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Reporter for iOS tracks your life through mini surveys and pretty graphs
Nicolas Felton is something of a data nut. (Hopefully he won't take umbrage with that characterization.) The man has been reporting various metrics of his personal life since 2005 in the annual Feltron Report. Eventually he created Daytum so that others could join in his obsessive tracking, but while the web and iOS apps were slick, they could be quite daunting for the uninitiated. A person needed to make a habit of tracking their habits -- counting how many cigarettes they smoke, how often they make it to the gym, etc... So, after a stint at Facebook, the world's premier self quantifier went back to the drawing board with a few friends and came up with Reporter. The new app is iOS only, sadly, but does offer a much lower barrier to entry while maintaining the nearly infinite level of customization that Daytum did. Instead of aiming for completeness, Reporter asks you at random times to track specific things with "lightweight surveys." This allows the app to still monitor broad trends in your lifestyle, without worrying about ruining your data by forgetting to log each cup of coffee you drink. Felton says that through randomized push reminders that "sample your life," you can still learn a lot without becoming a slave to meticulously monitoring your every act. Reporter still requires plenty of manual tracking, but the creator argues it's the best way to answer the most interesting questions. There is some help provided through data harvested from Foursquare and your contacts for autocompletion, and it can also tap into the power of the M7 processor for tracking your steps. While there are no concrete plans at the moment, Felton left open the possibility of expanding the number of sources that Reporter can pull data from. For instance heart rate or sleep-tracking information from a wearable, or the media you consume on your Apple TV. Reporter is available now in the iTunes App Store for $3.99.
Reporter app hopes to find a way to measure your immeasurables
We already have a plethora of digital tools to track everything from how many steps we walk to how well we sleep at night, but there are a few things that are a bit more difficult to measure. For example, if you were asked how happy you've been this month, would you have an immediate answer? Probably not, but that's one of the things that an upcoming app called Reporter hopes to help you answer. Reporter randomly prompts you to complete short surveys throughout the day. The questionnaires ask anything you desire from "What are you doing?" and "Who are you with?" to more relative measurements such as how happy you're feeling. After a few days, the results of these check-ins will begin to show patterns that can teach you things about your habits that you may not have known. If you find that you're eating junk food or napping more often than you're going to the gym, that may be a stat you can use as motivation. Or if you're spending even more time hammering out work projects at home than you realized, it might be time to ask for a raise (hey, it's worth a shot, right?). You can sign up for a notification when the app launches via the Reporter website.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: You owe me for this
In a subscription game, the developers have a certain degree of built-in obligation to the playerbase. You pay $15 a month, and while some of that goes toward the simple logistics of running the game, some of that also goes toward keeping the game in development. When you're putting down money, there's a tacit understanding that you are owed something in return. Strictly speaking, we know the only thing we're owed is access to the game, but even that is something. City of Heroes has entered the realm of free-to-play, though, and that means the expectations of what players are owed has become all kinds of skewed. There's a huge pile of content available to players who haven't paid a cent. What do free players actually deserve in this environment? What do paying players deserve? Where do you draw the line between what should be free for everyone, what should be free for subscribers, and what should just plain cost money?
Radio reporter uses iPhone 4 for all of his work
There's a very cool story over on the MediaShift pages of the PBS website about how a radio reporter has replaced almost all of his bulky radio equipment and with an iPhone 4. Neal Augenstein started working for WTOP in Washington 14 years ago, when just his mobile phone weighed as much as a bowling bag, he says. Since then, the size of equipment has shrunk, and now he does almost all of his reporting with nothing more than his iPhone and a few other pieces of kit -- some of them homemade. Augenstein says, "with the Apple iPhone 4 and several apps, I can produce intricate audio and video reports, broadcast live, take and edit photos, write web content and distribute it through social media from a single device." He uses the VC Audio Pro app to edit his audio and the same company's 1stVideo app to edit video captured on his iPhone. He often even uses the iPhone's built-in microphone after the Blue Mikey model he used with his old iPhone 3GS wasn't compatible with the new phone. Photos come courtesy of the built-in camera, which he edits by simply zooming and cropping in his Camera Roll then taking a screenshot to upload. He also carries an iPad to take notes in press conferences while his iPhone is on a press conference podium -- supported by a regular mike stand with a bit of foam padding. You can see Neal in action here doing an interview with his iPhone, and you can listen to some of his audio via the station's "As Heard on WTOP" pages here. It's impressive how he's reduced his equipment down to such basics, and it's also impressive that the iPhone 4 can produce broadcast-quality media. Good work, chap!
The Los Angeles Times visits BlizzCon
The LA Times has a story up that's about a month late -- it tells the story of a guild meeting up at BlizzCon last month (they were actually at the Lost Bar, a place we at WoW.com know well from past meetups) and doing everything players do at BlizzCon: meet each other face to face, talk Warcraft, and enjoy everything Blizzard has set up on the convention floor. Truth be told, the experience sounds pretty tame to us -- BlizzCon is BlizzCon, it's a ton of fun, but it's not that alien of an experience to go with your ingame friends to a gaming convention.Then again, maybe we're just biased. Maybe having guildies as friends is really a fascinating thing to someone who's never done it before, and maybe the spectacle of BlizzCon really is so interesting that you can just report it in the paper. They do chat with Morgan Webb (why?) and they get one line from Blizzard COO Paul Sams, but otherwise, it's just basically the story of the Dread Pirates and their trip to BlizzCon (complete with veiled accusations of misogyny and a dictatorial guildleader -- thanks, LA Times!). To folks who don't play World of Warcraft, it might be interesting, but for most players, especially those who've been to BlizzCon already, it's mostly business as usual.
Local news on WoW lingo
This is pretty silly, but we do have to give them credit: Bay Area NBC may have done a report on how incomprehensible our game's jargon is, but at least it's not a report about how WoW breaks up marriages or ruins the lives of children. But yeah, portraying WoW players as aliens with a foreign language all their own is a little far out -- the game's got jargon just like everything else, and what they don't do in this report, unfortunately, is show the etymology of all of these words ("QQ" means to cry because it looks like eyes crying, and "kek," as you know if you've ever been Alliance facing the Horde, is what "lol" translates into from Orcish). Not to mention that it's too bad she comes so close to the "I'm a girl, I don't get videogames" stereotype -- maybe if she sat down in the starting area for 20 minutes she'd know a little bit more about how it all works.But maybe we're asking too much. Let's not forget that this is the media showing World of Warcraft played by a normal dude with a reporter girlfriend and a nice apartment. Sure, they're didn't spell "pwnz0r" quite right, and the guy isn't exactly "top 10 out of 12 million" -- he does have Ashes of Al'ar, but his guild is actually number 11 on the Greymane server -- but at least they're telling the story instead of trying to write it for us.
EVE Online's war journalists report from the front lines
The creators of EVE Online are going all-out with their storyline-driven factional warfare in The Empyrean Age expansion, which is less than a day away from launch. They're injecting the coming struggle with as much gritty realism as they can muster. Massively has already covered the formation of EVE Online's in-game news organization, called Interstellar Correspondents, but it looks like the staff at CCP Games is setting their sites a bit higher. In a recent dev blog, CCP Ginger discussed the concept of embedded reporting in New Eden. Specifically, there will be war correspondents who report on the events that transpire during the clashes between factions. These members of Interstellar Correspondents will be in the thick of the action and report on world shaping events to the populace of New Eden.
Upper Deck seeking Spectral Safari Field Journals
The powers that be at Blizzard are really going all out with the Spectral Safari stuff lately -- first Upper Deck announces a series of TCG contests at stores around the country, and then Blizzard announces an official screenshot contest, and now there's a meta contest for the TCG events.Yup, be a reporter for Upper Deck's TCG site, and you could win a Spectral Tiger card of your own. All they're asking is that you go to one of their events next week, bring a camera and a notepad, and the best stories from the event will win prizes, either a Spectral Tiger card or a box of March of the Legion.Pretty cheap way to get someone writing for you, but then again our overlords here at WoW Insider pay us in Savory Deviate Delight and Conjured Glacier Water. So count your blessings, I guess.
