My thanks to the Brew Review for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. If you are a beer drinker that constantly forgets which beers he likes (let’s face it there are a lot of micro brews out there) then this is an app you need.
It has a tons of features for the beer obsessed and yet still works great for a guy like me that just logs the name of beer and whether it was enjoyable or not. Be sure to support them and check out the app — I’ve found it very handy.
Harry McCracken:
>All of which brings me back to Apple. Heaven knows, it often ships products that don’t include all the features an average consumer might want. But even when its products don’t “just work” in a way that feels practically mystical, they do work. What does it say about the state of the tech industry that this comes as a refreshing surprise?
This is a really good read that highlights a problem that has only been brought about due to the proliferation easy updates and acceptance of ‘beta’ labels.
MG Siegler interviewing Adam Bain about Twitter’s promoted tweets in timelines:
>When I ask about the importance of exclusivity for the deals Twitter is offering (that is, will only Twitter get to offer them?), Bain says that it’s important to note that Promoted Tweets aren’t just about deals or offers — he doesn’t want this product thought of as “Twitter Deals”. “That’s one of a bunch of categories that consumers find interesting,” he says. “More than half of our launch is about exclusive content,” he says.
That addresses my biggest frustration with ads on websites: ad exclusivity. I hate it when I know that I *could* see that ad on another site. What a valuable thing Twitter is doing here. ((My entire commentary is called: *sarcasm*.))
An interesting project from Google to try and speed up the web for the entire world — for free. There are some real concerns with allowing Google to do that, but as any nerd I was more interested in how much faster they could make TBR.
[Here are the results](https://f3a98a5aca88d28ed629-2f664c0697d743fb9a738111ab4002bd.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/pagespeedservice.png). ((Don’t see myself using it any time soon.))
So clever. Addresses one of my biggest iOS annoyances — well at the very least makes it less frustrating.
Ryan Paul:
>Comcast had the highest average download speed at 890KBps and Verizon came in second with 788KBps. A separate comparison of mobile broadband providers found that AT&T was the fastest at 416KBps and Verizon was the slowest of the major providers at 216KBps.
My own usage agrees with the above, with one major caveat: when it works. AT&T and Comcast are incredibly fast… when they work.
Sorry for linking to myself here, but since saying the MacBook Pro 13″ makes no sense I have had a deluge of emails and tweets. Two common arguments I am hearing are: RAM and storage space.
The RAM limitation is legitimate and 4GB versus 8GB *is* a huge difference. However I stand by this (which is what I am linking to) with regards to the storage space:
>There is certainly a large contingent of Mac users that have an overwhelming amount of data storage needs, but if you fall in that group than I doubt that even a 500GB hard drive will suffice for you.
That’s to say that if you can’t get it done in 256GBs then you likely need more than 500GBs too.
[Sad news today](https://twitter.com/#!/king5seattle/status/96276328705302528) that ‘Peanut Man’ Rick Kaminski of the Seattle Mariners has passed away. He has been a highlight of Mariners games for years now, I am linking not to the story of his passing, but to a video highlighting his skills.
He will be missed.
Update:[ A note from Mariners president Chuck Armstrong](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/marinersblog/2015742490_mariners_at_new_york_yankees_j_2.html#continue):
>On behalf of everyone at the Seattle Mariners, our deepest sympathies go out to Rick Kaminski’s partner Candy, his family, his many friends, and fans. Rick was a fixture at Seattle sporting events for as long as I can remember. His speed and accuracy with a bag of peanuts was matched by his quick wit and smile. He always seemed happy to see you, even if he was meeting you for the first time. Rick loved what he did and the fans loved him for it. He will be sorely missed at Safeco Field as well as Peoria, Arizona, where he got in his ‘Spring Training’ along with everyone else.
Stephen M. Hackett commenting on the 13″ MacBook Pro’s position:
>This machine is a great cross between power and portability. Pros need FireWire 800, Ethernet and more onboard. I know I can’t live with an Air as my primary machine at work.
Because nothing screams pro like: [Supported resolutions: 1280 by 800 (native)](http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro?mco=MTM3NjU5MzU). If you really need power and portability with FireWire 800: MacBook Air 13″ Core i7 with a new Thunderbolt display. There are also Thunderbolt adapter cables in the works to provide FireWire 800 without the extra glass. The 13″ is dead and, unfortunately, Apple just hasn’t told it that yet.
>Welcome to the Internet – a place where physical pages don’t exist, and there’s no such thing as “no space left”.
So true.
It’s a fantastic show. Now is the time to catch up. Also, Netflix, your instant streaming selection is rather poor — Mad Men makes up for it somewhat, but we both know you can do better.
Number 1 and number 7 drive me nuts.
Bing is integrated everywhere in Microsoft products, so it *is* unlikely that they would fire sale Bing. Though the whole search ‘on your TV with Kinect’ component — that sounds “fun”. ((Also gotta love the 1995 era design on this site.))
In this episode Shawn and I mostly talk about his new MacBook Air and FileVault. We also touch on some pre-holiday Apple launches and I talk about the degrading quality of our Skype connection — even though as a listener you won’t hear it…
Thanks to the fantastic [Fantastical](http://flexibits.com/) for sponsoring.
Mark Gurman:
>Apple is not specifically planning to launch an iOS 5 application that relies on their face detection technology, but plans to do something much more important. Open up facial recognition as a public developer API for iOS 5 applications.
I bet Apple does use face detection in one of their most prominent apps on the iPhone: the camera. Not so you can tag friends, but so you get that fancy ‘focus on faces’ mode that is popular in point and shoots.
This is cool, but it would be way cooler if they had a green meter on them that made the batteries look like they had liquid in them. Thus you can visually see the battery draining — although this is not as useful as a clear battery. ((This is why I am not in charge of such decisions.))
Isn’t it fun when a new version of Mac OS X comes out and you get to learn about all these security companies that you never heard of before? Not really, but Mike Lennon reports on a possible vulnerability in 10.6 and 10.7:
>The Mac OS vulnerability relates to user login passwords that are stored in the system memory even if the computer is locked or put into a sleep mode. Passware’s software captures live Mac computer memory over FireWire and analyzes it, extracting these passwords, a process that the company says takes just a few minutes–regardless of password strength and use of a FileVault encryption.
So I guess a good defense would be to use a MacBook Air because it doesn’t have FireWire?
By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg And Russell Adams reporting:
>In a pair of moves that suggest Apple Inc. is enforcing rules for selling content on its devices, Kobo Inc., the Canadian e-book retailer, and The Wall Street Journal said Sunday they will no longer sell content directly to customers through their apps for Apple devices.
[I doubt any of this will matter soon.](http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html#newsstand)
UPDATE: [Looks like Amazon killed their button to the Kindle Store too](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/25/amazons-kindle-app-updated-to-remove-direct-kindle-store-links/). Periodicals will likely go the way of the Newsstand as I alluded to above, however book apps like Kobo and Kindle — they will likely have to suffer. Still though it’s better than Apple making iBooks the only ebook reader on iOS.
Great tip.
Classic.