Readability Type

After spending more than 10 minutes with Readability’s new iOS app, here's some thoughts I had on the type.

It’s really quite a stunning app and overall incredibly well-thought out. I adore the loading effect on pull-to-move-to-next-article. Both color schemes work tremendously well and the limited options for text adjustment are pitch-perfect.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Readability features type from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, specifically three serifs and two sans. My personal favorites of the faces are Mercury and Whitney. They work phenomenally on both the iPad and iPhone, as well as in each color format. I was also surprised how well Gotham Narrow worked and find myself switching from Whitney to Gotham Narrow pretty interchangably. They are noticably different, but provide a similar reading experience.

Sentinel really only works on the iPad for me, and even then I’m not a huge fan of it. I think Sentinel can work great for text, it just doesn’t feel as good to me as the options above. Still a great choice to have on hand and I chalk it up to personal preference.

Vitesse is the only one that feels truly out of place to me. It looks excellent for headlines, but doesn’t provide an elegant reading experience at all. Increasing the text-size and decreasing the column width help, but still don’t make up for its inherent blockiness. It draws too much attention to itself. I know, I know Wired and all that; Vitesse still just doesn’t sit great for me. I would much rather have Chronicle or Hoefler Text as the other serif option.

And dream sans from H&FJ’s catalog would definitely be Ideal Sans, which I’m a little sad didn’t make the cut.

Jean-Luc

The Jean-Luc typeface was created as an homage to the title sequencing in a couple of Jean-Luc Goddard’s films. For the French director and film critic’s 80th birthday, Dutch design studio Atelier Carvalho Bernau (composed of Susana Carvalho and Kai Bernau) released this display grotesque for free.

Jean-Luc is uppercase only, with two styles, hairline and bold; however, in a very lovely style decision, the weights only come into play in the face’s accents and punctuation. (Seen above is the hairline). From Atelier Carvalho Bernau’s microsite:

This style of lettering is so interesting to us because it is such a clear renunciation of the “pretty”, classical title screens that were common in that time’s more conservative films. It has a more vernacular and brutishly low-brow character; this lettering comes from the street.

Pick up a copy at the Jean-Luc microsite.

The Topaz

Two ‘t’ types were used on today’s Tuesday treatments. Topaz, by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, is a lovely all-caps humanist chromatic face. It includes the shaded face (with inline styling), a separate inline style (seen in The Chalet’s copyright info) and a separate background style (seen in the lower text of The Gentleman Suitor). This face can be licensed separately, or in their Shades bundle along with Giant, Knox, and the ever-popular Cyclone.

Adorning the top of Topaz here are two selections from Robb Ogle’s The The Project. From the project’s description:

Wordmarks from a private stock of predigital lettering scoured from low resolution archives, personally converted to bezier outlines by Robb for use by today’s graphic designers who appreciate the wonky shapes of yesteryear. These are not fonts, sorry.

I’ve used the ”The’s” in quite a few projects now, and love them.

Both Topaz and The The Project seem to me to yield themselves towards the opening credits of older films, particularly those with a slight European flair. Enjoy!

Playfair Display

Playfair Display (created by Claus Eggers Sørensen) is a ridiculously fun and classy transitional serif, best suited for display functions (obviously).

The regular-weight face also features a gorgeous italic style. The design is described as not necessarily a revivial of any particular letterform, but more of an homage to the great transitional designs. You can really see the influence of Baskerville in Playfair’s lovely ampersand.

The typeface was created through the funding of Google Web Fonts and is available for download and webfont use there.

Sirba

Sirba, by Nicolien van der Keur, is one of my favorite faces from last year. Technically it was released in the prior year, but I had not encountered it yet. TypeTogether’s specimen is stunning and greatly demonstrates the incredible readability contained in Sirba.

Sirba is has three weights: regular, bold, and black. Italics are available for the first two weights. All styles interact well with each other and are never distracting.

Because of its open counters, the large x-height, short ascenders and descenders, this typeface conveys a pleasant reading experience and high legibility even in small sizes. Sirba is a low-contrast typeface, contemporary but with a classical touch, revealing its beauty in design details, such as the asymmetrical bottom serifs, curved bracketing and calligraphically reminiscent terminals.

Especially at smaller sizes, Sirba really seems to create a natural rhythm and flow with text. It gets out of the way and assuredly guides your eyes along the content. Gorgeous. Also, how lovely is that italic ampersand? Pick up a license at TypeTogether.

Grotesque Grotesk

Every face found at Klim Type Foundry is stunning, but I recently became infatuated with Founders Grotesk X-Condensed. This is type that begs to be large. Kris Sowersby designed it specifically for display:

The spacing in Founders Grotesk is purposely tighter than any of the referenced typefaces. I have found that graphic designers will happily use a sans serif at all point sizes, often tracking the default spacing to suit the size. As it’s simply not possible to space a single font optimally for all point sizes, I feel that designers can obtain better results by opening tight spacing for text, rather than closing loose spacing for display.

Shown below are some mockups using Founders Grotesk X-Condensed for a stylized cover of William Golding’s epic Lord of the Flies.

The serif companion seen on the designs is Sirba, a wonderfully dark book face (and a hint for next Tuesday’s type treatment).

When I finished the composition, I realized that I neglected to show off Founders’ gorgeous lowercase characters. You’ll just have to take my word for it, or better yet, check out the online specimen here or the pdf specimen here. Licensing available exclusively at Village.

Andrew’s Audio in 2011

Taking stock of the past year has become a habit for myself and my family. Each New Year, we gather together and read letters recounting the year’s blessings, achievements, ups, downs, et cetera. It may seem silly to include pop culture and media references within this recounting, but the goal through all of this is to establish a familial history and place that member within the constructs of their time.

I wish I knew what my Dad was listening to when he was my age. What albums did he burn out on? What was his go-to-band when he was 27? Here’s a list of the albums and tracks I placed the most value on during 2011. You’ll notice not all of these came out in 2011 and that’s intentional. It’s not about the music, it’s about me.

Albums

The Yearbook Project by Sleeping at Last

This project was started by Sleeping at Last in October of 2010 with their goal of releasing a three track EP every month for a year. Upon completion, none of the tracks sound filler—there are breathtaking instrumentals and truly some of the most moving lyrics I’ve heard in quite some time.

Drive Soundtrack

If you saw Drive, you’ll get it; if you didn’t — well, it’s 80s-tastic synth pop that I, for the life of me, would not have guessed I would have liked. But for the months following the film (easily my favorite from 2011), I could not stop listening. There are killer, atmospheric songs from various artists and the score itself by Cliff Martinez is pitch perfect.

Kiss Each Other Clean by Iron & Wine

Admittedly my first full-album exposure to Iron & Wine (stage name of Samuel Beam) and I fell in love with his voice. Walking Far From Home and Godless Brother in Love stand out as personal favorites, but the album is truly very impressive.

Bon Iver

The self-titled album of Bon Iver (stage name of Justin Vernon) is easily my most listened to and enjoyed album this year. But I didn’t like it on first listen. And that’s ultimately what I love about it. It doesn’t have obvious hooks or catchiness that beg attention. Rather, it demands multiple listens (with good headphones) to really appreciate the intricacies within.

I have come to value my acquired taste favorites more than any other music I listen to, because of the album’s requirement to overcome my first impressions. I liken albums such as this to long form storytelling or slow burner movies. You tend to appreciate them more and more with each repeat intake.

Tracks

1. Emphasis by Sleeping at Last
2. We Don’t Eat by James Vincent McMorrow
3. Old Pine by Ben Howard
4. Reckoner by Radiohead

The tracks are all from albums that may well have been in my top four list above, but for some reason the others stood out to me more. Notable on here is Radiohead, which, for a very, very long time I would listen to once or twice, shrug and not really get the appeal. It was after I came to enjoy the layered, textured Bon Iver album that I sought out Radiohead and greatly enjoyed In Rainbows. I even like The King of Limbs (sorry Internet). It was fun becoming acquainted with Radiohead this year.

Emphasis stands out from the November EP of Sleeping at Last’s yearbook project. I wrote it off as a bit cheesy and poetic at first, but repeat listens secured its place in the top.

If you dig these, you should follow me on Rdio. If you dig these and you’re using Spotify, you should drop Spotify, switch to Rdio and follow me there. If you dig these and you’re using Ping, may the Internet have mercy on your soul.

Props to Readability

Great update to the Readability platform, today. There are no longer feature differences between paid accounts and free accounts. From their blog post, Readability for Everyone:

First, we wanted to better distinguish the difference between having access to features and supporting content creation. As supporting great writing on the web is one of our key goals, having features tied to our support platform felt like it was muddling the message. So now they’re distinct: all features are free, and supporting writing still exists as a platform.

Readability has begun to pull itself up as simultaneously a beautiful Instapaper competitor and a way to support great content from your favorite authors on the web. While I truly adore Instapaper, the design decisions and layout of Readability pulled me over a couple of months ago. I am much anticipating their iOS app, reported to feature H&FJ fonts. You can see my Readability profile here.

Phaeton

Phaeton is one of my favorite guilty pleasures in type. Almost anything the layperson would want to set in Papyrus could probably work in Phaeton, but look a jillion times better (health food, organic stuff, earthy stuff, food stuff, manly stuff, girly stuff, vintage stuff—maybe not day spas or Avatar subtitles, but you get the idea). It’s artistic, full of character, and ridiculously easy to set.

Phaeton is a collaborative face by illustrator Kevin Cornell and designer Randy Jones. Kevin Cornell is noteable for many reasons, but you might know him from the A List Apart illustrations and The Superest (now defunct) site. Randy describes Kevin’s compilation of glyphs as “a stylistic chameleon” in the Phaeton guide:

What attracted me to Kevin’s initial sketches was how completely different the uppercase and lowercase are, yet how well they work together. It is as if PHAETON is suffering from multiple personality disorder. A stylistic chameleon, PHAETON’s forms are rooted in the 19th century, but it is both old world and old west.

The face almost begs for lyrics from Colin Meloy, but since we’ve already done that, I made an advert for a fictional haberdashery.

Phaeton’s OpenType support includes ligatures, swashes, fractions, catchwords, banners, and ornaments galore. Here’s an old shot of some of the ornaments available in Phaeton. It works great with so many faces, but really shines with a nice humanist condensed sans.

Lovely Limbo

From the very first glimpse of the title screen, I loved Limbo.

Set in what is likely custom paper cut style lettering, the title is bold, vibrant, moody, and disturbed.

For those unfamiliar, Limbo is a puzzle platformer game that was originally released on Xbox Arcade, but recently made its way into the Mac App Store. My wife and I have had a blast playing through it the past few evenings (still not finished). She nearly through her Macbook Air across the room during one eerie sequence. The game is just downright creepy, but in such a fantastic way.

There’s small details that make the game feel very polished. You make your way through no levels, just a continuous stream of puzzles, and dying only takes you back to the beginning of your current puzzle. The story plays out in a very engaging manner, using only environmental cues to teach you how to maneuver.

In addition to the title screen, Limbo’s pause menu is very nicely designed with some (I believe) Futura hanging out there.

Later, during a rooftop sequence (consequently, my favorite set piece/puzzle so far), a gorgeous HOTEL sign is dangerously illuminated.

Go download Limbo, dim the lights, pop in some headphones, and enjoy yourself a creepy platformer.

Conquering Instagram

I discovered the AW Conqueror family of fonts from its feature in the “Five Fine Faces” inside the first issue of Codex. The set of faces were created by Jean François Porchez between 2009 and 2010 in conjunction with the relaunch of the Conqueror papers collection. The set is beautiful and stand on their own as display faces, but they are designed to work together, as well.

I wanted to use the fonts as travel photographs and dug up some of my old Instagram shots to use as a background.

AW Conqueror Carved

The carved style of AW Conqueror is nostalgic and regal. There are five variations of the style, four of which can be layered to create multi-colored looks. The remaining style is the traditional carved look, with a dropshadow and textured interior, seen below.

Featured below is the fourth style of AW Conqueror Carved, the dropshadow.

AW Conqueror Sans

AW Conqueror Sans is one of the more versatile of the set, as it contains both upper and lowercase characters, and a fairly high x-height. It is very art deco and has some nice swashes for accents when titling.

AW Conqueror Slab

This slab feels very Rockwell, but the alternate characters and ligatures give it some more emotion.

AW Conqueror Inline

Reminiscent of old poster art and quite bold in its appearance, the Inline style of AW Conqueror can be quite useful.

AW Conqueror Didot

This didot iteration is my personal favorite of the AW Conqueror series. The thin strokes are incredibly tender and there are a surprising amount of swashes with this face. Additionally, the lowercase character set makes this one more than just a titling face.

One More Thing

The AW Conqueror family will be available for free on the Conqueror website until April 1, 2012.

Bree Serif

Super excited about Type Together’s announcment of Bree Serif today.

It’s no secret that I much prefer serifs to sans, and I’m always excited to see coordinating families come together. From the announcment:

This friendly upright italic is the serif cousin of TypeTogether's award winning font Bree. Designed by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione, Bree was originally released in 2008 and it became an immediate success because of its originality, charming appearance and versatility. The new serif style adds some extra flavour to this tasty font..

Best part is that the Regular weight is being released as a teaser for the low price of free. No reason not to grab this.

Lost Type Coop

If you’re spending any time around the design world, chances are you’ve heard of the Lost Type Coop. If not, Lost Type is a ”Pay-What-You-Want Type Foundry” whereby type designers can contribute fonts for users to download at any price they desire. The cool thing is that Lost Type (founded by Riley Cran & Tyler Galpin) doesn’t take a cut of the proceeds. Yay for supporting those type designers.

The bulk of Lost Type’s current catalog consist of incomplete display faces. I say incomplete because many of them are single-weight (or single-case, even) and do not have a full set of punctuation marks or alternate language characters. Lost Type elegantly notes a few specifics on the face’s content.

This incompleteness shouldn’t deter you from checking them out, though. The faces you’ll find here beautifully hearken towards nostalgia with much hat tipping to the industrial, art deco, and rugged. I have not yet had opportunity to use any of the Lost Type faces in a work related project, so today, I’ll just highlight three of my favorites on Lost Type:

1. Wisdom Script, designed by James T. Edmondson
2. Deming, designed by Mike Fortress
3. Aldine, designed by Javier Viramontes

Here’s a little promo for Colorado on top of an iPhone photo I took a few weeks ago.

Type Tuesday: FF Mister K

The second installment of Type Tuesday is a celebration of one of my favorite handwriting faces, FF Mister K. Mister K is designed by Julia Sysmäläinen and illustrated by Oili Kokkonen, though there are several others on the team that created this substantial face (distributed through FontShop). To be sure, it’s likely one of the best and most extensive retail handwritten faces I’ve ever seen. That being said, I would just love to have a version of Mr. Porter.

Mister K has a huge variety of ligatures and character styles, allowing the same words to be rendered differently, much like actual handwriting. The face also has several “editing” marks included, which easily allow for a rough draft-esque design. Its dingbats assortment that is truly uncanny, with illustrations ranging from weather and transportation to household items and cities.

Mister K’s name originates from Franz Kafka’s famous character Josef K. The face itself is loosely based on Kafka’s own handwriting. Here is an excerpt from the Mister K website:

While the starting point in designing FF Mister K was the study of letterforms in Kafka’s manuscripts, a digital font always has its own characteristics and a comparison with the original scripts shows that the result is not a simple imitation of Kafka’s handwriting.

One of the main tasks was the transformation of the writer’s eccentric letters with their strong form and size variations into a character set that enables a balanced typographic flow.

Mister K has a stellar website to cover much of its features and other styles. Go visit the site and pick up a license, now.

Time on my Hands

A few months ago, I got a new watch. I’ve never been much of a watch guy, but found the M&Co line one day and fell in love. There’s something so refereshing about their simplicity in doing one thing well. Since wearing a watch has become part of my daily routine, and the tops of my wrists are frequently staring at me as I work on the laptop, I have become much more conscious of time.

The thing that surprised me, though, is that it’s been a peaceful consciousness. I think I hesitated wearing a watch because I was reluctnat to be constantly aware of what time it was. Yes, my computer has a little digital readout in its top right corner, but I rarely glance at that. I’ve grown rather fond of noticing my watch. It’s a lovely piece of design and being aware of time makes me more perceptive and thankful for the time I’ve been given.

Long before the advent of a 24-hour workweek, before we were looking to multi-task (then to single-task), long before “getting things done” was a thing to get done, we got things done. On summer nights, the fireflies appeared and “dinner’s ready” was a common call. On schooldays, the bell tolled. On television, the screen tuned out for the evening, static signaling the end of day. Signals, then, that signaled time shifting. Ends. Or more optimistic, beginnings.Liz Danzico

It’s incredible how slowly, steadily, and assuredly the minute hand moves in its designated pattern. It’s beautiful, really. Sounds silly to think of a clock as beautiful, but it is what it is. Just took me a little while to recognize that.

Inaugural Type Tuesday: Livory

Part excuse to play with more type & part weekly project to experiment and stretch myself, Type Tuesday is venturing out on my site. I haven’t entirely formulated what this is going to consist of, other than a featured face every third day of the week. The inaugural face is Livory by Hannes von Döhren & Livius Dietzel.

I created a specimen of sorts inspired by the face’s description:

The typeface feels at ease with nature. Livory is inspired by snaggy forests, mellow meadows, wuthering heights & the season’s changes.

Snaggy forests reminded me of The Hazards of Love and Annan Water being one of my favorite tracks off of the album, it seemed an obvious choice. Additionally, it contains loads of ligature-tastic lyrics. Livory has 50 ligatures in each style, all with a gorgeous organic look that seems to fit this track by The Decemberists perfectly.

Welcome to Type Tuesday. Hope you enjoy and go pick up a license for livory, now.

Customer is the most Important Word

While there’s a huge gap between good customer service and bad customer service, there needs to be some uniform recognition that mediocre or even acceptable customer service is simply not good enough. The difference between good service and the rest is that good customer service actually considers the customer, not only the problem to be dealt with.

Here’s a story from my first (and only) experience with a popular daily/weekly deal retailer whose name rhymes with Cab. I placed an order for the Black+Blum lunch box and carrying case on July 15, 2011. Total cost of both products was about $15. The site indicated that the order would not arrive until a month later; not a huge deal, that's managing my expectations.

August 15 passes and I get a call from Fab verifying my shipping address, stating there was an issue with my apartment number (shouldn’t be, I use it for everything, but whatever). By August 30, I had not heard anything else from the service and sent an inquiry on both products. After hearing nothing else after that, on September 9, I cancelled my order on the site, stated my reasoning, and requested a refund. I received a response back, stating that “I have this ready to go out, so if you'd rather, I'd be happy to send this to you and issue a $10 credit to your account for the delay that you had on that.”

It’s just awful business to try and use bribery as customer service (explanation further down). I responded that I did not want it and please just credit me back my charge (it was only $15).

Then, oops, on September 12, I hear that “I show that this was sent on Thursday. If you absolutely do not want it, refuse the package and I will refund the money. If you decide to keep it, I will of course still give you the credit for the item that I promised.”

I have no idea where the disconnect from “I have this ready to go out” and “I show that this was sent on Thursday” occurred? I rejected the package at my door within the next few days.

2 months later. 2 months. On November 15, I get a refund email from a customer service representative. To be fair, they’d have been better off just not emailing me. It was $15 and I had not checked all too carefully that I received the refund.

I’m not a complaining consumer. I ususally won’t go out of my way to report bad service or bad experiences, but would rather spend time reporting excellence. The whole incident just seemed too ridiculous and I was frustrated. So I sent an email outlining the timeline and explained what a crappy first impression this was.

Here’s a clip from the response I get back:

If you’d like, we’d still be happy to send the Black+Blum order to you free of charge as it is still at our fulfillment center. If you'd like, I’d also be happy to add an additional $25 credit towards your account.

Gahhhhhhhhh. Here’s the thing, Fab had a number of opportunities to fix this in a customer-centric way. Please, do not misunderstand me, I'm not a complainer who is after free products. I'll happily pay over a product's value in order to deal with great companies.

1. For starters, my inquiry about the products not being shipped should have been answered immediately.
2. If I cancel my order, it means I no longer have an interest in dealing with the company and I would not like to pay for the product. It's crappy to say, “Please grovel back to us, we'll reward you with $10 credit.”
3. If I cancel my order, do not ship it to me.
4. If I cancel my order, refund it promptly (hint: 2 months is not prompt)
5. The coup de grâce on the whole debacle. Once I take time to write an email and complain, do not ask permission to service your customer. Making me respond to the “If you'd like” questions to receive credit to my account and ship me the horribly late goods free is asking your customers to swallow their pride, admit defeat, and crawl back to their offender.

At any point during 1 through 5, the proper response would have been:

We’re so sorry we didn’t follow through on your first order with Fab. We’re shipping your order to you free of charge and your account will be credited $x. We understand if you don’t have a need for the product anymore and aren’t a fan of our site, but hopefully you’ll give us another chance. Humblest apologies.

By focusing not just on the problem (Andrew didn’t get his stuff), but on the customer (Andrew has complained several times, what in the world could we do to rise above the incredibly low bar we’ve set for ourselves and make Andrew a believer in our company), businesses have the opportunity to blow people away.

A bad customer experience remedied well is better PR than just about anything. In customer service, both words are critical, but the former is key.

I swallowed my pride and took the credit and free products. I'm pretty sure having pride that's only valued at $35 is a sin. Whatever.

The Coexistence of Reading List and Instapaper

The tweet heard ‘round the world (or at least in the techy part of the world) from Marco Arment (Instapaper’s developer), was simply “Shit.” Apple appeared to be sherlocking Instapaper when they introduced Reading List and the iOS version of Reader. However, after using Reading List for awhile, I think the two can peacefully coexist.

Admittedly, I adore Instapaper. It is easily my most used iPad app and gets quite a bit of wear on my iPhone. However, I use the crap out of reading list, as well.

Simply put, I save articles and things I want to read later in Instapaper and I use Reading List for things that do not involve, well, reading. It has become my default “Sort” folder for anything I encounter online that I’ll want to glance at later. I never put articles in there. Saving a site to Reading List is one keyboard shortcut away (Cmd+Shift+D).

The two apps live quite harmoniously together and I really am enjoying Reading List. Just not for reading.

Gimmebar Loves You

Gimmebar is kind of like magic. But like, more addicting magic. I hesitated to try it because I already had a few thousand images, inspirational things, moodboards, et cetera invested into a Little Snapper library. I am so glad I ditched Little Snapper.

At its core Gimmebar is a shove box that allows you to put anything you find on the internet inside of its vast and easily accessible reservoir. Flickr images, YouTube videos, quotations, recipes, articles, you name it and Gimmebar can probably grab it (not flash … but please, as if you’d want to save anything in flash anyway).

If you’re like me and already had content locally, it is admittedly a bit tedious getting it into Gimmebar, but once you have, you will never look back. Gimmebar is fast, elegant, and makes it super easy to find your saved goodies.

Say you’re browsing along and you see something great that you want to save. You simply drag whatever you are wanting to save into the Gimmebar (it can be either public or private) and place it into one/many of your collections. Being obsessive, I prefer everything in one collection, but there’s a few things that easily belong in two.

You can find your friends based on who you follow on Twitter, or the site establishes a list of Stellar People who use Gimmebar religiously. Once you’re following some people, your Discovery stream will populate with all the cool stuff other people find on the internet. It’s like the best of the internet is magically coming to you.

The developers are incredibly friendly and have indicated that uploading existing content to Gimmebar is going to get easier. Additionally, they’re working on a way to find those grabs that aren’t yet placed in a collection.

If you’re not using Gimmebar, shame on you. Gimmebar loves you and you should love it back. If you don’t have an invitation, I have a couple left to send, so hit me up on Twitter and I’ll send one your way. Here’s my Gimmebar profile, too.

Zen and the Mainstream Art of Inbox Zero

It’s not really rocket science and it isn’t really anything revolutionary or new, but I’ve found an amazing level of comfort and daily relief in simply keeping my email inbox count at zero.

The idea behind all of this is that your inbox is a tool just like any other. By using the inbox as a to-do list, you’re failing to use it for its intended purpose (communication). This also forms multiple task lists for yourself, which inherently makes things more complicated. Everything in its right place, you know.

In November of 2010, I made a pre-resolution to keep inbox zero; four months in, I have been very successful and surprised by how easy it is to maintain. There are those out there whose inbox is far more dense than mine and whose daily email intake is simply mind-boggling. The important thing to know about inbox zero is that there’s no set pattern, it’s just another management skill.

My rules are simple and not overburdensome for my current situation:

1. Every evening before work is done (6 pm) have inbox zero
2. Inbox zero is defined as either responding to or tasking every email and filing the email in its proper location
3. Those emails that aren’t responded to are given an individual task in my to-do list with a ‘tomorrow’ deadline. The idea here is that I have a 48 hour turnaround on email responses.

Inbox zero for me was less about not having email in my inbox and more about having the structure down to manage the inbox. Scale these rules, follow your heart, and give yourself some structure.

My Continued Misuse of Social Applications

I quit using Gowalla, the social geotagging application, as a service on July 26, 2010. Prior to quitting, I had about a half-dozen “friends” on the service that lived in my region and among those only one or two who updated regularly. As such, I failed to see the social appeal of the system and fell in and out of the habit of checking in to locations.

I was okay with the service (more on that later), but the straw that broke my back on Gowalla was the auto-tweet-spam created on my Twitter account when I won a pin. This is simply unacceptable by any standards, much less those of such a well-known company. Additionally, as a social utility, auto-tweeting my personal Pins doesn’t make any sense. A default auto-tweet of something that more engages me with my twitter audience would be more logical (though still unacceptable). Nobody really cares who gets what pin. So, I quit. I quickly regretted the decision.

And though I suppose it would be more fun to use if more of my friends Gowallad, chances are good that even the 30 friends I do have aren’t paying much attention to where I check in. And that’s okay. Because what is most enjoyable about Gowalla is the cataloging of your own journey.Shawn Blanc

Gowalla My Pride.

The appeal to me became so obvious after reading Shawn Blanc’s post on how he uses Gowalla. For him, it wasn’t about the social aspect at all. It was a dead-simple way to keep a record of your travels and outings. Who cares about the social aspect?

Gowalla allows me to scan back over my past visited locations to easily remember that fun lunch-date with my wife, or the places we visited on our trip to Denver.

I personally place a lot of value on that, as every January 1st my family writes individual letters documenting the previous year’s blessings, accomplishments, failures, exploits, antics, et cetera. Traditionally my letter preparation involved looking back through photos or iCal appointments in an attempt to piece together the records of my annual deeds. Gowalla solved this problem in spades. So I rejoined.

Along Came Path.

Path, like Gowalla, fails to appeal to me as a social application. However, it’s one of my new favorite apps. I’ve been using it since it first came out and would honestly use it more were it not for one major hangup (hold your horses).

Path allows you to snap a picture on your phone and then quickly enter the People, Places, and Things (more like Activities) about the photograph. It then applies a nice glossy filter to the photo and stores it in a timeline on your profile.

As a journalling application, I love Path infinitely more than Gowalla. It geo-recognizes (word?) pre-tagged locations for you to enter in Places and auto-pulls the most commonly tagged People for quick entry. Yes, snapping a photo and then combing through them later would have a similar effect, but this places all the relevant metadata in an easy-to-digest timeline for quick production and consumption.

What of Actual Journaling Apps?

Momento has caught so much attention as an iPhone journaling app and I tried it for a bit, but ultimately gave it up. It didn’t simplify anything for me and entering long-prose journal entries is simply untenable on the iPhone. Frankly, I’ve given up that form of journaling anyway.

Path satisfies that itch of mine to document activities and record them in the Austin annals, without the hassle of actually writing a journal entry or even thinking of something interesting to say short-form. Picture, Who, What, Where, Done. It is a perfect utility for the iPhone, too. It’s fast, and as a system of journalling, it doesn’t feel like it needs to be on any other platform (though I’m sure they’ll expand).

Currently, I still keep both apps (Gowalla and Path) handy, but of late don’t launch Gowalla that often anymore. Path works much better as a catalog for me because it’s focused more on the moments and memories and less on the places.

On the Success Level of My Current Events Intake

So, I have an iPad.

Besides being all around amazing in almost every capacity, the iPad has quickly changed my habits regarding current events. I have never been a fan of watching local news (no television also helps with this) and I am not one to visit the individual sites of various news outlets. It’s simply too time consuming and laborious in correlation to the amount of substance I come away with. I’m really not a huge news junkie, but I do like to keep up with general daily news. You know, like a good global citizen.

So for the longest time, I’ve been subscribed to about 20 news sites using the application Times for the desktop. It really is a nice and elegant application, but I found that I wouldn’t remember to check it but once a week–if that. I appreciated the newspaper feel of it; something about that tangible ordered chaos that is the newspaper really makes a great presentation for actual news-worthy events. There’s a clear and structured hierarchy to the format, even though it’s a very dynamic presentation; and, I like that. Just not on the desktop.

Since Day-of-iPad-Acquisition, I’ve been more of a news–fiend than I have ever been. Granted, I’ve no doubt that I still don’t qualify for a news–fiend stature, but bear with me for the duration. I’ll end up checking USA Today, NYT Editor’s Choice, BBC News, and Wall Street Journal at least once a day, usually more though because it’s such an enjoyable experience. Oh and let’s not forget Instapaper (oh, how I do love Instapaper). I think the reason for my current-event-intake-success-level is two/three fold:

1. The apps are well-designed & quite fun to use.
2. The iPad’s reading experience is far better than reading on a laptop.
3. Related to the second–I think it really comes down to distraction-less reading.

In the spectrum of nay-saying relating to the iPad’s lack of multitasking, I fall squarely into this camp. Multitasking is not necessarily a good or bad thing, it’s a contextual thing. If I’m building a website and slicing a .psd, I want multitasking capabilities to the n^th degree. If I’m reading the news and catching up on current events, multitasking distracts me from what I’m doing and results in Continuous Partial Attention referenced in Louie Mantia’s post. When your objective is nebulous (i.e. simply catch up on news), this is terrible.

I didn’t make it far with Times on the desktop because there were shiny lights and buttons all around the perimeter of the app. Sure it’s something I want to do, but it’s not something critical and thus, I get distracted. My attention’s divided and I don’t fare well. With an iPad and some nice UI, I’ve got a distraction-less reading experience that allows a quick checkup on current events and doesn’t demand too much time. It’s simple and quite effective.

Why Not Digital Book Rentals?

Why hasn’t this happened yet!?

iTunes does the exact same thing for movies. Paying $9.99–15.99 for digital books sounds expensive to a lot of people (myself included). I would love to see the iBooks store implement a 30 day rental period for a book. It would give you enough flexibility to finish the book leisurely and could be protected by the same style of DRM that Apple uses for its movie rentals. This could be brilliant–kind of like a public library, where you pay up front, instead of through taxes.

Granted, the publishers would likely be hesitant, but I think there’s a large percentage of the e-book market that thinks the price is too high. I wonder if a rental pricing system might capture the portion of the market that would otherwise just wait until their local library picked up the book.