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New home

This blog has moved to Squarespace: http://blog.jeffryvandergoot.nl

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The Most Important Lesson I Was Ever Taught

I must’ve been about sixteen, about to get our first Geography lesson from Mr. Adams (a fake name, I am embarrassed to say I can’t remember his real name). Talk in the hallways was that he was an incredibly fun teacher. Imagine our surprise when we entered the classroom to find all the desks to be in straight and orderly columns, each separate. Not even the regular one-by-one we were used to.

Mr. Adams had written his name on the blackboard and stood with his hands behind his back at the head of the class. “Be seated,” he commanded. We did as we were told. He told us to open our notebooks and we were told to write down exactly what he lectured.

He began talking about Africa and its inhabitants. How the fact that it was so close to the equator, which meant that the temperatures were really high. This was the reason African people are slow and lazy, he told us. Because of the warm weather. Dutifully we wrote this down, the students that had actually been born in Africa not piping up. Because of the heat agriculture was impossible in Africa, he continued, that’s why their civilizations had not developed until the Europeans had come. This went on for at least 20 minutes.

Then he asked “Why are all of you writing this down? Why is no one questioning me? This is obviously a load of nonsense I am telling you.”

“Just because I am a teacher does not mean I know what I’m talking about. Never unquestioningly follow someone because they have authority,” he added.

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Promoting Personal Posts on Facebook

Recently I noticed a new feature on Facebook. I am able to “promote” my own posts on my personal profile. What does this mean? There is no clear explanation given when you click on the action, it merely immediately prompts you to pay.

Pretty much all my posts are for friends only. Does this mean like for Facebook pages that unless I promote not all my friends will see my post? That isn’t true, is it? Because that would be the first thing that Facebook did to me that would feel genuinely malicious.

The most confusing thing about it for me is that it shows up after I place a post, set to friends only. So, that would I mean I would be paying $6 just so my post appears more prominently for my friends? Why would I want to do that? Weird.

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Star Wars Episode VII – ∞

A new Star Wars trilogy, not made by Lucas. And a new Star Wars movie every year after that. One could look on in despair because it is no longer under Lucas’s control. I have no problem with that. One could look at this announcement through the glasses of cynicism and see it as nothing more than milking the Star Wars cow harder than before. But, there is a new hope.

Modern Fairy Tales

What does every Star Wars film open with? “A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away…”

The way a fairy tale does. What my hope is with this new trilogy and the annualization of the franchise is that Disney takes this approach. Let every film be unique and be written & directed by people with a vision. Let this be modern day fairy tales that are different depending on who tells it.

If whoever is now in creative control of Star Wars can ignore the rabid fanbase and its preference for “cannon,” the Star Wars movies could be a wonderful platform for interesting films for a general audience.

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Quick Little Tip: Real Skipping in iTunes

If you’re like me you have an intricate nest of smart playlist constructed in your iTunes Library. Because I have a large library, and I want to a fresh batch of tunes to listen to on shuffle, a lot of filtering happens in my playlists based on “Last Skipped” and “Last Played.”

However, did you know that if you don’t skip a song in the first 2 - 20 seconds of its playtime iTunes doesn’t update the skipped count or skipped date. That is pretty annoying and makes “Last Skipped” a pretty useless metric! Thankfully there’s a little AppleScript over at Doug’s iTunes Scripts that fixes this.

But to have to run that script from the menu every time we want to skip a song would be rather arduous, don’t you think? So I’ve added a keyboard shortcut to Alfred of CTRL+SHIFT+CMD+X that runs that script. Now I can safely skip songs whenever and be ensured that its metadata will be correct.

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"Pixel Perfect" Webdesign

A recent tweet by Almog Melamed made me think about the concept of “pixel perfect” webdesign.

Pixels have become meaningless

What people usually mean by pixel perfect webdesign is that a PSD is made in Photoshop and that is translated exactly into HTML & CSS (perhaps some JS for flavor). But the ever changing world of how we access the web is making this a futile pursuit.

Just imagine that someone made a 300px wide header in Photoshop – that is going to look completely different on your 1920x1080 iMac than on your 640x960 (but for the web effectively 320x480) iPhone 4S. We are no longer designing for the average 1024x768 desktop monitor. There is too much variability in the way users might approach our sites.

Now, if you were totally married to your pixel perfect outlook you could go down the route of subdomains and have a separate mobile site, but that approach is not entirely tenable, because what is “mobile?” Is it tablets? Is it phones? And those have wildy varying aspect ratios and resolutions, getting you no closer to pixel perfection.

The future is responsive

Having a single design that adapts itself to the available screensize might be more difficult to design in Photoshop and will never be “pixel perfect,” I do believe it is the future. Not only in the reordering the existing markup elements with certain media queries, but defining a layout by percentages (with perhaps a maximum constraint defined in pixels) instead of by pixels.

This requires a rethinking of the visual design from the ground up and lose the pre-occupation with precise placement of elements that designers might be familiar with from print, but it will ultimately lead to a better web. Or so I think.

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Boxee Box Remote

I have a Boxee Box and while at times it feels like the Android equivalent of the Apple TV, it does allow me to watch all my TV shows I am forced to illegally download with a nice interface. But its remote, dear god, its remote.

In The Dark

You know what the most probable lighting conditions are in the room wherever you install anything for a “home theater?” Probably somewhere dark. The Boxee Box remote’s designers did not thing of this however. As not only is the front symmetrical to the touch (meaning you have 50% chance of hitting the “exit” button when you meant to hit the “pause” button), but the keyboard on the back has dark blue and dark gray lettering on black buttons. Yep, super readable that.

Multiple accidental clicking

Because of poor design and manufacturing on D-Link’s part it is a known issue that the remote sometimes does multiple clicks. Try entering a password or URL with that little issue. I was able to temporarily relieve this issue by shoving a small piece of paper in the battery compartment.

Yes, that’s right, I had to jury-rig my own remote to make it work as intended, an absolutely shining example of engineering and manufacturing excellence. Kudos to all involved!

That said

If you don’t live in the promised land of online media (the United States) and therefore are forced to illegally download content because media companies are a bunch of assholes, you could do far worse than a Boxee Box. Otherwise just get an Apple TV. But don’t buy an Apple TV and jailbreak it. Jailbreaking, much like anime, is for jerks.

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Quick Little Tip: youtube-dl

Ever wanted to download a YouTube video for offline viewing and are bit reticent to use one of the sketchy looking website? Well, have I got a nice little tidbit for you.

Do you have a Mac (of course you do!), have Homebrew installed (of course you do!) and not afraid of getting your hands dirty in the terminal (of course you aren’t!)?

brew install youtube-dl

And now you are able to download videos from YouTube and a bunch of other sites. Also, I’d recommend using the -t switch to give your files readable and understandable file names. And if you have ffmpeg installed via brew you are also able to automatically convert any Flash files you download into actual usable MP4 files.

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Ads

I hate ads, I really do. I can’t stand them. And they still seem to be the go-to monetization method of anything internet-related, which I frankly don’t understand. The only reason would be that they work and I can’t understand a person who finds ads anything but intrusive.

On Ads

Weirdly, to me it depends on the medium though. Television is probably where ads annoy me the most. Not only are you already demanding I adjust my viewing habits to your schedule, content provider, but then you proceed to interrupt whatever I’m watching with the most inane, crass commercials. No, thank you. I literally cannot watched broadcast television anymore thanks to this.

Second worst are internet ads. Distracting animated, poorly compressed banners that disrupt a page’s design peddling products I am not remotely interested it. Or those generic Google Ads that seem to lead to the sleaziest, backwater sites on the internet.

Ads that I can stand however, seem to be those in physical newspapers & magazines. Either because I am accustomed to them and they are easier to ignore? I don’t know.

No Ads

I run adblockers wherever I can. I recently reinstalled my MacBook Pro and ran Safari without an adblocker for a while and I was appalled how some of the sites I normally frequent were plastered over with ugly ads (MacRumors, Last.FM and Giant Bomb come to mind) totally ruining their design.

Even worse are places where you pay a subscription and you still get ads! The Xbox Dashboard being the prime example in my mind, where 75% of most any top level screen is filled with ads instead of my own content. Or the huge distracting ads in the NYTimes app on the iPad (which has the added insult of having separate subscriptions for tablets and phones).

Go Premium

If you’re a content-driven business I heavily suggest you go for a subscription model. If you create unique, interesting content I truly believe that people will be ready to pay a premium for it. Now this won’t work for a content-mill like The Next Web or something, but then again we were talking about creating unique, interesting content.

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iCloud podcast syncing

I’m a voracious podcast listener. I tend to listen to about 2 to 4 hours of podcasts each day. And preferably I’d like to ability to listen to them wherever I want, but usually that means either my iPhone or iPad.

I’ve tried three of the biggest podcatchers on iOS: Instacast, Downcast and Apple’s own Podcasts. None of them are able to deliver a seamless slick working iCloud syncing of my podcast listening status.

Underpromise, overdeliver

This leaves me with one question: why are these apps offering this option? Sure, you can point to the fact that iCloud syncing is difficult to implement, but if that is the fact, why include this feature at all? If you can’t guarantee iCloud syncing will work (and I haven’t gotten it to work reliably in any of the three apps) don’t include it. It’s that simple.

My current podcast listening setup

Currently I am using Downcast on my iPhone (since that is the iOS device I am most likely to have with me at any time). Although the app looks like it was made for Android it doesn’t have the many minor bugs and glitches of Instacast nor the obtuse interface of Podcasts. So, in the case of choosing a lesser evil I recommend Downcast for the time being.

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A use case for QR-codes

Dear Internet, I think I've done the impossible. I've thought of a use case for QR-codes: Microwaves.

If every microwave came with a scanner and every microwaveable dish with a QR-code with instructions on how the product should be heated microwaving would be even more ideal for very lazy people.

All you would have to do is scan the packaging and then put the food in the microwave. It'll ding when you're done. Serial entrepreneurs, this one's free for you all to use.

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Lightning storm in a cup

“It’s just too bad about that connector change. Doesn’t Apple worry about losing customer loyalty and sales?” - David Pogue, New York Times

People complaining about the new Lightning connectors for Apple products remind me very much of the people who complained about the lack of a floppy drive on the first iMac. Maintaining old technology for the sake of “backwards compatibility” is stupid.

The current Dock connector has existed for more than a decade now, and if Apple is to be believed, the current design was holding them back from improving their devices. So I see no reason why they should hold on to old technology. And it’s not like all your old accessories suddenly become obsolete, they do offer an (outrageously expensive) adapter.

And how in the world would this affect customer loyalty and sales? My current iPhone 4S can charge with an old iPod cable that still splits into USB & FireWire, I’d say they’ve been plenty backwards compatible. Plus I find it hard to imagine someone who would look at the iPhone 5 and point to the new connector cable as a major objection to buying it.

Apple has been moving towards getting rid of the cable anyway. The only activity that requires a cable now is charging. Outputting video or audio can be done via AirPlay, syncing content can be done via WiFi or iCloud and it is no longer required to sync apps with an iTunes install. So the functional requirements of the cable have decreased as well.

In my opinion anyone complaining about the change in connectors is just an old fogey who can’t stand new things or progress.

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The Google YouTube iOS app sucks

The Apple-provided YouTube app has been discontinued as of iOS 6, in its place Google has released its own native iOS YouTube app. And it’s a piece of crap.

No iPad version

Now, Google probably isn’t used to having an audience on tablets and having to provide software for people on it, but this is just criminal. The iPad is basically my YouTube-machine and a company like Google isn’t able to release a universal app on day 1? Beyond stupid.

Not to mention that Google has changed their mobile website in such a way that in Safari you are unable to go fullscreen! Curiously, the player does go fullscreen in Chrome for iOS.

No native playback

Google does not use the native media playback features of iOS. This has several horrific implications. For one, the volume control for YouTube seems to be separate from the rest of the iOS. I shouldn’t even have to explain why this is a terrible idea.

Secondly, this means that the remote in the Apple headphones does not control YouTube. This, coupled with the previous blunder, meant that when I meant to pause the video I was watching I instead blasted Nine Inch Nails at full volume into my eardrums because the Music app resumed, instead of the YouTube app pausing.

And, finally, this means that unlike the previous app I cannot leave the app and guarantee that it will remember its playback position when I return later.

Subscription handling

My YouTube usage might be slightly different than most users, so this might be an edge case. But I rarely, if ever, randomly “browse” YouTube. I am subscribed to several channels and would like to see their latest videos when I launch the app. This is not the main view by default. Instead it is some mishmash of “recommended” videos as well as “recently played” (why would I ever want to see this front and center?) and videos favorited by the channels I follow. It is possible to make the main feed behave this way, but it requires changing a very buried setting.

Portrait/Landscape handling

The app does not respect my portrait or landscape setting at all. Browsing is always portrait and playing video is always landscape. This to me is typical Android behavior, just doing everything its own little way with no standardisation at all.

Conclusion

Seems like Google has yet to make an iOS app that is not butt-ugly (Google Authenticator) or a glorified webview (Gmail). I hope (probably fruitlessly) that it will improve in the future.

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My First Patriarchy Encounter

It was about five years ago when I first truly saw the patriarchal culture we live in. On a hot spring day I was walking down the street with a female friend. “Hey psst, pretty girl, pretty girl in the skirt,” the man passing by hissed, “why don’t smile for me, pretty girl, smile for me?” and pushed down his sunglasses to leer at her. She demurely ignored him, I felt creeped out. I did make the horrible quip “I don’t have to defend you, I’m not your boyfriend,” though.

Not five minutes later we come upon a dude from some charity trying to set us up for a monthly donation. I’m bad with these kinds of people. As I’m stumbling through my words my friend tries to save me. The dude says (paraphrased from a memory of five years ago), “surely the man of the house is in charge of the money?”

I don’t claim to be some kind of expert and hell, I’m definitely on the privileged side in a lot of areas, but these encounters first started connecting what I had read about feminism and real life experiences.

If there’s one thing you take away from this post, try to think about how in your mind a default human being is probably a white heterosexual cisgendered male. And how weird that is. And maybe ruminate on why that is.

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Cut the fat from your RSS

Do you still use RSS? Like, you check up on your feeds and stuff? No worries, I still do too. But I’ve made some changes that made it all a lot more palatable for myself.

First of all, I stopped following most large volume blogs. Do you really need the regurgitated press releases from sites like The Next Web, Gizmodo and the like? If you’re as hooked into the internet as I am there’s a big chance it’ll show up in a tweet or iMessage from a friend anyway. You won’t be missing anything big.

Instead I’m now following more authorial blogs. Maintained by a single person or a small group that is very focused on a certain subject. These will produce much more valuable and unique content than any of those big blogs that are trying to reach some kind of post quota.

Here are some of my favorites you might want to follow as well:

Dr. Drang’s blog

Matt Gemmell’s blog

Simplicity Is Bliss

Very Lemonade

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Your ass looks like a coke bottle

So, there’s this song that contains the following lyrics:

Looking like a super model Your ass from the side looks just like a coke bottle

I assume the artist in question was trying really hard to rhyme something with model (here are some suggestions). Instead of changing the previous line, he went with some crazy similie.

Look at that coke bottle and imaging a woman with a butt that is shaped like that. How is that attractive at all? Either she has a really long rear end or there is just a slight curve at the top. Nothing to write songs about, I think.

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Valve's Flatland

Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily. But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish. That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else. We do have a founder/president, but even he isn’t your manager. This company is yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.

You might’ve heard about Valve’s Employee Handbook (PDF) going around. It gives some amazing insight into how one of the most profitable and creative companies in the world does its thing.

It is the most beautiful thing to read how there is no hierarchy at all. It is bred into us to think that we need the safety of someone to tell us what do to succeed. But Valve proves that giving smart, creative people freedom & autonomy to do what they want will lead to great products.

Think about how much absolute trust that requires, for a company to say “You are an intelligent human being, how do you think you can best contribute to our company?”

I encourage everyone to read the PDF, it will blow your mind. And you know, this might not be an accidental leak, it looks like a great recruitment ad.

BONUS: Here’s a really long interview with Gabe Newell, founder of Valve Software.