Shack Attack

Y.N. Rich Kids - "My Bike"

This video by Y.N. Rich Kids makes me so happy. Great production values, great message, and these little kids have some amazing flow.

 

It looks like these are the same kids that put together "Hot Cheetos and Takis," an anthem to the red homework-staining spicy snacks that all middle schoolers love.

(Beats & Rhymes via Bike Rumor)

The 11th Nielsen Heuristic...

The Felicia Day test:

JIRA Jr. – Where Issue Tracking is Child's Play

I've been getting very familiar with JIRA over the last few months. This video made my April Fool's day:

 

Why I'm Not Getting a Paperwhite

No page-turning buttons. Really, Amazon? I love my 4th-generation Kindle, and now it looks like I might have gotten the last version before they took the buttons away for good.

Completely agree with John Gruber here:

It’s good that you can use the touchscreen to turn pages, but why not include dedicated page-turning buttons as well? The e-ink Kindles are designed to do one thing really well: display long-form text. Page-turning is at the heart of the Kindle reading experience. An active Kindle reader is going to go to the next page hundreds — in some cases, I’m sure, even thousands — of times every week. There should not just be buttons for page-turning, but great buttons. Buttons exquisitely designed and engineered to be perfectly placed and delightfully clickable. The problem with using the touchscreen to turn pages is that you have to move your thumb, from the bezel to the display and then back to the bezel after tapping, each time. With page-turning buttons on the bezel, like on the old pre-touchscreen Kindles, you never had to move your thumbs while reading. Not having to move your thumbs is one way a dedicated e-reader could hold an advantage over tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire — a missed opportunity here. It’s a little thing, but as always, it’s the details that matter.

Bummer decision on Amazon's part- the new screen is pretty exciting, and they're so cheap you don't feel guilty about buying the new one a year after the last one came out.

iOS 6 is Here, and Its Name is Cydia

Jailbreaking an iPhone to install non Apple-approved software has always been easy for older devices, but cracking Apple's newest releases takes a while. However, the Chronic Dev Team has finally released their "absinthe" jailbreaker for iOS 5.1.1, and all of us iPhone 4S users are now just a click or two away from free, open phones.

Jailbreaking involves three steps:

1. Downloading and running the Absinthe program.
2. Plugging in your phone and freaking out that you'll irreversably mess something up.
3. Discovering a new icon, "Cydia," hanging out on your home screen.

Cydia is an alternative to the app store, the channel through which all jailbreak-required software passes. There are a lot of great pieces of software out there, but a few of them do a fantastic job of patching the remaining usability holes in iOS.

#1: SBSettings- how does a company with such a killer design and UI team manage to hide something simple like turning off bluetooth behind several menus? SBSettings gives you one-click access to the most commonly toggled settings on the phone, and can be set up to activate with anything from a swipe from the bottom of the screen upward to double-tapping the clock in the lock screen. Beautiful (though they really need to prettify their icons.

#2: f.lux- This nifty program, long out for PCs and Macs, warms the colors on your screen at night to reduce eyestrain and blue light-induced sleeping issues. It's wonderful.

#3: Five Item Dock- I haven't really messed around with homescreen replacements, because I think the basic layout is pretty decent. However, it's really nice to have just one extra icon in the main launcher dock.

 

I'm sure there are a ton of great apps out there, but these are the ones that have fundamentally changed my experience with the device. I'm with Gruber- the low-hanging fruit to implement for the next iOS release gets harder and harder to identity. The only big ones I can think of at the moment are:

• Better maps with turn-by-turn navigation, which appear to be on their way.
• Multiple user sessions, guest passwords, or some way for me to loan my device to a friend and give them access to a certain subset of blank, unused apps. This would work exactly the same as Guest accounts on OS X, and is such a frequent use case I don't get why it hasn't been done yet.