Reminder: The In-Between Stuff Matters

Christopher Schanck compares his iPhone to his Droid X, and in doing so, highlights the interface paradigm introduced by the Android back button:

You know how every Twitter app on the iPhone has its own built in browser? And how each embedded browser works almost, but not quite like, all the other embedded browsers? With each embedded browser having different buttons, different scaling strategies, different rules for rotation? All of this exists to prevent you from having to leave your Twitter app and go to Safari, which would render the link properly. Going from TweetDeck to Safari is a big deal. After you switch to Safari, when you are done reading the link, looking at the picture, whatever, then you are stuck at a precipice — you want to go back to TweetDeck right where you left off. How do you do that? Home. Restart TweetDeck. Hope it is written such that you pick of where you left off. But traversing through the Home key and the Springboard is incredibly interruptive. Indeed, leaving TweetDeck or any other app in order to go to Safari feels like a huge step on the iPhone.

Contrast that with the Android Way: just click on the link, and whatever app you set as the default handler for that action springs open. Noise around, read it, whatever. Then just hit the back button and you are right where you left off. No barrier. It truly blurs the line between applications.

I know I’ve linked to it before, but it’s really worth repeating: The In-Between Stuff Matters.

Gone to pot

The Chronicle-Herald reports on a grow-op raid in Lake Echo, NS, and includes this choice detail in the description of the grow house:

The 1,135-square-foot home is about 40 years old and includes a high basement

No kidding.

Hello hello hello hello hello. Yeah, hello.

I love Google Voice, but sometimes I get the strangest messages:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Transcription: “Hello hello hello hello hello. Yeah, hello.”

Linkdump: some more programmer-journalist resources

A while back, I wrote about my plan of self-directed study to become a programmer-journalist. Since then, I’ve started plugging away at Google’s free Python class. I’ve also come across a few articles and resources that may be helpful for others with similar ambitions.

Will Columbia-Trained, Code-Savvy Journalists Bridge the Media/Tech Divide? from Wired.com’s Epicenter blog:

Journalism schools have frantically updated their programs in the last decade or so, as it became increasingly clear that traditional, newspaper-oriented skills were no longer enough to prepare students for the real world. But even fluency in broadly defined “multimedia skills” isn’t enough, with coding becoming as crucial to the news business as knowing how to use a computer was a couple of generations ago.

Coders meet journalists; journalists meet coders by Judith Townend:

Do journalists need to learn to code? Probably not, but those who can are likely to find themselves quickly snapped up by news organisations with interactive and data teams.

I have no grand hopes of learning to code properly, but I would like to feel a little more comfortable with the language and learn more about the ways programmers work and how it could help journalism.

Coding for Journalists 101: A four-part series by Dan Nguyen. Focuses on using Ruby to scrape websites:

I set out to write some tutorials that would guide the non-coding-but-computer-savvy journalist through enough programming fundamentals so that he/she could write a web scraper to collect data from public websites.

What’s better than DRM? Guilt!

Apparently, Tumblr has chosen to use URL-based guilt trips to fight copyright infringement:

Please Rob Me

According to this CBC News story, if you post your vacation plans online, you might get robbed:

It’s now routine for police officers to ask robbery victims what information they put on Facebook and Twitter before the crime and if their online connections are true friends or potential suspects, according to [Cpl. Janis] Jean [of the Saanich Police Department, north of Victoria].

Sound familiar?

It should. Of course, earlier this year, there was all the ruckus surrounding PleaseRobMe.com.

But as Andy Baio pointed out back in February, back in 1983, the Montreal Gazette warned against outgoing answering machine messages that tell callers you’re not at home. And in 1977, another article suggested that you shouldn’t list family weddings or funerals in the newspaper, lest you tip off would-be robbers.

Microtrack 24/96 battery replacement

If you’re like me, and you own a (now discontinued) Microtrack 24/96 portable digital recorder, and your battery life is terrible, here’s a tip: buy a replacement iPhone battery. Reports on the M-Audio forums indicate good results:

Works even much longer: I’ve got 3 hours 45 minutes for the continuos record (mp3, to keep recording longer for test), Phantom power ON, headphones in, backlit off. After that time battery had 3.5 Volts, which is perfect (3V minimum supposed for Li-Pol batteries), and then device switched off itself.

There’s even a decent step-by-step instruction guide here.

Good things come in threes

Kottke on Dribbble:

triple letters are the new omit the vowels

I credit HoTTT TopiXXX.

What to do with your income tax refund

If you’re Jenna and me, you buy two Spanish domain names:

• ifmoneygrewontre.es (for showing off the things she wants to buy, but can’t/won’t/shouldn’t)
• ukulel.es (because I wanted an .es domain, too)

Aren’t we clever?

Journalists of the future, according to Jay Rosen

I just watched this video interview with Jay Rosen from The Economist’s Tea with The Economist series. The interviewer asks Jay, “What would be the job description of a journalist in the future?”

I think there are different jobs that make up a twenty-first century journalist. One is to be a highly intelligent filter of information coming in. Another is to be an expert in reputation and reliability systems so that you are able to know who a reliable source is because there are so many sources, right? Another is community manager. Managing a community of people who have knowledge and interact with you as a journalist. Knowing how to have not just several dozen sources in your little black telephone book that you use to do your beat, but thousands of sources. Tens of thousands. And how to work efficiently with large groups of people to synthesize information is important. And also important is how to take the greater knowledge we have coming from how people use the internet. Because everything people do online is recorded. How to take this information about what people are clicking, what they’re interested in, where they’re going on the web, what they’re doing now. And treating it as clues to demand. Produce into that demand, without reducing yourself to simply a ratings-driven, click-driven reflex machine.

I think the most successful journalists are going to excel at various hybrid forms of traditional reporting, editing, checking, verifying and new forms of gathering, managing, interacting with people.

(via Jenny)