The Brooks Review

Month: August 2010

  • iWork 9.0.4 update

    Apple:

    …adds export compatibility to Pages for the standard ePub file format (for use with iBooks).

  • Keyboard Shortcuts to Speed Up Typing on an iPhone or the iPad

    Tips #8 and #9 a sweet, but #6 takes the cake:

    If you want to change the style of quotation marks or if you need to use a longer dash punctuation mark instead of the default hyphen, hold the corresponding key as show in the above screenshot.

    [via Mac OSX Hints]

  • Reviewing Products

    I have been reviewing some software (among other items) lately and they are starting to become rather popular, that is why I thought it important to take time and share with you how I review things. In other words, what it takes to get a positive review from me.

    The most important thing is that I am not looking for things that I review to reinvent the wheel, I am just looking at how well they do what they are made for doing.

    Usability

    The first thing that I look at is how usable the item is, I want to know if I can figure it out without much work or if I find myself scratching my head. I want and like things that are straight forward, I shouldn’t be required to read a book or take a class in order to figure out how to use your product, it should be intuitive.

    An example of a well known product that is not intuitive to use is Microsoft Excel, an excellent program that is only excellent once you know how to use it. Think about that for a second, if you had never seen a spreadsheet program before and were to open Excel, would you know what to do with it? Surely you wouldn’t know the functions and calculations that you can type in, let alone be able to find the buttons that help you. Excel is not very straight forward.

    Staying Out of the Way

    I next look at how well the product stays out of my way. If I am reviewing a bag or case, do I find myself constantly fiddling with the straps or nick nacks on it? If I am reviewing software do I find myself constantly in the preferences, or toolbars adjusting things? The best products are those that let you do your work and stay out of your way.

    Look at TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (Windows) these two are very good at staying out of the users way, they allow you to type stuff, and they don’t stop you by trying to guess what you want to do (looking at you Word, thanks for that great auto list that I never wanted).

    Is it Logical

    By that I mean does the way the product works make sense – which is different from whether or not it is straight forward. Perhaps a better way to explain this is by saying: when you do something, does the product react in the way that you expect.

    For example if you hit return in Tweetie, does it send the tweet or return to a new paragraph – the fact that it returns a new paragraph is not logical at first, but it is highly useable. If Tweetie sent the tweet when you hit return, there would surely be a lot of mistakenly sent tweets, therefore it is rather logical for a Twitter app to do this, but it may not be what the user is expecting.

    Looks and Feel

    This is 50% of the grade if you will whenever I evaluate something – does it look and feel good. People don’t just buy Macs because they look good, they feel good too. ‘Feel’ is not just about the physical touch of the object (though that is part of it) it is also about all of the above criterion that I went through.

    Feel is the single most important thing about any product. Imagine if your iPhone was very rough, like holding a split faced brick – yuck. If the iPhone felt like that no one would buy it. Imagine if all software looked like Windows 95 applications – yuck. Feel is so very important.

    The Small Things

    If you look through my reviews I rarely touch on every feature, I often leave out the big features. I left out talking about versioning with the Simplenote update, not because it isn’t important, but because it isn’t a reason to use the app. Rarely will you find me nitpicking on pricing, if it is a good product then the money aspect really doesn’t matter to me (not that I am rich, I have just decided that I want good products and I can and will save up to buy them).

    Often times I will mention a very small thing on a product, the feel of a switch that I rarely would use, the placement of a button in a piece of software and that small thing will sway my opinion – and it should. For me the small things are what can make or break a product. I recently bought a new case for my iPad, a Hard Graft sleeve, a beautiful sleeve that I truly love. There is one thing about this sleeve that is so small, yet just makes me smile every time I see it, that one thing is the little red and white striped fabric stitched along the bottom of the leather pocket, great detail.

    My Reviews

    Next time you read a review that I write, know that the above is where I am coming from.

  • Taylor Carrigan’s Excellent Notational Velocity Icon

    Go get this icon if you use Notational Velocity, a thing of beauty.

    notationalvelocity.png

  • What’s in My Simplenote

    Another meme by Patrick Rhone, here is what I keep in my Simplenote:

    1. Hex color values for different sites and designs that I like.
    2. Membership numbers for things like frequent flier accounts.
    3. Phone numbers of people that I figure I will only need to call for the next few days, and that are not worth adding to my address book.
    4. Blog post ideas and rough drafts.

    What’s in yours?

  • Pirate Bay Receives Notice To Keep a Torrent

    So a developer sees that his software has been cracked and is being shared on The Pirate Bay, and this is his response:

    I demand that you don’t remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minimoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the better crack be made, so that it doesn’t cripple the use experience of my beautiful program…

    Now that is a great way to deal with piracy.

  • Jared Spool​ Talks About Flash Splash Pages

    A must read quote.

  • The Big Picture – iPad App

    Smoking Apples:

    It doesn’t automatically load the entire story once you open it; doesn’t even cache the next image. You have to wait through a spinner every time (which I’m afraid will be quite a while on a slow net connection). Thankfully, it caches the story once you’ve viewed each image, even through an app relaunch. But, the moment you start viewing another story, it flushes the cache of all other stories. Perhaps it has something to do with licensing issues, but I love the fact that I can pick up the Eyewitness app at any time and view past images (Big Picture doesn’t even launch without an internet connection).

    I have to agree, I was really excited for this app when I got my iPad. Having the app now though is a bit disappointing.

  • Less Stress One Bankers Box at a Time

    It is Wednesday, August 25th, and I am tired. I am really tired, I don’t know why, but I am. I have been all over today and just read this great post over at FiftyFootShadows (via Minimal Mac) on minimalism and consumerism. It got me to thinking about a goal I have had for the past year. That goal is to get rid of all the crap I am filling the nooks and crannies of my life, my hope is that in doing this I am less tired.

    The problem though is where to start, and when to stop. So I had an idea, to fill one bankers box a week until October, roughly 6 bankers boxes. All that is to go into the boxes are items that can go to Goodwill or be sold online. Any garbage I come across is to be disposed of immediately.

    Once full the box is to immediately go to Goodwill or items posted online for sale. My hope is that by doing this in small chunks with a definite timeline I will be less overwhelmed and instead take to the challenge in a new way.

    I’ll check back in once I get the box full.

  • What Dave Caolo Wants From a New Apple TV

    I agree with his sentiments, and the update he posted at the bottom nails the model that needs to be in place.

    Ross Rubin via Caolo:

    …if Apple really wanted to avoid subscriptions per se, it could offer pre-paid access as it has for 3G on the iPad, with a lower fee offering a limited number of TV episode rentals per month and a higher number offering unlimited rentals during the month.

    I hate paying Comcast for 9,000,000 channels when I only watch a handful of them, I want and the industry needs, to have an a la carte subscription system. Why should someone get paid when their content is crap and I never watch it?

  • S​M​R​T

    Shaun Inman:

    Safari 5’s new “Smart” Auto-Complete has bothered me since the first day I updated. While this feature has been available in one form or another in previous versions of Safari it never ranked page titles over the urls when auto-completing and there was always a defaults write option to override the behavior.

    One annoyance solved today.

  • Review: Elements Text Editor for iOS

    Elements is a writing app that syncs its text files with your Dropbox (link is to my referral account, if you don’t like me go to Dropbox.com) account giving you full access on your computer. When it came out I downloaded it immediately I am a sucker for any new app that may make my life easier and this sounded like it might. The thing is I already had Simplenote and it was syncing via Dropbox and Simplenote Sync already, so Elements would have to be better.

    It isn’t better, it isn’t even close.

    The Flaw(s)

    I hate to give a bad review of anything because I know a lot of time and effort went into making this app, but it really isn’t worth the money. The UI is ugly, and icon is ugly – even on the larger screened iPad it still is ugly. Oh and did I mention that you can only sync it with the ‘Elements’ folder that it creates in your Dropbox account? Well you can only sync it with that folder, what a waste.

    Elements would be useful for a lot of people if it was just a text editor for Dropbox files, allowing you to edit and save back, any text files that you store in your Dropbox folder. Instead it forces me to create yet another folder, where I will promptly forget what I am storing in this new folder.

    Perhaps I am just spoiled by the recent Simplenote 3 update, but this really is not a great text editor. I am hard pressed to see any benefit it offers over Simplenote and that is reason enough alone for me to not use it.

    Why You May Like It

    Now that we have the bad stuff out the the way there is a subset of people that I can see really liking this app: those that don’t like to tinker. If you have Dropbox already and use a program like TextEdit or TextMate (and so on) then this is a dead simple method of syncing. Whatever is in the Elements folder is synced and accessible in the app, dead simple.

    Simplenote requires that you start syncing with its service (free) and then if like me you use Notational Velocity (with text file storage) enabled, placing the folder for Notational Velocity files in Dropbox accomplishes the same thing as Elements. It is a bit more complicated.

    Two Other Nifty Features

    Emailing as an attachment is a really nice feature. Simplenote can email a note, but it cannot email it as a text file attachment (though it has several other sharing options). Being able to attach a text file to an email brings me a step closer to a full computing experience.

    The second neat feature is the scratchpad, hit a button and you can jot a note, while you write another note. This feature is limited in its usefulness, but a great addition anyways.

    Bottom Line

    There is a very niche market for this app, and at a price of $4.99 that niche better be willing to pay up. Most are better off getting the free Simplenote.

  • Apple to hold media event on September 1st

    I guess new iPod touch’s that more closely resemble the current iPhone (front camera and retina display), iPod refreshes and the new Apple TV. I do not think they will touch the iPad at this event, they may quietly drop the price while the store is down though.

  • Someone Has Way to Much Time on Thier Hands and Possibly Super Fingers

    This person claims to have beat the world record for texting speed on an iPhone 4 by a whopping 4 seconds. If true, that is damned impressive.

  • Flashback: Brad Silverberg and Bill Gates unveil Windows 95

    Say what you will about Microsoft now, but Windows 95 was a game changer for the software world. Take a look at the first two videos in this post, great stuff.

  • Step Away from the iPhone

    Matt Richtel reporting:

    “People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

    It is no surprise that our brains need down time, I think we call all agree that stepping away from our phones/computers allow us to see the world in a new light. Not to mention it really helps us to think.

    [via Hacker News]

  • Garrett Murray Sees a Problem with Facebook

    Garret Murray:

    That’s the problem with Facebook. They are slowly destroying independent web applications with boring versions that immediately win due to Facebook’s population (which at this point is the 3rd largest country on earth). There’s no demand for excellence.

    Sounds a lot like the Microsoft we knew in the 1990’s.

    [via Tyler Galpin]

  • Review: Simplenote 3

    Last night Simplenote released the version 3 update, a massive update that brings a slew of new features to the very simple note taking app for the iPhone. I like so many others took to using the app at the urging of Daring Fireball’s John Gruber when he mentioned it quite some time ago. Since then the much ridiculed app icon has changed a few times and again in version 3 it gains a new icon, more than that the interface has been overhauled and refined.

    The Best New Feature

    With version 3 on both the iPad and iPhone Simplenote has introduced ‘full screen’ editing, where by you get a white canvas, your text and the keyboard and nothing else. No clock, or battery status indicator to distract the eye, a pure typing environment. This is awesome. Anybody who writes a lot will tell you just how great this feature is, and with most things iOS related this feature really shines on the iPad.

    The one complaint I always had about Simplenote on the iPad is that I didn’t like to have to type offset, where the text was pushed to the left. Now though with fullscreen the problem has gone away, a truly great writing app has emerged from what was once just a simple note taking app.

    Other Mentionable New Features

    Tags: a great way to help you stay organized, I however have never been a big user of tags and so I doubt that this will be very used by me.

    Pin to Top: This allows you to select a particular note that stays at the top of the list no matter how you are sorting. This was a much needed feature, I can’t tell you how long I have spent scrolling for a note (I often forget or neglect to search, mainly because I try to use it with just one hand a lot).

    Orientation Lock on iPhone: I know with iOS 4 you can double tap and get the orientation lock system wide, but let’s face it most people will not use that (except on the iPad the hardware switch is far more convenient) so being able to turn off landscape mode in Simplenote is great – who uses the landscape iPhone keyboard anyways?

    Little Annoyances

    On the iPad the UI simulates a stack of papers, but it would appear that the top sheet of the paper is the same height, just more narrow than the sheet behind it. This is unlike other UI tricks where the stack just appears to be eschew below the top sheet. Whatever is going on I hate it.

    The placement of the ‘sign out’ button in both the iPhone and iPad are in a terrible spot, I have hit them several times thinking it was the close or done button. Please move this in line with the other options for sanities sake.

    On the iPhone the button to go full screen is with all the other tools on the toolbar, on the iPad it is a very low contrast icon in the bottom right corner, by itself. This is really annoying, put it up top with all the other tools and buttons, don’t make me search for it every time.

    Buy It

    Buy this not because I say so, but because Evernote sucks and this is what a real notes app should be like. What an great update and I am sure more great ones to come. (I should clarify that Simplenote is free thought you can purchase upgrades in the app)

  • Battle of the Drones

    As I kid I remember playing F117a-Night Hawk on DOS, I had a joystick and a keyboard and I flew around shooting targets and trying to dog fight other planes. That was the past, but it appears it may also be the future of warfare. Amazing.

  • Keeping Mint’s Unique Referrers List Clean and Useful

    If you use Mint to track your web stats you will want to do this.