Matt Gemmell:
>For me, software experiences that feel like Augmented Paper are those that second-guess our (developers’) natural tendency to put functionality first, or to think of our apps as software. Apps are only *incidentally* software; software is an implementation detail. Instead, apps are *experiences*.
You must read this entire post, it’s the best thing I have read in a while.
Matthew Panzarino on the iCloud versus Dropbox debate:
>None of this matters because of this one fact: almost 70% of the 350M+ users of iDevices have access to iCloud, with some 100M+ using it already. Those are numbers Dropbox just can’t match.
Add to that the fact that one of those two services is something Apple has a heavily vested interest in…
Dan Provost on the 4-inch iPhone debate:
>If Apple begins asking developers to make their apps have a “flexible” UI (to be compatible with 3:2 and 16:9 iPhones), when a notification banner appears the top navigation bar could simply nudge itself down. This would greatly improve the unobtrusive quality the banners strive for.
That’d actually be great, if the 16:9 screen is really only 16:9 when viewing a video, the remainder of the time it affords for widgets to sit above or below the normal app content. I could get behind that.
Dan also does a great job of mocking up some potential iPhone screen changes.
The “Fair & Balanced” Fox News:
>A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official has been charged after being accused of stealing eight iPads from luggage at Dallas/Fort Worth International airport, KXAS-TV reported.
*The* weather app that I have been waiting for has finally landed. It’s a good looking app (damned blue icon though) and I can’t wait to put it through its paces to see how well it does, so far: best weather radar I have seen. It’s priced at a premium $5.99, but that makes me only like it more — I hate seeing hard work devalued by app store economics.
UPDATE: [I am told](http://twitter.com/CraigGrannell/status/191937578549772288) this is U.S. only and continental U.S. only at that.
I am not a runner, both because I hate it and because I have a recurring tendonitis that prevents me from running for long periods of time. That said when I received an email about this app and looked through it, two things caught my eye:
1. You can log the weather conditions during your run.
2. You can log the mileage on your shoes.
The latter I thought was really neat, I don’t know why, but I think it would be cool to know how many miles I put on a pair of shoes.
Tim Hornyak:
>The Royal Canadian Mint’s latest collectible coin features a dinosaur whose skeleton shines at night from beneath its scaly hide.
We often joke: “looks like a kindergartener designed that.”
It may be true in this case.
Richard Chirgwin:
>In a second post, however, Raiu fingers infected Office documents as the vector. He also states that the Trojan is in “active stage”, after the C&C server took control of a “goat” machine operated by Kaspersky and started looking for documents.
How long before the media starts a shitstorm claiming that Macs are now *less* secure than Windows? I give it 3 hours.
Dan Frommer gets to the core of why Facebook’s advertising model is so dangerous to Google:
>And then you’ll get to the magic: Facebook’s targeting page. Here, you can narrow your ad’s target by an incredible basket of options. Location, age, gender, precise interests (as volunteered!), Facebook connections, sexual orientation, relationship status, languages, education and specific workplaces.
And Google’s targeting:
>Google’s search advertising product, on the other hand, only offers a fraction of this targeting. You can target by location, languages and devices. But it mostly comes down to keywords: What are people searching for or looking at?
Jon Calhoun:
>Do you see the problem here? Nothing is integrated with my email, yet it is my primary source of communication. What the hell? I shouldn’t have to forward an email to accounting and then follow up to make sure they handled it. I shouldn’t need to lookup the original email for a feature request – it should be integrated into the request itself.
Amen. 60% of my work email gets forwarded, 30% is ignored. Yeah.
Christine McConville:
>TSA agent Jose E. Salgado, 59, of Chelsea was suspended from his job after his employers learned that local law enforcement agencies are pursuing criminal charges against him for the possession and sharing of pornographic images of children.
The most surprising part of this is my general lack of surprise upon hearing this news.
Should be the default for all browsers, it makes the web useable.
I’ve seen a ton of these types of hacks lately and this one looks nice, but I can’t wait for there to be a more elegant solution. That solution may just be waiting until the average Internet speed is fast enough for websites to always serve the retina graphics.
“NOT owned by Facebook”
Classic.
Stephen Hackett:
>Where does iCloud fit in to this? iCloud isn’t backed by piles of VC money, nor is it paid for by ads. Does that mean that it will go away one day?
His answer is spot on.
A while back when I was worried about the inevitable death of Flickr I decided to look around at other online photography options. 500px came right up to the top of the list and I signed up for an account (paid account) right away. I loved the design of the site and it seemed like a really nice place to be.
Fast forward to last week, with the arrival of my daughter, I needed a place to share photos with my family. I decided that 500px would be that place, not Flickr. With their [Lightroom plugin](http://500px.com/lightroom), it is really a snap to add pictures, well and drag and drop at least.
Now a week into really using the site I can see that this is *the* site I will be using for my photos. What a fantastic service. They also received a bunch of due praise this week for their readable and understandable [terms of service](http://500px.com/terms).
A great service run by some great photographers.
Drew Houston on creating the experience that “just works” with Dropbox:
>Achieving that experience is not simple: we have a polished exterior, but there’s this jungle of different operating systems [with which we must work] and even gnarlier stuff like operating-system bugs and incompatibilities. It’s a hostile environment: we macheted our way through that jungle of problems. It was a bunch of us spending big chunks of our 20s chasing down these obscure compatibility issues.
Statements like this are what worry me most about the future of services like Dropbox. I for one think that Apple is committed to iCloud and thus they would prefer it baked into all Mac and iOS apps instead of Dropbox — so what reason would Apple have to *not* break all the hacks that Dropbox has in place? And there’s Dropbox’s biggest problem.
Nice for those app developers that have yet to settle.
If it’s not, then I don’t want to see what is.
>Ben and Shawn talk about Ben’s life as a brand-new dad, Instagram and Facebook, and the Pebble smartwatch.
This was a fun episode talking about my kid, then Shawn wanted to know my thoughts on the Pebble watch and everything got *real* (huh?).