Over Christmas I spent a few days writing another iPhone app. With New Year’s resolutions fast approaching and overindulgence of wine fresh in my mind, I decided an application to see how much I typically drank might be useful.

I took a look on the app store and identified a vacuum: a nice looking, efficient way to record my consumption. Drinktrack was born.

The dark and refined UI doesn’t light up your face in a ghostly white when you’re sat in a trendy bar noting down your drink. Like One to Watch, it’s designed to be brutally fast to get information into the app. Four taps and some fun swipes.

One of the things Matt Gemmel recommends is adding some contact info to your iPhone’s lock screen image. I like this idea, as it makes it simpler to get your phone back if you misplace it.

I just noticed that OSX allows you to add a message to your MacBook’s lock screen too. Just look under System Preferences → Security & Privacy → General, check the Show a message when the screen is locked and click the Set lock message… button. I added a simple message: “If you have found this Mac, please email [my email address]. Thanks!”

UBS and LIBOR: Horribly rotten, comically stupid

Though it’s left the headlines, the LIBOR scandal keeps growing and growing. More and more banks are found to have been diddling the system.

The interchanges published by the FSA also reveal a comical stupidity among people who, if judged by their above-average pay, ought to have been expected to display above-average insight and intelligence. Sadly, they showed neither.

I find the apparent abject stupidity of many of those involved to be breath-taking.

The Web We Lost

Anil Dash talks about how the rise of closed social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on — has caused many of the strengths of the web to be hidden away from many new users of the web.

Anil first talks about how some of the functions of the web that were taken for granted five or ten years ago are no longer exposed in an obvious manner and moves on to thinking about what effect that has on assumptions made about what is possible:

Subcompact round up and The Daily

It’s been just over a week since Craig Mod wrote Subcompact publishing. And my, what a coincidence of a week it’s been.

Even the death of The Daily — though easy to label ‘failure’ — is anything, in my opinion, but a failure. What it’s done is shown us you can’t build a print island in the middle of our digital ocean. Yes: many of us knew that. But, still, to see an old-school structured publishing institution thrust upon this new space, have it willfully ignore many of the rules-of-engagement obvious to us, and then fail means we are, indeed, somewhere new. It’s nice to be able to say that with reinforced confidence.