The contenders.

Welcome, welcome.  Read, enjoy, and please leave comments.  Everybody has comments.  Comments are like…well, I won’t follow-through with that joke, but I will say everybody has one.

Ok, so a week or two ago, a friend sent out a tweet that said “there’s an XKCD iPhone app!!”  I decided this was a must-have-app.  I needed to add this app to my collection of almost 140 apps.  (Yes, I have a problem.  I know this and I’m currently avoiding therapy for it, thank you.)

So, off to the App Store I went and what did I find out?  I found out that there are a total of seven, yes SEVEN, XKCD iPhone apps available, and each of them are free.  Well, with that many free apps all created for the same purpose, I figured somebody on the interwebz had the geeky forethought put together a big ol’ app shootout to find out which was the best one.  I was wrong.

For once, somebody else hadn’t already thought to do this.  “Serisouly?” I thought, “nobody has done this yet?  For XKCD of all things!??!”  I couldn’t believe it.  So, I decided to do my own shootout review.  It’s my first review, so please be gentle if things aren’t as finely-polished as they could/should be.

In all truthfulness, you would not believe the PITA that this turned out to be.  Once I downloaded all the apps, many of them had different app icons and/or names than they showed in the App Store.  And since Apple was nice enough to let a few of them be named the same exact damn thing it was a bit tough sorting it all out.  And I couldn’t just go into the About page in some of the apps to sleuthly figure out which one was which, because some of them didn’t even bother with such time-wasting flimflam as info about the app.  It seems they let just anybody develop for the iPhone….although I basically already knew that.    (a short tip for anybody who might take on such a task in the future: leave your iPhone plugged into your computer while reviewing, and just check/uncheck apps as you’re reviewing them in iTunes. especially when many of the apps are named the same, etc. word.)

Ok, enough back-story.  In case I don’t mention it in each review, most of these apps allow you to view comics in portrait mode AND in landscape mode, unless otherwise noted.  Enjoy, and I hope this giant shootout review helps you decide which XKCD iPhone app you like best.  If not, then I’m a horrible failure….

xkcd by Josh Snyder

This is probably my favorite XKCD webcomic reader app.  It’s well done and easy to use.  You can search just as if you were in the iPhone’s native Mail app: Just scroll down past what is shown to you in the app’s home screen and you are greeted with a search bar.   Nice.

Search the way it shold be done.

Also, if you tap the button at the top left on the list of comics, you can “check for new comics,” “email the developer,” and “write App Store review.”  If you chose to send an email to the developer, it stays in-app, meaning it doesn’t kick you out to the Mail app.  When you send the email, you are brought back to the comic viewing app.  It’s the small things that make a difference.  Choosing the “write App Store review” option takes you to the app’s page in the App Store.

Extra options.

While you’re viewing a comic, you can tap on the button on the top right and you’ll get the following options: “view on xkcd.com,” “email link to this comic,” “tweet link to this comic,” and “delete image.”  I’m not quite sure what “delete image” will do, as I didn’t care to choose it.  You wanna risk losing one of the golden XKCD comics for ever and ever and ever?? …then you test it and let me know what it does.  Fine?  Great.  Let’s move on, shall we?  Choosing to view the comic at the XKCD.com website kicks you out of the app and into Safari, and emailing a link is in-app.  And, even though tweeting a link kicks you out of the app and into a Twitter app (if you have one on your phone, which you probably do), you have options in the iPhone’s Settings menu.

Ahhhhh, the land of options and opportunity...

In the iPhone’s Settings meun for this app, you can turn Rotation on and off, control zooming, and have a say as to when new images are downloaded.  Now back to the Twitter options:

Tweet, tweet.

Go to the Twitter client settings and you can let the webcomic viewer app decide, automagically no less, which Twitter app you want to use…or you can just get used to tweeting from one of the apps listed here and then select it from the menu.  Either way, it’s cool that you can “tweet a link” from this app.  These folks are aware of social media and how people are using it.  Good for them.

View on XKCD.com, email link, tweet link, or delete image.

For some reason, when you’re viewing comics in landscape mode, the “view, email, tweet” popup looks different.  Couldn’t tell you why.  Does it bother my inner perfectionist?  Hell yes, it does!  But alas, I’m trying to not let such petty things bother me nowdays….

The view, email, tweet, delete popup menu looks different in landscape.

And, as any good XKCD reader knows, there’s always more fun and humor hidden in the mouseover text.  If you want to access the mouseover text, just tap-and-hold on the comic you’re viewing.

Tap-and-hold to get to the mouseover text while reading a comic.

Another nice thing about this webcomic viewer is that it shows you which comics you’ve read and which you haven’t yet.  The “>” symbol means you’ve read that comic already, while the arrow that points downwards lets you know that particular comic has not been read yet.  Very handy indeed.

Arrows pointing down mean you haven't read that particular comic yet.

I really like this XKCD viewer, but the only thing it is missing is the ability to mark certain comics as favorites.  But, I suppose you can always email it to yourself.  In some of these apps, you might be able to tap-and-hold to save the comic to your Photo Library, but I don’t believe that is possible here, since the tap-and-hold action is used for displaying the almighty mouseover text.

xkcd by Saran Tunyasuvunakool

I also like this viewer, but there are some things about it that will keep me from using it on a regular basis.  My main gripe: the mouseover text displays at bottom of screen only after hitting the “<alt>” button on the bottom left, then you must scroll through to see the complete mosueover text.  Not user-friendly at all in my opinion.  I know, I know, it’s supposed to be a big funny to all the geeks out there.  I get it.  It’s funny.  It makes me feel like I’m part of a big nerd-love-in.  But, when it comes to user interface happiness: It’s still a big downfall.

For the mouseover text, you have to tap a button, then scroll to see the complete text. Not cool.

If you’re a stickler for controlling how many comics are downloaded at once (which really is not a problem, this is not a processor-intensive comic we’re talking about here), you can dig into the settings menu.  You can mark all comics as Read or Unread, turn auto-download for new comics on and off, set a maximum number of comics to auto-download, reset network usage (this would be nice if we weren’t all forced to have unlimited data plans), delete all locally stored comics, and even batch download all of the XKCD comics.  Not a bad feature set.  It’s an ugly menu, but hey, it’s more options than most of the other competition provides.

The settings menu.

You can also search for comics by title or by their numeric ID.  Getting to the search function is not as snazzy as it is in the previous app, but it’s only a tap away.  No complaints.

The search screen. No explanation needed.

So, this isn’t a bad webcomic viewer either, except that you have to jump through a hoop or two to get to the mouseover text.  Not a good implementation in my opinion, as the mouseover text is often an integral part of each comic.  What’s that I hear?  You say I’m being picky?  Possibly so.  But that’s part of doing app reviews, so I have my picky-meter turned up to 11. 

XKCD Viewer by Stefan Huber

And this brings us to our next XKCD webcomic viewer.  For the most part, the two previous apps will do just fine.  They are my preferred apps.  Now we’re getting into some real annoyances with the following apps.  First of all, this particular app has a loading screen at startup.  I don’t necessarily mind loading screens, but when other apps do the job quicker, and without a need for a loading screen, I find it annoying.

A loading screen?!?! Really??

And, I have a feeling that the “loading” that is going on has nothing to do with the actual comics, as you’ll see in the next screenshot.

Oh, how I *hate* ads in iPhone apps.

Yup, that’s right.  Advertisements in an XKCD app.  It just seems wrong.  And look, I know people have to make money.  In other apps, for instance when there is a free version of a paid app that is ad-supported since it’s free, that’s fine by me.  I can handle that.  But, this just seems like somebody is trying a little too hard to make a grab for the giant bag of cash at the end of the App Store rainbow.  Ya dig?  Oh yeah, and the best thing about the ads??  They often block parts of the comic, and you are unable to scroll around or zoom or anything to see the part that is hidden.  They aren’t on-screen at all times, but about 50% of the time, they’re all up in your face.  Very annoying.  FAIL.

“So, how about the mouseovers?” you ask.  A single tap on the comic you’re viewing will get you mouseover text love, but I often had to tap at top of screen the first time to get it to work, then a tap anywhere on the screen would work.  Once again…FAIL.

Once you get the sinlge-tap action to respond, you get delicious mouseoverness.

The mouseover display isn’t bad at all, I actually like it, although the transparent-ish backdrop could be darker.  It’s quite hard to read when most of the comic is white space.  Plus, although I have no screenshot of the popup menu, after you tap to get mouseover text, you can tap the button in the top right of the mouseover text screen to get “add to favorites,” “save to photo album,” and “email photo.”  Can you dig it?  I knew you could.

One of the saving graces of this webcomic reader is the fact that you can mark certain comics as a Favorite.  Nice.  I really wish the first app I reviewed had this, as it is my favorite so far.

A Favorites list. All of these apps should have this!

So, in closing for this particular app: It’s ok.  I mean, it could be better.  Actually, if they were to do away with the annoying damn ads, I would be able to forgive it for it’s other failures.  A quickly made application with some advertisements thrown in scream, “I don’t care, I just wanna get paaaaaaiiiiiiid!!!”  You are the most annoying link…goodbye.

iXKCD by Xuwen Cao

Well now, what do we have here?  An app with a little bit of creativity in it’s name…iXKCD.  Well ok, not that much creativity but it’s still better than plain-Jane “XKCD” or “XKCD Reader,” especially when there are also 2 or 3 other apps that go by the same exact name–oh nevermind, I’ve gone through that already.  So, it has a name that sort of sticks out, that’s good.  What else does it have?

Nothing.  You get no say as to which comic you’re viewing.  It’s all left up to the randomness which can be life.  If you like rocking an iPod Shuffle, then this may be an app you can enjoy.  Myself: No.  I want control.  It’s my device, and I want to tell it what to do.  I didn’t lay down all those hard-earned greenbacks just so I could be given whatever slop some stinky lucnhlady slaps onto my plate.  I want choice.

Is it a coincidence that I chose this particular comic? I think not.

So you might be thinking, “ok, dude, calm down.  How does it work?”  Well, in order to get a new comic, you must shake the phone, it makes an annoying clicky-type of sound, then you get a hot steaming order of haphazard nerd-comic goodness.  “Ok then, does it really do nothing else?”  Well, you can rotate and zoom the comics to your heart’s content.  And when I say that, I mean it.  You can zoom a lot and you can rotate a lot.

Zooma-zoom-zoom.

Zoomoutta-zoomout-zoomout.

Here’s another thing I haven’t mentioned yet: You can click on that nifty “i” in the blue circle Of Awesomeness & Answers and it’ll tell you your fortune.  Wait.  No.  Actually, it shows you the mouseover text.  And it’s also out of view a lot of times, since you have so much freedom to zoom around the comic, yet the Info Button is always stuck on the corner of comic itself.

Mouseover text. From back when it looked happy.

11 xkcd Reader by Trevor Mullins

Ok, here’s a quicky.

Oh goodie!! Another loading screen! SWEEEEET!

What you see is what you get. Wow, four comics? Jeez, I just don't know if I can handle such a giant amount of awesomess...

Landscape only. The edges kinda almost get cut off sometimes, too. It makes me sad.

What? I used this screenshot already? That's how boring this app is. Great extras: No search. And other crapiness I don't even feel like getting into.

XKCD Comic Reader by Craig Belpedio

Annnnnnnnnnnnd another quicky.

More loading screen Hell. But, I can see this app possibly adds a boxed-and-cropped-for-no-damn-good-reason function...

Yeah, this rocks. I can't zoom, but I can scroll around the image in an unnecessary box. Fantiastic. How do they comes up with this amazing stuff. (I wish I had a sarcastic font right now.)

The sad boy stares down at the hidng-in-plain-sight mouseover text ..... and the text sits there, feeling alone ... and feeling even more sad than the boy does ...

You can search. Here. In this beautifully designed search area. By the way, all this terribleness is brought to you in a portrait-only form factor.

XKCD Webcomic by Conquer The Day

And, the last but not least –  well, it’s the last one.

Has ads. That sucks. No search. No Favorites. No tweeting, no emailing. No sharing. --SLAP!!!-- Get yo' hands off that!!

At least this one has mouseovers. More that it doesn't have: Landscape mode.

So, in conclusion, I think there are only 2 XKCD webcomic reader apps you should really consider.  That is, if you’re interested in user-friendly design, a truly thought-out app, options to share by way of email and Twitter, the ability to mark your favorite comics, and generally, an app that doesn’t get in your way when you wanna laugh your ass off.  Some of the other apps are nice.  Others are not.  I hope I saved you some trouble.  You can send me money now.  Thank you. 

I'm starting to fee like this guy

I’ve become quite the jack-of-all-trades type of individual as of late.  I keep thinking of the Odd Job guy from the 007 movies, yet I don’t have the awesome bowling hat that can kill people.  If only I did, right??  Anyway, this the The Story Of Birmingham…

So, I get a call from a buddy, let’s call him Joseph, relatively late in the evening on Monday night.  Joseph says he needs somebody to go to Birmingham, Alabama with him to pickup a truck and drive it back to Little Rock.  Actually, there’s three trucks that need to be driven back.  He has no details, but says I’ll be getting paid to do this favor.  He’s a good guy, and I’m flat broke, so I begin to seriously consider his offer.  (quick background info: Joseph is a Meat Man.  He’s one of those guys that drives around in a truck with a freezer in the back who tries to sell you meat.)  Joseph gets back with me even later in the evening and says he’ll have to call me back in the morning concerning payment and any other pertinent details.  Ok, I can deal with that…

I wake up early Tuesday morning and get ready to hit the road before I even hear anything from Joseph, assuming that the gig is still gonna happen.  Sure enough, he calls and says we’ll be leaving around noon.  Our job:  To drive to Birmingham, pick up some meat trucks, and then turn right around and drive them back to Little Rock.  Ok.  The payment for each of the drivers is supposed to be there when we get there, along with gas money to get back, and we also have to drive a U-Haul truck back full of office equipment.  It’s all ready to go, it just needs to be driven.  Once again, ok, I can deal with that.  No big deal, right?

We hit the highway around 12:30pm in a Toyota Camry with 5 people in it.  Joseph had previously mentioned getting a van, but the company instead decided to employ one of their drivers and his wife, to drive three full-grown men in the back seat…all the way to Alabama.  Did I mention it was a CAMRY???  Yeah, it was a tad uncomfortable.  It ended up being a 7.5 hour drive.  Cramped, smelly to a certain extent, but still no big deal.  I’m getting paid to drive, and I like to drive, so this should be a sweet deal…

As we get closer to Birmingham, we’re looking at maps and I’m using my handy iPhone GPS apps to find where we’re supposed to go exactly.  We’ve been told Birmingham, AL, on a street called Moody Parkway.  No exact address.  Ok…but none of my GPS apps know anything about Moody Parkway in Birmingham.  I figure it’s a mapping glitch and go to the old standby…Google Maps…it always saves the day…yet it did not in this instance.  Paper maps don’t show anything either.  And we can’t get anybody on the phone with whom we’re supposed to be meeting.  7.5 hours and now we can’t find the fuckers we’re supposed to meet.  We all laugh, get out and stretch, and think it’s no big deal.

Finally, Joseph gets somebody on the phone.  The U-Haul full of office equipment?  Non-existent.  We’ll have to wait until tomorrow.  Remember, we planned and a turn-and-burn, we did not plan on staying in beautiful (HA!) Moody, Alabama.  It was supposed to be Birmingham, right?  Well, it wasn’t.  Hence the confusion.

"Moody Drugs" in AL. Quite appropriate, as we were all getting a bit moody.

So now we need a place to stay, but noooooo, they don’t have any of that set up already.  So Joseph has to get on the phone over the course of the next few hours, with numerous less-than-helpful individuals, and eventually scores us some rooms at a Motel 6.  We drink a few beers and decompress a bit.  We also find out that we’ve walked into more than we were previously aware of.  We actually have to go repossess the trucks before we can bring them back.  We also have to go find our own U-Haul truck and then hunt down the office equipment and load it up ourselves.  Quite a grand predicament, eh?

This picture doesn't show it, but my truck started to overheat as soon as I got they keys. Oh goodie!

After repossessing the vehicles, I get into my truck and found the above…..an overheating truck.  This just gets better and better.

Anyway, let’s get to shortening up this story.  I’ve let it sit too long in my Drafts folder and I want to share it with others…

Ok, after rounding up a box-truck and filling it with broken-down office equipment, we hit the road.  The only problem?  Our payment that we were promised upon arrival, along with gas money to drive these trucks back to Little Rock, was unavailable.  Joseph had fought long and hard for us up until this point, but he gave up.  So, we stopped every so often at gas stations along the interstate and sold meat from the trucks to get money for gas.  What a bunch of crap…  Anyway, here’s some pics of our ghetto-ass trucks we drove back:

My driver's inside door handle. Or where it USED to be. Had to open my door at highway speeds to close it completely once. That was fun.

Passenger side of my windshield. Crackheads done cracked it!

My broken passenger mirror. What more can I say?!?

My passenger door handle. More like the LACK of a door handle. Although, there was a cable you could reach in & pull on to open the door. Are door handles worth money to crackheads?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Yup. That's Bondo on my left taillight. Which, after dark we found out, was not in working order. Or course!

My right taillight. Been busted at some point, and the freakshow who fixed it decided that Bondo would do the job.

My AC controls had no knobs. I had to adjust them with my multi-tool. Thank the tool gods for multi-tools!

The view I had for 10 hours.

Got a dent? No problem! Just Bondo it! You say it needs to be sanded down? Nah! No need for that! Now where is my black spray paint??

This is Joseph's truck's right taillight. Nice job with the packing tape, eh?

Hope you enjoyed those pictures as much as I did not enjoy driving the truck I was stuck with.    I finally got paid 4 days later, after dealing with more idiocy and excuses as to why I couldn’t be paid just yet.  Was forced to be aggressive, which I am not normally good at, and payment finally arrived in my hand.  75 hard-earned bucks.  In the long run, quite a gip.  Oh well.  Lesson learned.

My next adventure??  Working on a production crew for TruTV.  Stay tuned for the story…

Under Construction----NOT ANYMORE!!!

Ok folks, after staying up all night (and I do mean all night), I’ve got a beauteeeeful new theme ready to go for my site!  Gone are all the flashy colors of the past theme and now I have something that is a bit more in line with my personality and with my content (which, I swear, is on it’s way).

The cool thing about this theme, Imagination by CSSJockey, is that it’s got 9 themes all built into one.  That way, if the mood hits, and we all know that happens, I can change it with the flick of a switch!  Plus, it’s fully customizable, so I can do whatever I want with it.  I really liked my last theme when I first got my site setup, but I think me and Imagination are gonna be together for quite a long time to come.

Now, seriously, I have to go get some sleep…or maybe I’ll just load up on coffee and crank out some content. 

Click below for more info…

The Little Rock Twestival 2009 is an event benefiting Read Out and Read Arkansas.  Here’s some more info about RORA:

RORA is an amazing organization that partners with pediatricians and clinics statewide to raise awareness about early childhood literacy and provide resources to families to encourage reading in the home. This cause is crucial to the well being of Arkansas’ children and the need is immense – just take a look:

• The Arkansas Department of Education estimates that 50% of our children are not prepared with the skills they need to succeed in kindergarten.
• It is estimated that 56% of all adults read at only a fourth-grade level or below. In some Arkansas communities, that figure reaches as high as 78%!
• Recent national studies have shown that 60% of families in poverty have no books in the home, and children in poverty are read to for an average of only 25 hours from birth to age 5.

Reach Out and Read Arkansas currently has 4 clinics that have applied for acceptance into the program, but RORA is unable to provide the resources to start distributing books in these clinics. We plan to change that, and we need your help!
LRTweetup will be hosting a fundraiser at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 10 to raise money and collect books for Reach Out and Read Arkansas (RORA). The cost is $10 and at least 1 book that is appropriate for children under age 5. We call it “10 Bucks and a Book!” You can purchase your tickets online. 100% of the proceeds will be donated to Reach Out and Read Arkansas, so please buy your tickets today and help us spread the word!

If you’d like to watch the announcement from my Qik livestream at last night’s LRtweetup, you’re in luck.  Look what I’ve hooked you up with below!!

On a tad more of a serious note, I’d like to thank Paul Strack from Custom Printing for the great promotional giveaway of his nifty new Mini Profile Cards and the fun and futuristic QR Code nametags he provided.

Now I’m off to post the video of the Twestival announcement that I livestreamed.  Have a great weekend everybody!

(livestream has been removed, since the event has long been over and all.)

Barolo di Argenta from Adam Berhiet on Vimeo.

28 different teams…19 awards in total…TeamArgenta and our creation, Barolo di Argenta, had 5 nominations…

I’ve never been so nervous sitting in a movie theater (besides on a first-date night, but I digress).  I could’ve powered a small town with all the energy I had inside (most of which was extremely nervous energy).  So…what would be the end result of all of our hard work?

WE GOT 2 AWARDS!!  Pretty awesome for our first year in the 48-Hour Film Project, if I do say so myself!  (please excuse all the exclamation points, but as you might imagine, I’m quite excited about all of this.)  Here’s a breakdown of the awards that TeamArgenta received tonight:

Award for Best Musical Score  (many, many thanks go out to Jason Burnett & the guys at Infrared Studios)
Award for Best Actress  (Jenifer Hamel, playing the character Victoria Shae)

In the interest of fairness and truthiness (thank you so much for that word Stephen Colbert), there was actually a 2-way tie for Best Actress.  The other actress who shared the award with our much-loved Jenifer Hamel was Paige Reynolds, from the film Fortunate, by Team Arkansas Times.

It was a fantastic night, I reconnected with lots of folks I haven’t seen in a while, I got to share the joy of winning two awards with many of my team members…it’s really just unexplainable how I feel right now.

In the next few days/weeks, I’ll be putting our film up on the intertubz for all to enjoy.  I will have it posted directly on this blog, so keep checking in to see if it’s up yet.  If it’s not, look around my site (I know, not much to look at yet) and please feel free to leave comments about how the site is coming so far and make suggestions for things you’d like to see here in the future.  I’ve got really high hopes for this site, but I’m not going to be able to make it happen without a community who shares their thoughts with me.  <<Ok, enough shilling for my website >>

So, in wrapping this up….CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYBODY WHO WAS A PART OF TeamArgenta!!!

If you’re interested in seeing the complete rundown of all the awards given out that night, check out www.48hourfilm.com/littlerock/.