Crag Dog 1.0 into the iPhone App Store
My second rock climbing-based iPhone app has just landed in the iPhone App Store. Crag Dog is a rock climbing grade converter, very useful for those times when, as I say on the website, “you’re climbing in another country and you just want to know if that ‘VIsup/VI+’ route is going to kick your ass or rock your world.”
Crag Dog converts between nine different rock climbing grade systems (including some obscure ones I hope you get to encounter some day) and three bouldering grade systems.
All for just a buck.
Another Grade Converter?
If you’re a climber with an iPhone you’ve probably already looked for a grade converter. You might even already have one.
Sure there are a couple other grade converters in the app store already and when I was in France over the summer I tried them all but, alas, found them all to be uniformly bland in operation and aesthetically unpleasing – with the exception of Climb Converter, which is visually very interesting and unique, but not particularly good from a usability perspective.
So I built another one.
I think my biggest peeve with all the others is that every single one of them implements the conversion using UIPickerView which, to be honest, is exactly how I would have done it myself the first time around had I not tried out theirs first. And the UIPickerView (the wheely-spinner bit) works just great for Apple’s Clock application but for a grade converter it’s pretty limited in the useful data it can show. And it’s slow to use.
Instead I chose to use UIScrollView instances which allows me to display much more data onscreen at once and also makes using the app itself easier, faster, smoother and more frictionless. Want to switch grades? Flick with your finger. Want to view grade conversions? Flick a finger. I just like it better.
So if you’re a rock climber and you own an iPhone and you fancy climbing anywhere else in the world, or just want to know what the local grades of Adam Ondra’s epic sends on Youtube are, grab yourself a copy of Crag Dog and enjoy.
Oh, and if you do buy it please be sure to rate and review it in the app store. It does make a difference.
Climb It 1.0 in the iTunes App Store
“The premier rock climbing route app for the iPhone”
I’m very pleased to announce that Climb It is now available in the iTunes App Store. You can check it out by clicking here.
This release represents over a year of hard work by Sam and I, late nights writing and reworking code, rainy weekends cataloguing route data, many, many hours discussing how Climb It should work and what it should do over beers at the Alibi Room.
It is a humble beginning to what we hope becomes the best rock climbing app possible for the iPhone.
We’ve also set up a Facebook Page for it, and there’s even an official Climb It Blog.
…the frontend product is what brings your revenue stream in, but your backend operations quality is what keeps your costs down as you grow. If your backend costs get out of control because of technical debt then you won’t make a profit, or someone who can keep them down will just copy you and wipe you out with less.
Zed Shaw, “Products For People Who Make Products For People”
Spoken Like a Robot
The very first sentence of a different blogpost, somewhere else on the web, which I’m sure is a great blogpost but I’m not going to bother linking to it because I hate this sentence, is this:
Reflect7 decided to diversify it’s B2C platforms by allocating resources towards the Android Market…
That’s a fancy way of saying “We decided to build an app for Android”, all gussied up in soulless marketing wank speak.
I hate that shit. Makes me tune out immediately when I read it. In my head I insert the words that should been used instead of all those noncommittal buzz-statements, and I get annoyed.
My mental picture of the person who wrote it, who I’m sure is quite lovely in real life, is most unflattering: I assume they are of a low IQ, have internalized quite a bit of self-doubt and loathing, having something of an inferiority complex, and probably wet the bed. But in reality they’ve likely just spent far too much time fine-tuning PowerPoint slides for their VC pitches.
I implore you: when writing a blog don’t write like that. Write like a real person, with a functioning soul* and a real personality. Leave that kind of writing to the dead, the vapid, the marketrons.
(*metaphorically speaking)
The Difference Between Hacker News and Reddit
I tend to read Hacker News quit a bit and Reddit on occasion. On Hacker News I also spend my time reading the comments, something I generally never do on Reddit.
Quit simply, the disparity between the quality of comments on each site is appalling. Witness “Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men”, a recent editorial by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch. The article made it to the top of both Hacker News and Reddit.
The very first comment on Hacker News is
I’m always slightly puzzled as to why this is an issue. Surely the goal is to have lots of innovative and successful startups, and the gender of who is founding them is irrelevant.
There aren’t, as far as I can tell, any real barriers to women starting a tech company; being able to code, having a lot of mental resilience and having some starting capital is not something that’s only possible if you’re male.
A thoughtful post, an inquiry for clarification that then led to more interesting comments.
The very first comment on Reddit
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
It speaks for itself.
At least Reddit isn’t Digg. This story also made it to #1 on Digg and the first 14 comments there are about some boycott of Digg itself. One has to get to #15 to find the first vaguely relevant comment, and it is this gem
f**k off Techcrunch… You have submitted so much s**t over the last few hours that there are 4 auto-submitted news from your site.
I guess it all comes down to the kind of community the users want to create.
Command Line Error
Not quit as egregious as the fabled ‘rm -rf /’, it turns out one can beachball TextMate pretty easily by accidentally typing
~/Sites/client_site (master) : mate /
instead of
~/Sites/client_site (master) : mate .
Good times.
Leo Demoralized
Something happened tonight that made me question everything I’ve done with social media since I first joined Twitter in late 2006.
Recently Google Buzz stopped publishing Leo Laporte’s posts (or whatever it is that Google calls them) for reasons unexplained and Leo has become upset that no one noticed. Writes Leo:
“It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me….”
Indeed.
With all due respect to Leo, what exactly did he think people are using Twitter, Facebook, Buzz et al. for? “Social” media is perhaps the single most narcissistic system humanity has ever created. It is devoted, in its entirety, to people shouting into the void solely for their own gratification.
That we can pay attention to others at all is almost a side-effect of the publishing mechanisms (social side-effect, not a technical one). A side-effect that largely exists simply to give a semblance of utility to the publishing side.
All of this is a bad thing, as far as I can tell, only if you want – nay, expect – other people to pay attention to you. In effect, for actual narcissists a system that democratizes narcissism is truly a terrible thing: a billion people all shouting “why won’t anyone pay attention to me?” all at the same time. The horror, the horror.
(I’m picking on Mr. Laporte here a little bit but only because I suspect he simply gave voice to what many others are hand-wringing over. In fact Mr. Laporte is one of the few worth paying attention to).
But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.
I think Mr. Laporte might be misunderstanding what happened to him in that he’s confounding “paying attention to Buzz” with “paying attention to me”. I suspect every time he posts to Buzz thousands of people read it, absorb it, click it, re-tweet it, and then promptly forget all about it. Like they do for everyone else. But no one’s sitting around thinking “Leo hasn’t posted in a day, two days, a week – the void in my life, oh how it grows!”
He’s right in that it’s lost, but that’s only because none of it has been designed to be remembered. Why would we?
