We’ve thrown this around in our head for some time now, and we finally decided to pull the trigger and disable site comments. There was no particular event that forced us to do this, and we weren’t encumbered by moderation problems like much larger sites are. So why bother nixing comments?

Over the past several weeks, we read various opinions across the blogosphere on commenting, and we decided that we agreed with the camp that many single-author sites fall into, which sounds something like this: “This is our blog, and if you want your own voice, comment on your blog.” It’s not a matter of control, or humbleness, but rather a philosophical stance that we believe harbors more useful commentary and discussion.

For one, mendax.org doesn’t get a lot of commentary to begin with. Of the commentary it does get, a good percentage is from people we’re already familiar with, who we already follow on Twitter, or Google Plus, or simply know in real life. Those people can just as easily comment using any of these networks, and we can easily comment back. The rest of the individuals who want to comment probably use one of these social networks also, so it’s easy for them to utilize these networks to comment here if they so choose.

Of the remaining individuals who choose not to have a social networking account, and still want to comment, there’s always e-mail. This should cut down on the number of non-productive comments we get, as feedback that’s direct (either via an @WyldKard at Twitter, else a direct e-mail) tends to be more constructive.

Two, we believe that a lot of useful information sometimes gets lost in a site’s comments. We’ve felt this when leaving commentary elsewhere, and we took a stance some time back that, if we have a real position worth leaving a comment for, we’d sooner write about it at mendax.org and give a link back to the post we’re commenting on. Not only does this help drive traffic to the person we’re commenting to, but it tends to make our response more thought out.

In a way, we liken this to the back-and-forth that philosophers and scientists had yesteryear, which was by way of letter. This slow, almost tedious approach provided both detailed thoughts, as well as a more three-dimensional banter between parties. The same can be done across blogs thanks to trackbacks and tweets, as a more detailed picture of the involved parties can be drawn in the context of their own blogs. As a bonus, this fosters a more personal exchange, and therefore, one less prone to personal attacks.

Three, our own comments to our posts often get lost over time, when a detailed response to a reader could just as easily become its own post. We believe it makes more sense to flush such responses out as a new entry, than to minimize its importance to our position in a sub-comment.

Four, the decision follows a more minimalist approach.The site is simpler, and in our opinion, cleaner because of it. No longer do we need to worry about whether our anti-spam plugins are working, and no longer do we need to worry about catching a comment alert via e-mail, or in WordPress’ admin section. Rather, we can rely on notifications we check for other purposes daily, and be better engaged with our audience. From a plugin perspective, it also means there’s less WordPress needs to handle, and less load the server needs to provide.¹

We’re not necessarily attached to this change long-term, but would like to try it out to see how well it fosters discussion and cross-linking over the near future. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, we can always go back, but this change seems right for what we envision the site to be.

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A lot of people still don’t understand how the iPad could replace a notebook. Mainly, this seems to be an issue of adopting new habits. Over at TUAW, Steven Sande doesn’t get it.

I have to vehemently disagree with the entire idea that an iPad can be a true laptop replacement in times of need.

That’s funny, because it seems to work alright for some people.

Sure, LogMeIn Ignition and iTeleport are great, and I have them on my iPad. But I try to use them as sparingly as possible and never to do work on my office iMac. Why? Most of the time, I find that even on a fast network, the scrolling required to move around the 27″ screen on the iMac is ridiculously slow.

Maybe Sande’s work computer is at an obscenely high resolution, but one then needs to wonder why he didn’t just decrease the resolution before going on his trip (or during, via screensharing itself). Since Sande likes counterpoints so much, he ought consider that we accessed our east-coast Mac Mini running at 1080p resolution, from Greece, via iTeleport without issue, for simple file management tasks.

Trying to type into our content management system here at TUAW over a screen sharing connection is an exercise in frustration; it’s slow and there’s a lag between typing and seeing the text appear on the screen (and the system doesn’t support direct editing in Mobile Safari).

Sounds like this is a TUAW content management system issue and not an iPad issue. We noted ourselves that we regularly write content in an external app, and then cut’n paste into the web-based WordPress app via Mobile Safari. Why would a similar method for uploading blog content not work for Sande? Did he forget that cut’n paste has been available on iOS for some time now?

While I was on my trip, I was spending an hour or two a day working on my NaNoWriMo 2010 novel to make progress on completing it before November 30. The original document was written in Microsoft Word (don’t ask — I write most of my books and other documents in that tool because of force of habit), and neither Documents to Go nor QuickOffice Connect seemed to do the job for me on the iPad. What did I do? Open the Word document in Pages for iPad after pulling it from my Dropbox. Pages for iPad is excellent for this type of writing, but it doesn’t allow me to auto-save the documents back to Dropbox.

There are four obvious solutions for this.

1. Change your poor habits in relying on a Microsoft file type.
2. Handle your edits on the road, and at the end of your trip, re-upload to Dropbox.
3. Once you’re done with your edits, copy/paste into an app that does handle Dropbox.
4. Stop using Dropbox and use Mobile Me.

Sure, Dropbox, Elements, and PlainText (as well as other apps) are lovely for writing text files, but I want a real word processor.

It’s curious that, in a world where there’s a clear demand for text editors aimed at writers instead of those requiring layout functionality, that Sande wants a “real word processor.” Since his example here is writing a novel, what functionality in Pages does Sande need so badly that he can’t get in an app designed for writing novels? At least if his complaint was that an app like Ulysses wasn’t available for the iPad, he’d have a more genuine argument.

…until there are real apps that work just like the big boys (Excel, PowerPoint, Keynote and Numbers) and support opening and saving in Dropbox, a laptop is still going to be the best way to do real work anywhere.

Unless we missed something, Sande’s example apps don’t save to Dropbox natively, either. And really, why dismiss the iPad based almost exclusively on the habit of using a single third-party service, when Apple offers a competitor that works better for Sande’s purposes?

If I have to carry an iPad and keyboard with me, why don’t I just carry a MacBook Air around?

Because chances are, you’re not using both the iPad and keyboard all the time. For most people, even half the time. Wouldn’t you prefer flexibility than being forced to schlep a keyboard around whenever you want to surf the web, check your mail, watch a movie, or play a game?

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Lately, all the Apple talk has been around the MacBook Air’s ability to serve as one’s primary computer, but we say that’s not going far enough. When the iPad was released, we embarked on a revolutionary experiment: replace our 17″ MacBook Pro with a 3G iPad, and see if the much smaller, sleeker device had the oomph to serve our needs.

Of course, there’s a mandatory disclaimer behind this experiment:

1. We bought the 64GB iPad in an effort to alleviate as many storage concerns as possible.
   
   
2. A Mac Mini server was purchased alongside the iPad to further address storage concerns for our media, and to serve as a means to update and backup our iOS devices. (As a bonus, the Mini, in lieu of an Apple TV, acts as our media server; the Mini is generally headless, though we use our 46″ LCD television as an output device when watching Internet-based video in our living room.)
   
   
   
3. The iPad is our home computer; we typically use company-owned computers during business hours.
   
   
   
4. We no longer actively develop code, or have other requirements that would limit us to a particular software suite or IDE.

That may sound like a lot of “buts,” yet it makes us a fairly typical computer user. We spend most of our computer time split between surfing the web and writing text, with the rest of our computer use consisting of entertainment (e.g. games and videos) or dabbling in content management/creation. A good chunk of this computing time is done strictly in our house, which means our office, living room, occasionally the kitchen, and when weather permits, our patio. We also like to take our computer on trips, and since we don’t have a business computer for business trips, we take our personal computer along for personal entertainment/tasks.

The disclaimer, realized.

To further allay the concerns some readers have with the four-point disclaimer we noted above, we admit that we played it somewhat safe when embarking on this journey. That is to say, in practice, we could have gone with less purchases as a safety net.

For one, the 64GB iPad was overkill; for many months, we didn’t come close to filling even half of this capacity. This is partially due to the fact that we don’t use our iPad as a music-playing device outside of, say, Pandora, which means we don’t need to use up storage space for a vast mp3 collection. The few mp3s we do maintain, we keep on our iPhone, which, among other things, serves as our iPod.

We do keep movies on our iPad, however. We have a select few reference videos that we’ve ripped and keep synced via iTunes, and before most trips, we rip a couple videos to watch while traveling. The brunt of our storage use is from apps, however, of which games probably take up the most space.

In reality, we could easily get by with a 32GB iPad. The 64GB merely lets us be less disciplined with juggling media. And, when on vacation, when we use the camera connection kit to offload raw images from our digital camera, that extra space can come in handy, as we don’t need to juggle around extra SD cards.

Two, dumping our 17″ MacBook Pro meant we technically had room in our lives for a Mac Mini server, which we’d been considering for some time. The purchase itself was overkill, we admit. For the purpose of acting as an iTunes portal for backing up and syncing our iOS devices, we could just have kept the 17″ MacBook Pro on a shelf and used it specifically for this purpose. So too, could we have purchased many a used Mac for same.

The Mac Mini solution, instead, was made because we desperately wanted to experiment with a media server hooked up to our television. Going the Mini server route was because we didn’t want to deal with external drives, and the server version came with extra storage capacity, which at the time of purchase, made sense since we had well over 500GB of files saved from the last 10+ years of computing. Sadly, a Time Capsule failure (we used the drive networking feature) meant that we lost all our files thanks to not having redundant backups. So by the time we had our iPad in hand, even the capacity of an old MacBook Air would have been sufficient.

The lesson here isn’t just that redundant backups are good, but that for people considering duplicating our iPad experiment, a much less capable Mac can be used if all one wants to do is sync iOS devices with iTunes.

Three, we’re not getting away with running fancy apps on work computers; even in the office, there’s little reason that we couldn’t get away with using an iPad for most computing tasks. We simply clarify as a matter of full disclosure, not because the iPad is incapable of providing the necessary tools for our job.

The add-ons.

While the iPad itself is core to the experience, just as one might purchase peripherals and accessories for a notebook computer, the iPad is not without its complimentary needs.

Let’s start with the most basic of needs for getting new media onto an iPad, as the lack of disc drive is a huge red flag for most people considering an iPad-only lifestyle: in order to get videos onto an iPad, they need to be in iTunes, and in order to get them into iTunes, they need to be downloaded or ripped. The former method doesn’t need much explanation, but the latter requires an optical disc drive. This isn’t an issue for most people who have a Mac or PC for iTunes use, but in our case, about four of five months into our project, we went out and bought a Superdrive for ripping DVDs (since the Mini server doesn’t come with a disc drive). From here, the process is obvious, but since we went the (mostly) headless route, what did we do when the TV was in use, and we wanted to use the Mini?

Enter iTeleport, a fantastic VNC client for all iOS devices. iTeleport is what we use both at home and on-the-go to access our Mini. It’s what we use to manage iTunes and sync devices, as well as running, say, RipIt for adding media to iTunes. Basically, if the TV is in use, we use iTeleport to simulate our Mini’s monitor, so we can do what we need to in order to support our iOS devices (e.g. managing peer-to-peer clients like Transmission, and basic iPhoto management tasks). If you have a Mac you’re using for iTunes that already has a monitor, then you don’t need a iTeleport, but it’s still a handy utility regardless.

Another obvious hurdle out-of-box was the lack of a physical keyboard. We didn’t anticipate that the software keyboard would be as useable as it is (it’s remarkably good once you’re used to it), but for longer writing sessions, we knew we’d want a physical keyboard, too. For us, the Apple bluetooth keyboard fits the bill. It’s only slightly taller than the iPad itself, which is about perfect for sitting on our lap while we type away, and it’s not too large to take along when we’re traveling. We use the basic iPad dock for propping the iPad up in portrait mode for when we type, and this works splendidly in most environments. Per our earlier post, setup time is quick and easy, too.

We don’t keep the iPad in a case, though when not in use, we pop it in a Saddleback sleeve so it doesn’t get beaten up in our satchel. Thus far, we’ve found no immediate need for the six-foot power extension cable that Apple sells, though we can picture a need for it in certain environments.

With this three-piece office ensemble (iPad, dock, and keyboard), and iTeleport, we’re perfectly able to perform most every task we need to at home and on the road.

The changing of the lifestyle.

The biggest difference with our computer use after going iPad-only is that traveling is more enjoyable. Schlepping around our 17″ MacBook Pro was a pain in the ass, but with how much smaller and lighter the iPad is, we’ve downsized our briefcase considerably. And, since we have the option of leaving the keyboard and dock at home, we can travel even lighter on short trips when we don’t expect to have much time for writing.

This easier ability to take our iPad on the road means we take it with us more often than we did our MacBook. (Mind you, we keep mentioning our old 17″ MacBook Pro, but the same held true for the 15″ MacBook Pro we had before it.) We wouldn’t have considered taking a notebook computer along on a camping trip, or most day trips, but the iPad is a great travel companion.

And with a battery life of some 10 hours, we don’t even worry about packing a power cord along for most day trips, either. The small footprint of the iPad also means it enters our kitchen more often, say, for looking up recipes. (And yes, it’s great for surfing the web from the shitter, too.)

But perhaps the biggest advantage to the iPad other than the small footprint is the 3G capability. Many have said they’ve heard people regretting a non-3G iPad purchase, but never someone regretting spending the extra money on 3G capability. For the extra dime, the option of 3G access is great, especially since 3G users aren’t on a contract, and can opt-in one month at a time.

About the only downside for new iPad buyers regarding 3G is that the unlimited data plan is no longer available. Since we use wifi at home and at Starbucks, the first couple months of use meant that we didn’t use that much 3G data, so we briefly dropped down to a lower plan. Given our use pattern, however, we occasionally spike: during a couple days of heavy 3G use when we were away from home and had no free wifi available, we burned through the capped data plan, and had to jump back to the unlimited plan. (We could have doubled up on the capped plan, but at that rate, why bother?) Maybe that’s not a huge problem for most people’s use, and arguably doubling-up on a capped plan may suit most people’s needs when such spikes happen, but it’s still something worth noting.

The surfing of the web.

Most people we talk to about going iPad-only bring up Flash as soon as internet use is mentioned. We consider this practically a dead issue and won’t rehash the anti-Flash sentiments in detail, but regardless of what sites are still using it today, the fact remains that Flash eats battery life like nothing else, and every mobile implementation of Flash offers a poor experience. With HTML5 being supported by most sites (like YouTube), it won’t be long before Flash is a footnote in web history, much like the blink tag of yesteryear.

That said, have we been frustrated on occasion that certain legacy sites don’t offer non-Flash versions? Yes, and in these cases, we either move on to the next site, or rely on iTeleport to give us a Flash version via our Mini. But as time moves on, we rely on this latter procedure less and less, in great part because developers are realizing that non-Flash alternatives need to exist. In fact, we’re contemplating removing the Flash plugin from our Mini altogether at this point, as we’re that confident that we don’t need Flash in our web-surfing lives.

Overall, the web-surfing experience on the iPad is fantastic. We don’t need to zoom around on a page like we do with the iPhone, and about the only common annoyance is dealing with web forms, which aren’t as quick to navigate as on a traditional computer, especially when the on-screen keyboard is used and cuts off a drop-down box (rendering it smaller, not obscuring options). Certain web pages also are not iPad-friendly, such as Facebook, which either remove options (Facebook chat, for example) or have broken functionality (Facebook photo uploads). Fortunately, there are apps for some of these issues (like third-party Facebook apps that enable chat and file uploads), but the inability to upload files via a basic web form on, say, an online forum, can be very irksome if you rely on such functionality.

The only other complaint we have will be addressed in iOS 4.2, and that’s conducting text searches in web content.

Given the iPad’s form factor, surfing the web in bed, or on the couch, or wherever else, is simply a more intimate experience that having a keyboard and mouse between you and the internet. If anything, web browsing is where tablets shine much brighter than conventional computers.

The writing of the text.

We’ve already covered writing on the iPad to some degree, but let’s rehash: the software keyboard works well for basic tasks, like taking brief notes, filling in web forms, et al. And, it works well in both landscape and portrait modes; though a lot of people criticize the software keyboard in portrait mode, we’ve found that it works about as well as the landscape keyboard on the iPhone, with the only minor downside being the weight of the iPad being a tad awkward if used for more than a few minutes.

Touch-typing on the software keyboard is also possible in landscape mode, and only becomes better when the auto-correct feature is turned off; mis-types that result in whole words we don’t want turns out to be far more annoying than simply back-spacing and making corrections. But for slow typers, the auto-correct feature can be handy.

For anyone who wants to seriously write on the iPad, however, a hardware keyboard is a must. There are now several, foldable keyboards on the market that open to full-size, and these may be better for travel, but the small, Apple bluetooth keyboard has worked for us so far. For home users, the camera connection kit allows a USB keyboard to be used so you don’t need to worry about keyboard battery life, but this hasn’t been a huge issue for us with our bluetooth keyboard. Still, the option is there (though you couldn’t have the iPad hooked up to a wall outlet in this scenario).

Just as with web pages, one annoyance when writing is not having a quick find/replace option. Perhaps as apps start to standardize more, we’ll see something like this evolve, but keyboard shortcuts are a no-go for most writing apps, so there is a slight speed advantage for those who are used to writing on a traditional computer. (We’ve found the lack of a page up/down shortcut particularly annoying, as we now have to scroll with touch gestures which means taking our hands off the keyboard.)

These slight issues aside, we’ve welcomed the simplicity that iPad writing apps offer. We purchased Pages from the get-go, but tend to use even simpler writing apps, as we don’t regularly mark up our text.

To be fair, we’re not power spreadsheet users either, so Numbers works fine for us, as likely would most other spreadsheet apps on the AppStore. It has a slightly higher learning curve for beginners than, say, Excel, but it’s nothing a half hour of tinkering won’t solve. If anything, office apps on the iPad feel manageable, whereas Microsoft Office can often feel monumental (in a bad way) comparatively.

We mentioned earlier the simplicity of the iPad dock as a stand, and if a table or desk is around, this setup works fantastic. If anything, you can get by with much less tabletop space than you could with a notebook, since a wireless keyboard can easily sit on your lap (being more ergonomic to boot).

That said, things become a tad more complicated if you’re not sitting in a chair in front of a desk. Take, for example, a situation where you want to write a few pages in the park, under a tree. Your keyboard can sit on your lap, but how do you prop your iPad up? You can throw something together with whatever you have around you (a jacket, for example, can become a makeshift support), but the ideal situation is a case that will support the iPad at an ideal viewing angle and not shift. With a notebook, the keyboard is the stand, but with the iPad, you have to buy a case that holds the iPad accordingly. We can’t comment on whether or not the iPad keyboard dock fills this need, but we’ve seen various other cases that seem better suited for this task.

Ultimately, the iPad is an excellent all-around writing tool, and should be plenty adequate for most people’s needs, to include students and professionals. Trickier things become as the need for more robust layout options arise. Folks in the design industry, for example, will likely want very specific software products to fulfill this niche, and until such apps arrive, they will continue to rely on traditional computing solutions. (This is akin to graphics professionals still needing a machine with Photoshop, while the layman can easily get away with one of the many lightweight Photoshop-like apps in the AppStore.)

For everyone else, however, the vast array of writing apps in the AppStore, to include writing apps for hand-written notes and apps integrating audio capture, should suffice for most any need.

The blogging of the thoughts.

So general writing on the iPad works well, but what about, specifically, blogging? Considering that most of the non-professional writing we do ends up online in some form or another, we hoped that the iPad would address this need well. As it turns out, blogging via the iPad is easy once one gets a decent methodology in place.

On our MacBook, we relied heavily on Skitch for grabbing and editing graphics from the web for use in  blog posts. On the iPad, we have to manually download a web graphic, else perform a screen-capture. We then open the file in our graphics app of choice, crop, edit, and re-save. We now have a graphic that we can’t simply upload via a web form, and that’s a shame. (The default WordPress admin interface doesn’t lend itself to file uploads from the iPad, nor is the content input box for a post resizable in Mobile Safari like it is in regular Safari. So sadly, it’s a poor interface for making new posts.)

Fortunately, since we predominantly use WordPress, there’s both a WordPress app and BlogPress (both apps with trade-offs, but that are reasonable methods for generating new blog posts). That said, in most cases, we still end up writing the actual posts in one of our writing apps, and then cut’n pasting the final draft over to the WordPress or BlogPress apps. This is where we would then handle image attachments and the like. (If we don’t want to deal with images, we often paste into WordPress via Safari.)

Admittedly, it probably takes us a little extra time to blog via the iPad than it did from our MacBook, but we argue that this is mainly because the WordPress app has shown itself buggy, and BlogPress remains limited in what it does. We’d definitely like to see a more robust blogging app, even if it’s just a more stable and refined WordPress app.

The watching of the multimedia.

The iPad is positioned as an entertainment device as much as it is a productivity device, and here, we’ve found no shortage of truth. Even though we don’t rely on the built-in iPod and Videos apps as much as others might, we’ve been pleased with the variety of video options in the AppStore. Key among these are streaming apps, like Netflix and Hulu Plus, but perhaps our top choice is Air Video, which allows us to stream video content from our Mini to the iPad on a local, or remote level. This means that video not encoded for viewing in iTunes can stream to the iPad just fine, and while Netflix and Hulu have licensing restrictions that won’t let you use them when traveling overseas, Air Video lets us watch what we want, where we want. (Plex is also great if you’re running the main Plex app on a media server like we are; it handles landscape mode nicely, and we’re starting to use this app more often now, though Air Video is still out go-to.)

While we could probably find a way to automate the transferring of content from our TiVo to the Mini, when we’re traveling, we simply find an RSS feed for a particular torrent of a show we already pay for via FIOS, and let Transmission on the Mini download new episodes as they’re posted. Air Video is set up to scan the respective directory with new torrent downloads, and we’re good to go. Even if your source isn’t torrents (i.e. you can automate downloads from Usenet or some other source), Air Video can look in the directory where videos are downloaded to and present them to you from the other side of the world.

With iOS 4.2 and multitasking, we expect the iPad to only become better; being able to run Pandora audio streams in the background while we surf the web, or write, is something we look forward to, as we’re currently handling background audio by running Pandora on our iPhone and keeping the phone nearby.

That which remains missing.

The iPad has met most of our expectations in six months of use, though there remain several things we’d like to see improved in the iPad experience. Recognizing that some things simply won’t change based on Apple’s position on third-party apps, there are other things we’d like to see happen.

1. Tethering: The iPad currently requires a traditional computer in order to back up files, downloads, and handle iOS updates. This means that the iPad can never be the sole machine in one’s tool-bag, and that isn’t ideal. Right now, the iPad is a great travel companion, but if we were to go on a major trip lasting several months, we’d question whether not having any backups during that time-frame, or missing a key iOS update, is something we could live with. The iPad needs a way to back itself up via an iPad-optimized version of Time Machine, which could be run on a home network or, even better, via the internet. And, the iPad needs to be able to download and install iOS updates without being tethered to a traditional computer. Once this happens, the iPad becomes a much clearer alternative to the 11″ MacBook Air.
   
   
2. APIs: We’ve heard from several developers that the apps they want to make can’t be made, because Apple still has many private APIs that developers can’t use (but that Apple uses in its own iOS apps). This isn’t good for the development of more powerful and competitive iOS apps, especially when basic things like text markup become restricted to developers. (Sadly, this is preventing apps like Ulysses from receiving a solid port to iOS.)
   
   
   
3. Screen-sharing: We mentioned how fantastic we find iTeleport, but why isn’t there a native solution to screen-sharing via an iPad? And, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a more powerful way to stream content from a server? We’re thinking something along the lines of OnLive, only connecting a video stream between you and a Mac you already own. While iOS 4.2 will allow us to stream audio and video from one iOS device to another on an app-specific level, being able to stream a Mac desktop to an iPad would be a fantastic ability to have.

More experimenting.

We’re not done with our experiment: we don’t plan on jumping back over to a MacBook anytime soon. Rather, we’re quite pleased with how well our iPad performs, and we’re actually more likely to replace it with another iPad well before we replace it with another notebook.

For those considering a similar experiment, jumping over to the iPad is difficult in the sense that switching from the PC to the Mac is difficult: it involves changing habits and adopting new ways of doing things. But once you start getting those new methods, then the iPad isn’t an obstacle for tasks, but a natural fit for them. The iPad isn’t perfect, mind you, but it’s already a solid platform for computing, and we only see it getting better over time. There’s a reason that the feel of the iPad is being transitioned over to OS X, which will only further help to drive iPad sales.

Yes, we sometimes get frustrated with a particular task on the iPad, because the way we know to do that task on a Mac feels easier, but those moments of frustration are less and less frequent as better apps are released, and as Apple continues to develop iOS further.

When it comes to apps, we also find ourselves thinking less and less, “We wish our iPad could do what the Mac does,” and thinking more and more, “We wish everyone used an iPad.” Why? Because more iPad users means more developers on that platform, which means better apps. And frankly, those apps on the iPad would be better.

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The iPhone dramarama wheel landed on Tweetie 2 recently, to the tone of much annoyance regarding the fact that the Tweetie 2 upgrade won’t be free to existing iPhone Tweetie users. That is to say, Tweetie 2 is a totally different program than Tweetie, and as such, will require another $3 purchase for those who want to use the latest Tweetie version. That’s not to say that users of Tweetie will be incapable of still using their Twitter client of choice, merely that the developer, atebits, will clearly be focusing on Tweetie 2 users rather than spending most of their time addressing problems with Tweetie “1″. So naturally, buyers of Tweetie may be a little peeved, since they feel neglected and betrayed, particularly when atebits could offer a discount to existing Tweetie users, or even simpler, make Tweetie 2 a free upgrade instead of a new app (albeit at the cost of atebit’s development time).

Perhaps the hoopla is mainly grounded in the naming of Tweetie 2. Clearly, atebits wants to capitalize on the success of Tweetie, though naming Tweetie 2 something different may not have gotten everone as riled up, since a clearer line would be drawn in the sand. After all, it’d be easier to convince people to buy a new Twitter client than a newer version of a client they already paid for. Sure, the argument against a sense-of-entitlement is a simple one to make: atebits clearly spent a lot of time building Tweetie 2 from the ground up, and as a business, they wants to make money where they can (and not where they can’t, thus the continued free-ness of Tweetie for OS X).

And maybe that’s where the second problem lies: blame it on self-entitlement or not, there’s a reason many Tweetie users are upset: the precedent for major upgrades to iPhone apps (as well as software like Tweetie for OS X), at no cost to previous buyers, was set long ago. Developers of apps like Twittelator Pro, for example, have added just as many features as Tweetie 2 will offer, and arguments of Tweetie 2′s superior useability aside, there are many other apps that have offered iterative, substantial updates over time, at an arguable loss to the developers who continue supporting purchases long after they were made. Now that’s no fault of atebits: they’re clearly trying to break free from the way things are generally being done on the AppStore, in such a way that they can afford to work on iPhone apps full-time, whereas many other developers may simply be working on their apps as a side-job. Neither way is inherently right, it’s just that Tweetie users are used to things moving in a direction that favors their AppStore expenditures.

It’s really not a matter of having to shell out a whole $3 more just for the update. We’d argue that if atebits made Tweetie 2 a free upgrade and kept certain features unlockable only through in-app purchases, that they could more easily convince many dissenters to spend that $3 for fancy new features. But instead, they made a new app, which will probably earn atebits a few more bucks in the long-run (since in-app purchases generally make less than stand-alone products), and though that’s certainly a valid move for a business trying to make some extra moolah, it somehow feels wrong, as though atebits is not being honest to consumers. That’s especially true for people who buy Tweetie today, only to find that their purchase will barely be supported once Tweetie 2 comes out.

So the hoopla is an emotional reaction to a problem not with atebits, but the AppStore process, highlighting yet another deficiency with the AppStore’s mechanism for enabling long-term application support by developers who make a living writing, and maintaining, iPhone apps. The only real fault we can find with atebits is not using the in-app purchase mechanism to support the transition from Tweetie to Tweetie 2, but maybe there’s a legitimate reason that atebits couldn’t go that route. (Any developers want to comment on this?)

Ultimately, if Tweetie 2 offers the same features as Twittelator Pro (with TweetPress support for WordPress), we’ll probably drop another $3, knowing full well that that $3 we spent earlier was effectively thrown away (Tweetie offered too little functionality by the time we picked it up). What we don’t want to see is this kind of practice being repeated again and again, however. Rather, if there’s an obstacle to using in-app purchases to charge for major iPhone app revisions, then Apple needs to address this issue pronto, else this won’t be the first time that app buyers get all up-in-arms over the Tweetie 2 upgrade process. As it stands, the process not only angers consumers, but negatively affects app developers also.

09/30/2009 Update: According to atebit’s response to an inquiry by The iPhone Blog, the in-app mechanism wasn’t appropriate.

If all I were adding were features, then the in-app purchase route would have been an option (but then again, if all I were offering were features, I’d probably release it as a free update). Tweetie 2 is a fresh start, 100% rewritten, shares no code with the original . The only thing they have in common is the name.

That doesn’t entirely answer our question though. Does Apple require a minimum amount of code to be the same between app updates? If not, then Tweetie 2 could have new features enabled with an in-app purchase, despite it being rewritten from the ground-up. Aside from the extra development time needed to include the in-app purchase functionality, is there an Apple-imposed obstacle here?

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For most web-surfers, one’s inbox is the focal point for spam, but let’s be honest: the internet itself is one giant hodge-podge of spam. The very ease of setting up accounts at most every portal and site out there makes for both convenience and interconnectivity, though it just as easily creates a spawning pool for the unsavory word-vomit that literally covers the cyberspace landscape. This is the very reason that e-mail services have incorporated spam filters, and why notable blogging suites have done same. Arguably, the lack of this feature-set is one more reason that services like Blogspot foster what is now commonly referred to as splogs.

We’ve never used Blogspot as a blogging outlet – we’ve merely experimented with its feature-set. From our understanding, we gauge that for a Google-owned service, Blogspot is rather weak in features compared to its competition, begging the question as to why so many individuals capable of using a hosted-blogging package like WordPress rely on Blogspot instead. This is particularly notable when Blogspot users decide that they cannot keep up with comment spam, which really means that they prefer to delete comments before the comments are posted, instead of afterward. Preferential aside, the real problem with comment moderation is not only that it’s slow (thereby artificially slowing community growth), but because it’s easily abused.

While comment moderation may keep spam out, it’s a tool often used to keep out differences of opinion as well. If blogs are the new journalism (or at least, the new op-ed), then it should follow that comments are ideal for fact-checking, followup, and opposing view-points. If blog authors conveniently abuse a comment moderation mechanism to silence opposing opinions, they’re effectively clumping these view-points into the same category as spam. With that mind-set, why should a commenter (who cares enough about the blog to weigh-in) ever comment again?

Comment moderation is a sinister mistress – it’s significantly subjective when employed against gray-area spam, but moreso when used against non-spam. Sinister is comment moderation’s invisibility – blog authors can simply refuse to publish comments, thereby giving the appearance that no opposing viewpoints among a readership exist. But when this does become apparent, our position is simple: either ignore the author’s inaccuracies or arguments entirely, else comment about them elsewhere. Anything else is simply exposing oneself to an unfair argument: if a blog author can selectively refuse to post a comment, especially in an ongoing discussion, then the author has the advantage of always being heard when the commenter does not.

Not only is comment moderation unfair to the audience, but it’s disrespectful to them as well. This is particularly true in the case of an ongoing discussion thread which, moderation initially appearing objective, suddenly morphs into the opposite, when a commenter is suddenly silenced. If a blog author feels she does not want to invest the time in continuing an argument, she could just as easily bow out of the discussion herself. Silencing the opposition, especially without noting such publicly, is simply poor etiquette, and sends the message that readers should either not comment at all, else stop reading the blog entirely, because their opinions, dare they not agree with the author, will be forcibly unheard.

To bloggers across cyberspace, we ask that comment moderation be deactivated. If no suitable anti-spam mechanism exists to fight comment spam thereafter, then you should move on to a blogging package does. In truth, if you’re capable of setting up a blog on Blogspot, then you’re capable of setting one up at WordPress; comment moderation is not an excuse for Blogspot’s lack of features – better solutions exist. If you believe this transition to be too time-consuming, then we argue that you simply don’t care enough about the quality of your blog, else don’t respect your readers enough to foster a thriving community around them.

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After reading Apple Gazette’s fairly positive overview of Blogo 1.2, we decided to give the stand-alone blogging application a try. (We tried out ecto and MarsEdit in the past, and ecto still stands as our victor.) From Blogo‘s screenshots, we were hopeful that the application could seriously stand against ecto, as it looks quite polished, with a nice feature-set and much better-looking UI than ecto, albeit one that could still use some polish.

One of the first things we noticed when we started Blogo up is that after easily adding mendax.org to our list of blogs, Blogo imported a number of recently published posts. While ecto does this also, the key difference is that Blogo imports saved drafts at the top of the list, whereas ecto drops them to the bottom as if they were posted weeks, months, or years ago. The ecto team claims that this is a WordPress issue, but it’s clearly surmountable.

Blogo also has a nice full-screen editing window that can be toggled. This feature makes Blogo great for authors who post longer entries on their respective blogs, or authors who like to keep their desktop free of distractions while writing. Also, Blogo has a nice preview mode for blog posts, which actually generates a template of your site by connecting to the site in question and grabbing the requisite style-sheets and related documents. All in all, were quite impressed with Blogo up to this point.

Sadly, this is where Blogo’s strengths end, for even with a nicer aesthetic to the interface than ecto, our experiences with Blogo went downhill quickly. Firstly, there’s little image manipulation that can be done. While some may argue that margin sizes should be handled by a blog’s style-sheet, we still like the fact that ecto lets one adjust image margins without hacking up the HTML code for a blog post. We also like that after aligning an image to the left or right in ecto, that text is automatically wrapped around the image. In Blogo, the HTML tags inserted didn’t display the word-wrapping well at all, and we couldn’t find a way to fix it without getting down to the raw HTML.

Blogo also doesn’t show a list of tags previously used. While typing a letter brings up a small window of tags starting with that letter, it’s not as simple as visually check-marking the tags you want assigned to a new post. In this respect, ecto’s implementation is better, though Blogo could run with both ideas and make the tag list an optional, detached window (like the comments window it sports).

Before submitting our first test post, we changed the time-stamp to the following day, so as to queue the post for later publishing. Unfortunately, Blogo ignored our preference and published right away, which is a bug that shouldn’t have made it out of beta testing. A similarly annoying bug was noticed during the editing process itself, in which italicizing or bolding text via command-I and command-B, respectively, did not work unless text was selected.

Finally, after publishing a post, we retrieved it with ecto to make changes. Immediately, ecto complained about HTML syntax errors. After fixing them, we took a look at the image we uploaded, and noticed that Blogo automatically changed the left and bottom margins to 10 (the image was right-aligned). It’s silly that Blogo doesn’t let users change this value easily.

All said and done, Blogo is a stand-alone blogging application with promise, though very simple bugs are making it to release, and that’s really unfortunate. As it stands, the application needs more testing, and more refinement, before it can really stand up to ecto or MarsEdit. For $25, Blogo shouldn’t sport a version number of 1.2 with these kinds of shortcomings.

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Some time back, we stopped paying attention to Bones Wiley’s web site, because he was outta town and knew he wouldn’t be updating it anytime soon. As it happens, his web site broke during that time, and only a few days ago did we manage to pick the old database and put Wiley’s old content back up. All this content was thrown onto a fresh WordPress installation, a new theme was selected as a temporary backdrop, and the song management system used earlier was discarded for something a bit newer thanks to WordPress 2.5.

We expect to see some promising new things from Bones Wiley, so we’re eagerly awaiting his latest creative endeavors.

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Apparently, our earlier coverage of Chyrp didn’t push anyone to build any extravagant or even irregular Chyrp themes, and we still haven’t updated our broken theme for WordPress yet either. Yes, we expected to move onto something better by now, but we’ve been holding out for someone talented to bring the Redoable theme up to snuff, else move onto a premium theme.

We’ve strongly considered utilizing one of adii’s Premium News Themes, and an upcoming contest has our interest piqued. Of adii’s themes, we were most enthused by the Kineda Inspiration theme, but as it’s been discontinued, we’ve sort of been holding out on what else adii comes up with. At present, we’d still prefer a grid-based news theme, but with developer support, which the unfinished Kineda theme does not offer.

We do like adii’s Live Wire 2.0, both because of the color scheme and the reliance on smaller graphics for the “main” article. It’s also easy to see various recent articles without scrolling, and overall, the layout puts more emphasis on the textual content of the page versus some other premium themes. Still, we’re not entirely happy with the color scheme (which we could edit ourselves, naturally), and we still prefer the more grid-like layout the Kineda theme offered. Perhaps if the Live Wire 2.0 theme placed the “main” article in the center of the page, with other articles flanking the sides and bottom, we’re be more inclined to give it a go, but then again, this could easily become distracting as well. The lack of ad-space is also a bit disconcerting, and we’d prefer to see more places one could put smaller ads, without requiring to do so.

Nonetheless, adii’s themes have come a long way, and we can see using them both here at mendax.org, as well as on some other sites we administer. Should we not win adii’s latest contest, we may opt to hold out a bit longer for something closer to what we’d like to see in a theme, though we can easily see using something like Live Wire 2.0 and simply having it altered by a professional web developer.

As an aside, what most premium theme designers ought to do is showcase the configuration options of their themes, such that potential buyers can see what options they have for ad-space, feeds, columns, etc.

Anyone have other suggestions as to a theme we should consider?

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Admittedly, I’m intrigued by the buzzwords used by those describing Chyrp, who claim that it is “lightweight” and “quick” and “uncomplicated”. Chyrp is a cross between a micro-blogging platform and a normal blogging platform, yet the available plugins already offer users a substantial base of features. While Chyrp doesn’t have the large community and extendability that WordPress does, it looks as though it’s off to a good start, and my only reservation on recommending it to someone is the possibility of the author ultimately abandoning it. To curb those thoughts, however, we note that the author has been at the project since 2004, and that the code is open source.

Chyrp is also simpler than WordPress, in that the code behind it appears less complicated, or at least, smaller. Would we ever consider using Chyrp here at mendax.org? The deciding factors would be whether or not available Chyrp plugins can duplicate features we depend on, and whether or not we can find a theme that we’d be willing to go with. As our recent research has been on adapting a magazine-style theme for mendax.org, it’s unlikely that Chyrp would be refined enough before we’re ready to make a decision. Then again, perhaps a talented designer will take a look at Chyrp and decide that it’s something they just must make a refined theme for.

As would-be earlier adopters, we’re also concerned with the fact that Chyrp doesn’t appear to have Feedburner integration possibilities, as the configuration only allows one to point to Chyrp’s own RSS feed. There’s also the fact that Chyrp doesn’t seem to be built to support desktop blogging software because of the way it handles a particular file, but these are all relatively little things that could easily be addressed by Chyrp’s author.

Needless to say, Chyrp looks to have a lot of potential down the road, and we’ll be watching its continued development and community with interest.

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When Asides/Sidenotes stopped working properly at mendax.org a mere two weeks ago, our troubleshooting didn’t turn up any solutions, and we ended up getting diverted and began researching new WordPress themes. Finding such themes has always been an annoyance, firstly because finding a good-looking theme that promotes the atmosphere we want is difficult, and secondly, because finding a theme with the options and support we’d like is doubly difficult.

This latter point bears reflection, because themes can be the scourge of users, and the headache of their respective developers. This is because themes come and go; themes are created, and then abandoned. This is a problem because WordPress is ever-evolving thanks to tremendous work on the part of its developers and users. Unfortunately, this evolution breaks many themes and plugins, and since every WordPress user isn’t a PHP/CSS/HTML master, or simply doesn’t have the time to employ such mastery, we are forced to rely on the developers of the troublesome theme or plugin when problems arise.

So it is that as WordPress users who don’t have the time to develop a unique theme ourselves (which is why we switched to WordPress from our homegrown code in the first place), one of our primary needs as a blogger/administrator is to select software with a future. For the foundation (i.e. WordPress), the future’s pretty clear for some distance, but for individual themes, this isn’t the case. In fact, since moving to WordPress, we’ve slept with at least four themes including the current one, and while each lay has been excellent in its own way, we now feel trapped, and so we keep eying the next pretty girl to cross our sites.

Fortunately, we’ve grown as man-whore, and can say that we’re at least picky about who we get drunk next. Part of us still hopes that Dean Robinson will convince Redoable to, well, do us again, by raising Redoable’s version and and somehow making Asides/Sidenotes work again, since we really started to rely on them for output. Since there’s been little word on this front, however, we’ve begun considering paying for our fun, and adopting a premium theme.

I’ve always been somewhat opposed to the idea of paying for a theme, especially when others can still use it. Of course, less people will use it, and there’s a better guarantee of developer support, but then again, we wonder just how long such support will last in the end.

We began using Redoable just under a year ago, and it’s treated us well for most of that time. A year is about what you’d expect to get out of updates, and it’s a miracle that Robinson intends to do something with the theme down the road, instead of outright abandoning yet. Nonetheless, unless such an update hits soon, and the specific problems we’ve encountered are addressed, then that same year of use marks its the expiration date on our end.

Nonetheless, a year is a long time, and premium theme developers haven’t been too upfront about whether or not their direct support will exist for a theme older than that. In fact, no time frame is ever mentioned as far as I can tell, and though we’re still intrigued about magazine/news-style themes (since it fits the e-zine concept we hoped for back in ’96), adopting this format for a price, when the theme will ultimately be disposed of a year later, leaves us with much trepidation.

Chances are, mendax.org will make its move to a new theme sometime in February. What theme we’ll adopt, however, is still up in the air. We’ve looked into Revolution, Premium News Theme, and News, and are still undecided. This morning, we heard that iThemes went live, releasing the Essence series of premium themes, but these too, are underwhelming. The problem we see is that many of these themes are based on visual eye-candy like pictures and movies, and don’t lend themselves to a more newspaper-style, primarily-text interface. We don’t want mendax.org to become some flashy site filled with large media files, partially because that was never what we intended to become, and partly because we don’t have the time and talent at the moment to generate that kind of content anyway. Then, we’d like a theme with the potential for ad placement, and by potential, we mean preset placement of ads paces, should we decide to use them. The ad subject is tangental at the moment, but on the back of our minds anyway, and so it’s a topic of consideration for our theme selection process.

In any case, should any of you fine readers have a suggestion, be that for a premium theme or not, we’d love to hear it. What’s clean, customizable, fairly unique, and backed by a developer who isn’t going to shed their relationship with the theme anytime soon? Are we hoping too much?

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