iPad Game Reviews, Guides, FAQs:

I have been writing up the iPad games I've played. I decided that I could put the time I invested into these games to good use by putting brief ads for my two books into the reviews, and as far as I can tell, people have been reading my reviews and increasing my eBook sales.

Not all of them, though. When someone sends me an email that says, "I saw your review of game X. How do I persuade the dragon to fly me to the island?" I know that person will not read my book, because he didn't even read my guide, which explains how to persuade the dragon to fly him to the island.

My reviews, FAQs and guides point to for some excellent ways to waste your time. Here's my current list:

• Aralon Sword and Shield Tips and Walkthrough
• Battle Frontier: a Review and a FAQ
• Book of Heroes: a review and a FAQ
• Dungeon Crawlers, a review and a Guide
• Kard Combat: A FAQ for the tablet game.
• Let's Golf 3 by Gameloft: A FAQ for the iPad game.
• Order and Chaos: Guide for new players!
• Words with friends: A FAQ for the tablet game.

Email: prior art!

This Washington Post story is about a man who has been honored by the Smithsonian for inventing Email in the late 1970's. The company I worked for in the 1960's had Email (and I believe we even called it that.) Applied Logic Corporation (a defunct company abased in Princeton, NJ, not to be confused with a current company by the same name) was a time-sharing company. If you had an account on their system, you could dial in remotely with a Teletype and use their computer services. Among these services was the ability to send electronic mail to any other account, addressing that user by name. It was Email, and it was available in 1967. We employees of ALC made extensive use of email to share our development work, APIs, etc. Years later, when I encountered Email on a Unix system, it felt like coming home.

Spring is here? (Feb 23)

I saw my first Robin today. Either Spring is here, or that was one hornswoggled robin.

The Spring of '62: New Old Mets:

The baseball season's acoming, and Robert Lipsyte has written a superb piece on the original Mets. I was there for those hapless Mets, and I expected Lipsyte's piece to be a rehash of old memories. Instead, it was fresh and alive with new insights into those old days. I can't recommend his article enough.

Quantum Walking to Fitness:

I have self-published a second book. This one is very short, so it is only an eBook. The book explains how to keep fit by taking many short walks during the day, walks that add up to a respectable total. I also explain how to work these walks into your daily activities, so that they do not take up too much of your time. You can preview the book or buy it here, for $0.99: Quantum Walking to Fitness.

And please allow me to remind you how to get my first fantasy novel for grownups, Raven's Gift:
eText versions for Kindle, Nook, etc.
The genuine book version at Amazon.

Super, Supersizing:

Macy’s is selling a cappuccino MUG. A mug! The first time I drank a cappuccino, it was served in an espresso cup. And just in case those have been supersized beyond recognition, let me explain that a traditional espresso cup holds just a few ounces of liquid.

Oh, and that  cappuccino mug? A mere twenty-four ounces.

Superbowl XLVI: Falling into the Endzone:

I’ve read many descriptions of that memorable play near the end of Superbowl XLVI, but none of them, I think, captures the full narrative. I shall tell it here.

There was scarcely more than a minute left, and the Giants were inside the Patriots’ ten yard line. The Giants appeared about to go ahead, as they were only two points behind. One of the NBC announcers, Chris Collingsworth, told us TV fans that the right play for the Giants, strange as it might seem, was not to score too quickly, to run out the clock.

The Giants’ coach, Tom Coughlin, did not tell his team not to score. In the huddle, Manning did not tell his team not to score.

The moment Manning handed the ball off to Ahmad Bradshaw, he saw the Patriots standing there, allowing Bradshaw to score. I suspect Manning made a sensible, quick decision: anything that the Patriot’s coach wanted to do must be wrong. It’s indisputable that Manning yelled, “Don’t score,” after the hurtling Bradshaw.

Bradshaw was running with a lot of momentum. Not just physical momentum, but also mental momentum. Here’s how he put it after the game: It’s terrible not to score the winning touchdown in the Superbowl.

Bradshaw teetered on the one foot line, trying to keep his balance, and he fell in.

There’s a miracle here. Can you imagine a Patriot running up to Bradshaw and shoving him into the endzone, to save a second on the clock? Can you imagine a Giant grabbing Bradshaw and hauling him away from those six points? I’m so glad we were saved from all that.

The American Lockdown:

Today, Bruce Schneier commented on a good, thoughtful article about the huge incarceration rate in the U.S.: The Caging of America, by Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker.

I would like to comment that there would be far fewer people in jail, if our country did not actively pursue people who buy marijuana and drugs, and jail the lowest level of dealers. I learned from my stretch in Grand Jury how actively the police try to catch the dealers who make less than fifty dollars a night dealing crack and marijuana. They arrest buyers as well.

The "war on drugs" is a mighty missile mis-aimed. The desire of the American People to consume drugs is what fuels the production, smuggling and dealing that we officially find so distasteful. As long as that desire remains, efforts to police the flow of drugs resemble holding a paper tissue up in a hurricane.

There's an awesome amount of hypocrisy at work here. Is there any way to sweep it away, other than to appeal most of our drug laws?

A Small Improvement for Google Mail:

As Google works on integrating all of its apps, it has changed the Gmail and blogging interfaces to a much more "clean" format. I would like to see Google take this progression one step further: in Gmail, The large SEND button should turn green when the text that I am writing is ready to send.

Frozen Dried Plums (oh, well ... Prunes):

Are you a regular reader of my blog? If so, I’m sure you appreciate the terrific food tips I’ve given you from year to year. Today’s tip derives from stupidity. Last Wednesday, I just couldn’t find my container of Sun Maid Prunes anywhere. Late that night, I opened the refrigerator freezer and there they were. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I misfiled them.

I was curious whether they had frozen rock solid. They hadn’t so I ate one. It was delicious, chilly on the tongue, its flavor concentrated by the cold. I left them in the freezer to determine whether they would freeze solid in another day or two. They didn’t, and I’m still enjoying my cold, cold prunes.

Why the ‘1’?

Since we upgraded to FIOS, we can no longer make 7-digit phone calls. We always have to specify the area code. (The phone companies have a reason for enforcing this new practice. But they would do much better to let us each specify, and change at will, whatever 3-digit prefix we wanted to use by default.)

At first, I felt that FIOS had dropped a drudgery on me. Why should I have to always type those extra three keys? But then I decided I was breaking even, or coming out ahead. True, I have to type ten digits instead of seven, but I also get to type ten digits instead of eleven! The ‘1’ before the area code is now totally unnecessary for me, and for many of you as well.

And then I started to feel superior: to all those web sites, ads, and print items that tell you to dial numbers like 1-800-555-5555 and so on. Every time I see them, I imagine myself sending an eText to their webmaster, publisher, etc., to say: Why the ‘1’? Get rid of the ‘1’, we don’t need it any more.

Stop SOPA! Stop PIPA!

                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                               
                                                           STOP SOPA!  STOP PIPA!                                               
                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                               

About Those Ba%#*&rds Who Caused our Financial Collapse in 2008:

I suspect you get a sour feeling when you think about the irresponsible masterminds whose financial dealings almost destroyed our economy in 2008. Perhaps it aggravates you that they haven't had to take responsibility. Few of them have been charged with a criminal offense. And hardly any of them will serve prison time.

Well now I know exactly why that is. It's very simple. They are: Too Big To Jail.

Think about it: Too Big To Jail.

This insight gives me peace. Now I understand, and I’m sure you do.


I thought up this phrase by myself today, but many others invented it before me. Please pass this phrase on to your closest friends. You, and they, deserve to feel as calm and accepting as I.

Thanks, - Toby

Email has always been bedeviled by a pair of minor problems: the Salutation and the Signoff.
I have no useful advice about the salutation. Often, it's really hard to guess what sort of person or people you are addressing. When I'm in the dark, I usually begin my Email like this:
Hi,
{Etc. ...}

I believe I have solved the signoff issue. It is always good, unless you are touching a loved one, to end your email like this:
Thanks,
- Toby

I think that this signoff feels especially nice in emails that criticize the recipient. No matter how nasty your email gets, you can assume that your polite signoff will disarm them.
Thanks,
- me

Kitchen Problem Solved!

Super markets, gourmet stores, and megastores like Target and all have gadget walls with kitchen gimmicks and gimcracks that are lots of fun to conjure with. I love to look at these walls. Some of the gadgets are so expensive that I can't justify the cost; I just dream about them. Others are so practical that I'm happy to buy them. But what I really like is to find a gadget the solves a problem that I never knew I had.

I found one of those gadgets tonigh,t and I'm more than glad to share it with you. Just imagine: you're roasting a turkey, and of course you want it to stay moist so you cover it with cheese cloth. Every 30 minutes, you to take it out of the oven, and you grab your handy baster. You suck up the pan juice and use the baster to spray the pan juice all over the turkey.

Wouldn't it be awful if you had to deal with an imperfect baster? Wouldn’t that drive you nuts? Well fear no more. Now you can have the Dripless Baster. You can be sure that when you suck up all those pan juices, your baster will not spill a drop into the pan before you spill every drop onto your turkey (and thus into the pan).

Problem solved. And you didn’t even know you had it.

Lottery Logic:

I strongly disapprove of any state-sponsored gambling. Not lotteries, not off-track betting, nothing. I won’t go into the many reasons here, but I want to note my fascination with the way state-sponsored gambling is advertized. The ads must draw in bettors without making claims that are too outrageous or false. A good example is New York’s focus on the value of winning. Could you win? Hey, you never know. (But if you had to, you could make a pretty good guess.)

The multistate Power Ball Lottery (of course I won’t give you a link) is doubling its ticket price, and they are plastering the air with ads that justify this move. They point out that there are lots of things right now whose price is going up, even as the value goes down. But not Power Ball! You pay twice as much for your ticket, but the minimum win doubles also, from twenty$ million$ to forty$$ million$$$.

Now just think of that: you pay twice as much, but you win twice as much; if you win, that is. The other 43,278,956 Power Ball players (my silly estimate) are paying twice as much for nothing.

Completely Confusled:

In New Jersey, and probably where you live, it's illegal to operate the windshield wipers on your car without turning your lights on. I had a problem with this law, but only because I was completely confused.

A light rain was falling, and the windshield wipers on our car make a horrible scraping sound when there isn’t enough moisture. I turned the windshield wipers to their lowest setting. The car lights helped me to see, but the wipers still made the awful scraping sounds. In order to achieve a little peace and quiet, I operated the wipers manually, keeping them off, but turning them on briefly every twenty seconds or so.

I was sure I was breaking the law. I imagined being stopped by a policeman. He would say, “You were running without your windshield wipers.”

I would say, “Well, I had them on manual.”

“I didn’t see them move,” the policeman would say. “It must be forty seconds since you turned them on. I’m writing you a ticket.”

Finally, I came to my senses. There’s no law against using my lights without using my windshield wipers! I had everything backwards. Silly me.

JimRomenesko.com

Jim Romenesko is a thoughtful journalist who, for years, ran a web page about weird news stories. He recently abandoned that site to start up JimRomenesko.com . He describes his new website as about: Media and Other things he is interested in. One of his interests, which he follows with patient agony, is the shrinking of the newspaper and print businesses. When you check our his site, you'll see a lot of words. Persevere, they are worth reading.

The Sequel...

As the year comes to an end, movie makers everywhere are deciding how to capitalize on past successes by favoring us with even more sequels. Unfortunately, some of the greatest movies of all time seem to be immune to sequels. But I’ve given them some thought, and here are my dynamite picks for next year.

1. Shawshank redemption, II: Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, unable to bear their great degree of freedom, plot to return to the only prison they could ever call home.
2. The passion of the christ, II: This time, Jim Caviezel is beaten with much more modern S&M equipment.
3. Twelve days of christmas: On the 13th day of ... (Note to you sticklers. I know you think this sequel should start on the 7th day, but that’s been done.)
4. Broadway melody of 1938, II: A group of modern music stars go back in a time machine to wow a late 1930’s audience with their Hip Hop and Rap. Due to the lack of modern sound equipment, and the stars' inability to project their untrained singing voices, the show flops.
5. Xanadu, II: Oops, sorry.
6. It’s a wonderful life, II: George Bailey’s life isn’t working out very well. He asks Clarence for a few minor changes.
7. Invasion of the body snatchers: After that mysterious menace takes over the minds of every single person on earth, an even greater menace comes down from the sky to wreak even greater havoc.
8. Excursion to the moon (1908), II: A party returns to the moon to repair the man’s eye, take a great step for mankind, and play golf. (Perhaps this one has been made already.)
9. The mouse that roared, II: Highly incestual inbreeding in the Duchy of Fenwick has produced a generation of terrifying monsters. J-Lo, a doctor with a degree in movie-monster-dealing, tries to stop them from conquering the United States. Again.
10. The godfather, part II, II: Anything in this franchise should make millions. If it does, look out for The godfather, part II, II, II.

Another Universal Calender. Yawn...

Dick Henry writes here about a new proposal for a universal calendar. His idea avoids interpolating a special year-day, an issue that has plagued previous proposals. Religious groups that worship a holy day every seven days hate the interpolated day, because it implies shifting the lord’s day from Sunday one year to Saturday the next, and so on.

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar interpolates a whole week, every five or six years. It does not monkey with the lord’s day calculations, and it has the fascinating side effect that any memorable day (such as your birthday, or July 4th) will henceforth always fall on the same day of the week. Henry proposes that we commence using this calendar in 2012.

A better idea would be plan now, to start using the calendar in 2062. If a great majority of people like it, that is. Here’s the problem:

On the web page I linked to, there’s a FAQ, including this item:

14.) Won't this whole exercise be costly?

It will be about as costly as the Y2K problem was.

Henry betrays a woefully poor understanding of computers in this answer. The challenge of Y2K was to find every computer program that would calculate the date wrong in the year 2000. If that calculation could cause any real problem, then the program had to be changed. A great deal of development effort went into making sure there would be few problems, and the most evident result was that computer departments did very little real development that year. The Y2K problem siphoned off a lot of potential creativity. Companies had less money to buy new hardware and software, because their staffs were working on Y2K. The Y2K cost was great enough to produce a poor year for the computer industry.

Shifting to the Hanke-Henry calendar requires a different kind of effort. Every single program that needs to calculate dates will be wrong. Every single one will have to be modified or replaced. Every program that keeps track of the “week of the year” will have to be changed to handle the 53rd week that will appear in some years.

There is only one easy way to introduce a new calendar, and that is to assume it will go into effect after 99.99% of non-complying programs are no longer in use. We can issue straightforward software libraries that make all necessary date calculations for both the current way and some new way, and use these libraries in all newly developed programs, from 2012 on. We can “throw the switch” to the new calendar when almost all old programs are dead. Fifty years of waiting should do it.

(The easy way to reform the calendar, if it was ever going to be formed again, was before we had computers.)

NOTE 1:Today, changing the way the date is calculated implies changing and replacing a lot of hardware, as well as software. Much hardware has programs burned into it, and some of that software does date calculations.

NOTE 2:Many people claim that the Y2K effort was overblown and mostly unnecessary, because there were, in fact, few problems when we entered the year 2000. My own feeling is that it was the great effort to avoid Y2K problems that produced such smooth sailing. But regardless of how you felt about the Y2K effort, this calendar proposal requires more effort, not less; because we KNOW that no computer program in production today knows how to handle the proposed calendar.

NOTE 3:The Y2K problem did not require republishing any books. A great number of books have information that depends on calendar dates, and many of these will become misleading and incorrect.

A Fraudulent Energy Rating:

When our old, old dishwasher died, we bought a new unit that had a very high energy rating. The new unit works almost as well as the old one, and I think I know why. The difference has to do with our infernal preoccupation with very high energy ratings, and what manufacturers do to achieve them.

I remember checking out advice at Consumer Reports about using dishwashers. They advise you that there's no point rinsing and scraping dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. The dishwasher can clean your dishes! What you're doing when you pre-clean is simply wasting water, a precious natural resource.

Our dishwasher came with two items of instruction that surprised me: They told us to pre-clean and rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, and they advised getting the tap water hot before starting the dishwasher.

I think that this advice enables the manufacturer to make a dishwasher that uses less energy. Making us spend energy and natural resources to make life easier for the dishwasher doesn’t count in the energy rating, and that's unfair.

Touchfire. Not a laptop killer for the iPad:

Touchfire is getting a lot of great publicity right now. I’m sure there’s a great market for it, and I might even try it on my iPad. But almost everyone who writes about it has obviously not tried to use it for serious writing. Critics are gushing about something it just doesn’t do.

The Touchfire is a see-through plastic overlay for the iPad with detents for your fingers. It covers the exact area that the standard keyboard appears in, and apparently it allows you to touchtype much more naturally, without preventing you from doing some normal swiping. And it can fold up out of the way when not in use.

Here’s some typical praise for the Touchfire.

I’ve done some writing on the iPad’s soft keyboard, and with the extra line of punctuation keys that iA Writer adds, it’s bearable. The problem with the iPad’s soft keyboard is that using it requires an inordinate amount of shifting. There are 35 keys on the standard iPad keyboard, compared to the over 100 keys on the real keyboard I’m using right now.

Touchfire will make simple typing easier and faster. But for those of us who want to tell you how fast the quick brown fox is running, and what sort of difficulties it’s getting into, Touchfire is not going take the iPad to some new level.

Fairy Calm:

Accidental typos can produce memorable jokes and even new expressions. I've been told that the old, printed TV guide, which published for many, many years, forbid the use of the word "skit" in descriptions of programs. They never, never, wanted to see the feared typo.


In Emails, I check my name very carefully, because I know I occasionally mistype "Toy" rather than "Toby". I do not want to refer to myself as:  'Toy'!


These musings are a run-up to a wonderful new expression I saw on the web today. I've changed the quote below to make my source harder to find, but I just loved the misspelling of 'fairly':
The protest was fairy calm until people started to target passing cars ...


We could use some of that fairy calm.

Big Football News:

Greg Foolallov, spokesman for Google, confirmed what many of us have suspected since late last Thursday: Google has completed a hostile takeover of the NFL, and now owns all of the clubs except the Green Bay Packers.

“We had to do something with all these profits,” Mr. Foolallov said, “and we think there’s great synergy here. Every ball carrier is always looking for holes, and we think our search technology can help.”

Fondly remembered:

In 1971 I was working for a timeshare company that enabled people all over the country to write and run computer programs on our centralized systems. We had a satellite office in Washington DC. I programmed a communications computer that simultaneously served sixteen Washington-area users, saving a lot of AT&T communications costs.

The Washington people asked if we could add a printer to their site, for efficient remote printing. My manager, Larry, put me on this project, and I gave what turned out to be a fairly reasonable calendar estimate for the job. It was a lot of work. I had to create many different modules and communication paths, because our system, at that time, had no notion of a remotely connected printer.

In the middle of the project, as planned, I, my wife and our sixteen month-old daughter took a twenty-nine day vacation to ramble around Europe. It was the longest vacation I've ever taken from work, and it was a grand pleasure.

About ten days before we left, Larry asked me how well-documented my project was. I told him I was very much in the middle of things, and there wasn’t any documentation of the planned software at all.
“I want you to document it,” Larry said. “While you're away, I may have someone else work on the project.”

That was fine with me. I was excited to think that I might return from Europe to find that the project was making progress. But I wanted to get the software into a certain state before I left. Doing the documentation in addition took a lot of time, and I just about killed myself getting ready to leave.

I handed everything over to my boss, and came back, well-rested, twenty-nine days later. “Larry,” I asked, “has anyone been working on my project?”

“Oh ... uh, no. No,” he said, “it’s right where you left it.”

I can’t tell you how furious I was. I had done all that extra work, and for what? But Larry was one of the nicest managers I ever had, so I didn’t let my anger show. I unpacked my project. Now ... where was I?

Twenty-nine days is a long time.

As I read through my documentation, the work came back to me, in all its detail. What I had already written; what to do next; what every piece of code was for; and exactly what was missing. And of course, I realized why Larry had made me write that documentation.

Holiday Movies That Even Santa Would Watch:

Neil Genzlinger, a columnist for the New York Times, has given us five modest suggestions for Christmas Movies that, somehow, for some reason, nobody has produced yet. He took a wonderful idea and filled it out beautifully. His column is consistently funny, and it’s right here. Here’s a tease, to persuade you to read his column: the titles of his five suggested movies are:

• A TANTRUM FOR THE HOLIDAYS
• NAKED CAME THE SANTA
• THE 78-POUND TURKEY
• THE CHRISTMAS CANDIDATE: COMFORT AND JOY
• THE CHRISTMAS CANDIDATE 2: AWAY IN A WAGER

The title of his essay is the same as the title of my blog item.

Computer Automation: We Shall All Suffer.

Here’s a wonderful example of computer automation: we humans tag photos with the names of the people in those photos. Then, aided by face recognition, the great computer websites take over and tag more photos. Pretty soon we can look at any photo on the web and know the names of the people in the pictures. (And that’s just the beginning. There’s a special class of photos on the web that require name-tagging to be done by identifying genitals. I’m sure some developers are working on that, too.)

Whew. Back to reality. A very nice person, who deserves not to be identified, posted a picture of the musical score to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe on Facebook. I did not add a link to that picture, did I? I DID NOT ADD A LINK TO THAT PICTURE because I do not want to make bad matters worse.

My inbox is clog-full of notifications from Facebook. Here’s what they say: Jim Jones has commented on a picture of you on Facebook. Sarah Brown has commented on a picture of you on Facebook. Muglia Teragladone has on a picture of you on Facebook.

Facebook thinks that the Iolanthe score is a picture of me! And I suspect it always will. I wonder what other musical scores will be identified as ME in the future.

This mess isn’t just annoying. It’s ironic. I own quite a collection of musical scores, and Iolanthe is my favorite G&S operetta. But that’s as close to Iolanthe as I care to get.

By the way, in my own files, I write dates in sortable order: YY/MM/DD. So today's date is a beauty: 11/12/13 .

Despotic Dictator (the Sim Game):

Maybe someone has already implemented my second idea for a Sim game, but that seems unlikely. Most Sims these days are aimed at young, impressionable children who are likely to make in-game purchases. I certainly wouldn't want my young children to play this game:

You are a despotic dictator. Your goal is to stay in power long enough to squirrel away $1,000,000,000 in foreign banks before the people overthrow your rule. To keep the populace in control, you can offer an occasional carrot, and you can control the news and entertainment media. if you build up your secret police, you can kill the leaders of any revolt against you. Your army, if it is strong enough, can attack large-scale demonstrations. You must be careful not to move your sequestered funds out of the country too quickly! You need some of that lucre to keep your police and your army sweet, and the people will rebel more strongly if if taxed too heavily. You can make speeches that threaten the people, or that appease them. If you are lucky, some foreign country will offer you asylum before your head is stuck on top of a pole.

There is a social aspect to this game. The computer keeps a running calculation of how grungy and despicable you are, and you can compare your despicability scores with your friends.

If you win this game, you are supposed to feel awful.

Big Bang (the Sim Game):

As a software developer, I was excited by the idea of a “Sim” game, when the first one was announced. The great idea was that the software would simulate some realistic action – the development of a city, the progress of a war, et cetera – while I, the human player, made small adjustments to the game’s parameters, to improve progress, or to bend the developments in my preferred direction. I couldn’t wait to play a “Sim” game, and I was disappointed to discover that they are just not my thing.


Over time, many sim games have appeared, some of them terrifically sophisticated, and thinking about how the guts of the software makes a Sim work still fascinates me. But in the real world of computer games, I can’t help noticing that programming a basic Sim game has become a dumbed-down cookie-cutter operation. New ones show up every month. Develop a florist business. Build bus routes. Manage a dinosaur park. Tend a poison ivy patch (okay, I made that one up).


Some of these proliferating Sims may be brilliant games, but the bottom line is that there are very obvious ways to tempt people to spend money inside these games, and the developers are me-tooing each other to death in their eagerness to find yet another unoriginal way to empty our pockets.


I think there should be more originality in Sims, and I have two modest suggestions. Here’s the first one: Big Bang (the Sim game): The computer models the development of the universe, starting with the Big Bang. Each turn, you introduce a few small perturbations into the simulated universe. Your goal is to produce a planet that supports life, and you win if a thinking creature evolves on your planet, smart enough for a dozen of the creatures to cooperate to build a home.


What interests me about this game, other than the challenge of programming it, is the meaning of a “turn”. At the beginning of the game, each turn will represent, perhaps, a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Later, when you are building your black holes and galaxies, a turn might be a hundred million years. And in the endgame, turns might represent dozens of decades.
Tomorrow: Despotic Dictator (Sim Game).

Too Small, Too Small, Too Small ...

Dear Jim Romenesko, I enjoyed your Obscure Store blog for a long time. I was sorry when you ended it to do something different. Your new web site certainly is different, but I think you are overdoing what you are doing to make your point.

When I look at all that small type, my heart sinks. I tell myself, I’ve got to hang in there, I’ve got to read it, I know it’s going to be worthwhile ... and of course it is.

The content is fine. Please reformat your main web page so that it doesn’t look so formidable, because, really, it isn’t.

How good is the Kindle Fire?

The reputation of the Kindle Fire is likely to be settled by online shouts and by its volume of purchases. But it is possible to take an unbiased look at how useable the Kindle Fire is, and to make thoughtful recommendations. Please check out this fine article by Jakob Nielsen, Kindle Fire Useability Findings.

I’m very interested in the 7” device size, and Nielsen has some sober observations about it. Neither ordinary web sites, nor web sites designed for the 10” tablet or the smart phone, are easy to use on the 7” tablet. If enough people buy these things, and if, as a result, enough web sites are designed specifically for them, then they can be great online successes. Read Nielsen to see why.

Nielsen skewers magazine reading and book reading on the kindle as well, and his reasons make good reading.