Both our kids have their own iPads and iPhones — all the devices are old ones — and because of that I have spent a fair amount of time trying to find good kids cases. Cases which help them carry and use the devices, but also offer ample protection.
I started first looking at military grade cases that didn’t look too insane. Each one I tried turned out to significantly impair the functionality of the iPad. Either rendering the speaker too muffled, or the touch screen far less responsive.
Clever setup from Jennifer Mack, I need to see if it works with Markdown formatting instead as I prefer to keep all my posts formatted that way. But looks cool.
Chris Vannoy shares his work travel gear.
John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke:
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
I guess I won’t be using that metric anymore — I always thought something felt a little off with those claims between manufacturers.
Federico Viticci:
There have been many cautionary tales about Apple’s cloud services and photo management apps, but I think they nailed it this time. I’m happy with iCloud Photo Library because it’s seamlessly integrated with my iPhone’s camera and photos – I don’t have to manually upload anything, and I don’t have to think about managing photos.
Yep, ditto.
This is absurd. Any officer that signed that police report should be kicked off the job.
Matt Gemmell:
We should be hearing women at least as often as we hear men, but that’s not what happens for most of us. Regardless of our gender, we probably hear men far more often. That’s a skewed, artificial version of reality, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s been a long time since I installed a third party screen saver. This one is worth it.
Nice tips from Álvaro Serrano in response to my bag post the other day.
Perfect site. Confused about government surveillance? Read this.
Lovely app.
Stephen Hackett:
The 6 Plus’ battery life is pretty incredible. While the differences between it and the 6’s battery life depend on the task at hand, I’m consistently able to last a day and a half if not longer on this thing without a charge. My 6 needed a charge every night, no matter what.
Sometimes I forget to charge mine and don't realize it until half way through the next day.
Marco Arment:
Having used an iPhone 6 full-time from its launch until these 6 Plus experiments over the last few weeks, I can confidently say that neither phone is extremely well-designed. Both have nontrivial and completely avoidable flaws. But the 6 Plus has bigger advantages over the other phones, while the 6 seems to sit in a mediocre middle ground.
I ran into something rather unexpected: it’s hard to choose a bag for a very short trip.
The scenario I found myself in: departing on a plane at midnight, and landing at 6am (destination time), then boarding another plane at 9pm (destination time), and returning home again at midnight. No hotel involved, just two flights, and work in-between each, before mercifully arriving home. ((To be clear, I drove the decision for such cramped flights, and not staying over longer. I wanted to minimize time away from the family as the available flight options were terrible.))
MG Siegler on iPad use in Europe:
Yet in five years, cafes everywhere will probably be filled with them. Much like the term “computer” has transferred from mainframe to desktop to laptop, I think it will take the place of “tablet” soon.
More and more I am not sure why most people buy anything but an iPad.
Conor McClure:
I’m still not sold on the usefulness of standing mats. It’s easy to see why comfortability should be prioritized, but in reality, it doesn’t need to be; after all, your standing desk exists for better health. If going barefoot for long periods of time is uncomfortable, your goal should be to train that, not eliminate the discomfort with a mat.
When I started standing my feet hurt so bad I couldn’t wait to get a fancy anti-fatigue mat. It alleviated some, but not all pain. About 6-9 months into using that mat I started to have pain again, mostly on my heels. It was too easy with the standing mat to put my weight load unevenly on my feet. So I ditched it and haven’t looked back. No pain, no mat.
If you use iOS then you’ve likely run into the most annoying part of iOS: the terrible shift key. It’s so bad it has a dedicated website to helping you understand if shift is on, or off.
Aesthetically the key works as it blends nicely with the look and feel of the keyboard, but from a usability perspective it is a miserable failure. Now Apple isn’t alone, there’s another offender I recently found for public flogging: Skype on the iPhone.
This type of stuff will die out, because the moment someone like Justin wants to go back and search for a product he tweeted about — and can’t find it on Twitter — back to the ol’ blog it is.