Blogs about reviews

Music Players for iOS.

Since iOS updated to version 9, the Music app is awful. Pants. Terrible. Balls. Poop emoji. Specifically:

• No, I don't want a subscription to anything. I just want to play the music on my iPhone..
• Why is this album shuffling? Where the hell is the shuffle button?
• Why are you wasting the entire bottom of my screen with advertisements instead of the customizable Albums / Artists / Genre pickers that you used to have?

So, I did the only reasonable thing, and spent an evening evaluating the available options from the App Store. These are the things that I was mostly interested when evaluating music apps:

• I prefer seeing buttons to learning gestures in an interface. I haven't found gestures to be common enough between apps that I can learn them easily, and I don't often spend enough time in any one app to really learn its particular gestures. (There are a few exceptions to this - flicking left or right to turn a page or to the next photo.)
• Integration with iOS music player controls, so i can still control them with Siri or from the lock screen.
• I love my album art, and I bet I'm not the only one. Album art should be featured prominently in the UI.
• It would be nice to be able to use playlists too, but Music is so bad that I'm willing to let go of playlists on my iPhone.

Ecoute

Ecoute is the best of the bunch and just $.99. Has an simple and clean interface, and allows you select music by Album, Artist or even playlists! It's standout feature is allowing you to queue up music to play next. Good-bye, Music.app.

TapTunes

A solid audio player, and it's free (but well worth the $.99 in-app purchase to support development). The UI is clear, and it gets right out of way and lets you to your music. I like the innovative way that it displays your album art in a random order to re-introduce you to old audio friends. And you can pick between music, audiobooks and podcasts. The only downside is that (as of this writing), it doesn't read playlists.

Listen

The UI is gorgeous, I love the outline around the album fills up as the song plays. But it is far too gesture driven for my needs - and I feel like the "track forward" and "track backward" gestures are reversed. Some of the App Store reviews mentioned problems with Albums containing multiple artists. But I tested this and didn't have any problems.

Songbucket

This app is focused on creating and customizing playlists. I only want to pick albums and play those - sorry Songbucket, it's not you, it's me.

Ebook Reader (for iPad) Findings.

I had been doing a lot of ebook reading on my iPad, but sometimes the experience was lacking due to the ereader application that I was using to read the book. Since then I put a variety of ereaders through their paces with various file types, and what follows is a summary of my findings.

Conditions

I only evaluated iPad ereaders. My primary use for ereaders is for technical books, with fiction novels being a less common use case. As such these were the features I cared about:

• Easy to use & jank-free reading experience
• Bookmarks
• Nighttime reading mode with a dark background and light text
• Able to import ebooks from Dropbox. (Most of my ebooks are available in .epub, .mobi and .pdf formats. A few ebooks are only available in .pdf. A very few are also available in .daisy or, more rarely, .apk formats.)
• Notes
• Displays code samples reasonably
• Highlighting
• Dictionary look-up
• Font size changing
• Opens URLs

Apps tested

These were the applications I considered:

• (by Amazon)
• by Barnes & Noble
• (by Google)
• (by Apple)
• (by Adobe)
• (by Appstafarian)

Conclusions

• - a relative newcomer to the ereader scene - is well worth the $4 price on the App Store. It's jank free, has ebook searching abilities, and looks and behaves beautifully. It's also got Dropbox integration which saves me from having to suss long titles out of the Dropbox app. Nighttime reading mode was a bit tricky to find in the UI; I expected it to be in the brightness settings, but it was actually in the font settings under "Themes". It only reads .epub files, but it excels at doing so.
• For .pdfs, iBooks is the best option. Nook can't tell the the difference between a highlighting and a page-turn gesture. Reader doesn't have highlighting, dictionary look-up or even bookmarking functionality.
• Kindle is the only one capable of reading .mobi files. It does a pretty good job at doing so, but the highlighting functionality is a bit wonky.
• Each app which also sells stuff (Kindle, Nook, Play Books, iBooks) is good for reading the stuff it sells. Often you can score free ebooks this way.
• Play Books can open both .pdf and .epub files, but you have to upload them to Google, which then does some kind of conversion on them. When reading a .pdf, the text rendering was fuzzy, and then the app crashed. When reading an .epub, there wasn't any highlighting or note-taking functionality.
• Nothing reads .daisy files.

Brussels Sprout Casserole.

Try this Brussels sprout casserole recipe to turn around the Brussels sprouts hater in your household. Roasting the sprouts on a preheated sheet pan ensure that they get cooked through and dark and delicious on the outside. Being able to make most of this dish ahead of time makes it great for avoiding holiday oven-contention.

PAX 2013 - Games.

I sure did play a lot of games at PAX this year:

Thursday

1. : Midway through the game, one of your co-players turns evil and tries to kill you all! Moderately complex, but would play again!
2. : Always fun, especially with my own custom blank cards.

Friday

1. : I'd never played a Pikmin before, but this one had a fun co-op mode.
2. Burn in Hell: One of the lesser known games from Steve Jackson, this was a little like Hearts but with famous sinners. I wasn't really a fan.
3. : It was nice to be reminded how pleasant this deck-building game is. I later bought an expansion that's quite a bit of fun.
4. : This game which pits spies against resistance operatives is all about hiding your identity and deducting the identities of others. I have a copy of this have enjoyed it every time I've played it.
5. + : Roll some dice and eat the brains. Now with Santa!

Saturday

1. Kill Dr. Lucky: James Ernest was demoing this (and Fish Cook) and trying to tune some of the mechanisms.
2. : Another demo from Cheapass James, I liked this quite a bit. James said that there would be a future Kickstarter for a deluxe version of Fish Cook.
3. : Roll 12 dice and make your own crossword. Score points using the zippers on the storage pouch. It's simple, but I'll play again.
4. : I didn't really need any further convincing to buy this game, but my demo play-through did not disappoint. I'm very excited for this to come out.
5. Battleblock Theatre: This XBLA game features competitive and co-operative play for up to 4 players. It's fun and cute.
6. Machine of Death: We got a demo of this from the creators, but I caught a major case of the sillies and I couldn't really tell you if we lost or not. If you like story-telling games, you'll like this. True fact: I know people who are responsible for the "Shiny Things", "Fancy Pants" and "Electric Sex Pants" cards.
7. : This was very silly; even sillier than Fluxx.
8. Munchkin Legends: This an exclusive-to-Target version of the core Munchkin game. It was fun, but the owner was a dirty cheater.

Sunday

1. : The traveling and collect-a-thon aspects of this game were pleasant, but I didn't like the constant score-keeping.
2. : This was a moderately complex zombie themed board game.
3. : This is a very silly strategy card game, where you can join dinosaurs with zombies for fun and winning. The best part was when the husband set up a base where every card was eaten by Steve's bear.

Monday

1. : We found this game confusing, and not-at-all about pork.
2. : This was a fun little game, but beware of sitting next to experienced players.
3. : Yep, it's Fluxx with a weed theme. That's pretty much all there is to it.

Another 3 Books for Web Developers.

After reflecting on my recent post Three Must-Read Books for Web Developers, I thought I'd also share three of the books I read when I first started building web pages back in 1999:

1. Unknown giant HTML4 reference manual: Embarrassingly, I can't remember the precise title or author of this one. It was a 700+ page reference manual for HTML4 and XML. It may or may not have included a bit on JavaScript, but I don't think there was any CSS in it.
2. : This was a design focused book which looked at a bunch of hideous and painful websites of the time. Pick up a copy if you want to see how far web site have come.
3. : This was a pretty good introduction to JavaScript for its time. I read the first edition, and then picked up the second edition when it was published in 2001.