I need to do this more often — we all do.
Ben Popken on a hotel that washes coins it receives:
The practice at the St. Francis hotel in San Francisco is said to have started when hotelier Dan London observed that some coins sullied a woman’s white gloves.
It is very cool that they still do this.
For better or worse one of the most popular trends on the Internet is to create infographics on topics (see a bunch here). Some of these graphics are stunning and really paint a nice picture, while others are, well, let’s just say others are less than helpful.
Those who follow me on Twitter know that I am in Miami right now, last night I grabbed the red eye from Seattle to Miami in hopes of seeing Will Smith — only to find out contrary to the song) he doesn’t live in Miami full-time. ((That is not really why I am in Miami.)) Part of my airport ritual is to purchase a physical magazine to read during take off (when digital devices are not allowed), this time was no different.
This time around I purchased Bloomberg Businessweek and it was a special ‘Year in Review’ edition that promised:
365 days, 61 Charts, 289 Pictures, 7 Essays.
I grabbed this issues because it appeared that Businessweek decided to make an entire infographic issue of a printed magazine. ((I realize infographics have been popular since before the web.)) So how did they do?
Pretty shitty.
I have never been more confused in trying to read a magazine ((More confusing that iPad apps.)), or just trying to figure out why all the numbers and charts and lines they are showing are important. I cannot recommend this issue of Businessweek to any of my dear readers.
If you need a concrete example just look at the bottom left corner of the last picture — they are not saying that those percentages represent each half of the country — no they just put percentages randomly over the top of the country and then colored it differently to show how “equal” they are. Lame.
I had a goal once airborne to use my MacBook Air and InDesign to finish up a form for work — middle seat in coach on Alaska Airlines does not work so well for this task. I slept instead. In fact it doesn’t work at all for this task, I needed more elbow room to properly use the track pad — frustrating. More on this when I get back though.
Katrin Bennhold on Microsoft’s Netherlands campus:
Ninety-five percent of Dutch Microsoft employees work from home at least one day a week; a full quarter do so four out of five days. Each team has a “physical minimum;” some meet twice a week in the office, others once a quarter. Online communication and conference calls save time, fuel and paper waste. The company says it has cut its carbon footprint by 900 tons this year.
A great story how Dutch workers are really taking to spending more time at home and trying to cut their work days from 5 to 4. I work from home on Fridays — it is not only the best day of my work week, but it is also my most productive.
Nathan Alderman’s conclusion of Postbox 2:
If you’d like a top-notch upgrade to your e-mail experience at a reasonable price, and you can live without Exchange support, the terrific and thoughtful features built into Postbox definitely deserve your consideration.
Postbox is one of those apps that I want to love (another one is Pixelmator). I have tried Postbox many of times, including the 2.0 release after Chris Bowler posted about how much he loved it. I just can’t get into — I think I may be too stuck in my Mail.app ways.
Looks like a good update — personally I never use Skype, but this is a great way to do video chat over 3G on the iPhone. I may just have to start using Skype again.
Ian Hines on how he got to only using 44GB on his MacBook:
As I mentioned above, I didn’t get to this point out of some coordinated effort to use less. Less is not more. Enough is enough. And for me, this is enough.
For reference I use 159.24GB on my MacBook Air, just a testament to what I said from day one about what a ‘normal’ computer user needs. If you are using more than 200GB of storage you are not in the majority.
A neat little utility to allow you to write in your text editor of choice and then upon closing that window have the text magically appear in say a mail message window. Clever and it supports TextMate. Here’s the thing though: there was another menubar utility that did this same thing a while back (like more than a year) bonus points if you know what it was/is.
Marco Arment weighs in with a very accurate list.
Josh Ong after reporting on the Playbooks current 3 hour battery life:
Despite these concerns, RIM’s Jim Balsillie has insisted that the PlayBook is “way ahead” of the iPad. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis recently said in an interview that the PlayBook OS is will lead RIM into the “next decade of mobile computing.”
I sure hope the “next decade” of computing doesn’t mean 3 hour battery life.
Yesterday I posted about CNN’s list of the top ten technology failures for 2010 — in the linked list I wrote that I no longer trusted CNN and would not be reading them. Upon thinking about it more I find their entire list to be pretty silly. Here are CNN’s top ten failures in tech for 2010:
Apple deservedly makes the list twice — but this is hardly a list of the biggest tech failures and the iPhone 4 antenna issue is hardly at the top. Compare CNN’s list to LAPTOP Magazine’s list:
This list makes even less sense. Let’s look at PC Worlds ginormous list of failures, which were annoyingly put in a slideshow format:
1.Google Buzz
2. iTunes Ping
3. Google Wave
4. Net Neutrality
5. Facebook Privacy
6. McAfee’s False Positive
7. Palm Pre / WebOS
8. HP Slate
9. Android Tablets
10. Nexus One
11. JooJoo
12. Plastic Logic Que
13. Lost iPhone
14. iPhone 4 Antenna
15. White iPhone 4
16. Blackberry Torch
17. Ask.com
18. Blockbuster
19. MySpace
20. Microsoft Kin
This is probably the best list I have seen, but it is hardly definitive.
With that in mind let me now rank how I see 2010’s biggest technology failures:
That is it, only nine things. So let’s talk about a few that made the list and why and then I will mention why I have omitted a couple of others.
Many of you may be wondering why an Oil Spill constitutes a ‘technology failure’ — I would argue that BP and the U.S. failed to use all available technologies to resolve the situation. More so they failed to properly use technology to prevent the spill in the first place.
Ignore the poor management of the clean up — a lot of technology failed to make the spill as bad as it was.
These were supposed to be huge, instead did one even ship with Windows on it? Ok — but they sure as hell didn’t live up to anyones standards. This was a massive technology and business failure.
Where the hell were they? Where is all the technology that they purported to be shipping? Ugh…
I left Ping off because if you re-read the definition above you will see that Ping did as advertised. Ping isn’t great and barely anyone uses it, but is that really worse than anything else on the list?
Did it stop users from buying it? If Kin makes the list for lack of sales than why would the iPhone 4 make the list…too many sales?
I hate Facebook, but apparently I am in the minority. Yes, they are making things less and less private — but I don’t recall something worse than the other things on my list happening.
I didn’t really want to make a list, but I saw no way around it. So if Apple ships the White iPhone 4 before the 1st then you have me to thank. ((They read this blog…right?))
Shawn Blanc enlightening readers about iOS group messaging:
Since Group Messaging means messages are sent as MMS no matter what, if you’re sending to people using Blackberries or non-smartphones then they have to open and download your text message as if it contained a media attachment. They think you’re sending a picture, but you simply sent some words.
File that under: “I had no clue”.
A huge thanks to Marco Arment for not only fixing the bug mentioned earlier, but for doing so quickly.
Marco Arment:
Users affected will need to tap the grayed-out stories in the iPhone/iPad app and select “Redownload” to fix them. Sorry about that.
[Updated: 12/29/10 at 11:23 AM] Thanks to all that emailed me — this looks to be a widespread problem for more than just my site. If you are seeing this please feel free to continue to report it and also report it to the developer of the apps that you are using. Thanks.
[Updated: 12/29/10 at 11:27 AM] Marco Arment the developer of Instapaper emailed to say that he is working on the problem. Please don’t flood his email box anymore. Thanks for your help.
To all readers using Instapaper for iOS could you please do me a favor and try to add this post to Instapaper by whatever means you usually do this. Once you do this can you sync your Instapaper account to your iOS device and let me know if the article shows up.
I have been getting scattered reports that an article (not linked list items) are showing as “unavailable” in Instapaper for iOS. This of course annoys me to no end and must be incredibly frustrating for you — the reader.
Shoot me an email to comments@brooksreview.net and let me know if it works for you or not and the steps you took.
Instapaper appears to work just fine for the linked list items.
Thanks!
A great write up from Stephen M. Hackett on how Things’ lack of OTA sync is really going to spell trouble for the company. Just look at the reviews that he links to and ask yourself: if you didn’t know anything about Things — would you buy it today based on the app store reviews alone?
I don’t care if you are going to list Apple’s iPhone 4 antenna problems as the biggest fail in tech of 2010 (though you would be wrong), but at the very least make sure you make a case for it being the biggest failure. Look at how CNN sees Apple’s “fail”, through the eyes of Doug Gross:
Months later, the problem is all but forgotten and the phones show no sign of dipping in popularity. So “fail,” in this case, is a pretty relative term.
So CNN is it a fail or not. Never mind I am just not going to read your crap anymore.
I mean clearly Ping is a bigger failure, yet it only garners 10th place? WTF.
A couple of things stuck out at me in the article.
Here let’s look at this closer, Ryan Singel:
If an app passes along that number to an advertisers, the advertising company can use it to build up a profile of the user, as well as keep track of which ads it has shown to a user before and which of those ads a user clicked on.
With browser cookies, however, a user can easily block them or delete them, essentially cutting off the profile. Neither is possible with apps that use UDIDs, since that number can’t be changed.
I am not sure that this is really that big of a deal — Google does it to you all the time. I do however take stand to the second sentence quoted — in no way do I think that most users think it is easy to block browser cookies. To make such a claim would mean that walking down the street and asking any computer user how to block cookies in their browser I should get more than 50% of people asked telling me how to do that. I dare you to try and actually get that.
“Apple knew this was an issue,” said Majed Nachawati, one of the lawyers who filed the suit. “They had a duty to warn consumers and at a minimum, if they intend to profit from this, they need to let people know and get their consent.”
Again how is Apple profiting from this? Is iAds at fault or is this other advertising platforms? If iAds, then sue Apple. Don’t tell me that Apple is profiting because they take a 30% cut — they take that from the sales price of the app, not from revenue derived from ad sales, unless they are iAds.
This though just made me lose all hope in humanity, I mean who wants to play “Pimple Popper Lite”:
Other apps named in the suit include Toss It, Text4Plus, The Weather Channel, Talking Tom Cat, and Pimple Popper Lite.
Ulysses is my favorite writing software and I just found out that it is on sale right now for 50% off. That is a steal. Right now you can grab a copy for EUR 22.49.
How much did it cost AOL in the 90s to spam us all with AOL install CDs? More than $300 million it would seem.
Wow.
I have been a long time fan of John Carey — his writing is excellent is his photography is superb. Add to that him giving away some of his images for you to use as backgrounds on your devices and you have to love the guy. They are beautiful.