So I turned comments off.

Who knows, I might turn them on again at a future date. But at this point, if anyone wants to chat about what I’m writing here, you’ll just have to do it via FB or some other location. Sorry for the inconvenience.

And to all you spammers out there – F-OFF!

But in the two years since the iPad 1 has come out, I’ve changed. I like to think of it as growing. Now, I prefer to read books on my iPad, iPod, and in the cloud reader on my laptop. I love that when I get to page 110 on my iPad, I can open up my iPod and be right there on that page. This is better than when in Jr. High I learned how to almost subconsciously remember where I was in a book without bookmarks to combat the teasing people who would grab my books from me and move or remove the markers in an effort to thwart my knowing where I was. (I also learned the best hiding places for reading at my Jr. High—back in the library stacks on one of the lowest shelves where no books were stored was the best. No bullies ever venture into the library.)

When Apple changed the rules and removed the bookstore links from the apps, I quickly bookmarked your site in my mobile Safari and made sure that that bookmark was synched to all my devices. And when you announced the Kindle Store, I saved the location as an app on my iPad so I could always get to it quickly.

It’s Not You, It’s…No, Wait, It Is You

The Kindle store “app” is nice. It’s flashy and feels much more like an app than a web page. It’s pretty and usable, but there are a number of things that are down right annoying about it.

• Recommended for me? Why the heck are you recommending books to me that I’ve already bought from you? Sure, yes, I did read and enjoy all the Anita Blake vampire books, but seriously, I have already read them. I don’t want to read them again, much less buy them again. I wish there were some way for me to tell the Kindle store “thanks, I liked this, but I’ve already read this, please recommend something else.”
• Is there any customization at all? The top 3 on the top 100 paid list has been the three Suzanne Collins Hunger Games novels for what seems like forever now. As an author, I’m happy for her. As a reader, and someone who has already read those books, I don’’t care! I’d love to see the 3 most popular SciFi or Fantasy novels, which you clearly know I read because of all the Anita Black recommendations in that first part. Even the Stieg Larsson books seem to have been in the Editors picks forever (and again, I’ve already read them). Please let me pick the sections to go here. At least that way I could blame myself if the lists end up being lame.
• Why don’t your categories match the categories in most other bookstores? Sure, SciFi and Fantasy are different, but sometimes the difference is more subtle than my brain can handle, and I then can’t find the book I want to buy. So I don’t buy it. Is that really what you want? Make it easy to find what I want and what I’m looking for.
• Speaking of which, why isn’t search “relevance” a default criteria? When I search for “Anne Bishop” and then change the sort option to see what is her most recent book, I don’t want to have to wade through other author’s books simply because someone in the comments mentioned Bishop’s name. I still want to see the most relevant searches before other searches even if the publication date for Patricia Brigg’s latest novel is newer than the novel Anne put out last year.
• I like to know the author, know when it was published, and know or at least guess that it will be worth the money I plonk down to buy it. And it would be really helpful if there were some way to show that information right in the search results.
• The sorting feature should remember my preferred sort option, and not constantly force me to change it back to my preference.
• And don’t get me started on books in a series. Holy cow it’s hard to figure out which book is in what series and what order they come in. When I’m at the bookstore, it is a trivial matter to look at the cover and see that yes, this is book 3 in the Foreigner series, and I’m on book 7. I would rather not buy book 4 three times simply because you make it hard for me to tell. And while I have bought duplicates in the past, these days I am more likely to head to Overdrive and see if I can check it out from the library rather than buy a book I may have already read.
• Which brings me to my last point. Can you make it possible for me to mark books as read? I know, this is the Kindle store but really, as I grow older I forget things. And just seeing a little icon that says that I’ve read the book I am looking at would make me a lot more tolerant of the issues I’ve mentioned above.

Thank you, Dear Amazon, for considering my suggestions. I want to like your bookstore as much as I do my local brick and mortar bookstore, but as you can see, you make it hard.

Signed,
An avid eBook reader

P.S. Now, I love the jolt of waking up as the iPad falls on my face while I read in bed. So some things never change.—Jenn

Stormageddon the day after we got her

I thought about being lazy and just put the kennel down and thought, “No, I’ll put it away right now, so it’s not cluttering up the kitchen.” I then walked to where McKinley’s leash and backpack go, put them away and then walked to the storage area and put away the carrier. Yay me!

McKinley's leash hung up by the door

A few minutes later I realized that I hadn’t put away the groceries. So I went back to the kitchen where I’d left the bag to put them away. No bag. But Jaryth had moved the chair by the door so he could get a cup of water from the sink. So, I guess he moved the bag. Started searching the most likely areas a toddler would put a bag of groceries—in other words I looked around the kitchen floor.

No bag.

So I looked in the living room and dining room.

No bag.

“Jaryth, do you know what happened to the grocery bag? You know, the one with the wolf on it?”

Blank stare, still no bag.

Mark starts helping to look about then. He looks outside where Jaryth had been playing in the rocks, in the barn, in the shed, in the trash cans, in the car.

No bag.

I am starting to wonder if I imagined buying groceries. As the bag is no where!

I give up looking, and decide to take Storm, who has woken up with all the commotion, outside to do her business. Mark comes out and says “I found it! Now you have to find it!”

Of course, I’m thinking “I’ve been looking for it for the past 20 minutes, what makes you think I could find it now that you’ve found it?”

He asks, “What else were you carrying when you brought in the bag?”

For those of you playing along at home, go back and look at the second photo in this post. Note that BEHIND McKinley’s backpack is a bag with a wolf on it.

what the leash rack should look like—sans bag

Most of the time, I do the stupid things done in this household, much as I’d like to lay the blame on any toddlers or animals in the vicinity.

This is a picture I drew of a leprechaun. I did it based on instructions from the About.com drawing and sketching website. Thanks Helen!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!

For the fourth year in a row, I am participating in the About.com Readers’ Choice Awards. I set up some categories related to web design, in February solcited nominations, and now the finalists are getting votes.

As in previous years, some people feel that there is a problem. Their site isn’t a finalist or they think another finalst is cheating or they can’t vote or they can, but too often or something like that. And they might start with a letter to me, but then they will move on to nastygrams and sarcastic comments and more. This happens every year.

I explain the rules, remind people that you can’t be a finalist without being nominated, that cheating is not tolerated, and that About.com is doing all they can to make things fair.

And then I (try very hard to) let it go.

Ultimately, I think that it’s great that people value these awards enough to get so upset about them. But I’m not interested in freaking out because of them. I want to stay calm and recognize that the awards will do what they do whether I am upset or calm. So I choose calm.

Makes me depressed, as I really like looking at the new stuff, but when the only feedback I get is “eww, that sucks, the scroll bar makes the car move, it doesn’t scroll down the page” it’s hard to stay motivated.

Specifics:
I posted a picture of the Beetle.com website last Wednesday as an example of an innovative site using HTML5 in a new and exciting way.

This resulted in (so far) five comments. Two of which were positive, which is more than usual and the rest were critical with one guy going into detail about all the reasons that he found the “quality” of the site lacking. Most of them were upset with the usability, which makes me wonder if they were viewing it in some crappy browser like IE7 or something. They don’t say.

My Opinion
I think that the web is changing. The classic website with “pages” and sections is going to go away and be replaced by sites like Beetle.com that are more like experiences, like games, like applications.

Content is still going to be very important, but websites are going to need to compete with all the other things vying for our attention like video, radio, television, movies, other websites, mobile apps, desktop apps, and oh yeah, our work… (what’s that?) Websites that are fun and draw you in are going to be more successful than ones that are just focused on slapping up “content.”

I think the other thing the people commenting on my Beetle.com post need to remember is what the audience of the Beetle.com site is and the demographics of who Beetle.com is trying to attract. Sadly, I suspect that the demographics of people who come to my site on About.com are much older (and more boring and less “hip”) than who Beetle.com is going for. Volkswagen wants to promote the new beetle as being “more power, less flower” but they also want to get on the cutting edge bandwagon of HTML5 siteapps. So they built a site that reflects that. It’s not just a website and it’s not just an app, it’s both

Helen, the Drawing and Sketching Guide, then pointed out that I’d have gotten smoother lines using a vector drawing tool instead. But I had a lot of fun drawing this stegosaurus (my favorite dinosaur!) using her tutorial and my Bamboo tablet.

I am trying to get comfortable drawing on the computer directly, rather than in a notebook and scanning. I have been resistant for a while, primarily because drawing with a mouse is challenging. Then when I got the tablet, I realized that I was still chicken. So I thought that if I did some exercises like the ones on Helen’s site, I might get more comfortable with the idea. Let me tell you, drawing with a layer tool is really cool. You can draw the body of the stegosaurus on one layer as a big circle/oval and then draw the plates on top, and simply erase the parts of the body that the plates cover, without worrying about erasing the plates! I know, this is probably obvious, but it was almost magical to me, and I’ve been using Photoshop since 1995!

A very pretty blonde woman attempts to pretend that she’s manipulating the world’s largest wall iPad using Snapseed. Unfortunately, the only thing I got out of that video was that Snapseed can be very hard to use when pretending to use it on a giant wall iPad. Look at her expression when she’s trying to manipulate the photos. It’s as if she was struggling to get her hand in the right place, and then the director would yell “SMILE!” and she’d go “oh yeah, I’m supposed to be having fun!” and smile for a second. After about 4000 takes the crew was tired and the director gave up and just cut it together with what he had.

I started wondering if the only point to the video was to get her model career started, as there seemed to be more images of her than of the app itself.

I then went to my standby app evaluation: go to the app in iTunes (iTunes) and look at the Most Critical reviews first.

Yep, here we are, from slugworthy: 1 star, “WAY overrated”. Slugworthy feels that filterstorm, photoforge2, and photogene2 are “MUCH better.” And hey! I already have those apps! Good, now I can go get an americano at *$ instead!