Three days of the Daily is just about enough for me also

by avinashkunnath

★ The Daily Wait
[Via Daring Fireball]

I’ve been reading The Daily each day since its debut Wednesday. Three days, three issues. My opinion of it has declined each day. Until I see an updated version of the app, I’m done with it. I noticed yesterday that it took way too long to load the day’s new issue. Today, I timed it. From the time I tapped the icon on my home screen until I could read a single page, today’s issue took one minute and twenty seconds. And to be clear, that was over a reasonably fast Wi-Fi connection.

One minute, twenty seconds. For over a minute of that time, this is all that I saw. At that point, it’s already a lost cause. There’s nothing the actual content or interface of the app can do to make up for the fact that it takes way too long to see anything at all. Imagine a paper newspaper that was wrapped in an envelope, and the envelope was so difficult to open that it took over a minute before you could see the front page of the issue. Who would buy that newspaper? No one, that’s who. And I suspect that’s who’s going to read The Daily, unless they fix this, and soon.

For comparison’s sake, I timed The New York Times iPad app. That took about 25 seconds to load today’s issue. A lot less time than The Daily, but, still too long. I realized that the delay before being able to read it was the reason I’d slowly stopped using The NYT iPad app over the last few months.

[More]

I agree that waiting to see any content is a pain. I really want to open and start reading. Flipboard lets me do this. It also has more interesting tidbits of news from the web. Because it not only provides quick entryways to to Twitter and Facebook accounts but also specific magazines and journals, it provides me a much greater customized news aggregator than The Daily.

The Daily reminds me very much of Time Magazine, except every day, not once a week. The only really compelling thing it has had was the video of Giffords, that was just lucky. It is not any sort of new media. It is simply the old media on a daily basis and in digital form.

But a big thing for me is the lack of outgoing links. The articles are written like USA Today ones, short with little real detail. In an era when there is no scarcity in space – there are no paper costs – why is every article so short and why are there no links to any other source or site for information. The only ones I saw were advertising. How about when reviewing apps for the iPad, have links to the apps to download? Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.

They have a blurb about a PDF at Verizon’s website but no link to the page.

I stopped reading newspapers online that refused to provide external links. from inside the article. I will do the same for The Daily.

The other thing I do not like is re-reading an article the next day. Old issues just disappear. How to I track them down if I want to re-read them? Not very easily. Luckily someone has done this, something the Daily should have had from day 1. As a subscriber, I should have easy access to ALL the content, not just  today’s and that content should be easily deliverable INSIDE the app.

This is basic stuff. Every day The Daily gets less and less compelling for me.

And do not get me started on how many times it has crashed. More than any other app I have ever had.

Wonderful. Now Marsedit seems to be keeping publicize defaults

I hate it when I start troubleshooting something and then it starts working. Now if I can just get Marsedit to stop getting categories, which is has been doing for 5 minutes.

So ecto works but not Marsedit

Something odd. I like Marsedit more than ecto but like to use publicize. It makes it easier to hit both Twitter and Facebook. Guess I’ll have to contact them.

Testing from ecto

Will ecto work without messing up publicize?

Update: yes ecto worked.

UPDATE:Testing from Marsedit

Testing publicize from Marsedit. It worked from WordPress. But will it work from Marsedit?

UPDATE: Nope. When I use Marsedit, publicize is messed up and I have to do it by hand.

UPDATE:Testing WordPress Publicize

For some reason when I send a Marsedit post, it changes the Publicize to drop Twitter and Facebook. I’m looking to see if it works fine from WordPress itself.

Update: Looks like worked fine from WordPress, as expected.

I haven’t gotten this email from ATT

by Bytemarks

AT&T to some iPhone users: stay with us and get a free microcell
[Via Ars Technica]

AT&T has quietly begun offering microcells to some iPhone customers in hopes of keeping them from defecting to Verizon. Some readers have reported receiving e-mails from AT&T with the microcell offer “as our way of saying ‘thank you’ for continued loyalty,” though not all AT&T iPhone users have received it.

The e-mail offer comes with a bar code and has instructions to visit an AT&T store to receive a “free” 3G microcell, which retails at $199.99. The microcell, which is actually a femtocell device, acts as a sort of 3G signal extender and allows you to receive a cellular signal on your phone in small areas—such as your home or office—where you might not normally get signal. (The femtocell device actually creates new 3G signal using your own broadband connection, so it doesn’t really “boost” signal so much as it creates new signal.) AT&T first started selling its own microcells to customers last year and they have been moderately popular among those who live in low- or troubled-coverage areas.

[More]

I have been out of contract for quite some time, waiting for the Verizon iPhone to come out and see what deals appeared. This  could be one but they have not sent me anything to try and get me to sign up for another 2 years. You’d think I would be someone they would be pressing hard, giving all sorts of deals to win my favor.

But all I hear is…

Just crickets.

“Jim Bob, see the coach and take your iPad”

by Monica’s Dad

NFL teams considering replacing playbooks with Apple iPads
[Via MacDailyNews]

NFL teams including the Dallas Cowboys could soon be abandoning.

[More]

Being able to save a lot of paper costs is one thing. But if they are going to use them during games to distribute information from coaches in the booth with coaches on the field, they had better have some good security for their wireless. I wonder how that would work?

How about in the cold or the rain? Paper may still be a backup on the field.

I think there are still some things to work out for field work but for a playbook. Think of interactive videos for each play, perhaps with closeups of each position, customized for the player.

Hope Verizon is ready for the rush.

by ButterflySha

Verizon breaks first day sales record with iPhone 4 pre-orders — in only two hours
[Via Engadget]

It took Verizon only two hours of having the iPhone 4 available for pre-order to break its all-time record for first day sales of a single device. That’s in spite of the fact it only opened up pre-orders to its own subscribers and did so at the dead of night. To be clear, between 3AM and 5AM yesterday morning, more people ordered up the iPhone 4 than Verizon has been able to get through its doors on any full product launch day. Predictably, the carrier hasn’t bothered to include the actual number of devices ordered up, but judging from the server issues it was having immediately after making the handset available and the subsequent shutdown of advance pre-orders, we’ll go ahead and guess it was “a lot.”

[More]

Setting a sales record in 2 hours. Considering more than half of Verizon’s Android and Blackberry users say they are likely to switch to the iPhone and it looks like launch day will be pretty hectic.

I think I will wait.