The Macalope:
>Still, if you had told us years ago that people would be only too happy to stand on a street corner talking loudly into a Bluetooth headset about their rash, we would have said you were crazy. And, yet, here we are. So maybe people will wear these dorky things.
Even if Mac-y is right, you’ll still look like a douche.
I love this app so much that it’s not only on my home screen, it’s in my dock. I’d write up a review, but [I’m a little busy right now](http://c276381.r81.cf1.rackcdn.com/sloane.jpg).
This is a pretty good visualization of what [I was talking about](https://brooksreview.net/2012/04/google-ly-eye-ads/).
Justin Luey responding to my suggestion that Paper should have charged $0.99 for the app, as well as doing IAP for additional tools:
>This might “set the expectation”, but it’s still shady to charge extra for essential features, and it makes the whole transaction more complicated than it needs to be. Charge a fair price for a feature complete app, and offer a free lite version to allow users to demo the app.
I’ve been thinking more and more about my suggestion since I posted it and it is really tricky to suss out. I don’t like the idea of ‘lite’ versions of apps — that’s complex for the user. They have to think about which one they want to buy — they don’t know if there is a free version and so perhaps they just see the paid version and buy that. It’s complex and frustrating.
The reason I like the idea of a paid app with IAP of some kind: longevity. I don’t like my apps to become abandonware and without upgrade pricing for developers on the App Store, there are only a couple of good ways to get continued revenue from the app:
1. Attract more users, thus selling more copies.
2. Use IAP to allow the user to buy something extra (including subscriptions).
Beyond that I worry that after a year the developer may move on to greener grass. With IAP the developer can add a new feature and charge all of the users for that feature, instead of just the “new” users.
Shawn and I talk about Shawn’s annoying new DAS keyboard, Google’s Project Glass, and UI-less UI in iOS apps (such as Clear and Paper). It’s a short one this week.
Gretchen Reynolds:
>But exercise paired with otherwise unalloyed sitting should be avoided, Dr. Dunstan says. “It is important the general public become more conscious about what they do in their nonexercise time,” he says. Almost everybody, he says, “should look for opportunities to reduce their daily sitting time and move more, more often, throughout the day.”
And this is why I stand at work.
Federico Viticci:
>[…] I think Paper made us realize even more that old interface schemes from the PC era belong to another age, and that all the metaphors we were accustomed to will have to be re-imagined.
Exactly.
Be sure to check your Mac to make sure it is not infected, because it sounds [like a lot of people are](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/04/flashback-trojan-reportedly-controls-half-a-million-macs-and-counting.ars).
Nick Bilton on Google’s new glasses:
>A video released by Google on Wednesday, which can be seen below, showed potential uses for Project Glass. A man wanders around the streets of New York City, communicating with friends, seeing maps and information, and snapping pictures. It concludes with him video-chatting with a girlfriend as the sun sets over the city. All of this is seen through the augmented-reality glasses.
I think they are missing a few ‘features’, so let me fix that (my additions in italics):
A video released by Google on Wednesday, which can be seen below, showed potential uses for Project Glass. A man wanders around the streets of New York City *seeing ads for condoms*, communicating with friends *while seeing ads for escorts*, seeing maps and information *like nearby deals, sponsored by American Express*, and snapping pictures *while being delivered ads for the products in the pictures*. It concludes with him video-chatting with a girlfriend as the sun sets over the city *and an ad for Dawn dish washing soap scrolls across his girlfriends face*. All of this is seen through the augmented-reality glasses.
Sounds fantastic, right?
>One person who had used the glasses said: “They let technology get out of your way.
Yeah, now it just — literally — sits between your eye and everything else you see. Totally out of the way.
>If I want to take a picture I don’t have to reach into my pocket and take out my phone; I just press a button at the top of the glasses and that’s it.”
Because it’s *way* too obvious when I want to snap a picture of a person’s mullet and I have to pull out my phone to do so.
Google: thinking everyone wants to wear a Star Trek visor that serves you ads all day long.
Another iPad app, this time a calendar app. I just saw this last night in the top paid list in the App Store. I downloaded it and played with it.
Before I go any further I need to stop and talk about the icon. It’s not hideous, but I have to wonder what in the hell they are trying to do with it. It resembles a moleskin, but the app is a calendar app — no matter how much they try to sell it as a “planning” app. Maybe I am missing something.
Overall the app isn’t anything really special in this category, but it has a couple of things I found noteworthy:
1. The app is slow to open, but once open your data is all there and there quickly. If you flip through the month view there is no pause to load in new calendar data or jittery scrolling.
2. This is also a weather app, kind of. There is a nice current time indicator and weather symbol in the upper right corner. It just shows the current weather condition (cloudy, sunny) and the time and date. Since this app hides the status bar, these are welcomed additions in that location and I thought it clever to add a little weather status in the app.
Overall I might actually use this app if they changed the icon and removed the branding and quotes from the top left. I find it minimal looking and clean, not too bad.
I had not seen this free Weather app before. It’s not bad, it is free and shows a banner ad along the bottom (also no retina graphics). The reason I am linking to it though, is because I think it makes decent use of the space provided by the iPad. It’s not the best use, but it doesn’t feel like the app is trying to cram information in because there is room to cram information in.
That said the banner ad is a deal breaker — not to mention the app is pretty sluggish.
(Be sure to pinch on the forecast data to move between views — nice touch.)
Again I don’t think this is a great app, but I do think it is one of the better ones — especially for a free app.
Shawn Blanc:
>Sara Lacy of PandoDaily asks him how Instagram plans to make money. Based on his answer it sounds like: (a) their current user-base of 30 million-ish people is not yet big enough to start monetizing the service; and (b) their plan is to build a tool that advertisers can use so they don’t have to go through the “terrible experience” of using their iPhone to post an image to Instagram.
*Pathetic.*
Shawn and I have talked about this stuff a lot on our podcast, but the bottom line is this: charge for your app. If you follow that advice you may grow slower, but you will grow with a business model that won’t leave you scrambling later.
I know that I linked to the Surefire 6PX-Pro not to long ago, but I just found this model when I needed a second Surefire — and man is it great. It’s a dual stage LED that outputs 15 lumens on the low end and 500 lumens on the high end (the aforementioned 6PX-Pro tops out at 200 lumens).
It’s really bright — like amazingly so.
It is just a touch bigger than the 6PX and yet it is over twice as much the output. Really amazing.
I can’t be the only one that thinks the 18th picture down (sorry I can’t link to just that spot) would make for a great Apple print ad — just put a little Apple logo in the bottom right and crop out the cameraman.
UPDATE: [Marcelo took the liberty of creating the ad](http://behindcompanies.com/2012/04/don-draper-think-different/). I think it would make for a great full page ad in, say, The New York Times.
Chris Foresman:
>Ultimately, iCloud security is a matter of trust between individual users and Apple. As confirmed by industry experts, Apple takes a number of precautions to prevent unauthorized access to user data by third parties, but those precautions don’t secure your data from Apple itself. If you require—or simply want—greater assurance than that, turn off whatever iCloud features you don’t need.
I am really paranoid about privacy issues, but I think the above from Foresman is really an astute observation. No matter the security in place, I simply do not trust Google. The same is not true of Apple, for now.
Eric Slivka:
>Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster today issued a report on his firm’s latest semi-annual survey of U.S. teenagers, the 23rd such survey in the firm’s history. The results of the extensive survey of 5,600 U.S. high school students show that 34% of surveyed students now own an iPhone, an all-time high in the survey and double the percentage seen just a year ago. Furthermore, 40% of surveyed students indicated that they intend to purchase an iPhone within the next six months.
I’m surprised it’s that low, [but I do recall this statement from Martin Fichter, the acting president of HTC America, on September 12, 2011](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/htc-boss-windows-phone-7-patents-iphones-cool-anymore/):
>I brought my daughter back to college — she’s down in Portland at Reed — and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.
So, either:
– The remaining 66% are using these other smartphones;
– Or a major shift happens where kids dump their iPhones when they get to college;
– Or Fichter was pulling data out of his ass.
Also of note, the iPad ownership:
>On the tablet front, an identical 34% of students report owning some sort of tablet device, with 70% of those indicating that they have an iPad.
So of those kids that have a tablet, 70% have an iPad. That’s insane.
Ina Fried:
>Acknowledging it is no longer a BlackBerry-only world, Research In Motion on Tuesday released the first version of its server software to manage other company’s mobile devices.
>The update to BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, as promised, can help businesses keep tabs on Android and iOS devices in addition to BlackBerry phones and PlayBook tablets.
[So it starts](https://brooksreview.net/2012/04/rim-ms/).
Dave Cameron, writing for my favorite Baseball site FanGraphs, about the recently announced Cincinnati Reds extension of star first baseman, Joey Votto (a 12-year, $251.5 million total contract):
>This deal is going to have lasting repercussions on the sport. Not only does it suggest that the Reds are going to remain competitive in the NL Central going forward, but it also resets the price expectations for every pre-free agent player in the sport. Congratulations, players, all of your expected prices just went up. Way up.
It’s a massive contract and shows two things:
1. Players are going to be getting paid a lot more.
2. Teams expect that to make financial sense.
Item number 2, that amazes me.
Jorge Quinteros:
>A new camera means a new incentive, a new enthusiasm to shoot more and most likely, an immediate and substantial upgrade to whatever you might have own before but what it doesn’t mean is being gifted with any additional artistic talent to produce something you may not have been able to create with your previous equipment.
Most common question I get from writers just getting started on the web: what tools do you use? The answer is irrelevant, because having my tools won’t make you any better of a writer (probably would make you worse). What Jorge says in the above passage really rings true to me: good tools are great to have and use, but they don’t instantly make you any better at what you use those tools for.
This has been floating around for a week or so, but I just got around to doing it — and oh man is it great.