Album Review: Nightlife by Phantogram
New York duo Sarah Barthel and John Carter have created a 6 track EP of wonderfully atmospheric electronic music, but managed to hang on to a pop sensibility without any pretence. The two swap responsibility for primary vocals back and forth, adding an extra layer of variation to this great set of songs. Listen on iTunes, Rdio.
I was curious if ‘Phantogram’ was just a made up term and discovered, to my delight, a fascinating 3D photography and printing technique where an image appears to float outside the paper it’s printed on. Read more over at Wikipedia, and be sure to look at the referenced work by Boris Starostra – it’ll help make more sense.
Thoughts on The Daily
After finally upgrading the firmware on my iPad, I’ve now been able to play with The Daily a little – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp’s new daily publication, exclusive to the iPad. Here are some initial impressions.
The App
Design-wise, the app’s icon and animated splash screen are lovely, but then things aready start to go wrong. The reader is taken to a screen showing that a new version of The Daily is being delivered, and the only choices are to sit and wait while looking at a summary of the weather conditions, or quit the app and leave. On the first launch of the day, this process takes over a minute in my experience. As John Gruber similarly complained on Daring Fireball, that’s like wrapping a traditional newspaper in a cellophane bag so well that when you’ve finally managed to get the wrapper off, your morning coffee has gone cold – totally unacceptable.
Once it does load, the app displays a carousel of page thumbnails. Sadly, these are poorly rendered shrunken images that exhibit lots of artefacts, or what a casual reader may simply perceive as noise. This affects both the text and the images on each page. In an age where HDTV is the norm, images that harken back to the colour-challenged web circa 1996 are, again, not something readers are going to accept in the long run. The scrolling of the carousel is not particularly responsive, and the animation is jumpy. To add insult to injury, I also found The Daily to be quite crashy.
As you browse through the pages, you are often greeted by a black page with a spinning wheel while the content loads. Though each of these loads only takes a second or so, it’s still an incredibly frustrating experience that breaks the reader’s attention and focus on the not-so-great content (more on that in a bit). I also found it irritating that, for an application that still very closely emulates the traditional page format (much moreso than, say, the Wired app), there are no page numbers to be found – just a straight line at the top of the display with a dot that gives you a relative idea of how far into the current edition you are. A few pages randomly scattered throughout the app have pages that are taller than the screen and can be scrolled, but it’s puzzling which pages receive this treatment and for what reason.
Some of the other features the app includes are the ability post comments (in typed or, bizarrely, audio form), share articles via e-mail or save them to for later reference. The app can be used in portrait or landscape orientation according to preference, and each page elegantly reflows to suit the format of the screen.
The Content
In a nutshell, it’s incredibly broad and shallow, with no real sense of coherence whatsoever. It’s quite disappointing really, considering the amount of emphasis placed on the fact that The Daily consisted of 100% original content, created specifically with this format in mind. I didn’t detect as obvious a right-side bias as I was expecting from the house of Fox, but it’s probably far too early to make any judgements on that anyway.
In my page-by-page survey of today’s edition, I found about 30 pages of what I would consider to be original content. The rest consisted of things like photos and video clipped grabbed from existing online sources and “enhanced” by a one-liner, or multi-page photo spreads, not to forget the omnipresent, annoyingly multimedial ads.
The tech section includes a 2-page “Ask the Editors” section, where readers can get painfully simplistic answers to questions so basic that fifteen seconds on google would have better served them. A whole page is dedicated to an iPhone case that looks like a mobie phone from the ’80 – anyone who follows popular tech blogs already glossed over this useless gimmick when it was circulated a week ago.
On a more fundamental level, it bothers me that a publication that aims to be a daily source of information has virtually no content that belongs in the context of a daily: no breaking events, Hell, there’s only a page-and-a-half on Egypt. The whole thing reads like a terribly watered-down newsweekly – and maybe even that analogy is giving it too much credit.
Closing Thoughts
To sum it up, I really don’t see what all the hype was about. I understand that this is a first attempt, but it’s one backed by one of the world’s largest media conglomorates and has been further supported behind the scenes by Apple in a way that I don’t believe any other third party app has been, and yet the execution of what is in principle a solid and straightforward concept has failed miserably.
Murdoch has managed to gain some significant publicity from his deal with Apple, but similar apps bound to overshadow The Daily in user interface, delivery and content quality are going to sprout in no time. Most of these will probably not attempt to take on The Daily, but instead focus on lucrative niches and target an audience that is defined by location or shared interests.
Overall, it just feels like The Daily fallen victim to the proverbial “jack of all trades, master of none”. Whether any major revisions will be made before the app goes from free trial to subscription-based payment once iOS 4.3 is released remains to be seen, but for iPad users today, there are already so many other ways of getting their daily fix of information and opinion that I simply don’t see this being a long term success.
…Then again, USA Today still sells about 2 million copies a day, so what do I know.
Getting to India
After lots of last minute prep at the office, and a week of other craziness that included moving to a new apartment, I headed for the airport to catch a 17:30 flight to Frankfurt. The flight was already delayed by half an hour, so I had more than ample time to wait in the usual long line at Pearson to drop off my luggage, and also pick up some Rupees.
On the flight, I conveniently got the chance to move into a bulkhead aisle seat to make room for a family sitting together, which made for some welcome extra legroom. Air Canada’s seatback entertainment system actually worked for a change, and so I watched The International and Watchmen. The former was a decent conspiracy/action thriller, although to be honest I can’t even remember the cast (I know it was someone like, but not exactly Daniel Craig). The latter was really quite awful, and halfway through I started falling in and out of sleep, more out of boredom than exhaustion.
We made up time in the air and landed on time in Frankfurt. Although I had a few potential plans to spend some of my 6-1/2 hour layover with friends or family, it all fell through and I ended up taking the train into town and roaming around for a few hours. I was honestly surprised at what a nice city Frankfurt is. I got off the train at Hauptwache, which is central Frankfurt and an area with lots of shops, cafes, and walking distance to the river Main. In addition to the expected clusters of bank and insurance headquarters, there were lots of older buildings, churches, galleries and museums, as well as a large park that runs the length of the river in that part of the city. Best of all, the stopover gave me a chance to consume some of my favourite German goodies that you simply can’t get in North America, including Laugenbrötchen and Apfelschorle (bread boiled in saltwater prior to baking and apple juice with carbonated mineral water, respectively).
Back at the airport I moved through customs and security without a hitch and boarded my Lufthansa flight to Mumbai. Unfortunately this time there was no entertainment system, and the aircraft was quite a bit older. The fact that the crew were significantly more attractive only partially made up for the lack of amenities, and the chosen video running on the few tiny screens – a Discovery Channel documentary on the life or Meerkats – didn’t make the time pass any quicker.
I sat next to a gentleman that was actually from Pune, and was just returning from a trip to Sweden on business for a scandinavian software firm he worked for. He was very familiar with the area, including Magarpatta City, the gated live/work community a little east of central Pune where I am staying. We talked a little bit about offshoring, life in Toronto and travel, but I spent most of the time listening to a number of playlists I’ve created on my iPod over the years, some of which – incidentally – are in desperate need of a refresh. A few others, however, have stood the test of time surprisingly well.
Upon arrival in Mumbai, my bags took forever to come off the belt – Murphy’s law, I suppose. They did, however, eventually arrive, with only a small snag in one of the luggage tags to note. Finding my driver took some time as there are a number of different gathering points for prepaid cabs, regular transport, shuttle busses, etc. The ride to the hotel was quick and uneventful, although it gave me a first glimpse at the poverty and that is so prevalent everywhere here. The most striking thing in retrospect is that all the photos of the hotel on the Internet are shot from the second floor up, so as not to have to show the ground level barricade and secure entry gate, and the fact that a stone’s throw away from the building, people are sleeping by the side of the road, near makeshift shelters and among packs of stray dogs.
Dear Facebook
Now might just be the time for me to quit facebook and move on. First off, where’s the font size option? Assuming I’m practically blind as an excuse to make me scroll past more ads is offensive at best. The site is a mess. I don’t want to see people’s comments on friends’ items in my feed. I spent considerable time putting together a clean profile page that presents what I want to share in an easy to browse manner, and now all that’s gone to hell.
And that’s just from 45 seconds on the new site. I dare not even imagine what five minutes worth of feedback would look like.
[Updated 16:29] And here’s what Facebook had to say:
“to inform our future products”? That doesn’t even make sense. Argh.
The Joy of Twitter
Ironically, this first blog post in ages was inspired by the proverbial anti-blog: twitter. Although I’ve really had a hard time getting myself to write more blog posts and personal e-mails, I’ve become a real twitter addict.
Twitter’s beauty lies in its simplicity. It’s so simple in fact, that it’s downright restrictive. 140 characters is all you get to convey something coherent – be it insightful, entertaining or just plain random. Part of the fun is working within those narrow confines, tweaking the wording to make every character count and squeeze every last bit out of the “tweet”, as it were.
In a way, it evokes the nostalgia of the telecommunications of days gone by; pay-by-the-letter wire telegrams, or a single sheet of airmail paper. Those times are long gone of course, but Twitter has returned some of the joy of living with limitations.
Sure, there’s a lot if useless messages whipping around the ether. Hell, I “livetwittered” Miss Universe. But used with a little restraint, it can be almost poetic.
Besides, any writing is better than no writing, and with a few dozen more tweets, maybe the blog posts will start streaming from my thumbs after all.
