The Brooks Review

Month: February 2011

  • TUAW Doesn’t Get It

    Victor Agreda, Jr writing on Mac OS X Lion’s NDA:

    It’s become painfully clear that Apple wants all of us to poke and prod and test and above all write, record and post about Lion.

    I am assuming that they are referring to this, from Apple’s developer website:

    In case you can’t read that, this is what the text reads:

    “Pre-release software, including information about pre-release software, is Apple Confidential Information and is subject to the terms of your Mac Developer Program License Agreement. Unauthorized distribution or disclosure of Apple Confidential Information is prohibited.”

    So I ask TUAW, what about the above statement makes it painfully clear to you that Apple wants this information disclosed?

    I can tell you that if someone comes by and steals $1 from me, I am not going to report it to the Police — why? Well, because reporting a $1 theft to the cops really isn’t worth my time, nor is reporting a $100 theft — but I still don’t want anyone taking my money. Perhaps it is not that Apple wants someone to break the NDA, but that it isn’t worth their time to yank access and send out C&Ds to all these websites.

    Agreda again:

    So from here on we’re going to ignore the NDA like every other Mac news outlet on the internet.

    Cool, because I remember when all the Verizon iPhone testers broke their NDAs and when the original iPhone testers broke their NDAs too. ((Actually that didn’t happen.))

    I am not saying you shouldn’t break the NDA — I don’t care — but don’t rationalize breaking this agreement by claiming that Apple clearly wants you to break the agreement.

  • The Very Rich Indie Writer

    A fantastic look at how a large group of previously unknown writers are striking it big by solely publishing with the Kindle store. The 100,000 sales a month mark set by Hocking isn’t likely, but there is a huge group hovering around 2,500 a month — that is enough to earn a living off of I would guess. ((I figure the publisher nets $3 after Amazon’s cut on average for $7,500 a month.))

  • New In-Game Advertising Model

    Christopher Mims on Tap Me’s new game advertising model:

    So imagine your in-game avatar is about to start its race across the game world. Want a speed boost? OK, here’s one for free — but it’s got the Nike logo plastered across it. Want the ability to fly? Why not let Red Bull give you wings? It’s not hard to see how brand advertising could integrate with a mobile game.

    That is rather clever.

  • Answering Reader Email: MacBook Pros and Airs

    I try to make an effort to answer all email that comes in (I will never get a response to everything though) and this email from Tyler Guidry stands out as one that I thought my response was best shared with all my readers. Here’s Tyler’s email:

    […]
    You did a great write up on the MPA 13 end of last year and was wondering what if anything would get you to move back to a MBP.

    I have been nursing a MBP 13 (Mid 2009) and holding out since last summer waiting for MBP line to refresh. I really had to restrain myself especially after the MPA review you did. I had been holding out for 1440 res on the new MBP 13 and was severely disappointed. Seriously, the 11.6 MPA has higher resolution than the 13 MBP.

    Any thoughts on why the 13 MBP did not get bumped resolution? And does the 13 MPA still feel like a solid primary machine 120 days in?

    There are only two ways that I would move back to a MacBook Pro:

    1. My computing changes in such a way that I would need more processing power.
    2. The MacBook Pros become lighter weight enough that the gap between the Air and Pro is much closer.

    Honestly though, I will probably always stay with a MacBook Air and instead choose a desktop (Mac Pro) to stay at home if I ever truly needed more processing power. I just don’t ever want to have to lug around all the weight that comes with a MacBook Pro.

    Which brings me to Tyler’s last question — 120 days in I think the MacBook Air maybe the best Mac that I have ever owned, even better than the fabled 12” Powerbook G4. The size, weight, and performance are all just perfect for me. Don’t even get me started on the awesome battery life.

    The 13” MacBook Pro

    I too was surprised that the 13” Pro didn’t get a resolution bump to make it on par with what the Air has — makes very little sense. I honestly think that this might be the beginning of the end for the 13” MacBook Pro line.

    If you believe that the Air line truly is the roadmap that Apple will follow then you believe the following:

    1. All portables are getting thinner.
    2. Optical discs are dead.
    3. SSD or bust.
    4. Battery life, lots of battery life.

    So if you take the current 13” MacBook Pro, remove the superdrive, grab an SSD, jam more battery in, and make the entire package smaller — you basically end up with a faster version of the 13” Air.

    Or look at it this way: once the Pro line ditches optical drives, what will be the difference between the 13” Air and the 13” Pro? Not much. I wouldn’t think Apple would keep two different notebooks that are essentially the same (price, and performance being the main differences). I just don’t see Apple trying to sell the Air line and the Pro line with the differences being computing speed. One will have to die, so will it be the 13” Air or 13” Pro? Doesn’t matter, they will be the same at that point.

  • Quote of the Day: MG Siegler

    “Just like the floppy disk before it, the optical disc will fade into irrelevance. And now you see why Apple has never included a Blu-ray drive in any of their machines.”

  • The B&B Podcast – A Technology Talk Show

    Halfway into January Shawn Blanc and I had an idea to start a technology talk show, we both quickly began learning about podcasting and getting some sweet high-quality microphones. During all this we recorded practices episodes, until a few weeks ago we kept things hush-hush. A few weeks ago we teased our Twitter followers with an unofficial first episode that we could also use to submit to iTunes and now we are launching full scale.

    Yesterday we pushed our first episode of The B&B Podcast and you can go check it out here and you can subscribe in iTunes here.

    If you like what you hear please leave a rating and/or reviews in iTunes. Thanks!

    [Updated: 2.28.11 at 2:10 PM]

    Shawn posted a little bit about the name “The B&B Podcast”. Also we are looking really good in iTunes right now, thanks to everyone who has rated the podcast!

    Lastly, I dig the logo and I know you do too — big thanks to Shawn for designing that, looks fantastic.

  • How To Turn A Laser Into A Tractor Beam [Not Ready for the Enterprise Yet]

    The Technology Review:

    If the scattering angle is just right, the total momentum in the direction of propagation can be negative, meaning the particle is pulled back towards the source and the light becomes a tractor beam.

    I don’t know what I want more now: a laser that cuts through walls or a tractor beam. Nah, who am I kidding — I want the cutting laser.

  • Quick Takes on Five Apps No. Two

    Last week was the first installment of the ‘Quick Takes on Five Apps’ posts that I plan on doing weekly — if you missed that be sure to go take a look at it. Here is the second installment.

    Thermo (iPhone)

    Sometimes all you need to know is the temperature outside based on where you are right now — that is exactly what Thermo is for. You can get it for free and upgrade in-app to a version with no ads (recommended). This app is not only gorgeous, but is pretty handy too — it is vying for a spot on my homescreen right now. Every time I run out of the house I like to know if I am going to need a jacket or not, Thermo is the perfect app for knowing that information. Love it. My favorite part is that the entire look of the app changes when the temperature drops below freezing — instead of being ‘normal’ red looking mercury, the app becomes icy and blue — what a great touch.

    What Cocktail? (iPhone)

    If you ever have to order a drink, then you probably could use this app. Also if you love seeing gorgeous design, then you really won’t want to miss this app. This is a simple app that tells you what to drink based on a simple input from you (your mood). I love that not only does it tell you a cocktail (or sometimes water/coffee), but that it also tells you a bit about the drink. The utility of this app is limited and I rarely use it — but it is truly a beautiful app.

    MLB At Bat 2011 (iPhone and iPad)

    If you are a baseball fan then you are sure to love this. Not cheap at $14.99 for each device — each season — MLB At Bat has been a staple on my homescreen since the app debuted. Live gameday information, live scores, live radio broadcasts for both the home and away team. You get videos of top plays, condensed game replays and if you subscribe to MLB.tv (waste of money) you can watch the game live. This is a great app, with a steep price. Personally I use it on my iPad to ‘watch’ Mariners games all season long.

    WebKit Nightly Builds (Mac/Windows)

    Chrome 10 was damned fast for me, but too limited. Going back to Safari left me with a yearning for more speed and the WebKit nightly’s have proven to be a touch faster. They are not as fast as Chrome 10 and can be very glitchy at times, but I rather like using them.

    Sound Studio (Mac)

    I didn’t know a thing about audio editing, but when I needed to do some no program came more highly recommended to me than Sound Studio. I have been using it for a month or so now and I really like it. Dead simple to use and looks great. Most importantly I can do what I need to do without getting hung up trying to find things in the app. The more I use it and get to know the app — the more I enjoy it.

  • The Brooks Review in the Kindle Store

    If you are interested in getting TBR’s article only feed pushed directly to your Kindle check then this is for you. Unfortunately I don’t decide the pricing and Amazon has chosen $1.99 a month for the service. Remember this is for the articles only feed, so you won’t be bombarded with linked list items.

  • “Apple gets back to basics in Mac OS X Lion”

    David Chartier on Lion:

    Just like switching between apps on an iPad or iPhone, or even restarting the device, Resume is Lion’s official support for third-party Mac apps to pick up right where they left off, even after a restart. That’s not merely a good idea in iOS, it’s just a good idea for any reasonably complex computing device—especially one that is designed to multitask and juggle many apps and open windows with ease.

    That really is a killer feature — can’t wait to see Windows try and implement that one.

  • DropPhox

    I have been wanting something like this for a while: take a picture and have it instantly uploaded to DropBox. It is a great little app with a very specific user in mind: me.

  • Why Is Scrolling Backwards In OS X Lion?

    Leander Kahney:

    Confused? You will be. It undoes years of muscle memory. So why would Apple do this?

    Confused the heck out of me — I had to turn it off. But I do know they did this for those who are confused as to why iOS and Mac OS scroll differently.

  • 2011 MacBook Pro – CPU crunch

    Bare Feats:

    The fastest 2011 13″ MacBook Pro runs faster than the fastest 2010 17″ MacBook Pro.

    Wow and the new 17″ is really fast, impressive speed bumps.

  • MLB.com At Bat 11

    It’s baseball season and that means that one of the best iOS apps is back: MLB at Bat ’11. I bought it for both the iPad and iPhone and I have to say it is just as good as ever.

    Go M’s

  • Moving iTunes Backup Folder

    Yesterday I was cleaning off my HD getting ready to partition it so that I could install the Lion beta. At the time I had 70 GB free and I was a little bummed that my Lion partition was going to need to be small. I started using the excellent DaisyDisk tool to analyze what was eating all of my free space and found a culprit buried deep inside (not really) the Application Support folder.

    This folder was taking an amazing 50GB of space.

    The folder is in your user > Library > Application Support > MobileSync folder and is called ‘Backup’. I am wary of deleting any folder with the title ‘Backup’ and some research on DuckDuckGo and Twitter turned up that this is the folder iTunes uses to store iPhone backups. Mine is so large because of all the iOS beta builds that I use. I ended up deleting a bunch of the old backups (you can read the Info.plist file to see what device and sync date the file is for), but I still had over 8 GB of data in the folder.

    I don’t keep my iTunes library on my Mac, I keep it on an external drive, which means that when I sync I need to be plugged into that drive to begin with. So I wanted to move the Backup folder off of my Mac and onto that drive — luckily you can do this with a simple symbolic link and the entire operation is detailed here.

    If you are low on space I recommend taking a look at this — might save you a few GBs.

    [Updated: 2.25.11 at 10:03 AM]

    You can also delete these backups in your iTunes prefs, but I recommend getting the folder off your Mac if you can.

  • OS X Lion Adds TRIM

    TRIM support is key to the long-term viability of SSD based storage, glad to see that it has been added.

  • [PSA] Girl Scout Cookies

    I got lucky on Sunday and a friend of my wife’s hooked us up with a lot of Girl Scout cookies (we paid). Here’s the thing: I bought seven boxes of Thin Mints — why? Because Thin Mints are clearly the best, I don’t care what you think.

    The Girl Scouts should be showing up at a location near you soon and I highly recommend that you buy copious amounts of their cookies.

    A Side Note for Those in Seattle

    Say its four months from now and you really would like a Thin Mint fix, if you are in Seattle you can get Thin Mints year round — so long as you don’t mind them mixed with delicious mint ice cream. It’s called Scout Mint and you can get it here.

  • I Feel the NEED, The Need for Speed

    How do you get users to adopt a piece of software that is ugly and unintuitive? You make it stupidly fast.

    That’s exactly what Google has done with Chrome 10. When the beta was announced, I read up and saw what seemed to be unreal benchmarks for the javascript speed. Since removing Flash from my Mac (thus removing it from Safari) I have kept an up-to-date version of Chrome for accessing the rare Flash site and I decided to see if I could ‘switch’ to the new Chrome 10.

    I am happy to say that Chrome 10 is much faster than Safari, but still ugly as sin and a touch unpolished in many facets. It’s not just the ugliness factor of Chrome that I find troubling, there are some very real tradeoffs that I faced in moving from Safari to Chrome.

    The UI

    I don’t love the way Safari looks, but I do like that it feels right on Mac OS X. Chrome though just looks out of place — not in the way that a ported Windows app looks, but it very much is not like the “others”. Here are the main gripes that I have with the UI:

    • Tabs at the top. I didn’t like it when the beta versions of Safari did this and I still don’t care for it in Chrome.
    • No toolbar customization. I can’t remove the back/forward and refresh buttons, even though I never click them. Likewise I can’t remove the icons that are added when I install a new extension — I don’t know what that crap is.
    • The bookmarks bar is fine, except that it insists on showing a small icon next to the name. This is probably fine for ‘normal’ users, but I have a ton of folders and bookmarklets in the bookmarks bar — meaning I see white paper icons next to the bookmarklets and goofy outdated blue folder icons for all the folders. ((Outdated in the sense that I hate the default OS X folder icon.))

    Again, for the most part these are minor annoyances, ones that I can work around and eventually learn to live with.

    Speed

    The difference in speed is unreal. It is without a doubt leaps and bounds faster than Safari in practical use. Visiting sites that utilize Typekit (like this blog) will really show you the difference — they just load faster. What really won me over though was the speed that Chrome loads my Mint stats. Those panes used to take a good while to load up in Safari, now they just snap into place — it’s surreal.

    It doesn’t matter to me if things actually are faster, or if the speed is just perceived (meaning Google is using visual tricks to make it appear to load sites faster) all I know is that everything feels faster. If you don’t believe me try it for yourself because it is noticeable right away.

    H.264

    I had forgotten that Google decided to no longer support HTML5 + H.264 as a standard. I have enabled a Flash blocking plugin for Chrome, and I really do miss all the nice smooth video playback that I got out of Safari. This is the biggest trouble spot for me so far: how do I playback video smoothly without overheating my Air? It was no problem in Safari because 99% of the time I could watch beautiful HTML5 delivered media, but Chrome throws a wrench in this process.

    So now where I used to reserve Chrome for Flash playback — I now reserve Safari for general video playback. A rather silly setup.

    Tab Behavior

    One of the greatest things that I found in Chrome (besides the speed) is that when you have multiple tabs open you can open another and when you close the new tab you are taken back to the last tab you were viewing. This is incredibly neat and very helpful when you have a bunch of stuff open. Safari does not do this and has always been a point of contention for me — I used to prefer to open a new window at times so I didn’t “lose” the tab I was reading.

    Downloads Bar

    A downloads window makes seeing downloads easy, as does a progress bar. A huge bar across the bottom of the screen, or a separate tab to view downloads, is just silly feeling. Further a dial like indicator of download progress is unhelpful. I also don’t like the way a single bit of data is displayed on the downloads page — hate it in fact.

    I don’t download a ton, but that little arrow animation that appears when you start a download isn’t helping anyone. I mean a huge bar already appears at the bottom of the screen — why do you need both?

    Opening Bookmark Folders

    This is a feature I use in Safari all the time — click on a bookmarks folder in the bookmarks bar and open all the links in tabs. I love doing that first thing in the morning to check in on a bunch of sites before I dive into email. Chrome doesn’t do this as far as I can tell — that presents a large annoyance to me every morning.

    [Updated: 2.25.11 at 6:37 AM] I am told that right clicking the folder icon will allow me to do this. So you can strike this one.

    Surprisingly, you can change the default search engine from Google to whatever you want it to be (unlike how Safari restricts the options). For me that meant changing from Google to the excellent and growing DuckDuckGo search engine — I am loving this feature.

    Extensions

    Chrome may have had extensions long before Safari, but Safari has better extensions. There were a ton of them that I couldn’t find to replace simple extensions I have for Safari.

    Result

    By the time you read this I will have switched back to Safari. I really like Chrome 10 and the speed it brings, but it still is not quite there. Don’t let the ‘10’ version number fool you, because Chrome is just now starting to feel like a 1.0 version. This is endemic to the way that Google operates, luckily version 15 is probably just around the corner.

    The bottom line is that while Chrome may load things much faster than Safari — I work much slower in Chrome and that means Safari overall is still faster for me.

  • Spotting Influencers in Big Companies

    Lauren Cox reporting a on new business tool for analyzing your internal communications network:

    Johnson says Syndio Social also works with companies undergoing mergers and acquisitions. “It’s making sure the right folks who hold things together aren’t fired in the merger,” he says. “If you have a company that has three people who tie things together, even if they aren’t the highest performers in numbers, you want to make sure they stay.”

    Pretty great tool if it works.

  • CrunchGear’s Motorola Xoom Review

    John Biggs:

    Is it – or will it be – the best Honeycomb tablet out there? I doubt it, but Motorola has offered a strong showing out of the gate and I was very impressed at the build quality and attention to detail, at least when it came to UI and physical design.

    From what I have seen that sounds like a pretty accurate summation. I found this but odd though:

    Battery life is about 18-20 hours on one charge although your mileage may vary.

    Especially when Engadget says they only got about 8 hours and 20 minutes.

    Though 18-20 hours of battery life would be killer — something tells me that CrunchGear is a little (a lot really) off.