Online forms are predictable—predictably boring and annoying to use. There’s dozens of services out there, but they’re all so similar, the biggest difference is usually the pricing and plans available. No matter which you choose, your form’s going to look rather dated, force desktop users to switch back and forth from mouse to keyboard to fill out the form, and require finger gymnastics to fill out on mobile.
Ok. Perhaps they’re not that bad. But they’re almost that bad. And even the best seem to have changed precious little since the first web forms were introduced in the '90’s.
And then there’s Typeform. Launched in beta last year, Typeform takes a decidedly different approach to forms, making them both keyboard and mobile friendly at the same time, and—dare I say—beautiful. Typeforms are something you’ll have to experience to understand, so go check out Typeform’s demo form first, then come back and finish this review.
Impressed? I thought you would be.
Simple Doesn’t Have to Mean Basic
Making a Typeform isn’t that much different than making a form in any other online form app. You’ll drag-and-drop the sections you want into the form interface, adding in the descriptions and options, and linking parts of the form together with logic to direct your form users to different questions depending on their answers, if you want. The interface for making forms is nice—don’t get me wrong—but so is Wufoo’s interface.
But then dig deeper, and you’ll find more to be excited about. There’s options to add icons to your form options, making them more like buttons in an app. You can add a background picture to your form, include rich media including full-sized photos and YouTube videos, or customize the landing and exit pages with your company’s logo and links to your site. There’s detailed font and color options, with pre-made color palettes to pick from and options to save your own palettes to quickly make new forms in your company’s style. And the Typeform form interface is so light, your forms will blend into your site’s branding just by adding your logo and matching your brand’s typography and color choices.
Forms themselves are already very useful, but add in the extra image and customization options, and Typeforms can be used for so many different things—from interactive stories to customer surveys to promo landing pages to get people excited about your next app. The Typeform team even recreated the console from War Games using a Typeform.
All of those different uses work so great with Typeform because of the unique way Typeforms work. As you’ve already seen in the demo, Typeforms only show one question at once, and already have your curser in the answer filed for you to type in your response without having to click anywhere. If there’s multi-choice options, Typeform shows letters beside each option so you can simply tap an option on your keyboard and immediately proceed to the next question. On mobile, the one-question-at-a-time view makes it equally easy to enter your answers without squinting at the options and trying your hardest to tap the tiny text boxes. Multi-choice questions are even more fun on mobile, since they’re easy-to-tap buttons that feel perfectly designed for mobile.
Filling out forms on your PC typically is an exercise in frustration as you try to click on tiny bullet points and tab through fields just hoping you don’t miss anything. And on mobile, filling out a form online feels like poking your way through a field of land mines—you’ll always end up taping the wrong thing. And in one fell swoop, Typeform fixes the biggest frustrations with forms on both.
Taking Your Forms Pro
There’s more, too. Typeform has an API so you can access your form data—or even create a form on the fly when the new Build API launches—with a few lines of code, and incorporate Typeform into your internal apps. There’s also the metrics and analytics you’d expect, including social network reports that show which network sent your form the most clicks. And as you’d also expect, you can embed Typeforms into your site or have them display in a separate window or a popover on your site, and you can have them email you anytime a form is filled out and export your form data to use in any spreadsheet app.
And then, Typeform’s pricing is equally impressive. There’s a free tier that lets you make unlimited forms with basic features, and then there’s Pro forms that let you add logic jumps and hidden fields to forms, remove Typeform’s branding, and soon will let you collect payments via Stripe, use icons from The Noun Project and premium fonts in your forms, and more. You can pay $10/form to create pro forms that’ll let you access your form data for a month, or you can pay $20/month for unlimited pro forms. Either option is very rarely priced, but the one-time payment option is especially great if you only occasionally need to make advanced forms.
Forms Worth Getting Excited About
I know it might sound a bit silly to get excited about a web form tool, but Typeform is really, really nice. You’ll never need to wait to fill out a Typeform form on your PC, since they’re so easy to use on your smartphone, and you’ll also be able to fill out Typeform forms quicker than ever on your computer with its keyboard shortcuts. That’s what’s really so surprising: it’s better on mobile and on traditional computers.
Typeform was refreshingly new when it was in beta and I had the opportunity to interview the Typeform team at AppStorm, and now that it’s open to the public, its polish and brilliant pricing plans make it the obvious choice if you want a new way to make online forms. It really is that nice.
And I’ve got something special for Techinch readers: for the next week, you can use the coupon code BLGtechinch when you signup for a Typeform account to get 3 months of Typeform Pro for free. Here’s your chance to make some awesome forms—or interactive stories, or something even more amazing—with the greatest new form tool. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
You can’t share more than 140 characters in a tweet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t include a lot more info than that. For quite some time now, links have been auto-shortened by Twitter, so they’ll each take up exactly 22 characters of your tweet, giving you more room to write. Images can also show in-line on Twitter.com and in most apps, so if you have another 22 characters to spare you can add a tiny preview picture to make your tweet stand out. And, of course, you can share your location, no extra characters needed.
Then there’s Twitter Cards. Since 2012, Twitter’s shown extra text, pictures, video, and more in-line when you expand a card that includes a link from a participating site. The New York Times, YouTube, and so many other sites support Twitter cards—but it’s still fairly rare for a link you tweet to show up with a full card. Most sites don’t just support it yet.
I’d assumed you had to be a Twitter partner or have some other special verification to get your site working with Twitter cards, but was surprised to find today that it’s very easy for any site to work with Twitter Cards. All you’ll have to do is add some extra info to your site’s header—including a special Twitter-specific page title, summary, and more—using the info you’ll find in the Twitter Cards documentation. Or, if you’re using WordPress, just install the JM Twitter Cards plugin and add your info through its UI. Then, you’ll need to go to the Twitter Card Validator, enter one of your site’s links, and make sure it looks fine as a Twitter Card. You’ll then see a button to request to get your site added to Twitter Cards, and after a short wait you’ll get an email saying it’s ready.
For me, it took less than an hour from the time I requested to get my site added to getting the email and seeing Techinch links with a full Twitter card. It may take a little while for new links to show up with their preview card, but soon enough, you’ll see the cards appear for your tweeted links even when they were shared months back.
Then, you can tweak and make your Twitter Cards even better. There's an option to add your own summary, a full sized image, live media (say, video or audio), and even a product card that can showcase a photo, price, description, and more about your products. If you're comfortable tweaking your site, there's plenty of ways to get your tweets showing as much info as you'd like—and you won't need any special treatment from Twitter to add them. Once your site's authenticated, it'll just take some tweaking to get the perfect cards you want.
It’s annoying how many network-specific integrations you need to add to your site these days—Google Authentication, Facebook page images, iOS touch icons, and now Twitter Cards—but they’re the extras that seem worth it. Twitter, at least, definitely seems worth taking the extra time to get integrated nicely, since it still sends so much traffic when tweets get popular. I'd wish Twitter would automagically parse the info from your site, no extra code required, but this is the price we all must pay to make links look nicer on Twitter.
And hey: when your tweets can get a boost of 200 extra characters, for only a bit of time tweaking your site’s code, that sure seems worthwhile.
It’s too easy to find info these days. Why remember the phone number for your favorite restaurant — or even take the two seconds to save it to your contacts — when you could just Google it again next time?
We’re so reliant on Google that it’s hard to imagine an internet without it. Non-techies are apt to sit down at a computer, type “Google” into the search bar on your browser, select the first link, and then search for what they’re looking for — even if said site is something that’d be easy to remember like the New York Times or the MLB.
And it’s not just about Google itself — google’s just an easy short-hand for search engine, one that’s an official English verb these days. So whether you Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Google, if you’re like me you likely do it far too much.
Search engine’s effect on our brains has been debated for quite some time, with Nicholas Carr asking in The Atlantic “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” half a decade ago, and the UCLA and CNN countering several months later that “Google does a brain good”. In reality, it’s hard to say it’s a good or a bad — we’re so reliant on search engines, we wouldn’t know how to function without them. Why would you remember basic facts when you could just look them up later? It’s the same rationale most of us made in school when we decided our teachers were crazy for having us memorize obscure names and dates, and it’s the same rationale we make each time we Google for something we’ve already looked up before.
We’ve outsourced our brains, without the slightest qualm.
I just argued in this issue’s first article that you should stop remembering where your files are saved on your computer, and search for them instead. Indeed, I think you should. Your computer’s smart, and you should let it do the heavy lifting for you and save your cognitive skills for more important tasks. But searching for the same fact on Google a dozen times isn’t smart.
So what should you do instead? Build your own Google.
Geeks reading this, don’t go fire up a server and start crawling the entire internet. Bad idea. Unless you’re Gabriel Weinberg, in which case, keep up the great work.
Instead, you should start saving everything that you’ll want to find again in the future to your own library. No, don’t just bookmark sites when you find them — instead, save the info you wanted to your computer so you can find it directly again without having to reopen a site that may or may not still be there. It’ll only take a second, and next time, you can search locally and find what you need with almost zero effort.
I’m going to recommend using Evernote — there’s a ton of other notebook apps that’d work great too, and even plain text files with the info snippet or PDFs if you want the whole site would work, though, if you really wanted to use something different. But Evernote has three major advantages that make it particularly perfect for building your own google: browser extensions that make it easy to save anything online to your library, apps on every platform, and — crazy as it may sound — integration with Google so you can find what you saved when you search online anyhow.
Here’s what you do. Whenever you need info about anything, Google it as normal. Find what you need, then hit the Evernote extension and clip just the part of the article you actually need and save it to your library. Keep doing that for a while, and at the same time put any other important info in your database as it’s convenient. Whenever you’d write something down, or file something away that’s not a typical file you’d put in your Documents folder, put it in your notebook. You can even get fancy and have IFTTT automatically archive stuff to your Evernote, if you want, or have Instapaper save your favorited articles to Evernote automatically. Basically, anything you think you’d ever want to find again, throw it in Evernote.
Now, after a while, you should be able to start trusting yourself to have info again. Search your computer when you’re looking for something, and Evernote’s results will start showing up more often than not. And hey — if they don’t show up in your search, it’ll take zero extra effort to search the web from your search tool once you’ve typed you’re query in.
Which brings us back to Google. The Evernote browser extension has a nifty extra that lets Evernote display search results from your own library right alongside your Google search results in your browser. If you’ve been saving everything to Evernote and still forget and Google for the answer, Evernote will still bring your saved result to the top and give you one-click access to the info you need without searching through search results.
Will this all make you smarter? I doubt it. Memorizing more data might make you smarter, but that’s a dubious proposition at best these days with so much data thrown at us in modern life. But it will make you a lot less panicked when the internet is out, and you’ll save a lot of time you’d otherwise have spent searching through search results or trying to rediscover data from links in your bookmarks that are long gone.
Originally published on October 29th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 7
“Just be yourself” sure sounds like a good motto to live by. It’s essentially why Buffer, the tool to automatically Tweet on a schedule, seemed like a crazy idea to me at first. After all, if something’s automatically Tweeting on your behalf while you’re asleep, that’s not really authentic and being yourself, is it? Sure, all my followers aren’t online whenever I tweet, but at least the ones that are online at the moment I post something know it’s genuinely me saying what I said right now.
But how real is social networking, anyhow? On Facebook, your stream of updates typically shows the stuff Facebook think you’ll want to see, and I’ve noticed posts from my siblings showing up above far more recent posts from friends I rarely talk to. Twitter, on the other hand, is a stream of consciousness of the whole world, and unless you go back and read older posts you’ll only see what’s posted right when you open your Twitter app. Either way, you miss far more than you see, either by the network only showing what it thinks you want to see or because you aren’t watching the stream of messages 24/7.
Let’s stop pretending social networking is authentic. It’s not. We post the updates we want people to see, the doctored pictures we’ve taken just to showcase our most interesting lives, and like the pages that we both authentically like and think will appeal to our peer group (and avoid liking those we secretly like but don’t need to make too public). That movie that you love but was a bust on Rotten Tomatoes? Eh, just leave it off — no need to get ribbed over liking that one.
We’re perfecting the picture-perfect idealistic versions of our online identities in our own fictional online world, and then have the audacity to complain about certain ways of using social networking not being authentic.
Making it Meaningful
But then, something about the whole idea of scheduling social media posts still strikes me as wrong. After all, if we’re supposed to be building friendships online — if that’s the whole point of social networking, to start with — then what on earth does automatically posting gain you? Sure, we’re already not being authentic — whatever that really means in reality — but shouldn’t there still be something sacred about our conversations? Or have we already let our robotic overlords take control of the conversation for us?
Perhaps that goes back to the very core of the idea behind social networking. See, there’s a bit of a fallacy we’re living out every time we login to Facebook: humans can’t really be friends with hundreds and thousands of people. Dunbar’s Number says we can have at most 150 stable relationships, and in reality, I doubt many people have more than a half-dozen or so close friends, especially if you have a decently large extended family already. The rest end up being acquaintances you know but aren’t really close to — and the ones beyond #150 or so are people you at best occasionally broadcast to and at worse are a meaningless random number on your profile.
You’ve got to pick how you use social networking. You could use it to keep your friends in the loop on what’s up in your life. If you and your limited group of friends only use one network — say, Facebook — like that, then there’d never be a need for tools like Buffer. You can afford to be authentic, posting only when you really want to post, and everything will just work. You’ll likely wonder what the rest of us keep complaining about with social networking.
But odds are that’s not enough. We want to share ourselves with the world, and our buddy list isn’t enough. Plus, our interests change, and we want to make new connections, and increasingly in this global, flatter economy we have to market ourselves.
Ah, goodness. Just give up and embrace it. You can be authentic in DMs and emails and private messages — that’s where my real friend conversations take place, in 900 word treatises. Facebook, even, is my censored authentic “personal” self, where I share pictures of picnics and vacations, and (very) occasionally write updates, but sharing my tech articles and promoting myself makes no sense there. It does, however, make sense on Twitter and App.net, where I’m trying to build new connections and broadcast myself.
Your public updates can be authentic if you’re treating your network as just your friend group. That’s Facebook, for me — and even still, it’s filled with people I don’t really know, but whatever. It’s where family and people that know me in real life are, so it works for that. But if you’re trying to broadcast yourself, trying to share with the world (or a thousand followers), nothing’s really authentic anyhow. Embrace the broadcast mode — that’s all there really is.
So Buffer.
And so I came around to the idea of Buffer, enough that called it “the best social networking tool today” in my Web.AppStorm review. I wasn’t joking, either: if there’s one social media tool you need to post to a number of social network accounts across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and App.net daily, then Buffer’s the one tool that beats them all. It simplifies things by letting you broadcast posts on a schedule to all the networks you use, without taking more than a few seconds of your time. That’s valuable.
I still think you shouldn’t use it indiscriminately, just to post witty quotes and other filler content. But when you’ve got something to share, and want to make sure all of your followers see it, why not use the best tool for the job? Scheduling posts is just another tool, one you should put to use if it makes sense for you, and one that can free your time for better things than worrying about whether your followers see what you wrote. It’s a tool I’m glad I started using.
Originally published on September 10th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 5
As a kid, for some reason, I’d add up the combined computing power of all of the computers in our house as a mental game when trying to fall asleep. My own computer, a 1996-era Compaq laptop, had only a 75Mhz CPU and 700Mb of storage, which paled in comparison to the 500Mhz CPU and 20Gb hard drive in the family desktop computer, or the 2Ghz CPU and 40Gb hard drive in my dad’s laptop. At that time, even adding in random mp3 players and flash drives added a significant amount to our family’s total digital storage.
Those numbers are rather quaint today, when we’re carrying around 1.3Ghz ARM processors in our pockets. ARM processors are so common now, they’re among the world’s most-used products, pushing even McDonalds down the popularity ladder. Storage is still at a premium today, thanks to the price increase when you jump to flash memory, but now that there’s a 128Gb microSD card, surely our phones will start having as much storage as a laptop soon.
Computing’s everywhere. It’s rather staggering to think of how much computing power is around you at any given moment. Look around on any mass transit, and there’s almost always at least one computing device—with at least a 1Ghz CPU and 4Gb storage—per person. There’s likely far more than that, even, if just 1/10th of the passengers are also carrying a laptop or tablet. Suddenly my old game feels a lot more fun—imagine what type of supercomputer could be built from the computing devices in a train at a given time.
It struck me most vividly several months ago, after climbing 1,237 stairs up a mountain to see a viewpoint and temple in southern Thailand. It’s torture climbing that many stairs—and almost worse to have to go back down—until you stand in amazement looking at this temple that someone carried bricks, stone, and concrete up this mountain to build. That’s quite the marvel of human ingenuity and determination. And yet, on the top of that mountain, I counted no less than 5 iPhones, 2 iPads, and several other smartphones I couldn’t recognize. There were, as likely as anything, 10 ARM CPUs up there on that mountain, all tagging their photos with GPS and straining for a signal (and yes, there was 3G all the way up there, even if it was faint). Less than a decade ago, it’d have been odd to have any computers up there—who carries a laptop on a nearly vertical hike up a mountain?—and yet, today, it’d be odd to be anywhere without seeing a computing device. That’s as much a marvel of human ingenuity as the temple itself.
We’re carrying around computers in our pockets, to the tops of mountains and the bottom of the sea (at least, in Apple’s latest iPad commercials—but if there’s people selling those iPad cases and accessories, there’s got to be a market for it). There’s so much power there, so much potential.
And yet, look around, and those mini computers are being used to chat, check Facebook, and play Candy Crush. The usefulness of the average app is so low, even Jeff Atwood—the guy who started StackExchange—is questioning the reasoning behind building most apps. The potential is there, but it’s wasted by most.
There’s insanely powerful software for smartphones. Look at the photo editing features in VSCOcam and so many other photo apps, the OCR in Prizmo, the full Office-style features in the iWork apps, the beautiful instruments in GarageBand and the many other music apps, the writing and scripting environment in Editorial, the math power in PocketCAS, and even the offline reading environments of iBooks and Kindle and Instapaper. Download these apps, then go offline, and your device’s CPU will be doing its own work to crunch your data, no server required. As ridiculous as it may sound, even a spreadsheet can be a powerful tool on the go, making it easy to crunch numbers and, say, comparison shop. Maybe there should be a better dedicated app, but the spreadsheet is still quite a killer app.
Most apps out there are pointless. Plenty are just repackaged websites that would be far better as a standalone website anyhow. Plenty more are only an updated version of the old CD-rom demos and catalogs that were more useful as a frisbee than anything.
But we’re carrying around real computers, and it’s about time to treat them as such. Call the best smartphone apps “software” if you must, to differentiate it from the lite junk apps, but there’s no reason those fast CPUs in our pockets are going to waste. It’s a shame to think how many of the devices around us are literally useless to their owners if the internet goes down.
That’s why quality apps are worth paying for—they make your devices do more, make that glass and metal worth more than it’d be on its own. Phones and tablets aren’t dumb terminals, and it’s time apps stopped treating them that way. They’re computers in their own rights, and deserve the powerful software that proves that worth.
When you’re evaluating new apps, that’s the criteria you should test it by. Will this app make my device do more on its own, in a way that’ll actively improve my life? If so, it’s entirely worth paying for. If not, you’re likely better off ignoring it. There’s quality, powerful software for your iPad and iPhone and Mac, enough that it’s a shame seeing how many people stick with the stock apps and some web-powered free apps like Facebook and their favorite chat app and whatever in-app purchase ripoff game is the most popular that day. You’ve paid for a smart device, now give it the software that’ll make it powerful for you. There’s high-quality productivity apps, unique tools, and beautifully creative games that cost up-front, but that’ll make your app something someone would want to show off in a commercial, something that’d inspire someone else to buy that device. Few people would buy an iPhone just for its built-in camera app or email app—and yet, they take their new device home and manage to miss the wealth of quality software for it that can really do stuff.
There’s a common thread in the apps Apple shows off in its new iPad commercial: they’re all powerful software that work directly on the devices without needing an internet connection. They’re making those iPads be used as computers, not dumb terminals. After all, an app that requires a server would be of little use on a windmill in the ocean—or while diving under the ocean. If you’re going to take a computer up a mountain or to the sea, after all, it might as well be a bit useful.
Those apps—nay, software—that are powerful enough to help you get work done and improve your life? They’re the ones I’ll take the time to write about here. The rest are merely a distraction, junk that’s filling up the App Store and making it harder to find the truly powerful and great software that developers labor to craft.
Ever since Google killed Google Reader last year, I’ve felt uneasy about using Google’s services. That uneasiness hasn’t been enough to push me away from Gmail and Google Docs, but it did convince me to move Techinch’s RSS feed off Feedburner soon after Google Reader shut down. After all, if they killed their RSS reader, what’s to keep them from killing off their RSS syndication tool, too?
But then, sans-Feedburner, it’s next-to-impossible to know how many people are subscribing to Techinch. Maybe that’s an unimportant stat, but it’s fun to know that people are reading what you write. And so, last week, I signed up for FeedPress to get stats on Techinch’s RSS feed, among other things. That requires a little .htaccess tweaking, which is always slightly unnerving for me since I have the uncanny ability to mess something up every time I open that file, but it went fine the first time. Then, once everything looked good, I just had to get a FeedPress Premium account so I could keep everything on my domain to make moving away from FeedPress—if such a thing was ever needed—possible without any pain.
That’s when I managed to mess stuff up (and so, to everyone who subscribes via RSS, sorry if you got some random articles from a different site in your reader today. That was my fault, and it’s fixed now). I couldn’t leave good enough alone, and wait for more time to get things working.
My feed worked before, and it worked after the initial redirect to FeedPress. It would have been fine to wait. And yet, there’s this crazy, eternal drive to tweak stuff. They say plumber’s pipes always leak. For them, it might be because they’re too busy to fix their own, but for geeks, our problem is typically that we can’t leave good enough alone. All’s not well until everything’s perfect—but it should be readily apparent that there’s no such thing as perfect in a fast-changing industry like ours. You can eternally tweak, but there will always be something else to tweak.
So stop. Agile development and rapid iteration and constant progression is good, but it’s so easy to take it too far. If your Mac is working, just get your work done and don’t go trying to tweak something to make it better. Same for your site, and your to-do list, and your everything else you’re tempted to tweak with when you’re bored. When it’s time to actually improve your site, set aside a block of time to do that, and just do that. But stop with the constant tweaking. You’re only going to drive yourself mad.
Or at least I’m going to. Which is why I’m trying to stop, and thought you might do well with the reminder to do so, yourself.
I'm a tech writer and editor, who remotely from Thailand online for Envato, an Australia-based company. And it's great. The only problem is, my job title is inherently confusing to anyone who's not geeky. Say you're a writer, and people assume you've published novels (now that'd be nice, but...). Say you're an editor, and people either assume you work in a newspaper (not bad), or stare blankly. Try to say you're a tech writer, and it simply doesn't make sense. Perhaps this all wouldn't be so hard in an English-speaking country—I can easily get by saying I'm a writer in English, but anything beyond that still tends to break down—but in Thai, it just doesn't work.
The simple question of "What's your job?" has, for so long, been the most annoying part of meeting new people for quite some time. That's ridiculous.
And then, finally, it hit me a couple months back: when asked, just say I "work in IT." Everyone gets that—even old people. It conveys that I work with tech, sounds like a real, respectable job (especially without any published books to back up that "writer" title), and even makes people not surprised when I say I work remotely. That one tiny change to the way I refer to my job has simplified my life way more than it seemingly should have. It was one of my best life decisions of the past few months.
Seth Godin recently asked the question on his blog "Should you teach the world a new word?" He discussed his own challenges with finding a job title for himself that didn't cause confusion, something that obviously struck close to home for me. He then expanded the idea to naming products, careers, and anything else, saying:
"Your job might be like no other one like it in the world, but that doesn't mean you need a new job title. ...if you can happily succeed while filling an existing niche, it's far easier than insisting that people invent a new category for you.
It doesn't matter if you're right, it matters if you are understood."
Isn't that the truth? Being understood—getting our point across—is the whole point of language and communication and titles. And yet, it's easy to want to call your thing something 100% new. Who wouldn't want the world's most unique and impressive job title? Who wouldn't want their app to add new words to the vernacular?
That's preposterous. There's enough real words out there to describe what you're doing with out having to invent something new. So simplify. Use normal words the way they were intended, and make what you're saying as clear as possible to everyone. It'll simplify what you're saying for others, and will actually simplify your own life, too.
Life's a lot easier when you're not having to explain everything you say a second time.
...though if developers keep using real words for their new app names, it's going to start getting harder to say anything that doesn't have a tech double-meaning...
There's a little app called IFTTT that can change your life.
Tech can get pretty tedious, and if anything, it's getting more tedious instead of less. We take pictures with our phones, then edit them in Instagram where they're automatically shared on Twitter and Facebook, but then would have to upload them again if we wanted to share them on another network. Then, we save those pictures to Dropbox or back them up to our computers so they don't get lost. And that's just for pictures of your lunch.
There's no need to wade through countless junk emails or have to duplicate everything you share online to make sure all of your friends can see it. You shouldn't check Etsy or Craigslist daily to see if the thing you want to buy is available, and you shouldn't even have to ask Siri if it's going to rain. Instead, you should enlist one of the coolest free tools to help you: IFTTT.
Launched in beta back in 2010, IFTTT is the ultimate simple automation service built around a simple sentence: if this then that. If this thing happens, do this.
Stop for a moment and think of all the things you could do based on that one phrase. If it's going to rain, send me an SMS. If I tag my grandma in a photo, email it to her since she doesn't use Facebook. If my package is out for delivery, email me. And the list goes on and on.
Whether you've already been relying on IFTTT or haven't heard of it before now, chances are there's more ways you can put it to use that you haven't thought of yet. It's simple to use — you literally just pick the thing that happens first, and then pick what happens if that first thing happens. Set it, and forget about it. There's a brand-new free iPhone app for IFTTT that lets you use your iOS photos, contacts, and reminders as IFTTT this triggers to let you do more with the data on your phone, in addition to the stuff you can already do with it online. But even online, IFTTT is insanely valuable. Here's some of the best ways to put it to use:
Backup All Your Stuff
Even if you keep your computer and phone backed up, you're likely not backing up all the stuff you share online. Sure, much of it is inconsequential, but you'd likely want to keep at least some of the photos you've put on Facebook and Instagram if they happened to accidentally lose them. And the great articles you read in Pocket will quickly be tough to find if you don't have a place you're keeping them after they're archived.
With IFTTT, though, none of this has to be difficult to do. You can set it to backup all of your stuff to Dropbox, automatically, so your stuff will be protected and you'll never even have to think about it. You could have it save your contacts, archived articles, and bookmarks to Evernote, all the pictures you're uploaded and tagged in everywhere to Dropbox, and all the emails you send to your significant other archived as PDF. You could even backup all of your social media updates to Evernote, so you can go back and see everything you've written online.
Sure, you might not want all of the stuff, but why make yourself have to think about what's really important? Just set it all to backup, and then forget about it.
Social Networking Without Being Social
Social networking can get quite frustrating when your friends are spread about between a half-dozen different services. Plus, you might want to post somewhere else entirely — on your blog, perhaps — but you know no-one will even see what you write without it being on Facebook and Twitter.
Here's what you have to do. Figure out where you want to post by default, then use IFTTT to publish it everywhere. There's never a reason to have to copy and paste to post to Twitter, App.net, and Facebook at the same time — let IFTTT do the dirty work for you. Just set up a recipe to post to the other networks whenever you post to your default network, and you're good. Better yet, just write on your blog, then have IFTTT share that post on all of your networks. And to save just a bit more time, you can have it change your profile pictures on all of your social networks when you change it on one of them.
Then, for good measure, you can have IFTTT backup your blog posts to Dropbox or Google Docs or Evernote. Or all 3 — the more, the merrier, right?
Quit Talking to Siri
Siri's great, really. But why should you have to ask it what the weather is, or what today's stock prices are?
Instead, use IFTTT to tell you when there's news that's relevant to you, when stock prices on your stocks change over a certain amount, when it's going to rain, and more. The latter two are simple: there's built-in weather and stock/currency triggers that you can directly. With News, it's a tad tougher since Twitter locked down on IFTTT's API usage, but you can still use it to monitor news RSS feeds for certain topics (or turn Twitter into an RSS feed and use that in IFTTT), or follow @breakingnews on App.net and use IFTTT to let you know when stuff happens in your country.
You can even have it remind you when you're supposed to be doing stuff — have it SMS you when you have an appointment, or turn on your coffee maker in the morning with a Belkin WeMo. Combine it with your email and an app like Mint or your bank's own alerts, and you could have it SMS you when you spend over a certain amount of money. Make your budget go even further with alerts of sales on Craigslist near you, without having to waste any of your time looking for them. And, of all things, you could have it keep track of all these little things in Evernote, giving you yet another backup on a part of your life that you would have never thought of backing up, but that just might be interesting going forward.
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IFTTT won't automate everything in your life, but it sure can simplify a ton of the tedious little tasks that take up time and keep you from being productive. And it can even help you know stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. It's hard to imagine living without it once you've got it integrated in your life.
You can check out the Most Popular recipes on IFTTT's own site, or see what Hacker News and Quora users are using it for. Or just think of what you need to automate — your inbox, the news, your backups — and try to put it to use on your own. You might be surprised how much this one little tool can keep you productive by taking care of more of those little frustrating things for you, automatically.
Originally published on July 15th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 5
It’s just a screen. A rather locked down screen. Let’s change that.
The TV was everyone’s favorite thing to say should be disrupted, until watches became the Next Big Thing™. Steve Jobs famously called their Apple TV set-top box a “hobby”, but that didn’t keep away the annual rumors that Apple was eventually going to make their own TV. But it’s not that surprising that Apple hasn’t gone for it yet; the road to a fully disrupted TV is littered with dead products and failed dreams.
It’s hard to look at the so-called Smart TVs today and think that we’ve arrived. If anything, they’d remind you more of the original Tablet PCs with clunky software that doesn’t feel like it’s been designed specifically for that device. The TV needs an iPad-style revolution.
But what would such a revolution look like? For that, you’ll need to take a stroll down the dark alleys of the internet. No, you won’t need Tor, but you will need to look beyond the likes of PirateBay to the streaming sites that list every movie and TV show imaginable. For there, just one search and a few clicks through ads later, you can instantly watch anything you want. The quality varies, and you’ll occasionally find something recorded in the wrong language, but that’ll be easily forgotten after you’ve started watching anything you can think of seconds after searching for it.
Now, combine that with full-length HD movie downloads for the stuff you want to keep around without the DRM restrictions that make movie downloads today so cantankerous — something the likes of PirateBay or a couple downloads and your Bluray player can provide today — and you’ve got a solid glimpse of what the future of movies and TV shows could be. And you can’t reinvent TV without first solving the content issue itself.
We’re 6 Years Behind
Digital music used to be every bit as frustrating as digital video is today. If you had an iPod and bought your songs from the iTunes Store, or if you had any device and bought CDs and ripped them yourself, you were fine. Otherwise, you’d have to pick from an excruciatingly limited selection of music that’d work with your device or jump through hoops (like burning DRMed songs to a CD and ripping them) to get songs from iTunes to play wherever you wanted. It was a mess.
Compare that to today, where every digital song you buy online or from iTunes is DRM free and will work from any device on the planet, and there’s an incredible number of streaming services that’ll let you listen to as much music as you want with a subscription. It’s a world of difference, one prompted by Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Music” post on Apple.com. Today, there’s no excuse to pirate music — it’s simpler to stream it online or buy a copy from iTunes, and you can use the copy you buy anywhere and back it up however you want.
We’ve solved the digital music issue, so why not solve the movie issue? We’ve got a partial solution today, one very similar to the music issues of a half-decade ago. You can buy almost any movie or TV show you can think of from iTunes, but will have to play it back on a Mac or PC, iOS device, or Apple TV. Or, you can stream most TV shows and a number of movies from services like Netflix, the one place it’s easier to go legit than to pirate. Broadcast TV — say, CNN and sports — are hit-and-miss, some easy to watch online and others only available if you also have a cable subscription.
What we really need is DRM free video purchases, and reasonable streaming/rental options that have everything we’d want to watch. If Netflix had every movie and TV show ever made ready to watch in a click — and was global, without any location restrictions — I’m certain they’d be able to easily charge double or triple their current subscription price. And if iTunes HD movie downloads were DRM free so you could play them directly on any TV sans-HDCP or burn them to a disk to play at Grandma’s house or watch them on an Android phone or Microsoft Surface, digital video purchases would make a lot more sense. Purchasing — or legit streaming — would be simpler than pirating.
Broadcast TV and cable stations would still have to have an future-proofed online solution, of course. There’s still stupendous to turning on a channel and watching whatever’s on, without thinking about it, and that’s lost with digital video where you have to pick what you want to watch. Plus, you can’t switch news and sports to simple episode streams the way you can chop up AMC and HBO’s content, so we still would need live streams. But that should be simple enough — after all, online streaming video is nothing new. Do it in an open standard, on its own subscription or perhaps bundled in a Netflix-like service, and make it fully global, and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work.
Put all of that together — streaming video services that have extensive catalogs, DRM-free downloads, and streaming channels, all without geoblocking — and you’d have the media part figured out for the future of TV. We’re at least half-way there, what with Netflix (and their new ventures into original content), the iTunes/Amazon/Google Play stores (and Vimeo’s new shot at streaming indie movies and selling and rather innovative sports streaming that lets you pick angles and replays to rewatch — but we need to go the rest of the way before we can really have the future of TV. It might take forever for the studios to catch up, but it’s beyond time to make the changes.
The App Store Potential
But then, limiting the TV to just video seems ridiculous in the age of the App Store. After all, a TV is just a big screen. And yet, we’ve been far more creative with the other screens in our lives — hello, computers and tablets and phones — than the TV. Surely once we have media solved, we can do a lot more with the TV — both for videos and for things we haven’t even thought of yet — than Smart TVs of today offer.
Now, TVs have far fewer pixels than your iPad, so they’re definitely not going to be where you want to do your reading — even though reading apps have become one of the main killer apps on the iPad. One might think that the TV screen would be great to fill with widgets showing the weather and stocks and your latest emails, but we already know how horrible TV news looks now with multiple tickers and info-panels. Throwing an API at the big screen is surely not enough, or otherwise the smart TV interfaces we’ve seen so far would have fared better.
What we need is someone with a brand new idea on how to use the TV screen. Not something out of Minority Report or the many “tech of the future” videos put out by Microsoft and others, but something that’s a new idea for how you can put a TV to use today. See, no one seemed to think of ways normal people could put a tablet to use in their lives, so when Apple made the iPad they had to make their own best-in-class apps for it, from iBooks and the built-in browser and email apps to iWork and Garageband, to showcase what it was capable of. Someone’s got to do that for the TV before the whole idea of a smart TV makes any sense. We need a killer idea for what a TV can be used for, and then the tech to bring that to the TV.
I happen to think Geckoboard and other status board web apps for teams are one of the most innovative uses of a large screen that we’ve seen in a while. Perhaps everyone doesn’t need something like that for their personal use, but it’s an idea, at least. Then, there’s the oldest living room tech, game consoles, that still are the best alternate use of TVs to date. There’s got to be more ways to put the largest screen in your house to use, though, and someone’s got to come out with an incredible new idea that makes the way we think of TV today seem quaint by comparison.
Until then, the TV will continue to be a video and game screen. And that’s fine, really, especially if the studios would hurry up and get everything online. But I’m looking forward to see someone who will revolutionize the TV the way Apple did the smartphone and tablet. It might be Apple, or it might be someone else. But without an incredible idea of something new the TV can be used for, there’s little more an extra set-top box can do for us today — we’ve all got the tech already to make DRM-free video and streaming services work on the TV.
Somebody’s going to figure this out, and it’ll seem like it should have been obvious all along in hindsight. But today, there’s nothing on the market that’s the real future of the TV, aside from the first steps of Netflix and others to free TV and movies from the constraints of cable and disks. We’re waiting and ready — someone needs to surprise us and deliver the future of TV.
Originally published on September 10th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 5
There’s not enough time to learn everything you want to. It’s just impossible.
So go make stuff.
I know, it sounds like an insanely backwards idea. But it’s the best way to learn.
Case in point: Jennifer Dewalt. She decided she wanted to learn to code, and to do so decided to build 180 websites in 180 days, armed with nothing but Google. Her first sites were basic, but she worked up and each day improved her craft. She built everything from basic games to to-do list apps, using everything from CSS animation and Instagram APIs to Backbone and Node.js, all without taking a single coding class. Her school was trial and error, combined with Google, GitHub, and StackOverflow. Instead of regretting that she didn’t know how to code, she quite literally just did it and made real stuff along the way.
Now, her example isn’t enough to prove anything. There’s theories galore on how much you need to practice to master a craft, everything from Malcolm Gladwell’s theory in Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to perfect a skill to Josh Kaufman’s book that says the first 20 hours are the most important for learning anything. But both of those ideas include the same thing: practice. Practice makes perfect, says the old saw, and while it may not be true, you’re at the very least going to learn a lot more with practice than you will doing nothing.
It’s a lot easier to read yet another simple trick that’ll help you do what you want to do, but a lot less rewarding. So go make stuff instead. You’ll mess up, but that’s the point: you learn from the great old school of hard knocks. And hey, start small: you don’t want those knocks to be too hard. But there’s no better way to start running than to try to avoid falling down.
*****
We decry the notion that tablets are only for consumption, not creation, but then the most popular uses of phones, tablets, computers, and the very internet itself is for consumption. We watch viral videos, read rehashed news stories, upvote funny comments — we consume content. That’s what tech ends up really being about. The only guy spending time wisely on Reddit is the one doing an AMA to promote his work; for everyone else, it’s almost only passive consumption of brain junk food.
Fuss about Instagram filters all you want, but at least it’s got more people than ever trying to capture moments artistically — creating something of value, at the very least to their own selves. That’s not bad.
Blogging, they say, is a dying art. Don’t let it die. Go write something, however small. Share your photos. Strive to improve. Try to take a slightly better picture every day — don’t go buy a new camera or new apps, but use what you have and improve your skills a bit at a time, and publish your efforts. Don’t read a book on coding — go try to tweak the CSS of your blog’s theme. It’s the perfect test ground where nothing can really go wrong (and if you’re that worried, go make another blog just to break.). Change some numbers here, refresh, see what broke. Now fix it. If you can’t fix it, Google the problem, and then fix it. Now go break something else. Then write another blog post, but break out the thesaurus and use words you’ve never used before. Use different sentence structures. Break English, and fix it, too.
*****
If I ever have kids, I plan give the Lego company a ton of money — but I don’t plan to buy any of their branded kits. Instead, I’ll get a ton of the raw original Legos and a table of green sheet Lego board, and let my kids go to town. No, I’m not being a cheapskate. I just think the kits are as dumb as the next toy set, and the plain sets of raw Legos are one of the best ways ever to promote making stuff and learning by doing.
Putting a kit together by following the instructions is just like putting IKEA furniture together as an adult: you’ll feel like you’re accomplishing something, like you’re making something, when really you’re just doing some really active consumption. You don’t really have to think (that is, once you’ve figured out what the diagrams mean — that, admittedly, can sometimes be a true puzzle).
Making something new, though — that’s a whole different game. You stare at the little blocks, and imagine what they could be if you put them together just so. But there’s never enough of the right pieces, so you’ll have to improvise. And then, your perfect dinosaur’s head is far too heavy and falls over, and you’ll have to improvise again. Trial and error. Learning by doing.
Then you grow up, and by the time you’ve put your IKEA furniture together, you feel pretty good that it’s done, and sit down to consumer some more content. Why not make your own shelves from raw wood and screws instead? Yeah, don’t put your valuable stuff on them at first, until you’re sure they’re sturdy, but I bet you can do it. And if not — if you hit a snag after you started — you’ll be able to find the answers. Just don’t look for them beforehand.
There’s something to planning ahead, counting the cost, and thinking before doing. All very important. But that’s not something you need to think about when you’re trying to learn. You’re either busy being born or busy dying, as Steve Jobs liked to quote Bob Dylan. So keep being born, reinventing yourself, learning. It’s messy. Life’s messy. But you’ll sure learn from it.
So go make stuff. Over and Over. Every day. Keep making stuff, something small, every day. Oh the places you'll go, oh the things you'll learn. You’ll improve your skills, a tiny bit at a time, without even thinking about it. You’ll grow. You’ll become an expert, accidentally.
The next time you think “I wish I knew how to do that”, go do it. You’ll learn a lot trying. And you’ll make stuff.
Originally published on October 8th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 6
