The magic lies in using Instapaper to collate the articles I want to read and provide them in a text-only format stripped of all the navigation, sidebars and advertising. To get started simple visit http://www.instapaper.com/ and register with your email address and provide a password. To use it you simply send it the URL of the article you’re reading, and it takes care of the rest. There’s a bookmarklet that you can install as well as it being supported by a shedload of existing applications. I don’t keep my bookmarks bar visible in Safari, so I prefer to use the Instafari extension.

Another excellent source is the Zite App for iPad. With Zite (and when browsing through my feeds) I tend to skim, so I use the Read Later button built in to Zite to push it directly to Instapaper.

I also find a lot of stuff that I want to read through Twitter and my feeds in Google Reader. The iPad/iPhone Twitter app has a Read Later function built into it, but I sometimes use the Mac app or even the Twitter website, neither of which don’t have the Read Later function. So to connect these to Instapaper I use the excellent new web service called If This Then That. What this site does is let you create incredibly powerful triggers into existing web services. They’ve also effectively made my weeks of tinkering with Yahoo Pipes irrelevant. The site is currently invite only, and I’ve already used up all my invites, but if you just request on their site you should get an invite pretty fast. So what I’ve done is used the Star functions of both Twitter and Google Reader as the flag that tells If This Then That to take that article that I starred and push it to Instapaper. The interface on ifttt.com is incredibly simple to use, my current two tasks are below:

So now all the articles I’ve saved from Safari, Zite, Twitter and Google Reader are pushed either natively from the app or through ifttt.com through to Instapaper. The last step is now to get all of those articles onto the Kindle or iPad. There is an Instapaper app that you can buy ($4.99) but I ended up never using it. For the actual reading I prefer to visit the Instapaper site and download the format for Kindle and iPad. For Kindle, you can have Instapaper automatically send the articles you save through wireless delivery, but Amazon will charge a delivery fee. I prefer to simply download the Kindle .mobi format file and transfer it across over USB. For the iPad I just visit the Instapaper website in Safari and select the ePub download format.

When prompted choose Open in iBooks (assuming you have it installed) and you’ll be good to go.

The mobi and ePub files have linked contents pages and images get pulled through as well. Enjoy all the articles you collected offline.

If you find Instapaper useful (and how can you not?) please consider subscribing to their service. It’s entirely optional and right now you get nothing extra for doing it, but at $1 per month, it’s not a whole lot to support a great service!

Our environment is not a “traditional digital” one – expect to be immersed in and exposed to all levels of the creative process – irrespective of medium or platform. If you’re not interested in the thinking behind why we build what we do, then a you’d be better suited somewhere else. Thanks for reading this far anyways.

So for those of you who haven’t already wandered off to check Facebook, we’re looking to fill the following roles in our Cape Town office:

Senior Digital Art Director
A conceptual thinker who understands digital behavior and how we best translate that into online experiences. Loves telling brand stories through images. It goes without saying that you have the craft skills necessary for this role.

Front-end wizard
Your passion should be in making the user experience as beautiful and natural as possible. Your tools are wireframes, HTML5 and jQuery. Potential candidates should expect a test

While these are the specific positions that we are looking to fill right now, we’re always interested in talking to people who are excited by what they do and passionate about creating participation through their ideas. If you’re a digital copywriter or digital production manager (someone who knows how to connect the bits to make things work online) please get in touch – you never know what will pop up

If you believe that you’re the person to join our team, let me know by mailing some motivating material at hello@atplay.biz and we’ll talk.

You play a vampire and your only job is to get to your coffin before you run out of blood. Along the way you get to avoid, navigate and dodge holy water, stakes and sun rays. Tilt the phone in the direction you want him to run and tap the screen to jump. The gameplay is easy to pick up and deceptively addictive. Not to mention incredibly frustrating. But in a good way. The kind that keeps you coming back again and again because, you know, if I time that jump just a little bit earlier I’m sure I can get to that last drop of blood.

The entire game was designed and coded here in Cape Town by (full disclosure) 3 people I know quite well. Alan Cronje, who heads up the creative side of AtPlay, designed all of the characters, screens and sprites for the game. Etienne la Grange, who coded the Engen African Welcome diary application for us earlier this year, handled all of the actual game coding, and Werner Marais, ex-Saatchi now at Y&R, wrote all of the copy and designed the levels. This is something that they worked nights and weekends to pull together and it’s great to see all of their effort come to life.

Since I got my iPhone I’ve downloaded a lot of mediocre applications and games. This is not one of those. If you’ve got a US iTunes account I’d highly recommend you grab this and give it a whirl. If not, hold on for a bit, it should be in the SA store soon.

Can’t wait to see what they bring out next.

The actual launch day was a strange mix of press, entrepreneurs, business owners and developers – strange because it meant that each presentation was only really talking to half the audience at any one time. I think the event could have been a lot shorter and delivered more value if there had been two distinct streams – business and development.

For me the two sessions that were the most interesting were Adrian Frielinghaus from Blue Leaf Games, talking about some of the learnings that they had building a multiplayer game in MXit. It wasn’t a technical session at all but he touched on 2 incredibly important points: how do you build behavior into the game that builds retention and ultimately money, and how do you prepare for the scale and magnitude of numbers that you may attract.

For the developers in the room the session after lunch was the one we were all looking forward to – building an actual application live on screen. Gustav Mauer started by taking us through the technical requirements for using the API and the reasons for going the way that they did. Bad news (for me) is that your development and hosting all happens in a Microsoft environment – Visual Studio Express 2008 or greater with the WCF framework, deployed onto a Windows server. The reason for this is twofold: existing developer base in South Africa and the performance of Net.TCP over the alternatives. Your application will send to, and be sent messages from, MXit, so it needs to be a protocol that supports full-duplex communications. The good news is that this is the first API that they are launching, other languages and frameworks will be catered for in the future.

On the face of it, the API interfaces are incredibly simple: connect, disconnect, send a message, request a payment. MXit can send back a message and let you know if payment went through. There are a couple of others, but this is the core that will get you going. I was initially a bit disappointed that that was all the API provided. It seemed that there wasn’t a huge amount more that you could do than if you simply asked MXit to proxy an external HTML page into a portal/contact for you. What would have been nice was to be able to interact with the user in some way – access their images, status messages, friends – but I can understand why we can’t. With the user base that they have and the privacy issues that they encounter, giving developers easy access to the user detail could easily be abused. I’m sure that all of these considerations will be dealt with in time, but for now it’s an important step forward in giving developers a solid way into building the interactive experiences that they want within MXit. There’s a lot happening in the background that the developer doesn’t have to deal with – dealing with caching, images and the actual MXit protocol – but all considerations for the guys building the API. Slow and steady is fine.

The day ended with a Q&A session, some interesting questions from the floor. The one that I think was on everyone’s mind was how much traffic/data will applications potentially generate? It’s a bit of a how long is a piece of string question, the best response we could get was to host somewhere that can scale, and scale fast. Adrian shared some info on how their app is deployed – because it is database intensive they have 4 heavyweight DB servers, two of which are currently carrying the load of their 150 000 users. His presentation from he day has some graphs on the number of users they see on a day to day basis, which you could probably use to load or performance test your application ahead of launch.

While the API isn’t the panacea for mobile and MXit, it has opened up the platform a lot more than in the past – with the right idea (and a willing .NET developer) you can build some really engaging experiences (and for the marketers out there) some real participation with your brand.

In it’s basic form, what I wanted was a place to file away a note/document/reminder and then flag it for followup at a later date – scheduling it to be handled/worked on at a later date so that I can concentrate on what needs to be done now.

Evernote has a special search operator tag: that let’s you search for a specific tag within your notes. My system uses TextExpander to define some macro’s that create tags for dates in the future, and then a single macro that creates the search to look for notes with tags of the current date.

If you’re not interested in how or why they work then just grab the snippets and install them in TextExpander.

My initial thought was to use the built-in date math that comes with TextExpander:
%e %B %Y
prints out the current date in full, but if you make it:
%@+1D %e %B %Y
then it gives you the next day in full: 24 October 2010.

This is fine, until you start flagging things for 4 days time and the date then falls on a weekend – unless you’re checking your notes every day you’ll miss the followup flag. Luckily TextExpander lets you create a snippet out of AppleScript, so the code
%@+1D %e %B %Y
became

set dateTemp to (current date) + (1 * days)
set dayTemp to (weekday of dateTemp as string) as string
if dayTemp = "Saturday" then
set dateTemp to (dateTemp) + (2 * days)
else if dayTemp = "Sunday" then
set dateTemp to (dateTemp) + (1 * days)
end if
set output to (day of dateTemp as string) & " " & (month of dateTemp as string) & " " & (year of dateTemp as string) as string
return output

The trick here is to check if the future date falls on a Saturday or Sunday, and if it does, shift it to the Monday.

Note: If you’re an AppleScript wizard cringing at how I’ve munged the language, feel free to let me know how to make it better. I’ve got the sum total of 13 minutes of AppleScript experience.

So based on this logic I created a set of snippets for 1, 2, 3, 4 days ahead, as well as 1 and 2 weeks ahead, and set them to only expand when used in Evernote.

The @nextmonth snippet gets the date of the first weekday in the next month. So for November it would be the 1st, but for January 2011 it would be the 3rd (the 1st is a Saturday).

Ok, so how does this work? Well create or open a note in Evernote, click into the Tags field and start typing in the snippet to add some days:

which (since today is the 23rd) will expand to:

Now, to find notes flagged for followup today, you use the @flagged snippet in the Evernote search bar. The @flagged snippet is a lot simpler, since it doesn’t need to do any date math:

tag:"%e %B %Y"

it just creates the Evernote search for the current date as a tag (inside quotes) with the special tag: action.

That expands to

And that’s it. A quick and easy way to schedule notes for followup later and then filter in on just what needs to be dealt with today.

As I said earlier, my AppleScript is probably dodgy as all hell, so feel free to amend or correct. Also, if there are snippets that I missed (or you would like) let me know and I’ll add them in. Also credit must go to this post which is where I learned everything I now know about handling dates in AppleScript.

So for those of you who are excited at the prospect, we’re looking to fill the following roles:

Digital Creative Lead
This position is in our Johannesburg office and you will work closely with the Creative Director and his team (ATL/BTL) to ensure that digital thinking sits at the heart of what we do.

The following roles are all for our Cape Town office:

Senior Digital Creative
A conceptual thinker who understands digital behavior and how we best translate that into online experiences. Loves telling stories through images. It goes without saying that you have the craft skills necessary for this role.

Creative Writer
Also a conceptual thinker but one that tells their story through words, not pictures.

Front-end wizard
Your passion should be in making the user experience as beautiful and natural as possible. Potential candidates should expect a test. And no, you won’t have access to Google.

You’ll notice that I called them roles and not positions. Because of the fluid nature of our work, the edges of where one persons job ends and the other starts tend to blur. I’m interested in people who are excited by what they do and passionate about creating ideas that people participate with. Because of this I’ve purposefully left the scope of what we are looking for quite open to interpretation. If we do decide to meet we will of course be discussing things like job description and other specific requirements.

If you believe that you’re that person let me know by mailing me motivating material at hello@atplay.biz and we’ll talk.

My first issue is that the “Music I Like” feature has pre-filled it with my purchases from iTunes store. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m sometimes not very discriminating when making purchases, so I don’t always “like” everything that I buy.

Basing this on purchases and not my actual listening habits seems a bit limiting. You cannot Like in Ping a track that is playing, only show purchases, reviews, ratings and likes on the iTunes store. Compare my profile on last.fm:

What I’ve listened to and what I like. Based on my actual music library, not how I’ve navigated around their store.

What would have make Ping really useful, was if your music library details were uploaded (or just linked with the already uploaded Genius details) so that you could see how many of your friends have the same music, if they listen to it, like it, recommend it. Something like this perhaps:

That would be far more interesting and useful than seeing what other people have bought or reviewed on the iTunes store.

As soon as I hear these ads I feel like reaching for a cigarette again. Which isn’t really the point. Or is it? Here’s a convoluted scenario, worthy of donning a tin-foil hat for. Cigarette companies can no longer advertise their goods. But they have this bank of music that is instantly recognisable and associated with their brand. So they create a product that mimics – but doesn’t replace – the smoking experience. And then they haul out their instantly recognisable music to market the new almost adequate replacement. Dormant addictions send ex-smokers in search of their old vice. Hah, now there’s a conspiracy theory movie waiting to be made!

Stuyvie, anyone?

The first one is that I’ve become a typical “user” – the kind of person we used to put on hold when they called in to the Helpdesk and snicker about. I guess that the change has come about because I now work on a MacBook Pro, and from both a hardware and software perspective, there’s no need to know arcane commands or jumper settings to get the most out of it.

The second reason is that the technology used to be the centre of my work. When I had my own business I was the coder and I would simply leave out parts of the design that I didn’t feel were worth the effort. Rounded corners? Nah, seemed silly. Problems were tackled by looking at the technology. Now, technology is the last place that we look.

So why the change? If you’ve ever attended the Nomadic Marketing course at UCT GSB, you’ll know that I bang on about how technology for the sake of technology is not the answer. Technology needs to support what you are trying to do and it does that best by not getting in the way. When the supporting technological implementation is unobtrusive it is at its most effective. Both Henry Jenkins and Clay Shirky echo similar sentiments when they say “Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices” (Jenkins) and “…tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring” (Shirky).

Which brings me to my longstanding bugbear – IT departments that control and dictate the manner and terms of a business’ online presence. When I was working at UCT in the mid-90′s the IT department were the people who made the website – simply because we were the only people who knew how to build it at the time. And since the files all lived on a web server that the IT department had to set up, it made perfect sense to just let us get on with “this internet thing”. A long time has passed since then, and remembering the quotes above, we now understand how the internet has enabled and changed cultural practices, as well as seeing the internet as something that is technologically boring.

As an advertising and marketing company, we use communication to solve problems for our clients. The participation that we want to encourage or story we want people to talk about is a marketing and communications issue. The technology supports and enables this, it’s not the way that the problem is solved.

You wouldn’t ask marketing to set up your new mail server, so why are you letting your IT department build your website?

I’m running a plugin to do all the heavy lifting on it, and it provides a nice panel to include specific recommendations based on the content of the post.

There’s two interrelated problems that I have with the new button though, both to do with stats.

I like that you can put a + sign onto the end of a bit.ly link to see all of the stats for that link. The new twitter default URL shortener doesn’t appear to have that functionality at all. All you get is a link from the Tweet button to search for the link.

The second issue (and this might be related to the plugin) is that when you change the default URL shortener to bit.ly (which the Tweetmeme plugin used to use), unless you’ve already registered all of your links with your bit.ly account, you lose the tweet count that you’ve already generated.

I personally don’t track the stats that closely, but if you’re already using Tweetmeme/bit.ly and like to keep track of those sorts of things, it might be worthwhile to wait it out until Twitter gives us access to decent metrics on their t.co URL shortener.

[Update] I also suspect that bit.ly tracks re-tweets within Twitter of your URL, but the t.co engine does not. Will keep monitoring it though.