The Brooks Review

Month: May 2014

  • OmniFocus 2 for Mac: Available Now

    Finally.

  • Stress at Home

    Belinda Luscombe:

    A new study out from the Council on Contemporary Families suggests that contrary to most surveys, people are actually more stressed at home than at work.

    Men and women, with or without children, doesn't matter.

  • Quote of the Day: Jonas Downey

    “Remember when the web was damn simple? It still can be. It’s up to us to make it that way.”

  • Sensor Size Debates

    Josh Ginter on deciding to go with micro four-thirds:

    In complete contrast, Micro Four Thirds cameras don’t deliver the same image quality and they are certainly held back technically by their 2x cropped sensors. I don’t think there’s any denying that Micro Four Thirds cameras are not capable of doing the best portraiture.

    That entire paragraph isn’t quite correct. The sensors are very good and really only have trouble with huge prints. Beyond that they are on par with most other sensors. This is a long debated topic, but I’m in the camp that the sensor size doesn’t matter.

    What’s different between micro four thirds and say Fujifilm is that the latter has different color rendering and the best noise control I’ve ever seen. Different sensors and sensor sizes really only give you different looks in your photography. It’s up to you to decide which look you like.

  • Fivethirtyeight Weighs in on Sit-Stand Desks

    Emily Oster:

    There is no definitive answer in the literature, but reading it all together I find myself more convinced of the sit-stand desk’s benefits than I expected — sufficiently so that the next time I move offices, I’m getting one.

    It’s the best way to work. I miss my standing desk when I am at home.

  • Why Lavabit was forced to shut down

    Ladar Levison:

    In Virginia, the government replaced its encryption key subpoena with a search warrant and a new court date. I retained a small, local law firm before I went back to my home state, which was then forced to assemble a legal strategy and file briefs in just a few short days. The court barred them from consulting outside experts about either the statutes or the technology involved in the case. The court didn't even deliver transcripts of my first appearance to my own lawyers for two months, and forced them to proceed without access to the information they needed.

    His story is absurd, but not because of his stance, but because of the overall lack of due process and — you know — justice.

  • The new DuckDuckGo

    Brett Terpstra on the DuckDuckGo redesign:

    My favorite part of the redesign is that image and video search results are available on the main search page.

    It really is a fantastic update.

  • Google Predicts Ads in Odd Spots Like Thermostats

    Rolfe Winkler:

    In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was disclosed Tuesday, the search giant said that it could be serving ads and other content on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”

    Enjoy your Nest…

  • Quote of the Day: John Carey

    “If you start to imagine photographs not just as fractions of light caught or frozen and more as time itself callously repeating itself despite what has happened in the mean time they can start taking on a life of their own.”

  • iOS Devices for Sketch.app

    Sweet.

  • Why I Moved Back to Ulysses III

    When iA’s Writer Pro came out I promptly switched over to it (having previously being a huge Writer fan) and I was largely happy using it over Ulysses III. The difference is splitting hairs in the simplicity realm of writing, but I’ve come to find out that single hair makes a very large difference to me.

    Both Ulysses III and Writer Pro are exceptionally simple. Writer Pro is a no-nonsense ‘here is what I am, and that is all there is’, type of app. Ulysses III is more of a ‘this is your writing space and it is as simple as you want it to be’, type of app.

    Both are simple, just in very different ways.

    To me the complexity inherent in Writer Pro is evident in two areas:

    • The modes are the first stage. Where you actively have to think about what part of the writing process you are in. That’s a great tool overall, but one cannot argue that on some level it adds psychological overhead to the process of writing. “Wait, I want to write, but I am in edit mode.”
    • The file storage is the biggest area of concern for me in Writer. Writer Pro relies on simple text files, yes, but those files can be stored anywhere, or in varying folders within iCloud. Each must then be opened by themselves in new windows and thus managing your files becomes more complex than in an app that manages files for you. In other words you have to think about organizing those files.

    Ulysses suffers from different levels of complexity:

    • It is meant to house all of your writings. Which is great because they are all there, but also they are all there. You see everything when you have more than just the editor window open — and that’s just distracting. Though to be fair, CMD+1 removes all that visual clutter.
    • Unlike Writer Pro, Ulysses has options — and those options can lead to a more complex tool. The way they are presented keeps things on the simpler side, but options adds complexity.

    In my opinion, Writer Pro is actually the more complicated app to use.

    Everything you do in Writer Pro, outside of writing and editing, must be done somewhere else — not in the app. So while Writer Pro is more simple, it adds more complexity to my overall workflow as I need more and more tools to do something — anything — with that text I just labored over.

    In a nutshell that’s the top reason I am back with Ulysses after a stint with Writer Pro: Ulysses affords me the ability to interact with my texts after I am done writing them and keeps them all in one depository. I can do more with one app in Ulysses than I can in Writer Pro.

    Of course there are a few other reasons why I came back, and in no particular order here those are:

    • I think the overall design of Ulysses is better than Writer. And if I don’t like the design, I can just change the colors and fonts. The flexibility is there, but not a distraction as can be in so many other apps.
    • Variable typewriter scrolling is amazing. I like the line I am writing on to be static in position, but I don’t like that position to be the middle of my screen, or maybe I do. With variable typewriter scrolling I can decide on the fly where I want that line to be. It’s fantastic.
    • It’s nice to use, nice to work with, and constantly being improved.
    • Feels like a notebook with endless pages and a notebook always feels like endless possibilities for new ideas and thoughts. Writer feels like an endless stack of sheets of paper, where they will get lost and are limiting in usefulness. You don’t go into the most important meeting you’ll have this year with a stack of loose paper — you choose a fine notebook.
    • I like the document states in Writer Pro, but I’ve been able to replicate them (and more) with tagging in Ulysses.
    • Color and fonts: I can choose them. I can tweak them, and Ulysses remembers that I like my light theme in window mode and my dark theme in fullscreen mode.
    • Daedalus is better on iPhone than Writer Pro. But, you likely disagree with me. It’s an odd duck, but I really like it. (And you can install your own fonts to it to match your Mac!)

    Of course there are somethings that are still not so great:

    • I really don’t like the process for adding links. If you paste a markdown formatted link, then the app doesn’t recognize it properly. So you have to start the process and paste in the link when the popup appears. If I hadn’t figured out how to automate this with Keyboard Maestro this would have been a deal breaker.
    • Markdown is not copied by default. Instead you have to use a different keyboard shortcut — maybe. Actually the secondary copy shortcut can be one of many formats and which one is based off of the format you used last. Which is not only annoying, it’s inconsistent with logic of any kind. Just let me set what type of text ‘copy’ copies.
    • Lack of publishing support to weblogs. It’s been promised, but it’s not here yet. This is something that any writing app should have at this point in time.

    Overall though, still one of the best writing apps I have ever used, and the best I have found for OS X.

  • GM Has Recalled More Cars Than It Sold In Five Years

    Patrick George:

    If you add up GM’s total U.S. sales from 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, it equals about 12.18 million cars, according to their own sales data and news reports. And in 2014 alone so far in the U.S., they’ve recalled more than 13 million cars, with possibly more on the way. P

    This entire situation is crazy, and I am surprised it is not bigger news. John Oliver has a really good take if you are an HBO subscriber.

  • Being Cool

    Rance Crain:

    What Samsung is basically saying, Sir John argues, is that “the other guy isn’t cool. Because I’ve basically taken what they’ve done and I’ve made it a different shape and a slightly different size and I’ve brought it out in different colors. That’s not cool. So I think they could find themselves in a short-lived space.”
    The bottom line for Apple is to continue improving the product, by all means, but most important: Don’t react, because that’s not cool.

    Really great article as long as you stop at the last line above.

  • The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas

    Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras:

    Legal or not, the NSA’s covert surveillance of an entire nation suggests that it will take more than the president’s tepid “limits” to rein in the ambitions of the intelligence community. “It’s almost like they have this mentality – if we can, we will,” says German. “There’s no analysis of the long-term risks of doing it, no analysis of whether it’s actually worth the effort, no analysis of whether we couldn’t take those resources and actually put them on real threats and do more good.”

  • Mod Notebook Review

    Patrick Rhone:

    In fact, I would likely be all in on the idea if they offered just the service/app part for any notebook you already owned or preferred to use. Say, for instance, if for that price you could print off a pre-paid shipping label, send them any notebook up to a certain size, they scanned it and made it available in their app, and then sent it back to you. That, I might buy.

    Now I feel bad for pointing this notebook out to him.

  • Updates From the Past

    When I first started computing, updates were a rare thing. Sure they happened, but not often and not always for free. The updates had to be shipped to you, on some sort of physical media which was not only annoying, but slow as well.

    Then the internet and software downloads came along and changed all that. Programs could be rapidly updated to take into account other changes to operating systems and time in general. Things became easier and faster. Good all around.

    Then Apple’s App Stores came along. With the App Store updates and downloads and buying is easier and better than ever. Well, except that the App Store has thrown us back in time with app updates. Unless a developer requests the limited emergency update protocol, the nuclear option, it can take a week (or more, or less) to get an update to users.

    Which really isn’t acceptable to anyone. Not developers, not users. Well, except maybe Apple, they seem happy to leave things as they are.

    If something breaks in an app you rely on because Apple updated OS X, and you purchased that app from the App Store, well now you get to wait.

    And wait.

    Work?

    What work?

    Oh, there’s the update. Thanks Apple.

  • Everyone Should Know Just How Much the Government Lied to Defend the Nsa

    I’m quoting his conclusion, but this entire piece is a must read. Trevor Timm:

    Intelligence director James Clapper’s infamous lie to Congress – in which he claimed just months before Snowden’s leaks that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans – will certainly follow him for the rest of his career even if it never leads to his prosecution. But while Clapper almost certainly broke the law, the senate committee members in front of whom he spoke knew the truth regardless.
    The Justice Department, on the other hand, convinced the supreme court to dismiss a case that could have dramatically curtailed the NSA’s most egregious abuses of power based on false statements. And now all of us are forced to live with the consequences of that.

    Those motherfuckers.

  • High-Speed Data Transfers between Macs with Thunderbolt

    Jordan Merrick:

    Similar to Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode, the speeds are incredibly fast and, with a little overhead, my tests showed transfer speeds hit 700MB/sec.

    Noted.

  • It’s All About Dew Point

    Dennis Mersereau:

    If you're getting a respectable weather report, they'll also include something called the “dew point” immediately after the temperature. The dew point tells you to what temperature the air would have to cool to reach full saturation, or reach 100% relative humidity. Looking at the dew point is the best way to determine how much moisture is present.

    Must read in my book. I had no idea.

  • Who Has Your Back 2014

    LOL, Snapchat.