Dear Amazon,

The Kindle is nice and all, but it’s a lot of money for a dedicated device for reading books when I already have tons of devices capable of reading books. A screen, a wireless connection and a keyboard. That describes a Kindle. That also describes laptops, cellphones, iPhones, PDAs, etc.

If you want to sell lots more ebooks, I suggest you release Kindle software for some or all of those devices. Specifically I would suggest laptops and iPhones. The iPhone is my preferred way to read Kindle books (it is way smaller and lighter than Kindle, and I already have it with me all the time), but it’d be really swell if I could wirelessly purchase the books from you and not have to break the law in order to read them.

Now that Apple has 3rd-party apps for iPhone/iPod Touch, I HIGHLY recommend that you make a Kindle app for them. You’ll sell bajillions more books than you already do. BAJILLIONS.

Defined tags for this entry: amazon, books, ebooks, iphone, kindle, open letters

Hey Google,

It’s me again.  Since our last conversation, I’ve realized something else you could do to make our time together in Reader more productive and less angrifying.  Know how I share lots of stuff in my “Shared Items,” despite only like 4 people seeing them?  Well, it’d be really helpful if I didn’t have to be subscribed to my own Shared Items.  I mean, I shared them.  I don’t need you showing them to me again. (Despite that one time that I accidentally saw something cool in there that I forgot had gotten there because of me, and went ahead and shared it again.  Sharing an item from my shared items… that’s classy.)  At the very least, could you make sure they actually get marked as read after I read them?  I perpetually have 11-or-so “new” items in there that I’ve seen a hundred times.

Seriously, Google.  I’m beginning to think this conversation is one-sided.  Don’t make me start writing to SkyNet instead.

Defined tags for this entry: feedback, freedback, google, google reader, open letters, rants

Hey, Google? 

I know we’re not the bestest of friends, but you may have noticed that we spend a rather large amount of time together.  I’ve been thinking: I’d like for you to do something for me to make that time just a little bit more pleasant.

You know how I use your Reader to read all the blogs and stuff to which I subscribe?  (Of course you do.  You know EVERYTHING about me.)  Anyway, I frequently find that, after reading an article in Google Reader, I’d like to go leave a comment on the originating site.  This then involves scrolling back up in reader to get to the TOP of the post—which is the only place you include a link to the originating item’s URL.  Could you go ahead and add a link at the bottom of each entry as well, so I don’t have to keep scrolling back up, oftimes quite a distance?

You may have noticed that your FeedBurner service frequently includes “comment” links in the bottoms of people’s posts, and that most feeds include “comment-url” fields that you could use to generate “comment on this” links rather easily.  It would be even more spectacular if, when you have such data, you could go ahead and generate such a link for me and put it in the footer of each item.  In the absence of this data, a simple link to the originating URL would suffice nicely. Either way, a link at the bottom of the post would be at least as—if not more—valuable as the one at the top.

Aside from making me happier, this could also help provide you with another metric of usage by your users.  You’ll know which posts they commented on, and can provide them a list so they can check up on them later.  It seems to me that knowing the level of interactivity users have with specific sites would be a rather valuable addition to the amount of data you amass on each of your users, allowing you to target advertisements just that much more accurately.

This simple addition could go a long ways towards making my—and undoubtedly countless others’s’s—time with you just that much more pleasant.  Not to mention that it would make each and every one of us just that much more valuable to you as a statistic.

Hopefully yours,
Oh heck—like you don’t already know who I am.

Defined tags for this entry: freedback, freedbacking, geeky, google reader, improvement ideas, open letters, pleasing users

Dear GIMP developers,

It is hard enough for me to convince people that GIMP is quite capable of doing pretty much everything the average user of Photoshop would require from it without you guys up and moving shit around all the time, and/or releasing “stable” versions that don’t function properly.  Had I not had 10 years of wonderful experience working with GIMP before running the version that Ubuntu installed for me, I would have not only been pulling my hair out, but I’d be advocating that no one ever waste their time with it in the first place as well.  Stuff just doesn’t work.  Weirdnesses to which I had finally adjusted are now either gone or weirder.  My active layer keeps getting into a state where neither I nor plugins can change it.  Selections are behaving strangely.  I’d hate to have my income be dependent upon using GIMP, because I’m having serious troubles getting anything done with it right now.

Granted, Ubuntu is giving me a somewhat outdated version, but I would think that however old the version is, coming from the “stable” tree would ensure that it, you know, would WORK properly?  I suppose it’s possible that the Ubuntu folk may have broken something after you were through with it, but I can’t help but wonder whether most of the Internet ravings from Photoshop users about how GIMP is worse than MS Paint might be as a result of crap like I’m running across now.  I know that GIMP is a top-notch application that, aside from some annoying quirks from time to time, is perfectly capable of replacing what 95% of Photoshop users use it for (despite that not being the intent of GIMP in the first place), but trying to get anything done with this release (2.4.2) is proving impossible for this 10-year veteran self-proclaimed GIMP ‘expert.’   I’m pulling my hair out trying to get anything done; I’d suspect new users, however, would just tell their friends how much it sucks and be done with it.

In the decade or so that I’ve been using GIMP I’ve gone from the bleeding-edge compile-it-myself-the-minute-it’s-released type of user to kind that just uses whichever release his package manager presents him with; I’m pretty sure the latter is the group that most of your user-base falls into.  You need to make sure that those people don’t come across crap like this, because they’re the ones who aren’t going to put up with it and end up saying bad things about you.  Isn’t that why you have the unstable tree in the first place?

Defined tags for this entry: geeky, open letters, open source, photoshop, The GIMP, urge to kill rising

Dear Apple,

Would it have killed you to have made the ‘new tab’ button in Mobile Safari automatically put the new tab into URL entry mode? I mean, what else could I possibly want to do with a new tab other than go to a URL?

Defined tags for this entry: Apple, complaint, iPhone, open letters

Dear Morgan Spurlock,

I’m a fat-ass and it’s your fault.

See, I never used to eat fast food. Never at all. I was lean, mean, and healthier than anyone I knew. Chicks dug me. My doctor wrote a paper on human bodily health using me as a benchmark for perfection.

Then I saw you eating all that delicious-looking food in your film Super-Size Me and everything changed. I had to have some. Then I had to have more. Now I can’t go a day without eating greasy, fried, DELICIOUS food from any number of drive-thru eating establishments. The larger the portions the better. Hell yes I’d like bigger fries for just $0.39 more.

Thanks a lot,

Alistair Hoel

p.s. “30 Days” is very enjoyable, even when I can see the hands of the editors shaping things according to the message you want to put forth.

Defined tags for this entry: delicious, documentaries, fast food, McDonalds, Morgan Spurlock, movies, open letters, rants