The Brooks Review

Year: 2010

  • I Remember When: Tribute to Mac OS X’s Tenth Birthday

    Today marks the tenth anniversary of the release of the Mac OS X beta. It wouldn’t be for another three years that I would get my first taste of OS X on an iBook during a communications course at my University. A year later I would come home to find my laptop stolen and a desperate need for a new computer. It was at this time that I purchased a Powerbook G4 12” – the most fabled and perhaps most loved Mac portable to date.

    Since the end of 2004 I have used Mac OS X non-stop, I am an early adopter on all Apple products and a hardcore fanboy. I have been thinking a bit about what Mac’s mean to me, specifically what if anything I should write on this anniversary of the platform.

    Piece of Mind

    Then it came to me, what I really truly love about OS X (putting aside the beautiful hardware) is the piece of mind that it gives me. Here are a few worries that Mac OS X made moot:

    • Anti-Virus Software
    • Windows Registry Issues
    • DLL files
    • Clippy (you know the MS Office paper clip helper guy)
    • Viruses
    • NetSend (if you don’t know what this is Google it)
    • Plastic computers
    • ‘Active Desktop’ Errors
    • Internet Explorer
    • ‘Safe mode’
    • ‘Safe mode w/ networking’
    • ! Important Install Drivers before plugging this peripheral in!
    • WinZip
    • PS/2 Ports
    • Little yellow bubbles in the corner of my screen

    Mac OS X, giving me piece of mind since 12/2004. Thanks Apple.

  • Mark Zuckerberg opens up for The New Yorker

    Truly fascinating interviews and accounts of Facebook and Zuckerberg.

  • Exchange “remote wipe” is a terrible, terrible bug

    Did you know that when you setup and exchange account on your mobile device the Admin can wipe it – whereby ‘it’ I mean your entire device? Neither did I.

    [via DF]

  • Rui Carmo on the Samsung Tab

    Rui Carmo:

    A Tab is, physically, almost exactly half the size of an iPad, and although we could go on about specs, features, ergonomics and whatnot, the mere fact that the built-in productivity apps are shameless dumbed-down rip-offs of Apple’s (without addressing functionality gaps or providing distinctive features) kind of sets the tone for the first generation of wannabe competitors.

  • Fraser Speirs On Battery Life

    Fraser Speirs:

    Simply put: if your device doesn’t last for 10 real-world hours of use, your device is no longer competitive in education.

    I think we can expand that to more than just education at this point.

  • dConstruct 2010 Talks

    I just downloaded these over the weekend to listen to on my morning and evening commutes. The first one was great this morning.

    [via Merlin Mann]

  • Need Help? Start Listening.

    You may or may not know this, but by day I am a commercial property manager, in a nutshell this means I collect rent, schedule maintenance, and listen to complaints. It is without fail that every working day I get the same type of call, someone has a problem and they need my help. This is not problem at all, in fact tjis is what I get paid to do, the problem is when the person calling won’t stop talking.

    For example, it was noon one day and I received a call from a tenant (let’s call him Steve) telling me that he never received a copy of his lease, as I promised to send him. I knew I had mailed it out, but patiently waited for Steve to finish the explanation of why I had lied to him. When Steve finished I explained that I had mailed it and it must have been lost. I told Steve I would not be able to send another copy until the next business day, but in the mean time I could just email him a PDF copy so that he could look for what he wanted to.

    At some point between when Steve stopped talking and before I started talking, Steve stopped listening. When I was done telling him the above he reiterated that he never got a copy, a copy that he really needed, despite the fact that I told him I would send him a copy. At this point Steve and I are both frustrated. Steve wants his copy 3-months ago and is pissed he doesn’t have it now. I am frustrated that the mail is making me look like a liar and that Steve is not listening to what I am saying. This banter between Steve and I ensues for another 5 minutes.

    I finally lose my cool and forcefully tell Steve his options, get an emailed copy now and a hard copy in a couple of days, or wait for the hard copy to come in a couple of days. Simple right? Then Steve tells me that the PDF is 29 pages and will take up way too much file space, not to mention that he does not want to pay to print out 29 pages. I ignore for the moment that he is basically telling me that he is too cheap to print it out and would rather I do so while paying for the postage, and tell him that he can view a PDF on the screen for free. ((Seriously I had to tell him this.))

    At the end of the conversation I get Steve’s email address and email him the lease and mail him the hard copy. The kicker: Steve has a Gmail address, meaning he really doesn’t have to worry about file storage.

    Time to Listen

    This type of conversation happens to me everyday. I listen to peoples problems and they don’t listen to the solutions that I offer. Had Steve listened to what I said the first time around we could have been off the phone with a satisfactory result in less than 5 minutes. Instead Steve took the approach that many before him had, he beat his chest to let me know who was in charge.

    The thing that Steve and so many other people don’t realize is if you are asking someone else for help, then it is because you need their help not the other way around. In fact Steve never asked for my help, he demanded it and when I started to help he ignored it.

    Take this Advice

    No matter your company size, your position, your age, your sex, your race – if you are asking someone for help you better be prepared to listen to them when they offer it. Once you stop listening, people will stop wanting to help you – when that happens you mine as well be beating your chest in the mirror.

  • QoTD: The Single, Most Important Secret to Success

    Running a small business is like flying an airplane. There’s not a single thing that keeps you in the air. It’s doing a lot of things right. But the truth is that whether it’s landing a plane or running your business, you can screw some things up and still be successful. –Mike Taber

  • The Macalope Weekly: Choices

    The Macalope:

    The horny one is confused, though. What exactly is Google’s path to “victory” if carriers can make phones that exclusively use Bing?

    I couldn’t agree more. Be sure to read the last bit about Acer, pure gold.

  • The Microsoft Fake Funeral for iPhones and Blackberries

    I don’t get it, where was Android they are clearly a bigger threat than RIM. Why are they being so cocky when they have yet to prove anything. This may go down has a huge embarrassment for Microsoft next year, but I tend to think they will be embarrassed by this long before then.

  • Here’s a Reason to Switch to a Mac

    Stefan Worthmuller talking about DLL hell on Windows:

    Installers of programs overwrote existing versions of DLLs, leading to the first iteration of DLL-Hell: Installing an application could possibly break other applications (because they were build for a different “version” of the DLL). And even worse, uninstalling an application could remove some DLLs that other applications depended on. Most applications installed their DLLs in the system directory (and many still do) in hope to share them with other programs but there was no way to keep two different versions of a DLL in the system folder as the file name usually remained unchanged.

  • Sean Parker

    David Kirkpatrick talking about Parker’s youth:

    The teenager had been sitting in the family den, all night, drilling deeply into the bowels of a Fortune 500 company, which he refuses to name. Back then he had a hobby, he says, of hacking into different sorts of organizations, keeping a file of .com, .edu, .mil, and .gov Internet domains he had penetrated in various countries around the world. His goal was to break into one of each type in a laundry list of countries. He claims that once inside he usually alerted the system administrator—from his or her own e-mail—to vulnerabilities he had discovered.

    A great read.

    [via I am pretty sure I saw this in John Gruber’s Starred Instapaper items. Just add him as ‘gruber’ on Instapaper.]

  • Twitter for iPad – Extended Look

    There has been a lot of mixed feelings about the new Twitter for iPad app, and I have really neglected to write anything because I didn’t really know where I stood until now. Listening to the latest episode of The Talk Show with Dan Benjamin and John Gruber I really started to become annoyed with how they were talking about Twitter for the iPad (I completely agree about their thoughts on Tweetie for Mac).

    The UI

    Yes, the UI is nothing short of different bordering on crazy. When I first started using it (in landscape mode) I was really annoyed that the right 2 inches of the screen is nothingness. Then I clicked on a tweet and it all made sense, a sliding columnar view – OK I get it. Much like Instapaper and Kindle or iBooks, Twitter for iPad really shines in Portrait orientation.

    What irks many people is that the sliding interface seems to odd, making the entire app feel wrong. There is also much criticism over the new tweet field, Milind Alvares nails the problem:

    My only problem with the compose window UI, is the freakin thing is so narrow, you can hardly type something without it overflowing from the view. Not just that. The actions are floating inside the window, so if you’ve typed something long, you can’t see the character count unless you scroll to the bottom. There’s no reason that compose window needs to be so narrow, let along have the actions floating at the bottom. I hope this is fixed in the next release.

    I agree and so do many others, but this is version 1, this is expected to have a few annoyances. Overall I think the UI is far better than every other Twitter app that the iPad has seen to date. If you are a multiple account user you will love it too, you don’t have to back out of the tweet stream to switch accounts, it is always sitting on the left side to flip between everything.

    The Best an iPad can get.

    Twitter for iPad is without a doubt the best Twitter client available on the iPad ((Yes I have used Twitterrific, and no it is not that great.)) I have several Twitter accounts but only two of which I regularly check (@benjaminbrooks and @brooksreview) with all the others I have tried this was a pain. Twitter for iPad fits perfectly with how I use Twitter and perhaps that is the real crux of the issue. Twitter for iPad is not as universal as the iPhone version is, meaning it is not for everyone.

    One Major Annoyance

    One thing that I find beyond annoying is the way that Twitter for iPad opens TwitPic (among other photo sharing options) pictures. I don’t need to see the entire damn website, just load the picture like almost all the other Twitter clients do. This is beyond annoying to me.

    Version 1

    In the end it is pertinent to remember this is the first app that Twitter has released for the iPad – which excites me. If this is how much they can do on their first try, then there is no telling just what they will be able to do with more time and feedback.

  • Daring Fireball-Style Linked List Plugin for WordPress

    I had been using the plugin that Shawn mentions as well, I just switched the blog to this new plugin as it is much nicer. Also there may be some hiccups as I get adapted to it, so bear with me.

    Also please note that in the RSS feed now when you see the Infinity symbol ∞ at the end of a post that is the permalink, and when you see it before the title of the post that means it is not a linked list post.

  • Nokia Makes The Same Mistake Again: Hires A Manager, Not A Product Visionary

    Dan Frommer on Nokia’s new CEO:

    Sounds like another suit, and not the dreamer that Nokia needs to beat Apple and Google.

  • OmniFocus: Why You Don’t Need All 3 Versions

    Earlier this week something odd happened, my Father came to me asking if he should pick Things or OmniFocus for task management. Naturally I recommended OmniFocus, but I quickly warned him to take price into consideration. If you were to buy the Mac client, iPhone app and iPad app of OmniFocus you would spend a grand total of $139.97, before any of your local taxes. That is no small chunk of change.

    That’s when the wild notion hit me; maybe you don’t really need to buy all three versions. I already knew that I could get by with just one version of OmniFocus, I have done it in the past when on vacation, but what I really wanted to know is how I use each version of OmniFocus. To figure that out I decided to pay very close attention to what I do in each version over the past 3 days, what I found out surprised me a bit.

    OmniFocus for Mac

    The Mac version costs a whopping $79.99, so this is the easiest one to save some real money on. What I found is that I use the quick entry panel the most out of all the other features on the Mac version, I use Quick Entry about 3-4 times during the day. The rest of the time I only used to OmniFocus for the Mac to reschedule tasks.

    Honestly over the past three days I have only used the Mac version of OmniFocus to entry a few tasks and reschedule a few tasks, nothing else. This is astounding to me, given that it was just under a year ago that I spent at least an hour a day using the program.

    OmniFocus for iPhone

    The iPhone version comes in at a high price (for an iPhone app) of $19.99 and is the cheapest of all three. Being around now since just shortly after Apple allowed 3rd party apps I have gotten quite used to using OmniFocus for the iPhone.

    Over the past three days my usage has been quite a bit on the iPhone. The two main things I do with the iPhone version are: quick entry of new action items, and viewing of what I need to do. The iPhone in GTD terms is my ubiquitous capture tool, it is where 9/10 times I will input actions items that are on my mind. Due to this my iPhone with OmniFocus has become a very valuable tool in my proverbial tool bag.

    OmniFocus for iPad

    Weighing in at $39.99 for the app, OmniFocus again pushes the upper echelon ((What a fun word to say.)) for iPad app pricing. Over three days of monitoring I have found that I use the iPad version to do the following things: view what needs to be done, check off completed items, filter items added to the inbox (set the context, project and due date), organize the rest of my actions.

    In other words out of all three of the apps I use the iPad app the most. As I have mentioned before I really love the forecast view that the iPad app offers, it is by far the best way to see what you need to do and when they need to be done. More than that the way the new action window / editing actions window is setup is by far the best and easiest way to assign contexts, projects and due dates to your actions items.

    Assigning this data to actions is by far faster on the Mac, but once I get to work I usually won’t process new actions items. I usually will only process actions items when I wake up, and at night before I go to bed, making the iPad app even more of an optimal experience even if it takes a bit longer to accomplish.

    Save Yourself $99

    If like many people out there right now you are trying to figure out if OmniFocus is right for you, save yourself $99.98 and just buy the iPad app to begin with. You can do everything you can on all the other versions and it is by far the best version of OmniFocus. If after a bit you find that you have really taken to OmniFocus (and you will) go get the iPhone app for another $19.99. ((Don’t worry OmniFocus will sync without the Mac client in the mix.))

    At this point I know that I could get by without the Mac app. Not everyone has all three devices, but if you do I don’t see a compelling reason right now to buy the Mac version of OmniFocus. Unless of course you have $79.99 kicking around that you want to part with.

  • HDR Video

    Now this is very neat, I could see this being a new effect in movies.

  • Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac

    I use it everyday, and every update is faster and better than the last.

  • MG Siegler on the Openess of Android

    I thought the Randy Savage videos I found today were awesome, then I read this from MG Siegler about Android being open:

    Instead, open is proving to mean that the carriers can choose what they want to do with Android.

    and:

    What happens when Verizon won’t update your phone to the latest greatest Android software — not because they can’t, but because they want you to upgrade to a new piece of hardware and sign the new two-year agreement that comes along with it? The game remains the same.

    and lastly:

    “Open” is great until you have to define it or defend it. I’m not sure Google can continue to do either in this situation.

  • Where is the White iPhone 4?

    John Gruber making observations about Apple’s iPod event from last week:

    THE WHITE IPHONE 4

    Not even mentioned, let alone shipped. Embarrassing.

    I had forgotten about this, but yeah that does suck (I really wanted a white one).