The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • BlackBerry 7 OS

    So sad:
    >The new BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 smartphones are expected to be available from carriers around the world beginning this summer.

    In other news RIM also announced that BlackBerry 10 OS will be shipping sometime in the future.

  • Apple Doomsday Meme

    Jean-Louis Gassée:
    >The notion that the iOS platform will lose to Android “the way Mac OS lost to Windows” ignores history and disregards facts such as the growth of the iPhone and iPad.

    An insightful post and well worth the read.

  • Grandview

    Grandview is a fullscreen writing app like you have never seen before. Yes, you can customize colors and fonts — but you only get to see one word at a time as you type. That is one word, fullscreen, while you type. The experience is a bit trippy at first — after a few times through you start to see just why the developer wrote this app.

    It’s not something that will make you focus better, or write better — it is a very unique app that is loads of fun to use. I have been testing the app for quite sometime now and have to say that I really do enjoy it — not for every writing moment — there are times though when it feels like the right tool for the job.

    The app is available in the [app store](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grandview/id432436025?mt=12) for $4.99 (my copy was provided free), or you can hit the main link and see a video of the app in action and give a 7 day trial copy a go. I really recommend you give the trial a go, it’s pretty fun.

  • Fixing in Post

    Justin Williams has a nice take on why Apple won’t be losing its lead in tablets anytime soon. The bottom line is that too many companies are shipping incomplete products with the promise of updates that will fix all the problems to come later — except that those updates are not shipping.

    It reminds me of photographers that snap a picture, look at it and realize it isn’t very good — then go on to state: “Umm, I’ll fix it in Photoshop later.” Except that “fixing” a photo in Photoshop takes just about as much talent as creating a great photograph to begin with would — often it takes even more talent in my book.

  • Thinking Room

    Jonah Leher:
    >Although we’re only starting to grasp how the insides of buildings influence the insides of the mind, it’s possible to begin prescribing different kinds of spaces for different tasks. If we’re performing a job that requires accuracy and focus (say, copy editing a manuscript), we should seek out confined spaces with a red color scheme. But for tasks that require a little bit of creativity, we seem to benefit from high ceilings, lots of windows and bright blue walls that match the sky.

    Something to keep in mind when choosing your workspace — especially for those of us with [home offices](http://www.flickr.com/photos/showngo/5192693338/).

  • On Xoom Sales

    Justin Williams on the reported Motorola Xoom sales number:
    >250,000 is not a number to sneeze at. In fact, it’s more than I thought they’d sell in the three months of the device’s existence. What I am more curious about is how happy customers are with the purchase.

    That will be the true test.

  • Questions for RIM’s CEOs

    Eric Jackson:
    >The features you touted last night for your new phones were better battery life, a better browser, and better graphics for gaming. Is someone going to buy a BlackBerry over an iPhone or Android phone because of your improved browser? Is that what has been holding them back? Also, for your games: I thought your PlayBook just ships with Tetris. Are there going to be any other games I can play on the new BlackBerries that use your improved graphics?

  • Push Ads in Android

    Martin Adamek:

    >What has happened? In the last update of the app I introduced new ads provided by AirPush. These ads are not visible as part of the app, instead they appear in notification bar. They will appear max once a day and are easily cancelable (as any kind of notification). This update has started the wave of negative user comments and 1-star ratings.

    and:

    >Guys you are right, this can’t be compared. TV ads are there only during the show, while push ads appear anytime, even while you do not use the app. I completely missed this point.

    Stay classy Android.

    [via DF]

  • Google’s Crowdsourced Traffic Database

    Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Maps back in 2009:
    >It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

    That is significantly more than zero effort — especially for your battery life. I imagine this is what Apple wants to make better, making it so that users don’t have to take any additional steps by providing historical analysis instead of real-time crowdsourcing of the data.

  • Associative Fallacy

    Ethan Kaplan:
    >Chasing business models in one media with business models of fundamentally different media is a recipe for disaster. I see this happening continually with newspapers and magazines and the iPad, and I see it happening with the music subscription services. It’s applying an associative fallacy to things that are disparate, and history is littered with the fatalities of these collisions.

  • Slow Time

    37signals (I believe this is excerpted from a Jason Fried interview):
    >Slow time is “Maybe it takes two or three days to have this conversation. And we do it over periods of 15 minutes here, two minutes there, four minutes there.” And that’s fine. It doesn’t need to happen all at once. Unless it’s really, incredibly, truly urgent. (Which most things aren’t. They’re made out to be that way, but they really aren’t that important.)

    Read the parenthetical again.

  • On the White iPhone Thickness Crap

    Dr. Drang:
    >Not only is there going to be variation from one phone to another, there’ll be variation from place to place on the same phone. If someone does go out a measure a few white iPhones and finds them to be several (not just a few) thousandths of an inch thicker than black iPhones, I’ll be convinced there’s a difference.

    He also shows that his black iPhone 4 is thicker than his son’s black iPhone 4 **and** how one should photograph these things. But this makes the most sense:

    >Wait. Before I do that, let me digress and say that the best way to prove a difference in thickness is to measure the goddamn thicknesses. But perhaps this is too technical a solution for a “marketing guy.”

    Exactly.

  • Drew Houston on Usability

    Drew Houston the cofounder and CEO of Dropbox:
    >Relatively early on we brought a handful of people off the street (literally) for our first round of usability tests. Most of them had trouble even getting through the installer: for example, zero of the five people noticed that we had a tray icon (our most important UI element), and more than one person tried clicking the screenshots in the tour. This was a mortifying experience for us, causing us to add a Giant Ass Blue Bouncing Arrow pointing to the tray icon during install, and to tweak the coloring of the screenshots to distinguish them from your OS chrome. Forcing these people through some kind of folder mapping scheme would have been a colossal train wreck.

    His entire response is great and worth the read for anybody thinking about usability issues.

  • Weather.cgi

    [Dr. Drang](http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/04/weather-or-not/) whipped up a neat little python script that you can place on a web server to grab weather info in mobile Safari (and Safari for that matter). I forked the project over on GitHub and styled the layout a bit. Check out the demo [here](http://b3nbrooks.com/cgi-bin/weather.cgi). ((Be sure to add it to your homescreen so you can see the great icon I whipped up for it.))

    You can’t change the location because it is hard coded, but you should be able to get it working on your web server.

    *Note: I am not saying this is better than My-Cast, but it is interesting what you can put together in a short period of time.*

  • Speaking of Weather

    WeatherSpark:
    > WeatherSpark is a new type of weather website, with interactive weather graphs that allow you to pan and zoom through the entire history of any weather station on earth.

    This is Flash only, but that aside it is a massive amount of data they give you. Not my thing, but pretty information heavy.

  • 5AM Wake Up Call

    Elle Luna:
    >It was 5:30AM, my goals were completed, and I didn’t need to leave for work for another 3 hours. 
    >This was the instant that my experiment was a success. Having 3 hours in the morning to do nothing. Planning for nothing. Making time out of my day to have just three hours to myself. That was a revolutionary idea for me. 

    It really is the best feeling when you have that time to yourself — I prefer it in the morning and wake up at 5:30a, even Twitter is quiet at that time. My Wife on the other hand prefers it in the late hours of the night, between 12a-3a.

    You don’t just have to get up early, but if you can be awake at a time when your house is quiet and you can think — that’s when you find the magic.

  • “It’s Not What Your Software Does, It’s What People Do With Your Software””

    Greg DeVore:
    >The creators of Garageband for iPad didn’t care about what their software could do. They cared about what people could do with their software.

    The end result of which is smiles. Lots of smiles. Go ahead and try not to smile when the iPad, or other software, does something that you find “magical”.

  • The Phones Know Too Much

    MG Siegler:
    >Let’s face it, our phones have a lot of potentially personal information about us on them beyond just location. That’s why it really sucks when we lose them or they’re stolen. And just imagine when these devices all have NFC chips in them for easy payments. That’s really going to suck. I’m sure the FUD stories will start about that in the next year or so.

    Set passcode lock. Check. Set erase data after 10 failed passcode attempts. Check. Duct tape iPhone to hip…

    As our phones know more and more about the financial parts of our lives security is going to become a bigger and bigger issue. It already is not taken serious enough by most users.

  • How Apple Updates Its Location Database

    In this July 12th, 2010 letter to Edward Markey and Joe barton, Apple details how and why it collects the user data to update its location database. From reading this it seems that Apple only grabs this anonymized data under two conditions:

    1. You are requesting your location. At this point Apple grabs any updated information.
    2. You are using another app that uses location services, at which point Apple will update its data.

    Of note: you can stop all this from occurring by turning of location services.

    [h/t reader Jose Marques]

  • Apple’s Response to the iPhone Location Data

    Apple via Press Release:
    >This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.

    So the location database people found was not actual locations that the person traveled to, but data that Apple pulled down from its WiFi and cell tower database location cache. Interesting, what really made me do a double take:

    >Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
    >No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.

    So Apple is not collecting data from the database file people found, but from another source which is anonymized, encrypted, and sent to Apple. I want to know more about *this*.