The Brooks Review

Year: 2015

  • Padbury Clock

    It’s been a long time since I installed a third party screen saver. This one is worth it.

  • Picking the Right Bag for a Trip: A Simple Set of Rules

    Nice tips from Álvaro Serrano in response to my bag post the other day.

  • Can They See My Dick?

    Perfect site. Confused about government surveillance? Read this.

  • Highball

    Lovely app.

  • ‘Well, I switched to the iPhone 6 Plus’

    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.

  • ‘An iPhone 6 owner lives with the iPhone 6 Plus’

    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.

  • Short Trips and Which Bag

    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.))

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  • “Tablet”

    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.

  • A Few “Standing Desk” Best Practices

    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.

  • Obvious Button States

    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.

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  • “Blogging” with Twitter and Instapaper

    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.

  • Desk PM

    There’s been an an abundance of talk about Desk, a multi-blog publishing tool that looks very pretty. The talk, unsurprisingly was drummed up because the creators chose to buy a spot on Daring Fireball to advertise the product. I held off because Ulysses, but at some point I have to try things like this to see if there is something here.
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  • Tim Cook’s Leadership

    Fantastic profile of Cook. He truly seems to be the type of leader you, I, should aspire to be.

  • New Version of Napkin

    New version of an app I use almost every day. Fantastic week for good software.

  • Filters for iPhone

    800 filters for $0.99 in a well designed package? Uh, yes please, and thank you very much.

  • Fantastical 2 for Mac

    The app is goddamn gorgeous looking. ((Federico has a more in-depth review than mine.))

  • Homemade Mini Donuts

    I can attest to these being delicious.

  • Fear of Apple

    Eli Schiff:

    Arment too let his fear be known: “I’m scared of having damaged my relationship with Apple.” It is highly interesting that Arment of all people now regrets and fears having criticized Apple, considering that six years earlier, he was not so afraid of throwing punches at the company.

    Interesting post all around about how people criticize Apple.

  • Scenery for Mac

    Really sweet new Mac app which provides a dead simple way to put your app screenshots on beautiful images. Very nice work, and a great pricing model too.

    If you work on apps, add this to list.

  • MagSafe Has Never Been Great For Light Laptops

    Yours truly, in my review of the 2010 MacBook Air:

    The computer is so light that when sitting on the couch cushion and charging I am not at all confident that the MagSafe would release before the computer would get yanked to the floor. I thankfully have yet to test this in the “real world” but in giving it a few tugs it seems to be that 60% of the time the MagSafe pops loose. It really depends on the material the Air is sitting on as the lack of weight in the machine means that it needs some friction to help that MagSafe release without pulling the Air to the ground.

    Puts things in perspective a bit.

    (Apologies for the missing images, I’ll have to search for those.)