Month: April 2011

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  • Ripping Open a Link-Bait Fool

    I have been told that people don’t think I should link to obvious link bait posts, I can see why. Instead of causing a direct link, how about I provide [this link](http://swizec.com/blog/ubuntu-better-for-app-management-than-apple/swizec/1672) to the post and we go on to dissecting this load of drivel. Some guy that goes by the handle “Swizec” posted an […]

  • Questions for RIM’s CEOs

    Eric Jackson: >The features you touted last night for your new phones were better battery life, a better browser, and better graphics for gaming. Is someone going to buy a BlackBerry over an iPhone or Android phone because of your improved browser? Is that what has been holding them back? Also, for your games: I […]

  • Push Ads in Android

    Martin Adamek: >What has happened? In the last update of the app I introduced new ads provided by AirPush. These ads are not visible as part of the app, instead they appear in notification bar. They will appear max once a day and are easily cancelable (as any kind of notification). This update has started […]

  • Google’s Crowdsourced Traffic Database

    Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Maps back in 2009: >It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody. That is significantly more than zero effort — especially for […]

  • Associative Fallacy

    Ethan Kaplan: >Chasing business models in one media with business models of fundamentally different media is a recipe for disaster. I see this happening continually with newspapers and magazines and the iPad, and I see it happening with the music subscription services. It’s applying an associative fallacy to things that are disparate, and history is […]

  • Slow Time

    37signals (I believe this is excerpted from a Jason Fried interview): >Slow time is “Maybe it takes two or three days to have this conversation. And we do it over periods of 15 minutes here, two minutes there, four minutes there.” And that’s fine. It doesn’t need to happen all at once. Unless it’s really, […]

  • Speculating on Apple’s Traffic Database

    Apple said this in the [iPhone location database Q&A](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html): >Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years. The above could mean a lot of different things, a lot of different stupid things such […]

  • On the White iPhone Thickness Crap

    Dr. Drang: >Not only is there going to be variation from one phone to another, there’ll be variation from place to place on the same phone. If someone does go out a measure a few white iPhones and finds them to be several (not just a few) thousandths of an inch thicker than black iPhones, […]

  • Drew Houston on Usability

    Drew Houston the cofounder and CEO of Dropbox: >Relatively early on we brought a handful of people off the street (literally) for our first round of usability tests. Most of them had trouble even getting through the installer: for example, zero of the five people noticed that we had a tray icon (our most important […]

  • Weather.cgi

    [Dr. Drang](http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/04/weather-or-not/) whipped up a neat little python script that you can place on a web server to grab weather info in mobile Safari (and Safari for that matter). I forked the project over on GitHub and styled the layout a bit. Check out the demo [here](http://b3nbrooks.com/cgi-bin/weather.cgi). ((Be sure to add it to your homescreen […]

  • Speaking of Weather

    WeatherSpark: > WeatherSpark is a new type of weather website, with interactive weather graphs that allow you to pan and zoom through the entire history of any weather station on earth. This is Flash only, but that aside it is a massive amount of data they give you. Not my thing, but pretty information heavy. […]

  • 5AM Wake Up Call

    Elle Luna: >It was 5:30AM, my goals were completed, and I didn’t need to leave for work for another 3 hours.  >This was the instant that my experiment was a success. Having 3 hours in the morning to do nothing. Planning for nothing. Making time out of my day to have just three hours to […]

  • “It’s Not What Your Software Does, It’s What People Do With Your Software””

    Greg DeVore: >The creators of Garageband for iPad didn’t care about what their software could do. They cared about what people could do with their software. The end result of which is smiles. Lots of smiles. Go ahead and try not to smile when the iPad, or other software, does something that you find “magical”.

  • Quote of the Day: Marco Arment

    “But since they had never used those features, they didn’t know how much they wanted them.” — Marco Arment Marco is talking about why he pulled the free version of Instapaper, but I think the above quote applies to so much in life. Like food, until you try it you have no idea how much […]

  • The Phones Know Too Much

    MG Siegler: >Let’s face it, our phones have a lot of potentially personal information about us on them beyond just location. That’s why it really sucks when we lose them or they’re stolen. And just imagine when these devices all have NFC chips in them for easy payments. That’s really going to suck. I’m sure […]

  • Answering Reader Questions About My MacBook Air

    Reader Brendon Cromwell (among many others) writes in to ask about my MacBook Air: >How is it holding up for you in your daily routine? What’s your feel for how long you think it will hold up under the increasing software requirements? >I’m going back and forth between a 128GB MacBook Air (& replacing my […]

  • How Apple Updates Its Location Database

    In this July 12th, 2010 letter to Edward Markey and Joe barton, Apple details how and why it collects the user data to update its location database. From reading this it seems that Apple only grabs this anonymized data under two conditions: 1. You are requesting your location. At this point Apple grabs any updated […]

  • Apple’s Response to the iPhone Location Data

    Apple via Press Release: >This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we […]

  • iPhone Weather App Follow-Up

    A few follow-up points on the iPhone [weather app round-up](http://brooksreview.net/2011/04/weather/) that I did. ### The Weather ### I left out that you can, in fact, create custom views in this app. The problem is still that those custom views still don’t work right for me and just adds another tab that you have to switch […]

  • PlayStation Network Breach

    The PlayStation Blog: >Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase […]