The Brooks Review

Year: 2012

  • The New Square Icon

    Even if it wasn’t blue, it’d still be hideous.

  • ‘Introducing the Innovator’s Patent Agreement’

    Adam Messinger, VP of Engineering at Twitter:
    >The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission.

    Interesting.

  • Canon 5D Mark II vs. Mark III vs. Nikon D800 High-ISO Video

    The Nikon appears to be much more sensitive to light and have much more noise. Amazing how well the Mark III handles noise at really high ISO. I want that camera, badly.

  • ‘The Challenge of Syncing OmniOutliner’

    The Omni Group just pulled a ‘Cultured Code’ and instead of shipping sync they have decided to explain it. This makes me sad.

  • MacStories Interview with Nate Weiner of Pocket

    Nate Weiner:
    >Absolutely yes — our hope is that Pocket will take ‘save-for-later’ to the mainstream.

    Thinking about this a bit more, I don’t think Pocket will ever be that useful for me. But I do think that it would be for my wife, and mom, and my father. I don’t save all this other crap that most people do, I don’t have a need to watch a ton of web videos — the place where I save all my web videos for later watching? Devour.com — I don’t even need to go anywhere else, everything good is usually there.

    For me I just want to read and that’s Instapaper. But I bet my wife would love Pocket — it would ‘fit’ her better.

  • Amazon Item of the Week: Lighting Science Definity – A19 Omni V2 LED Bulb

    [Marco Arment recently went through his options for LED light bulbs](http://www.marco.org/2012/04/09/led-light-bulbs-reviewed), but I wasn’t happy with his conclusions. I found this bulb and bought a couple for our living room that is illuminated just by two tall lamps with these bulbs. I have to say, I love these bulbs — even my wife noticed the difference when compared to the nasty CFLs that were in there.

    I can’t say how they stack up to all the bulbs Marco tested, but I am buying more of them.

  • Read It Later Reborn as Pocket

    Federico Viticci has a detailed take on the transformation (?) and states:
    >Unlike Weiner’s previous attempt at solving the “save for later” puzzle, Pocket is immediately visual, making it extremely clear that it wants to be a place where you save “stuff”, not just articles.

    I think thats a good description. Pocket feels more like Yojimbo in the cloud to me, than it does a good read-later service. Yojimbo may even be a poor comparison, Flipboard Pro may be a better analogy.

  • Patents and iA Writer

    Oliver Reichenstein in an interview with Dylan Love for Business Insider makes an interesting statement about patents:
    >While feel that Reading Time should be a common standard for everybody (other text editors and Websites started using it now as an indicator of text volume), we have a patent pending for Focus Mode. Some people criticized us for that. But we don’t make the rules of the industry. We follow them. Dealing with copycats is not all sunshine and rainbows. And if even bigger companies start copying us (the latest version MS Word now suddenly has a blue focus optimized cursor, just like Writer), we better have something to prove that this was our idea and not Microsoft’s or Apple’s.

    I had no clue Word adopted the blue cursor, that’s pretty lame.

  • iTunes’ Windows Problem

    Jean-Louis Gassée:
    >Today, the toxic waste of success cripples iTunes. There are times when I feel that iTunes has reached Windows Vista bloatware proportions: Increasingly non-sensical complexity, inconsistencies, layers of patches over layers of patches ending up in a structure so labyrinthine no individual can internalize it any longer. (Just like the Tax Code.)

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and by far iTunes is the one app on my Mac that I do two things with:

    1. Dread using.
    2. Actively block websites from opening.

    Something needs to change.

  • Quote of the Day: Shawn Blanc

    “My MacBook Air is now my ‘desktop’ and my iPad is now my ‘laptop’.”

  • Inside Nathan Myhrvold’s Office

    Geekwire has some photos behind the scenes of a patent troll’s office. I gotta say, the offices are fitting.

  • Augmented Paper

    Matt Gemmell:
    >For me, software experiences that feel like Augmented Paper are those that second-guess our (developers’) natural tendency to put functionality first, or to think of our apps as software. Apps are only *incidentally* software; software is an implementation detail. Instead, apps are *experiences*.

    You must read this entire post, it’s the best thing I have read in a while.

  • iCloud Numbers vs. Dropbox

    Matthew Panzarino on the iCloud versus Dropbox debate:
    >None of this matters because of this one fact: almost 70% of the 350M+ users of iDevices have access to iCloud, with some 100M+ using it already. Those are numbers Dropbox just can’t match.

    Add to that the fact that one of those two services is something Apple has a heavily vested interest in…

  • The 4-Inch iPhone

    Dan Provost on the 4-inch iPhone debate:
    >If Apple begins asking developers to make their apps have a “flexible” UI (to be compatible with 3:2 and 16:9 iPhones), when a notification banner appears the top navigation bar could simply nudge itself down. This would greatly improve the unobtrusive quality the banners strive for.

    That’d actually be great, if the 16:9 screen is really only 16:9 when viewing a video, the remainder of the time it affords for widgets to sit above or below the normal app content. I could get behind that.

    Dan also does a great job of mocking up some potential iPhone screen changes.

  • ‘Why Airport Security Is Broken—and How to Fix It’

    [Over the weekend a lot of readers sent this in to me](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303815404577335783535660546.html?mod=WSJ_hps_editorsPicks_1), a lot — it’s an article about the TSA and its faults. I saw it, thank you. The problem is, that while former TSA administrator Kip Hawley denounces some of the tactics used, he still has concluded that the TSA *is* a necessary evil.

    I disagree.

    The problem with the TSA is twofold:

    1. The policies that they follow, both on what is and isn’t allowed and how they screen. This is addressed very well by Hawley and it is a major problem.
    2. The people, the job.

    The second problem is what isn’t addressed, and it’s the bigger issue. Because even if we succeed in getting rid of porno scanners and allowing liquid through, we still face the issue of TSA “officers” over stepping their bounds.

    Since the inception of the TSA I have thought that airport screening should be handled not by a new agency under the directive of a dubious agency tasked with “homeland security”, but rather by the FBI.

    I say this because here is the requirement for being a TSA screener:

    Those aren’t stringent requirements, and yet they are (as the TSA would have you believe) the people on the front lines protecting this country from terrorism. Yeah.

    [By comparison here’s what it takes to be a Special Agent with the FBI](https://www.fbijobs.gov/1111.asp). [And then here’s the application process.](https://www.fbijobs.gov/112.asp)

    You may not like the FBI, but not just anyone can be *in* the FBI. And that’s the difference. The TSA was built out in a couple of months and staffed as quickly as possible with the most readily available people — and that’s why the TSA is as bad as it is.

  • TSA: Keeping Us Safe from Terrorists and Our Own iPads

    The “Fair & Balanced” Fox News:
    >A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official has been charged after being accused of stealing eight iPads from luggage at Dallas/Fort Worth International airport, KXAS-TV reported.

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  • Dark Sky is Out

    *The* weather app that I have been waiting for has finally landed. It’s a good looking app (damned blue icon though) and I can’t wait to put it through its paces to see how well it does, so far: best weather radar I have seen. It’s priced at a premium $5.99, but that makes me only like it more — I hate seeing hard work devalued by app store economics.

    UPDATE: [I am told](http://twitter.com/CraigGrannell/status/191937578549772288) this is U.S. only and continental U.S. only at that.

  • LogMyRun

    I am not a runner, both because I hate it and because I have a recurring tendonitis that prevents me from running for long periods of time. That said when I received an email about this app and looked through it, two things caught my eye:

    1. You can log the weather conditions during your run.
    2. You can log the mileage on your shoes.

    The latter I thought was really neat, I don’t know why, but I think it would be cool to know how many miles I put on a pair of shoes.

  • Canada’s Newest Coin Glows in the Dark

    Tim Hornyak:
    >The Royal Canadian Mint’s latest collectible coin features a dinosaur whose skeleton shines at night from beneath its scaly hide.

    We often joke: “looks like a kindergartener designed that.”

    It may be true in this case.