Introducing Jottpad 2.0

I’m proud of this update. (App Store Link)

Interface Refresh

The old interface was a bit dated and dark, the new look is bright and minimal. Pull to Refresh has been added which makes room for the sort controls along the bottom toolbar.

Lists

A new list details page has been added to expose duplicate and sharing options as well as renaming. The duplicate option is for quickly copying a list such as “Celebration Dinner Prep” to “New Years Day Festivities” where you might have a lot of overlap but need a new list. There is also the ability to share the list via email, SMS, iMessage, or copy to the clipboard.

Items

Big changes to items with the addition of notes, URLs & reminders. Plus the ability to move an item between lists. Adding a new item also has some shortcuts to take advantage of the additional fields.

More Elements Visible
The main items page now includes all these additional elements if populated. And the links are clickable directly from this view.

Enter by URL
Shopping for that new coffee brewing system, you can quickly add an item by URL. Just paste the URL into the add item field and a lookup will be performed filling in additional data from the web page.

Add with Note
Want to add an item with a note, you can do it in one step.
Simply use the syntax item title - item note.

Additional Actions
Tapping the action button in the top corner will popup an additional actions menu which allows exporting, sharing, copying & check/uncheck all items.

Details
New details page with move between lists, notes, URLs, and reminders. Any data in the notes sections such as URLs, phone numbers, addresses, etc.. will be clickable.

Reminders
Jottpad isn’t a task management app but there are still cases where adding a quick reminder to an item makes sense. As of now reminders are not synced or shared across users. This requires push notifications and will be coming in a future release.

Move Between Lists
Decided the beef tenderloion belongs on the Christmas specific list, no problem just move it.

More Stuff

• Performance improves for syncing
• Removed section indicators (Active & Completed) on items view
• Fix for getting duplicate lists & items over a slow connection
• New icon

Do One Thing, Do It Well

Jottpad is not and will not be a to-do list app, but that puts it into a weird category of why should I use it. From the genesis of Jottpad[1] - Start Something - I talk about where the idea came from, easily shareable lists. But, when I launched the iOS app five months later the focus was already muddied - Jottpad. What is it?.

Shawn Blanc writes in a recent review of Recall:

For one, I am (as are many of you, I suspect) a fan of apps that do one thing well. Secondly, the more my to-do list is filled with items not critical to my current projects or responsibilities then the more those non-critical items can dilute the importance of the truly critical ones.

Refocus

In what is typical of my enterprise engineering past I took a simple feature set and immediatly tried to generalize so it would appeal to more users. In the current App Store era of specialized, focused apps, I need to refocus.

Jottpad is easily sharable lists:

• shopping
• packing
• traveling
• prepatory [2]

Backing up this idea is the usage of Jottpad. When I talk to users, the happiest ones are using it for the above. Trying to shoehorn in task management or reminder type items is frustrating.

Keep Scratching

Marco Arment of Instapaper and Loren Britcher of Letterpress have both said they built their apps to “scratch an itch”.

There is definitely something to be said for evovling the app in a direction I, the developer, will use. I built Jottpad to scratch an itch but have floundered a bit in the evolution by not staying true to my original ideas.

Let this stand as a reminder to myself and a lesson in general. Don’t piss away the effort put into creating a shareable syncing engine which is non-trivial to host & maintain. More focused features are in the pipeline.

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1. Originally named Simplelyst, glad I was talked out of that.  ↩

2. And by prepatory I mean where you have compiled a bunch of items and want to quickly go through the list and check off to make sure nothing is forgotten. For example, you have a list of items or steps you always go through before a big client presentation.  ↩

Pay What They Ask and Take What They Give You

Uncle Willie is the Confucius of our family. We were buying ice cream at a little shack along the beach. I was young, maybe 7 or 8. It was the middle of August, incredibly hot, and the ice cream started melting immediately. I was attempting to contain my cone with proper licking management but it was a losing battle. At one point I’m sure I started complaining about the ice cream all over my hands and face - I wanted to go back and demand another cone.

Uncle Willie looked down and simply stated - “You pay what they ask and you take what they give you.”

Looking back I realize buying a young kid an ice cream cone in the middle of a hot summer day is going to make a mess. My parents understood for a few dollars I would get some enjoyment and a they would get a big chocolate cleanup. The mess was a known thing - they knew what they were buying and dealing with.

App Store Economy

David Barnard writes:

Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize user value/entertainment. It’d be a shame if the mobile software industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.

I stopped playing Words with Friends when Zynga bought it and plastered ads and spamminess all over the place. Same goes for their recent aquisition of Draw Something.[1]

John Gruber writes:

The differences between the iOS App Store and Android Market are a microcosm of the differences between Apple and Google. Apple is a retailer, a purveyor of well-crafted goods that people will line up to purchase. Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.

You can add a whole slew of companies to this list. Facebook and Twitter have become advertising companies no longer crafting a superior product to attract users but selling the users who helped build the service to advertisers.

More and more the web, mobile, app store economies are not about paying.

Paying for Stuff

I want to pay for products and services and the key word here is PAY. By paying there is an explicit contract detailing what I get for my money. I realize this is definitely a minority position, a small minority. However, I hope we are starting to see a group of like minded consumers which will allow paid software to survive and hopefully thrive.

Not all of these are still small, but I’ve been paying since it was an option in hopes the product or service sticks around and stays non-spammy.

• Pandora (no ads)
• App.net - as opposed to Twitter
• Dropbox (upgraded storage)
• Instapaper subscription
• Donation to 5by5

I don’t want to be part of the eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs[2] way of monetizing. I enjoy paying for products and services especially when doing so supports a small or independent developer like myself.

How Does it Change

It changes by making people aware of the trade-offs for not paying. Are you ok with being the product? Do you realize all that “personal” data on Facebook is being sold to advertisers?

Couple recent conversations with friends.

“My internet is too slow, I want cheaper internet.”
Ugh, internet is not a God given right. If you want quality service then pay, if not quit bitching.

“Pocket is free, why would I use Instapaper.”
Well, like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, Pocket is a VC funded eyeballs business. At some point it is either going it run out of money or morph into a service that no longer cares about the users - it’ll care about selling the users. I don’t mean to call out Pocket in a bad sense. Pocket is just an example of the free, has to grow to attract users and hopefully funding business model I don’t want to be a part of.[3]

I still use Google even though I understand I’m the product they are selling. Google is providing enough value to me that I’m ok with being the product they provide to advertisers.

I still use Twitter although I have an App.net account and will be attempting to ween myself from it. Twitter is borderline for me. I’m getting value out of the service but the recent hostilities towards developers and the march to monetize is turning me off.[4]

I quit Facebook.[5] It wasn’t providing me enough value for the trade-offs of selling my data. I think in this regard Facebook will eventually do more for the Pay For What You Use movement then anybody else. The march for more users, more data and less privacy will start to push users away.

So Pay or Don’t

Paying is like the current craft brewery resurgence [6] going on in the US. I love having the multitude of choices when it comes to quality products.[7] I care about quality and want those supplying it to survive. Thousands of small brewers across the country are creating a distinct and much higher qualtiy product than the flavored water of Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors. The craft brewers are focusing on the product and the customer, not just throwing huge advertising and marketing dollars at the consumers.

Or don’t and be another eyeball. Just remember, you can’t complain when you aren’t paying and that service morphs into something spammy or goes away entirely.

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1. Zynga is telemarketing for the Internet. Please stop supporting Zynga.  ↩

2. Eyeballs & Eyeballs don’t pay the bills  ↩

3. Pocket is VC funded  ↩

4. @rick on App.net  ↩

5. Almost a month since I quit Facebook.  ↩

6. Beer Wars  ↩

7. This is a bit of a stretch since I am living in Nigeria and the beer sucks but you get the point I’m trying to make.  ↩

Google Contact Sync - Custom Labels Finally Come to iOS

Yesterday Google announced CardDAV for syncing Google Contacts.¹

The Verge:

Google just announced a new method for iOS users to sync Google Contacts. Beginning today, the company is supporting the open CardDAV standard on Apple hardware running iOS 5 or later. Until this point, Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync had been the sole option for anyone that wanted to sync their contact list and have changes immediately reflected across their devices.

Mac OS X users are likely to see the benefits of CardDAV implementation as well. Whereas the existing desktop Google Contact syncing method requires manual user input — you have to click an icon in the OS X taskbar to initiate the process — CardDAV is fully automated and works behind the scenes.

Old Way - Google Sync

Up until now I have been using Microsoft Exhange ActiveSync via Google Sync. This works great for push email notification and it does keep my contacts in sync but it is hampered by the limitations of Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, most notably you get a limited subset of labels allowed for phone & email. iOS supports custom labels but this feature is disabled when syncing via Google Sync / ActiveSync.

Google Sync Support

Limited Contact Information. The iOS device can synchronize up to 3 email addresses. Phone number synchronization is limited to 2 Home numbers, 1 Home Fax, 1 Mobile, 1 Pager, 3 Work (one will be labeled 'Company Main') and one Work Fax number.

Why this matters to me… my wife and I travel around Africa and Europe. We have accumulated quite a few local prepaid SIM cards and with those an equal amount of phone numbers. A contact card for my wife in iOS turned into a guessing game of which number goes with which country.

As you can see keeping track of phone number - to - country proves almost impossible with the limited subset of labels available. Plus, you are limited to 9 numbers total.

New Way - Google CardDAV

With the release of CardDAV custom labels and unlimited phone numbers are now supported.²

I use a system of 2 digit Country code, followed by L or Int for dialing that number internationally or locally. How you dial + CountryCode or without impacts billing in some of these countries.

This syncs with Google Contacts lickety-split.

Making the Switch on your iOS Device

First step is turning off the contact syncing via Exchange / Google Sync.

This will remove all contacts from your device but no matter they are stored in Google Contacts and will be re-synced on the next step.

Next, follow the steps outlined in the Google CardDAV Support documentation.

FYI, Google CardDAV works on Mac

Setup CardDAV sync through the Contacts app using the same Server, User Name & Password info.

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1. Google CardDAV Support.
2. As far as I can tell from the iOS documentation it's unlimited. Although anything over 20 seems to get a bit hard to manage.

Software Engineers, the Athletes of Software Companies

Or how I explained the difference between what I do and IT (Information Technology) to my wife. And what I mean by IT is a supporting role in an organization.¹

When my wife and I initially started dating she would explain what I did to her friends and family as "Computer Guy" or "IT". This would immediately lead to questions about fixing email, how do I upload pictures to Facebook, and the worst of all... anything to do with a PRINTER. None of this is what I do. I have never and hopefully will never be in a role that requires anything remotely related to fixing or solving said problems.

I build, develop, write, code software. I don't perform a support role at a Fortune 500 company answering the phone when you can't login to Outlook. If you forget your password, don't call me (unless it's for one of my apps). In fact, if you aren't married to me - my answer to any support question is "Go to the nearest Apple store". I respect the Geniuses at the Apple store for being able to deal with endless problems, questions and general nonsense.

I was a good high school and decent college basketball player. I put in a lot of hours practicing (building), scrimmaging (testing) and finally playing the actual game (shipping the product). Consider the team as a software company, people are coming to the games to watch the athletes, not the trainer, athletic director, or assistant coaches. All of these ancillary roles are important and without them a team could not thrive but the athletes are the product - they are putting on the show and that is an entirely different experience than supporting the product. I realize this is a bit of a prima donna attitude. I'm not trying to sound all high and mighty but I do want to make it clear the difference.

A software company - Fog Creek - they make software products. People pay money to use the products the engineers working at Fog Creek create. Joel Spolsky, co-founder has written Field Guide to Developers explaining how they take care of the engineers at Fog Creek. The developers are treated this way because they are directly responsible for the quality of the product and ultimately how many customers are paying for the product. Sure, a good marketing team and slick sales staff can sustain a sub-par product but for only so long. Quality wins out over the long run.

A product company - Coca Cola - they sell soft drinks. People pay money for the brand they've created. It's a marketing and product company. Any developers working at Coca-Cola are not involved directly in selling a product to consumers. It's a support role.

My first job out of college was at a product company. The company made bearings and steel. I was on the IT staff, so far removed from making a difference to the companies bottom line I might have well as banged my head into a wall - it would have had the same impact on selling steel. I left there after 9 months and took a job at a startup software company - the difference was astounding and I've never looked back.

I build stuff. I want the products I build to make an direct impact upon customers and the bottom line of the company I am working for, without that constant feedback loop I get bored. Going out on that basketball court I knew I could have a immediate impact on whether we won or lost. I want the responsibility of mattering, of measuring how well I'm doing with the success of my company or team. It's the only way I know how to be.

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1. Microsoft outsourcing IT services for 3 years.