Design Spotlight – Tasks

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I’ve become a real stickler for good software design. I stickle on a regular basis, even in public. In fact, that’s become one of my main considerations when deciding on whether to use or keep an Android app. Yes, I said Android. Apps that adhere to Google’s recent design guidelines for Android 4.0 can be not only functional, but beautiful. Increasingly, if an app doesn’t have an Action Bar, I’ll pass.

Last week I talked about Epistle, a slick, well-designed text editor that makes excellent use of several Android core features (Holo theme, system share menu, etc.). I think apps like this showcase what makes Android special: simple, consistent user interface and a focus on discrete functions. I prefer simple apps that interact cleanly with others to behemoths that try to do everything.

This week I want to introduce you to another app built with that philosophy of simplicity. Even the name is simple: Tasks. (There is an ad-based free version, but this link is for the paid version, 99 cents for a limited time.)

There are lots of to do apps for Android. Most of them sync with Google Tasks. So what makes this one different?

It does less.

Tasks is just a Google Tasks client, and it adheres tightly to Google’s design guidelines to keep things simple. Create a new task by tapping the + in the Action Bar. Move tasks up and down in a list by dragging them with your finger. Promote or demote (indent) by tapping and holding to enter select mode, tap the items you want to change, and then < or > on the selection action bar.

In short, if you know how to use any modern, guidelines-compliant Android app, you know how to use Tasks.

Syncing so far has been flawless. It only syncs with Google Tasks, but that’s the point. You can clear completed take from each list, but you can also bring up a view of just completed tasks (via the Action Bar overflow menu).

Widgets are flexible and efficient. They scroll and resize on ICS and sport a + for quick task creation. You’ll need a separate widget for each task list or category you want on your home screen, and the widgets support indentation. Tapping on a task in the widget pops up a dialog asking if you want to edit the task or just mark it as complete.

There’s not a lot more to say. Tasks is fast, clean and elegant. If you’re already a Google Tasks user, this is the Android app you’ve been waiting for. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles sone other apps have, but the sheer speed and simplicity make it worthwhile.

Distraction free and on the go: Epistle and TextCounter

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One of the things I liked about writing on the iPhone was the variety in distraction-free writing apps. It took me a while to find the same kinds of things on Android, but not only are they there, but I found a combination that makes use of Android’s native Share function to do something you just can’t do in iOS.

The first piece is Epistle. This free app is a bare bones text editor. It’s nicely designed, and fits the Android 4.0 design guidelines; it feels like a native Android app rather than a quick and dirty iOS port. This scores big points with me. There’s not much to the app itself. It syncs to Dropbox and edits plain text files that you store the /Epistle folder of your Dropbox account (you can reassign this to a different folder if you like). What it has going for it is that it’s fast and lean. It supports Markdown syntax, so you can toggle over to an HTML preview of what you’re writing as you go. I love this, and prefer writing in Markdown any time I can. Epistle also provides a full screen view for really distraction free writing.

It has a few quirks. I can’t get it to scroll in full screen mode, so I have to find where I want to put the cursor ahead of time and then just start typing (maybe this is a feature?; not being able to scroll back certainly helps avoiding distraction). And a big, glaring flaw is that it lacks a word count function. This makes writing to a specific target really difficult.

Or does it?

The other free app I wanted to talk about is TextCounter. By itself, it doesn’t do much. It automatically pastes in whatever’s in the clipboard and pops up a little toast notification letting you know how many words, paragraphs, etc. are in the block of text.

Where TextCounter really shines, though, is that it ties into Android’s share system. So if you’re writing in another app — like, say, Epistle — and you share your document to TextCounter, it pops up the word count notification over the app you’re writing in. You don’t have to copy and paste, or leave the app. You’re essentially calling TextCounter as an add-on module to whatever app you’re using. Neat!

Why do I prefer using this with Epistle? Because its simpler. With Epistle, all I have to do is tap the share button at the upper right of the Action Bar and select “TextCounter (en)” from the list to get my word count. Writing in Evernote, I have to exit the editing mode, select all, and then hit Share from the overflow button on the text action bar. If I hit Share from the note itself, I get the number of words in the note title, not the note itself. In Google Docs, it’s even harder. Because Google Docs appropriates the Share function for it’s own kind of sharing, there I have to select all text, copy, and then switch to the TextCounter app manually (where it automatically pastes and counts, but still). With Epistle, it’s just two taps and I’m done. These two apps make writing a clean, distraction-free operation my Galaxy Nexus, while still giving me the power I need to make my word count targets.

Then and Now

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In 1999, I started writing a weekly column about using mobile technology for writing. It was a radical idea at the time. The top of the line handheld computer was the Palm III, and almost no one took seriously the idea of using one of these digital organizers as a real computer. Writing down an appointment or jotting down a quick shopping list, fine. But writing articles? Books? Madness.

I wasn’t deterred. I had recently finished writing my first novel longhand in a paper day planner and then later transcribing the handwritten pages into my computer. I was addicted to the freedom of writing anytime, anywhere, but I also know there had to be a better way than using paper.

So I started Writing On Your Palm, a weekly blog before the word “blog” even existed. The first few years the site was static HTML, hand-coded by yours truly and optimized to look good on desktop monitors and PDA screens. I had a lot of fun writing that and helped a lot of people along the way. I even drew the attention of the mobile tech powers of the day, Palm and Microsoft.

Then, somewhere in the mid 2000s, I wandered away from WOYP. Smartphones had become common and powerful enough that treating them like small computers was no longer such a weird idea. I didn’t think I had anything left to say on the matter, so I did other things instead, including writing a novel really good enough for publication, Revelation.

Lately, something’s been bugging me. I have a ton of fiction I need to finish, and I’m starting a business as a freelance commercial writer. And while I can certainly do these things on my laptop, more often than not I still turn to my trusty smartphone (currently a Verizon Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0-based CyanogenMod 9). It’s with me all the time, even when my laptop isn’t. And because everything I do these days is cloud-based, I have access to everything I need anywhere I am without having to remember to sync it before I leave.

And then it dawned on me, that hey, things have changed. Options for mobile writing are more varied and powerful than ever, but they might not be obvious to everyone. I still have something to say here.

So welcome back to Writing On Your Palm. Instead of launching it as a discrete site, I’ll just be posting a new WOYP article here on JeffKirvin.net every Monday morning in the Writing On Your Palm category. If you want to subscribe to just the WOYP content, use this RSS feed. And I’ll see you back here next week.

Do non-white heroes hurt book sales?

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Harlequin had done extensive market research, she said.  They knew which titles were hits and which were flops.  And whenever they published a book with an Asian hero or heroine, no one bought those books.  They might be the best stories in the line, but they invariably failed in the marketplace.

“I want your books to be bestsellers,” she said.  ”And this will hurt your sales.”

– Tess Gerritsen

It struck me as odd, years ago, when I got the first “thank you” for making the protagonist in my Between Heaven and Hell series, Daniel Cho, a Korean-American. I wanted Daniel to stand out, and I thought Yet Another White Guy would be cliche as my hero. Especially considering that as the series plays out, Daniel becomes one of the most important human beings to ever live. I thought giving that destiny to Biff McWhitebread would be a waste of a good opportunity to do something else. So being a big fan of Margaret Cho, I gave him her surname, and a somewhat stereotypical Asian-American background, which Asian readers have ended up lauding for its authenticity.

But it never once occurred to me that it could hurt my sales.

Apparently, ignorance was bliss. Tess Gerritsen, whose Rizzoli and Isles novels I’ve loved for many years, posted today that the next R&I book will have two prominent Asian characters, and she felt like it was a breakthough being able to include them. Fortunately, the comments (now closed, alas) allowed many of her fans to cite examples of some of their favorite fiction that featured non-white leads. So it would seem I’m not in bad company.

But still, why did it come to this? Is this another example of publishing imposing a view on their readers that isn’t really there? After all, in the late 90s New York publishing declared that Horror and Westerns were dead genres, despite the fact that readers seem to continue gobbling up whatever slips past the conventional wisdom and gets published anyway. Did the same publishers “know” that their readers wouldn’t accept non-white leads, because books like that never sold, forgetting that they never sold because they were never published in the first place?

Seattle Mystery Bookshop will be out of business in a year, maybe two

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Sorry to say that we cannot offer you a signing. We cannot do anything to support, help or benefit Amazon. Theyre the enemy of independent bookshops and aiding them in any way – mainly ordering their books and selling them and promoting them – would be suicide. Things are tough enough without cutting our own throats. – JB Dickey, owner

via Seattle Mystery Bookshop: Cant Shake the Devils Hand and Say Youre Only Kidding.

Amazon is setting themselves up to be the world’s biggest publisher. They’re starting imprints for every genre. They’re signing big name talent like Barry Eisler and Ed McBain (well, the latter’s estate, anyway). Between their imprints and the indie author/publishers they distribute (myself included), they’ll account for a huge chunk of the “books in print”, perhaps a majority.

And this guy refuses to work with them.

He’s a sole proprietor, so at least he’ll only take himself and any employees dumb enough to stick around with him when he falls. But he’s refusing to carry the biggest publisher of the 20-teens, because they’re “the enemy.”

Hopefully, most independent bookstores will not follow his lead, and instead position themselves as community-oriented service businesses, focusing on discovery and recommendation. Just moving paper isn’t enough anymore.

Hug your helpdesk

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Take a moment today and thank your IT people, because it’s a thankless job. The ideal of an IT Support person is to be invisible. If you never notice them because nothing ever goes wrong with the computers at your office, they are doing their jobs perfectly.

But, of course, that rarely happens.

Disclosure: I work in IT, and have, off and on, for two decades. We don’t get accolades. Even at our best, we’re a cost center, not a profit center. We bring no new money into the company. Our job is to make sure you don’t have to spend any more than you have to in order to remain competitive. It’s a game of attrition.

And when things do go bad, no one cheers us on for the work we’re doing. If a problem drags out over hours, even days, the users typically don’t think, “wow, that must be a tough problem, or they’d have it fixed by now.” Instead, they’re more likely to think, “those stupid geeks can’t do anything right!”

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I don’t like having the CFO breathing down my neck, fretting over the money we’re losing while some crucial system is down. If I could get it fixed any faster, I would. We’re doing the best we can, and we know you can’t do your job until we finish ours. Reminding us of that every five minutes only slows us down further.

But here’s the catch of working IT Support. Even if you’re amazing at your job and you do keep the trains running on time, it’s not enough. Then they wonder why they’re paying you so much, when they never see you do anything. Couldn’t they just replace you with someone off the street for half as much?

So keep in mind that your IT Support folks work their asses off every day just to remain invisible. Thank them for their efforts and tell them how much you appreciate it. Trust me, they never hear it.

I’ve got a Droid on my back

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My friend James Kendrick recent wrote about the Android Fiddling Ratio, the ratio of the time spent configuring/tinkering with an Android device versus the time spent using it. This has been a problem for me dating back to my Palm days (remember HackMaster?). Android and Windows Mobile are the worst for fiddling, but Palm OS and iOS certainly weren’t exempt (especially after jailbrraking the latter).

Last week I decided to try a different tack. A new leak of Gingerbread (Android 2.3) specifically for my Samsung Captivate landed on XDA-devs. I figured this was my best chance to return to running a “stock” ROM without all the fiddly bits without giving up the performance and data tethering I’d grown used to with Gingerbread.

That lasted a weekend, and only that long because I was still setting up my new apartment. I installed the beta of Cognition 5 by DesignGears this morning, which is based on the leaked stock Gingerbread I was running, but tweaked to avoid certain annoyances. A second beta is due out soon (edit: it’s out, and requires me to wipe and reinstall all my apps), which should support ClockworkMod Recovery, allowing me to flash further updates over the air rather than through my PC.

I need to break this habit. I have a LOT of fiction to write, and tinkering with technology is taking up time I really don’t have. How do you stay focused and control your technology, rather than the other way around?

Dancing with them that brung ya

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Kristen Lamb is killing it recently on her blog. Great writing advice. Here’s one that I could have used years ago, and might boot me into posting here more regularly.

Fiction authors are not blogging to become experts. You are blogging to connect with as many people as humanly possible and recruit them to your team. Period. That simple.

I blog about writing and social media, but my blog is being used to establish me as an expert in my field. I write books for writers.

Do you write books for writers? No? Then you don’t have to establish expertise. Have fun. Connect with people via your shared passions. Isn’t that how friends have always been made?

via Sacred Cow-Tipping–Why Writers Blogging About Writing is Bad « Kristen Lamb’s Blog.

I’ve enjoyed some of the writing articles I’ve posted here, and I’m glad they’ve helped some people. But really, most of the connections I’ve made online over the years have been tech related. And I’m still as active and opinionated regarding technology as ever. Yet I haven’t said a word here about stuff unveiled at Google I/O and WWDC this year.

I think the other big roadblock for me in tech blogging is I keep trying to write articles, not posts. Posts are smaller, centered around a single idea. I’m still writing long-form journalism, and it takes too long to write.

So, I’m going to try to write shorter, more frequent tech posts. If you like them, please link to them on Twitter or Facebook and help me reach more readers. Thanks!

Launch day jitters

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Ebooks are… different.

I know, I know, you’ve heard that a thousand times. But for reals, they are. And even though I’ve been working with ebooks for 14 years, it still sneaks up on me. The conventional wisdom does not apply.

As some of you saw on the Twitter machine, I have a new book out. Between Heaven And Hell: Revelation is the first book in the BHH trilogy, written for NaNoWriMo 2009. In the past 18 months, I’ve written, rewritten, hired an editor, rewritten again, took naps, poked the manuscript with a stick, all the things you’re supposed to do if you’re enterprising/dumb enough to wear a publisher hat over your writing hat (which is only possible because while the writing hat is a smallish fez, the publisher hat is a big, roomy Stetson). And now, finally, it’s available for sale.

*blows party noisemaker, echoing forlornly from the cavern walls*

Admittedly, I haven’t been a whirlwind of publicity. I’ve mentioned it off-handedly, as in passing, on Twitter. I haven’t asked for retweets, and have received almost none. Launch day sales, all told, will buy me a burrito, and maybe, if I’m lucky, an iced tea. Small.

And this is okay.

That’s the part that snuck up on me. I’m still awash in what Kris Rusch calls “produce thinking,” applying legacy publishing standards to ebooks, and getting discouraged for absolutely no good reason.

Print books do need to open big. The produce analogy is a good one. A book has to turn a profit in three months, because the sales it gets in the first three months are the vast majority of all the sales it will ever have. Because not too long after that, it will be pulled from bookstore shelves to make room for the next book. It’s a similar, if a bit slower, phenomenon to what we see in the film industry. In movies, if you don’t make back your production costs opening weekend, you failed. If you don’t turn a profit in three weeks, well good luck with the DVD. Books, the dead tree variety, are almost as bad.

But as I mentioned above, ebooks are different. Ebooks are what Chris Anderson calls the Long Tail. Ebooks are forever.

So Revelation hasn’t made much money to start out. About 50 cents a month over the 18 month production time. But that’s now. In a year, when all three books are available, it will be a very different story. Patience, Grasshopper. Let it grow. Let people discover it, and read it, and tell their friends. It will still be available in six months, a year, two years, ten years.

So for now, I’m working on getting it released on the Nook and on CreateSpace for folks like my mom who still prefer paper, and then I’m getting to work on Between Heaven And Hell: Crusade, the second book in the trilogy. Because the best use of my time right now is writing more books. Promotion comes later.

SPB Shell 3D for Android review

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I have probably tried every Android “home” app available. Touchwiz (which comes with my Samsung phone by default), the Froyo and Gingerbread AOSP launchers, LauncherPro, ADW.Launcher, Go Launcher, Zeam, the list goes on and on. These apps are generally considered the UI of Android, the desktop interface from which you launch apps and interact with various widgets.

I’ve had a serious Goldilocks problem with Android launchers. In a way, I think the choice itself is the problem. In iOS, you have Springboard. That’s it. You take what Apple gives you and you like it. Even if you jailbreak, all you can do is dress it up. But on Android, every launcher app does things a little differently. Touchwiz and Go Launcher try to mimic iOS’s Springboard. LauncherPro and ADW stick with the “stock” Android launcher paradigm, but try to add features or flexibility. Zeam just tries to be as small and fast as possible. All of them have something I like, but they all have something I don’t. And ultimately, I gave up trying to find the ideal and stuck with the Gingerbread-themed Froyo launcher that came with with Serendipity, the custom ROM I use on my Samsung Captivate. Nothing really stood out.

Until now.

I knew SPB well from their work on Windows Mobile. They were almost single-handedly responsible for making Windows Mobile at least look like a modern smartphone OS (well, until HTC started doing their own thing).  Now they’ve taken SPB Mobile Shell from Windows Mobile and reinvented it for Android, and in the process they’ve come up with an Android launcher that really stands out.

Home screen carousel

Carousel

The first thing you’ll notice is a little slide bug in the center of the dock. Slide this back and forth, and the screen drops away to a carousel view. You can spin the screens around as fast or slow as you need, and pick the right one out of the group. You can swipe from screen to screen like every other launcher out there, but I find this use of 3D (hence the name of the app) actually helps me find the panel I’m looking for quicker. The animation is fast and fluid, and the spin slows down with the natural, organic feel you would expect from Apple.

Panel editing

Panels

If you tap on the little three-panel icon in the lower right of the carousel view, you get the editing screen shown above. While this is completely intuitive in use, the screenshot looks little confusing. The carousel pulls back, so you’re now looking slightly down at it rather than directly at it. Think the difference in perspective between an MMO like World of Warcraft and a first person shooter like Quake, respectively. In front of you between you and the carousel, you see several available but unused panels lying “flat” relative to the carousel. You can pull panels down from the carousel and put them in the stack, or pick up panels from the stack and insert them into the carousel. Like I said, it’s quick and intuitive in use, and the screenshot really doesn’t do the UI justice.

The panels available range from ad hoc things you build yourself to dedicated purpose panels that you might think of as full screen widgets. The included panels include time, calendar, SMS, weather, travel, images and more. These all show SPB’s usual polish and attention to detail. I particularly liked the weather panel, complete with animated current conditions, although in the beta I used for this review, I couldn’t get the weather to update reliably. I hope they get that ironed out for the release, because it’s really neat.

SPB Widgets

Widgets

You also have individual widgets supplied by SPB if you don’t want to take up a whole panel for your calendar, say. What I really like about these is that they are all multi-state, and you can change them in size to fit the layout you have in mind. The time widget can be a 2×1 condensed clock, showing your next alarm, the time and small date, or a 4×1 clock showing the same but with longer, more descriptive date and time formats, or a 2×2 analog clock. When the screen is in edit mode (which you enter by tapping and holding an icon, just like every other launcher out there) SPB widgets have a white arrow in a green circle in their upper right corner, as seen above. Touch that arrow to switch modes.

Also note the black bar at the bottom of the above screenshot. This is the tray, where you can hold items, apps, shortcuts and widgets, if they overflow while you’re moving stuff around. SPB Shell 3D automatically reflows each panel’s contents for you, and this means you never have a “no more space on this home screen” error. It also means you don’t have to tediously try to drag something from screen to screen to screen if you need to move it somewhere else. You can drop it in the tray, swipe over to where you’re going, and drop it where it belongs from the tray.

In the lower right of the above shot, you see the standard grid icon for the app drawer. This is pretty standard stuff, smooth scrolling against a black background, but they managed to put in a nifty feature even here. When you’re in edit mode, you’ll see a little house icon over each app in the drawer that is also on the home screen. This is a great way to see at a glance what apps you have out on your panels and which apps you won’t see unless you look in the drawer. Personally, I prefer to have just about everything on the home screen, so the only apps in my drawer that don’t have little house icons are those that I launch by widget instead (BeyondPod, Rdio, etc.).

Folders

This is SPB Shell 3D’s best feature, IMO. The stock launcher has had folders for some time, and even iOS finally gave up and admitted they were necessary. But there’s a problem with home screen folders. Once you put something in them, even if the folder icon shows you tiny thumbnails of the icons, you rarely go back to that app. Folders are where apps go to be forgotten.

But SPB Shell 3D has a different approach. Yes, you can have folders that are just 1×1 thumbnails of the apps inside, but like Shell 3D’s widgets, folders can also be multiple sizes. As you can see in the screenshots above, in addition to the thumbnail grid, home screen folders can contain 3-7 full size icons that are just as tappable as anything else on the home screen. This gives you the best of both worlds. A labeled container to hold related apps, but you can still get to those apps without the extra step of opening the folder. Of course, you can open the folder and see all the apps contained therein at their full sizes, if you need to. But I find that even with big groups of apps like Utilities, there are rarely more than 7 I need quick access to. Maybe I’m OCD — okay, definitely — but I really like having my home screen apps “penned in” with like apps in neat little groupings.

Speed

The last really cool feature I don’t have any screenshots for. You’ll just have to see it for yourself. Given all this eye candy, you’d think SPB Shell 3D would be slower than the competition. But the folks over at SPB have optimized this down to every line of code, and it runs not only faster than “full service” launchers like LauncherPro and ADW, but it runs faster than the stock launcher in my testing. Everything is quick, taps are responsive, and animations are smooth. It doesn’t feel like it weighs down my phone at all. And as far as launcher replacements go, that’s really saying something.

Downsides

While it’s fast and pretty, that all comes at a price. Battery life. I noticed my battery draining noticeably faster with SPB Shell 3D than with the stock launcher. The drain isn’t dramatic or crippling, but it could be a factor if you’re just barely getting by with battery life as it is. I still get through a full day with my Captivate, but the battery is almost completely dead by the end of the day rather than around 30%.

With the caveat that my test copy is a beta, I also found a few issues with crashing. Sometimes things would just stop responding, and I’d need to reboot, or I’d get weird feature lockups like the weather panel refusing to update. I’m sure these are normal development bugs and will be fixed in the release version.

It’s also a little pricey compared to the competition, selling for $14.95. This is really expensive by Android app standards, three times the price of LauncherPro. Is it worth it? I think so, but your mileage may vary.

Conclusions

SPB Shell 3D is my new default launcher. It makes my Android phone more capable, and more fun to use. It’s a little pricey, but well worth it if you use your Android device heavily. SPB Shell 3D is available now on the Android Market.