i break stuff

So, I had jury duty the other day. Well, I didn't get picked to sit on a jury, or even interviewed really. But, I did get to sit in a room for the better part of a day that I couldn't leave.

I don't know how common knowledge this is, but the Blogger twitter account just left some great details about dealing with exports in a comment on Craig Burton's blog. Add in the conversion tools here, and I'm a happy camper about being on the blogger service. Now, I just need to remember to export my data every so often, just in case.

Apple, the app store sucks. Yeah, it's a brilliant innovation to have an app store for a smart phone, but I'm over that. You have a serious problem in that you've made it so trendy and cool to create iPhone apps, that damn near everyone is doing it.

As a result, there's a total lack of quality in many of the apps. For free ones this isn't that big a deal, because well if I get something for free, I'm not necessarily expecting it to rock up to 11. But, when I pay $10 for an app, I want it to freakin' work flawlessly. You don't have to agree with them, but here are my rants on the system as it stands today :

• Comments and star ratings aren't enough. I want to know the percent of the time the app crashes, the percent of the time the application gets uninstalled, and a bug tracker for each app in the store with statistics on time to fix bugs, etc.
  
• I should be able to return a paid app through the store. If it sucks, I should have 24 hrs to get my money back via some official mechanism. Buying software should not be a gamble.
  
• Allow bug fix updates to make it into the store faster. I keep seeing blog post after blog post about waiting for an updated version to show up in the app store. It's a new platform and there will be bugs in software, you need to streamline the process to resolve those bugs for the users.
  
• Fix the platform. There are precisely 2 hardware devices for these things. How hard should it be to make a stable application for it? I don't know if it's issues with the language, the OS, or sunspots, but I don't care either. There's no excuse for a memory leak in a user application on a hardware platform of 2 freaking devices.
  

I feel like this rant has lost some steam since the app that inspired it had an update today and is about eleventy billion percent more stable, now. (Outpost for the record) Well, at least, the NYTimes app is still crashy.

From now on, include a created_at or some other field on every table to make it easy to dump a subset of the database for testing, development.

To help with migrating old projects to rails 2.x conventions

It seems that for better or worse, our world is increasingly dependent on small, bite-size communications. And, you probably suck at it. I'm sorry; maybe you're too old, or too young, or you never got around to taking that creative writing class in college. It's going to be okay, we're all bad at something. Just watch me try to communicate with a large group in real life (IRL), and you'll see what I mean.

Instant messenger, txting on phones, facebook chat, voicemail, IRC, telegrams. We all have to deal with communications mediums that have limits. Nowadays it seems you can't go 10 minutes without seeing, or using IM, or txting (SMS if you're old). Trying to cram a meaningful thought down to 160 characters is really tough. The youngins do it by abbreviating the hell out of everything. Some people split the thought into fragments, or worse only send a fragment of the thought. We all have to send corrections follow-ons.

• "hey what'd you think?"
• "My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc." (link)
• "wh0 8 MY 54|\|DW1cH!?"
• "question" - "i get an error" - "in my app" - "when I try to click on the button"

Now, some of those carry more meaning than others. The question, is whether they have enough to convey to the reader what the author meant. I'm not against using abbreviations, but you have to know your audience well enough to know if they'll have to consult wikipedia just to translate it. It takes practice.

In the same way that blogging offers a way to practice other styles of writing, I think twitter offers a way to refine your short communication skills. There are plenty of other (probably better) reasons reasons to use twitter, but go sign up anyway. See, the trick to twitter is that you're putting a message up the whole world can see, and it has to be short. Real short. 140 characters, short.

So, how do you fit a meaningful thought into 140 characters, and not sound like an idiot? You think about it for a minute or two before you send it. That's something we're probably not used to doing before we fire off an IM, or a txt to a friend. I think that if we consistently take that extra step of making sure what we've typed really, truly says what we mean, that we'll all get better at this uber-concise world we live in.

So, head over to twitter, sign up, follow jasonrohwedder, add a couple more friends and see how it goes. You might hate it, you might love it, but hopefully you'll be a little more deliberate before you send me a useless IM/txt/email. k thx bai!

Trying this one out since iBlogger required a line-break option that would have required me to reformat most of my old entries.

That's something I'd like to avoid.

Look ma' a photo.

[photo was here, really]
-- Post From My iPhone