David Carr looked into the [Oregon Blogger](https://brooksreview.net/2011/12/blogger-oregon/) case from earlier this month and found that there is quite a bit more to the story that initially reported.
Month: December 2011
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Apple’s MacBook Air to Dominate Ultrabook Market
Lance Whitney for CNET:
>As other vendors try to mimic Apple’s model by introducing their own lightweight laptops, the ultrabook field stands to get increasingly crowded.Here’s the question I have: why is that every time Apple launches a successful product “analysts” seek to shove that product into a new category?
The iPad is great, but the iPad is in a market of its own — that’s why we can look at sales of the other tablets without including the iPad.
No, no — the MacBook Air isn’t a laptop — it’s an Ultrabook…
Give me a break.
It’s like a defense attorney saying: “Hey, *I* know you are innocent. But I don’t know if *they* believe that.”
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Seattle, Day One
A great video from Garrett Murray showing his visit to one hell of a city.
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iPhone Lunar Eclipse
Great shot of the lunar eclipse using an iPhone and a spotting scope. That couldn’t have been easy to do.
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The TBR Store
I have launched a new store where you can buy a bunch of my old stuff. From gadgets that I reviewed to old bags that I no longer need / want. I give my honest opinion about the item in the description so that you aren’t misled at all.
I will be adding items as I have things to add, and I only have one of each item. So check back often and order things when you see one that you want. All proceeds go towards running this site.
Thanks for your support.
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Styli
Marco Arment on the new Cosmonaut stylus for tablets:
>The Cosmonaut is the only capacitive stylus I’ve wanted to use for more than thirty seconds. The others were novelties, but this is a truly useful tool. It’s excellent, and I’m going to start bringing it in my computer bag.Me a few days ago on Twitter:
. @shawnblancnet anyone who owns a stylus for their iPad should have their iPad taken away.
— Ben Brooks (@BenjaminBrooks) December9, 2011
Perhaps Marco is right and the Cosmonaut is different — but if that is the case then it is probably a misnomer to call it a “stylus”. My feelings about the Cosmonaut have always been that it can’t possibly be better than a finger, but from what Marco says it is.
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Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire
Andy Ihnatko:
>The two tablets have the same dual-core Texas Instruments CPU but boy, it’s immediately clear that either Barnes & Noble is doing something right with their implementation of Android or Amazon is doing something wrong. -
“Journalism”
Brooke Crothers on CNET writing about fanboi sites like [Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net/):
>Take the blog Daring Fireball. It offers some solid analysis. But in the end it’s a fanboi site. Assailing the misinformed. Or pointing out how wrong or disliked the Android competition is. That kind of attitude gets in the way of informed insight.Take the blog by Brooke Crothers at CNET. It offers a lot of random links in its text. But in the end it falls short of journalism. Assailing random accusations. Or pointing out how wrong others are without the facts to back things up. That kind of attitude gets in the way of informed insight.
*Just* saying.
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A Proposal to Save the USPS
This plan would mean I would be paying to not receive any mail — I’m so in.
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Change Scares Some
Paul Miller pens a post on *The Verge* about UI issues that bug him on Mac OS X and Windows. He brings up some really good points if you can ignore the incredibly distracting animated GIFs. He points out the wizard nature of the Windows Control Panel and how it always assumes you are looking at the screen for the first time.
He talks about how bad Address Book and iCal are on the Mac.
He also has some idiotic points about not needing window shadows — umm yeah we don’t need them, but we also like for our UI to not look like shit.
Then Miller completely discredits everything he said in his post when he writes:
>In my personal quest to escape the condescension, I recently switched my Windows 7 install over to the “Classic Theme,” which is basically Windows 95 incarnate, just with all the under-the-hood improvements I’ve come to rely on. I really like it. It feels right, and if it isn’t beautiful, at least it’s honest.
No, Paul, it’s hideous and I no longer trust your opinion about any design and UI related topics — you undermined your entire article, which I was largely agreeing with, with your last paragraph. (The animated GIFs really should have tipped me off.)
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The B&B Podcast – Episode 37: It’S Old School, Bro
Shawn and I have a long talk about Twitter and Twitter related things (e.g. Instagram) — we touch on the design, the vision, and the business model of the service.
Big thanks to the sponsor this week: [Instacast](http://affiliate.vemedio.com/itunes/app/420368235/bbsponsor).
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Thunderbolt: How Devices Affect Each Other on a Daisy Chain
A nice batch of tests from James Galbraith on Macworld to see what happens when you have a Thunderbolt chain arranged differently.
The end result seems to be that you are fine no matter what you do, until you add two Thunderbolt displays to the same chain — that’s when things start to slow down.
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Meg Whitman and Marc Andreessen on webOS
Joshua Topolsky interviews them for *The Verge* about how HP will be using webOS in the future. The interview is played as Whitman confirming that new webOS tablets will be coming, but read the actual transcript:
>In the near term what I would imagine – and this could change, in full disclosure – is I would think tablets, I do not believe we will be in the smartphone business again.
Then she was asked if tablets are a “real possibility”, to which the response was “yes”.
HP has flip flopped on just about every move they have made, so I would think anything is a “real possibility” with HP right now. The bottom line though: HP open sourced webOS in order to cut development costs — given that I don’t see a full commitment to the OS for hardware development.
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Quote of the Day: Nilay Patel
“God I hope Dell builds some sweet webOS phones.” -
webOS Being Open Sourced
Chris Ziegler:
>HP has decided the fate of webOS today, and it’s an open one: the platform will be contributed to the open source community. The company says that it will be an “active participant and investor in the project,” and that its ultimate goal here is to accelerate development. In other words, it doesn’t want to pump the amount of money into webOS that would be required to make it fully competitive, so it’s looking to the public to help make that happen.That’s the death of webOS as a main stream platform.
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Motorola Mobility Wins German Patent Suit Against Apple
Does this mean Apple has to stop selling iPads and iPhones in Germany? It’s not clear yet.
What’s more interesting, and what I couldn’t stop thinking about when reading this, is: wouldn’t it have been cheaper for Apple to just have bought Motorola and shut it down? Disregard DOJ and anti-trust concerns — think about the money Apple is spending to fight patents against Motorola and the potential loss of sales if they lose. I would think it would have been easier to just buy the company (hostile takeover if needed) and shutter it.
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Gruber on the New Twitter
John Gruber:
>The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be. It all makes sense if you think of the label under the “#” tab as reading “Dickbar” instead of “Discover”.[Like I said yesterday](https://brooksreview.net/2011/12/twitter-4/), Twitter no longer wants to be seen as a tool or service — it’s not a backbone to be built a top of. Twitter is a place on the Internet. Twitter wants to be an environment that people spend time at, not a service that people spend time using without every “seeing” it.
I think Gruber is only partially right here. There’s a lot more going on than just setting the app up for monetizing the service. I would guess that any new Twitter user that loaded up Twitter 4.0 verses Tweetie 1.0 will find 4.0 far more comfortable and useable. I don’t think that is the case because they “don’t see the appeal” of Twitter — I think that is the case because Twitter has evolved beyond what it was when people like Gruber and I first started using it.
One thing that Gruber points out that is really at the heart of the matter is the waining support for 3rd party Twitter apps. I really wouldn’t be surprised that come 8 months from now all 3rd party apps are severely crippled in someway compared to the official Twitter clients — so much so that it becomes masochistic to use them.
A lot of people are surprised that I *still* use the official Twitter apps — the reason I do is because I know that they are the only ones that will be around in the future. That is: I don’t think Twitter likes that there are 3rd party apps and because of that I think they are slowly trying to kill them off. Example number one was the integration in iOS. Example two is the killing of photo sharing services with the `pic.twitter.com` service.
It’s a matter of when, not if, Twitter is going to kill 3rd party clients.
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What Twitter for iPhone 4.0 and Twitter’s New-New Design Tells Current Users
“We care more about new users and you finding more people to follow rather than about how everyone has been using Twitter in the past.”
Don’t read that as a bad thing. Don’t read that as a good thing. It is simply just a thing.
The fact is that the web version of Twitter doesn’t matter to me. I rarely use it and try to stay logged out of it. I don’t care about the web version.
The iPhone app though — it is the most used app on my iPhone. My iPhone is Twitter.
The design changes are just design changes and I mostly think they look nice. These changes are a nice new look at Twitter and I have no qualms with them — even though the top blue bar is a bit bright.
I really like the new ‘Connect’ tab because of the ‘Interactions’ menu that shows not just @replies, but also shows new followers, retweets, and favorites. That’s a welcomed change and I think pretty helpful for all users.
What is absolutely crazy — what drives me nuts — is the ditching of the swipe-to-act gesture. In previous versions you could swipe left or right on a tweet to slide open an action menu. From there you could quickly favorite, retweet, Instapaper, or reply to the tweet.
That was the single most fantastic thing about the app.
Now it’s gone.
I think the reason this was removed is explained by the direction Twitter is moving: gone are the days when Twitter was a tool because now Twitter is an environment.
The latest updates to Twitter seem to be saying: “stick around, don’t leave.”
I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it’s certainly not how I am used to using Twitter.
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Normal Really Means Performance
Walt Mossberg in his review of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime:
>Asus and Nvidia build in three battery modes, and I tested only the one called Normal. Unfortunately, Nvidia now says that nomenclature is misleading, and that Normal is really meant for only high-performance tasks. So, early next year, when it switches to the next version of Android, it plans to rename Normal as “Performance,” to steer users to a less power-hungry mode called “Balanced.” I can’t say how the Prime’s battery will perform in that scenario with the new OS.I had to read that paragraph twice because I got confused. Why aren’t those features already present? Why ship the tablet with a battery mode mislabeled?