Ben Atkin's Weblog - Latest Comments

Re: Why apps fail as marketing channels

Ben Atkin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:44:38 -0000

I don't think I made my point clearly. I think having a user install the app can get them to return to it, but only if there's something remarkable about it. Providing relevant information or amusement is remarkable. The vast majority of apps fail at this. After checking out both of those apps, I think they succeed, but only for certain niches. And the numbers agree: the Audi app I tried has more reviews than Tweetie does.

It's commissioned mobile interfaces for websites, done as native apps, which seem to be asked for by many website stakeholders, that I'm ranting against. If there isn't something remarkable about the app, yet users install it and don't remove it, I don't think having the logo on peoples' iPhone home screens helps market the product very much. It's like a tiny banner ad with a lot of impressions going to the same person.

I looked at the websites of both of them on my iPhone. thenorthface.com is flash. 'Nuff said. audi.com works, but isn't tailored to mobile devices. They do have a mobile site, but I only found it when I followed a link in Audi's app. I don't know how I would have found it otherwise.

I don't think the app development slowed down the development of their mobile sites. I think that was a separate issue. I think the apps are a good idea, but that they should build out mobile sites as well.

Re: Why apps fail as marketing channels

jsmestad — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:46:46 -0000

I think there are obvious exceptions to this. I dont think you can market a product, but you can easily market your brand. Take North Face or Audi as an example, both apps dont sell you their products but provide useful information/amusement in a branded application promoting their brand.

Re: Organizing github repos

Tim Lossen — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 05:55:15 -0000

good idea ... thanks for sharing.

Re: A plan for twitter

Ben Atkin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:02:32 -0000

I sent that tweet out manually. It looks like an automated tweet, though. :) I like to post small tweets sometimes. I think they're easier for people who aren't interested to skim past.

My current limit is not very low. I've posted more than twenty tweets in a single day on many occasions. One way or another, that loses readers. (With lists and checking individual profiles, I pay more attention to some people I follow than others.)

There are many schools of thought on twitter, and many reasons to use twitter. I'm trying to use my account to get more involved in open source. There are so many people and projects in open source that I can't keep track of anywhere near as much information as I'd like. I'm sure others feel the same way.

Re: A plan for twitter

aimee — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 06:30:11 -0000

How funny that writing this blog post caused an automatic tweet to occur! ;)

I think i probably tweet too much, but i don't really care. I've never kept track of my follower count. Lots of random people follow me for reasons i will never fathom!

Re: Organizing github repos

Ben Atkin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:17:38 -0000

Great idea!

Re: Organizing github repos

Kev Burns — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:13:10 -0000

You should write a bash script to clone a repo into the proper dir.
$ gclone benatkin/weaky

Re: define: savvy savvy

Ben Atkin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:49:47 -0000

Part of why I am posting this is to remind myself of how I felt. Now I'm almost used to the new Hacker News, and the TechCrunch culture. It helps to remember when things used to be different, or at least when you remember thinking how things used to be different.

Re: Recording Programming Sessions

Alex Mansfield — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:01:33 -0000

That's an interesting way of commenting your code!

Re: Recording Programming Sessions

Joe Fleming — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:38:22 -0000

I remember learning that people can understand others at speeds of up to 2 or 3 times as fast as they normally talk. As an example of this, some people record lectures and play them back at twice the speed so they can review the information in half the time. This usually only applies to audio though, but you might benefit from speeding up the playback of your screencasts as well.

Re: How to really disable the bell in Vimperator

spearbearer — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:40:50 -0000

I typed this command into the .rc file, and it indeed disabled the bell for the scrolling functions. However, the search function still beeps, if no string is found. Thoughts?

Re: vim and the enter key

Ben Atkin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:23:00 -0000

zenzike,

Looks like the last part of each line of your mappings got cut off. Would you please try posting again?

That's very good to know about terminal vim. I'll try it and update my blog post.

Re: vim and the enter key

Nicolas Wu — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:18:21 -0000

After using the "moded" sticky shift-enter, I agree that it isn't that great.

However, I use a control-enter to force a insertion where I want one. These mappings work in both gvim and terminal vim:

inoremap
inoremap
inoremap

Re: vim and vimperator, a few weeks later

aimee — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:03:33 -0000

Fascinating! That is EXACTLY the same experience as i had. I really, REALLY like Vim, especially because it means i can have the same development environment at home and at work. But Vimperator soon lost its shine. For the exact reasons that you said, plus on Linux it overrides the copy-paste behaviour and introduces something called a PASS-THROUGH which is confusing as anything.

It's also what it *doesn't* do like 'u' for undo in a text field.

Last night i uninstalled Vimperator but quickly realised how much i'd come to rely on it for some things, like 't', 'y' and 'gh'. It was disappointing to be without those. So i've installed it back again but made some tweaks in my ~/.vimperatorrc file.

The 'awesome bar' behaviour is well worth having if you don't already use it: http://www.developernotes.c...

Re: How to really disable the bell in Vimperator

vimmer — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:24:58 -0000

You should use :hi Bell display: none; in Vimperator 2.x

Re: How to really disable the bell in Vimperator

Silas Barta — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:54:36 -0000

I will add my thanks. I had just installed Linux for the first time (Ubuntu 8.10) and tried Vimperator for the first time in six months. (I had blogged about it previously.) I noticed the beeps and also noticed some of the instructions mentioned a "visualbell" option. I googled that, which took me to your priceless advice on how to turn off the beep.

What bothers me is how an otherwise great plugin makes some very questionable user interface decisions. I just spend a few hours figuring out how to find the $HOME\.vimperator path so I could add in the javascript file that lets you use the old, non-numerial hint commands. What on earth led Herr Stubenschrott to decide that number keys are easier to type if my hands are on the keyboard? Or that it's easier to type up the first few letters of the link when hitting f obscures those letters and you usually have to cycle through similar links?

*sigh*...

Re: How to really disable the bell in Vimperator

aimee — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:05:14 -0000

LOL, what bell?! I never heard any bell!
Perhaps i'll notice it as soon as i put earplugs in, and i'll immediately be back here to find out how to switch it off! :)

Re: How to really disable the bell in Vimperator

Ben Atkin — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:03:46 -0000

You're welcome. I've figured out how to shut off most beeps on my system, and put all of the instructions in a Silencing and Disabling Bells WikiBook. I hope other people find it useful and add instructions for disabling bells in applications that they use.

Re: How to really disable the bell in Vimperator

actionshrimp — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:11:41 -0000

Thanks so much for this, the beep was infuriating! Found a few sites that suggested changing the accessibility.typeaheadfind.enablesound setting to false in about:config, but firefox didnt seem to let this stick. Had no idea it was to do with vimperator, but this was a lifesaver :)

Re: Rails 3 and merb slices

Derek Neighbors — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:50:06 -0000

Thanks for coming out and participating in the discussion. Merb Slices and the direction that Wycats is wanting to take them is very exciting. We hope to get the video online shortly.

Re: Ubiquity

Harsha — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:37:03 -0000

The ubiquity command Tweet is not working at the ling redirect from the herd page https://ubiquity.mozilla.co... .. I had to google and take it from http://benatkin.com/ubiquit... . Are the commands lost after I update Ubiquity?

Re: Trying Out CouchDB In FireBug

Ben Atkin — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:49:31 -0000

Aimee,

I had forgotten that Firebug used to not have the extra step to load responses. I would like it to work the old way for me. I don't see why it's not configurable. I hope Firebug hasn't gone down the path of insisting on a simple UI at the cost of customizability like Gnome has. If it has, perhaps a fork or an extension that interacts with the Firebug extension will be in order.

Thanks for telling me about the Same Origin Policy. I seem to remember hearing that phrase before, but it didn't come to mind when I was googling for information on the matter. I'm going to try getting my custom JavaScript environment working with CouchDB now that I know this.

Re: Trying Out CouchDB In FireBug

aimee — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 13:36:31 -0000

Woohoo!! It's so fun to see people trying out different things with CouchDB! :)

Oh, that Firebug change annoys me so much where it doesn't load the POST response for you. At work i actually went back to the previous version for exactly that reason.

I believe the AJAX problem you had from the Merb project is to do with the AJAX "Same Origin Policy" to stop you calling pages on another server. I didn't realise it prevents you going across ports on the same server though!

It is easily overcome by doing an AJAX request to a proxy page on your own site which does something like this:

response = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(CGI.escape(params[:url]))) render :text => response

I'm really excited to see where you go with Merb and making an application which uses CouchDB directly! :)

Re: On finding interesting Ubiquity commands…

Ben Atkin — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:46:46 -0000

Thanks for working on this! I think that adding tags is a simple and elegant way to get 90% of the functionality that I want.

Re: On finding interesting Ubiquity commands…

Abi — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:14:02 -0000

Agree with everything you say. I want to see more powerful commands too, beyond just pure search commands. Part of the solution for this is categorizing commands. Another thing we are also adding is the ability to create your own search commands using another command. This is good for the user because it is simpler to create your own searches rather than subscribing to others' search command.