For those who may read this who don’t know, there’s a website that’s become very popular with folks who love technology called Daring Fireball. It’s been available for readers since 2002; I’ve been a regular reader since about 2004. It is authored by one man, John Gruber. I doubt he’ll ever read this.

I have loved reading his site mainly because he states what I’m feeling about technology in good, concrete terms, and elaborates on what subtle movements by companies can mean in the long term. He is seldom wrong in his predictions. I don’t think he can handle not being the underdog, though.

Over the past few months I’ve been following along with both is writing at Daring Fireball and his regular talk show, appropriately titled The Talk Show and there is a greater undercurrent of carelessness than usual. I’ve found his writing to always be brave and honest; part of being honest is stating things as directly as possible and part of being brave is only caring about the listener you have in mind. John seems to be exceptional at this part; only caring about being honest for his intended listener.

My problem is that he seems to be caring about less and less these days. Either that or I don’t care about what he writes as much. To me, it’s an interesting case of being a victim of good fortune.

Everything John does revolves to some extent around Apple. Apple has become the largest corporation in history. Apple is now the incumbant. When you are the incumbant you are treated differently; rebels take on a different shape when they assume power. John has been a very successful rebel online, writing honestly and bravely about the up-and-coming Apple. Now that Apple has the power, the shape of John’s writing is changing in my mind.

Windows and Intel are shrinking dramatically. Yep. And?

RIM is history. About right to me; this is old news.

And then there’s the Claim Chowder¹ that just keeps rolling in. Very, very old. People say stupid things, this is not news.

So now that I’ve sufficiently buried the lede, let me tell you what I think should happen. John should do what I think all successful entities should try to do: be honest and brave and open about the future. Where does he see Apple going and why is Apple going to be the best? The pieces that still resonate with me are future oriented; subtle stings at ailing companies don’t make me laugh anymore.

Psychologically speaking there are different positions you have to take when you are the majority versus when you are the minority in order to resonate with people. The minority states its case as loudly as possible and never acknowledges the opposition’s points as even potentially valid. The majority acts magnanomous in victory and emphasizes its plan. I believe in the past John’s posts followed the minority position very well.

Daring Fireball is no longer a minority blog, it’s time for it to accept success.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas.

via Matt Mullenweg.

Now that BrewControl has launched I’m able to think about how to optimize the way I release software.  I think this quote is incredibly valuable.  You probably don’t have to be in my shoes to understand why.

When you develop a product, you can become so insulated from the outside world in how you view that product.  You are invested in the small details, because you want to get the small details right, because that’s how great products are made.  Since our brain doesn’t see all levels at once we will miss the big picture of how the thing is working if we know the dozen little details that must be addressed.  We can’t do both.

Getting people who want to use the product to use it is oxygen.  It breathes life into a project.  It makes you happier to work on it and it helps the project grow in the right direction.  The sooner my project gets oxygen the sooner it transforms from great to really great.

Ratings are your friends, too.  Well, as the developer, your ratings are my friend.  But they look good on you too!

My new project now seems to be trying to get the news out.  It’s kinda interesting in that I actually enjoy telling folk about the app.  It’s not hard or unnatural.  This is what I was looking for.

Incidentally, you can follow @BrewControl on Twitter at http://twitter.com/BrewControl or visit the website at http://brewcontrolapp.com   And I’ll have that link to the app store as soon as it’s available.

Today that changes. I’ve completed the modifications, and now app has all the functionality I originally wanted. Please add a bookmark for the Switchblade web app. It has all the annotations, search based on your current browsing context, and a completely iPhone native look-and-feel.

I’ve added a link to the app on my sidebar, and if you are interested I’d love for you to tell your friends about it. Enjoy!

This is much better than just trying to do a search for the word “Hawaii” or “Flower,” because you can tailor your search results to find only the tweets you want to as you are creating the tweets. So, you think about what you might want to search for in the future, and you tag the tweet as such. It’s a pretty good system.

My problem is reading the tags. See, the hack that they use is to put the hash symbol right before the tag, making the “Hawaii” tag look like “#Hawaii.” This has become annoying. It’s not so bad when tags are at the end of tweets, where you can mostly ignore them, but there are many times where tags are not at the end of sentences. There are also cases where tweets use multiple tags for different reasons, making them harder to ignore.

Hash tags add more noise to an already quiet signal. When you only have 140 characters to use, adding 10-20 characters of noise is too much for me.

What I propose, however, is not to do away with hash tags. As I’ve said, they are very useful, and it’s not really possible to reproduce their functionality without doing something stupid, like completely overhauling Twitter’s back-end system. I believe that a simple UI trick can work.

I believe that tags should appear without the hash in front of them as a link to the search results for that tag. I’ve included a few mock ups of a couple scenarios in the scientifically proven best Twitter iPhone app, Tweetie.

Here’s a screenshot of the way hash tags are currently formatted, that is to say unformatted.

You can see in the tweet by Clint the hash tag for #short_url. Check it out as I would like it.

While this may still be too jarring for some, I believe it flows better in the reading process than having to interperet random hash characters. If time allowed, I would like to play with subduing the colors, or perhaps doing away with the button altogether and just changing the text color for the tag itself to indicate a link. In any case, I firmly believe that the hash character itself must dissappear if the tweet is to be readable.

Just for fun, here’s an example of a tweet with multiple tags at the end, to see how it might look.

Hopefully this may stir your creative energies, too. Goodnight.

While the application does have some upsides, they are not the upsides you want. The app is unobtrusive. This is good for most applications from a simplicity standpoint, but it’s not great to have your users think “at least I don’t have to look at this all the time.” After opening the application from the system tray, where it resides full time, you are greeted to a window with a questionable color palette and one link.

The buttons on the right are not buttons at all, but rather links to Southwest’s airlines. While this program is not malware of any kind, its dishonest design generates worlds of mistrust.

Lastly, the app is not useful for me at all.  Every “Ding!” price that I’ve seen so far in the past few weeks has been for a one-way trip.  I have no use for one-way tickets. I’m sure there are people out there who do buy one-way tickets on a whim, but they don’t have any immediate family, job, or other commitment to speak of.

If you install this app, it won’t cause any harm beyond taking up space on your machine, but that’s all it did for me.