1. Chris Messina™: Pondering @jennydeluxe's query "Are We Suffering From Mobile App Burnout?” on @branch. What's your take? http://t.co/5IHHJjOI

    .@chrismessina briefly: I agree that, whilst I have a fair number of apps installed, very few of them get regular use. Interestingly IME there is little/no correlation between cost of app and frequency of use (my most expensive apps are music creation ones which get used rarely compared to, e.g. tweetbot, mail or safari).

    I also like some of @scottjenson’s thinking around JIT interactions. Certainly that approach has applications outside the .

    This evening’s hacking is based around parsing and importing my diagnostic data — should be interesting to see if I can find any behavioural patterns.

    (btw, I refuse to sign in to branch with twitter so they can send a tweet for me so you can let me write on your branch. Just… no :)

  2. Current status: manually copying, pasting and emailing my iOS diagnostics information to myself so I can mine and visualise it. This is stupid.

  3. What is it called when you subconsciously expect a UI to be somewhere it isn’t, e.g. double-tapping a word in a dead tree book to get a definition, or expecting a "like/favourite" button in, e.g, an email client?

    And no jokes about obsession :) it can't just be me.

  4. Tags and categories have different connotations. To me, tags are community, collaboration, flexibility, fuzziness, visibile metadata. Categories are authority, rigidity, structure, taxonomy. Tags can be found inside content (), categories are separate, controlling entities. Content owns tags. People own tags. Categories own content. Authority owns categories.

    Beware of vague naming — some software mistakes one for the other (e.g. Mediawiki categories are in fact many-to-many).

    The organisational technique used doesn’t only have technical and usability implications, but social and philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical?) ones.

  5. Erin Jo Richey: @BarnabyWalters Tags provide bottom-up structure and information architecture, categories provide top-down structure and IA.

    .Erin Richey my reasoning is that tags are something you add to content, whereas categories are something you put content into. Tags -> content -> categories — so categories are higher up in the pecking order.

  6. I got tired of WPSM looking and working the way it does (I wrote it when I was 13 and learning PHP), so I’ve taken the data and started building the Music module. Live here. Major but already looking and working better than the old one!

  7. The gig went alright, considering we had major bagpipe tuning problems (chanter stuck a quarter-tone between F# and G). Thanks to everyone who came!

    Now I’ve played Bach in front of a paying audience I feel like a real musician. Couldn’t have done it without Robin Andrews though :)