The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Mars Rover Curiosity to Receive OTA Update

    Mike Wall, in writing about the Mars Rover update, notes this:
    >The MSL team calls the flight software that guided this daring touchdown R9. With Curiosity now safely on the surface, it’s time to switch over to R10, which was uploaded during the rover’s eight-month interplanetary cruise.

    Uploaded to the rover, while in space, on the way to Mars. That is one hell of a OTA update if you ask me. Especially when you consider the trouble Google is having just [keeping Android users on the latest version of their OS](http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html) while on *Earth*.

  • Keyboard Shortcut to Save Directly in iCloud

    This is awesome-sauce from Zettt:
    >With the advent of iCloud, there is now a new shortcut to save files in that location, for apps that support iCloud: Command-Shift-I.

    I tested this in Writer and it works like a charm — Command-Shift-D (to move the desktop) is probably the most used shortcut across various apps that I use, something tells me that by this time next year that shortcut will be Command-Shift-I.

    I am going head first into iCloud for document storage — I hope every app that can, adds support for it.

  • White House Pulls Down TSA Petition

    You have got to be kidding me, 2,500 votes shy of holding the TSA responsible and the public petition is pulled. Why even bother asking for petitions if you don’t intend to honor them?

    This better be a mistake, because this is bullshit.

  • ‘The Unibody iPhone’

    Whether or not this “unibody” iPhone is the next iPhone or not doesn’t really matter when you dive into the design factors associated with such an iPhone the way that Don Lehman did for The Tech Block.

    >Thinness is a major feature of this design. Take a look at your iPhone 4/4S from the side. Now imagine that the new design is only as thick as the metal band. That’s a big deal. From my estimates, that would make this design anywhere from 2-3mm thinner than the iPhone 4S. That sounds small, but it’s a huge difference. That’s as much as 32 percent thinner. As a point of comparison, the Retina MacBook Pro is only 25 percent thinner than the old MacBook Pro.

    If we accept the fact that the new iPhone is going to be taller — whether or not that changes the physical height of the device — I think it will be doubly important for Apple to further reduce the thickness of the iPhone. Currently the 4S is a great phone, but it will *always* be too thick in your pocket.

    You may disagree, you may think the iPhone fits nicely in your pocket, but that’s only because you are used to it. I don’t want any new features in an iPhone, except for it to be thinner.

    That said, with a thinner phone you need to make the structure more solid — otherwise you have the potential for the device to snap in half when a user bends his leg with the phone in their pocket. That is what interests me so very much about this design.

    This rumored design is 32% thinner as Lehman points out **and** much stronger than the current iPhone — that sounds like a win to me.

  • The B&B Podcast #73: Faded Avocado

    >Shawn and Ben talk about fax machines, open source software, the future of the digital landscape and how that affects the apps we use today, and the right and wrong ways to publish a link list-type blog.

  • TextMate 2 at GitHub

    This is news because TextMate 2 has been the Duke Nukem Forever of the Mac nerd community for so long and also because of what open sourcing the project means to users.

    This likely means we will never see a final TextMate 2 build, of the quality and polish that all TextMate users have come to hope for and in that respect this comes as saddening news.

    I am personally torn — I supported TextMate 2 irrationally for much longer than I should have, while I stumbled along with TextMate 1.5. The thing is: TextMate 1.5 still works, and works fine for most of what I use it for, but with the changes to Mac OS X its age is showing in many spots. The alpha builds of TextMate 2 have been nice, but buggy and mostly unusable even for a non-coder like me.

    Unlike so many other people, I haven’t switched to Sublime Text 2 or Chocolat ((The latter because the name reminds me of a bad movie.)) — no I decided to jump fully into Coda 2 and Writer. I haven’t missed TextMate since making the change a while back, but I always held out hope to switch back to it.

    As for TextMate 2 and its future , this presents an interesting crossroads for the app. Either it will languish in development and interest and become but a blip in Mac nerd memory, or it will be rapidly worked on with the potential to become the best open sourced text editor for the Mac.

    The latter is probably not likely, but I still irrationally hold out hope that the latter is what occurs.

  • ‘Energy-Efficient Lightbulbs May Have Dark Side When It Comes to Health’

    Ted Burnham reports, for NPR, on a study that shows defects in the manufacturing process of most all compact fluorescent lightbulbs; a defect which can allow UV rays through. UV rays are both damaging to skin and art alike.

    That’s CFLs, but smart people stay away from them because they have a pretty bad quality of light and prefer “standard” bulbs or high quality LED bulbs.

    But CFLs are cheap and are being pushed heavily by energy companies in the U.S., with many of those companies offering trade-ins for standard bulbs.

    Burnham also looked at LED lightbulbs and found that even if the same coating is damaged (the one that allows UV rays to leak through CFLs) in LEDs, the light becomes blue *and* stays out of the UV spectrum — in other words there is no harm. This is fascinating and I wonder what the potential liability is for CFL manufacturers will be in the coming years.

    All the more reason to buy [my favorite LED lightbulb](https://brooksreview.net/2012/04/amazon-led-bulb/), or you could [buy Marco’s favorite](http://www.marco.org/2012/07/31/two-new-led-bulbs).

  • ‘Why Twitter Still Needs to Care About Accessibility’

    Austin Seraphin writing about the official Mac Twitter app, from the perspective of a blind user:
    >And now we come to the point of this article. The official Twitter app for the Mac has zero accessibility. I don’t mean a little, or enough to get by, I mean nothing. VoiceOver shows a close button, a minimize button, and a zoom button. And nothing else.

    I was actually just talking to Marco Arment about accessibility and how so many apps get it wrong. I am not blind so I don’t rely on on such features, but as we know the iPhone is a very helpful tool for the blind, so I was saddened to hear from Marco of how poorly so many apps fare in accessibility testing.

    Voice over, and general accessibility, features probably aren’t important to many people in the grand scheme of the App Store, but for those that it is important to, such features become critically important.

    If you want to see just what I mean go to: Settings > General > Accessibility > Triple-click Home > VoiceOver. Exit settings and triple click your home button, now launch any third party app you rely on and try to use it with your eyes closed. The iPhone will speak what you are touching, unless the app isn’t properly coded: which is likely the case.

    Finding this out actually bummed me out. I am thinking that I will start to include notes about Voice Over support in my reviews of apps — and look into anything I can do to this site to improve accessibility.

  • What Does “Clear Browsing History” Mean to Google? Not Much.

    Nik Cubrilovic found something interesting:
    >I have recently discovered two privacy issues with Google Chrome that users should be aware of. They both relate to browsing history data not being deleted despite the user taking action to delete browsing history.

    That’s the intro to Cubrilovic’s post, but it is a bit misleading. Basically Chrome clears your browsing history in the history menus, but not two settings:

    1. Zoom level info
    2. Prefetched DNS stuff

    What this means is that if you change the zoom level on a site or the DNS is prefetched for the domain, that domain will be recorded and not removed in two files within Chrome. Now you have to know about this, as people around you are not likely to stumble on this information.

    However, as Cubrilovic points out, this is a potential area of vulnerability on a publicly shared computer — especially with Chrome’s surge in usage.

    I think more importantly this is one of those areas where a function works in a way that the user didn’t assume it would work. I think most users would assume nuking the browsing history would nuke it everywhere — I wonder if Safari and Firefox have these issues too.

  • ‘Bluetooth vs Airplay’

    Fred Wilson talking about how he loves to allow anyone in the car to control the audio over the bluetooth connection and comparing that to AirPlay in his home:

    >But that doesn’t support Android phones and not all third party mobile apps support Airplay. Airplay is not ubiquitous in the way that Bluetooth is.

    After realizing how awesome bluetooth is he bought an adapter to use at home:

    >I am betting that by replicating the experience they have in the car in our home, they will take control of our home music system with their phones in the same way they do in our car.

    I am betting they are going to love streaming 1080p videos over that bluetooth connection… wait.

    Bluetooth *is* more “open” than AirPlay, but to say that it is better? Hmmm, I think not.

    For starters you aren’t going to be streaming HD video over bluetooth. Secondly and most importantly: you need not pair AirPlay. Anyone can walk into my home and as long as they are on my network (most friends and family are setup to be already) they can AirPlay audio and video to my TV. That’s awesome and let’s face it, the majority of people that come into my home have iOS devices, not Android.

    Here’s another reality: while bluetooth will likely be OK for those that live in the home, it’s going to be a pain in the ass to pair a new phone for those that come and visit. The *moment* will have passed, if you will, by the time you are setup and ready to go.

    I just don’t see the benefit of this move unless you are an Android only family — which I think Wilson is heavily invested ((Not in the $$$ sense.)) in Android.

  • ‘Saving Private Research in Motion, RIM, Blackberry’

    Jean-Louis Gassée has a fantastic article dissecting the comparisons of RIM now and Apple back in the mid-nineties (when Apple was on the verge of collapse). A lot has been said about RIM and what they are trying to do, but I love this question for RIM believers from Gassée:
    >Weren’t most of these engineers already onboard when RIM fell asleep at the switch?

    Indeed.

    At this point it’s not only that RIM doesn’t have a competent platform to even compete with Microsoft, but it is that they seemingly can’t decide what the hell the right path forward is.

    – We will march on!
    – New CEO
    – We are massively talented.
    – Slash 5k jobs.
    – BB10 will save the world.
    – BB10 will run everything for you.
    – Our handset business is still growing!
    – We *might* need to license BB10. Might.

    It’s like playing Monopoly against a child and convincing the child to trade different colors with you back and forth as it benefits you. Every trade you make a compelling case why it is best for them, without thinking the child buys that case and makes the trade. Next time you make another more compelling case that contradicts your last. And so on.

    RIM is the child here.

    They started off assuring everyone that they were fine that the management was great. Then they hire a new management team, which says everything is fine. Then they cut thousands of jobs, but it’s right back to everything is fine.

    This is a pathetic line of rhetoric that seemingly only RIM’s board is buying.

    Yes, there will always be those that want a hardware keyboard, but if the demand for such a device is strong enough I assure you an Android partner will make it. There simply are no more compelling reasons why one chooses RIM over Apple/Google/Microsoft.

  • Reminder: Join the Movement of App.net

    The only other project that I have pushed my readers this hard on was `Dark Sky` and I think we can all agree that Dark Sky is a damned fine weather app, perhaps the best one out there.

    Now I want you guys to trust me and go back App.net. I was granted access to the working alpha build of the site, what can I say, it works. Right now things are basic, but by building an alpha they are showing me something that a lot of other products don’t: they already know how to make the product.

    It’s $50 and that’s steep, but it’s $50 that gets you this:

    1. Twitter without ads, ever.
    2. Twitter that won’t ever block a third party client.
    3. Twitter without spammers, because they would have to pay $50 only to get banned.
    4. Twitter without your parents.

    At least one of those has to be worth $50 to you guys, I love the price point and the idea — I hope we can make it a reality.

  • Bing v. Google

    Quentin Hardy:
    >When Mr. Shum shows ways that Bing outperforms Google, it tends to be around search queries with long strings of words, or deep catalogs of information (including over 3,600 ways to misspell Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name, for example). His deep neural networks of computation involve thousands of potential pieces of information for each query, and in milliseconds crunch several variants of a search around a single topic.

    While I use DuckDuckGo only on my Mac, on iOS I actually have been using Bing for the past few months. I try to use Bang On when I can, but I always forget and end up in the search field in mobile Safari. Since I have Bing set as the search there, I get a fair amount of exposure to Microsoft’s little search engine. The above quote seems trivial, and on the desktop it probably is, but on iOS the above quote is one of the little things that I really like about Bing.

    We all tend to misspell things, well I do, and when searching that’s a big problem. Google always gives you the passive aggressive, slightly pompous: “did you *mean* X” dialog, but Bing always seems to just get it right. For example I searched `black brids` just now on Bing mobile, not a single prompt telling me that I might have misspelled the word, instead two small links at the top to tweak my search:

    1. “Including results for `black birds`.”
    2. “Do you want results only for `black brids`?”

    The first result: “Blackbird” on Wikipedia. The first result of `black birds` — spelled correctly: “Blackbird” on Wikipedia.

    That’s not revolutionary, but my larger point is that Bing just works pretty well on iOS. It takes a lot of getting used to, but it looks nice and is fast. It’s not as good as DuckDuckGo, but I think it is just as good as Google. Should be interesting to see if adoption picks up with Windows 8 using the Windows 8 style UI.

    **Update:** [It looks like Google is using similar language as Bing.](http://twitter.com/jalifax/status/232617172940247040/photo/1)

  • Access iCloud Files From the Finder

    A great tip on where to locate the iCloud files locally on your Mac. As noted in the tip, Finder even changes to say “iCloud” in the title bar when you open this folder.

    Oddly you cannot add this folder to the Finder sidebar, so if anyone knows how to do that — I would love to know.

    Also in looking at this the Apple apps seem to have fairly clean looking folder names, but the rest of the apps have a string of characters before them — I wonder if this is Apple “cheating” or if there is something developers can do to get a cleaner looking names.

  • Slogger

    Brett Terpstra has made the mother of all logging scripts for Day One users. I mentioned before how journalling with Day One never stuck for me, but now I am using it a lot. Well, Slogger is really neat because it can grab all sorts of your internet activity and pull it into Day One as entries, all without you having to do it manually.

    All your tweets, your posts, and so on. It is very cool, I just set it up and can’t wait to see how much data will be in Day One now.

  • Instagram and Polaroid

    Nancy Macdonell:
    >“The original Paper Denim look book was done with Polaroids,” says Chantel Valentene, the brand’s creative director. “Instagram is the modern equivalent, so when we were talking about doing the look book for the relaunch, it was a natural step. It fits in with our idea that getting dressed should be easy — with Instagram you can’t retouch, it’s what you see is what you get. It’s the opposite of fussy.”

    I like the analogy that Instagram is the new Polaroid, but I think that Valentene is being a bit short-sighted. Even if an Instagram photo is taken with an iPhone, and never leaves the phone, there are still plenty of tools that a person can use to tweak and retouch the image. Not to mention selecting a proper filter can be quite “fussy”.

    Still, I think one of the biggest questions that surrounds modern photography (as we move forward) is going to be: what’s real? Some of the more iconic photos of the last 5 years were shot on digital and heavily tweaked in software during editing — are these photos then, not real?

    Which photos do we archive as a historical record of our world? Do we care that we removed cellulite and zits? Do we care that everyone looks perfect, unless taken to show how evil the person was?

    I wonder if 20 years from now when my daughter is looking at photos of nature from 2010, if she won’t stop and ask: “Dad, why aren’t the trees *as* green anymore?”

    Well, sweety, boosting color saturation used to be *the* thing to do…

    [via Om Malik]

  • Hawaiian Hammock Chairs

    My grandparents gave us one of these chairs. Not only is it really comfortable but:

    1. My daughter loves to nap in it with me;
    2. I love to nap in it.

    If you have a spot in your yard to hang one, I think it’s better than a regular hammock. Amazon has a bunch too, but I can’t vouch for any of those brands.

    Pro tip: mount with an eye bolt and hang with a caribiner for easy winter take down.

  • ’20 Months’

    Alex Arena, commenting on Things, in response to Shawn and me on the B&B podcast:

    >But since they haven’t been acquired, they still need to make money, and Things is their only product. Lying to all of your customers isn’t a good way to make money.

    I think Arena ((If this guy’s name is really Alex Arena — that’s badass.)) gets to the heart of the user frustration, but he’s off base. I don’t think Cultured Code lied, I think they were over matched with a task that they had to ship, but couldn’t get shipped.

    Things was solid at one point but has been so distracted by this cloud sync that they have lost significant ground to rival OmniFocus. Now all that remains to be seen is if they can quickly ship some great updates (since the biggest one is now mostly out of the way).

  • Covering the Olympics with a Smartphone Camera

    Dan Chung is on assignment shooting for the Gaurdian as a professional photographer, but he is shooting with what appears to just be an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4S. This is a link to his photoblog of the coverage, and he notes on each picture any adapters he used on his iPhone(s).

    I hate to say it, but this is going too far.

    It’s one thing to only take your iPhone places for photos, it’s even fine if the iPhone is your only camera. But to take the iPhone on assignment shooting sports, that’s just a gimmick.

    His composition and lighting is fine, but just look at the sharpness of each photo — for the most part the photos are soft. The photos *look* like iPhone snapshots.

    [Compare them to these taken with pro level equipment on *The Big Picture*](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/08/london_2012_olympics_one_week.html).

    The difference is immediately visible.

    There is one cool thing that I hadn’t thought about though — for journalists. With Photostream uploading all your photos to iCloud, and the ability to share those streams with others — this could be a powerful tool for covering breaking news events for news networks. Photojournalists wouldn’t have to stop to upload and news desks would get the photos in near realtime. That could be pretty damned useful.

    All that said, I get that Chung isn’t trying to take the world’s best photos with his iPhone, but I get the sense that when he gets home and sits down to review his shots, he’s going to see more than a few that he regrets not having his dSLR for, and that sucks.

  • How Apple Designs Products

    Nicole Perlroth and Nick Wingfield reporting on testimony from Christopher Stringer, a longtime Apple industrial designer, in the Apple v Samsung spat:
    >In his testimony earlier, Mr. Stringer said that Apple’s design team consists of 15 or 16 designers who work around a small kitchen table, a sharp contrast to Samsung’s 1,000 designers.

    I cannot be the only one that finds this to be the single most interesting note about this trial so far. Some questions that I have:

    1. What kind of table?
    2. How big is “small”?
    3. Why does it take a 1,000 designers to rip-off an Apple design that only took 15-16 people to make?

    I can’t wait to read more testimony like that.