The Brooks Review

Year: 2014

  • The Anti-VSCO Photographer

    Conor McClure:

    It just doesn’t make sense anymore. I see photographers buy these new packs like they buy new iPhones—immediately, at whatever price, just because.

  • The Synopsis

    I linked to my new site when I launched it, but I didn’t write about it much. I didn’t want to say too much, as I just wanted to see what happened. That and I was pretty busy at the time.

    I do think it is worth taking a moment to address the site and some of the motivations, goals, and ideas behind the site.

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  • The Eight Year March

    Eight years ago, well a little longer than that, I wasn’t working. I was a little over a year out of college and was “freelancing” in various fields, but really just sleeping in late and staying up late doing only enough work to pay the minuscule bills I had at the time. I was fortunate enough to have a father who kind of let me do whatever while helping to support me. I didn’t have any money, but back then I really didn’t need any money either.

    Ah, I miss those days at times.

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  • The Only Practical Advice for Parents

    I can’t offer much great parenting advice, but there is one bit that I always find myself chanting when I am bleary eyed and trying to get a kid to sleep: “At some point, no matter what, this kid will go to sleep.”

    That’s the only thing I know to be true. Sure, sometimes that sleep may mean you only sleep for an hour or two before work, but — at some point — that kid will sleep.

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  • Quote of the Day: Tim Cook

    “So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”

  • Why is the CurrentC app collecting your device information?

    Nick Arnott:

    To their credit, CurrentC does employ SSL pinning to protect the application's traffic, but at this point it's hard to know if that's to protect their users, or their questionable data transmissions.

  • Email Drafts the Hard Way

    I think Gabe is wrong about interleaved replies, clearly, but the rest of his advice is spot on. I’ve long thought email clients should only ask for the recipient at the bottom of the screen, or when you go and hit send.

    I used to draft emails like this, but fell out of practice. Consider that changed now I am back to drafting outside of email apps (you guys will never guess which app I am going to use). (First iOS email app to add an extension system for “draft reply in…” wins.)

  • iOS Bugs

    Add these iCloud bugs, which I see with Twitterrific to the “it takes 15 seconds to delete an app” bug and iOS 8.1 can be very annoying.

  • CurrentC

    John Gruber:

    I don’t know that CVS and Rite Aid disabling Apple Pay out of spite is going to drive customers to switch pharmacies (Walgreens is an Apple Pay partner), but I do know that CurrentC is unlikely to ever gain any traction whatsoever.

    CurrentC stores your payment information in the cloud and uses QR codes. LOL.

  • The Zombie iPad

    There have been a lot of arguments going around the web about why the original iPad mini is still being sold. The ‘zombie iPad’ they call it.

    With Apple’s standard practice of not shafting iOS owners the year after they buy a device, it’s likely that iOS 9 will have to work on this iPad mini. And the problem, developers say, is that it is a bear to develop for such an old and slow device. The refrain seems to be that support for this iPad won’t be dropped until 2017 meaning we will have to endure, I don’t know what, until then.

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  • Pixelmator for iPad

    Good overview from Viticci. Add this to Flare 2 and I am now 99% sure that not only do I not need Lightroom, but that I don't even need a Mac to edit my photos. I can't wait to get this entire workflow laid out.

  • What we give away when we log on to a public Wi-Fi network

    Maurits Martijn:

    I will never again be connecting to an insecure public WiFi network without taking security measures.

    If you don’t think this matters, read this and you will see why it does matter.

  • What Google really means by “Don’t be evil”

    Leo Mirani:

    But it also means that Google has effectively redefined what “evil” means. It is whatever Google thinks it means.

    Convenient.

  • The iPad Air 2′s Huge Upside

    Ben Bajarin:

    Based on the types of jobs that are extremely mobile and work done out in the field frequently, we estimate there are upwards of 300m jobs, and growing, where computers are not used today because they were in the shape of a notebook or desktop. Yet this is where the opportunity lies to bring a computer in the shape of a tablet.

  • BitTorrent Sync vs. The Cloud

    Brett is doing something I do, which is using Sync for a personal cloud because we have Mac minis in a colocation facility. It works exceedingly well for me.

    It’s also amazingly fast. Sitting at home I can upload something I save to my server from my iPhone (via the new Transmit iOS app) and it syncs for that Mac mini server back to my MacBook Pro almost instantly. It’s quite incredible.

    (I use the Mac mini server because it is always running. Also the Sync iOS app is really slow in my use.)

  • The Travel Bag Review

    Some weeks back now, Tom Bihn asked if I would like to try out some of their new gear. I looked over the list and was immediately drawn to two items: Aeronaut 30, and the Travel Laundry Stuff Sack. Both seem to fill real needs in my travel bag setup (well, not if you ask my wife).

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  • Yosemite + iOS 8.1: What Photographers Need to Know

    Austin Mann:

    It’s now super easy to slow down your iPhone Slo-Mo footage on your Mac: just open the slow-motion video file in QuickTime and drag the sliders on the timeline below. This process will be familiar as it’s exactly the same as the process on your iPhone.

    Oh, I had no idea. That’s cool.

  • Behind The App: Flare 2

    I downloaded Flare 2, having not used the first version, and I like it quite a bit. I think with some patience it will replace Lightroom for me — but that’s a long post for another month.

    Shot from my iPhone, processed in Flare 2 on my Mac. Expired Fujifilm effect, customized to remove the border crap Flare loves to add.

    I am pretty sure I may have found a workflow that gives me 90% of the photo editing power of my Mac, while doing all edits on iOS. This could be very cool.

  • Twitter’s “Peace Offering” to Developers Is Meaningless

    Marco Arment:

    They’re not obsessed with messing with developers’ heads — we’re just innocent bystanders getting hit whenever this fundamentally insecure, jealous, unstable company changes direction, which happens every few years.

    I don’t think there is much money in developing things for Twitter, which is too bad because I love Twitter.

  • The iPad Air 2

    Despite what most say, I still think a new iPad is the best computer you can get.