Joe Simnacher and Terry Box:
>In 1962, Mr. Shelby created the first Shelby Cobra, borrowing British Ace Bristol sports car bodies and mating them to Ford V-8 engines in his Venice, Calif., garage. The Shelby Cobras finished first and second in a race held around the Dodger Stadium parking lot. The race prompted Ford to sponsor his project.
That car was a game changer.
Great little app from 5by5 that allows you to listen to the live stream and get push alerts when your favorite show is starting.
I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s a great way of listening to great podcasts do go get it.
Dustin Curtis looked into that Forbes article that claims the HBO’s president, Eric Kessler said the Internet was a “temporary phenomenon” and here’s what he found:
>It’s so unbelievable that I went to the primary source, a 40 minute video interview with Mr. Kessler, which draws a fascinating picture of HBO’s business strategy. After listening to the entire interview twice, I could not pinpoint where Kessler actually said “temporary phenomenon.”
It turns out what HBO’s president, Eric Kessler said was more along the lines that he thinks the Internet is big, but it can’t replace the deal they have going right now with cable. Which makes sense.
So good job with the Linkbait Forbes.
A new $8,000 digital camera from Leica that only shoots in B&W. Yep, you read that right.
So: why? Well take a look at the images posted on this link, they are shot at ISO 6400 and ISO 10,000 and yet they have very low noise compared to most other cameras.
That’s why.
Also the B&W looks excellent, cool camera — just wish it was in my price range.
In my [Evernote post the other day](https://brooksreview.net/2012/05/evernote-end-game/) I mentioned that Evernote should strive to be more like [Drafts](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drafts/id502385074?mt=8) for note capture — turns out someone already has a Drafts like app for Evernote. (Buyer beware: I haven’t tried this app at all.)
Dan Miller:
> So if you swipe up on the dash, you get an em dash. Swipe up on the dollar sign and you get the cents symbol. One thing I like is that this is one way to get smart quotation marks.
I had no clue.
Microsoft:
>When searching for a particular subject, a list of Facebook friends who may know about that topic is displayed in a light-gray sidebar on the right-side panel of the results page. “So if you query ‘Hawaii,’ user models in the network look at public information in your profile such as where your friends live or have lived, what they’ve liked on Facebook, and photos — and turn up a list of people who likely have information relevant to your query,” says Sandy Wong, principal development lead for Bing. “You’ll still see search results for Hawaii within the traditional Web search results. But now you’ll also be able to consider the advice of your friends who may know something about Hawaii.”
Bing will pull from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Quora — man there’s one missing isn’t there? Hmm. Oh yeah, Google+ — yeah doesn’t pull from that. So let’s recap:
– Bing: Pulls from all non-Google social networks.
– Google: Pulls from Google+
I’m still a DuckDuckGo fan, but this is a smart move from Microsoft.
Shawn and I have a lot of Skype problems on this show, but we manage to discuss diaper technology and advertising on the web.
Thanks to our fine show sponsors: [Igloo Software](http://www.igloosoftware.com/officeofipads) and [Hover](http://hover.com/dansentme).
Yes, none of these icons will make sense to my daughter if she stops to try and figure what each picture is, but it also won’t matter. All that really matters is that people know that a floppy disk picture means `save` — so while us “old people” may be the only ones that have seen the real life objects these icons depict, it doesn’t matter as long as people know what they mean.
Still, interesting to think about.
It’s $149 in the Mac App Store and it is *the* RAW photo editor that I use. Aperture is nice, but Lightroom is great. I have only been on version 4 for a little while, but it is a nice upgrade. Lightroom is still the absolute best tool to use for reducing noise in your images — hands down.
One important note (that I didn’t know) is that buying the Mac App Store version only grants you a license to use it on a Mac, whereas buying the downloadable version from Adobe (same price) grants you a license to use it on Mac or Windows. So if you like to use Macs and *have* to use Windows, this is something to think about.
Update: [Jim Dalrymple notes some more caveats](http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/05/10/lightroom-4-available-on-mac-app-store-with-caveats/) with Lightroom 4 in the Mac App Store — so many I would recommend that you buy it from Adobe’s website instead.
A very eye-opening post by Dustin Curtis on how to properly scale images for use on the web by ‘pixel-fitting’. His examples are great and this is a must read for anyone who puts graphics on the web.
Looks great and I think it is really neat that Amazon is wanting offices in downtown Seattle instead of moving out of the city core — which I am sure would be cheaper.
A fantastic post that asks what journalism really is today, and if defining journalism matters anymore. The post is a must read and there are so many good bits to quote that I have to limit myself to just this one:
>The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.
Michael Lopp:
>This is about how these two universes should collide and that means what I’m really talking about is gamification. There’s a reason I didn’t mention this until paragraph 17 because there are a lot of folks who think gamification means pulling the worst aspects out of games and shoving them into an application. It’s not. Don’t think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate someone to learn so they can have fun being productive.
Great point, and one that I hadn’t thought of when we talk about gamification. The type of gamification that Lopp is referring to sounds fantastic, but rare.
David Sparks is *the man* when it comes to getting to paperless and automating that workflow. Haven’t had a chance to read this book, but his description made it an instant buy for me:
>Paperless takes the mystery (and fear) out of going paperless with your Apple technology. The book includes 32 screencasts, 4 movies, over 26,000 words, and other rich-media assets to turn you into a paperless ninja.
Sold.
Great post by Craig Grannell that [responds to Jason Pontin’s thoughts](http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40319/) about magazines creating native apps. Most magazine apps are just terrible to use, plain and simple. When something is terrible to us, people don’t use it.
If I was a magazine publisher I would figure out how to get an iPad app that updated to the latest content in less than 30 seconds.
That’d be goal one.
Goal two would be to whittle that time down to 10 seconds.
Most current iPad magazines fail before readers even get a chance to view them.
Today the [TSA groped a congressman’s balls enough that he pushed the agents hands away, claiming](http://www.kens5.com/home/I-TEAM-EXCLUSIVE–Video-of-TSAs-aggressive-pat-down-of-Congressman-Canseco-150109935.html):
>The agent was very aggressive in his pat down and he was patting me down where no one is suppose to go and it got very uncomfortable, so I moved his hand away
That sounds like it would cost extra.
[In Salt Lake City a Type One Diabetic](http://www.abc4.com/content/news/state/story/TSA-diabetes-salt-lake-insulin-savannah/Az-QjubuEUeXMX7LAbC1Xw.cspx) (hat tip to [Douglas Stephen](http://twitter.com/DougStephenJr/status/200207539315556354)) — the type that wears an Insulin pump 24/7 — was forced to go through the body scanner, even after she showed TSA “officers” a note from her doctor explaining the pump should *not* go through such scanners. No worries, it ended up a-OK, well if you consider a broken $10,000 Insulin pump, and putting a teenagers health at risk to be an a-OK outcome.
I don’t. Also when you have a 16 year-old calling for a government agency to be better educated, well then you kind of know you failed.
As a result of the CIA, not the TSA, foiling a bomb plot — well the TSA took it upon themselves [to send a “security guidance” to other countries](http://www.semissourian.com/story/1846854.html). No word yet on whether the other countries have stopped laughing.
Oh and speaking of that foiled bomb plot — [yeah looks like the TSA wouldn’t have even noticed the bomb had the person wearing the bomb been scanned with a body scanner](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/body-scanners-would-not-detect-underwear-bomb-2012-05-09) — so there’s that.
And that is your TSA update for today.
On Monday I asked [in my linked post](https://brooksreview.net/2012/05/evernote-huh/) to the Evernote acquisition of Penultimate:
>Anybody else confused about Evernote’s endgame?
I genuinely am confused by what their goal is, but [Federico Viticci points out](http://ticci.org/wheres-evernote-going) their goal on the [Evernote site](http://evernote.com/), quoting:
>Save your ideas, things you like, things you hear, and things you see.
That’s really only one part, as Evernote claims it has three goals: capture anything, access anywhere, find things fast.
So where do Skitch and Penultimate come in?
Evernote says Penultimate will help with handwriting recognition, ok. I just don’t see the value in these acquisitions at all. A few others chimed in with thoughts on Evernote’s endgame too.
[Michael Schechter guesses](http://bettermess.com/a-guess-at-evernotes-end-game/):
>Evernote wants to be our external brain and our brain tends to capture a variety of media in a variety of ways. That doesn’t always lend itself to a single application. As it continues to evolve, I see a world where Evernote’s prime offering becomes less about capture more about storage and recall.
Schechter sees Evernote needing more apps to accomplish this goal, but [Gabe (ye, Macdrifter) points out](http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/05/evernote-acquisitions/) something I certainly feel:
>I’d like Evernote to stop buying sharing buttons and start buying Evernote enhancements.
I’m with Gabe on that one — even though I am not currently an Evernote user, I do try it from time to time because [it can be a powerful tool](http://nerdgap.com/landing/evernote-essentials/).
All of this brings me to the one glaring problem that I have always had with Evernote, and [it is noted by Viticci](http://ticci.org/wheres-evernote-going):
>If Evernote really wants to stay around for the next 100 years, they have to build a solid foundation of connected apps *now*.
Agreed, but more than that — they absolutely must make their tools excellent, because right now they only have good tools. There’s a big difference between good and excellent.
If Evernote truly wants to be the place that I “capture anything” then it has to make it seamless for me to do so. Every time I give Evernote a go, I get held up on the capture process — and it is a process.
Entering text should be as easy as it is in [Drafts](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drafts/id502385074?mt=8) if Evernote truly wants me to use it as a capture tool. Until you reach that level you just have a tool that captures things, but in a cumbersome manner.
Evernote does a good job at “access anywhere”, but really they should have been the Dropbox in this category. If I was Evernote I would have squashed the Dropbox powered text editor movement on iOS by opening and pushing the Evernote engine as *the* sync engine. That’s truly access anywhere, because right now — truthfully — they are “access anywhere we have an app, and only in our apps”. Again, there’s an important difference here.
Lastly we have “find things fast”. I can’t comment very well on this because I don’t have enough data in the app, so let’s just say this is acceptable since I don’t remember having complaints about it — or hearing complaints.
Even if Evernote succeeds at “find things fast” I think it largely does just an average job at its first two goals. Which brings me back to my question: what’s their end game with these acquisitions?
How does Skitch and Penultimate tie in to make “capture” and “access” better? There are some obvious areas where these two help the capture aspect, but then why require users to download, install, and use multiple apps if the goal is “capture anything”?
Evernote, in my head, has always been billed as a tool of that nature of: “you only need this tool, it does everything.” In that sense Evernote is a lot like a Leatherman — very handy, but not the best at anything other than being really handy.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have its place — I own three Leatherman tools — but it is to say that what makes a Leatherman handy is that all the tools are in one package. What Evernote is doing is selling the Leatherman, but also saying there is a neat hammer and a neat drill that you can buy to go along with it — which makes the entire package a bit *less* handy.
Paul Ford:
>Facebook also has a CEO concerned about rivals usurping it. If you had a huge pile of data about websites and services that might pose a competitive threat and billions of dollars in cash at hand, what would you do? Right: You’d buy Instagram. And you’d be able to make a very informed decision without consulting anyone, because, well, math.
Great article.
Remember [this statement](http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/business-of-it/2012/04/25/apples-cook-i-hate-litigation-40155095/) by Apple CEO, Tim Cook:
>I’ve always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it
A lot of people took that to mean that perhaps Cook was more open to settling a lawsuit than Jobs was.
Here’s Florian Mueller, [today](http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/05/apple-and-samsung-drop-claims-against.html), quoting an Apple legal filing against Samsung:
>Samsung’s infringement of Apple’s intellectual property has already resulted in damages that reach billions of dollars. […] It is critical to Apple to start trial on July 30, to put an end to Samsung’s continuing infringement.
So, yes, perhaps Cook is willing to settle, but if this filing is any indication — the settlement amount and terms will be massive to Samsung.