The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • ‘Mountain Lion and the Simplification of OS X’

    Shawn Blanc, writing about iOS and Mountain Lion, and where and why OS X is headed where it is:
    >To build iOS, Apple needed its years of experience making OS X. And now, to refine OS X, Apple needs its newfound expertise from iOS to bring power and simplicity back to the Mac.

    You should actually go read Shawn’s entire post because it is one of the best posts I have read about OS X, iOS, and the direction Apple is taking. The notion that Shawn presents, of Apple having the ability to throw out everything and start from scratch with iOS — and then bringing those paradigms back to the Mac — is spot on.

    What OS X is shifting into *is* more iOS like, just probably not in the way that you think it is. It’s not about features or UI, it’s about simplifying things that have been unnecessarily difficult in the past.

    I hope that Apple continues on this trend, I hope that we see all files in iCloud stores, I hope that more and more [I don’t have to worry about where something is](http://informationarchitects.net/blog/mountain-lions-new-file-system/), or how to find X. I think that’s the computers job.

  • ‘Is Twitter a Media or Technology Company?’

    Me thinks the latter is the case, as Nick Bilton reports:
    >Mr. Costolo said he wanted to migrate away from developers building more external Twitter apps, to a world where developers and companies are building products inside the Twitter platform — a move, he argued, that would create a better experience for users.

    That sounds an awful lot like Facebook apps to me, than it does iOS apps. How many Facebook apps do you depend on daily, or are willing to pay money for? I actually don’t know the answer since I don’t use Facebook, but I’d guess that the answer is less than how you feel about iOS apps.

    I think that none of this comes as a shock, and the bigger question is not whether Twitter wants developers building Twitter clients (they don’t), but whether they will ever cut off access to existing third-party Twitter apps. I’ve long thought that they would have to cut off access, otherwise how do you stop developers from building new Twitter apps?

  • The iCache Geode

    Garrett Murray on the [iCache Geode](http://www.icache.com) that he backed on Kickstarter:
    >Frankly, I’m surprised the iCache Geode is legal to sell in the United States. It could effectively be used as a skimming and cloning system. The price point of the iCache Geode is low enough that nearly anyone could afford to buy it and go around cloning credit cards.

    I had missed this device/case when it went through Kickstarter, or at least I missed it, but Garrett Murray will save me the trouble of buying. Noting that he only has had 20% success rate with the card and it takes about 30 seconds to get ready. The above quote though is very concerning — it is already a known issue that less than reputable wait staff have card skimmers that they use. The difference is that these villains have used skimmed card data to sell to people, the Geode basically makes the data instantly useable to them — on the spot.

    That alone is enough reason for this product to not be legal.

    Luckily though, as Murray notes, it doesn’t work all that well.

  • ‘Apps Must Be Cross Platform!’

    *Note from Ben: I added the exclamation point, because after reading this post I really felt that the exclamation point was need to denote the ridiculousness that ensues in the post.*

    Charlie Kindel writes for GeekWire, in what I assume is a guest opinion post, that mobile apps “must be cross platform”. Hmm, really? Let’s take a look at his argument, shall we?

    Wait no, first I should mention who Charlie Kindel is, from his bio on GeekWire:

    >Charlie was previously the GM for the Windows Phone 7 app platform at Microsoft. During his 21 year tenure at Microsoft, Charlie built a broad range of products and technologies ranging from Internet Explorer to Windows Media Center, Windows Home Server, and Windows Phone 7.

    That’s his past, not his present, but it’s all you really need to know before writing this post. He knows mobile, yes, but he knows mobile as it exists in the Microsoft sphere — the sphere that held the iPhone funeral a while back.

    Ok, on with his post:

    >Maybe there are a few Robert Scobles out there who still believe that a significant number of successful apps in the future will be unique to any one client platform.

    Count me among the few, how often do you see apps launch, at least initially, only on the iPhone? A: A lot. How many do you see that for Android? A: Not many. Windows Phone? A: ha.

    So Kindel is swinging at balls right out of the gate, then he follows up with:

    >Connected experiences across all devices is where the growth is and it would be insane for anyone, from a major brand to an early-stage startup to believe they don’t have to build for at least iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and Windows 8 tablets.

    I agree that ‘connected experiences’, if I understand that term correctly, is important, but what herb are you smoking to believe that Windows 8 tablets — they that have yet to ship — are on par with the iPad in importance? I am ok with including Android, but including an as-of-yet released tablet is just stupid.

    Kindel goes on to talk about three options for coding for multiple platforms, and gets to HTML5, where he states:

    >However, HTML5 is not in Apple’s best interest and they are obviously dragging their feet with compatibility and [performance](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/03/confirmed-some-web-apps-not-seeing-ios-43-javascript-speedup/).
    >Why? Because websites that run as apps break Apple’s strangle-hold on their walled garden.

    Now that link takes you to an Ars Technica post from a year ago about the problem. I agree that Apple may be dragging their feet on this issue, but to say that such implementation would “break Apple’s strangle-hold on their walled garden” is utter crap. Let’s not forget that Apple initially tried to sell developers on making web apps instead of native apps, and had to reverse course on it because no one wanted them.

    If anything Apple is dragging their feet on this because it simply doesn’t matter to Apple’s customers.

    What’s funny is that later on Kindel mentions how poorly Android is fairing in HTML5 support, yet doesn’t lambast them for “dragging their feet” — must be because Android is open.

    Kindel’s purpose with this post is to show that the best way forward is what he calls “Mixed Model Mobile Apps”. Built with tools like Mono — using RDIO as the prime poster child. Indeed RDIO is a nice app, but I counter with Instapaper — built specifically for iOS and Android, native on both platforms. Those too are nice apps.

    Kidnel’s main problem is that he passes off “Mixed Model Mobile Apps” as the best way forward, when it is simply the second best way forward. The *actual* best way forward is to create native apps for each platform, and despite what Kindel says, it just may be the case that not every app should run on every device.

  • ‘Money Dollars’

    Interesting point from Brett Kelly, wondering how read later services can impact the bottom line for sites that sell features like single page views and PDFs. Kelly notes that last year he bought an Ars membership just to download the Siracusa review in a single PDF, but this year he doesn’t need to buy it because Instapaper will grab all the pages.

    I can relate to the problems caused by all the tools available on the web when I designed the paywall for this site. I quickly came to the realization that no matter what I did there would be ways around the paywall — that’s just a fact. And as a publishing entity, once I realized that I just embraced that fact. Any member can share a link to a paywalled post, that allows those that click on the link to read it — so instead of banning that behavior, I just embrace it as a way to attract new members.

    And I think that realization is applicable in this case: if someone wants to circumvent paying you, then they will always find a way, so best to just not worry about it.

  • ‘Turning Off Ads in Parallels’

    Michael Tsai stumbled upon the dirty secret of Parallels: they spam their users. Both in the VM with offers from different 3rd party manufacturers, and by email — I get a reminder seemingly every week to update to some new version of Parallels that they rolled out. The updates are great, but as a customer it feels like I no sooner update than a new one is out, it’s worse that staying up to date with Apple goods.

    I like Parallels otherwise, but I will be buying Fusion instead of upgrading Parallels.

    The thread is amusing to read with some good screenshots of what I am talking about, my favorite part is that Parallels kept responding only in private messages — that’s bad form, in fact all the Parallels responses are shitty.

    **Update:** [Here’s how you turn them off](http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120724235352514).

  • Your Airport Is a Petri Dish

    Brian Fung reports on a new study about the spread of germs in airplanes and airports, finding this interesting tidbit about the air inside an airplane:
    >Between drawing in clean, fresh air from outside the cabin and passing old air through high-quality filters designed to catch 99.999 percent of germs, the air inside a cabin is replaced some 20 times an hour — far more often than in office buildings or in houses, which exchange air every 12 and 5 times an hour, respectively.

    Moreover planes are designed to drop the recycled air back into the same row from which it came — I had no clue. So what then did MIT find in their study? The airports are disgusting places to be, but then again we all knew that (right?). So which are the worst offenders of grime?

    >Leading the list: New York’s JFK International, followed by Los Angeles, Honolulu, San Francisco, Newark, and Chicago’s O’Hare and Washington’s Dulles International Airport.

    Sounds like you should book your next stop in Seattle instead.

  • USB Power Delivery Spec Upped to 100W

    Michael Gorman, for Engadget, reporting on a new USB 2/3 spec:
    >That’s ten times what Thunderbolt can do, and it means that you can charge up your laptop or power most any peripheral via Universal Serial Bus.

    That could change the way a lot of peripheral gadgets work, but it also causes problems for laptop users. If you are powering your monitor off your USB port, I would imagine your laptop battery would drain pretty fast.

    The brings me to something else that has been bugging me and an ask on Twitter yielded no answers. Why aren’t both sides of USB cables the size of microUSB ports instead of the huge rectangular annoyance that they currently are? Is it a speed/power issue on the smaller connector, or just a silly standard that no one has bothered to question?

  • Canon EOS M Hands-on Preview from Digital Photography Review

    Interesting looking camera that shoves the guts of an entry level dSLR into a smaller camera of the size class that the micro 4/3s play in. When I saw the news of this my first reaction was “crap”, because having just bought the Panasonic GX1 I thought I really should have waited for this. I am a huge Canon fan, and given that you can buy an adapter to mount the Canon EF lenses on this, it looked like a great deal.

    The more I read about it though, the less I like it. First the controls are made to be set and fiddled with on the touchscreen, with the ability to do so in a very cumbersome manner via the few hardware buttons the camera has. The GX1 has touchscreen controls as well and I hate them. What I hate about them is two fold:

    1. I have to look at the screen to use the button. Whereas with physical buttons I can memorize the location and change settings without having to look at the camera. That may not be a big deal for many, but I change settings on my cameras all the time, so I expect this would be very annoying for me.
    2. On the GX1 you can set a focus point for the camera to lock to by tapping an area on the screen, but while this is a really nice feature, it’s incredibly frustrating when I accidentally hit the screen with my hand and guess what: I get an mis-focused image of a priceless face my daughter was making.

    I am not saying the EOS M will have these problems, but they are the two things that concern me most about the camera. However if reviews start coming in that this camera is substantially better than the GX1… well anyone want a GX1?

  • Cue

    The past week or two, there has a been a lot of chatter about archiving your Tweets into text files. [Dr. Drang just reminded me of this when I saw this follow-up post from him](http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/07/archiving-tweets-without-ifttt/). I’ve used ThinkUp and implemented one of the IFTTT methods, but I have found Cue (formerly Greplin) to be the best way to find old tweets.

    I like that I can do a simple search on any device for a tweet and find it — it’s a pretty simple service with a decent iPhone app. I am not sure what they are trying to do with the new Cue service (since I only use it for Twitter), but the search functionality of your Twitter account works really well.

  • Amazon Item of the Week: Seagate GoFlex Desk With Thunderbolt Adapter

    I purchased the GoFlex Desk 3TB a while back, when I bought the retina MacBook Pro, but I only went with the USB 3 version. The retina MacBook Pro had some USB 3 hiccups (now resolved for me) and so I never was happy with the USB 3 connection. It was quicker than USB 2, but wasn’t all that impressive. Luckily this drive can be [swapped out for a Thunderbolt connector](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B007IJ7UKE/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20), and I purchased that a few days back.

    Thunderbolt is fast, like move 5GB in “less than a minute” fast — and that’s to a spinning platter drive, not an SSD. It’s really expensive to go with Thunderbolt drives right now, which is why I only have one, but it is the future and makes a huge difference given that I keep my iTunes library and photo archives on the drive.

    I highly recommend this.

    [There’s also a portable version](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B007IJ7T4G/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20), but I haven’t tried it so I can’t speak to its quality.

  • ‘Marissa Mayer Has a Secret Weapon’

    Steven Levy following up his fantastic post about Mayer last week, adds this fuel to the fire:
    >In short, Marissa Mayer has developed a deep connection to over three hundred of most talented tech people in Silicon Valley. They may still be at Google, they may have moved to companies like Facebook or Dropbox, or they may have started their own budding enterprises like Optimizely. But in some sense they are all Marissa’s acolytes.

    He’s referring to the fact that Mayer ran the coveted APM program — the program that Google created to train future Google leaders. It was her program Levy notes and those then went through the program are “bonded” to Mayer.

    What’s interesting in the above quote is that Levy uses the term “Marissa’s acolytes” and not “Google’s acolytes”. Those two words are telling not just for the future of Yahoo, but for the future of Google.

    The more I reader about Mayer, the more obvious it is to me just how big of a loss she was for Google — what remains to be seen is if she can translate that value to another company.

  • Squarespace 6

    Squarespace recently launched version 6 of their web hosting/CMS system. I have personally used Squarespace for a while now for a personal site and for my company’s website — it’s a fantastic platform on rock solid hosting.

    [David Sparks now has MacSparky](http://macsparky.com/) on Squarespace 6, if you want a look at what a good blog looks like on it (including the ability to do proper linked list posts).

    If I were just getting started with blogging I would go with Squarespace without hesitation for a few reasons:

    1. The themes are stunning.
    2. Incredibly easy to build, with tons of later flexibility.
    3. Solid hosting, done inexpensively.

    What I don’t know, and what I would like to know more about, is how easy it is to move from Squarespace to WordPress — if it is as easy as it is to go the other way, then it is a no-brainer to go with Squarespace. (Unless of course you do something crazy like implement a paywall.)

  • ‘Append to Dropbox Note With Drafts App’

    Speaking of [Drafts](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drafts/id502385074) and Hazel, Gabe the Macdrifter as come up with a way to append text to a Dropbox note using Drafts. This looks way more complicated than just buying [Scratch](http://gokarbon.com/scratch/) and using both apps, but hey — pretty neat thing to figure out.

    One thing that I wish either Drafts or Scratch would build, is a way for me to set and action that appends text to one specific note file — making it easier to keep a running log/note in a file. This tip is to hacky for my liking, and Scratch requires a lot of taps to do it.

  • ‘Skype Won’t Comment on Whether It Can Now Eavesdrop on Conversations’

    Ryan Gallagher on the ability of Skype to eavesdrop on conversations:
    >In May 2011, Microsoft bought over Skype for $8.5 billion. One month later, in June, Microsoft was granted a patent for “legal intercept” technology designed to be used with VOIP services like Skype to “silently copy communication transmitted via the communication session.” Whether this technology was subsequently integrated into the Skype architecture, it’s impossible to say for sure.

    Software developers are complaining that a change in the Skype architecture looks to make it more readily available to law enforcement eavesdropping, but no comment from Skype. I take the no comment stance as confirmation that they can do it, but that law enforcement would rather they not say.

    Otherwise I think Skype would just market the technology as secure. This seems like a greasy used car salesmen saying: “You’re a terrorist, perfect app for you to use to plan things. What? Oh I can’t comment on that, but you *should* totally use this. Totally.”

    Best just to assume — as with most web services — that what you do will be made public one day.

  • ‘Core of the Disappointment’

    Rian van der Merwe responding to all the misplaced anger on the web about the Google acquisition of Sparrow:
    >It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens.

    [See also Matt Gemmell’s post about the misplaced anger](http://mattgemmell.com/2012/07/21/entitlement-and-acquisition/).

    I completely see where people are coming from, I own the Mac app, but the truth of the matter is that there is nothing you can do to keep a company from being acquired — at least not as a consumer. It doesn’t matter how much you pay, or how many times you pay, if the company gets an offer they like, they are going to take it. Paying doesn’t prevent this.

    My argument is that when the service or product is given away free, those that make that “thing” will have to actively seek a way to pay for their life. They will be looking for a way to make money. When you pay for an app the developer has already figured that part out, charge users, and now he just has to figure out how to get the paying users.

    I know it’s a very fine distinction, but I don’t think it is fair to be upset at the Sparrow team, or at the fact that you paid for an app. I stand with Gemmell on this one when he says:

    >Thanks for that $10. It did indeed keep the lights on between 09:30 and 09:35 this morning. So if you’ve used Sparrow for more than five minutes, I guess we’re even.

    Did you get value out of the app? Will you continue to get value out of the app until it stops working on your Mac? Likely yes to both questions. Just because the product is no longer actively developed, doesn’t mean the rational thing to do is delete it off your computer — that’s silly if you still love and want to use the product.

  • ‘Control Your Mac Remotely With Drafts, Hazel & AppleScript’

    Clever use of these tools by George Coghill, using Drafts to save text files quickly to Dropbox, Hazel to monitor the files for keywords and then execute AppleScript/Automator actions based on the contents of the file he saves.

    I’d go one further and say that you could setup LaunchCenter Pro to add the text in Drafts for you, for your common triggers — thus automating this a bit more. Pretty clever, now I just need to decide what I want my iPhone to be able to tell my Mac.

  • ‘The Geography of Gun Deaths’

    Richard Florida wondered what factors he could draw statistical correlation with for death by firearms and concludes:
    >While the causes of individual acts of mass violence always differ, our analysis shows fatal gun violence is less likely to occur in richer states with more post-industrial knowledge economies, higher levels of college graduates, and tighter gun laws. Factors like drug use, stress levels, and mental illness are much less significant than might be assumed.

    Very interesting analysis — by no means is it proof of anything, rather just a correlation between two data sets. Still, it is apparent that change is needed — whether or not you believe this data.

  • Is Kickstarter Selling Dreams?

    Felix Salmon has a really smart analysis of Kickstarter, and specifically the psychology behind backing Kickstarter projects. It’s interesting to think about what Salmon is talking about, with regard to why people back things.

    Do we back something because was see it as a pre-order? Do we back things because we want to support our friends? Why does this work on the web, when you would have laughed if it came in the mail to us? Are we backing ideas, or are we wanting products?

    I am waiting for quite a few Kickstarter projects to actually ship the goods to me, so this last sentiment from Salmon rings close to home:

    >But as consumers get wise to those risks, especially if one or two high-profile million-dollar Kickstarter successes end up producing nothing at all, then at that point we’ll realize that the funders weren’t just buying a dream after all. They really thought they were buying a product.

    Elevation Dock, Flote Stand (to be fair I am not a backer, I just pre-ordered after it was funded), and a few other smaller projects have yet to ship anything to me. I knew the risks, but it has made me become very picky about what I do back now — and ultimately that hurts Kickstarter and other potential products.

  • ‘Awakenings: An Android Design Process’

    Sebastiaan de With has posted about his design process for an Android alarm clock app that he designed. He goes through the how and why of an alarm clock, the — umm — intricacies of designing for a platform with some many different screen sizes.

    Near the end of the post he gets on with a fascinating topic to me:

    >It’s… well, designed for humans. All these details seem like such obvious things, yet you’d be surprised to find that nobody seems to have thought about these details before. I sincerely hope our app inspires others to adopt the same design patterns, simply because I believe it makes people’s lives better.

    There are some really great touches that are in the app — things like sleep cycles make the app something more than your normal alarm clock.

    I often whine on and on about weather apps, but it is true that something well designed, well thought out, and designed to *help you* can almost be magical. Case in point: Dark Sky. Just look at what [Dr. Drang has to say about Dark Sky](http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/07/dark-sky/) after heading its advice and waiting out rain, while watching a colleague dash into the building:

    >I waited out the full three minutes and sauntered up to the door with only a couple of stray drops hitting me. She now owns a copy of Dark Sky.

    It was a powerful enough moment that he felt compelled to write about it, because in that moment the app seemed like magic. Indeed, Dark Sky often seems like magic when you use it — like something that shouldn’t be possible because it is almost too accurate.

    Why should that just be limited to Dark Sky, seems like this alarm clock is heading on that path and I would love to see more apps take this route too.