25.03.2013
Meneux
When I wrote about my usage of Lists a while ago, I forgot to mention a service I use multiple times per day: TeuxDeux. TeuxDeux's concept is very simple. It basically gives you a ToDo list for every day, allowing you to plan your work over the course of a week (or even longer).
Since I check TeuxDeux so often, I wanted a way to quickly access it. So I wrote Meneux, an app that sits in your menubar and gives you quick access to your TeuxDeux lists.
You can download Meneux here or check out the repository on Github.
23.03.2013
Filterbubble 2.0
One of the things I like about Twitter Twitter-like services is what I usually refer to as the Signal-to-Noise-Ratio: The amount of useful information compared to the amount of useless, uninteresting stuff. This ratio is also the reason why I never even look at my Facebook Newsfeed. I know that I will be overwhelmed by crap before I even find a single interesting post.
But even though Twitter's SNR was always relatively good, about a year ago, I started using filters to make it even better. While these filters are not supported by Twitter itself (I guess they would ruin what Twitter likes to call brand engagement), most Twitter clients support them.
I started by filtering certain users. Basically, if someone started tweeting out-of-context nonsense every ten minutes (which usually happens when people are at conferences), I would just mute them for a couple of days. Later, I also started muting certain clients, such as Foursquare (If where you are is really that important, you should take the time to write an actual tweet instead of letting Foursquare do it for you) and Timehop (Which just flooded my timeline with stuff from yesteryear.)
This served me well for the bigger part of a year, until about two weeks ago, when I found the perfect filter. One simple filter that made my Twitter timeline approximately 100% better and 90% shitstorm-free. And here it is:
#
I realised that there was one thing that all the tweets I wanted to block, be it conference-tweets, shitstorms, viral marketing campaigns or just stuff written by wannabe-SEOs had in common: hashtags. At the same time, of all the tweets I favourited in the last 100 days, only one contained a hashtag.
I am perfectly aware that this might not work for everyone, but my Twitter feed is now hashtag free, and it's so much nicer than before.
17.03.2013
Subscriptions v2
Today I am releasing version 2 of Subscriptions.app. It features numerous bugfixes, a completely rewritten YouTube parser as well as a beautiful icon designed by Florian Rogner.
The new parser is no longer a modified version of LNYoutubeExtractor. Instead, I wrote my own parser that uses regular expressions to parse Youtube. This means that instead of working ~50% of the time, it works always (at least I didn't manage to break it).
I also published the project on GitHub, which means you can check out my terrible programming style when I write something for myself.
14.03.2013
Reader's Death
As you should have heard by now, Google Reader will be shut down in a couple of weeks. And as always when a widely used service is killed off, a lot of people are complaining about it. I'm here to tell you why you shouldn't be one of those people.
Developers
I know that many developers have built successful Apps around Google Reader, and I am also aware that many of them make a living selling those Apps. I'm a developer myself, so believe me when I say that I would also feel angry when a popular API was shut down so abruptly. After all, I think that the way Twitter treats it's third-party developers is terrible.
But there is one thing that makes Google Reader special. There is one fact that, in my opinion, every developer who decided to base his business on Google Reader should have been aware of, and that makes all complains from third-party developers completely irrelevant: Google Reader never had a public API. All Apps that implement Google Reader in any way use an unofficial, undocumented and private API to do so. And if you use private APIs, you have to be aware of the fact that these APIs can break anytime.
I implemented Google Reader's API myself about two years ago by following some whacky unofficial documentations. It was a great way of learning HTTP communication and text parsing in Cocoa and I even learned a thing or two about reverse engineering, but I would never rely on a private API in any App that I plan to make a living with.
Users
Of course a lot of users where also angered by Google's announcement, which is totally understandable since they all continuously paid for the service. Oh, wait, that's not true. They were angry because they think that they are entitled to this free service. After all, Google is all about being open and not being evil, right?
In case you didn't get the sarcasm in the last sentence: If you still believe Google's crap about being open and friendly, I'm afraid you missed out on a couple of things. Google is not open about anything that is important to them. They are not open about their search algorithm, they are not open about how they use your data and, most importantly, they are not open about their ads. Google is only open about something when they need to be open in order to commoditise a market.
Whenever there is a new product or a new market that threatens Google's ability to collect data in order to show advertisements to you, they jump in with some free, "open" solution, killing all the competition and therefore innovation in that market. At the same time, Google looks like the good guy for providing millions of users with a free product.
This process also happened to RSS Readers. As soon as Google Reader became popular, RSS Readers that were not able to sync with it's (private) API were basically dead-on-arrival. Even though Google Reader was never very pleasant to use, practically nobody bothered to develop an own solution to synchronise RSS Subscriptions. Suddenly, there was no innovation in the field of RSS Readers. The way that RSS should be used was no longer defined by the possibilities of the format but by the features that Google Reader chose to implement.
I don't think that the sentence "RSS is dead" became popular because RSS was killed by Twitter or Facebook. I think it became popular because RSS became boring. And RSS became boring because of Google Reader.
But now that Google Reader is dead, RSS can finally be interesting again. I believe that over the next couple of months, there will be several new, interesting RSS subscription services competing and therefore driving innovation.
In conclusion, don't sign any of those "Please, almighty Google, don't kill Reader" petitions, because even if Google continues to host Reader, do you really believe that they will start innovating a product that they already wanted to kill? Is transferring your subscriptions really so hard that you are willing to sacrifice the possibility of innovation in the depressingly stagnant market of RSS Reader and Subscription services? I, for one, don't think so.
13.03.2013
Lists
I have spent a lot of time on ToDo lists. In fact, I've probably spent more time researching, testing and developing ToDo apps than actually using them. Also, ever since I'm no longer a student, I found that my need for complex ToDo solutions with tons of collaboration and other features has diminished.
So instead of using ToDo apps, I started using lists. Simple, text based lists. And while plain text might not offer a lot of features, it's simplicity is also it's biggest advantage: When I need to write down something that can't be appropriately represented by a list, I just write it down anyway. When I want to share something, I just copy it into an email or put it in a shared Dropbox. It's old-school, but it works everywhere.
On my iPhone, I currently use an amazing app called Listary. It's basically an App that allows you to create lists and sync them to Simplenote, and while that might not sound very interesting, the App offers one feature that makes it stick out: While all the lists are plain text, the representation of lists within the app is in todo-list style, so you can just tick off list items.
While Listary has served me very well over the last couple of weeks, I still feel that it is missing something. For example, syncing to Simplenote is nice, but I'd much rather have it put all the lists into Dropbox as txt-files. Also, there is no equivalent Mac App, and while nvALT is a very good Simplenote Client, it is optimised on full-fledged text editing rather than lists.
So, in case you get bored and want to write something in ObjC, here's my concept of a perfect list app:
- Offers ToDo-style lists (where you can tick off individual items) as well as normal ones
- Presents the lists in a simple, clean interface
- Enables the user to tag and search lists
- Stores the lists in plain text files in Dropbox
- Has both Mac and iOS versions
- Bonus feature: Enables easy sharing of lists
03.03.2013
Les Misérables
Les Misérables was one of those movies that normally just fly by. I know they exist, I know that people like them, but I'm not really interested in seeing them. That was the case until I saw the awesome trailer (or rather collection of clips) that was shown at the Oscars.
So I saw Les Misérables. I mean, I like musicals, so what could possibly go wrong? It's not like I'll contemplate leaving the cinema for two hours while not actually hearing any music.
Oh, that's exactly what happened? Oops…
But what went wrong? Well, the one thing that was most annoying for me was that while the movie, like a real musical, has constant singing and background music, the "music" part of it really is nothing more than a background, which is to say that while the voices of the actors are perfectly audible, the wonderful music that is meant to play alongside them is degraded to movie-soundtrack volume. There are maybe three scenes in the entire movie in which the orchestra actually gets the attention (in term of volume level) that it deserves, and those are also the scenes I enjoyed most about this otherwise rather dreadful musical that seams to want nothing more than getting rid of it's own music.
So the sound's wrong. Fine. What else can be wrong about a movie? Maybe the camera? Well, it just so happens that Les Misérables camerawork might just be the most headache inducing case of shaky-cam I have ever witnessed. Other can a couple of extremely impressive (CGI-)shots that were used to tie together different narratives, most of the movie's scenes feature:
- An enormous amount of shaky-cam
- far-too-close closeups
- weird camera angles
- an unjustified fear of symmetrical shots
While the first three points are fairly self-explaining, I would like to further explain the last one. While I personally like symmetrical shots (the kind of scenes you can find all the time in movies by, among others, Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson), I understand that filmmakers might want to avoid them. But the extend to which Les Misérables tries to be "natural" by avoiding any kind of symmetry in it's images is nothing but a recipe for disaster. It tries to look natural so hard that it actually looks completely fake.
Also, I hate the ending. But I can't blame the movie adaption for that and I don't want to spoil it in case you want to watch the movie (which I wouldn't recommend).
Overall, Les Misérables is a movie I want to like. I really do. It's got really good music (which is far too quiet), a nice story (with a cheap ending), and good actors as well as beautiful sets and costumes (which are shown in all the wrong angles).
So, to sum it up: Les Misérables is a movie I want to like (but I just can't).
23.02.2013
Subscriptions.app
Update: An updated Version of Subscriptions.app is available that fixes most problems mentioned in this article. Check out v2
Do you sometimes visit Youtube to catch up with your subscriptions, only to realise that Youtube has had another one of it's biannual redesigns which means that they probably show you all activities instead of just new uploads until they receive enough complaints to change it back so you have to click a couple more times until you finally get your video but then you see that it's showing annotations even though you already disabled annotations about a million times and suddenly your fan starts imitating jet engine noises because the f'ing video is in flash so by now you're so annoyed you don't even want to watch the video anymore?
No?
Well, I do.
So I wrote a nice little Mac App that shows you the latest videos from your Youtube subscriptions and opens them in QuickTime when you double click them. It's called Subscriptions (If you know a better name, let me know) and it works about 50% of the time. Yay!
But seriously: I was bored so I wrote the app for myself, but then I decided that it might be useful to ~3 more people, so I'm releasing it. The Youtube parser (the magical machine that finds the video URLs to open in QuickTime) is based on LNYoutubeExtractor, but I rewrote large parts of it to get HD videos. Since Youtube performs a lot of obfuscation on it's links, the current process only works about half the time, so if you get an error by QuickTime just double-click the video again. It's still less clicking around than on the Youtube homepage.
Roadmap (aka Stuff I might do sometime)
- Better parsing
- Choosing the preferred video player
- Icon (ideas welcome!)
- Putting the project on github
16.02.2013
How I Knew Her
I have been a huge fan of Pomplamoose for quite some time now, and after being postponed several times, How I Knew Her, the first solo album of Pomplamoose's lead singer Nataly Dawn has finally been published. You can listen to some of the songs on her Youtube channel, but just to make sure that you don't have to search around, here are some of my favourites: Araceli, Leslie, and I Just Wanted You to Get Old
Araceli
Leslie
I Just Wanted You to Get Old
05.02.2013
OpenVPN on iOS
In my last post, i mentioned using a VPN to access Netflix. In fact, I have been using VPN services pretty much all the time since Austria passed the data retention law. If there is one positive thing about data retention, it's that it reminds me to use encrypted connections whenever possible.
One of the problems I had until a few days ago was that the VPN provider I use (AirVPN) only offers OpenVPN, which is not natively supported by iOS.
This was the case until two weeks ago, when OpenVPN finally released an iOS app that allows you to connect to OpenVPN servers, and the connections even stay active when the app is terminated. I don't know how they got the app through the App Store approval process (To my knowledge, there is no public API to create persistent VPN connections), but I guess that they got a special entitlement from Apple, similar to Cisco's AnyConnect app.
Anyway, your iOS device now supports OpenVPN. Yay!
04.02.2013
House of Cards
TV shows are called TV shows because they are produced and broadcasted by TV companies, right? Well, Netflix just published it's first original series, and it's off to a very promising start.
House of Cards is a show about the politics and intrigues in Washington DC. It focusses on Francis Underwood, who, while technically working for the president, is plotting plans to become president himself. And he is willing to do pretty much anything to achieve his goal.
While the idea of a TV show produced directly for Video on Demand would already be enough to gain my interest, the show's casting makes it even more interesting: Kevin Spacey plays the role of Francis Underwood, David Fincher is directing some episodes and the series is written by Beau Willimon, who also wrote the very good political drama The Ides of March.
After watching the first episode, I have to say that House of Cards looks extremely promising. There are only two very small things that throw me off: The weird aspect ratio (2:1, which is somewhere between the usual 16:9 for TV and 2,39:1 for Hollywood movies) and the fact that the main character occasionally breaks the fourth wall by talking directly to the viewer, providing a form of in-show commentary.
If you want to give the show a try, the entire first season is available on Netflix (assuming that you are either lucky enough to live in country where Netflix is available or know how to use a VPN)