Hung Truong: The Blog!

Letterpress Coasters – Giraffe!

I finally got the rollers for my letterpress machine yesterday, so I tried printing something.

I had ordered all the other supplies I needed, including:

• A crapload of blank coasters (1000)
• A giraffe printer’s block

I already had the ink from my purchase of the machine. The machine itself is from 1941, and the ink was from the same company, in a tube. I’m not sure the ink is from 1941, but if it is, it’s held up really well!

I also bought a bunch of other stuff that ended up helping me a lot when troubleshooting. Luckily, I read a lot of posts on briar press and was eventually able to get a decent looking impression on my coasters.

At first, the ink was getting onto the block, like behind the giraffe’s neck. This meant that the ink rollers were pushing up too hard against the printing surface. I had to adjust the pressure by putting some electrician’s tape on the chase bed. Three layers of tape made the rollers touch the printing surface just right, while not getting on other stuff.

The impression itself was also a little too deep at first. You could see the part of the block that pressed into the coaster (which at this point didn’t have ink). So I adjusted the pressure of the platen (the part that runs into the printing surface) with a screwdriver. After getting a few crazy impressions, I started getting the hang of the adjustments. I got quite a few good looking coasters. Here’s a video of the machine in action:

I’ll be experimenting with letterpress stuff some more once I get different colored inks and more printing blocks. I’d also like to get a printing base so I can make my own photopolymer plates (printed from normal Illustrator files). Those cost quite a bit though, so I’d like to see what my press can do before blowing a lot of cash on it. I also put the coasters I made on sale at Etsy, so take a look at my giraffe letterpress coasters and buy ‘em before someone else does!

New Addition To The Home: Mortimer The Letterpress!

As I wrote earlier, I really like letterpress stuff. I’ve been thinking of getting into it on my own, so I scoured eBay and craigslist looking for a printing press for myself. I wanted a tabletop press that wasn’t too heavy.

I ended up getting a Kelsey Excelsior 5×8 model from a guy just outside of Lansing. Emily and I drove over there to pick it up, then we took it to her parent’s place in Grand Rapids where Randy did a super good job fixing it up with WD-40 and oil. He also attached it to a piece of wood for easy letterpress action! Thanks, Randy!

We learned from the seller that this particular press was rescued from a funeral home, where it was used to print memorials and stuff. We also found some pre-set type along with the press with words like “DIED” and “INTERNMENT.” Creepy! I hope no ghosts decide to haunt my press. Because of its history, I named the press Mortimer. It also sounds like a good old-timey name. The serial number on the press’ chase bed reads “B41D” which tells me that the thing was built in April 1941.

Although I need to buy new rollers for the press, I decided to practice setting type. I made a pseudo business card and made a blind impression with the type. I made the imprint on some of my old Microsoft business cards (won’t need those ones anymore).

I can’t wait to see what the results look like with ink and paper that’s made for letterpress. I also have a few other supplies I need to buy before I’m in business. Stay tuned for updates on letterpress stuff!

foursquare 2.0 UX Sloppiness

Foursquare just released a new version of its iPhone app.

Something I noticed right away which disappointed me was that they basically slapped on a new view to the existing app, and didn’t even bother to match the style of the original app!

Not only is the new bar a different color, it’s also a different height than the existing one! It also lacks labels where the original one has labels below the icons. This is simply sloppy design. These two screens exist in the same version of their app! It wouldn’t have taken much more work to either update the app so both bars are grey, or match the new views to the old one.

I recently saw that foursquare is looking for a new Product Manager. I’m considering applying to help them out with their product issues 🙂

EDIT:

After emailing back and forth with Alex Rainert, foursquare’s head of product, it seems that, to answer my own question, this was a conscious design decision to change the visual style of the buttons. In one context, they are for navigating various top level features, and in another, they are buttons for various pop-up actions. It’s of my opinion that the change in visual style is a bit too much (the change in height along with the loss of the location footer in some screens), but that’s a design choice that foursquare made intentionally.

Performance vs. Brand Advertising on iAd

I’ve got some more thoughts on iAd after trying iAd out on one of my apps for about a month now.

As I noted in an earlier post, Apple responded to a really low fill rate on their iAd program by enabling developer ads. Developer ads are simple banner ads that entice a user to download an iPhone app. Here’s what the use case looks like via Business Insider:

To Apple’s credit, the workflow is actually pretty good. It doesn’t require users to leave the app to download another one.

Since developers can’t really afford the insane $2 cost per click that the big media customers pay, Apple is charging $.25 a click instead, and no cost per impression. Theoretically, this should mean that the fill rate would be very high (as long as developers are not maxing out on their daily spend limit or too aggressively filtering out apps). Yet I’ve noticed a pretty big fall in fill rate (from about 30% to 20%) in the last month.

I think the main issue is that Apple never really intended iAd to be used for performance advertising. Performance advertising is about getting that direct action (in this case, an app download). Apple’s been pushing iAd as a great Brand advertising solution (where the user is not expected to go out and buy Dove soap from their phone). That’s why the premium brands are willing to pay so much per click and impression. By comparison, AdMob ads on the iPhone seem to be more geared toward performance advertising.

By introducing developer ads, I think Apple has tried to appease publishers at the cost of the perceived premium value of iAds. Sure, the developer ads aren’t as flashy as the premium advertisers’, but $.25 versus $2 a click for the same piece of real estate is quite a difference. Add the perception that iAds for developers are not cost-effective and you could come to the conclusion that Apple is doing it wrong. It doesn’t help that the premium brand advertisers seem to be frustrated with the process of dealing with Apple as a gatekeeper.

So what can Apple do to fix this? They should go back to their specialization: doing one or a few things really well. They should focus on iAd as a brand advertising platform. They should work on getting as many large partners onto iAd as quickly as possible. This will alleviate the growing pains that publishers (including me) are feeling with fill rates. Right now it seems like Apple is reacting rather than acting; following rather than leading. They need to show that they’re serious about carving their own niche in the mobile advertising space.

Quora

I finally heard about Quora enough times (I suppose I reached my contagion threshold) to make a profile for it a week or so ago, and I ended up exploring it in depth today.

Quora is basically a site that lets you ask questions and answer other people’s questions. Facebook also just recently released a feature called Questions that seems sort of similar. While Quora hasn’t put limits on what kinds of questions you can ask, the bulk seem to be about technology and startups, probably because of the types of early adopters who are using the site.

Quora is interesting to me because it’s basically enabling people to share knowledge. In a way, it’s like Wikipedia, but with a seemingly smaller barrier to entry. While Wikipedia has some harsh rules on how to edit an article, Quora is centered around questions and answers on various topics. You can literally sign up and answer questions within a few minutes.

As with any great piece of social software, Quora seems to work because it makes the right things visible, which gives incentives for people to keep contributing. Personally, I see it as a way to build up my online reputation as an expert on a number of subjects. It’s interesting because the incentives to use the site are baked into the site itself. It’s easy to see who has answered many questions, who has a lot of followers, who has been “endorsed” by others, etc. With this system, pretty much everyone wins. The question askers have their questions answered, the answerers get the glory of answering a question well, and even users who do neither can still benefit from reading good answers to good questions.

Another neat aspect of the site is that there are many users who could be considered “internet celebrities” or important in some other right. There are many founders of companies and other execs who go to the trouble of answering questions about the companies they founded. This is cool because users are all sort of on the same level (or at least have the potential to be). Think of the opportunities if you were one of the first 1000 people on Twitter and could have great conversations with the other early adopters.

From playing around with it a bit today, I’m very impressed and excited about Quora. By comparison, I just goofed off on Facebook Questions and unlocked the Rickroll Easter Egg (ask “How is babby formed?”). Quora still has a few things it could do better (like make it easier to find really great answers to really great questions, perhaps older ones) but even now it seems like a great tool. With the right attention to detail and community, I feel like it could be the next Wikipedia in terms of social computing success stories.

Oh, and here’s an example of a really good answer to a question: Why is Facebook creating a Q&A product to compete against Quora?