Month: March 2011

Liz Dwyer: >The desire for reader feedback keeps the students excited about wanting to write more posts, and they’re eager to improve their writing skills for their readers’ benefit. “They now have a worldwide forum instead of an audience of one,” Christens said, noting that the students “see themselves as writers—real writers.” This is awesome.

Hugh Sissling shares how he organizes his iPad homescreen and — well — it is the polar opposite of what I do.

Walt Mossberg on Firefox 4: >Though Mozilla doesn’t say so, I believe one reason for the revamp is to try to win back the hearts and minds of those techies and influential users who shun IE and once swore by Firefox. I’m guessing that those users aren’t going back full time. Firefox has become quite […]

More than a few of you asked for my iOS wallpapers, here they are: – [iPhone](https://f3a98a5aca88d28ed629-2f664c0697d743fb9a738111ab4002bd.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/iPhone-wallpaper.jpg) – [iPad](https://f3a98a5aca88d28ed629-2f664c0697d743fb9a738111ab4002bd.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/iPad-wallpaper.jpg) Enjoy.

Reader Nikolay Andreev emailed in this morning to shoot me a link to his post about organizing your iPhone homescreen — he also asked if I would share my tips. After taking a look at his post I thought I would share my thoughts on how to organize and arrange your homescreen icons for any […]

From the Twitter blog: >Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the […]

John Oates: >Microsoft has made a formal complaint against Google to the European Commission accusing the search and advertising giant of using various illegal methods to dominate the European search market. Something comes to mind about throwing rocks and glass houses…

“So don’t pretend to know everything. That’s just dumb.” — James Shelley

Neven Mrgan commenting on icons and specifically app names that get truncated on the homescreens of iOS users: >I understand that iOS icon-label limits are frustrating, but please, please, pick a name that fits! This truncated nonsense looks super unprofessional. Agreed.

This [coverage map](http://network4g.verizonwireless.com/pdf/VZW_4G_LTE_Coverage_Map.pdf) of ‘4G’ LTE coverage from Verizon says it all. Ignore all the red, that’s just 3G coverage. Look at the yellow circles with the green outline — those are the **current** 4G coverage spots ((Truly they are spots, not areas.)) . All those green stars you see are slated for 2011 — […]

Fraser Speirs on using the iPad as a digital whiteboard: >So, what does iPad + Penultimate + AluPen get you? It gets you a digital whiteboard with infinite pages and undo. The beauty of this is that you get to keep every whiteboard you draw during the lesson. You can flip between whiteboards and go […]

About 72 hours ago I decided that I was going to start publishing blog posts directly from TextMate instead of writing in TextMate and posting with MarsEdit (more on this in a bit). ((Don’t worry I still love MarsEdit.)) This did present a problem for me though, it would be nearly impossible to post linked […]

You know what I want? A 14″ laptop with not one, but two screens — oh yeah and get rid of that silly keyboard. Clearly carrying this around would be better than an iPad **or** a laptop. Who wants this? This is one of those devices that looks really cool in movies, but sucks in […]

“If you’re working with a spreadsheet or a thread of correspondence or a set of data, I’m not sure you’re doing your best work if you’re doing it on an iPhone.” — Seth Godin

Charlie Sorrel, reporting on a leaked document that says the PlayBook (RIM’s upcoming tablet) will ship without a basic email, messaging or contact app on the device, adds this nugget: >You can almost smell the desperation that has crept into RIM ever since the iPhone arrived on the scene. The smell is getting pretty strong […]

“‘Cause that’s the first thing [people] ask you: ‘What’s your e-mail address?’ So now, that makes me feel that I’m part of something–and then I feel that I can see and do more things now than I did before, because I didn’t have it a computer.” — David Worthington’s Mother That quote is from his […]

Camera+ came out with a new update (version 2.2) that boasts a new ‘filter’ called Clarity. Typically when you see the words ‘clarity’ or ‘definition’ in photo editing software it means that it will be adjusting the micro-contrasts. Basically it is going to make your shots look a little sharper and give them some more […]

Following up on his work to make his Slugger+ plugin work with iOS WordPress apps so that you can set the ‘slug’ field in WordPress — Justin Blanton made another plugin that allows you to set a custom field using the same framework. This is absolutely amazing — I can’t tell you how much of […]

Peter Merholz on the NYT paywall and pricing structure in general: If you look at the companies that offer the most confusing pricing plans (telcos, health insurance providers, most major airlines), they are also the companies that deliver the poorest customer experience. This is not a coincidence. These are companies whose success is built on […]

Have you noticed how absolutely stupid some iOS app names are? I really mean this — just calling your app “InstaX” doesn’t mean it is as good or as cool as the original. ((Which would be Instapaper.)) When I am browsing the App Store you have two chances to catch my attention: 1. With your […]