It’s been a good few days of updating all my Chrome projects with various upgrades, and bug fixes. Here’s a quick review of the updates to AcceleReader – one of the newest in my collection.
Add tags to articles from article-added notification when you add them to your Pocket list. The ‘Add Tags’ link in notification opens a pop-up to add tags to that article.
Continue reading AcceleReader – tagging, history chart & beta support
Just because a thing can be noticed, or compared, or fretted over doesn’t mean it’s important, or even relevant.
Accompaniment to another of Seth’s quotes:
If you measure it, it will improve
I strongly recommend everyone read the full post.
A big reason behind why I removed most of in-app analytics from my Chrome projects.
I’m sorry. This is yet another post1 on more UX/UI mess that keeps bothering me.
Starting with something I recently started using after 8+ years – Facebook. FB earned a reprieve from the tech press after its change of heart on native smartphone apps. But their Android app is still way below par for what is the primary user interface for vast proportion of their users.
Here are 2 bits that bugged me right away…
Facebook states that stories/posts that are posted natively get shared more widely to the followers, compared to those posted as links. Yet, the mobile interface makes it practically impossible to click-through to read those very natively-posted long posts.
Continue reading Facebook Android app – a UX minefield
You’re better off trying something and having it not work and learning from that than not doing anything at all.
– Mark Zuckerberg
In professional cycling, the more dangerous surface to race on is not the slippery one, or a rough / cobbled one, but an unpredictable one. The cyclists can slow down, and/or change the angle of approach if they know about the slippery conditions, or broken road surface. Crashes happen when they go into a corner full gas not knowing about the bad road surface condition ahead.
Moving from pro-cycling to media (and people), the problems caused by bias are just the same. It’s easier to deal with a person who you know is strongly, and consistently biased one way or the other1 – irrespective of whether that bias is in alignment with, or against, your own biases views. It’s the unpredictable ones who are harder to read (and deal with). As interesting as people are to write about, in this post, I’ll stick to media.
Karthik wrote about what he considers The Economist’s *shit* coverage of Indian politics, tinted by their bias against Narendra Modi. Yet, he continues to read the newspaper2 for their non-Indian-politics coverage. However, in view of his recent discovery of the Murray Gell-mann Amnesia effect, Karthik ponders whether he can trust The Economist’s viewpoint on other topics anymore. Read his full post here.
My take on this issue is different. It relies on known and unknown biases. Having been a paid subscriber of The Economist for about 8 years now, I have come to identify their bias as ‘Economically Conservative, Socially Liberal‘3 4.
iDoneThis is a unique productivity tool that begins where normal productivity tools finish – after you complete a todo/task. The core idea is very simple – log your completed tasks in (as you go, or once daily), and then track, search, tag, discuss, share them as you want.
To log a task you can either email a specified email address with completed tasks (better: just reply to their daily emails), or go the iDoneThis website to log the tasks.
Users can be part of (and post dones to) multiple teams, say one for each project or department. Completed tasks can be #tagged for easy organisation, and team members can comment on and/or *like* each completed task.
The log-by-email option used to work for me till, as a productivity hack, I decided to keep my email client and Gmail tabs in a default closed state *all the time*.
The hack’s worked brilliantly! There’s no notifications, and no more quick-check-if-there’s-any-important-new-email only to spend 15 mins going through unimportant, but interesting ones. I open the email client now only when I want to send an email, or am taking a break so I have time to spare. No more interruptions!
The downside to this successful hack is that now I don’t want to open the email client, more recently the Inbox tab, or the iDoneThis website just to send a one line completed task email. And so, slowly, I stopped logging any dones at all.
This new extension, Done!, is my solution to this problem – a way to quickly log completed tasks to iDoneThis without sending an email, or opening the website. Quick, simple, single-purposed.
Continue reading Introducing: Done – Chrome extension for iDoneThis
Fiscally conservative, socially liberal – the political space where new Labour resided, and where Lib Dems should be.
In my opinion, it’s the best choice for a prosperous, yet fair society. Yet, the hardest option to sell. Specially to an ageing population, in a hyperbole-driven, politicised media landscape.
The opposite – social conservatism (Tories & UKIP), and fiscal liberalism (old Labour) are both much easier to sell.
We’ve managed to elect a government that the media, both on the right and the left, have found wanting.
What would it take to get elected a government that the media, both on the left and right of centre, find able.
Chrome Web Store‘s developer attribution doesn’t seem to be very clearly documented anywhere. It took me a while to figure out how to display my name, instead of my domain name on my app listings. Seeing people ask about this in Chrome-apps mailing list, I thought I’d put the details out here for Google to index.
CWS1 offers two kinds of owner attribution for app2 listings:
Here’s how to set them both up:
Continue reading Displaying developer name in Chrome Web Store app listing
I’m happy to announce that the latest update of AcceleReader for Chrome brings article filtering to Pocket.
Articles may be filtered by age or length:
The filtering interface is brought up by:
It can be dismissed in the same manner, or by clicking anywhere on the page.
After reading-time tags for mobile, this is the second big feature I’ve been enjoying using myself, and hope other users like it as well!
