Month: April 2012

New app to file complaints directly to the TSA & DHS. Something tells me the TSA/DHS is not going to enjoy this app being out there. I don’t know — call me crazy — I just get that sense.

John Moltz:
>Basically, you dock your phone and it becomes your desktop computer. Which surely couldn’t lead to any kind of compromised user experience.

I wonder what it would be like playing back a Flash YouTube video from your phone that is powering a 24″ screen — I mean phones don’t have fans, so the phone would just, erm, melt — right?

Man is this response seething with contempt… Love it.

A new “feature” of Dropbox is that it shows a nag screen when it detects a photo card being attached to your Mac — it’s an annoying and B.S. move if you ask me.

See also:

This Dropbox BS where they highjacked the auto-sync from device to Aperture/iPhoto to display an ad is crap. Thinking about canceling.

— Chris Parrish (@twenty3) April 30, 2012

Shawn Blanc:
>Suppose our iPhones only had apps like Simplenote, Agenda, OmniFocus, the camera, maps, and the SMS and phone apps. If that were the case, would we still be so prone to pull our phones out? How often would we reach for our iPhones if they were absent of any and all apps that are ripe for casually checking (such as email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and RSS)?

I think back to before the App Store, and how much I used my first — the first — iPhone. Answer: a lot. Not as much as now, but I used it a lot. The reason? Mobile Safari.

Take away some of the third party apps and I am still going to be nose first in my iPhone, take away Safari? Well that’d suck.

Isaiah with a counter to Shawn’s (and others’s) post about the iPad [replacing a laptop](https://brooksreview.net/2012/04/ipad-mac/):
>The problem is that writing, posting to a blog, and reading blogs are some of the tasks that an iPad is perfectly suited to do. So there seems to be no end to the number of writers that can tell us about their iPad productivity. It’s a bit of a self selecting bunch, though.

The funny part about this post is the Isaiah thinks we (writers) are writing to ourselves here, but Isaiah is coming at it from a programming and design aspect.

What we really need to do is look at using the iPad as a general purpose computer from the standpoint of the average computer user. Which means the iPad needs to be able to do three things:

1. Check email.
2. Check Facebook.
3. Get photos off of another device.

Personally, I think the iPad excels at all three, and that is why I advocate for it to be the first and/or *next* computer that most people buy.

Shawn Blanc:
>It is not a sacrifice to use the iPad as a primary device.

Indeed, it is not. For me it works fantastically well as my portable computer — so much so that my next computer probably won’t be a laptop.

John Brownlee on Quasar by Pedro Franceschi:
>I’ve been saying since last year that this is a killer feature Apple should try to lift in iOS 6, but up until now, all we’ve seen are jailbreak hacks sloppily emulate the functionality. No longer. A hack has finally come along that does it right.

Brownlee has clearly lost it, take what [Craig Grannell has to say for instance](http://reverttosaved.com/2012/04/30/quasar-windowed-app-system-for-ipad-misses-the-point-of-focussed-computing/):

>I admire the technical skills of the author, but am dumbfounded at the commenters on the Verge piece and elsewhere clamouring for such functionality to be built into iOS. First, the Quasar system is pretty ugly, with chunky ‘Close’, ‘Full Screen’ and ‘Rotate’ buttons.

This is an ugly hack, but more than just that (as Grannell talks about) it is counter to everything that the iPad stands for. Like the [Brydge](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/552506690/brydge-ipad-do-more) Kickstarter campaign this is [another instance](http://5by5.tv/bb/58) of people wanting to make their iPad into a Mac.

The iPad is not a Mac and no matter how much crap you attach to the outside of it, or how many hacks you apply to the software, you will be sorely disappointed if you want to make an iPad into a Mac.

This hack is sloppy and it *is* a hack, add to that the fact that it adds a feature that the iPad doesn’t need. Meaning: you just put one of those Honda Civic, weed wacker sounding, exhaust systems on your Ferrari.

Urban Dictionary:
>A unit of time ranging in value from one realtime minute to several hours.

Dr. Drang on why he switched back to Google from DuckDuckGo:
>The main reason I’ve switched back is that I prefer Google’s results. DuckDuckGo doesn’t give that mix of regular links, links to news stories, and links to images that a typical Google search gives.

That’s a really good point because it can be really off putting to some that the results are just regular links — they are categorized at all on DuckDuckGo. I know it takes a lot of getting used to because of how much and for how long we all have been using Google.

Google is a good search engine, the problem is: I don’t trust them. I trust their results, just not the company behind the results.

*(And yes, Doctor, the results are much slower and I choose to be OK with that.)*

Stephen Hackett on my ‘[Gamification is for Dicks](https://brooksreview.net/2012/04/gamification-dicks/)’ post:
>Ben’s choice of words aside, I don’t think the addition of “secret” UI themes in Clear is a bad thing. The app itself — its gestures, etc. — are playful and light. The “gamification” doesn’t get in the way of using the app, and the “awards” don’t add any functionality. It simply adds new free themes.
>What’s so wrong with that?

This is the main complaint about my argument ((Aside from the very small minority that didn’t like my wording.)) : that Clear was/is a poor example because it is just themes. Stephen does point out that the app, to him, is “playful and light”.

I disagree with that notion.

Firstly, just because an app is gesture driven doesn’t mean that it is “playful and light”, it just means it is gesture driven. I think it is wrong to classify gesture driven apps as being playful, because gestures themselves aren’t anymore playful than using a mouse.

It seems to me that Stephen wants to dismiss the gamification of Clear by trying to make Clear sound like it is already a game-like app — and I don’t think that is true at all. Clear is a productivity tool, with game mechanics to unlock themes.

Secondly, themes in Clear are a very integral part of the app — in Clear themes are a feature and not an accessory. The themes are how you prioritize items in the list — using the color of the theme to show priority. In most cases themes would just be a nice add-on, but in Clear I would argue that themes are a central part of the user experience.

And that’s why the gamification of unlocking themes in Clear presents a really bad user experience.

David Kravets:
>In short, the measure seeks to undo privacy laws that generally forbid ISPs from disclosing customer communications with anybody else unless with a court order.

*Fantastic*.

Tim Moynihan about Camera Awesome:
>Another useful option for capturing short videos of laughing babies and/or game-winning-hit scenarios at baseball games, Camera Awesome’s video options include a “Precord Video” setting that automatically buffers and saves 5 seconds of video *before* you press the record button.

That actually is a pretty neat trick — though I wonder what kind of havoc that wreaks on your battery life.