time analytics data on our clicks. So where’s the compromise?

Here’s where it gets really fun.

Using tools like bit.ly Pro, awe.sm, and others, we can still set up a URL shortening service with analytics. The trick is that instead of choosing a convoluted, unmemorable mess of characters for your short URL, you can just use your real domain name. So your “short” links look like this instead:

http://widgetzinc.com/hz9Btf

But that’s certainly longer than a bit.ly link! What about our precious characters? Remember, that’s not your actual link, it’s only what’s displayed to the user! Your actual link is this:

http://t.co/1jcC4Yd

And your tweet is displayed like this:

Pretty neat, huh? What this means is that you can post links to Twitter that match all three of our key criteria that we determined earlier.

Promotes strong brand recognition
Compact to allow more room for copy
Provides real-time analytics data

And I would personally add a fourth: improves user experience by providing context.

The best part is that Twitter full expands URLs up to 37 characters long on the web and in their apps, so even if you don’t have a particularly short domain name, you should still be able to fit what you need into your tweet.

There are a few downsides to using this method, though. First and most prominent, t.co URL expansion is not yet supported in all clients. However, every one of the current top 10 Twitter reading methods do support it, representing about 75% of all Twitter usage. Moreover, now that Twitter has beefed up the available APIs, developers are adding support for it daily.

If your reader’s Twitter client doesn’t support expansion, they just see a t.co link. This still meets the criteria of a short URL, it still provides analytics, and although it’s not branded, it does provide context since regular users are likely to recognize that a t.co link comes from Twitter and is safe to click.

The second downside is that not all clients support posting t.co links, but this one is a little easier to solve. Even if your client will not shorten URLs automatically using t.co, any existing t.co links posted using them will still expand properly on the user end. What this means is that once you generate a t.co URL, it’s canonical, and any tweet containing it will expand properly, even if it wasn’t posted by you.

You can take advantage of this loophole by using a site such as Instant.so. Hand it a regular link and it will give you back the t.co version of that link that you can post using any client, even those that don’t natively support t.co shortening.

To test this, take one of the t.co links I provided earlier in this post and try putting it in a tweet. Even though you’re not using the @WidgetzInc account that I used to originally create it, what you’ll see is this:

The link still expands! Although it’s a little bit of extra work, I think it’s worth it in exchange for an amazing user experience.

Conclusion

Right now you’re probably thinking, “did he really just go on for 2,000 words about URLs on Twitter?” To answer your question, I would say once again that if you really care about your readers, your users, or your customers, you absolutely must think even the most mechanical things like this through. Even if you decide not to change how you post links on Twitter, the simple fact that you’re now more aware of how the system works is a positive change.

And if you thought I was crazy for writing this much about URLs, just wait until I get around to talking about background images.

UPDATE: August 13, 2011

When I originally wrote this article, Twitter was only using t.co to wrap links sent from the web, their official clients, and API elements. Earlier this week, Twitter started wrapping all URLs with t.co. Everything in the article above still applies, but some people are still a bit confused about how this works, so I wanted to clarify a few points.

First, t.co links will still show up as http://t.co/… in clients that do not support expansion via Tweet Entities. Many clients do already support this expansion, but a few popular ones do not, including Twitterrific on all platforms.

If you see a raw t.co link that hasn’t been expanded to the full link (or at least a preview of it), your client does not support expansion, but note that other users will still see the full link or preview on the web and in clients that support expansion.

The other big misunderstanding is that this will break analytics via bit.ly or other URL shorteners. This isn’t true. T.co links do not replace shortened links, but they can supplement them.

For instance, I have a link that is as follows:

http://widgetzinc.com/about/corporate/investor-relations/

I want to post that link to Twitter with my custom URL shortener (discussed above) so I can get analytics on it. So I shorten the URL to:

http://widgetzinc.com/7ue90d

When I post that link to Twitter, it gets wrapped with the t.co link:

http://t.co/sfRTn8u

However, that t.co link doesn’t replace my original URL. What happens here is that the t.co link is clicked, it resolves to my custom URL shortener, which then resolves to the full URL. Because the user is sent through my shortener, my analytics still work.

This adds an extra layer to URL resolution, and could conceivably slow down the ability to get to the final site, but the effect should be minimal.

With the recent changes to Twitter’s t.co, I think now is a better time than ever to examine the way you post links to the service. This is something that I didn’t really touch on in my previous iteration of the article, but I hope you keep in mind that URLs are for humans, not machines. You should take your time to make them as useful as possible to your end users.

Six reasons your data is safe in Evernote

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 08:05:26 -0500

Six reasons your data is safe in Evernote:

I’ve been using Evernote for a few months as a place to store just about anything — documents, photos, checklists, meeting notes, and just quick thoughts that I want to jot down.

The problem, though, when you fully rely on a third-party system to organize your life, is that you don’t control the third-party. But in this post, Michael Hyatt gives six excellent reasons why Evernote can be trusted, even if they do go out of business at some point in the future.