My thanks to Agile Tortoise for sponsoring this week’s RSS Feed to promote the excellent Drafts app for iPhone. It’s one of those apps that immediately clear out room in your iPhone dock for — at least I did.
It’s $0.99, and that’s about $20 too cheap.
I love this game because it’s fun and you can play it with one hand (the baby is often in the other). Can’t quite get to Kottke’s high score, yet.
Declan McCullagh:
>The FBI general counsel’s office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.
The argument seems to be that as people make the move to digital communication tools, away from telephones, that the FBI cannot monitor those tools. Since the FBI has access to monitor telephones, they only think it natural to ask for these backdoors to be built in.
I see where they are coming from, it’s just that it is completely wrong headed.
“Luckily” it looks like there is a loophole:
>The requirements apply only if a threshold of a certain number of users is exceeded, according to a second person briefed on it.
There’s a business opportunity: create an secure email service that users must pay for that stays below that threshold. I mean it’s not like terrorists or your general “bad guy” would use such unmonitored services.
Basically this law allows the government to monitor stupid criminals, but not the really smart ones that pose the most damage.
Adam Clark Estes profiles Jenna Wortham on how she goes about news consumption during the day:
>I avoiding spending a lot of time in my inbox — it’s the equivalent quicksand — so instead, I keep an eye on the emails to address anything urgent that comes in and make a list of people to reply to via email during a late-afternoon coffee break or before bed at the end of the night. My best sources know that text and DM are the easiest and most surefire ways to get in touch and get a response.
It’s also fascinating how huge Twitter his to her daily routine — me, I’m still an RSS guy.
Horace Dediu and Dirk Schmidt:
>Apple offers a place where people can discover and get answers about technology without the pressure of making a purchase. The job is to simplify that which is complex for a price premium.
Well said. Going to an Apple store is like no other store experience that most people have had. Not only are the staff friendly, but [they trust you](https://brooksreview.net/2011/12/trust-respect/).
I’m not a Yankees fan, but you’d be [hard pressed to find a baseball fan that doesn’t enjoy](http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/poll-the-most-respected-athlete-of-all-time/) watching Rivera work, just look at his stats as reported by Dave Cameron:
>Among relievers with at least 500 career innings, Rivera’s 2.05 ERA is easily the best ever.
Let’s hope this isn’t the end of a spectacular career.
This video has been making the rounds. It shows an *improved* method for selecting text on the iPad. I think it looks really neat, but the call for Apple to add it as a feature is pretty misguided if you ask me.
If you think about iOS — this would be a very poor feature for the general iOS user base. The reasons are the same as why Apple doesn’t make the multi-touch app switching gestures readily public, it’s not discoverable or memorable for normal users.
Imagine what would happen if a user slid two fingers along the keyboard accidentally and then started typing. Oops. While this system is certainly better than what is currently on iOS, it would also lead to much user confusion. That alone is reason enough to not add it in iOS.
There’s something about this footage, especially the night footage, that looks so much like CG to me. I don’t know if that is the styling applied in this video, or a credit to how far CG has come, but it is bugging me.
Shawn talks about a new Samsung phone that was announced and that will be outdated by the time it ships, we “debate” about the Paul Miller leaving the internet “sensation”, and lastly we talk about when and how to link to KickStarter projects.
So Draw Something’s usage has fallen off a cliff and Zynga looks to have over paid for the company. But it should also be noted that Zynga took a gamble on this acquisition.
Had Draw Something continued to grow then Draw Something would be worth considerably more — and Zynga would have bought it at a bargain. But Zynga knew this *could* happen, they likely just thought it wouldn’t happen this fast.
On a personal note: it’s hard to feel bad for the company that gave the world FarmVille.
A simply amazing story about the power that the blind are finding with the iPhone and third-party apps. While I read this story I had one thought that kept popping in my head: how the hell do they keep their phones charged?
I often use Google maps to drive from point to point and doing that eats the battery, now imagine you have to keep it on all the time otherwise you might get lost, that’s just scary to think about.
A while back I posted about how I didn’t like the concept of indoor mapping using shoppers with WiFi, but I hadn’t thought of the power of such technology for the blind, luckily some one has:
>”One of the biggest concerns of the blind community is finding their way around independently,” he says. “You can find an address, but what if you get someplace and you have nobody to help you find your way around the building?” His solution, still in the works, will attempt to sketch a map of the building based on previous routes taken within, and the strength of the wireless signals bouncing from the different sources. It’ll also take into consideration the pace and number of steps a person takes from one point to the next. If a blind person were to arrive to a hotel, he’d only need to be shown to his room once. The iPhone will remember the way for him, and navigate him back and forth from the room to the lobby.
That’s fantastic.
Farhad Manjoo:
>I’ve long trusted and admired Google. I use its services to store and organize my most personal data, including my email, contacts, bookmarks, Web history, and calendar. The Street View scandal hasn’t destroyed my trust in the company, but after reading the report, I no longer trust it implicitly.
In my mind that is the worst statement someone can make about a company like Google. For users to use Google services they simply must trust the company — you just end up storing too much data there to not trust a cloud company of Google’s reach.
Manjoo continues:
>Even in the best-case scenario, someone at Google thought it would be a good idea to insert code that spies on the world, and no one else noticed. It doesn’t inspire my confidence that, a far as anyone from the outside can tell, anything has happened to the people who perpetrated this.
>How do we know some similar rogue program isn’t operating in Gmail, Chrome, or Android?
Great question.
Fantastic little app, I had been using SmushIt before — this is way easier.
*The Week*:
> MIT researchers have unveiled a new technique that “virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare.
I’ve heard about this project before and it really seems like something that Ive should be all over — and not just for iOS devices, for all Apple devices. Glare is about the nastiest, ugliest, reality that plagues Apple devices today so it seems very likely that Apple would be all over this type of product.
I like where Michael Schechter is going with this tip, setting Keyboard Maestro to open OmniFocus every 90 minutes, because I too often forget to check what’s in there until it is too late.
What I don’t like is the forced nature of the tip — I don’t want a window popping up if I am in the middle of something that I truly don’t want to interrupt. So I fixed it: my version of his KM macro just pops a Growl notification on my screen every 90 minutes that reminds me (gently) to check OmniFocus.
I just created this so I am not sure how it will work long term, but I really like the idea.
Love the title of his post and he covers quite the lot of iPad cases. Me, I’m still a Smart Cover guy.
Murray:
>You’re going to have all the same problems you had before, only now they’re going to be even more annoying to other people. Paul doesn’t need to quit the internet for a year, Paul needs to control himself and reduce his use to reasonable limits, get some creative hobbies, and spend more time with his friends.
Murray is spot on, if Miller is really leaving the internet because he can’t control himself. I think that is certainly part of the issue, but I have to wonder if he doesn’t have something like a book deal hinging on this…
Marco Arment on the kill apps from the multi-tasking bar myth:
>It’s one thing to hear this myth from the idiots at AT&T and Verizon stores, but it’s just embarrassing for Apple’s own retail employees to be peddling placebos that imply that iOS can’t multitask without constant babysitting and manual maintenance.
John Sides:
>The question we can then answer is this: Based on the historical relationship between presidential approval and the economy as well as these other factors, is Mr. Obama more or less popular than the model would predict, given the economy and other circumstances during his first three years in office?
What a fascinating model and I am glad he showed it for other presidents too.
When I saw [Justin Blanton post about this](http://hypertext.net/2012/04/qlocktwo-watch) I was all set to make fun of him, then I clicked the link — oh man is this a great looking watch. *Want.*