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April 20, 2019
Sift News Therapy aims to reduce your news anxiety
The trouble with the news is that the focus is on what is new — what’s happening now. We sometimes get analysis that allows us to see the bigger picture, but even that is fairly limited. In the end, the news can leave us feeling apprehensive, even outraged, because so much bad stuff is happening and there is nothing we can do about it.
A snippet from Sift on the topic of U.S. immigration
Making things worse are those who take advantage of the situation by offering quick-fix political solutions designed to make us feel like something is being done. This helps governments stay in power and helps opposition parties win power. It helps us not at all.
The makers of an app called Sift News Therapy believe that we need way more context. For example, when you’re reading about the latest tragedies and controversies at the U.S.-Mexico border, what you really need to know about is immigration policy.
This is a much bigger topic, covering a lot of territory. But if you learn something about it, you’ll find that there isn’t really much in the way of news at all. Much of it, in different forms, has happened many times before. Opportunists have been whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment for hundreds of years.
Sift looks at U.S. immigration policy in two parts: the economy and cultural identity. In each section, you swipe through pages with snippets of information that together leave you much better informed.
Included are interactive charts, tables and quizzes — all of them nicely designed. And along the way are deep dives into related topics such as the tech industry.
Backing it up are credible sources. For example, the two for entrepreneurship are the Americas Society and the Center for American Entrepreneurship.
When you’re done with a topic, you can check in with your anxiety level. After reading about immigration, I chose the lowest.
The other topic currently available is guns. Coming up are climate, education, heath care and media literacy.
If you want to read about them, though, you’ll have to pay for a subscription. You get a one-week free trial, then it costs $26.49 every six months in Canada or $19.99 every six months in the United States. That’s around $4 a month.
Is it worth it? Well, for one thing these topics are covered very much from an American point of view. If you’re an American, that’s great. If you’re a Canadian who gets their news from CNN and the New York Times, it could also be great.
I’m kind of surprised at how many apps are asking for subscriptions — sleep apps, yoga apps, meditation apps. And now news apps. Where does it end? How much are people willing to pay?
The old journalist in me hopes that a lot of people are indeed willing to pay for the news. Good journalism requires good journalists, and they don’t come cheap.
The other problem for Sift is that it is a new. Will they get around to finishing those other topics? Can we count on them to create new topics on a regular basis? You might want to wait and see before paying. But if everyone does this, the lack of cash flow could kill Sift before it has a chance to prove itself.
The company behind Sift is All Turtles Corporation, which funds startups with a focus on technology. They cite a study from the Pew Research Center that shows most Americans suffer from news fatigue. Their own study shows that people feel less anxious and overwhelmed and more informed after using Sift.
If true, I hope they succeed.
March 31, 2019
Apple News only works well with the +
The message you get from Apple News is clear: unless you’re willing to pay for a subscription, don’t bother.
The epitome of this message came today in the form of a headline from the Wall Street Journal: Apple News+ is great for magazine lovers, but it’s not the future of news.
And right underneath it: an Apple News+ label.
In other words, we have a deep-dive story about Apple News+, but can only read it if we subscribe to Apple News+.
But maybe we don’t really need to, because so much is said in that headline that rings true.
Apple News (without the plus) is a collection of news and magazine stories, some of which are free and some of which are only available if you subscribe to Apple News+. The split is about half and half.
The free stuff is mostly news articles that you can find elsewhere — either on competing news apps or by going to websites.
The stuff you have to pay for is more exclusive. That article from the Wall Street Journal likely contains insights you won’t find elsewhere — at least not of the same high quality.
But it’s mostly magazine articles that demand a subscription. There are a lot of them, and they all look good. Gaining access ($12.99 in Canada, $9.99 in the U.S.) is an amazing bargain.
So if, as the Wall Street Journal says, you’re a magazine lover, paying for Apple News+ is a no-brainer.
Apple News (sans plus), on the other hand, will leave you unsatisfied and annoyed. You’re stuck with navigating around half the articles because you haven’t paid for them. And for the other half, well, there is much more satisfying way of discovering and reading them. It’s called Flipboard.
March 16, 2019
The anti-apps you won't find on your phone
On a quiet little street in Norwalk, Connecticut, across from a thrift store and a pre-school, just down from a large church, is the headquarters of a puzzle empire that spans hundreds of publications filled with crosswords, fill-ins, logic and math problems, sudoku, word seek, and just about any other puzzle you can think of.
PennyPress and Dell publications are tucked in with the magazine section of pretty much every grocery and drug store in Canada and the United States. They hearken back to a time when doing a puzzle meant putting pen to paper, not firing up an app on your phone. These are puzzles that might seem too hard for the attention-challenged brains of today.
Yet their continued existence is proof that ordinary, everyday people were and are capable of solving complex cryptograms and perplexing logic. You can tell there is nothing elitist about these collections. Just look at the cartoon image of a bunny sitting in a top hat to symbolize anagram magic squares. Or the cliché Sherlock Holmes looking for cryptogram clues.
You might think these puzzles are best left to old folks who can’t figure out how to use a computer. But you would be wrong. They are for anyone who wants to grow new connections between the synapses in their brains. Or at least nourish the ones they’ve retained.
Think of them as anti-apps. Think of them as a way of renewing your ability to think.
February 20, 2019
You, too, can learn to love WeatherCAN
Your first impression of WeatherCAN, the free new weather app from Environment Canada, is inevitably made by its icon.
I want to say it’s fine example of brutalist design, but that would imply that someone who knows something about design made the conscious decision to do it that way. But I’m pretty sure it was actually done by some well meaning federal government employees.
Four types of weather are squeezed into that tiny space, and the government of Canada logo is jammed in for good measure. And when you fire up the app, things don’t get any better.
But how about we accept the design as charmingly naive, and leave it at that. Because the actual weather information is really quite good — better in some ways than the stock Apple app.
There are five sections to explore: the current weather, the hour-by-hour forecast, the seven-day forecast, the satellite image, and fun weather facts that show up every couple of days.
There is no skimping on detail for these forecasts. When I say hour-by-hour, for example, I really do mean one forecast for each hour of the day.
You play a short looping video of the satellite image to get an idea of where the clouds are headed. On the downside the map is kind of minuscule on my iPhone SE. It might look better if you have one of the monster phones that are the new normal.
I find the fun facts more interesting than I thought I would. I’ve learned about ice pillars, sun dogs, and the lack of wind on the day Canada’s flag first went up a pole in front of parliament in 1965.
One strange thing I’ve noticed is that the forecasts are consistently more pleasing in the WeatherCAN app than they are with the Apple Weather. In the midst of a cold spell, it’s heartening to see the warmer days ahead predicted by WeatherCAN.
Kidding aside, this difference is puzzling.
The Apple app gets its data from The Weather Channel. But where does The Weather Channel get its data from? Do they have an army of meteorologists that rivals the resources of Environment Canada? Seems hard to believe, and I couldn’t find anything on their website to answer this question.
In any case, WeatherCAN makes me happier so I’m sticking with it.
February 17, 2019
lire settings
In my review of lire, I griped about some of the settings being hard to find in this RSS feed reader. So here’s a bit of documentation for those who would like to polish their experience with the app.
When you first fire up lire, there are three places where you can find settings:
- The filter
- The folder
- A bunch of other stuff
The screenshots below show how I have them set up for unread in the filter, subscriptions in the folders, and font in the other stuff.
1. Filter for default to unread.
2. Set for subscriptions in folder:
3. Set for font, theme, etc.
To get at the typography settings, you have to open an article. This is where I found the all-important line-spacing. I made the margins a little wider as well. These settings will apply to all articles.
Location of typography settings:
Set for line-spacing, etc.:
February 16, 2019
lire close to being perfect RSS feed reader for iPhone
RSS feeds are the best way to keep up with the news, and lire is the best way to wrangle them on your iPhone — with just one niggle.
It’s bizarre that anyone uses Facebook or Twitter for their news. Posts and tweets come in at random times chosen by an algorithm that is not explained to us. The sources of news might be reliable, but just as often they might be fake.
With RSS, you get to choose your news sources — everything from a local newspaper to a national TV network to a new site specializing in a topic. If you can’t can find the feed for a site, send them an email. I got a local paper to put one in that way.
There is only one thing bad about RSS feeds. Sometimes you only get a headline or a snippet of the story. If you want to read the whole thing, you have to go the site. All too often, this means having to wade through ads and trackers to get at the precious content.
Some feed readers have a third-party add-on that pulls in the story, but they can be slow and maybe not work at all.
When I found out that lire was a “full-feed” reader, I was intrigued. The description at the App Store promised I would never have to go to a website to read a story unless I wanted to.
The reviews were good, and I liked the fact that the price ($6.99 in Canada) is a one-time payment. There are no subscriptions to worry about, although you can add a “tip” later if you really like the app. I’ll probably give one myself.
After a few weeks of exploring lire, I was able to make it do pretty much anything I could think of. For example: it defaults to unread, the font is Helvetica Neue, the line-spacing is much looser, the background colour is muted, the margins are a little bigger.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it took me a few weeks.
The line-spacing was way too tight for my eyes, and I thought regularly about sending a suggestion the developer about adding a preference for it. Turns out that there are a bunch of typography-related preferences, but you have to go into an individual article to find them.
Even when I found them, I suspected that they would only work for that one article. They would much easier to discover if they were in with all the other preferences.
Which leads me to one last discovery that makes lire close to being perfect.
My feeds are divided into folders named for categories of news — regional, national, world and so forth. The default is to show all the subscriptions in the folder together, but I like the option of being able to read one subscription at a time. You can set a preference for this (again not easy to discover) but it’s a either-or situation. You can’t choose as you go along.
This is not a deal-breaker for me, and likely isn’t one for you either. So if you’re looking for a great RSS feed reader, go ahead and take a chance on lire.
PS: Could we please have a version for macOS?
May 27, 2018
How to block Facebook login / signup pop-up
I’ve been thinking about deleting my Facebook account, but I’m worried that I will still need access to it from time to time. For example, I might want information about a local event, and they’ve decided to post about it only on Facebook.
You can visit Facebook pages without signing up or logging in, but you have to contend with an annoying pop-up that covers a big chunk of the bottom. It grows to cover the entire page if you scroll down.
I found a way to stop this, but it took a fair bit of searching. So I thought I’d post it here in the hope that this will make things easier for other people in my boat.
First, install uBlock Origin as an add-on or extension to your browser. This is a great open source ad blocker that works flawlessly. It has the option of allowing you to whitelist sites that you favour, so there’s no need to feel guilty about denying ad revenue to the good guys.
Open uBlock, and click on the dashboard icon at the top right.
From there you can click on the My Filters tab. This is an area that allows you to customize what gets blocked — including Facebook’s annoying pop-ups.
Copy and paste the following into the dashboard, and click Apply Changes.
www.facebook.com###pagelet_growth_expanding_cta
That should do the trick. You can check out Facebook to your heart’s content without Facebook knowing about it.
July 31, 2017
How my web skills helped cultural tourism in Tanzania
The three weeks I spent in Tanzania as a volunteer web designer in the Leave for Change program were a perfect fit for me. Except for Joomla, but even that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
When I first heard about the program at Thompson Rivers University, I was working as an auxiliary, which meant I wasn’t qualified to apply. It was also soon after having been laid off my job of over 20 years at the Kamloops Daily News. The family financial picture was uncertain, to say the least.
But three years later, I was on full-time and my wife agreed that this too good an opportunity to pass up.
I went to the Uniterra website to check out Leave for Change openings and was surprised to find a couple of openings for web designers. The one in Tanzania seemed closer to what I was doing in TRU’s marketing and communications department, so I made it my first choice when applying.
A few months later I was on my way.
Looking back on it, I can’t really say why I was so nervous about going. I worried about every little detail, even though I had been assured by other volunteers that the organization would take good care of me. And in fact, they did.
I was greeted at the airport and taken to a beautiful bed-and-breakfast in Arusha, a city near Mount Kilimanjaro. In fact, I viewed this fabled peak from the airplane on the way in. It was an impressive sight.
In spite of a warm welcome, I found myself overwhelmed by the foreign-ness of the place. The closest that I have come to a similar country was Sri Lanka back in 1982. I was a lot younger then, and a lot more fearless.
I felt not so much cultural shock as cultural overload. There was just so much to take in.
Needless to say, I adapted. And what helped — as I mentioned at the beginning — was the fact that my assignment was a perfect fit. The work set out for me on the Tanzania Cultural Tourism website was a lot like the work I’ve been doing for years at TRU.
Updating. Coding. Editing. Organizing.
It all came together because it was stuff I was already used to doing. The upside to being an old pro (the downside being that you’re old) is that you have confidence that you can solve pretty much any problem that gets thrown your say.
The first problem, and the biggest, was trying to figure out Joomla. This is a content management system along the lines of WordPress. Unlike WordPress, it is poorly documented and ugly as sin.
At first I struggled to do the simplest tasks. How do you update an article? It can’t be that hard. One thing that helped immensely was a theme I found for the back end that at least cleaned up the clutter and made the interface look like something that was designed in this century.
I persevered and eventually discovered how to do all the things I needed to do. The key was creating my own documentation. I wrote down where everything was, along with step-by-step instructions on how to get stuff done.
So how was this a blessing? By teaching myself I was better able to teach others.
The bulk of the assignment entailed updating a website that hadn’t been updated in five years. A lot had changed, and a lot hadn’t been coded correctly in the first place. It was a big job.
But the other half of the assignment, which in some ways was more important, was to leave behind the knowledge I had gained. Those step-by-step instructions I created for myself forced me to break things down into manageable bits of training for three staff members of the Tanzania Tourism Board.
They had initially wanted me to work with their IT department on training. But I assured them that using a CMS to update a website was no more difficult than using Microsoft Word to update a document.
They were pleasantly surprised to learn that I was right.
The real test, of course, will be to see whether they actually do keep the site up to date now that I’m back in Canada. They have my email address, and I offered several times to give them guidance if they need it.
My fear is that the staff is quite small, and even with the best of intentions they just might not find the time to do the updates. Other things might take priority. We’ve all been there.
Regardless of the outcome, I’m satisfied with what I accomplished in 12 working days. I did as much as humanly possible for a good cause.
Cultural tourism, which I had never heard of before, is a great idea. Local groups around the country organize tours of their village or region, and apply to the Tanzania Tourism Board for support. They must meet strict guidelines.
I saw one such enterprise in a place called Tengeru. The people there were incredibly friendly. To a certain extent, it was rehearsed — how could it not be? — but I also felt a genuine warmth.
The day consisted of two main parts: a coffee tour and a canoe ride at a nearby lake. Our guide had a great personality and proved to be quite knowledgable. His English was impeccable. The fact that he had experience guiding tourists on Kilimanjaro probably didn’t hurt.
I learned where coffee comes from, and had a lot of fun doing it.
But the best part was knowing that most of the money people spend on these tours (I met three Americans and three Belgians while there) stays in the community for local initiatives such as education and health care.
The website I worked on helps promote these tours. Visitors and tour operators can refer to it and find something that suits them. Pretty much everyone who visits Tanzania comes for Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti or Zanzibar. But they often have a few days where they are at loose ends, and these cultural tours are a great way to fill the gap.
If I was even in some small way able to keep these tours thriving, I will indeed be quite happy.
July 26, 2017
A day in the life of a web designer in Tanzania
First, you have to get there. That means surviving wall-to-wall people at Addis Ababa airport.
But it’s all worthwhile because you start your day with a glorious sunrise like this.
Or on a sunny day, like this.
I stayed in a nice little bed-and-breakfast type place.
It was called Adia’s Place. Adia made me breakfast every morning, except for a couple of days she took off to have a baby.
This dude did the laundry and other stuff.
This guy drove me to work every day.
Why did I need a driver? Because you never knew who might be lying in wait at the side of the road.
Lions.
Cheetahs.
Leopards.
So we had to drive fast.
I didn’t work in a clock tower, but it was near a clock tower.
So here’s the building where I actually worked.
I shared a tiny space with other volunteers.
It seemed even smaller when these guys moved in.
And this guy.
Luckily, we had some other guys building new furniture for us.
The boss was kind of grumpy.
And this guy was kind of shifty.
I never did find out what these guys did.
After working really hard, I got a promotion and moved into this office.
On coffee breaks, we had fresh coffee. Really fresh.
First, we would pick the beans.
Then we would dry the beans.
Then we would shell them.
And roast them.
And, of course, grind them.
Finally, we had a nice drink of coffee.
By the time that was over, it was time for lunch. We went to a nice place by the lake.
And had a hearty meal for $3.
For dessert, it was bananas.
Sometimes, we would have company for lunch.
And more company.
By the time I was done lunch, it would be time to go home.
The wildebeest crossings could really slow you down.
But the turtles were even worse.
Finally, I made it home.
And had that great feeling that I had found my TRU
December 18, 2016
Three steps to freedom in web design
One of the coolest things about Resilient Web Design is that it is a web book. Yes, entire book with chapters and an index, created first and foremost for the web. It looks good and reads great on any device.
But a book is nothing without content, and this one delivers. Mostly, Jeremy Keith presents a history of web design, but along the way we learn about the founding principles of the web and the philosophy they infuse in everything we do today.
It’s taken awhile, but we’re finally reaching the point where it’s considered normal to design a website so that anyone, armed with any device, can use it. Knowing the history of the web, it’s easier to understand past mistakes. It’s also easier to understand why we need no longer repeat them.
Keith’s big takeaway is his three-step approach to web design:
- Identify core functionality.
- Make that functionality available using the simplest possible technology.
- Enhance!
In many cases, the simplest technology might be nothing more than semantic markup. If someone can visit your site and get want they want with no CSS or JavaScript, count that as a victory for the web.
I would be tempted to go one step further. Before you even think about design, create all your content — or at least get it close to what you want. Then mark it up. Then design it.
Following this approach, by the time you reach Keith’s Step 3, you can go nuts.
