My semi-developed Unified Theory of Translational Apps

Idea Lab , , , , ,

Two years ago I tested 350 apps in a single year. Last year I tested 202. I’ve tested iOS apps. I’ve tested Android apps. I’ve attempted to test Windows Phone apps but really haven’t seen any. And here’s what I’ve found: Setting aside apps that are purpose-built for media production, most of the best products I’ve seen for journalists weren’t designed with journalism in mind.

I was at a conference a few weeks ago and ran into ThingLink’s founder. The app puts an interactive layer on top of photos. It has a robust desktop presence and a mobile app. She had no idea so many journalists were using ThingLink, she said. I think a lot of app developers out there would say the same thing.

Since then I’ve been looking at my apps and what makes them good and what makes them bad. Why do I like some apps more than others, other than the obvious reason that some apps are just crashy and stupid? I’ve semi-developed this Unified Theory of Translational Apps:

The apps that I use for journalism either fill a need I have or point out to me a need I didn’t know I had. Most of the apps I use the most are in the second category.

I’d put ThingLink in this category. I had no idea that I’d need to create interactive graphics with embeddable media from the field. And yet it’s one of my most used apps. PicPlayPost is another one. It’s a collage app that allows for video collages. Never thought I’d do video collages. But it’s become one of the most interesting and unique content forms that I do. The people I train love it.  Going through the list of apps I use the most, it’s pretty clear that very few of them were designed for journalism. And yet they’re breaking new ground for journalism (no, this isn’t an app column; you can see my lists here, here and here).

These apps are translational apps – designed for one purpose, able to be used for another. So what makes them like that? I found common attributes:

  1. They all display information that I’m already gathering in a unique way. That is, I don’t have to go out of my way to get info that fits into the app. If I’m doing video interviews, I can use those interviews as embeddable video in ThingLink or for collages in PicPlayPost. If I’m taking photos, I can bring them into TypeA and create extended captions.
  2. They all are three taps or less. There’s very little learning curve in the apps that I’m using. At most, it takes me three taps to generate the most basic level of content. All of my translational apps took me less than 10 minutes to learn the depths of.
  3. They keep the entire creation session within the app. I don’t have to double-tap my home button and go searching for things. They seamlessly import files from the camera roll/Photos/gallery/whatever-we’re-calling-it and let me get on with creating my content.
  4. They work all the time. I have some great apps that crash. A lot. These don’t. They work and they work consistently in the same way. I don’t have blow ups or crashes.
  5. They have stable design. This might a sign of benevolent neglect in some cases, but I don’t have to search for functions. Also, in every case, the design is clean, straightforward and doesn’t hide crucial functions in menu upon me.
  6. Other than ThingLink, Bubbli and Steller, which are hosted on those company’s servers for logistical reasons, the translational apps all save to the the camera roll/Photos/gallery/whatever-we’re-calling-it. It’s the intersectional hub of my phone. I want my stuff there, not solely exportable to social media from a proprietary library.
  7. They all are designed to create products that are consumed socially.

 

This is as far as I’ve gotten. But I’m intrigued with this. Maybe you will be, too? Where are you on this?

 

 

 

What’s the best mojo rig for you?

Tools and Toys , , , , , , , , , ,

“What’s in your mobile kit?” is probably the perpetual question of the day for the mojo crowd. It’s prevalent enough that one of the sponsors of MojoCon, the international mobile journalism conference, is holding a “Show us what’s in your kit” contest. Which is pretty cool. And, if we’re being really honest, speaks to the nerdy nature in-the-weeds mobile journalist.

A question I get from news outlets is “How should we build our kit?” The first answer I usually give is “That depends on what you need it for.” Most of the time I hear “Out on the streets,” “fast,” “breaking news-kind of situations.” I’ve spent the last few months developing variations on those themes using equipment I had on hand. I’ve come up with four for phones plus one for the iPad (interactive photos with links to buy things below; as always, I do not do affiliate sales and see no money out of this).

This was designed for news gathering in dynamic environments where getting news out fast (and generally to social) was the first priority. The anti-requirements (what it wasn’t) was for long documentary or commercial stuff where you have a lot of time to set up.

Here’s the requirements:

— Easy to jump out of a car and use
— Not use a pre-amp (I love the iRig family of devices, but they can get unwieldy)
— Balance between quality and convenience
— Be able to be mounted to a tripod if needed
— Be able to handle multiple phone sizes

I should also point out that there is some mix-and-match here. I’m not terribly dogmatic about which grip I use. It’s entirely situational for me. If you’re making buy decisions based on these, look at this as guidance. And if you, see, for instance, a wireless transmitter slipped into a cold shoe, know that cold shoe can also hold a light or a shotgun mic. At the end of the day, the best kit is the one that works for you most of the time.

 

Kit variation No. 1: The Run n’ Gun No. 1

This variation gets a lot of happy responses when I show it to news outlets. It looks newsy and doesn’t require a lot of special gear purchases to be complete. It’s built on an inexpensive L-bracket with a silicone handhold for better grip. It holds the phone securely in a ShoulderPod S1, which expands to accommodate the phone and then screws down to hold it. It provides two places to mount light and sound equipment on the top of the L-bracket. And the Rode mic provides good enough directional sound you can use it for interviews if you’re close enough to frame the head shot correctly. The downside is that it doesn’t allow inexpensive 37mm lenses to be mounted, so you’d have to go with a case-mounted lens system like an iPro if you wanted to improve the native lens.

Kit variation No. 2: The Run n’ Gun No. 2

This is a similar style and fulfills a similar function — out of the car and into the wild with quick setup. It’s easy to wield and includes a spot for (in this case) a wireless receiver. This variant swaps out the L-bracket for a plastic pistol grip BlackWing HC-2 from FotoSafari. Switching out the L-bracket means losing two shoes, so I put a strobe bracket into the 1/4″-20 hole in the HG-2’s bottom. I like the idea of being able to run wirelessly with this. It means I can use the wireless transmitter for my stick mic if I’m working as a two-person team or I can do a walk-and-talk using the wireless lav (and not worry about it ripping off the lapel if I get too far away). Downside: Using that 1/4″-20 hole at the bottom of the grip means I can’t mount out it easily on a tripod.  Also, I used the snap-on mount that came with the HG-2. It works fine, but since anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I might use the ShoulderPod S1 if I know I was going to be in a crowded place.

 

Kit variation No. 3: Protective with sound and light

This one goes in a little bit different direction. I was looking for a way to protect the iPhone a little bit and be able to use the 37mm lenses I have. I came up with using the BeastGrip Pro to hold the phone and attach the lenses, but then ran into a problem: the BeastGrip is studded with 1/4″-20 holes, but only has one built-in shoe. Attaching something easily requires an extension bracket, in this case a Y-mount (or a triple-shoe bracket, if you prefer). It includes a 30-LED light and a shotgun mic. I think you could use this in a crowd situation, but I think it makes a nice stable shooting platform sitting on a tripod, too. If I were in a large crowd and wanted to use my 2x telephoto, this is the set up I’d use.

 

Kit variation No. 4: The Double-handed shooter with light and sound

This is a unique one. FotoSafari built a very stable double-handled grip by putting a thick piece of metal between two pistol-grip Blackwing HG-2s. It’s a great idea. Two hands means smoother pans and less overall shake in your video.  The phone is held in place by a “chip clip,” that opens wide to fit any phone. It holds the phone securely enough, but I’d still prefer the ShoulderPod S1. The metal has slots in it for screws and other mounts. In this configuration, I have a shotgun mic going forward, but FotoSafari has mounted Zoom recorders there and I’ve also used the mount for a wireless receiver. The downside is that 37mm lenses can’t be used; you’d have to use a case-mounted system. Or, you could mount the BeastGrip Pro on top and have a really stable, really protective piece of gear.

Kit variation No. 5, sort of

But what about if you shoot iPads? I sometimes do. And I like the iOgrapher for it. In fact, for iPads and iPad Minis, iOgrapher is the only piece of gear that I’d recommend (Why don’t I recommend it for phones? It’s not that I don’t, it’s just that I don’t like single-size chassises). It has the 37mm mount for lenses, a 1/4″-20 hole on the bottom to put it on a tripod and three cold shoes that are widely spaced enough that you put a light, a shotgun mic and a wireless receiver on there (if you were using a dual-channel pre-amp).

 


How a story gets found

Story , ,

I teach three classes or four classes a semester and story-finding seems to bedevil my students. I never had a problem finding stories as a reporter. What little natural talent I had was in that area, but I think most of it is just recognizing the elements that make for a successful story, rather than just a topic. I broke down two stories — one I found a few weeks ago but didn’t write because I’m busy and the other one a needle-in-a-hay-stack story I wrote awhile ago. Maybe the process will help someone.

The story I found but didn’t write: Microsoft announces it will stop supporting anything but Windows 10 sooner than planned, throws institutional computer users into a tizzy

How I found it: My neighbor is a support engineer for a computer component manufacturer. I ran into him and he looked glum. I said “What’s wrong?” He said “Microsoft announced yesterday that they’re only going to support Windows 10 after [insert some date next year that I’ve forgotten]. Most of our clients aren’t on Windows 10 and they’re going crazy.”

I asked “Why?”

His response: “Because our clients are all huge — 2,000 to 20,000 workstations. They can’t turn on a dime. They need time to plan, time to budget for the new licenses and time to do all the testing to make sure it works. They don’t have that time.”

And there is the essence of the story: Microsoft made a sudden move that’s going to cause customers pain — and money. This is a story that can be pursued in virtually any place where there’s companies that are going to have to upgrade. It can be sliced and diced in a couple easy different ways: How is the local university with 15,000 computers to support going to handle this/pay for this? How are small- to mid-size businesses going to deal with it?

This has all the elements that we’d look for in a successful story: A large condition we can apply to a relevant population, a cost (financial and otherwise) and clear conflicts (between companies and Microsoft, between institutions and their budgets and their competing needs, etc.). Characters are easy to find since a large group is being affected.

 

The story I ended up writing: Illegal immigrant kids are wildly successful in high school sports but have no path to a better life through scholarships (which you can see here).

It was 2006 and immigration was a big deal. Most of the cities in the American southwest had both pro- and anti-immigration marches. The news was filled with stories. The country’s leaders were trying to figure out what to do about the U.S.-Mexico border and the millions of undocumented immigrants in the country.

An editor I worked with at ESPN:The Magazine and I were talking and he said “You’re down in the center of it. You should figure out someway to connect immigration to sports.” I got to thinking about it. College teams were going to be tough — too much paperwork with documentation has to happen for scholarships and enrollment. And if I found just one person, it wasn’t much of a story. I wanted a number that made for a critical mass. So I shifted my sights to high schools. But how could I find them?

I had done some border reporting before. But I could also look at a map. I had a much better chance of finding a cluster of high-school-sports-playing undocumented immigrants in border states than I did in, say, Ohio. So I called the information offices for high school athletic associations in border states that had historically high immigrant populations: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. I explained what I was looking for.  Texas was no help. California gave me a few leads that petered out. Arizona didn’t have anything. But the information officer in New Mexico said “Actually, last spring we had a soccer team that was full of illegal immigrants play for the state championship against a rich school from Albuquerque.”

That sentence was everything I was looking for: It had all the story elements that I wanted (a critical mass, a team) and the bonus element of a strong social class contrast). I found out the town and called the school superintendent there. He confirmed the story and gave me more details that strengthened the story.

This was an example of taking a large issue and having an idea to scale it down. As a colleague of mine says “We don’t need to eat the whole cow, we just want a steak.” Scaling it down to “immigration in sports” and then further scaling it down to high school sports helped me focus my reporting and find the story that I thought I was looking for.

 

Some tips on the recommendation letter you’re going to ask for

Misc. , , ,

I would say that it’s recommendation letter season, but that seems to be all the time these days. I wrote 21 last semester and have written 18 recommendation letters so far this semester. There are times where recommendation letters feel like sand — they get in every crack of my day and I will spend weeks on end doing nothing but writing them.

The funny is that I enjoy writing most recommendations. It’s a way to help students take a step towards their dreams, which is the business I’m in. But sometimes students look at recommendations as something that they’re entitled to. I’m not a fan of that. So I wrote out some thoughts on what the recommendation letter looks like from my side of the desk.

 

  1. Writing you a recommendation is an investment in time.  You’ve asked me for a recommendation for something. I’m probably happy to do it. Then you ask me again for another recommendation. I’m probably less happy to do it. This is a function of workload. Writing a good recommendation takes me about 30 minutes. If I have five of them to write, that’s 2 1/2 hours out of my week.  I save every recommendation letter I write as both a Word doc and a PDF. So I can sometimes adjust them quickly. But when it has to be very specific to a position, it adds to the work.
  2. I like it when you come and ask me personally. This is personal preference, but I think a face-to-face request is simple good manners. There are times when you can’t do this (like when you’re abroad or you’ve come to my office and I haven’t been in), but I think you should make the effort if it’s not an exceptional circumstance. I don’t want you to genuflect and kiss my ring; I want to see your body language and see if you’re excited about the opportunity. And I want to ask you questions about it. It’s probably a pretty cool opportunity that you’re going for; I’d like to know more about it.
  3. Give me time. The worst thing in the recommendation letter world is being told “I’m really sorry, but the deadline is tomorrow.” Try and give me at least two weeks. I am trying to fit your letter into a schedule. If it’s something that has come up in a hurry, tell me that. If it’s because you totally ate it on the deadline, remember that your emergency is not my emergency.
  4. Your relationship with me is not the same as my relationship with you. If I’m doing my job right, you shouldn’t know if you’re a favorite or an, um, not-favorite.  But understand that I have opinions about you and your work. Which means that I have different levels of recommendations. I call them “A,” “B and “C” level recommendations. They have nothing to do with grades. They’re mostly about your intangibles — teachability, attention to detail, ability to generate ideas, potential, etc. Sometimes it’ll be about your performance in my class — like if you fell asleep in there or if you really struggled but kept after it. That “C” letter looks a lot like “This person was in my class. Enrollment in the class meant they would have worked to achieve skills X, Y and Z.” Any halfway intelligent person who reads it will know that I’m just not that into you. So feel free to ask if I’d give you an “A,” “B” or “C” recommendation.
  5. My reputation is on the line, too. If you apply for an internship and I write you a recommendation letter, I’m endorsing you. There’s ways I can write a letter that will damn you with faint praise (see No. 4 above), but I’d really like to write you a letter that’s going to get you a job. But I won’t if I don’t think you’re able to hack it — or if I think that your performance in a program is going to harm my credibility in getting another student into the program down the road.
  6. The more I know about you — and the more I know you — the better the letter usually is. It’s very hard to write a recommendation for you if you sat in the back of my introductory newswriting class and didn’t talk all semester and never came to see me during office hours. I don’t know what motivates you or what you want to do with your life. I don’t get how this internship is going to fit into your life plan. I’ve created a form that I push everyone who asks me for an internship towards; it collects those details for me. This is especially important if I don’t know you very well.
  7. I really want you to own your issues — and explain them to me. Did you struggle in my class? Tell me why. Are you asking me to write you an appeal to get into a program you don’t have the grades to automatically get into? Tell me why your grades are low.

 

Apps I’m using a lot, February 2016

Idea Lab, Tools and Toys

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. In fact, it was last spring.

The way I’ve used my phone has changed and so have the apps I’m using.  I hadn’t taken a step back and looked at how my apps had changed until this weekend. And what I found was that I’m still using a lot of the same apps — and where I’m not, it’s because something better has come along. There’s very little loyalty in the app market and I think the comparison shows it. Links on the icons will take you to the App Store.

Lots more analysis after the image.  I talk about winners and losers and why some apps have been relegated to the dustbin.

 

 

The Disapppeared

Let’s talk about what survived and what didn’t. Let’s start with what didn’t.

Twisted Wave Editor, a great single-track recording and audio-editing app, got moved off my main screen. Why? Is it because it’s a single-track audio editor? Yes and no. I had it on there for a long time because it was the best recording and editing app out there. But its fatal flaw has always been not having multiple tracks. The app development folks at WoojiJuice worked with a bunch of journalists to create an extended version of their Hokusai multi-track audio product that took all the good things about Hokusai (ease of use, multi-track recording) and did some journalism-specific things to it. The result was Ferrite, which is about as solid and perfect as you could want to do journalism with it. I haven’t touched Twisted Wave since I downloaded Ferrite, and it’s all due to feature set.

Voice Record Pro went into the Mobile Bits folder, too (where I store apps I don’t use but don’t want to delete).  VRP is a great app — free, creates high-quality and easily exportable audio recordings. But it never developed to the point where it could edit and getting it to work with external mics was sometimes tricky.

Diptic and Diptic Video both disappeared from my workflows, replaced by PicPlayPost. Diptic as a collage app that only did photos (though it did allow you to put text over the photos) was too single-use for me. Diptic Video did the same thing as PicPlayPost, just not as well. I was a big fan of the Diptic apps, too, but the combination of feature fragmentation and competition relegated it to the bits bin.

StoryByte is gone, which is a shame because it did traditional slideshows really well. The company went out of business, or at least closed down the app.

360 is now in Mobile Bits because, well, it got old and outmoded. I love it because it’s fast and keeps the processing on your phone. But Bubbli does a better job of the 360-degree thing, provides a more interactive phone experience for the user and creates a sharper image. On the downside, Bubbli’s processing and hosting is on their servers.

Storehouse is gone, too. It didn’t even make Mobile Bits. I deleted it. The company created what was basically a “Snowfall for mobile” tool that combined scrolling text with images. It worked beautifully. Then they went in a different direction and got rid of a lot of the social features that made work easily shareable. It became unuseful (if that’s a word).

And then Meerkat. I’m not even sure what to say here, other than Meerkat got hit by the 1 million-pound gorilla (that would be 71, 429 stones for my audience in the British Isles) that is Periscope. Periscope made it so easy to go directly into the Twitter feed. The downside is that you have to use an accessory service, like Katch to archive those compelling live streams.

Why did apps disappear from my main screen? Mainly it’s since they were surpassed by other apps. It’s a competitive marketplace and if you don’t innovate you die. We can call this the “Voddio problem,” after the first-to-the-market full-featured mobile audio and video gathering/editing app. They stopped improving the app in 2013, just as mobile journalism began to really take off.

The Survivors

If we look at the apps that survived since last spring, they all have improved themselves, with two exceptions.

FiLMic Pro stayed. At one point last year I didn’t think it would. The app’s codebase went to dirt, it was crashy and had problems building media libraries in iOS8 (everyone did, though). But the company kept at it, rewrote the entire app and kept improving it. They fixed a lot of the interface mistakes they made in 2014-2015, made it more reliable and continued to innovate. To be honest, there are at least four other apps out there that have similar or better functionality than FiLMic. But only FiLMic combines all those apps functionalities in one place that works. Also, I’m a big fan of their customer service.

Camera+ stayed. All of the good camera apps took advantage of iOS8’s manual controls features. Camera+ managed to not be crashy when they did this. And they’ve continued to refine their interface and controls to make it easier to shoot with the app. The in-app editing functions continue to develop; it’s not the equivalent of Snapseed, but it probably accomplishes 85 percent of what I need.

Clips made it through, despite no longer being supported by the developer. The last major update before being purchased by Google included being able to copy and split clips, which was incredibly helpful. It’s still there because it’s still a useful app for me — if I need to do light and fast editing, that’s what I usually use. There’s no thinking involved with it. And it’s stable. I do wonder if it makes it another year on my screen.

Video in Video hasn’t been updated since 2013 and is growing long in the tooth. But it works. I can do picture-in-picture in a couple different apps, but it’s so easy in ViV.  Just like Clips, I wonder if it makes it another year.

PicPlayPost manages to wow with sequential video collages. It’s easy to use and the collage templates provide lots of ways to tell a story. It survived the year because I use it a lot — I often find it the easiest way to tell a story. And it’s effortless to teach people to use.

ChartMaker Pro continues to be really useful to make numbers interesting. I’ve not run into an app that’s better than it for doing the seemingly simple task of graphing and then sharing to the camera roll.

Type A remains my favorite app. The ability to write extended captions on photos and bind them to the photo, save them to the camera roll and then share them is unrivaled. No other app does this as well. Not many apps even do this. It hasn’t been updated since 2014, though, so I wonder how long it will live. Not a lot of innovation keeping it alive — but it is useful in a niche where nothing else has surpassed it.

ThingLink is another example of a niche app that’s useful. They’ve done some innovating, but it’s mainly around because there’s nothing better to do interactive images from the field. I would put LapseIt and Hyperlapse, Steller and Periscope into the same category: Niche apps that no one has surpassed. There hasn’t been a great deal of innovation around any of these. But they still beat out anything in the category.

Pinnacle Studio Pro is kind of old, kind of new. It’s built on the Pinnacle Studio chassis, which I think is the best mobile video editing platform out there. But it adds a bunch of features to the old version.

The New Kids

Video Crop is new for this year. The fact that I’m using it makes me angry because SHOOT YOUR GODDAMN VIDEO HORIZONTALLY. But if we’re going to be platform-devout in how we think, we may get a piece of video destined for Snapchat or Instagram (and thus vertical) that we want to repurpose for a more traditional viewing experience. We need to crop that to a 4:3 or 16:9 ratio. This app allows us to do it. Still, every time I use it, a white stone disappears into a black pool in my soul.

Title Master is in there. It’s a production app: It puts words over images. Woo. But it does it well and I find it easier to use than its main competitor, Gravie.

Bubbli‘s a new kid on my screen. Love it. Talked about it up above. Sharp images and a way to replicate the 360 video coming out of the Theta cameras is nice. Wish it didn’t have to be hosted on their servers, though. Maybe they’ll figure out how to shift the processing to the phone…

Luma Clip is a light, fast and free post-production app that allows me to trim and change the speed or direction of clips. It’s part of a host of post-production tools that Luma Touch — the company that makes Pinnacle Studio and Pinnacle Studio Pro — have in development.

 

MobileJudd: The Newsletter

Tools and Toys

So I’m better at scribbling notes than writing long blogs. So I’ve created a newsletter that aggregates a lot of the stuff that I’m reading. It’s not published on any kind of regular schedule and it reflects some of my eccentricities and theories about how we use mobile tools and what those tools are. It will also include at least one pun per newsletter. It’s free. I don’t distribute your emails to anyone.

powered by TinyLetter

 

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