White Elephant: A possession entailing great expense out of proportion to its usefulness or value to the owner. (Random House Dictionary)

Today, AP debuted its AP Stylebook iPhone app.

According to the press release. “AP Stylebook fans have been asking for a mobile application so they can have style guidance wherever they go. Journalists never know when they will need to run out the door to chase a story, so as long as they have an iPhone in their pockets when they go, the Stylebook can go with them.”

…Which indicates the strategy here: The AP Stylebook iphone app is basically an app as e-book. Which almost explains its exhorbitant price: $28.99.

Yep, that’s right: $28.99 for an iPhone app. Seriously.

Beyond displaying the text of the AP Stylebook 2009, this app adds a little extra functionality: “The 2009 AP Stylebook app features searchable listings for the main, sports, business and punctuation sections, along with the ability to add custom entries and personalized notes on AP listings. Stylebook app users are able to mark any entry as a favorite for easy access.”

…In other words, similar with what you could do with this book on a Kindle. Only AP doesn’t offer a Kindle edition of the Stylebook.

AP does offer online Stylebook subscriptions: $25/year for an individual, with cheaper bulk pricing available for organizations. Which means that the iPhone app is more costly than an online subscription. So why wouldn’t iPhone users buy an online subscription instead and access it through the mobile Safari browser?

Here’s another thing baffles me: Why sell an app that’s basically a standalone e-book? Why not offer a free app with some free content/service that also can allow paying subscribers to log in from their phone and have a mobile-optimized experience? It seems to me that AP is reinventing the wheel with this app, missing obvious opportunities to grow its Stylebook market, and positioning this product poorly through ludicrous pricing.

It gets worse… but it could get better too…

USABILITY HURDLES

I own an iPhone, and I use it a lot. Typing and editing on this device is a frustrating chore. Given the difficulties of typing on an iPhone keypad, who would want to do any copyediting on the iPhone? It seems to me that most news professionals would be writing or editing on a computer. They wouldn’t actually write or edit stories on the iphone.

However, some reporters may file brief updates or field reports via iPhone. And they may want these to be stylistically correct — if the updates are being published live, without further editing.

In this case, there’s a usability hurdle: you can’t run two apps at once on an iPhone. So in order to check something in the Stylebook app you’d have to:

1. Save your work
2. Close your writing app
3. Open the Stylebook app
4. Look up the answer to your question
5. Copy the relevant info (or just remember it)
6. Close the Stylebook app
7. Reopen your writing/editing app
8. Put the AP info to use.

That process is so clunky as to be deeply impractical. Especially if you’re covering fast-breaking news in the field.

HOW AP COULD DO BETTER

I’m not trashing the mobile app-as-ebook concept. It can be useful, especially for reference material. And it makes sense for how-to content that is periodically updated.

But in order to justify a price that drastically exceeds the print edition ($18.95 for journos, cheaper for member papers and college bookstores, even cheaper to buy it used online), a mobile app must offer more functionality than just taking notes, bookmarking items, and making custom entries.

AP completely missed the mark on this one. It’s yet another example of how badly this news behemoth really just doesn’t get online or mobile media. It’s like they’re not even trying. I’d be surprised if more than a handful of mainstream journos who just got their first iPhone and think this sounds like an appropriate professional tool would  buy this. And I suspect those that do will quickly regret it.

Fortunately, AP has room to redeem itself on this. It could:

1. Rework the app to make it an access tool for paying online subscribers.
2. Re-release it as a free app. (Maybe give a year’s subscription to the suckers who bought the pricey app.)
3. Offer a “try before you buy” demo — maybe five free searches, so people can get a feel for the user experience.
4. Include a “subscribe to Stylebook” option prominently in the free app. to make it easy for people to buy after they try.
5. Offer some free content with the free app. (500 most common stylebook queries, etc.), as well as a daily tip or other fresh content. In other words, PROVE that the Stylebook is, in fact, relevant and useful.
6. Make sure the free app works with bulk (corporate) accounts, not just individual subscriptions.
7. Gather data from the free searches about what kinds of terms they might want to include in future Stylebook editions.

contacts weirdness

One of the strange new entries polluting my address book. Click image for full-size version.

Something weird is happening with my contacts list on my mac laptop and iPhone.

Background: Last week, my Macbook Pro’s hard drive crashed during a Snow Leopard install. The Apple Store replaced my drive, installed Snow Leopard, and told me to restore my data from my Time Machine backup. But Snow Leopard wouldn’t let me specify the correct Time Machine backup to restore from, so I had to bring it back to the Apple Store a total of three times (including my staying in the store for over seven hours to make sure my repair was handled correctly) to get them to restore my data. Yeah, the ordeal sucked, and deeply shook my confidence in Apple technology. Here are my tips to avoid a similar crisis.

What’s weird now: After this, my mac’s address book (“contacts” app on the iPhone) contained dozens of duplicate entries. I was able to merge these via the Card –> Look for Duplicates command on my laptop’s address book.

BUT…  I’ve discovered that dozens of new entries (maybe more than 100) have been mysteriously and inexplicably added to my database! Each of these are random collections of 10 or so e-mail addresses. (See picture) As far as I can tell, I have to delete these manually.

WTF? Has anyone else seen this happen? I’m hoping this is just some weird artifact from the grueling restore process, and that after I clean up the random e-mail entries the problem will go away. But it’s just weird…

I’ve made a discovery about Amazon’s Kindle e-reader: It’s a pretty good “news radio.” That is, its text-to-speech function does a surprisingly decent job of reading news content aloud.

I currently subscribe to the Wall St. Journal on my Kindle, and I’ve gotten in the habit of letting it read me some interesting articles as I go through my morning routine. I like it. The automated text-to-speech reader is a bit flat for fiction, narrative, and essays that require significant emotional or rhetorical inflection — but it’s great for news. I’ve starting considering it my “robotic NPR.”

(Ducking the reflexive outcry from all my friends at NPR…)

Of course, my point isn’t only about the Kindle. It’s about how any text-to-speech service or tool can interact with text-based news and information content — and why creators of text-based news content should start to take that into consideration. Because you never know exactly how people will experience your content…

Like e-reader display technology, text-to-speech technology has improved significantly in the last few years. It’s still far from perfect, but of all the versions I’ve heard the Kindle’s is one of the clearest, and others are catching up. This is good for people who have a preference for audio news, because now we can experience news produced for text in a format that works with our preferences.

Don’t get me wrong — I love news specifically produced for audio (either radio broadcast or audio/video news podcast). I listen to a lot of it. (Oh, if you haven’t tried the Public Radio Tuner iPhone application, get it, it’s killer.)

Still… It’s pretty cool to be able to have stories from WSJ.com read aloud to me while I cook my veggie pesto omelet. Or articles from the newly online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which I can quickly “Kindlfy” via the free Instapaper service, which I wrote about earlier.

As text-to-speech technology continues to improve and proliferate, I’d suggest that text news publishers consider how well their online and Kindle content “reads,” in the audible sense. One thing I don’t like about listening to WSJ stories via Kindle is that it reads aloud all the navigational context at the top of the story: word count, etc. This is just a minor and fast irritation, but it bugs me. There’s got to be a way to get around that.

So, as I recommended when I first wrote about the Kindle 2, when your newsroom gets its Kindle (or when you get to fondle someone else’s for a bit), try listening to some news stories (preferably your own, but anyone’s news is a good start). You can subscribe to many newspapers and magazines via the Kindle store for a free two-week trial, or buy an individual article or two. Play with the settings for speed, gender of voice, etc. Realize that you’re listening to a stepping stone technology that presages a potentially important channel for your news in the future. And just keep it in mind.

(Note: This is a slightly re-edited version of an article I originally published in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

Now that I own (and use daily) a laptop, iPhone, and Kindle, I’m developing a new relationship to text content. I realize that I shouldn’t have to care about the device. The news and other content I choose to read should just be there — available on whichever of my devices I prefer at the moment, in a format friendly to that device.

This is especially true for anything longer than about 750 words. I’ve found that’s my personal limit for reading through a Web browser, either on my laptop or iPhone. Yes, I can and do occasionally slog through longer Web-based content on those devices. But honestly, after about 750 words I tend to stop truly reading and instead scan quickly through the rest to gauge whether it’s worth further reading.

So I was pleased to recently discover an online service called Instapaper, which makes it easier to read electronic long-format content and to share that content across multiple devices.

Here’s how it works…

How Instapaper works: After you set up a free account, install Instapaper’s “read later” bookmarklet in the Web browser toolbar on your computer.

Next, install the free Instapaper iPhone application on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Launch it and enter your account information. Then click “settings” and click the “install ‘read later’ in Safari” button there. Follow the instructions for installing that bookmarklet in mobile Safari.

Finally, connect your Instapaper account to your Kindle — which you can do under “account” when you’re logged in on the Instapaper site. Then, when you save items with Instapaper, the service will route them to Amazon for Kindle reformatting and wireless download to your Kindle.

…I know, it sounds like a lot of steps. Personally, I’d prefer it if this integration process was more streamlined. I suspect that, as mobile technology matures and devices become easier to integrate, this will happen. Still, you don’t have to be a tech wiz to get Instapaper to talk to all your devices. Integration setup is a little tedious, but not hard.

Once it’s all set up, here’s the result: When you find text content that is longer than you’d comfortably read through the Web browser on your computer or mobile phone, you can save it in a central online location that automatically distributes it to your other devices which offer more comfortable reading. So anytime, anywhere, you can have a comfortable reading experience of the content you choose with whatever device you have handy. You don’t need to remember to print anything, or to copy a file somewhere — it’s just there for you.

While the Kindle probably offers the most comfortable reading experience of all my devices, I especially notice the benefits of Instapaper on my iPhone. Mobile Safari is a pretty good mobile browser, but it’s a hassle for reading long text documents. Quite often I’ll follow a link on my phone to something I want to read. Once I realize that I want to read it — and that it’s more than about 750 words long — I immediately save it to Instapaper. Then I switch to the Instapaper iPhone app for a more comfortable, user-friendly mobile reading experience.

True, Instapaper works well with a combination of devices that I happen to own. But it’s an example of a general strategy I suspect will become increasingly popular — especially if e-readers like the Kindle drop in price. Content shouldn’t be pigeonholed by device.

This is a crucial step beyond offering printer- or mobile-friendly versions of your content — it gives users more control over how they experience your content. And as the rapid growth of online and mobile media shows, people like to be in control of their own media experience.

…If you’re skeptical whether more advanced mobile devices will catch on beyond the techno-elite, bear this in mind: Last week I was on a bus in Oakland, Calif. I overheard a guy sitting behind me, talking on a simple cell phone which would have seemed luxurious a decade earlier. He was saying, “OK, well I confirmed my appointment at the Social Security agency. I’m serious about getting off the streets…”

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

As an avid iPhone user, I love my apps! I use several of them daily, including Omnifocus, GroceryZen, Twittelator Pro, Google Mobile, iBART, and Google Maps.

Apps are not enough, however. First of all, some online services I use (like Gruvr or My511, nudge nudge) don’t yet offer iPhone apps. (This is especially annoying if they also don’t default to mobile-friendly site layout upon mobile access, grumble…)

But also, several very cool and useful online services are meant to play nice with the rest of the web.

For instance, I get value from my preferred social bookmarking service Delicious because I can use it to bookmark, tag, and comment on any page I happen to be browsing. And on Twitter I often tweet links to pages I find online. For these services, I want their functionality integrated with my iPhone’s Safari browser (since you can’t run two apps at once on the iPhone, and since the iPhone also doesn’t yet allow cut and past, grumble…)

That’s when Javascript-based iPhone Safari bookmarklets can come in handy…

Lifeclever explains in 17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone that: “Bookmarklets are little pieces of Javascript code that can be saved as ordinary bookmarks in your web browser. They enhance your browsing experience by giving you super-instant access to useful tools and special functionality.”

Since I’m an utterly compulsive user of Twitter and Delicious, I’ve installed a couple of bookmarklets in my iPhone’s browser to allow me to integrate my mobile web surfing with those services pretty easily.

My preferred Twitter iPhone app is Twittelator Pro (which costs $4.99 and just this week debuted a very, very slick and handy 2.0 update). It used to frustrate me that if I found a cool page in my iPhone browser, I couldn’t easily tweet it because of the lack of iPhone cut-and-paste. But recently I installed the Twittelator iPhone bookmarklet in mobile Safari.

This bookmarklet solves that problem perfectly for me. Here’s an example of how I used this bookmarklet on my iPhone to create this link tweet.

link-tweet

I posted this link tweet today from my iPhone. This didn't used to be easy

Here’s how I made it happen:

1. I opened the article page in mobile Safari. Then I clicked the bookmarks icon.

mobile-safari

2. I selected the Post with Twittelator bookmark, which I’ve saved in Safari on my iPhone:

3. Twittelator then launches and puts the full URL into a new tweet.

create-tweet

4. I add some explanatory text for that link. But when I do that, I end up with a tweet that’s 30 characters too long. No worries. I hit “send,” and…

add-text1

5. Twittelator allows me to shorten the link. When I do that…

shorten-link

6. My tweet now has 39 characters to spare. Perfect for posting! I click “send” again, and it posts to Twitter.

ok-to-go

THE BAD NEWS IS…

The process of saving a working Javascript bookmarklet into mobile Safari on the iPhone is a bit clunky. In this case, I first had to navigate in mobile Safari to the Twittelator iPhone bookmarklet page and follow the lengthy instructions there. Basically you have to save that page as a bookmark, and then go back and edit that bookmark to delete everything before the javascript:window.location=%27twit://%27+window.location part of the URL. Once you do that, the bookmarklet executes the steps to post to Twitter (rather than just bring up the explanatory page about the bookmarklet).

This gymnastic routine currently is the norm for implementing a useful bookmarklet into mobile Safari. Yes, it’s clunky. But it only has to be done once per bookmarklet, and then you have the functionality. I think that, for now, that’s an acceptable tradeoff.

I hope that in the future that Apple will make this process less cumbersome — or even better, start allowing cut and past in the iPhone OS so I don’t even need the bookmarklet to make the two apps work together.

But for now, this is a big help.

Oh, and: Here’s the post to Delicious iphone bookmarklet. Just install and edit it the same way. The drawback is that the form for entering information about your bookmark is not mobile-optimized — but if you flip your iPhone sideways for a horizontal display, it’s easier to use.