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About Me
I'm Zack. I'm an entrepreneur. I like surfing, tea, history, Baltimore sports, and making things on the Internet. I live in San Francisco.
- 59thirty
"Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither.
Games are good, points are good, but games ≠ points.
"
This is something that needed to be said.
We’re cheapening the richness of actual games by referring to everything with incentives, as a game.
Part of the reason we love games, whether they be board, video, bar or other types of games is that they have many ways of doing the same thing. In a game of pool, I can shoot at a variety of balls, make one and move on to the next. My choices and actions have consequences that influence my next set of choices.
Adding badges for me saving money each month doesn’t have the same effect. I can either save or not save. That either gets me points or it doesn’t.
The essence of gaming lies in the player’s option to be creative. We have to remember that if we’re trying to make something compelling. Or we should just be honest and call it what it is: pointsification.
iPad/iPad Nano
(photo via engadget)
The iPad as your new central hub
(photo: ohad)
What if you could control the house around you with nothing but an iPad?
It’s coming.
I remember watching Cribs years ago as some actor showed a clunky handheld computer that he carried around his house that could control the lights, the blinds, the TV, etc.. No doubt that whole system was pretty expensive. And now it’s getting cheaper. Imagine the iPad as that new handheld computer but sleek, sexy and connected to your house full of receivers.
The front door, the blinds, the tv, the lights, the oven, the refrigerator, the shower, the thermostat, the alarm system, the garage door and maybe your car will, in the next few years, begin to connect to your mobile device like never before.
Right now, a company called Schlage provides the equipment and the app (Schlage Link) as seen in this iPhone commercial, where a mother turns her home lights off from Denver International Airport.
Starter kits are pricey, starting at $223 on Amazon.com, and allow a homeowner to wire their front door. Schlage also provides connections to the lights, home webcams and the thermostat as add-on modules.
With the release of the iPad though the market for these technologies will undoubtedly increase and with the demand up, the prevalence and cost of the technology to be installed in the house will drop.
Apple’s positioning of the iPad between the Macbook and the iPhone means that the iPad will likely be a household device while the laptop and the phone roam with their owners, right? Suddenly, setting the oven to 425 degrees no longers requires anyone in the kitchen and turning up the heat can be done from the comfort of your warm bed.
I don’t remember how I came upon Soulver but it has since turned into an indispensable calculator app on my iPhone.
Right now I’m using it to figure out where I should live next year in Boulder based on a few factors:
- Square footage divided by monthly rent
- Convenience (proximity to the University of Colorado)
- Furnished vs. unfurnished
- Lease length
Thanks Soulver!
Apple has the iPad’s features almost all figured out
It’s a whole lot easier to talk about what the iPad can’t do right now because no one has an iPad in their hands to rave about. It’s important to remember that Apple is positioning the iPad in between your everyday computer and your cell phone.
There are features that both your laptop and cell phone do much better than the iPad ever could. Apple will obviously never make the device that does everything because it would cut into the sales of their other products. They selectively omits things from their devices for a reason, usually because there are other products in their line that can do the same things, better.
Aaron at TechThinker.com has posted 8 Important feature missing in Apple’s iPad. Of the eight that he points out, only one of them is actually a feature Apple should have included.
His missing features include:
- No SD Card Reader
- No USB Slot
- No Multitasking
- No HDMI Port
- The iPad does not support true HD. The aspect ratio of the display is 4:3 instead of the newer 16:9 ratio.
- No GPS
- No Built In Camera
- No Cellular Voice
The SD card reader and USB ports are on your computer already. In the Keynote, Steve Jobs talked about how the iPad would sync just like your iPhone, loading all of those photos, videos, and playlists onto your iPad. The iPad has limited solid state memory and Apple realizes that it’s more important for the user to control the amount of stuff they’re putting on their iPad from their computer, hence no SD readers or USB ports
An HDMI port wasn’t included in the iPad because chances are high that the TV you want to connect your iPad to already has a connected DVD player. Apple knows that if you wanted to watch a movie on your TV, you would go through other devices. Keeping the form factor small was also a priority in the iPad. More video-out technology means more space those components take up inside the device. Apple was right to leave out the HDMI port as well.
Your iPhone or in-car GPS device do GPS and navigation better and more efficiently than the iPad could. I don’t really see anyone keeping an iPad in their front seat to help them figure out a way around town. Falling prices in the GPS market would make buying an iPad solely for the GPS features an irresponsible purchase.
Your computer has a camera and what’s more important — a battery whose resources aren’t as valuable (assuming your primary computer is a laptop). The iPad’s battery is limited and video chatting would waste valuable battery time that you may need later. Besides, there’s no multitasking, so if you needed to look up something while video chatting, you would be out of luck. Apple knows their MacBooks can do video chatting in a more efficient way so the camera had to go.
And as for using the iPad as a cell phone, come on, Apple already made a phone for that. Chances are there’s already cell phone in your pocket. Why do you need two? Put a cell phone in the iPad and you might as well call it an iPhone Jumbo or the iPhone an iPad Nano.
Finally, the feature that is rightfully missing: Multitasking. At this point multitasking being omitted from the iPhone OS is irresponsible of Apple because competitor’s phones are busy capitalizing on this feature. If Apple does implement multitasking, they’ll limit the amount of apps to some number under five, in the interest of battery life. Hopefully multitasking comes with the next iPhone update later this year.
The only other feature that’s missing from the iPad is Flash. I won’t go into that here because there are a million other blogs talking about how the lack of Flash is the iPad Killer.
Before we go pointing at the iPad and talking about what it can’t do, think about what purposes the device is supposed to serve and what other technologies that you already own can do those things in a more efficient way.
Updated: How Twitter can improve Trending Topics
I wrote a few months ago how Twitter can improve their Trending Topics by allowing users to delete uninteresting topics from their respective lists.
I’ve updated the post with more information as well as a link to the Twitter company blog detailing their recent efforts to begin to alter the way Trending Topics are built (on their end) and used (on our end)
How Programmer/Journalists Craft Their Own Study Programs
My next project, starting in a few weeks. Who the hell says journalism is dying?
Facebook Lite reminds me of the phones/remotes/calculators that older people buy when their eyesight is going, the ones with the gigantic buttons that are impossible to miss.
