The Brooks Review

Month: October 2011

  • Dark Sky – Weather Prediction, Reinvented

    Adam Grossman and Jack Turner:

    >We’ve made the best fucking weather animation you’ve ever seen.

    It’s on Kickstarter and it’s not just *another* weather app — that’s good.

    Backed.

  • Airlines Are Trying to Cut Boarding Times on Planes

    Jad Mouawad:
    >One airline did figure out a way to sharply cut boarding time. Spirit Airlines found that passengers got to their seats much more rapidly once it started charging $20 to $40 per carry-on bag. More passengers checked their bags. Celebrating one year of “stress-free boarding” this summer, Spirit said its policy cut boarding time by six minutes on average.

    That’s a good policy. It’s not just the boarding times that drive me nuts, but the deplaning times are horrendous. Too many people futzing around trying to carry on and off bags that should have been checked.

    My idea: enforce the size limits for carry-ons strictly.

  • Free and Integrated

    Federico Viticci commenting on the [WhatsApp numbers](https://brooksreview.net/2011/10/whatsapp/):

    >Free, native and integrated beats “free and third-party” any time for the majority of users when it comes to iOS-to-iOS communication. And it’s not like iOS-to-iOS messaging is a rare scenario nowadays, with over 250 million iOS devices out there and quite possibly a large percentage of them being iOS 5-enabled (iOS 5 runs on the older iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3rd and 4th generation). iMessage works on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It’s free and supports text and media.

    You also have to remember that iOS users (on average) download a lot more apps than other users on other platforms — meaning I would guess the majority of Whatsapp users are iOS users.

  • Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet Wins 2011 Tablet World Series

    Avram Piltch, LAPTOP Online Editorial Director, on the winner of the “Tablet World Series”:
    >With strong features like a scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass display, support for enterprise-level security software / encryption, and an optional active stylus, the ThinkPad Tablet simply dominated the game this weekend. Users were undoubtedly also attracted by the ThinkPad Tablet’s productivity-centric software, including its note-taking app and file manager. Full-size USB ports and SD card slots also helped the ThinkPad tablet’s case.

    The iPad 2 didn’t make it through the first round, likely due to that all important lack of an optional stylus. This makes me wonder just how damned good that note-taking app is that the Lenovo is sporting — must be amazing.

  • WhatsApp Users Now Send Over One Billion Messages a Day

    Drew Olanoff:
    >According to a blog post from Messaging app WhatsApp, the company is now getting over one billion messages sent using its platform a day.

    That’s a lot. My wife uses this app to communicate with her cousin while she is studying abroad and said that she likes it for the purpose it serves.

    I have to think though, despite the cross platform nature of the app, that iMessage will essentially dominate this market. I can’t imagine that a year from now, text message replacement apps, will have substantial enough use.

  • Kinect for Windows Coming in Early 2012

    Paul Thorrott responding to Microsoft’s concept video of what Kinect for Windows *could* be:
    >This is cute and everything, but unrealistic: People will not being playing “air violin” or performing “air surgery” with Kinect, sorry.

    Agreed, most of the things that are shown in the video are pretty uninspiring. They would have been far better off just showing clips from *Minority Report*.

  • Met Police Using Surveillance System to Monitor Mobile Phones

    Ryan Gallagher and Rajeev Syal reporting on a covert cell phone surveillance system in use in England and (reportedly) by the U.S. Secret Service :
    >The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitan police from Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the Middle East among its customers. Strictly classified under government protocol as “Listed X”, it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person’s movements in real time.

    That sounds a bit invasive and over-reaching, until you read this line:

    >The company’s systems, showcased at the DSEi arms fair in east London last month, allow authorities to intercept SMS messages and phone calls by secretly duping mobile phones within range into operating on a false network, where they can be subjected to “intelligent denial of service”. This function is designed to cut off a phone used as a trigger for an explosive device.

    That’s downright useful. It’s one of those technologies that could be used to save a lot of lives, and could also be used to be very invasive and potentially ruin the lives of many people — not to mention the legal rights that we hold here in the States. What it comes down to is keeping the technology in the “right” hands — the question then becomes, whose hands are the “right” hands?

    This is only the beginning of these types of technology and these questions that surround them.

  • Siri, Reminders and OmniFocus

    I am a huge fan of having a “Trusted System” where you store anything and everything that is actionable. For quite a long time that has been OmniFocus for me. To the point where I don’t even bother to look at other reminder apps when they come out — I have no interest.

    Then Apple added the Reminders app to iOS, with the ability to remind you of tasks as you leave or arrive at certain locations. I thought: OK that is too cool and too handy not to give a go. And it is, incredibly handy and creates a somewhat ideal situation for a task management app — for people that don’t care about due dates.

    OmniFocus, being the smart ones that they are, quickly added this functionality to OmniFocus on iOS and just when I thought that I now could let go of Reminders, Apple upped the ante and brought us Siri.

    With Siri I can create a reminder that is location aware without ever hitting a key on my iPhone — that’s pretty powerful for a guy that drives ~90 minutes round trip every day. ((A side note: You can use Siri to create tasks in OmniFocus via email, but that is an inelegant hack that I have no interest in.))

    So do I use both apps, effectively destroying my trusted system, or do I forgo the added benefits of one or the other?

    I chose the former, but I found out it doesn’t destroy anything.

    What I have found (and am not alone in finding) is that you can have a pretty elegant solution by using both the Reminders app and OmniFocus. For any task that I create on my Mac, I use OmniFocus as the sole repository. It is still the best option and easiest to use when my fingers are already on the keyboard.

    However, OmniFocus has two big limiting factors:

    1. It does not natively integrate with Siri.
    2. Location aware reminders are based on the context that you add to the task, not the individual task as with the Reminders app. (More on this in a bit.)

    You could also add a third downfall, which is in my testing Reminders seems to remind you when you really are at the location, whereas OmniFocus seems to remind you when I get within 0.5 miles of the location — that’s a bit annoying.

    ### Location Reminders with OmniFocus

    As I noted above OmniFocus uses contexts to provide the location data to each task, whereas Reminders uses input on a per task basis. This is both good and bad. To get around the inevitable need for a reminder when leaving instead of when arriving, in OmniFocus you need to create two contexts, such as:

    1. Office – arriving
    2. Office – leaving

    Then setup your tasks accordingly. This is a pretty good solution, especially when applied on your Mac — but certainly not as elegant as Reminders.

    The problem with OmniFocus, though, is that the reminders are not pushed to the phone — you must manually pull them down by opening the app.

    Often I find that I set a reminder on my Mac for when I get home, only to arrive home never having seen that reminder. The problem is that I didn’t open OmniFocus on my iPhone prior to getting home. Bummer.

    My work around is Siri and the Reminders app and truthfully this is more of a solution than a work around.

    ### Siri + Reminders

    What I have found is that those one-off reminders that belong to no project and therefore are simple “reminders” fit pretty well in the Reminders app. ((Go figure.)) So instead of looking at Reminders as a competitor to OmniFocus, instead I look at it as a completely different app that complements OmniFocus.

    Siri is essentially my personal nagger. In that I always ask people (mainly my Wife): remind me next time we go to X to do Y. As any couple knows, asking your significant other to remind you of something is rather hit and miss — not so with Siri.

    So instead of using Reminders to store tasks I use it to store, well, reminders. OmniFocus stores my tasks, projects, and goals — everything else I just ask Siri to remind me of, because typically these are just simple things that truly are reminders.

    This doesn’t break my trusted system, instead it cleans it out for me. The reminders I input typically aren’t actionable things that I need to do, as much as things I just need to remember.

    This all works surprisingly well.

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  • How to Build a Site That Looks Great on Every Screen

    The linked post isn’t particularly mind blowing in any sense. What is interesting to me is all the frameworks and tools that are popping up to re-flow websites based on the screen size of the device being used. For the most part I think they all suck, because it is just a set of rules that allows someone else to drop in their content.

    All of these frameworks look amazing with the examples given, but one must remember that these examples were made to look great on the framework. Every site should have its own framework for flowing differently based on screen size, because every site’s goal is different. And it’s not that challenging.

    On the one hand I love the idea of the site changing based on my screen, but not every site. The goal shouldn’t be “make the site work on all screen sizes with responsive design”, it should be make the site work on all screen sizes, period. Responsive design should be used (added?) as a way to enhance a site on a smaller screen, offering the visitor an even better experience than what they would have otherwise received.

    The danger with responsive designs is that there is no option to go back to the “full site”. That can be very annoying to users if proper care was not taken in the implementation.

  • Easter Island Heads Have Bodies

    File this one under: that’s even more creepy.

  • A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

    Mona Simpson on her brother, Steve Jobs:

    >His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

  • Some Responses to the Magazine Counterarguments

    Marco Arment responding to criticism on his [Double-dipping post](http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad-magazines):

    >I don’t need to know why $4.99 is insufficient to pay for 15 articles on my iPad. I just know that it feels like a premium price for such a relatively small amount of content, and I don’t feel right paying premium prices for ad-subsidized products.

    I don’t see how people in the industry can be angry at Marco, he is the customer and he is feeling ripped off. Whether or not you believe that “the customer is always right”, you certainly must believe that a customer feeling ripped off is not good for business.

  • Facebook Says 600,000 Accounts Compromised Every Day

    Bob Sullivan reporting, and doing the math:
    >That might sound like an impressive record, but doing the math, that means 600,000 accounts are hacked or otherwise compromised every day.  Facebook’s 0.06 percent figure seems intentionally precise, so it’s probably fair to surmise that potentially 18 million accounts per month are impacted.

    A clear example of how different the numbers look when you change from a percent to raw numbers. I’m not saying this is bad or good, but it is a lot.

  • ‘Apps Are the New Channels’

    John Gruber makes a great case for how an Apple “TV” experience could be. As I [talked about with Shawn today on our Podcast](http://thebbpodcast.com/2011/10/episode-32-displays-and-televisions/) it is evident to me that the experience on such a device needs integration between each of the apps.

    That is, if I search for a movie on the current Apple TV, it should search all available “channels”, not just within the iTunes or Netflix areas. Doing this would make a better user experience and an easier to use device. This can and should be done with apps, the user just shouldn’t need to first pick an app if they don’t want to.

  • Edovia – Insanely Great Software for Mac and iOS

    A big thanks to Edovia for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I use their Screens apps on all of my devices on a daily basis — they are simply great. I am also a big user of the TouchPad app that they make and Screens on my Mac is a far better solution than any other that I have found.

    I truly like these apps, so if you are in the market, you can’t go wrong with Screens and TouchPad (the app, not the tablet).

  • MacBook Air Screen Colors

    The writer behind *Recenseo* noticed that the screen on his MacBook Air didn’t have great color because:
    >The one made by Samsung has the perfect settings from the very beginning, but for some reason the LG doesn’t. To make the LG version look similarly as good as the Samsung screen, you’ll have to follow a couple quick steps.

    I don’t have the screen with the “bad” color, but when I retweeted the article a few people pinged back thanking me because this change made a difference (for the better I assume). Give it a try, and with all these things backup first.

  • Reminders.app Versus OmniFocus

    Don Southard has a nice breakdown of the Reminders app and OmniFocus on the iPhone — importantly how there is a use for both. I too like the Reminders app for adding small tasks while on the go, that would all change (of course) if Siri could add things to OmniFocus.

  • The B&B Podcast – Episode 32: Displays and Televisions

    >Shawn and Ben discuss the dying Cinema display that Shawn owns and his options for future upgrades, with speculation about what Apple may do to those displays down the road. The Apple TV set is also discussed and how such a content model would work. They talk about funding projects on Kickstarter and making chili.

  • Why I’m Kissing Spotify Goodbye

    Brett Kelly lays out some good reasons why Spotify isn’t for everyone. For me the moment they decided that you needed a Facebook account to use the service was the same moment I knew it wasn’t right for me.