The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • September iPhone 5 Speculation

    Federico Viticci ruminating on why a September iPhone 5 launch makes sense:
    > Last, a September release means Apple could move the iPhone against the much more profitable holiday season. If a new iPhone comes out in September, how many users are going to buy one come Thanksgiving and Christmas? Remember the golden iPod days? Right.

    I would add a couple more things:

    1. A September launch leaves room for the white iPhone 4 to launch in the next month. Thus Apple gets the “normal” press hype to push them into July.
    2. July announcement of iOS 5 and launch of Lion for Mac users pushes the press frenzy into September (all the press will be wanting to delve into the new Mac OS).
    3. September just makes way more sense — that’s when gifts are purchased, not June/July.
    4. Allows Apple to launch more things in iOS 5 and to give developers time needed to get their apps up to date.
    5. Eases the pain Verizon customers would feel — whom still would have had their iPhone 4s for less than a year.

    At least that is what I am thinking right now.

  • The Bro Show Episode 54

    I had the honor to be a guest on the excellent Bro Show with Myke and Terry. We talked about a bunch of different things, including: the unicorn iPhone, iPhone location tracking, Apple v. Samsung, and Twitter buying Tweetdeck.

  • More on the iPhone Location Hubbub

    Watts Martin:
    >What’s grating about this reporting is, as usual, the emphasis being placed on the fact that it’s an Apple product. The headlines are all variants of “Apple is recording your every move!” In fact, there’s no indication that Apple has any way to access this data at all—the only way to get it is to have access to your iPhone or to your iPhone backups, and to know whose iPhone the file belongs to.

    You really have nothing to complain about if you regularly check-in on social services or geo-locate your tweets. That said, I loved Martin’s last quip where he links to this [service](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4151.en.html) for Android:

    >We introduce a new forensic technique that allows to collect users’ past locations on most current Android phones, within a few seconds. It becomes possible to tell where the user was at a given time, or where a phone call took place over the last few hours or days.

    Now that is troublesome.

  • Randomly-Selected Snippets in TextExpander

    Brett Kelly shows you how to randomly select a TextExander snippet, in TextExpander. A pretty neat trick that will come in handy for a few very specific users.

  • Steven Sasson — Sitting in the Pixel Chair

    A nice quick video interviewing the inventor of the digital camera.

  • iPhone Tracker

    Apparently your iPhone and iPad stores a hidden, unencrypted, file on the device and backs it up to your Mac — in this file is location data on where you have been. This is both surprising and not that surprising all at the same time, some clever guys did this:
    >This open-source application maps the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements. It doesn’t record anything itself, it only displays files that are already hidden on your computer.

  • Tweetbot versus Twitter app (HIP Method)

    This is a fantastic way to look at Tweetbot versus the Twitter app, Kaishin L.Reda explains:

    >To see if Tweetbot lives up to the hype, I tried to pit it against the official client using a GOMS-inspired, oversimplified human information processing model (HIP) on a set of frequent as well as less frequent tasks we perform on Twitter.

    Which basically means that a time value was assigned to every action (less typing time) and then each app was put through its paces. So for instance how quickly can one reply to a tweet in each app. This is a very neat method and the results are basically a wash.

    The *more* interesting conclusion that was drawn is that it would seem Tweetbot is better when used as a Tweet reader, rather than that of a conversation tool. Meaning: you read tweets more frequently then you actually send tweets.

  • OmniFocus Love

    Stephen M. Hackett:
    >Am I using OmniFocus to its full potential? Probably not. But in another, very real way, I am, since I’m getting things done with better results than ever before.

  • “Customization for Customization’s Sake”

    Justin Williams on fully customized UIs:
    >The second item on improving usability, however, is a must. Never customize the interface of your application just for the sake of customization. Do it because you truly believe it offers a better experience over the standard iOS way for all of your users.

    That’s a great take and Justin makes some very well reasoned arguments — arguments that are hard to argue with.

  • Dropbox and Security

    Miguel de Icaza:
    >This announcement means that Dropbox never had any mechanism to prevent employees from accessing your files, and it means that Dropbox never had the crypto smarts to ensure the privacy of your files and never had the smarts to only decrypt the files for you. It turns out, they keep their keys on their servers, and anyone with clearance at Dropbox or anyone that manages to hack into their servers would be able to get access to your files.

    That is very concerning for me — I keep just about everything in Dropbox these days. I may have to think about storing more sensitive stuff inside encrypted DMGs on Dropbox.

  • Full Rundown of Apple’s Lawsuit Against Samsung

    Nilay Patel breaks down the case and makes it a damned interesting read.

  • A Feature

    It would — perhaps — be egotistical to assume that above was about, or directed at, me. Perhaps, but I am going to assume that this is at least directed at me in some small way and I want to address two things about this statement.

    First: Yes, UI and UX can be a differentiating feature. It just so happens that I believe that not to be the case in Tweetbot — you may not agree and that is fine. For UI or UX to be differentiating in the way that @tapbot_paul is speaking, is to mean that you are adding value through UI and UX ((This is my assumption of what he means.)) and I don’t think Tweetbot adds any value through that.

    Second: Perhaps most importantly it feels like the maker of an app — that I gave an honest and well thought out opinion about — is now telling me to get off their lawn because that opinion (seemingly) doesn’t suit them. I criticized Obama the other day too when talking with co-workers, should I then leave the U.S.? It feels like he doesn’t think I should be an iOS user because I don’t love what Tapbots have done.

  • I Swear I Just Saw This

    Amber Nettles Eric Fadden (sorry for the wrong attribution):
    > But developers must not lose sight of functionality. A Ferrari that lacks an engine is, for all intents and purposes, useless. The same goes for applications.

    I had no knowledge of this post when I used the analogy in my post. Please do not associate me with this drivel.

    >Running it the first time was like finally going to that new restaurant you’ve been wanting to try only to realize that the food is no better than what you’d make in your own kitchen.

    She must either be a) a great chef, or b) going to some pretty crappy restaurants. If b), try Urbanspoon.

  • It’s Not the Size of Your Chip…

    Ian King and Ari Levy reporting on a new chip from Tilera that puts 100 cores on one small chip:

    >Simply increasing the speed at which a processor handles instructions from software has its limits. That approach generates a lot of heat and requires expensive cooling systems. “Turning up the clock frequency has given us a great couple of decades, but it’s run out of juice,” says Tahernia, who joined the San Jose company in 2007 after a career at Motorola and Xilinx (XLNX). “For the first time, the semi industry is in the way of progress.”
    >Tilera is creating grids of relatively simple processors on a piece of silicon. They can handle huge numbers of Web requests simultaneously without needing to run so fast that they overheat. The company is targeting the cloud computing market, where the ability to cram thousands of processors has become as important as the high-level data crunching and calculations needed to run, say, an Oracle (ORCL) database.

  • UI, UX — Style

    Sean Sperte takes exception to my views on Tweetbot:
    > The problem I now have with Ben’s perspective is that he’s confusing UI style for UX style. For instance he’s quick to dismiss some of Tweetbot’s features (like swipe to view conversations or list-as-timeline) as “a wrapper”, but I think those are true features – original functionality, unique to the app.

    I almost wrote the entire article Sperte is referencing without mentioning Tweetbot, because honestly I didn’t want to have to defend my lack of love for Tweetbot — in the end the article was better with a concrete running example, so I left Tweetbot in. I stand by what I say, but I want to address a couple of points that Sperte and others have brought up.

    >But a Kia? Come on, that’s just mean-spirited.

    Not my intention at all, it’s just that Kia is as generic of a car as you can get here in the U.S. and Ferrari is just about as unique as you can get. Saying that the style of a Ferrari is unique to a Ferrari is simply not true — [Pininfarina](http://www.pininfarina.com/index.html) does much of the body work, as does air forces around the car. What I am saying is that the official Twitter client is the Kia and Tweetbot is the Pininfarina wrapper around the Kia to make it look better.

    #### The Gestures ####

    The fact of the matter isn’t that pull to refresh is unique, or anything else about the official Twitter app. In fact the official Twitter app, right now, is about as bland as you can get. You can call gestures a unique feature if you invent using gestures — the iPhone did that for smartphones, Tweetbot didn’t. Tweetbot just came up for more things to remember — essentially taking Twitter for the iPhone and adding movements previously only seen in Rubik’s Cubes.

    *Jog this way, swipe here, tap fifteen times there and viola.*

    Gestures in the case of Tweetbot aren’t adding anything to the all important UX — in fact I would think they are detracting from it by straying so far from conventional iOS norms. Most apps recognize one swipe per table view item (the Tweet itself in this case), Tweetbots breaks that convention and recognizes two: both left to right and right to left. That’s not bad, or good — it is unique — but there is no way you can call that a feature when other apps achieve the same end result with less moves.

    The best argument I have seen to the Tweetbot having no unique features stance that I take is that you can grab related tweets. For the life of me I don’t know how, or if, you can do that in the official Twitter app. That may be a unique feature, but I would guess that other Twitter apps implement this as well — it’s not something that Tapbots invented.

    Sean’s right that I didn’t make a clear distinction between UI styling and UX style — but I don’t think those two things are as important to users as designers think they are. The thing that is most important is how well, and the enjoyment derived, from interacting with the app and my willingness to want to keep using the app.

    Right now, for me, Tweetbot is only being kept on my phone so that I can easily see when it gets updated.

  • Save Drive Space, Banish Old Email

    Mr. Blanc pointed out this tip that saved him 25GB of space, I got back about 5GB — be sure to check it out.

  • The Case for An Apple TV…Set

    MG Siegler makes a nice case for Apple building a TV set.
    >It certainly would be. Conventional wisdom says that Apple cannot build a television. The same conventional wisdom also said that no one wants a tablet computer. Apple thrives by defying conventional wisdom.

  • Outlook with Metro UI

    I really hope that Microsoft keeps putting the Metro UI to work on their apps, this is probably the best looking Outlook there has ever been. Who knows if it is good — what matters most is that it doesn’t look like a cluttered mess.

  • B&B Episode #8

    Have you been wondering what my thoughts on Tweetbot are? Well you are in luck because that’s what Shawn and I talked about on the latest episode of the B&B Podcast. We also threw in some weather talk for good measure.

  • Massive Shut Down of Online Poker Sites

    Jacqui Cheng:
    >As a result, the 11 individuals behind the three poker sites now face “at least” $3 billion—you read that correctly, billion—in money laundering penalties, in addition to the shut-down of 76 bank accounts in 14 countries.

    That is a lot of money, a lot of money. Also be sure to read the second to last paragraph for quotes from FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Janice Fedarcyk — who must have had CSI write the statements for her.