The Brooks Review

Month: October 2010

  • Mac OS 10.7 Dreams

    October 20th 2010 – up and until this date you are going to be hearing about a lot of Apple rumors, on the 20th Apple will be holding a press event. The event has been titled on invitations as ‘Back to the Mac’ which certainly means that the focus of the event is not iOS oriented. In the past I have predicted what I expect to see at these events, often leading to me looking a bit foolish (as anybody who regularly predicts Apple stuff is). This time around I decided to put together a Mac wish list of sorts.

    The following is a list of things that I would love to see Apple announce, that are not too far out of the realm of something that we could reasonable expect Apple to release.

    FaceTime

    This may just be the only thing on this list that I am sure of. FaceTime really needs to be integrated into Macs – what will be interesting is wether Apple decides to use iChat (which really is aging) to implement it, or if they will create and entirely new FaceTime app on the Mac. Either way, we need it built into Mac OS.

    Better SSD Support

    SSDs are the way of the future, that is why Apple offers them as an upgrade right now. My guess is the Mac OS gets all the latest and greatest SSD support baked into the new OS. Specifically TRIM support.

    Other than that I would hope that this new version of the OS will be something along the lines of optimized for the SSD first and a platter drive second.

    iOS & Mac OS Love

    By that of course I mean a better way for Mac apps to talk to iOS apps for syncing data and so forth. Right now the best way is Dropbox, which requires more setup than the average user will undertake. I would love to see a system where iOS devices can recognize a Mac app via Bonjour and just go from there.

    [Hat tip to Mac Stories where I initially saw this thought ]

    A New iCal

    Soooo…I have talked about this before but iCal on the Mac really sucks and all the replacements for it from third party developers suck. I want this:

    iCal Redesigned (Concept)

    A New Mail.app

    Better filtering options, widescreen support built in, keyboard commands, exchange support is better, spam filtering is amazing, filing is improved. Most of all I hope that Apple gets with the times and realizes that most of the world does NOT use MobileMe and therefore needs Apple’s Mail client to work with things like Gmail and Exchange, and to work with those services very well.

    Subtle Tweaks to the UI

    I like the way Mac OS 10.6 looks, it is definitely the best looking OS out there right now (without heavy customization at least), but it too could use some refinements. For instance we could use a new Finder icon and a new Trash icon – man do they look dated. Ok and while we are at it, why can’t the inspector windows look a little more like the HUD themes that you can find online?

    Updated Finder

    Any Mac power user will tell you, Finder is showing its age. Tabs are the biggest wish for most people. I would settle for better network drive support, for both WebDAV servers and network shares. But my biggest complaint? Why can’t I hide some of the computers that Finder shows under the ‘shared’ tab in the sidebar? I mean only a few of those are ones that I need to access, so let me hide the rest away for crying out loud.

    New Preview

    I love the Preview app on Mac OS X, what a jack of all trades it is and far better and faster than using Adobe Acrobat. That said we need better support for reducing file sizes, the ability to OCR a PDF, and some basic tools to be able to digitally sign a document.

    Yojimbo / DEVONthink type App

    File folders are so 1999, today we just like to search or see things organized for us. This would be in addition to Finder, giving us a place to store and search all of our files, view and edit them – think iTunes for the rest of your crap.

    Saving No More

    I just feel greedy at this point, but one of my favorite features of Notational Velocity is that I don’t have to worry about hitting save. All that is done for me and backed up – saving needs to be a thing of the past. I can just imagine the commercials comparing saving on a Mac versus saving on a PC.

    New iChat

    Last but not least, if we are going to be forced to use iChat in order to use FaceTime on our Macs, the least Apple could do is make it good again.

    Just sayin…

  • The Talk Show on 5by5

    If you aren’t already listening to The Talk Show with Dan Benjamin and John Gruber then you are missing out. Just finished listening to it live and what a great show it is – better live, second best while commuting.

  • Outpost 2 for iPad

    First native Basecamp app for the iPad that I know of. Expensive given that the website works just fine on the iPad – but it actually is very nicely done. With exception of how the file viewing works – if you use that a lot probably best not to buy this app.

  • Windows Phone 7 Could be More Distracting

    Thibaut Sailly on the new Windows Phone 7 Ad:

    If I understood the product description well, the home screen of the Windows phone is going to be the dashboard of your digital life. Each part of it will reflect on the activity of your friends and other content your care most about. Wishfull thinking, but each part of it will be a reminder that you are missing something in your connected life. Each part of it will be an invitation to get sucked in. All the time.

    It’s a big push notifications agregrator right in your face as soon as you get your phone out of your pocket. Not really what’s advertised.

    This is precisely the reason I turn off all ‘badges’ for app icons in iOS (the ones that I can atleast) those badges are just way too distracting.

  • AAPL of My Eye

    Have you had a chance to see Apple’s stock lately, in case you haven’t here you go with a convienent comparison of RIM’s, Microsoft’s, Nokia’s and Adobe’s over the last six months time. Bottom line: Apple is up 24% at the time of this writing and the others are done on average 23.5% or everything Apple has increased the others have lost. Bummer for them.

    Screen shot 2010-10-13 at 8.49.22 AM.png

    As a side note do you see that nasty drop that Adobe had – ouch.

  • Apple’s 10.7 Kitty Press Conference

    Engadget got an invite stating “Back to the Mac.” with an Apple logo cutting away to reveal a lion. Leaving many to speculate that Apple will release Mac OS X 10.7 and that they will call it ‘lion’. Though to be honest at this point they could call it ‘Kitteh’ and get away with it – I mean have you checked their stock price lately?

  • Financial Times’ iPad App Brings In £1 Million in Ad Revenue

    Mark Sweney for PaidContent.org on the Financial Times iPad app:

    Ben Hughes, who is also the paper’s global commercial director, said more than 400,000 subscribers have signed up for the app. He added that it now accounts for 10% of the paper’s new digital subscriptions.

    He also notes that print advertising only makes up 40% of the overall revenue now. The Financial Times app is good, but incredibly expensive to be a subscriber to. That said it appears to be working for them, though it will be interesting to see what the trend on this will be over the next year.

  • Seeing Blue

    I pointed this out the other day, but way too many iOS apps use blue icons. I mean way too many, it is to the point where I could make entire home screens of nothing but blue icons. It is not just junky apps that use blue either, some of the best apps out there use blue for their app icon and it needs to stop. Our iOS devices are capable of displaying so much more color, please developers choose something other than blue.

    Now I don’t want my devices to look like a damned rainbow or anything, but I do want my app icons to look somewhat different so that I can easily find the icon I am looking for.

    For instance currently on my iPhone:

    • 89 apps in total
    • 35 of which are blue
    • 6 of which are red
    • 39.3% Blue
    • 6.7% Red

    On my iPad:

    • 66 apps in total
    • 21 of which are blue
    • 3 of which are red
    • 31.8% Blue
    • 4.5% Red

    On my Mac’s Dock:

    • 11 apps (not counting finder & trash)
    • 4 of which are blue
    • 0 of which are red
    • 36.3% Blue
    • 0% Red

    Am I the only one that finds this crazy? No, I know I am not, I have seen others talk about this before. Where are all the good red, yellow, orange app icons? Gowalla’s is orange and it is perhaps one of the easiest apps to find on my iPhone because of it.

    Again I am not advocating that developers get all crazy and force my home screen into looking like a rainbow or a Jackson Pollock painting, I just want a little more diversity.

    Let’s expand our use of colors when it comes to iOS icons, and hell Mac icons for that matter too.

    I was being very conservative in the counts above, as there are some apps that could also qualify as blue, but that blue wasn’t the main color of the icon.

  • Making Gmail Play Nice With Mac OS X Mail

    Stephen Hackett has put together a great guide on how to get Gmail to work really well with Mac Mail. There are more than a couple of tips in here that I didn’t know about – what a great guide.

  • In What May Be the Greatest Move by Seattle

    Chris Legeros reporting for Kiro 7 News in Seattle:

    “Yellow pages” publishers may sue the city of Seattle, because of an ordinance that passed Monday. The ordinance requires yellow pages publishers to be licensed, penalizes publishers up to $125 per book if they’re delivered to people who don’t want them and requires the industry to pay for recycling all the paper it distributes.

    and later on:

    Yellow pages publishers also believe the ordinance is a violation of their right to free speech and they are considering a lawsuit to challenge it.

    Let me respond by saying good job to Seattle as these books are a huge waste and secondly to the above complaining about a violation to their rights: I am sure spammers feel the same way, you guys should get together and have a conference or something.

  • Quick Blog Notes

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    Last be sure to drop me a note either on Twitter or via email if you disagree with or agree too much with anything I say.

    Thanks for reading.

  • Pepsi Throwback Is Here To Stay… For Now

    I don’t normally talk about health related things, but this is such great news I felt I needed to share it. I used to be a Pepsi addict on a 4-6can a day schedule. My wife has changed that and now I only drink a few cans a week (for the better). Pepsi Throwback though is amazing, it has no high fructose corn syrup (which if you didn’t know already is very bad for you) and instead uses cane sugar to sweeten it.

    The end result is a much better tasting soda pop. I know a few places in the Seattle-Tacoma area that you can regularly find Pepsi Throwback, but until now it was a seasonal item. This is really great news – soda pop is still not good for you, but cane sugar is much better for you than high fructose corn syrup.

    (Plus the retro styling on the cans is much better than the current looking cans – carrying a fashionable soda can is important to some.)

  • New Site Feature: Suggested Reading

    Just published a new page called ‘Suggested Reading’ where I am pulling my latest five starred items from Instapaper into the page. You can click on them to see what I find worthy of reading.

    To do this I am using Bill Israel’s excellent ‘Give Me Stuff I Starred’ javascript. Go get that here.

  • “Deleted” Facebook photos still not deleted

    Jacqui Cheng for Ars Technica following-up about how fast/well Facebook deletes its old photos:

    It seems we haven’t quite found the limits of that “limited amount of time” just yet—after all, 16 months is quite a while.

    So 16-months after Ars deleted some photos from Facebook you can still access them if you have the direct link to that image file (which is easy enough to get). This is just absurd – if you aren’t going to delete the photo then don’t tell the user that they can delete it, instead say something like ‘archive’.

  • App Hall of Fame

    Very neat listing of 12 ‘Hall of Fame’ apps as voted by a fairly large group of people. I agree with every single selection on the initial list – with exception of one.

    I cannot agree that Evernote is of Hall of Fame quality. I know a lot of people use it, but it is just not that great in my opinion. Though a bunch of people say it is, so I guess I am in the minority on this one.

  • Windows Phone 7 – Phones

    Engadget has a nice listing of all the new Windows Phone 7 phones announced today – for my money I would go with the HTC 7 Trophy, not that I am leaving iOS.

    Also, what is up with the names of these things? They. Are. Terrible.

  • The Importance of a Well-Designed iPhone App Icon

    Not only is he right about just how important it is to have a good looking iOS app icon, I would stress that more people need to make app icons that are not blue. There are other colors out there (or so I am told, my home screen just looks like a blue pool of water).

    [via MacStories]

  • 1 Useful Apple iPad Tip

    Mashable’s Amy-Mae Elliott posted up 10 tips/tricks for iPad users, most of are very basic, but I had no clue that the iPad did this:

    The spacebar will create as many spaces as there are fingers on it, so one finger will produce one space, two fingers two spaces and so on.

    Clever.

  • Did Microsoft Just Pull a Don Draper?

    Over the weekend I posted about the Angry Birds icon appearance on the Windows Phone 7 website. It turned out that the developer of Angry Birds (Rovio Mobile) has yet to commit to building a Windows Phone 7 version of their popular game. At the time I thought nothing of this, then after watching the latest episode of AMC’s Mad Men (Season 4 Episode 12) and seeing this post by John Gruber where he stated:

    (I’ll bet five bucks that it’s the same story with that Tap Tap Revenge icon, too.)

    All of a sudden with Don Draper fresh in my mind it hit me – this is something Draper would do. As Peggy Olsen said in this last episode of Mad Men (I am paraphrasing big time here) “If you don’t like what people are saying, change the conversation” which isn’t this exactly what Microsoft did by posting apps that have not fully committed to developing for their new Windows Phone 7 platform?

    This seems like a classic marketing move to me, they (Microsoft) didn’t have some of the popular app developers from the iOS/Android world lined up so instead they just faked it. Instead of trying to persuade Rovio to get on board Microsoft just decided to pretend like these guys were already on board.

    In doing this Microsoft shifted the pressure from Windows Phone 7 to the developers – a dick move to be sure, but it might just pay of in spades for them. Think about it from Rovio Mobile’s point of view, they were not convinced that they should develop for Windows Phone 7 and then this happens and a ton of people start talking to them about how they want to see Angry Birds on Windows Phone 7. That amount of pressure would probably convince a lot of developers to go ahead with plans to make a Windows Phone 7 version.

    Now I am not saying that Rovio will make Angry Birds for Windows Phone 7, nor am I saying that they should. After this weekend though, I would guess, that the pressure to make a Windows Phone 7 version is at the very least 100x greater than it was before this all happened.

  • Patrick Rhone’s iPad Life

    Please welcome Patrick Rhone, best known for Minimal Mac Patrick was kind enough to take the time to talk iPads with me.

    Tell me a little about yourself, what do you do, where do you live?

    I’m likely best known these days as a Writer and Curator at Minimal Mac, where you will find original writing, links, quotes, photos and submissions around the theme of minimalist practices in the area of technology. An idea I often refer to as ÒenoughÓ.

    I also am the proprietor of Machine Methods a firm that assists individuals and micro-businesses get the best out of technology.

    What was your reaction when the iPad was launched?

    I knew I wanted one immediately. I was an Apple Newton user for many years. In fact, I used one as my main mobile machine for most of those. I knew the iPad was the next logical (and long awaited) progression of that idea. As someone who’s job is often highly mobile, anything I can do to reduce that load is a welcome one.

    Which model did you order and why?

    I bought the WiFi only 64GB model. I knew this would become my main mobile machine for the next couple of years so I did not want to have to worry about running out of space. As for 3G, well, in every case I might need it I have my iPhone with me and it is better suited for that kind of task, so I saw no need. In hindsight, I don’t use it for much onboard media (music so I likely could have sufficed with the 32GB model.

    How are you using the iPad on a daily basis?

    As said, I use it for my main mobile machine. When I’m out and about, or even away from my desk at home, I’m on my iPad. Lots of email, browsing, writing, reading, etc. I do take the Apple Wireless Keyboard with me if I know I’m going to be doing a ton of typing (like now, for instance).

    Can you give me a quick run down of the apps that you use the most?

    I do 95% of all of my writing on the iPad in Simplenote, which syncs with Notational Velocity on the desktop. It is a fantastic app. Instapaper for reading is equally fantastic. In fact, if those were the only two third party apps on my iPad I would probably be just fine. Reeder is used for my RSS feeds. I use Ego, less to see my stats but more to keep track of my multiple Tumblr based sites. Also, Mail.app and Safari get a ton of play. Twitterrific gets more than it should. Don’t even get me started on Angry Birds.

    Which app is your favorite?

    That would be a hard choice between Instapaper and Simplenote. If forced, under penalty of death, Simplenote would likely win. I am a writer after all.

    Do you have any bag/stand/case recommendations for people?

    I’m a big fan of Waterfield Design stuff. I have the iPad Ultimate SleeveCase slid into my in my larger briefbag. I also have the Keyboard Sleeve for the wireless keyboard.

    What features do you want to see in a future iPad?

    The retina display will be very nice once it happens. Otherwise, it really is a near perfect device for me. I can’t think of anything else right now.

    Thanks again to Patrick for taking the time to give us a little insight into his iPad life. Be sure to follow him on Twitter he is @patrickrhone.

    More iPad Life

    To see more people’s iPad Lives take a look here.