Year: 2014

Dr. Drang:

What I wasn’t expecting was for the phones to act like freshly caught fish. As I tried them out in the store, I nearly dropped both of them on the table. Now it’s true that I was manipulating them in ways that I probably wouldn’t in normal use—testing how far my thumb would reach and using the Siracusa grip, for example—but even so, both phones felt precarious no matter how I was holding them. I’d never trust myself with a bare iPhone 6.

Shawn Blanc:

Our home is now filled with images that I’ve taken over the years. In my office I have photos of my wife up by my desk. In our living are photos of our boys. Upstairs we have some cool “artsy” photos hanging in the bathrooms. On the fridge are other snapshots from the summer. We love having these great images all around our home.

I am cleaning out a room in our house right now and have a pile of 20-30 images that are printed, but have no frame to call home. The best part about photography for me, is printing out the pictures to display them in my home.

Craig Mod:

We could have added a bit of thickness to the body — evening it out, for example, with the camera — giving you an additional hour or two of battery life. But, no, we wanted to keep it as thin as possible since we knew you’d veil our electronic surrogate baby in infertile silicon.

Mod has run into the same problem I am guessing most iPhone 6 owners have run into: this phone is fucking slippery. The rolled edges, the metal, the glass — save the camera bump — the entire phone is slick to hold. And big. Big and slippery. ((Sounds like XXX feature film.))

I bought a red silicon case for my iPhone 6 and I use it on the weekends when I am most likely to have it out near the kids (who constantly bump me). But I hate the case.

As Mod notes, you lose the best feature of the iPhone 6 when you add a case: the smooth feeling of swiping from side to side on the phone. That’s never felt better, but the case adds a lip, and so you lose that with a case.

It’s a tough call, and I doubt I ever put the case back on mine (and so I bought the AppleCare plan for it).

Alfie Kohn:

But if you read the results rather than just the authors’ spin on them — which you really need to do with the work of others working in this field as well[7] — you’ll find that there’s not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school. The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we’d start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that’s published.

One of my favorite apps for finding new stories to read is Digg, all the others I have tried don’t do a great job curating things down to the truly good. Next Draft also helps with this, but that’s only a weekday newsletter.

SmartNews is a new (to the U.S.) app that shows the top stories in user selectable categories. I’ve been using it about a day now, and I like it. I don’t love it, as I find the inconsistent content layout between categories odd, but it’s way better than subscribing to “news” type RSS feeds.

Great little plugin from Marcelo Somers. When I switched to this theme I made a big change on the way that posts are displayed, I started to use Post Formats instead of just categories. Previously WordPress would decide how to display a post based on the category, but now that is based on the format. Alas, Editorial and MarsEdit (the two ways I post to this site) don’t support Post Formats so I was left publishing, then logging into the site to change the the format.

With this plugin that is done automatically. This is one reason I love WordPress: the community is so large there is bound to be someone else with the same problems I have, who have also found the solution.

Carolyn O’Hara on working from home:

They discovered that the best workers typically worked intently for around 52 minutes and then took a 17-minute break. And these restorative breaks needn’t take any particular form.

Russell Ivanovic:

On the surface, nothing has changed. The problem is, it feels like everything has changed. In short while Apple’s hardware continues to impress me, their software has gone downhill at a rapid pace.

Del Quentin Wilber:

U.S. law enforcement officials are urging Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc. (GOOG) to give authorities access to smartphone data that the companies have decided to block, and are weighing whether to appeal to executives or seek congressional legislation.

Good luck with that. While they are at it, they should also require that the government gets the keys/codes to all safes — that’s basically what they want.

Peter Sims:

At that point, it all just started to feel weird, until finally she revealed that she was in Chicago at the launch of Uber Chicago, and that the party featured a screen that showed where in NYC certain “known people” (whatever that means) were currently riding in Uber cabs. After learning this, I expressed my outrage to her that the company would use my information and identity to promote its services without my permission. She told me to calm down, and that it was all a “cool” event and as if I should be honored to have been one of the chosen.

Welp, add Uber to the list of things I won’t ever be using again.

This is fantastic, I’ve been wanting to figure this out for a while now.

Great essay about why, we in Seattle, love the rain.

Ole Begemann on the design of his 6 plus:

The way the display glass curves around the sides is stunning and feels great in the hand. There is almost no discernible seam between glass and aluminum. It must have taken Apple’s industrial design team tons of work to arrive at this level of workmanship. The curves also make the built-in swipe gestures feel a lot more natural.

I am in 100% agreement here, and in fact his entire ‘design’ segment of his first impressions are spot on.

Stephen Hackett:

The iPhone 6 is actually 17 grams heavier than the 5S but it feels lighter, due to not being as dense. The glass over the screen is thinner, making taps feel more hollow than on the old phone, or even the iPad. The combination of these things makes the iPhone 6 feel cheaper than the 5S somehow.

I agree with most of Hackett’s review, but this blurb I have to strongly disagree with. To me the fit and finish of the iPhone 6, feel in hand, and ever other detail feels leaps and bounds better than the iPhone 5s. It’s not even close if you ask me. I’m not sure what he means about feeling more hollow, it feels more solid to me. The iPhone 5S always felt kind of empty to me.

The iPhone 6 feels like solid metal and glass.

This is one of my favorite features about iOS 8. It works well, and you can put in a lot of stuff. Do note that you can only see this if you use a passcode to lock your iPhone, but you are doing that right?

One thing I added to the medical notes section: a reward for returning my phone.

I showed this to a coworker when iOS 8 launched and his response was: who will ever find that? Indeed it is a bit hidden, but iOS is so prevalent that I suspect it won’t take cabbies, or EMTs long to be knowledgeable about this.