Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 91

Sparrow, the Nokia Lumia 800, and a finished product

Late last week, news broke that my favourite email client Sparrow had been purchased by Google. The notice came with some grim news about Sparrow, namely, that it wouldn't receive any new updates outside of patches and bug fixes. This morning, I uninstalled Sparrow and configured Apple's Mail app as my default client.

Why did I uninstall Sparrow, even though today, July 22, 2012, I like it more than Apple's Mail? There's two reasons. Apple's Mail is going to get an update in a few days when Mountain Lion ships, and Sparrow, while excellent, is never going to get better. The second part of that sentence matters when you realize that as good as Sparrow was, I feel like I used it because I knew one day it would be a lot better. I saw the potential in Sparrow, and was excited to support an app from infancy to adulthood. I was doing what I felt a good customer does: support an indie developer selling a great app by giving them money.

Marco Arment, Instapaper developer and blogger, fairly recently wrote about this:

If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it?s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.

I don't know if it's good or bad that the Sparrow team now works for Google. It's absolutely possible that the Sparrow team can make gmail a lot better. It's also possible that Gmail will released a ruined version of Sparrow on desktops, just like Twitter did when they acquired Tweetie. What I do know is that the ten dollars I gave to Sparrow was used to enjoy their app from the time I purchased it to last week, and that's it. I don't regret my purchase, but it still stings a little.

[image error]

I'm sure people who used and loved Sparrow felt it was a solid, finished product, but I never looked at it that way. I saw something with loads of potential, and wanted to support it so that one day it would really blow everything else away. But perhaps that's my failing: supporing something in the hopes that it'll be good one day, but isn't necessarily now.

When I look back on the Mac apps that I've purchased, Sparrow is one of maybe three that, as of today, don't exist anymore. Every other one—Transmit, Scrivener, Textexpander, 1Password, Omnifocus, various Rogue Amoeba apps, etc etc—are all still independent, succesful, and able to improve on software because I and a lot of other people support them. Sparrow isn't part of a great trend. It's an oddity.

I was thinking about this when I answered a craiglist ad and purchased a second-hand Nokia Lumia 800, a device that will get one more software upgrade this year and then no more for the rest of its life. Why, if I'm interested in in supporting living products, would I buy one that's essentially DOA for future care?

[image error]

The simple answer lies in Matt Buchanan's blog post a few weeks ago, where he suggests that it's much wiser to buy products that are great now, instead of ones that promise to be great later:

You might buy a new phone that's missing something, thinking, "It will get better." No, it won't. If I were to tell you one thing about buying technology, it is this: Buy something because you like what it is right now, not because you think it's going to get better, or that one day it'll be what you really wanted it to be. It's kind of like marrying somebody and thinking you'll change them and they'll get better. They might. But they probably won't. Over time, you'll just hate them even more. And yourself, at least a little.

I bought and supported Sparrow because it was really promising and I believed that one day it'd kick ass. I bought the Lumia 800 becasue even if it never recieves another update, it's an amazing phone that does everything better than I hoped.

I'm still getting used to writing longer posts, so I'm not good at conclusions yet. But I just wanted to say what I thought about future expectations when putting money down on things, and how that's a somewhat complicated relationship. I'm sure I'll come back to this idea later.

Article: On Rejection | Sarah Wrote That

Article: On Rejection | Sarah Wrote That:

How do you know when pieces are “done”? Short answer: when they’re going to press/in the posting queue. But really, they’re done when anything you do seems to throw them off balance more than sharpen them; when you can no longer find a way in, and they seem to exist separately, no longer yours to tinker with.

Day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the...

Day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

- The Dispossessed

Using Twitter with IFTTT

​This is going to be the first in a series of automation-based entries, focusing on really helpful tools like IFTTT (If This Then That), Instapaper, Hazel, 1Password, and other apps that help automate repetitive tasks. 

The entire point of computers is to automate repetitive and tedious tasks, so why are we constantly letting it bog us down in mindless work? ​

Recently, Twitter stopped Linkedin from using its API, which means Linkedin people can't see or distribute tweets on the social network. ​But there's a website called IFTTT.com that allows users to send information from one online service to another. It's a very, very robust automation engine, and I'm going to be writing several posts about this site alone. 

IFTTT calls its tasks 'recipes', as you can create them and then share them with other people to do the same. Below is a recipe I created called "Send Tweets to Linkedin." ​

[image error]

​

​I use IFTTT to send my tweets to two more places: Facebook, and Evernote (links go to IFTTT recipes, which you can simply use yourself by activating these channels in your account). The Facebook recipe is simple enough, but the Evernote one is pretty complicated. Essentially, I modified a recipe created by Justin Blanton. His idea was to send all tweets to a single text file in Dropbox (which is pretty genius). But I like to use Evernote as my personal archive for everything, so I had it send all tweets to a single Evernote file. It's the same recipe, which you can see below: 

[image error]

​

​It works beautifully. Now, my tweets are all organized in Evernote's incredibly-searchable database, as well as distributed across various networks. To make it even more complete, I also have recipes taking @ replies and favourites to the same note, so I can see a pretty clear timeline of my activity. 

Choosing nostalgia

I get really nostalgic for stuff that, when I think about it, didn't exactly impact my life in heavy ways.  Although it's probably common enough, I'm more nostalgic about products, fictional characters, and moments in another person's published narrative than I am about actual occurrences in my life. 

This is used for evil by companies that own intellectual property, like Square, who recently made Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, a music-based game that focuses on the soundtracks from all 13 major releases. It's astoundingly diabolical. ​

[image error]

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy is carefully crafted nostalgia​

That it is a solid music game is entirely incidental. It plays music you remember from the last twenty five years of video games, and that feeling makes you warm and fuzzy and old (2 out of three ain't bad). They spector-style avatars are a constant reminder that this isn't the real thing. As you can see above, each Final Fantasy main character was re-imagined in a cutesy dead-doll fashion, their unblinking blue eyes a reflection of their purpose. It's like Final Fantasy, but it isn't. 

But why isn't it? Why isn't this a Final Fantasy game? There's battles, grinding, and very, very good music. What's missing? Story, of course. There's no story here at all (there's something about a crystal, but whatever. It's ten seconds at the beginning and you only see it as a scoring device). Without story, these characters don't mean anything. They're props, there to make you feel a tinge about that time you spent 100 hours with them saving the world.

I don't think I'm breaking ground here by suggesting that it's what a character does that's important, and not just what they look like and if they have cool hair or a neat gun. ​I'm not likely to fall in love with any of the characters from Theatrhythm because they don't actually do anything. They just stand there, or walk independent of my action. I'm not really paying attention to them anyway. I'm tapping and swiping. But they look a little like a character I used to really like embodying. They have the same name, and the same outfit. But it's a ghost, just a memory, a husk.

I don't like sequels to things for this reason, or fan service in general. If Theatrhythm had featured no characters at all, I wouldn't have liked it any less. ​But this is a problem with fiction in general: people like tropes. They like feeling like they know what's happening. They like comforting character types. People like formulas. They're easy. 

I didn't use to think I included similar notions in my stories, but I do. In fact, I mapped out the overall plot and character motivations from my three books (one unreleased). Turns out, I've been telling essentially the same story over and over, just with different characters. ​I've got similar beats about love, betrayal, and growth in all my stories, and I didn't even do it intentionally. I probably learned about this from Final Fantasy, a series of games involving different characters in different worlds, all telling somewhat similar stories, running into similar character conflicts, and overcoming similar personal and world-saving problems. I think I'm far more forgiving of this kind of reused ideas, and I'm not sure why. 

I looked over the main beats of my three books, and I wrote out the formula for all three. It's not exactly scientific, and three doesn't exactly make a lifetime pattern, but it's still interesting: ​

One main character, two secondary characters 4-5 tertiary characters The main character begins thinking things, and finishes knowing thingsThe main character is in love with both secondary characters The main character believes in a system. This system frames the plot, and informs the strengths, weaknesses, and decisions of everyone This system must be broken, and it must be destroyed in the narrative. This happens so the characters can growBoth secondary characters should betray the first.  This should not make the main character love them any less.

Now, I like this little formula I've made, because I can weave a ton of different characters and ideas through it, and it still comes out feeling a little similar (but not lazily so) to the last one, which is comforting on a similar level to the nostalgia thing so many companies do by re-introducing old characters into new things. At least, that's the theory.

I mean, okay, I guess?

I mean, okay, I guess?

The Adobe sponsorship and credibility

The Adobe sponsorship and credibility:

If a sponsor ever has a problem with something I write, and that affects
pending or future sponsorship buys, that’s fine with me. I can find other
sponsors. And if I can’t, I’ll write for free, like I did for years. If
given the choice between writing for free or censoring myself, I’ll write
for free.

Posting the best things

I make a lot of things, and I don't really post a ton of it. This goes for writing clippings, photoshop and layout work, and photography. I've posted about 1% of the things I've made, and I'm satisfied with maybe half of it.​

The current Graphic Portfolio I have up on this new site represents maybe half a percent of the work I've done in photoshop. I'm happy with it, but over the course of the next few months, I'd like to replace all of it with better things. Iterating, improving, and then shelving the stuff that isn't good enough anymore. That's my plan. ​

I don't post everything because a) a lot of it simply isn't fit or finished enough for public viewing, and my ego isn't solid enough to handle people seeing unfinished work, and b) a good percentage of my work is actually private, and not the kind of thing I just want out there. ​Like Jeff Buckley said (I'm paraphrasing) "Some songs I do for everyone, some songs I do for just a few people, and some I do just for myself. Nobody else gets those." I think it's a good philosophy to have those three pillars for creative output.

But with the ease of this new blog, I might post more and more rough work. I'll see. I haven't decided on that yet. I don't know if it'll be helpful, but it could also be tremendously good for me, to just put everything on display. Still thinking about it.​

​

Montréal

​Here are a few photos I took on a recent trip to Montréal. 

[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]

​

[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]

Consolidating for fun and profit

I'm not sure I have the best track record for websites. I've made lots of them for other people using a handful of applications, and every time I learned a new one I'd make my own website with it. Over the years, I've simplified my own personal website almost down to a nub, while exploring other themes and ideas in separate blogs. But time restraints and a desire to focus have brought me to this new thing here. Welcome to my new website. It's on squarespace, which has always been my favourite thing to use that I didn't use. Why didn't I use it? Why indeed. I asked myself that every year. 

As of last week, my website looked like this: 

[image error]

​

This is almost too​ simple, as you might think. I didn't have analytics on that, so I had no idea how many people had visited the site, nor could I really tell if it was helping anyone find me. I have a feeling it wasn't. Single splash pages that almost never get updated aren't exactly SEO candy. You can see that I'm doing things, but they're all spread across the web, named differently, authored differently, and far too diverse. That's a problem I've had. I spread myself too thin. I don't focus. That's about to change. 

None of this is happening right away, but within the next few months, almost ​all of the links you see above won't work anymore (I mean, they don't work right now if you're just looking at this jpeg.) I'm going to be consolidating everything I want to keep into this one blog, and then dumping the rest.

Hey, I love Tumblr as much as the next addict, but it's got to go. My blog there takes up too much time for not nearly enough return. Another built-in problem with Tumblr is that I end up looking at everyone else's posts and completely ignoring the fact that I should be making my own. That's not a problem here. ​

I'm not going to stop tweeting, because it doesn't take up much time, is​ actually helpful, and has always been a great alternative to IM, comments, and forums. I don't really need to go to any of those things online anymore because of Twitter. 

I won't go over the rest, but you can assume that it's gone. I'm going to focus. The question is, what on? ​

I'm curious and passionate about three things: personal writing, publishing, and graphic design. This new site of mine is going to focus on those three things, and the point at which they converge. I'm a novelist first and foremost, and this space will have updates for new work. It will have blog posts and ideas for independent publishing. Finally, I will also be showcasing my graphic design work, as well as writing my thoughts on various topics therein. ​

So what's with the 'fun and profit' bit? Well, first off, I'm going to be selling things, eventually. I'll also be giving things away, which is infinitely more fun for everyone. I've got lots of goodies in mind, and the folks that should be excited are content creators who want some new resources and tools. I'm really excited to make these things available. ​

I'm really looking forward to the rest of 2012, as I clean up my online presence and finally make things clear for everyone. Earlier this year, I consolidated all of my email addresses into one, and it felt incredibly to remove all that cruft from my life. This website is going to do the same thing for everything else.​

​