The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Dave Winer: ‘I Deleted My Facebook Account’

    Dave Winer on deleting his Facebook account:
    >Bottom-line: I know from experience that it’s bad to depend on a for-profit company to give me a free service that is supposed to not feel like it’s free.

  • Mixel: The World’s First Social Art App, for iPad

    And why are we still creating apps/services that require Facebook to login? Is it that hard to create your own login system when you [claim](http://www.subtraction.com/2011/11/10/introducing-mixel) that your app is indeed, also, a social network?

    I’m not saying the app is bad or good, I’m just saying that I can’t use it. ((By my own choice of course, I could sign up for Facebook — I guess.))

  • Adobe, not too Shabby

    Dan Frommer on Adobe’s end to mobile Flash:
    >Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen isn’t a magician, but he’s proving that he’s not a dummy. Today, Adobe — in theory — has a plan.

    Some good points and Frommer is right — Adobe seems to understand that they need to continue to adapt.

  • The iTunes Rental Icon

    Turns out there is a benefit to washing sidebar icons in all one color: when you color one of them it can serve as an alert. Nice touch.

  • HP’s Meg Whitman, Still Incompetent

    Joshua Topolsky:
    >HP CEO Meg Whitman just told a room full of Palm and HP employees that the company doesn’t yet know what to do with webOS.

    She needs more time to analyze all of this, after all it’s not like she has been on the board and able to analyze this while Apotheker was CEO. ((Actually she was on the board.))

  • Adobe Kills Mobile Flash Player

    Danny Winokur, November 2011:

    >However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.

    and then:

    >We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

    [Steve Jobs](http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/), April 2010:

    >New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

  • More Consumer Reports Madness

    Marco Arment on the way *Consumer Reports* graded the iPhone:

    >They also say the iPhone has “one of the best cameras we’ve seen on a phone”, but that wasn’t enough to earn the “excellent” dot-circle rating.

    Marco does a great job breaking this down. At the end of the day I can’t help but wonder if *Consumer Reports* just knows that rating the iPhone well will result in less traffic to their, erm, Reports — thus they try to be *more* “objective”.

  • The Quiet Place

    This is the first thing I have added to my ‘Morning’ bookmarks folder in at least a year.

  • Apple Store App Adds in-Store Pickup, Accessory Purchase

    Dan Moren on Apple’s updated iOS app:
    >Using your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S, you can scan the barcode on a product, which will provide you with information about it (specs, ratings, reviews, etc.), and then log in with your Apple ID and pay for it using the same credit card that’s linked to your iTunes account. After that, you can take your item and walk right out of the store. Receipts for items you’ve purchased via EasyPay are available under the app’s More tab, just in case the security guard isn’t convinced.

    It’s a pretty clever solution, but I have to wonder the implications on how easy it is to walk out of the store — what if I want to buy more than one accessory, can I do that, and if so what if I need a bag? I’ll check this out over the weekend, but for now I think this can only help to alleviate some of the congestion at Apple stores.

  • Consumer Reports Recommends the iPhone 4S… Kinda

    Mike Gikas, presumably picking words at random:
    >Other phones that topped the iPhone 4S include the LG Thrill ($100 on AT&T), which has the ability to capture stills and videos in 3D […]

    If only I had a phone that was completely shit, but allowed me to capture 3D video — life would be complete…

  • How Good Is the iPhone 4S Camera’s IR Filter?

    Preston Scott on why the iPhone 4S camera looks less purple than the iPhone 4 camera:
    >When IR light is allowed to pass through to the sensor, the IR light contaminates the channels (mostly the red channel) with information that was not visible in the original scene. The result is an image with a color cast.

    Great job explaining this — I had no idea the new IR filter was the reason for the more accurate colors in the 4S camera.

  • How Does the iPhone 4S Measure-Up Against All Other iPhone Models in Low Light Shooting?

    A great comparison of all iPhones in low-light situations. Look at how much better the 4S camera is over just the iPhone 4. Really impressive improvements.

  • ‘The Most Impressive Thing About the Nook Tablet Is That It Exists’

    Dan Frommer:
    >This isn’t a company with a strong electronics background like Apple or Sony, or an Internet leader like Amazon or Google, or even anything close. This is a company that has spent most of its recent history selling paper books and magazines, cat calendars, overpriced CDs, and Starbucks coffee.

    Good point.

  • $249 Nook Tablet

    It’s $50 more than the Kindle Fire, with less content, and a stupid notch in the bottom corner.

  • Tweaking

    Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs:
    >Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it.

    Gladwell argues that Jobs’ best gift was his ability to make things better — perhaps the best they could be. It was not that he was inventor, so much as it was that he was a tweaker.

  • Anoka-Hennepin Teachers Write Their Own Online Textbook, Save District $175,000

    I had a professor in college that wrote his own textbook for our accounting course. It saved us, as students, a boatload of money. However having a textbook that your professor wrote is not ideal — it was much worse than any of the other textbooks.

    We stilled learned the material, but did so by reading the book not learning from the professor — who just referred questions to specific pages in the book.

    My experience is not going to be the case everywhere, but it is a very real danger to self-published textbooks.

  • Google Chairman Eric Tells US Senators Apple’s Siri Could Pose ‘Competitive Threat’

    Josh Ong reporting:
    >In the letter, Schmidt backpedaled from a previous statement in September 2010 where he had denied that Apple and Facebook were a “competitive threat.”

    >”My statement was clearly wrong,” he said. “Apple’s Siri is a significant development—a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search.”

    What’s interesting about this is not that Schmidt is saying it, it why Schmidt is saying this. He is saying this to help Google not have anti-trust regulations slapped on them. He is saying this to make Google look a bit less anti-competitive and bit more like a company struggling to keep pace.

  • Closing in on the Mac Pro

    I can’t believe how close the performance of the high end iMacs and MacBook Pros are compared to the Mac Pro.

    The MacBook Air, not so much.

  • The B&B Podcast – Episode 33: A Show

    >Shawn and Ben talk about the new design of The Verge, Shawn’s AT&T data usage issues, battery backup packs for iPhones, and why they won’t be friends if Shawn buys a minivan.

    All I know is that the last bit is true.

  • Amazon Item of the Week: NuForce NE-700X Audiophile-Grade Earphones

    I purchased a pair of these bullet looking headphones a while back and have had really good luck with them. My cat has chewed on the earbuds with no success thanks to the metal nature of them, the connection points have yet to wear out. The sound is OK, less bass than Bose headphones — but I actually prefer this.

    My only complaint is that (as with all ear buds) they can be tricky to get stuck in your ear if your ears are not “normally shaped”. I haven’t had a problem, but your mileage will vary on fit — they do come with an assortment of different sized tips.