A few days ago someone, I have no idea who to credit because Twitter search is a clusterfuck, who I follow on Twitter mentioned Instacast. It’s fantastic.

Instacast gives you a native iOS app that is built around one thing: subscribing and listening to podcasts. It’s a great example of a focused app that does one thing and does it really damn well. Best of all it’s not connected to my iTunes library. My podcasts now update every time I open Instacast. No need to be chained to iTunes.

The player is also tuned specifically for podcasts. The built-in Music app places a volume slider at the bottom, Instacast has a time slider. It still has all the necessary things like AirPlay and local caching.

Overall it’s just a really well-polished app. I’m excited to get back into podcasts now that they’re more easily updated right on my iPhone.

UI Gold

A nice interface doesn’t make up for a sub par app. But, when you start with a well designed app like The Hit List a gorgeous interface really makes the app shine. Those small touches I mentioned in the earlier post are just part of the story though.

For example, task entry in the iPhone app is a thing of brilliance.

Not only is the adding interface simple but once you start typing one task you get that slick plus button in the bottom right. Want to add another task right away? It’s just a tap away.

This thoughtfulness carries over into the desktop app in more ways than I have time to mention. One of my favorite features though is the ability to view any task as a card.

Any task can be viewed like this and you’ll see the title, tags, date information, and a totally free form note field. I use this view way more than I first thought I would. In some ways it’s replaced how I use Notational Velocity. If I have a quick idea for a blog post I can just create a new task and start writing. It’s a great way to just capture information for later.

These two features allow me to really get the most out of The Hit List. I can get right into the app on my iPhone or on my laptop and start right into inputting information.

The whole point of a task app is to not spend gobs of time with it. You’re supposed to spend all that time on the actual tasks. So, it’s crucial for an app to make it easy for me to get in, enter my information, cross things off, and get out. That’s exactly what The Hit List does.

A smart app

Another area where it’s clear Andy Kim spent a lot of time working on is the little things surrounding tasks. The repeating task interface is a great example of this.

Like other task apps The Hit List uses natural language processing to parse what you mean when repeating a task. For example, if I type “1st” it automatically sets the task to repeat every month of the first.

Similarly typing “Mondays” or “Monday, Tuesday” will, respectively, repeat it on every Monday or every Monday and Tuesday. Just another way The Hit List lets me add tasks without thinking about how to use the app.

The task filing I mentioned in the earlier post is another example of this. It’s seriously incredible. With one or two keystrokes I can select a task and file it where it needs to go. Or, with a couple of keystrokes I can go to any list I have created.¹

There’s more too

That barely scratches the surface of my love for this app. Almost every day I find myself amazed by how wonderful it is. It takes just a few minutes to learn the basics of the app and not much more time to really master it.

The Hit List certainly isn’t one of the cheapest task apps out there. It’s $49.95 for the desktop app, $9.99 for the iPhone app, and $19.99 a year for cloud syncing.²

Sure, it’s a sizable outlay for software but I can’t think of an app that you’d want to spend more on than a task app. It’s your digital brain, invest in it and you’ll get way, way more than $80 of value out of it.

Andy Kim has done a terrific job with this app. As an early beta tester I can say that the 1.0 desktop app and the long-awaited iPhone app have blown away my expectations from when I started using it a few years ago.

1. All it takes is pressing “g” and then typing the list you want to go to.
2. Syncing which is blazing fast by the way.

Also, who the heck decided to put the term community engagement in scare quotes? Perhaps it’s more depressing that The Post does not even know what that idea means. If the company had cared about community maybe they wouldn’t have had to sell Newsweek for a dollar.

AT&T, send some engineers to redesign the iPhone to make better use of the country’s fastest wireless network.

From the New York Times of all places.

In my ideal management world, a review is simply a documentation of well-known facts, your performance over the year. It also contains constructive advice and insight regarding how your boss believes you can improve on that performance. My dream is that you already know all of this information because you’ve been getting year-round feedback from your boss.

In my case I want to use my RSS reader for one thing: reading. This is why I felt that it was worth $30 to move away from Google Reader.

As Google has developed Reader over the past years and months I’ve felt that they’ve strayed from the original idea of providing a lightweight and fast way to stay on top of the news that’s important to you. If I want to share an article, save it for later, email it to a friend, or “like” it I have my own ways of doing that and don’t want those features to infringe upon the primary purpose of my RSS reader.

The fact that I was so willing to drop $30 on a product that I couldn’t even use a demo of is a testament to my faith in Shaun Inman as well as my simple frustration with Google. It also got me thinking about news in general and the experiences that most (if not all) major news organizations provide.

The largest problem that I currently see with the homepages of most news sites is that they’re trying to be like Google Reader; that is, they’re attempting to provide all the tools and information that all of their users could ever want. This ultimately leads to nowhere good and results in all users receiving a mediocre experience with none getting exactly what they want.

The highlighted portions are what I'm actually interested in.

Take The Guardian for example. This is a news organization that is generally praised for its site and has won many awards for their work. What happens when I visit their homepage though and highlight just the information that I’m actually interested in? The result is to the left and is not very pretty.

Even someone like myself who loves reading and is interested in everything from politics to sports to music to international relations and more is left wanting with The Guardian’s site.

A lot of space is devoted to content that is not at all interesting to myself nor even relevant in some cases. Even with a user account created with The Guardian the site offers up irrelevant information and provides for no apparent way to customize the content.

Part of the minimal amount of information that The Guardian collects is my US Postal code. However, even with this entered the site still shows me the current weather in London. Other wasted spaces on the site attempt to pitch me jobs, dating, web search (give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just go to Google), somewhat sleazy offers for travel and DVDs, and a whole bunch of stories that I frankly don’t give a damn about. If this is what counts as the “Website of the Year” than that’s just sad.

The highlighted portions are the articles that I'd actually be interested in reading.

Looking at the New York Times though is even worse. The Gray Lady does a lot of things well but providing an even half-way navigable homepage is not one of them. I’m bombarded with articles to read, but out of all those articles there’s only a few that I care to read.

Like with The Guardian I have a user account with the Times, for what that’s worth. It doesn’t really get me much of anything on the homepage besides a link to manage my account and alerts. No customization, font preferences, or anything really.

Here is where I see the solution residing for news organizations large and small. The user account that a lot of news sites allow for ought to be about one thing: personalization through minimalism.

I’m not talking about minimalism in the design sense, although that could be one facet of it, this is more about minimalism in terms of the experience and the content. News sites need to shrink the amount of information that is presented to the user. Furthermore, the information that is there needs to be personalized to the user.

My ideal user account with a news site could include the following:

• Geographical location – This could be the basis for weather information, events updates (i.e. concerts, speeches, plays, movie times, etc.), and even a way to highlight news stories from around the country that are relevant to one’s location.
• Segmented content – Allow for a user to select which aspects of ancillary content to show. Perhaps I’m actually looking for a job in London; if so, then having The Guardian show me a list of recent job postings would be great. The same ought to apply to classifieds, dating, and housing links. If I’m interested than I want to see them, otherwise they’re in the way.
• Reading habits – This ought to be the crux of the account. A news site should allows users to opt-in to the ability to track which articles they are reading. The metadata that is ideally associated with these articles could then be leveraged to dig up similar stories that share certain information. The way I like to think of this is having a Pandora for the New York Times. Just like there are thousands of musicians out there that I don’t know about that perhaps might interest me there are probably thousands of New York Times articles and multimedia that would interest me if I only knew about them.

Combine the above features and even a news organization like the New York Times with its tremendous amount of content could provide a homepage that is relevant, clean, and targeted.

Not only could this benefit a news organization’s serious readers but it could benefit advertisers too. Think of the relevancy a homepage that displayed content based upon previous reading habits would contain!

This surge in relevancy could be leveraged by a news organization to target ads based upon what content a reader is interested in. Theoretically this could lead to an increase in value to the user as well as advertisers. Look at the premium rates that advertisers with The Deck and Fusion pay for ads that they know will be seen by an interested audience.

If a news organization were to pair this relevancy with vetted advertisements then things could really start getting interesting. This could go a long way to solving the perpetual elephant in the room: the business model.

For news organizations to survive with any type of business plan they will need to make themselves valuable to users instead of trying to make users more valuable to them. The first step toward this will be in organizing and managing content in such a way that it is easily digestible by the user. Bombarding them with a homepage that features articles and links to all sections of a site is not the way to go about doing this.

Read the New York Times review here.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a book written by the philosopher Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1975 in France under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, it was translated into English in 1977. It is an examination of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that occurred in western penal systems during the modern age. It focuses on historical documents from France, but the issues it examines are relevant to every modern western society. It is considered a seminal work, and has influenced many theorists and artists.

Foucault challenges the commonly accepted idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due to humanitarian concerns of reformists, although he does not deny those. He does so by meticulously tracing out the shifts in culture that led to the prison’s dominance, focusing on the body and questions of power. Prison is a form used by the “disciplines”, a new technological power, which can also be found, according to Foucault, in schools, hospitals, military barracks, etc. The main ideas of Discipline and Punishcan be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.

Read the full Wikipedia article.

How shallow and vague that is; how glibly it breezes through the life of the mind. A Mercy is eked out with a few set pieces, but even they rush us through; the book never seems to settle into narrative “real time.”

For all its cheerlessness, the novel is anything but grittily realistic. Some scenes, such as one in which a character gets out of her bath “aslide with wintergreen,” evince an effort to make even these miserable lives picturesque. But Morrison’s failure to evoke the period is more the fault of her all-too-contemporary prose style: “1682 and Virginia was still a mess.” No one likes an archaizer, apart from a million Cormac McCarthy fans, but a novelist writing of the 17th century should at least avoid language that is jarringly inconsistent or out of place. Reminiscing, the slaves vacillate between would-be-poetic English and an equally improbable sort of Hollywood Injun: “Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in.” Anachronisms abound, from New Age lingo like “She gives off a bad feeling” to the dialect of the postbellum South: “her borning young.” We are even told that our Anglo-Dutch trader had “gone head to head with rich gentry.” What, and not drunk their milk shake?

For the one required class on campus Freshman year we were required to read Beloved which I found to be a self-indulgent and arrogant piece of literary crap. I have never been able to understand why Toni Morrison gets the praise that she does for her novels while other American writers simply get overshadowed.

Link to the original article.