The "Rate this app" controversy

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There's been a lot of buzz in the iPhone developer world about Rate this App dialog boxes. You know the ones I mean, the ones that pop up and say would you like to review this app? and give you some buttons like yes no or later.
The controversy started with a John Gruber link to a post saying that we should all give one star reviews when they have one of these dialog boxes in the apps. Instapaper developer Marco Arment jumped in with his thoughts, which essentially came down to "don't do it". They continued with some discussion on their podcasts The Talk Show and Accidental Tech Podcast.
However, I think they slightly missed the point on why developers do this. They seem to be under the impression that developers were trying to get as many reviews as possible in an effort to gain the ranking systems in iTunes. 

I am now a little embarrassed to admit it, but I have one of these rating dialogs in my app. My goal, however, was never to get more ratings. My goal was to get good ratings. And by good I don't just mean positive, but also well-thought-out. One of the great things about these popups is that you can choose to show them to the people who are actually using your app by only showing the dialog box after the app has been opened a certain number of times. That way you you'll hopefully get a review from someone who is finding your creation useful. As the app store ratings are riddled with ridiculous comments like "I'm giving this dictionary app 2 stars because it doesn't stream live music", hopefully some informed reviews from experience users will balance things out.

On the other hand, I definitely see the points behind these rants against "rate this app" dialogs. It's a bad user experience. When someone opens your app it's to DO something, and that something is being interrupted. When I added this this "feature" it wasn't a very common practice at the time. Furthermore, I set it to only pop up when the user opened a the new version of the app for the 30th time or so. Since I have made very few updates over the last three years my users have seen this popup at most 2-3 times over the last 3 years.

However, this practice has become a lot more prevalent. Now that so many apps are doing it the cumulative effect is annoying. I think I'll remove this in my next update, but no promises when that will be . . .

Year Zero

I finished Year Zero last night and I thought I'd mention it here because I found the premise to be pretty amusing

In short, humans are really really good at music. For some reason our position in our galaxy makes us really good at recognizing what makes great music. Mind you, these aliens are supposedly "refined", and they're good at everything else. They just suck at music.

Year Zero: A Novel

By Rob Reid

Anyway, at some point in the 70's they discovered Earth music and, well, they became obsessed. Quickly every alien in the universe had the entire Earth's library on their little-green-guy version of their iPods.

However, in their delirious excitement, they didn't pay for it. And, as refined species, they are honor bound to obey the native planet's laws. Unfortunately for them Earth's recording industry somehow thinks pirating a song justifies a $150K penalty. Multiply this by all the aliens in the universe and you get a pretty big number. Then, multiply that number by all the songs produced by all the countries on Earth (except in North Korea) and you get an inconceivable number.

As a result, the aliens are indebted to the Earth for more money than exists in the universe. So, a rogue alien labor union decides to surreptitiously help Earthlings find a way to destroy themselves.

Enter an mid-level music industry attorney and his love interest and, well, hijinks ensue.

Oh, a bit of a spoiler, but it turns out a retired CEO of a huge company that makes operating systems for the majority of the computers in the world is an alien. And he's single handedly responsible for creating a drastic slowdown in the technological advancement of humankind. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't suspected that . . .

CLs and EMRs: A better way

I wrote a post on EyeDock about how I feel contact lens modules should work in EMRs, complete with an interactive mockup. Please go there to check it out, but I'll include the video walkthrough here. 

EyeDock's new soft lens searches

Well, I've been pretty quiet lately. Things have been a little busy at home, and I've been spending what free time I have finishing up my new soft lens searches for EyeDock. It's taken me about 18 months (way too long!), but I'm pleased with the results. 

I've written a short page on EyeDock about the new features in these searches so I won't repeat here. I will, however, include the screencast I made introducing the new searches.  

I'd love to hear your feedback! 

A new feature for EyeDock's soft lens searches: Enter a refraction and EyeDock will take care of vertexing to the corneal plane, transposing (if needed), and will find appropriate lenses. Even more helpful, it will find the closest available power for the chosen lens and give an estimation of the best potential VA.

In my head I'm an action hero

When I click my keyfob to lock my car

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I sometimes imagine that I'm an cool-as-ice action hero detonating a bomb

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Of course, on seeing this picture, my wife surmised that I must be an 80's action hero. You know, due to the short shorts and the Schwarzeneggerian haircut. 

DoIt.im: Capturing tasks with Siri

Another day, another convoluted workflow to accomplish something simple.. .

I wrote in my last post about how I was using Doit.im as my GTD (Getting Things Done) app. It might be less feature-rich than Omnifocus but it seems to do almost  everything I need.

I say almost because Omnifocus does have one feature that I covet: The ability to use Siri to capture tasks. In other words, a person can trigger Siri and say "Pick up my pants" and that task will be added to Omnifocus. To do something similar in Doit.im I need to open the app, create a quick task (very easy - just swipe down), click the microphone on the keyboard, and dictate my task. Since I'm often thinking of things I need to do while I'm driving I'm not comfortable with this many steps.

From their user forum it sounds like the nice folks at doit.im may be working on a solution to this, but I'm not sure when we'll see it.

While we wait for this to be built into the app there may be another [roundabout] solution. I learned today that IFTTT (IF This Then That) now has an iOS app that can use triggers from some of the native iPhone and iPad apps. The apps that can trigger events include Photos, Contacts, and, of interest to us, Reminders.

I took advantage of this to capture Doit.im tasks with Siri. 

First, I decided to create a new Reminders list on my iPhone called "Do it". This can be done by opening up the Reminders app, clicking "Create New List...", and calling it "Do it".

You'll also need your Doit.im email mailbox. If you haven't used this already I'd recommend it - it let's you add tasks to your doit.im inbox via email. For example, when I get a statement from my daycare I have a rule set up in Gmail to forward it my task mailbox. It shows up in my inbox and I can process it as I see fit.

Your doit.im task mailbox can be found on their website or in within the app by going to settings -> account info. For this example let's say my address is nerd.ribuck@doitim.in.

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Then, I downloaded the IFTTT app onto my iPhone.  You can create a new recipe by clicking the mortar and pestle icon in the upper right corner. This will expose your recipes, and you can add a new one by pressing the "+" sign. For the trigger, scroll through the options until you find the Reminders app. 

We'll want the option that says "New reminder added to list". The list we want is the one we created earlier, "Do it".

Note: you will probably have to "activate" the Reminders "Channel" to give the IFTTT app permission to access its content.

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Next, we'll select our action. I'm going to use Gmail, so I'll make that selection and enter nerd.ribuck@doitim.in  as the "To address". 

Save the recipe.

I did make one little tweak at this point. Your task in doit.im is going to be the subject of the email that you're sending, and I want to keep that as simple as possible. I opened the recipe, clicked "edit recipe", and changed the subject from what it was to just "{{Title}}"

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Now, I can grab my phone, trigger Siri, and say "Remind me to change my socks in my 'do it' list". IFTTT will see this and email the text to doit.im, which will add it to your inbox to be processed the next time you open the app.

So, it is a bit of a workaround, but I think it'll get the job done until DoIt comes up with a native solution.

Getting Things Done with DoIt.im

I've implemented a loose Getting Things Done (GTD) method of task management, and it really is helping me keep my life in order. These days it makes sense to use our technology for GTD and there's a plethora of options to help you do that.

All the cool Mac users swoon over Omnifocus. Omnifocus sure seems great, although a bit pricey and complicated (neither of which I mind very much). The biggest issue I have with Omnifocus, however, is the fact that it's Mac and iOS only. I try to spend as much time as I can in the Apple universe, but for a big chunk of my day I'm using a PC and Android phone for work. 

After trying a few apps I settled on Doit.im. I like the fact that it has apps for all the major mobile platforms and it has a nice web app for me to use in the office.  From a GTD perspective is has all the things I need. I can quickly capture tasks, assign them to contexts, group them into projects, and create reminders and alerts.  I can even create tasks by forwarding important emails to Doit.im. 

There are definitely fuller-featured apps out there, but this one is scratching my itch.

My perfect navigation app

Google acquired Waze earlier this month. I've played with a lot of the GPS / navigation apps on the iPhone and they all have their pros and cons. However, I discovered and wrote about Waze last summer and it has emerged as my favorite.. 

So how do I feel about Google buying Waze? There's always the concern that a big company will screw up the services they acquire, of course.  However, if these two companies combine their strengths I think this could be a good thing for consumers.

This got me thinking. What would be my ideal app?  I think it would be a hybrid of the most popular apps.

I'd take the search capabilities of Google. That's a no-brainer. In fact, this was the major weakness of Waze, and it's the thing that makes me the most excited about the collaboration of the two.  

I'd also take Google's maps and driving directions.  It's really the standard, and as Apple's well documented mapping problems demonstrate, you can't just pull mapping out of thin air.

I'd take the social aspects of Waze. Most of the major navigation apps try to provide some traffic data, but nothing beats the reporting in Waze: Speed traps, accidents, traffic slowdowns, detours - you name it. Adding all the Google users will only make this crowdsourcing better. 

I would, however, add one social aspect of Twist. Twist is pretty much a one trick pony, but it has a nice trick - it lets people at your destination know how soon you're going to be there. Waze has tried to do something like this, largely via Facebook, but I like Twist better.

Of course, this feature would also really work well if it could be combined with the iPhone's Find My Friends app. 

Despite how widely panned Apple's foray into mapping has been, I actually kind of like it.  I haven't had any issues with navigation, but I know it IS an issue (that's getting better, but it's still an issue). However, it has a very nice aesthetic and, of course, it's nicely integrated into the operating system (read: Siri).

So, make me an app that combines all these features and I'll be happy.

Make sure it's easy to use though  :)