Dotted Eighth

You’re on the Flash diet, aren’t you? All the cool kids are doing it.

It turns out that audio posts on the Tumblr Dashboard don’t work if you don’t have Flash installed, so I wrote a Safari extension called Dotted Eighth that makes the Tumblr Dashboard use HTML5 players for audio posts. Now you can listen to audio posts sans Flash. Boo-yah¹.

Here’s what it looks like:

To download Dotted Eighth, click this link. Once it’s downloaded, double-click to install.

Tell your friends.

Nota bene: this extension only puts HTML5 audio players on the Tumblr Dashboard. If you’re looking at someone’s Tumblr site, it won’t work. That might be my next challenge.

(Also, let me know if the extension doesn’t work. I think I’ve set up updating correctly, but this is my first Safari extension rodeo.)

(Also also, thanks to Ryan for motivation.)

¹By default, the Safari <audio> element says “Loading…” — it’s lying. It won’t start downloading the audio file until you click the Play button. I know it’s confusing, but it was either that or have every audio file on the Dashboard download at once. So, deal.

If there isn’t a Tumblr about comical (but justified) user interfaces of computers in movies and television shows, I will make one. Do you know of one that already exists?

Selling Mac Apps

Hey you guys, can I ask you a question? I promise, this isn’t a bit.

Is it just me, or is it really hard to sell Mac apps? It seems as though, in order to really do a proper job selling Macintosh software, you have to set up your own online store, and then you have to write the code in your app and server-side to deal with licenses and serial numbers and stuff. After that, you (optionally) write code to prevent your application from being pirated. Once you’ve done all of that, then you can work on your software, the thing you’re actually selling.

That’s the process that thousands of Mac developers have to go through. Think about how much we’re collectively re-inventing the wheel here — thousands of people are solving the same problem over and over, yet each is starting from scratch to do the whole thing themselves. It’s as if every architect felt the need to design an entry-exit device vis-à-vis a house and/or home, and each one of them took the time to invent the door. Y’know who’s kinda got this shit down pat by now? The door people. Why do software developers keep doing this to themselves? How is this not a colossal waste of time?

These guys, they’ve already figured out.

If I had to pick the single biggest thing that Apple has done with the iPhone, one of my frontrunners would have to be that they’ve made the process of writing, selling and distributing software super-easy. As an iOS developer, you don’t have to worry about implementing your own secure credit card payment system or anti-piracy measures to stop people stealing your app. That stuff’s all taken care of by Apple, giving you more time to work on that insanely great app.

Maybe there’s an opportunity for something like that in the Mac space — a product that, out-of-the-box, gives developers some space in an online store and a framework that lets them quickly and easily implement the licensing and serial number logic with just a couple of delegate methods. Think Sparkle meets Shopify.

I think this could be a thing. Do you?

Online Shopping + HTML5

First, a rant. Then, some HTML5 talk.

The Rant

For the most part, I like online stores just fine. I live in Australia though, so there are some issues. If you live internationally, you’ll probably commiserate with me when you read these.

Issue # 1 - The Products

I understand that copyright laws are antiquated, so I know that, sometimes, you can’t sell me a product. Publishers do publishing deals on a by-country basis, so something that you can buy online from the US can’t necessarily be bought from Australia. I get that.

However. If I’m signed in and you know my shipping address, don’t let me get to the “enter your shipping address” part of the sale before you tell me that I can’t buy an item because you’re not allowed to sell it to me.

Issue # 2 - The Shipping

Shipping internationally costs way more than shipping domestically (understandably). When stores usually show prices for things, they show domestic shipping prices. Why? Well, because it makes the product look cheaper than showing international shipping prices, and because, chances are, most of the store’s customers are from the US.

This becomes a problem when I go to buy something and it turns out to cost a lot more than I thought it would. $20USD for a t-shirt? Eh, I can afford that. But $20USD for a shirt + $20USD to send it to me? That’s a very different cost/benefit analysis. So often, I’ve made it to the “select your shipping address” stage of the purchase before finding out how expensive something’s actually going to be. So that’s one problem with shipping.

The other problem with shipping is this. Some stores don’t offer things to other countries (you can’t get an Amazon Prime subscription outside of the US, Japan, the UK, France and Germany, for example). That’s understandable — it’d cost a lot to provide me in Australia with free shipping for everything for $70 a year or whatever, so you shouldn’t offer that service to me. One thing that pisses me off to no end, though, is Amazon’s Super Saver Shipping. Observe.

INCORRECT! Even when I’m signed in and my default address is in Australia, Amazon still tells me that I qualify for Super Saver Shipping. I can fill my cart up enough stuff to qualify for Super Saver Shipping, and Amazon tells me this:

Great, right? So I check out with my Super Saver-qualifying order, and what are my options for shipping?

Do you see Super Saver Shipping there as an option? No.

Amazon. You know where I live (since you regularly tell me I can’t buy certain Kindle books because of where I live), yet you still tell me I’m eligible for things I’m not. You are lying to me.

So those are the kinds of issues I have with online shopping. Geographical issues. Now, how to solve them.

The HTML5

One of the things that the HTML5 spec includes that doesn’t get as much attention as <video> is geolocation. HTML5 lets your (non-IE) web browser do a pretty good job of figuring out where you are. Here, try it out.

Since websites know where I am, here’s what they should do:

• By default, show me shipping prices for the country I’m shopping from.
• By default, don’t tell me I’m eligible for a service if I’m not actually eligible for it.
• By default, only show me the things that you’re allowed to sell me.

Does this seem like a good idea to anyone else?

[[NSPodcast alloc] init];

If I was going to host a podcast about Mac OS X and iPhone software development, y’know what I’d call it?

NSPodcast.

I explain a little bit more on the site, but I’m considering making a show for and about Mac/iPhone software development. Not a big thing — just some interviews with developers that I think make neat software. I think that’s a reasonable goal to shoot for.

More news on NSPodcast as it happens.

15,000? In a row?

So I had an idea. It was tentatively named “Wasn’t She In?” and it was going to be a web app with two text fields and a do-button. In each text field, you’d type the name of a movie or TV show. When you hit Return or clicked the do-button, the web app would tell you what cast members those two films/shows shared.

The idea is that you’re watching a TV show (say, oh, I don’t know, an episode of The Big Bang Theory) and you recognise one of the cast members (Sara Rue, maybe) from somewhere. You wonder, “hey, wasn’t that person in Movie X?” (in this case, Idiocracy, and yes she was).

Normally, you’d go and find out the person’s name from the IMDb page for the TV show that you’re watching and then do a ⌘+F for that name on the cast list for the movie you thought they were in. “Wasn’t She In?” was going to be a way to streamline that process.

I say was because accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.

Let me say that again.

Accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.

So, yeah. I don’t think I’ll be following through on that idea.

(btw, Boxee pulls in metadata from IMDb for movies and TV shows, but they don’t pay that $15,000 annual fee. They screen-scrape.)

Idea

Just need to capture this real quick.

Idea: a Tumblr theme called P ’n’ V that makes your Tumblr look like a poker-and-viagra-ad-covered robo-blog.

A YLNT Idea

I’ve had this sitting on my hard drive for a while, but the Sleepy Adams’ mascot stirring from his slumber reminded me of it.

Joel and Jeff of the StackOverflow podcast get the community to transcribe episodes of their show. Apart from allowing those who can’t hear to also consume the show, this means that the show’s content is indexable and searchable.

I was thinking of setting up a similar thing for YLNT. It’d be a wiki, stylised (wikis don’t have to be ugly), with a bolt-on component that would make the transcripts look like screenplays. Wouldn’t that look cool? It would be this taken to the next level.

It wouldn’t be that hard. The difficulty would be in transcribing the backlog — there’s ≈ 35 episodes in the bank, but I think that myself and some intrepid volunteers from the YLNT Nation could pull it off. Plus, if we throw in some YLNT rewards for those in the Fun Bunch who contribute a lot, maybe that would incentivise people to get the job done.

Answers enabled, so you can tell me — is this an opportunitystake, or am I crazy?

Movies

I’m back.

OK, so I didn’t get as much time to myself this weekend as I hoped I would. I did manage to make something, though.

Movies is a little iPhone web app for making a list of movies you want to see. You can add movies to your list and tick a checkbox next to a movie’s title to remove it from your list. It’s not much, but in making it, I got to learn about dealing with client-side databases in JavaScript and storing those databases and other files locally with that fancy-schmancy HTML5 offline caching business. If you add it to your homescreen (which was how it was meant to be used), Movies will work offline.

The weekend was a bit of a disappointment, but don’t worry, I have some ideas in the pipeline.

An Idea

A tumblr about depictions of The Future in film that are now in the past. Examples:

Escape From New York, set in 1997.
Escape 2000, set in 2000.
Death Race 2000, set in 2000.

This would be a micro-niche blog. To broaden the scope a little bit, you could have a tumblr just about depictions of The Future in film (Blade Runner, Back to the Future Part II, and Soylent Green come to mind as prominent examples).

This idea is yours for free.