Drama vs Real Life

Derek Sivers summarizes Kurt Vonnegut on drama. With charts (but no chartjunk).

Chartjunk

Interesting blog about bad charts: Junk Charts.

This is obviously inspired by “chartjunk,” from Edward Tufte’s classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. If for some reason you’re not familiar with this book, go read it! There’s tons of useful advice on how to present numbers so they can be understood.

Dogfooding

Raymond Chen often writes about Microspeak — jargon that shows up at Microsoft.

I hadn’t realized that “dogfooding” was now a verb (though Wikipedia concurs), but the usage in the Office 2010 Engineering blog just seems wrong. “For those of you who are dogfooding the Technical Preview build, thanks for all of the great feedback you’ve sent us.” But, the phrase is actually “Eating one's own dog food!” It does not mean beta testing! The author of the blog may be dogfooding, but those in the blog’s audience presumably do not work in the Office 2010 group. I imagine they are actually users of the Technical Preview. They are not eating their own dogfood. They are eating the blog author’s dogfood. This may or may not need a colorful term, but it would need to be a different term.

When I use Opal, I am eating my own dogfood (because I’m the developer). But the people who help me test prerelease versions are not.

Take Back the Beep

David Pogue writes of the nuisance voice mail prompts the cell phone companies have inflicted on us in order to increase airtime usage. I run into it most often calling my wife, who has a Sprint phone. Luckily they have posted how to disable the prompt I hear, thanks to Pogue’s campaign:

“To turn off caller instructions aka "TAKE BACK THE BEEP"

“Dial into your voicemail accout (sic), select 3 for personal options, select 2 for greetings, select 1 for main greeting, select 3 for add or remove caller instructions, then press 2 for do not play instructions.”

(Of note: Apple wouldn’t let AT&T inflict this on iPhone accounts.)

Pogue now has a followup to his first column.

Less Flash!

I’d been using Click to Flash for some time, but didn’t realize there has been a lot of improvement (I think I had version 1.0, and it’s now up to 1.4.2).

Click To Flash is a simple plug-in for Safari that handles all Flash content — by not playing it until you click. This means you can visit web sites without running a handful of programs masquerading as ads. The problem is that many (if not most) Flash apps are extremely greedy in their use of the processor. This means the computer heats up, which means the fan runs louder. In fact, Elise’s machine appears to heat up to the point that it abruptly shuts down to prevent damage. And if you’re running on batteries, you run down the charge faster. Click To Flash simply shows the word “Flash” instead of running the app.

But what if you want to actually play a Flash game? That’s where the “Click to” comes in. Click on the blocked Flash content and it loads and runs.

Like I said, I had an older version that was functional, but doesn’t offer the ease of use for white listing sites, or a number of tweaks (such as using H.264 video on YouTube). I don’t know how I missed the update. You shouldn’t.

The Intention-Behavior Gap

I remember telling my friend Al Tommervik I had a great idea for a game, and him replying that he didn’t want to hear it, otherwise I’d be less likely to complete it. (This was a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure the game was one I did end up completing perhaps 10 years later: King of Dragon Pass.)

I’ve always appreciated that advice, and it’s one reason I don’t talk a whole lot about software I have in development. I just learned that there’s research that shows that people who don’t announce their goals are more likely to achieve them. According to an abstract of four recent studies, “intentions that had been noticed by other people were translated into action less intensively than those that had been ignored.”

So unless something is imminent, I won’t be mentioning it here, as fun as it might be.

iPhone App Store

Digging through some old notes, I found this link:

According to Anita Hamilton in Time, Apple’s upcoming App Store will be “anything but a bargain.”

She wrote that in July 2008, and since then the App Store has obviously turned out to be an amazing bargain. Seems like almost all apps are $0.99 or free, which is kind of a shame (since I’d like to sell apps). I’m still hoping Apple figures out a way that premium games can sell for a premium price. Right now there’s no differentiation in the App Store. I do see a few of the top 100 paid apps at $4.99 or higher, but most of those are associated with an existing brand (Sims 3, Tiger Woods, Tetris). Games that sell for $19.99 on Windows or Mac are just $0.99 on iPhone (Sally’s Salon).

As others have written, it’s because the easiest way to market on the App Store is to price yourself less than others. I’m not a marketer, but it seems like this is exactly the opposite of the way Apple operates. They sell better than average products for a price that reflects their value.