I have an on again, off again, relationship with Osfoora for Mac. I love the UI and the fact that it actually works well, but I have not been a big fan of the icon, or lack of streaming API.
Both of those things changed today. The latest version of Osfoora supports the streaming API (finally) and they updated the icon. The icon is better, but not sure if I like it.
The streaming API addition alone is enough for me to give Osfoora a go again as my full-time Mac Twitter client.
When I posted yesterday that no one freaks out because Office isn’t on their iPad, the only response I got was from people who use track changes all the time. Well, let’s see what Mr. Sparks has to say about that:
>Office² just released an update with the holy grail for iPad attorneys, track changes.
Now, it would seem, we can all agree that Office is irrelevant on mobile devices.
This is like the [CableDrop that I mention a while back](https://brooksreview.net/2012/05/amazon-item-cabledrop/), but made for handling more cords. It’s a nice addition to the side of my desk, where I can use it to hold:
– MacBook Air power cord
– USB cable for HDs
– iPod/iPhone/iPad Cord
I only have three cords there and before I used two CableDrops to hold them — now the Cable strip does this job a bit better. For less than $10 for two, it’s worth checking out.
*Bonus tip*: A couple readers mentioned that double stick tape doesn’t hold well — to combat that clean the surface you are sticking anything to with alcohol (not the drinking kind) first and you will get a long lasting hold.
Farhad Manjoo:
>And then what will we have? A movie about a guy who was great at being terrible — a sure hit, but not one that tells us anything about how Jobs pulled off the biggest corporate turnaround of all time.
He’s probably right. “Good movie, not accurate, and a wasted opportunity.” Is probably how my review would read.
Wolf Rentzsch ((Yes, I am late to reading this.)) on how to decide where to buy a particular app from, says:
>Fortunately Apple now only accepts sandboxed Mac apps, clarifying the situation: customers should buy Mac apps directly unless there’s a good reason not to.
I disagree. Rentzsch makes some great points and arguments for buying apps directly, but there is a simple reason why most Mac users should buy only from the Mac App Store: peace of mind.
As Rentzsch lists, there are a few really strong reasons to buy from the Mac App Store — what he doesn’t say is that most of the reasons to buy direct don’t apply to the non-nerd population, which is most of the Mac user base.
Personally, being a nerd, iCloud alone is reason enough to only buy from the Mac App Store.
Nicole Perlroth:
>The researchers, Yair Amit and Adi Sharabani, discovered that LinkedIn’s mobile app for iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system, included an opt-in feature that allows users to view their iOS calendar entries within the app. Once users opt in to that feature, however, LinkedIn automatically transmits their calendar entries to its servers. LinkedIn grabs details for every calendar on the iOS device, which may include both personal and corporate calendar entries.
And a bit later:
>She did not clarify why LinkedIn transmits calendar information to its servers.
This is shady of LinkedIn, but two things strike me about this. It’s opt-in, so the privacy busting feature is off by default — that’s not an excuse, but it makes this entire thing slightly less offensive to me. Basically LinkedIn asks to access your calendar and the user grants it.
The shady part is not that the app gets access to all of this, but that all that calendar data is sent back to LinkedIn servers. This, however, is a failing on Apple’s part.
This is the very thing that the App Store was made to protect users from: shady companies, doing shady stuff with your personal data.
LinkedIn = shady company.
Sending calendar data to remote servers = shady stuff.
Calendar data = personal data.
We already know LinkedIn is a SPAM king, so what would you expect from them? Nothing less than this.
In my view, the failing here is on Apple.
Ole Begemann found a nice quote from Steve Jobs on the file system and after seeing this I have to conclude that we won’t see a Files.app in iOS anytime soon.
A great list of stupidity from Kottke.
Personally I wish their press release said: “Check.”
This should worry Microsoft, as I talked about already today, Microsoft’s office is becoming even more irrelevant to mobile users. With this Google is taking yet another step towards trying to woo more and more people from Office, to Google’s own platform.
Barb Darrow:
>Tier 1 analyst Carl Brooks said this Windows first strategy is nutty in this day and age. “Microsoft wants to own user data in Office across the clients and in the cloud obviously. But this is a fight Apple’ s going to win on its own platform,” he said. “Microsoft can obviously deliver a better experience on Windows devices, but waiting too long or restricting Office to Windows would be suicide. I can already read .docs and .ppts on my iPhone and it gets easier all the time,” he said.
Microsoft is in a very interesting position on mobile: they want users to be on their platforms, but they also want to sell as many copies of Office as they can. It was a long held belief by many in the corporate world that iOS could not, and would not, be successful for businesses without Office on them. Turns out they were wrong about that one and because Microsoft still hasn’t shipped Office for iOS/Android there have been many third parties that have risen to the challenge and made great apps that open these documents.
If you use iOS, you have probably never once thought about the fact that you don’t have Word or Excel on your device — yet this was a real fear for the platform when it launched. Now though, would you even bother buying Office for iOS if it came out?
I wouldn’t — and that’s a problem for Microsoft because now users have no compelling reason to buy Microsoft software *and* no compelling reason to *move* to Windows platforms.
Khoi Vinh on the “Allow use of location data” prompt that iOS presents when an app wants access to the photos on the device:
>From a technical perspective, this dialog box makes sense, because the sensitive information at question isn’t the photos but the location data. Nevertheless, it’s a very confusing way to ask the question, because most users don’t think of their photos as being anything more than just that — photos.
It’s a really poor dialog, but it has to convey two things to users:
1. That the app wants access to photos.
2. That your photos *do* contain location data.
It’s quite a challenge to do this with one small dialog — here’s hoping it gets changed in the next update. Perhaps just allow Apps to get to Photos while stripping the location data?
(Vinh also points out how annoying it is to change your mind at a later date too. Can’t imagine the support emails for that alone.)
The headline says it all. Oracle is pissed that Lodsys started to threaten their customers, so they want Lodsys’ patents invalidated. That’s good for anyone not invested in Lodsys.
Here’s the thing about Oracle: Larry Ellison is a worse person to piss off than Steve Jobs was.
I think that about sums up how this is going to play out.
I love Merlin Mann’s retort to those complaining that “GTD is not for X”.
Marco Arment:
>Simply add up to 10 locations that you enter and leave often, and Instapaper will frequently update without manually launching it.
What a clever hack, this should make an already great app even better. I had never heard of this, but Arment says this idea is from News.me — credit where credit is due.
I also love this little privacy note:
>Instapaper stores these locations only within the app itself, only for this purpose, and does not share them or send them to any web service (not even its own servers). I respect your privacy.
My thanks to Shiny Things Software for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed to promote their new game: [Sudoku Touch](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sudoku-touch+/id512397454?ls=1&mt=8). Before I was contacted about this game I had never, not once, played a game of Sudoku. I didn’t even know how to play, so I am about as rough a use case as you can get to test a Sudoku game on.
I caught on in about five minutes flat — an hour later I was still playing Sudoku Touch. For this beginner I loved having the app tell me when I misplace a number because it is a great way to get a hang of the game without getting frustrated. Now I just love how fast I can play numbers by drawing them on the screen.
I honestly don’t keep many games on my iPhone, but this game will stay on there for a long time.
Nick Bergus on the dangers of clicking a “like” button in the name of humor:
>Amused, I posted it to Facebook with the line “A 55-gallon drum of lube on Amazon. For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.” And then I went on with my life.
>A week later, a friend posts a screen capture and tells me that my post has been showing up next to his news feed as a sponsored story, meaning Amazon is paying Facebook to highlight my link to a giant tub of personal lubricant.
I don’t know what Bergus is thinking here — he didn’t use an affiliate code on his link to the lube. So I have taken the time to do so, [buy it from Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MR3IVO/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20) and I will post a link to your site if you use my affiliate code — you just need to provide me with a short 100-word review of the product. ((No, really, I will.))
[Hurry](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MR3IVO/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20), only 10 left as of this writing.
David Zax on new technology to be a part of Intel’s, soon-to-be-doomed, ultrabook initiative:
>Basically, it lets a device automatically join a free Wi-Fi network, even if that network typically requires some sort of manual input to join. It achieves this feat by sending a specially-formatted DNS query that can worm its way past any Wi-Fi router that’s not hyper-fortified. The query then heads to Devicescape’s servers, bearing details of the Wi-Fi point; then Devicescape’s servers send back tailored instructions on how to gain access to that Wi-Fi point. Devicescape’s software on your device is then able to link you–automatically.
The article goes on to make it sound like the WiFi access points have to opt-in to the service, but there’s a lot of potential for — well — things to go badly. For example, what’s to stop a hacker from registering his WiFi hotspot and skimming all your data when you connect — since the connection can be made while the laptop is still in your bag?
This entire idea makes me very uncomfortable.
Bill Ward on a room that is 99.9 percent sound proof:
>Besides being able to hear one’s own heart, stomach and even inner ear, or the sounds emitted by a cellphone’s display, first-timers in the quiet room find their other senses discombobulated by “cross-modal” perceptual effects.
>“Your eyes don’t feel as comfortable in this room,” Orfield pointed out, adding that some visitors have had hallucinations during or after a spell in there. “You lose your touchstones.”
You have no idea how badly I want to see how long I could last in this room.
Pat Dryburgh filled in for me this week and talked about iPhone and Apple TV rumors with Shawn.
Tapping the link is just going to download the zipped file for my Keyboard Maestro macro, so let me explain what you are getting.
First, credit where credit is due, a big thanks to [Greg Pierce for getting me a working AppleScript for this](https://twitter.com/agiletortoise/status/207954077345267712) (I was using an Automator action before, which was pretty slow).
All you have to do to make this work is to grab the path to your image and plug it in to the AppleScript and you are done. From there you can adjust the time and days that your image changes.
I use this to change the image:
– In the morning when I get up.
– Mid-morning
– Evening
– Late night
– When I launch iA Writer
The first four are pretty simple, I just trigger with the time and have a new macro for each desktop image and time that I want it to change the background. I set it so the late night image is very dark, and the morning is bright, therefore slowly moving from bright to dark throughout the day.
*(Bonus tip: save the images as something like `morning.jpg` all in the same directory so that you only need to type the path once. Another bonus to this is that if you ever want to change the image you only need to replace the image with a new one of the same name — no touching the macro.)*
For the iA Writer background change I have the macro set to activate when I launch iA Writer and another set to switch back to a predetermined background when I quit iA Writer.
One final note: you will notice that I assigned a hotkey to this macro as well, that’s because this script changes the background of your *current* main display. Therefore if you hook a laptop to a monitor, the image will not change on your laptop — the hotkey is so that I can manually change the image if I please.