Rene Ritchie:
>We’ve heard that Apple is getting ready to ditch the dock connector as it’s currently sized and implemented on iPods, iPhones, and iPads. The reason isn’t anything political, like a new desire to conform to an outdated micro-USB standard, but typically Apple: to save space inside the iPhone 5 for what are now more important components.
I’ve been wondering how long the dock connector would stick around.
Peter Burrows, Brian Womack and Hugo Miller for Bloomberg:
>Google Inc. (GOOG), which won U.S. approval for its acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. (MMI), is close to naming Dennis Woodside to run the business when the deal closes, three people familiar with the matter said.
[Florian Mueller reporting on Google’s conference call when they announced the acquisition of Motorola](http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/first-reaction-to-googlemotorola.html):
>Google said in the conference call that it would operate Motorola Mobility as a separate business, but the price Google agreed to pay is not reflective of the value of Motorola Mobility as a stand-alone business: that’s the kind of price paid by a strategic buyer who plans to use the acquisition target as leverage for its (Google’s) own core business.
The big thing is that Google has been pretty adamant that they won’t meddle, that they won’t mess with Motorola. All a long I’ve thought that to be bullshit — well here’s the first meddling: naming Woodside a Google Ad Sales chief to the CEO post at Motorola. That pick says a whole hell of a lot about Google’s goals.
Jeffery Battersby has a nice rundown of the apps that are out there for doing your taxes on iOS, but is it just me or does that seem like a really odd/weird task to be doing on iOS? I know iOS is very capable and can be used in place of a computer for most people, but man this doesn’t seem *right* to me.
Charlie Sorrel:
>It’s hard to imagine a scenario where your SD cards would need to be “waterproof, shockproof and magnet proof,” but Samsung has gone and made some ruggedized cards anyway. Available in several speeds and sizes, the brushed metal cards will look as good out of your cameras as they will in it.
I only want them because they look awesome.
I could only find one microSD and one SDHC in 16GB on Amazon right now, but if you buy them with these links I will get a cut. [16GB SDHC](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005TUQVR2/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20) and [16GB microSD](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005TUQUZA/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20).
They have now caught up (not really) to where OmniFocus was in 2008. Things is nice looking and all, but I really have to question your motivations if you are still using it at this point. ((On a side note, I bet someone on Twitter that we would see TextMate 2 before Things Cloud Sync — we could argue beta verses alpha, but I think I won that one.))
Give this a go…
I agree with everything Mr. Skoda says in this post. Everything.
Matthew Panzarino:
>One of the biggest additions is the re-introduction of Tweetie’s swipe actions, allowing you to quickly perform several Twitter functions after a swipe on a Tweet.
Hell yeah.
I hate that the iPro makes you use a case. That seems like a bad design decision to me. Nice compariSon though — I had been wondering.
Gabe over at Macdrifter on the excellent Moom app:
>The rest of Moom is great though. Moom is kind of like LaunchBar, but for window management. I don’t realize how much I use it until I sit down at my wife’s mac and curse myself for not installing it earlier.
He’s got some great tips too.
Fantastic.
Microsoft’s IE blog:
>When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.
Yeah, but it’s probably in the least evil way possible… Probably.
Overall a really nice review by Glick. His ‘random quibbles’ and ‘things I liked’ sections are all ditto for me. I am still using Osfoora, but there are some very large omissions I would like to see added in, such as: live streaming and related tweets when viewing a conversation.
Dr. Drang solves the mystery of why LaunchBar still shows iChat and doesn’t seem to be able to index ‘Messages’ in it’s place. ((Some of you may be thinking: Ben said he was done with posting links to anonymous blogs. This is true, but Dr. Drang is pseudonym and that for some reason doesn’t bug me. Likely because I can say that ‘X wrote Y’.))
There’s a new feature that Frakes talks about called: VIP:
>We all have particular people—our family members, our boss, our bookie—whose messages are more important than others. While Mail in Lion let you use combinations of rules, labels, and mailboxes to make a particular person’s messages easier to identify or view, Mail in Mountain Lion adds a new feature that’s custom-made for such purposes: VIPs
I already do this by flagging email based on a rule, but this looks way better.
Nick O’Neill on Forbes “stealing” an NYT article:
>I had that experience myself at AllFacebook with this article. It was an article that I wrote following 6 months of research on copywriting. The reality is that in the world of newsfeeds and streams, titles matter more than ever before. The best content in the world will fall flat without a great title. Nothing illustrates it better than this recent Target article.
This is, unfortunately, very true. I written things I thought were just OK and had them blow up because the title was “clever” and then written something I spent days on and it fizzles because the title wasn’t that great.
A new site:
>Instapaper’s most liked articles, as determined by Twitter.
Very nice.
Marco Arment:
>If I asked most careful people if Instapaper could have their location, they’d refuse, because there’s no obvious good reason. But if the app asks right when they enable a location-based setting from a screen that shows why it’s asking for their location, they can make a more educated decision. Similarly, if an app doesn’t seem to have a good reason when it asks for Contacts, a skeptical person can decline.
I would love to see more developers put thought into when a user sees a dialog so that users can make more educated choices. I am not holding my breath though. ((There are hundreds of great developers, but thousands of developers that are less than great.))
Jim Dalrymple still isn’t seeing it:
>You see my point? Apple added these apps to iOS because they made sense for those users. That’s exactly what Apple did with Mountain Lion — added apps and features that made sense for that OS.
He points out things that clearly came from OS X to iOS. Here’s the problem: OS X came first and iOS is based off of it. So yeah, of course it has elements from OS X. That’s why the above quote proves my point: “added apps and features that made sense for that OS”. Glad we agree.