The Brooks Review

Year: 2012

  • The New Digg

    Digg relaunched their site/service recently and while ([as I talked about on the podcast](http://5by5.tv/bb/72)) I don’t particularly care for the new site, there is one part of the site that I do like. But first a recap of what I don’t like:

    1. Facebook login only — lame.
    2. The design doesn’t do much in the way of telling me what is the most important, other than the one large item.
    3. I don’t understand what value the little “reaction comments” are supposed to add.
    4. The Most Popular section has graphs of popularity over time that do nothing to tell me if the story is something I should read or not. Why are people so obsessed with time and isn’t a mark of a lame post that it is no longer popular a day later — let alone an hour later?
    5. The Upcoming section is just boring.

    I mostly hate the new site for #1, but all the other items bug me. Digg, for me, had/has a lot to prove to show me that it still can be useful.

    So while Digg’s website may not be great — I am liking [their mobile app](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/digg/id362872995?ls=1&mt=8). The Digg iOS app isn’t amazing or even revolutionary, but I find it very useful in how light, fast, and relevant it is.

    Digg tweeted that people should check out their app to stay in touch while out and about over the weekend. And all weekend long I was behind on Twitter and RSS, but it only took 20 seconds to stay up on Digg’s app — and every time I found something neat I wanted to read.

    That’s the Digg I remember liking back in the day. It was a welcomed surprise.

    Now because I can’t sign up (damned Facebook logins) I had to share each story via email to my Instapaper email address in order to add it for reading later — even so I am liking using the [Digg app](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/digg/id362872995?ls=1&mt=8) to find neat stories when I only have half a minute or so to look.

  • Try FontShop fonts in Photoshop and Illustrator

  • Reminder: Join the Movement of App.net

    The only other project that I have pushed my readers this hard on was `Dark Sky` and I think we can all agree that Dark Sky is a damned fine weather app, perhaps the best one out there.

    Now I want you guys to trust me and go back App.net. I was granted access to the working alpha build of the site, what can I say, it works. Right now things are basic, but by building an alpha they are showing me something that a lot of other products don’t: they already know how to make the product.

    It’s $50 and that’s steep, but it’s $50 that gets you this:

    1. Twitter without ads, ever.
    2. Twitter that won’t ever block a third party client.
    3. Twitter without spammers, because they would have to pay $50 only to get banned.
    4. Twitter without your parents.

    At least one of those has to be worth $50 to you guys, I love the price point and the idea — I hope we can make it a reality.

  • Bing v. Google

    Quentin Hardy:
    >When Mr. Shum shows ways that Bing outperforms Google, it tends to be around search queries with long strings of words, or deep catalogs of information (including over 3,600 ways to misspell Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name, for example). His deep neural networks of computation involve thousands of potential pieces of information for each query, and in milliseconds crunch several variants of a search around a single topic.

    While I use DuckDuckGo only on my Mac, on iOS I actually have been using Bing for the past few months. I try to use Bang On when I can, but I always forget and end up in the search field in mobile Safari. Since I have Bing set as the search there, I get a fair amount of exposure to Microsoft’s little search engine. The above quote seems trivial, and on the desktop it probably is, but on iOS the above quote is one of the little things that I really like about Bing.

    We all tend to misspell things, well I do, and when searching that’s a big problem. Google always gives you the passive aggressive, slightly pompous: “did you *mean* X” dialog, but Bing always seems to just get it right. For example I searched `black brids` just now on Bing mobile, not a single prompt telling me that I might have misspelled the word, instead two small links at the top to tweak my search:

    1. “Including results for `black birds`.”
    2. “Do you want results only for `black brids`?”

    The first result: “Blackbird” on Wikipedia. The first result of `black birds` — spelled correctly: “Blackbird” on Wikipedia.

    That’s not revolutionary, but my larger point is that Bing just works pretty well on iOS. It takes a lot of getting used to, but it looks nice and is fast. It’s not as good as DuckDuckGo, but I think it is just as good as Google. Should be interesting to see if adoption picks up with Windows 8 using the Windows 8 style UI.

    **Update:** [It looks like Google is using similar language as Bing.](http://twitter.com/jalifax/status/232617172940247040/photo/1)

  • Access iCloud Files From the Finder

    A great tip on where to locate the iCloud files locally on your Mac. As noted in the tip, Finder even changes to say “iCloud” in the title bar when you open this folder.

    Oddly you cannot add this folder to the Finder sidebar, so if anyone knows how to do that — I would love to know.

    Also in looking at this the Apple apps seem to have fairly clean looking folder names, but the rest of the apps have a string of characters before them — I wonder if this is Apple “cheating” or if there is something developers can do to get a cleaner looking names.

  • Slogger

    Brett Terpstra has made the mother of all logging scripts for Day One users. I mentioned before how journalling with Day One never stuck for me, but now I am using it a lot. Well, Slogger is really neat because it can grab all sorts of your internet activity and pull it into Day One as entries, all without you having to do it manually.

    All your tweets, your posts, and so on. It is very cool, I just set it up and can’t wait to see how much data will be in Day One now.

  • Yes, I Was Hacked. Hard.

  • Instagram and Polaroid

    Nancy Macdonell:
    >“The original Paper Denim look book was done with Polaroids,” says Chantel Valentene, the brand’s creative director. “Instagram is the modern equivalent, so when we were talking about doing the look book for the relaunch, it was a natural step. It fits in with our idea that getting dressed should be easy — with Instagram you can’t retouch, it’s what you see is what you get. It’s the opposite of fussy.”

    I like the analogy that Instagram is the new Polaroid, but I think that Valentene is being a bit short-sighted. Even if an Instagram photo is taken with an iPhone, and never leaves the phone, there are still plenty of tools that a person can use to tweak and retouch the image. Not to mention selecting a proper filter can be quite “fussy”.

    Still, I think one of the biggest questions that surrounds modern photography (as we move forward) is going to be: what’s real? Some of the more iconic photos of the last 5 years were shot on digital and heavily tweaked in software during editing — are these photos then, not real?

    Which photos do we archive as a historical record of our world? Do we care that we removed cellulite and zits? Do we care that everyone looks perfect, unless taken to show how evil the person was?

    I wonder if 20 years from now when my daughter is looking at photos of nature from 2010, if she won’t stop and ask: “Dad, why aren’t the trees *as* green anymore?”

    Well, sweety, boosting color saturation used to be *the* thing to do…

    [via Om Malik]

  • Quick RSS Feed Note

    Yesterday I deleted access to the ‘articles only’ RSS feed, so if that’s not working for you that’s why. There were about 400 of you using it, sorry for the lack of notice.

    With the increased length of my linked listed posts and the subsequent decrease in post frequency I no longer find it necessary to offer an articles only feed. Also I believe now that it is equally important to read both post types.

    I deleted it yesterday and did not set a forward. The reason there was no forward set was simple: I feel that it is within my rights to remove things without your permission, but not within them to add things to your RSS reader without your permission. Redirecting, forwarding, or changing the RSS feed instead of deleting it would have added things to your feed and I wasn’t ok with doing that.

    This is the main and only (non-member) RSS feed now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBrooksReview

  • Hawaiian Hammock Chairs

    My grandparents gave us one of these chairs. Not only is it really comfortable but:

    1. My daughter loves to nap in it with me;
    2. I love to nap in it.

    If you have a spot in your yard to hang one, I think it’s better than a regular hammock. Amazon has a bunch too, but I can’t vouch for any of those brands.

    Pro tip: mount with an eye bolt and hang with a caribiner for easy winter take down.

  • ’20 Months’

    Alex Arena, commenting on Things, in response to Shawn and me on the B&B podcast:

    >But since they haven’t been acquired, they still need to make money, and Things is their only product. Lying to all of your customers isn’t a good way to make money.

    I think Arena ((If this guy’s name is really Alex Arena — that’s badass.)) gets to the heart of the user frustration, but he’s off base. I don’t think Cultured Code lied, I think they were over matched with a task that they had to ship, but couldn’t get shipped.

    Things was solid at one point but has been so distracted by this cloud sync that they have lost significant ground to rival OmniFocus. Now all that remains to be seen is if they can quickly ship some great updates (since the biggest one is now mostly out of the way).

  • Are Tanks Hard to Drive?

  • Firm Ditches Facebook for Twitter, Claims Clicks Are Bots

  • Covering the Olympics with a Smartphone Camera

    Dan Chung is on assignment shooting for the Gaurdian as a professional photographer, but he is shooting with what appears to just be an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4S. This is a link to his photoblog of the coverage, and he notes on each picture any adapters he used on his iPhone(s).

    I hate to say it, but this is going too far.

    It’s one thing to only take your iPhone places for photos, it’s even fine if the iPhone is your only camera. But to take the iPhone on assignment shooting sports, that’s just a gimmick.

    His composition and lighting is fine, but just look at the sharpness of each photo — for the most part the photos are soft. The photos *look* like iPhone snapshots.

    [Compare them to these taken with pro level equipment on *The Big Picture*](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/08/london_2012_olympics_one_week.html).

    The difference is immediately visible.

    There is one cool thing that I hadn’t thought about though — for journalists. With Photostream uploading all your photos to iCloud, and the ability to share those streams with others — this could be a powerful tool for covering breaking news events for news networks. Photojournalists wouldn’t have to stop to upload and news desks would get the photos in near realtime. That could be pretty damned useful.

    All that said, I get that Chung isn’t trying to take the world’s best photos with his iPhone, but I get the sense that when he gets home and sits down to review his shots, he’s going to see more than a few that he regrets not having his dSLR for, and that sucks.

  • How Apple Designs Products

    Nicole Perlroth and Nick Wingfield reporting on testimony from Christopher Stringer, a longtime Apple industrial designer, in the Apple v Samsung spat:
    >In his testimony earlier, Mr. Stringer said that Apple’s design team consists of 15 or 16 designers who work around a small kitchen table, a sharp contrast to Samsung’s 1,000 designers.

    I cannot be the only one that finds this to be the single most interesting note about this trial so far. Some questions that I have:

    1. What kind of table?
    2. How big is “small”?
    3. Why does it take a 1,000 designers to rip-off an Apple design that only took 15-16 people to make?

    I can’t wait to read more testimony like that.

  • Quote of the Day: Carina Chocano

    “These sites are not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so. That might be O.K., but it also means they have a lot more in common with advertising than they do with curation.”

  • ‘Playing in Gatekeeper’s Sandbox’

    Watts Martin on the real ramification of Apple’s sandboxing requirements:
    >Thing is, iCloud also magically brings document sandboxing to OS X. If I want to see what I wrote in Byword on the iPad, I *need* to go to Byword on the Mac. If I want to preview it in Marked or do some power editing in Sublime Text, I’d still have to open it in Byword and then drag it to the other app.

    He goes on to talk about how rough a time you then have if you decide to ever switch away from the Apple ecosystem — because once you buy into iCloud, you have really bought into iCloud.

    This is a really important point, something I hadn’t thought about. I don’t think we should be calling on Apple to turn iCloud into Dropbox, but I do think that it’s not out of the question to ask (demand?) Apple to provide an “export my iCloud documents” button.

    Though, I’m not holding my breath on this one.

  • Quote of the Day: Fraser Speirs

    “If we are going to trade off functionality for portability, let’s go all the way and make the thing really portable.”

  • The B&B Podcast #72: I Clicked That Ketchup Article

    >Shawn and Ben talk about the new Digg, Cultured Code’s Cloud Sync, the balance of shipping half-finished products early versus taking longer to ship products that are finished, why not being on Facebook may mean you’re a suspicious citizen, and how real-life priorities intersect with “GTD”.

  • Apple Wants Dismissal, Winning Verdict in Samsung Case for Evidence Leak