I'm the Online Communications Manager for The Arc, a nonprofit organization that advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I'm a former journalist who does a bit of everything and likes it that way.
I build dynamic, content-driven websites. I love online strategy, front end development and social media. I have a master's degree in interactive media from Elon University and a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Central Florida.
If you had asked my co-workers before the holiday season which tablet I might buy, they would have all put money on the Apple iPad. After all, I’m the only one in the office with the iMac, and I’ve brought up Steve Jobs at a few staff meetings.
But I never considered an iPad. Two days after Christmas, I let go of my Apple bias and bought a Kindle Fire. Why? Several reasons:
I already have a laptop, so I couldn’t justify spending $500 for another, no matter how beautiful and useful it turned out to be.
The main reason I wanted a tablet was to read e-books, so I knew cheaper e-readers existed.
I knew I would use my tablet for content consumption above all else.
First Impressions
The Kindle Fire does one thing well – help you browse and consume content. The other thing it does better – direct you to buying that content from Amazon.
Liking This…
Easy to set up, and get going with access to your Amazon content.
Changing the appearance of type while reading books is nice.
The size is perfect.
Not a Fan of…
Silk: It’s slow, very slow. I turned the acceleration off and it sped things up.
App Store: Not even a Twitter or Facebook app, but glorified links to mobile sites. That’s ridiculous. Updates come to the Amazon App Store much slower than normal. Sometimes, it wants me to update an app, but won’t let me update the app – probably because the Amazon-approved version isn’t available.
Navigating the perils of converting e-book files back and forth proved to be a learning experience. Luckily, there’s Calibre.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the Kindle Fire gives me what the iPad could not – a supercharged e-reader with a reasonable price tag. I can read and buy books all I want, and when I need to, check websites, blogs, etc. I’m excited to see how my reading habit will change this year. In the end through, if Apple made a $200 or even $250 iPad Lite, I would have bought it instead.
One of my favorite authors, Steven Pressfield, did an interview with CopyBlogger recently, and talked about his life as a writer. One of the interesting things he said was that he refused to use social media himself because it got in the way. His publicist primarily monitors his social media channels. Does Pressfield have a point here?
Absolutely. Do you adjust the use of social media if you’re working on a big project or goal?
As one of the commenters points out – there is no perfect CMS. Each user’s needs differ vastly – especially enterprise clients. And as John James Jacoby says, Gallagher’s “they” are us. We can change the course of WordPress in a number of ways to make it more like the perfect content management system. You just can’t say that about proprietary systems.
Some of the proprietary systems do some of the things that Gallagher wants better, but none of them handles the user experience or ease of installation/updates better than WordPress. That’s something to remember. WordPress has nailed that pretty well, and can continue to build on it.
What do you think? Is WordPress as weak as Gallagher makes it sound?
(SOPA) [is] an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it.
Let’s not let ill-formed legislation, written by people who know nothing about technology, destroy the Internet. Actually, screw that. This isn’t so much about technology as it’s about freedom. Act now!
I really need to write my first WordPress plugin. Jesse Friedman, a 10-year-old who recently attended a WordCamp, took away what he learned there and created one. Great inspiration, and good to see a young one getting involved in coding early.
It’s an amazing read, and I enjoyed it immensely. Some techies may not appreciate it as much as they could because it isn’t technical. You won’t read about all the ins and outs of making the iPhone or iPad, but you will read about the big breakthroughs, obstacles and quirks of Steve Jobs. That was just what I wanted.
I took away many things from the book and Steve Jobs’s life. Here’s a short list:
Be passionate. You can’t make any real difference with your work or life without believing in what you do. Jobs truly wanted to create great products. It showed in the results he and his team at Apple unleashed over the last three decades.
Mind the details that matter. Details make the difference. Paying attention to how a product looked on the inside, even though no one ever saw it, helped Jobs build products that looked like nothing else.
Be a jerk. Sometimes. Issaacson’s biography recounts many instances of Jobs being a jerk. Sometimes warranted, sometimes not. That persona can prove invaluable when you can’t get your idea or vision through to people any other way.
Focus. The thing that I marveled at more than anything in the book is how Jobs reinvented Apple’s product line after he came back in the late 1990s. It took a lot of guts and vision to say “This is what Apple is good at, and this is what we’ll do,” so to speak. So many companies and organizations fail at this.
What obstacles? Issaacson writes a lot about Jobs’s “reality distortion field.” Jobs certainly set unrealistic goals at times – almost always. However, it was that shooting for the impossible, and ignoring limitations that made him and his team at Apple do groundbreaking things, and make a “dent in the world.”
Have you read the book? What did you learn. Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
A great video by Gary Vaynerchuk on social media and the temptation to view it as THE buzz word to describe all things Internet these days. A definite must watch.
