Trust the process – Increment: Teams (Increment)

Though they run on a mixture of paper and lore, effective editorial organizations ship like clockwork. Can engineering teams learn from their enduring processes?

This is a very interesting take on the work increment. In automotive, it works much more like the media side than the software side, with hard-and-fast deadlines
Rebble with a Cause: How Pebble Watches Were Granted an Amazing Afterlife by an author (ifixit.com)

In the early summer of 2018, you could buy an Apple Watch with built-in GPS, wireless payments, and speakers that buzz water out after a swim. Meanwhile, Katharine Berry was hustling to keep five-year-old watches with black and white screens alive.
Berry had worked for Pebble, maker of the first not…

Putting the Soul in Console by an author (Anil Dash)

Playdate, the upcoming indie handheld gaming console from venerable software publisher Panic, is really important. But if you don’t know the history of where the little company behind this little device comes from, it might be hard to understand why this isn’t just another random gadget like you might see

spending the morning troubleshooting windows XP blue screen of death in the year of our Lord 2017 AD
Since the advent of broadband internet, and even a bit before, “piracy” has been a problem. I use quotes because there is probably a better term that evokes illicit copying rather than Captain Hook. It is one of those problems that is supposed to get the same reaction from anyone. Asking a congressman to justify almost anything they do yields the response “because ______.” Only one of the following reasons is acceptable to fill in that blank:

  •  Terrorists
  •  The children
  •  Piracy

Why is our defense budget so high? Because terrorists. Why do we need to take away all the guns/arm all the teachers? Because the children. Why can’t we unlock our cell phones? Because Nazis… I mean, because piracy.

No one is learning how wrong-headed that is right now more than EA. They bought and resurrected one of the most beloved and storied game franchises of all time, Sim City. It released this week, and was purported to be fantastic. The majority of the people who bought it, though, apparently would not know. EA designed this game to require a constant connection to their servers, even though it is essentially a single player experience. They claim it is for a social aspect, so people can share cities or something, but let’s be honest: it is for piracy. EA wants your $50-60, and wants to make damn sure that you can’t play if you didn’t pay. (Also hilarious: they are not offering refunds.)

In an ironic twist, many who did pay still can’t play. EA has been working on adding servers all week to support demand, to no avail. Rather than updating the game to remove the requirement of connectivity, they have decided to save their precious game-breaking DRM by disabling the actual game features that require the internet, like leaderboards. Kotaku has billed this fiasco “Sim City Disaster Watch.” Polygon, who initally gave the game a review score of 9.5/10, has lowered its score to a 4. I can’t say it better than Chris Kluwe:

 

The other end of the spectrum is Game of Thrones (or it is a different spectrum, not sure). HBO could care less that it is the most pirated TV show for a couple years running, because it gets people talking about Game of Thrones. However, in their case, it is more about necessity than stealing. They offer no other avenues of purchase besides subscribing to their network (on top of a cable subscription, in the age of cable cutting).

Really, there has to be some middle ground here somewhere. A way for a company to take my money in exchange for a good product. Capitalism, maybe?

via Tumblr http://craigpilcher.tumblr.com/post/44865233867

Tweetdeck Android
Tweetdeck Android

Twitter dug itself into a deeper hole with its power users last night when it axed the non-web versions of Tweetdeck. It is somehow both totally uncalled for and long overdue. Twitter purchased Tweetdeck in mid-2011, when it was easily the best mobile Twitter client and arguably the best Facebook client at the time as well. As the picture illustrates, Twitter updated Tweetdeck only once, to remove its native picture sharing service, and it has languished in the Google Play Store ever since. In that time, Twitter has moved to a newer, locked-down API and has a new official app on most platforms. However, Tweetdeck arguably still has a better interface, as well as far more features.

I cannot make sense of this. I don’t think I would be mad if they integrated Tweetdeck’s columns into the default app’s interface, because it would greatly improve tracking conversations. Twitter has list functionality, but on mobile they are buried so far down they are practically useless. And why did Twitter sit on this app for a year and a half if they were just going to shut it down? They could have updated it, or just removed Facebook from it if that was the issue. Pushing an inferior version of your own product just to get people to look at ads is not the way to win the tech crowd.

Anyway, they already pushed me over to app.net, where I am hoping that someone will resurrect the Tweetdeck client in spirit.

I finally uninstalled the Facebook app on my phone about two weeks ago, mostly because it sucks. I checked back a few nights ago via the browser, and I had not missed much of anything (except an old friend getting engaged – congrats!). The next logical step is to stop sharing things on Facebook. For the better part of a year, I have prided myself on doing my sharing almost exclusively through third-party avenues (because I want control over my data, and I am a social network hipster), and the only step left is to stop.

Why do I go back, even to share? Because everyone else is there. Facebook has been around for eons in Internet Time. In the beginning, it functioned more like an actual “face book”, which people did not update daily. However, it was still people you actually knew and wanted to keep up with. Those roots continue to reinforce themselves over time as you build a digital archive of yourself, but what is left is a gargantuan filter bubble. It is much harder to break out of a filter bubble of people you know IRL, which Facebook knows. That is why the point of the site was lost somewhere between the immediate, actual, meaningful connections and “Your friends like Diet Coke, you should too!” (Of course, this could all change in a week.)

The laundry list of things Facebook actually does is pretty impressive until you consider that several other places offer the same service, usually better. General status updates work very well on Twitter; if it is longer than 140 characters, get a blog. Dropbox, Flickr, and Picasa all offer picture storage and sharing, with the added bonus of export. Instant messaging can be done with GTalk, iMessage, or the mother of all internet communique: email. Link sharing and other content curation are Tumblr’s forte. Foursquare has check-ins locked down. Personal moments meant to be shared with only close friends and family can be set up easily in Path or Google+. In fact, G+ does pretty much all of this, and shares it more intuitively than Facebook.

Lifehacker beat me to it, but the way Facebook has adapted their advertising is annoying, albeit nefariously intuitive. Ads themselves are not all that bad. The service has to make money somehow. Google is basically an advertising company, but aside from the search results page it is generally unobtrusive, and the service is good enough that it warrants forgiveness. Almost all the services mentioned are ad-supported, and the alternative to that is paying your own way with something like App.net.

So, for those visiting from my Facebook link, welcome to my page. You may see it pop up occasionally on my FB feed in the future, but independence has to start somewhere. One last cleanup of various outdated likes and other personal details, and I will be on my way. This is a break, not a full-on deletion (because how else will I occasionally use Spotify?). And if they change and improve somehow, I will gladly eat these words.

via Tumblr http://craigpilcher.tumblr.com/post/44081659815/thisistheverge-after-reaching-twitter-token