Five Sins of Tech Journalism

If a journalist covering the federal government of Canada were to write that Prime Minister Harper smothers babies in their sleep, they'd find themselves out of work pretty quickly.  Also probably sued for libel.  Rightly so as well, we've come to expect a certain level of quality in journalism, and while there are obvious examples of bad journalists in all fields it seems that tech journalism suffers from a fairly high number of them.  In politics one can point to Fox News as a place where sensationalist and often downright deceptive journalism is rewarded, but in tech journalism they're all too easy to find.

Part of the problem is that making incorrect or outrageous statements is often rewarded.  The need for traffic, which drives revenue, often means that getting the clicks is often more important than getting the facts.  Good SEO (search engine optimization) often trumps good reporting and in the world of blogging simply quoting a few paragraphs from someone else's published work will often get you paid as much as having done the work yourself.

It's hard to pick just five things that I see wrong with a lot of tech reporting, but the internet likes lists so here is a list of five of the most common mistakes.  If you see these sins in a piece then you should start to be more skeptical as you read.  If you see more than one then you might as well be reading fiction.

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Calgary designed iPhone game is App Store hit

In October 2009  Ph03nix New Media launched Canada's first iPhone development fund to promote the creation of iPhone applications.  Since then the market for iPhone applications has exploded, and Ph03nix New Media is seeing the payoff with Big Stack Studios' Sigma for the iPhone.

The puzzle game has been a hit for the start-up studio, with a marketing push by Apple who featured the app in its New and Notable section of the iTunes App Store.  The game has reached #16 in the Canadian App Store and #17 down in the United States.

An addictive puzzler, the game manages to emulate the addictive qualities of Bejewled or Tetris, prompting players to shoot coloured blocks back and forth across the screen in order to match sets of three. 

Urbanizer wants to know what mood you're in so it can take you for a drink

"The first telephone directory, consisting of a single page, was issued on February 21, 1878." - Wikipedia

Mood MapThe race to make the telephone directory relevant in the age of Google continues with the recently released Urbanizer, an iPhone application aiming to be the pocket sized hip extension of that dead tree tomb that sits unused in a corner of your desk drawer.  On the go and want to know where to eat, well that's what Urbanizer is for. The catch with Urbanizer, the thing that separates it from the crowd of other location based applications is that it doesn't just group its suggestions based on location, user ratings or any of that useful stuff it suggests places based on your mood.

Urbanizer is from the good people at the Yellow Pages.  It also has a website that shows mood maps for the cities where the application currently works (Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa).  The application includes the now obligitory social media functions, allowing your suggestions to be refined by what your friends are digging.  It feels a bit odd to use an app where “hipster snack” is an option, but maybe that's just me.

iPad Apps: Getting Things Done

Having had the iPad for well over a month, and as we are into the second day where Apple's new tablet computer is available internationally, I've decided to take a look at some of the productivity and getting-things-done type applications that I've been using to keep my life in order. 

Everything is after the jump.

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iPad Apps: Reading

iBooks

After a month and a bit with the iPad I have decided to cover some of the reading applications for the device.  Touted as a portable computer that's poised to kill off the Kindle the question is does the iPad live up to the hype of a portable reader or is does it fall short of e-Ink and traditional print options?  What applications are the best for reading on the iPad and will users be able to start building their virtual libraries?

Reading a virtual book

Before I delve into the nitty gritty of comparing applications the question of whether or not the iPad makes a good book reader should be addressed.  I grew up reading, through elementary school and well into high school books were more reliable friends to me than actual people, and so I have a a great fondness for printed books.  If I were in elementary school today there's no way that an iPad would replace books taken out from the school's library, if only because like my favorite Wayne Gretzky poster that I brought to class for show-and-tell one day, it would likely be stolen by older kids.  I also don't read the iPad in the bath, which is something I regularly will do with paperbacks and comic books.

The iPad is light when compared with a laptop, but heavy when compared to a paperback or even the Amazon Kindle.  Holding it one-handed for extended periods of time can be tiring, and more likely as with a hardcover book it will need to be rested on something for longer reading periods.  Also unlike a printed book or an e-Ink display (as in the Kindle or Sony's eReaders), the iPad's screen is backlit.  This makes it easier to read in situations where lighting might not be optimal, but some people do find it tiring on the eyes.  Having said that the eyestrain is nowhere near as aggravating as that from the ten year old computer monitors I use at work, and even after several hours of reading I've yet to experience any discomfort reading.

Where the iPad clearly trumps traditional books is size and storage.  It's no heavier than a hardcover book, and yet it can fit hundreds of books easily in it.  It's far easier to pack an iPad than two or three novels if you're going on a trip, and that's without even considering that the iPad also plays music and video, does email, browses the internet and much more.  While books, and the Kindle, are clearly better dedicated reading experiences many people are going to find the advantages of the iPad as being worth the trade-offs. 

One area where the iPad does trump the Kindle as a reading platform is that it's much more verstatile.  The Kindle only will read ebooks bought through Amazon and some document files loaded in to the device (via an Amazon service that's charged per-use).  The iPad will read Amazon books through the Kindle application, ePubs through iBooks, books sold via Apple's iBook store, most standard document types and more.  Also reading comicbooks on the iPad is amazing, and something that the Kindle can not reproduce. 

More on all of this after the jump.

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iPad Apps: Twitter

For the international launch of Apple's iPad I decided to take a look at some of the significant Twitter applications and give my thoughts on them after using them for over a month.  Considering the amount of mindshare that Twitter holds in the tech world, it's surprising that the selection of Twitter clients was not stronger, both now and at the iPad's launch.  Tweetie, now renamed Twitter after the company bought it back in April, is my preferred iPhone Twitter app and is still nowhere to be seen.  Birdhouse, an iPhone app I use to compose many of my Tweets, is also missing.  So what does that leave us with?

TweetDeck
Price: Free 

TweetDeck for the iPadI will be the first to admit that I am not a TweetDeck fan, and have never been.  On both the iPhone and the desktop the application just seems much too interested in being more powerful than anything else it's like being shot in the face at point-blank range with an information shotgun.  

TweetDeck's strengths are, to me at least, its weaknesses.  The ability to have panes upon panes of Tweets to flick through makes it hard to focus on anything, and soon the experience is like trying to accomplish a task while a room of sugar-fueled children are shouting for your attention.  Rearranging the panels into any sort of order is still a task that befuddles me, and so as with the other versions of the application after about two hours trying to use it I quickly closed it for the last time and walked away to lie down and cry.

If you're someone who has decided that having tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, and following another thousand people, is important then this might be for you.  Having instant access to each and every Twitter account you have might be worth the trade-off of not being able to just focus on one at a time.  And let's be honest, complaining about losing focus while on Twitter is like complaining about calories while in a candy shop.  

Twittelator
Price: $4.99 

Twittelator for iPadTwittelator is my preferred iPad Twitter client.  Though even with this I still have a sense that it's not quite the perfect Twitter app for me, I have a much harder time pinpointing what my problems with the application are than I do with TweetDeck.

What Twittelator does well, in contrast to TweetDeck, is to section off each of the potential multiple Twitter accounts so that it's easy to focus in on one at a time.  In fact each differing bit of collected Tweets are presented in their own window and often there is only one window on the screen at a time.  Thus it's easy to read through your friends' Tweets, then check to see if anyone has been mentioning you before going on to see if anyone has been talking about TechVibes all without getting confused as to which pane you're looking at.

There are some very nice visual touches, the wood background for example, and managing and editing an account profile is easy to do from the application.  Updates to the app have addressed some of my initial concerns, and it's truly a nice way of handling Twitter. 

Twittelator is by far my strongest recommendation of any of the iPad Twitter apps currently out.  Yes there is something about it that still does not quite feel exactly right, and yes I'm looking forward to Twitter's official iPad app, but for now it's the best in the bunch.

Twitterific for iPad
Price: Free with $4.99 upgrade that gets rid of ads and allows for multiple accounts 

Twitterific for iPadTwitterific for iPad is the third of the current Twitter clients for the iPad that are worth checking out.  It suffers from being kind of in the middle between the senses assaulting overload of TweetDeck and the visual style of Twittelator.  

For the most part I have no complaints with the application, though it does freeze the screen when it's loading new Tweets which can be exceptionally frustrating.  This is probably the best starter Twitter app I could recommend.  The ad-supported version is free, and if you don't mind unobtrusive ads appearing in your Twitter stream and only need to access one Twitter account it's going to be enough for you.  (If you're looking at paying the $4.99 to upgrade I would consider Twittelator).

What Twitterific does really well is that everything is really large and readable.  Different kinds of Tweets are colour coded differently to make spotting when you're mentioned or your own Tweets that much easier in the Tweet-time-line.  Basic Twitter functions such as reading, posting and re-Tweeting are easy to do with Twitterific, but more advanced things are complicated.  That you can't immediately see if someone is following you, the way you can on Twittelator, is also a shame.

 

iPad one month (and a bit) later

iPadBack when Apple's iPad was first released in the United States I wrote a brief review of the device for The Georgia Straight's Tech Blog.  However playing with something for a weekend, and actually using one as a part of your life are two different things.  How does the iPad hold up beyond the few days of testing that most reviewers get, if they're lucky, before writing their articles?  How does the iPad fit into my life, when I've already got an iPhone and a Macbook?  Is the battery still as amazing as it seemed those first few days?  

What is the iPad?

The question of what an iPad is, and where it fits into people's lives is going to really determine how people take to it.  Yes, the iPad is quiet clearly a computer, and for many people it might be all the computer they need.  Email, web browsing, photos, video and music are all as good on the iPad as they are on any computer that I've used.  I can think of several people who I know who could use the iPad as their only computer, and not have to sacrifice anything they are doing now, while gaining portability, ease-of-use and affordability.

The problem is the iPad remains, somewhat inexplicably, tied to a computer.  Like an iPhone or an iPod touch the iPad requires an initial connection with iTunes to activate it, and if you're using it for music and video you'll be needing to use iTunes to manage your media.  The message from Apple is clear, the iPad is not quite a standalone computer yet.  Much of the pre-release backlash from some quarters of the technology seemed to misunderstand that, and the arguments against the iPad often were more based in ontological views of what a computer should be, rather than what the iPad was.  

With the exception of people for whom email, the web and media are all they need a computer for, the iPad is essentially an extension of a computer.  It's the computer you take when taking a computer is a pain in the ass, it fits in between the iPhone and a laptop and it feels good there.  I could not live with the iPad as my only computer, but then again neither could I stand having only a cheap netbook as my only computer.  

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HootSuite adds Instapaper, Languages, and Email

HootSuite Owl - MangaAnyone who is using Twitter in any sort of promotional or professional capacity is probably already using Vancouver's own HootSuite.  Both the web version and the iPhone application are the best options for managing Twitter feeds, timing the release of tweets and tracking the reach of your Twitter message.  Now the application has added new features, making the service even more useful.

The new features were announced in a blog post on May the 19th, and include the addition of support for saving items to Instapaper for later reading, translation to Japanese, German, Spanish, and Portuguese as well as "Tweet to Email" allowing Twitter posts to be sent to those few people who don't have Twitter accounts.

The update includes both the Full and Lite version of the HootSuite iPhone applications.

iPad meets strong pre-order sales in Canada - new orders shipping for June 7th

Apple Store OnlineApple started taking iPad pre-orders on Monday with orders arriving on the iPad's release date of May 28th.  It appears that the iPad's demand is strong enough here in the Great White North that Apple has gone through their initial batch of iPads.  Orders made today through Apple's online store are now promised to arrive on June the 7th. 

While Apple will still have iPads for sale on the Canadian release date, to get your hands on one of those you will have to brave the lines outside Apple's retail locations.  Of course the option of cross border shopping remains, with iPads reportedly in stock in most American Apple Stores.

Or, you know, wait until June 7th.

Once again for those who missed our previous blog post, Apple has announced the iPad's Canadian pricing as: 

Pad (sic) is available in Canada for a suggested retail price of $549 (CAN) for 16GB, $649 (CAN) for 32GB, $749 (CAN) for 64GB for Wi-Fi models and $679 (CAN) for 16GB, $779 (CAN) for 32GB and $879 (CAN) for 64GB for Wi-Fi + 3G models. iPad will be sold through the Apple Store® (www.apple.ca/store), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.

Canada gets iPad release date and prices

iPadIf you haven't already cross-boarder shopped yourself one of Apple's new iPads, you might be interested to know that the company has finally announced the first round of countries getting the device along with the street date, the pre-order date and pricing.  Canada's one of the nine countries in the first round of the iPad's international release, which was pushed back due to stronger than expected demand in the United States. 

Today Apple announced that the iPad will be released in Canada on May 28th, with pre-orders starting on Monday May the 10th.

Pad (sic) is available in Canada for a suggested retail price of $549 (CAN) for 16GB, $649 (CAN) for 32GB, $749 (CAN) for 64GB for Wi-Fi models and $679 (CAN) for 16GB, $779 (CAN) for 32GB and $879 (CAN) for 64GB for Wi-Fi + 3G models. iPad will be sold through the Apple Store® (www.apple.ca/store), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.

Demand in the United States has remained high, with Apple having sold more than one million units since it's April 3rd release date on the south side of the border.

There has been no news on data plans for the Wi-Fi + 3G models, though since in Canada three of the national cellular carriers handle the iPhone it's possible that data plans will be availble from Bell, Rogers and Telus.  Rogers has already said that they would offer plans for the iPad, while people reading into things have assumed that Telus would be selling the iPad.

Most likely no matter what carrier offers plans for the device, it will not be sold through them just as despite the fact that AT&T sells the iPhone in the US, they do not sell the iPad.  In fact in the US Apple has done as much as possible to eliminate the users' need from the need to deal directly with AT&T, allowing users to sign up for data plans right from the iPad without having to go into an AT&T store.