>This week Shawn and Ben talk about Flickr, the announcement of OS X Mountain Lion, and iMessage notifications.
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A nice Twitter client for the Mac. I have only been using it today and I haven’t stopped using it yet — which is longer than most apps last. I am not sure that it is better than the official Twitter app, but it has some great things going for it, like: Instapaper support, Tweet Marker, etc.. ((The icon is horrid though.))
[Jim Dalrymple doesn’t like](http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/02/17/mountain-lion-is-not-more-like-ios/) the idea that Apple is trying to make the Mac more iOS like, saying:
>Mountain Lion is about familiarity and integration. The new features and apps in Mountain Lion make sense for a desktop operating system.
>These claims of Mountain Lion being more like iOS are just shit.
Are they? I don’t disagree with what Dalrymple is saying up and until the last line. Apple is indeed trying to bring some familiarity and integration between the two platforms, but there’s more to it than that.
The way I see it, Apple is trying to simplify OS X and bring to it some of the features from iOS that make sense. To that end Apple is very much making Mountain Lion more iOS like. Take for example these screenshots from [Jason Snell’s preview of the OS](http://www.macworld.com/article/165407/2012/02/hands_on_with_apples_new_os_x_mountain_lion.html):
It’s hard to look at those two images and not be reminded of iOS because not only do they look similar to their iOS counterparts, but the ideas showed up in iOS first. Now, you can certainly argue that this is the ‘familiarity’ angle at play — but how does that differ from iOSification arguments? Both are saying the same things: stuff is being brought from one OS to the other OS in order to make both more uniform and familiar.
I believe Apple is trying to make all their OSes more simple and it just so happens that the most simple OS available right now *is* iOS. Therefore it only makes sense that Apple would want to make OS X more like iOS — in that iOS is far more popular and far more simple than OS X.
Here’s [John Gruber on what Mountain Lion is doing](http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion):
>The recurring theme: Apple is fighting against cruft — inconsistencies and oddities that have accumulated over the years, which made sense at one point but no longer — like managing to-dos in iCal (because CalDAV was being used to sync them to a server) or notes in Mail (because IMAP was the syncing back-end). The changes and additions in Mountain Lion are in a consistent vein: making things simpler and more obvious, closer to how things *should* be rather than simply how they always have been.
Exactly. Dalrymple is right that Mountain Lion “is about familiarity and integration”, but Apple is making those changes by bringing more iOS features *to* OS X. That’s how they are gaining the familiarity.
[Michael Schechter correctly points out how Mountain Lion is moving us towards the future of apps for iOS *and* OS X](http://bettermess.com/responsive-app-design/):
>The expectation would be one unified application that has been seamlessly thought through at all levels, making the distinction between mobile and desktop that much more irrelevant. This could inevitably lead to a unified App Store with truly universal apps that span both OS X and iOS.
This is what I see happening with OS X and iOS: bringing both to the point where the average user doesn’t *have* to see a difference between the two OSes, but where there very much *are* differences between the two.
Making OS X more like iOS is not a bad thing — iOS is fantastic — just so long as OS X is made more iOS like in only the areas that it clearly needs to be more iOS like. Thus far, this is exactly what Apple has done.
Michael Hinkelman reporting:
>Federal prosecutors unsealed bribery charges today against a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) instructor at Philadelphia International Airport.
The charge:
>The charging document said that between August and October 2011 Gilliam took a $200 bribe in exchange for ensuring a passing grade on the mandatory, annual certification exam by taking the test for a security officer.
This is *clearly* way over blown, it’s not like TSA is ‘protecting’ us from terrorism or anything. ((Actually a bigger deal needs to be made of the people working at TSA.))
A great, and thorough, explanation of a new security feature coming to Mountain Lion.
Here’s a common scenario for me: I find an interesting article on my iPhone in Reeder/Twitter/Fever and open it in Safari, then decide I don’t have time to read it, so I send it to Instapaper.
The next time I am at my computer reading articles in Instapaper I come across that article I saved from my phone. Ah, but the web admins were clever and had redirected my iPhone to a mobile version of the article. So now when I load it up on my Mac I have to either: a) find the “full site” button, or b) try removing the m/mobile portion of the URL.
Here’s my gripe: if you are so clever that you can redirect my iPhone to a severely crippled ‘mobile’ version of your article, then why the fuck can’t you redirect Safari, on my Mac, back the — oh I don’t know — full site version of the article?
*Pathetic.*
Speaking of great iPad text editors, don’t forget about Writing Kit. I was thinking about this the other day and realized that if I had to do all of my writing on the iPad and could only have one of the plethora of writing apps installed on my iPad: Writing Kit would be my choice.
Don’t get me wrong, I love writing in iA Writer far more than any other app. But the features that Writing Kit offers makes it the best all-in-one writing/research app that I have tried. A lot of that has to do with the previewing and HTML export, but there are also other killer features in the app.
It’s worth checking out if you like to write on your iPad/iPhone.
It seems like it has been far too long since I talked about iPad text editors here. Dave Caolo has a nice review of Phraseology and talks about one of it’s most unique features:
>The Arrange Menu offers drag-and-drop control over the body of your document. Specifically, you can rearrange paragraphs, sentences and line breaks with a swipe. Just grab the handle next to each and drag that element to its new home. The Arrange Menu even shows the word count and character count for every paragraph and sentence. Deleting elements is just as easy; tap the red delete button and they’re gone.
I don’t remember when or who told me about this app, but it is quite clever in a few areas. Admittedly I am not a fan of writing in it, but I am a fan of editing my documents in it (for those rare times when I do: a) write 100% on my iPad and b) actually edit). It’s worth giving it a look (or just reading Dave’s review) if you are into iPad text editors.
David Chartier:
>In fact, if you’ve previously chatted with someone on your iPhone or iPad with iMessage, then start talking to them in Messages on your Mac, the app will download your previous conversation and begin keeping it in sync with your other devices.
Not only that but I didn’t open my MacBook Air from 4p yesterday to 6a this morning and all of my iMessage conversations during that time when my Mac was asleep were up on my screen right away in Messages when I opened up my Air. This was at once very weird and also kinda cool.
Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries for *The Wall Street Journal*:
>To get around Safari’s default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser’s privacy settings. While Safari does block most tracking, it makes an exception for websites with which a person interacts in some way—for instance, by filling out a form. So Google added coding to some of its ads that made Safari think that a person was submitting an invisible form to Google. Safari would then let Google install a cookie on the phone or computer.
Given all the privacy issues Apple has faced this week, with the address book issues, you have to think they are pissed about this one. This was a pretty self-serving and short-sighted move by Google.
Can’t wait to see how this one plays out.
MG Siegler:
>More importantly, Twitter has now firmly established itself as not just the iOS go-to social service, but Apple’s go-to social service.
I still can’t believe the level of integration Twitter is getting — but I am glad that it isn’t Facebook.
Florian Mueller:
>Today’s ruling and the revelation of this new Microsoft lawsuit show that the noose keeps tightening around Android’s neck in many ways. With more and more patents being asserted against Android in different courts, Google needs to come up with a better way to address its intellectual property issues than possibly trying to reach a state of mutually assured destruction on the basis of FRAND-pledges standard-essential patents, a kind of misconduct that antitrust regulators won’t tolerate because standard-essential patents are a fundamental issue, unlike Google’s desire to get away with infringement.
The mutual destruction path seems to be where all this is headed for now, but what a win for Apple. I can’t imagine not having “slide-to-unlock” on any touchscreen smartphone.
Paul ‘Supersite’ Thurrott on the OS X Mountain Lion release:
>There were absolutely no rumors to indicate such a release was coming, and given the timing, one can logically assume that Apple is trying to steal some thunder from Microsoft’s eagerly-awaited Windows 8.
[Apple CEO Tim Cook to the Wall Street Journal](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204880404577226864202052768.html):
>I don’t really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple
Who to believe, who to believe…
John Gruber:
>And then the reveal: Mac OS X — sorry, OS X — is going on an iOS-esque one-major-update-per-year development schedule.
That’s going to be great.
Be sure to read Gruber’s entire post about this — he offers a lot of great insight.
Apple on the new OS X:
>Messages, Reminders, Notification Center, Twitter, and more. You love them on iPad. Now you’ll love them on your Mac. And with iCloud, they all work better together.
“Mountain Lion”? Really?
Say goodbye to iChat and hello to Messages (with support for iMessage).
Walt Mossberg’s conclusion:
>The Samsung Galaxy Note isn’t for everyone, and I can’t recommend it as the main mobile phone for most people. But as a stylus-driven small tablet, it might be just what some users are looking for.
*I’ve been dying to get my hands on a “stylus-driven small tablet” that’s at once too big to use as a phone and too small to replace an iPad. Sounds fantastic.*
John Paczkowski:
>“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”
That’s about the *only* response Apple could give at this point.
Kim Zetter reporting for Wired.com on the alleged targeting of attractive women for the porno scanners:
>“She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’‘You just have such a cute figure,’” Ellen Terrell recalled to CBS News in Dallas.
The best part of this though is that there are over 500 complaints — so the TSA responded by:
>When asked about the complaints, the TSA released a statement to CBS saying that scanners at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, as well as at the Love Field airport, had been upgraded so that they now showed only a generic body outline, rather than a detailed image.
Why even bother with these scans then? Wasn’t the point, from the get go, to have a detailed accurate scan to see if there is hidden contraband on the persons body? How then does this make sense?
Also: “Upgraded”???? I think the word you are looking for is “downgraded”.
My mind hurts.