The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Improving Basecamp Email Notifications

    I am a big fan of Basecamp and this update to the email notification system is great and I love that they include a Mail.app rule for filtering it in the blog post. Good stuff.

  • The Next Six Months

    John Gruber thinks that 2011 might yield two new iPad models. If this is true my wallet will hurt.

    He is guessing the iPad 2 comes out in April and another iPad in September.

    What I know for sure: HP, RIM, Google, et al., hope that there are no new iPad models in 2011.

  • Spot on Description of The Daily

    Marco Arment with the best description of what The Daily content is:

    It’s acceptable, for what it is: a very lightweight rundown of the previous day’s most mass-marketable news, with an editorial or two that usually leave me wanting more depth.

  • Why Native USB 3.0 for Mac Won’t Happen

    Matt Tinsley:

    Regardless, and getting back to the Mac Life article, it’s unlikely that we’ll see Apple natively support USB 3.0 because Light Peak is on the horizon — be that a distant one. In my humble opinion, with the slow adoption of USB 3.0, and its imminent obsoleteness with Light Peak around the corner, it wouldn’t make sense for Apple to introduce a technology that’s about to be replaced by a better one.

    I still think we will see USB 3 as dropping support for USB won’t come for years, so why wouldn’t you just go with the fastest spec (maintain backwards compatibility). Macs could have BOTH after all. ((As seen with the FireWire and USB ports living side by side.))

  • iOS Needs to Add Single-Game Data Back-Up and Restoration

    With many good iOS games reaching 1GB+ in size, users are finding that they need to delete games more often. Craig Grannell points out the problem with that:

    The only difference is that an iOS device can hold a bunch of ‘cartridges’, but when one’s removed, the result is the same: all your progress is lost.

    This is a real problem and not just because of the size of the games themselves. When I go on trips I slim down my games and apps to maximize space for photos, videos, music on my iOS devices — I would love to have game progress backed up.

  • Near Field Communications (NFC)

    Ars Technica has a great primer on the NFC technology that will soon become ubiquitous in our lives. Bottom line: there are flaws and the only way it will succeed is for widespread adoption to occur. Or, to put it simply, how badly does the world want to rid themselves of a wallet?

  • Stupidity

    Felix Salmon for Reuters talking about The New York Times website design versus the Huffington Post:

    Most importantly, the HuffPo page is genuinely, compellingly, interactive — it’s almost impossible to visit it without finding something you want to click on. Like! Comment! Tweet! Go here! Try this! Visit that! There’s site navigation, yes, but that’s just one layer of a very rich and complex page architecture. At the NYT page, by contrast, to get out of the Media Decoder blog you either have to click on a generic navigation button like “Sports,” or else you’ll just leave the page and the site completely.

    Ok now that you read that look at a comparison picture of the two pages provided in the Reuters post:

    Comparison2

    You sensible readers will probably be thinking: “HuffPo is ugly and annoying looking.” Thanks for thinking that, but Salmon continues:

    The fact is that readers come to the NYT — or any website — because they want to read its stories. They don’t much care about branded sections, or deciphering the difference between a news story and a blog entry.

    Right, which is why this early statement of yours makes no sense:

    Still, the difference between the two pages is much starker than it needs to be: the NYT page is like walking into a library, while the HuffPo page is like walking through Times Square. The HuffPo page is full of links to interesting stories elsewhere on the site — about Egypt, or the kid in the Superbowl Darth Vader ad, or the stories my Facebook friends are reading. And there are lot of links to media stories, too; each one has a photo attached.

    I don’t know about you, but Times Square is the last place I go to try and read stories. Times Square, just like HuffPo, is distraction overload. I recommend reading HuffPo with Safari Reader (not Readability, they don’t need any more of my money).

  • Get the Basecamp Mobile Interface in Your Menu Bar With Fluid

    I am not a huge fan of having a lot of stuff in my menubar, but this is a very neat trick and I rather like it.

  • SXSW

    I will be at SXSWi this March and would love to meet any of you readers that are attending. February 11th is the last day to get discounted prices on a badge, then it goes up to the walk-up rate.

  • Toggle Twitter

    A great script to show and hide Twitter. If you are using Twitter for Mac you can also implement this in preferences. Just another reason to use FastScripts though.

  • ‘Real’ Page Numbers on Kindles

    Stu Woo on how the ‘real’ page numbers are implemented:

    Hitting the “Menu” button brought up the corresponding print page number: “Page 176 out of 237.”

    This is a great addition to the Kindle. This is useful for students and book clubs and provides psychological reassurance for everyone else (like me).

  • ZAGGmate Case for iPad Has Great Keyboard Inside

    John Martellaro on the ZAGGmate iPad keyboard case:

    I was worried that the outside of my hands would feel the edges of the case, near the cursor and shift keys, but it turns out to be not an issue.

    I am unconvinced that this would be anything but uncomfortable to use. Looking at the pictures it is smaller than a full size keyboard and looks to have edges that would cram your hands in the small typing area. I haven’t seen one close up, but based on the looks of it I don’t know why would buy this over some stand alone bluetooth keyboard that folds up smaller and is full sized. ((The iPad isn’t a netbook after all.))

  • iPad Stash

    I only use a case for my iPad on the weekends. ((I do this because the iPad spends most of the weekends sliding around the couch and coffee table areas and I need to protect it from cats that run amok.)) I currently use the Apple Case for iPad and it does a nice job. This case those may make me rethink my choice.

  • The Apple Wireless Keyboard

    A great review of a great product from Oliver Hulland on the Apple Wireless Keyboard:

    Simply put, it is one of those products that disappears when in use, allowing you to do what you need to do efficiently.

    This is the keyboard that I use everyday — I love the Apple Wireless Keyboard. It really is a fantastic product — admittedly I am not a keyboard snob like some.

  • I Wonder Why Apple Killed Split Screen iPhone Email

    A great screenshot of the Apple mail program in iOS from 2007. I honestly don’t remember that being shown at all, but it should be no surprise that in actual use it would not be that great.

  • AOL Acquiring HuffPo For $315 million

    David Kaplan on a smart acquisition by AOL:

    As part of the deal, Arianna Huffington, HuffPo’s co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, will be named president and EIC of The Huffington Post Media Group. The new unit will house Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and other sites.

    That is a scary thought for every site listed there. I am no Arianna Huffington fan and I worry about sites like Engadget and TechCrunch — never heard of the other sites, MapQuest? ((Clearly I am joking.))

  • Chris Bowler On File Browsing

    Chris Bowler on managing files in Transmit on OS X:

    Because it has two panes, each of which can be used for local or remote locations, it’s perfect for moving files from one folder to another. This is certainly faster than using 2 Finder windows.

    When I asked on Twitter the other day about PathFinder I received a bunch of responses that were all over the board. Then Chris DM’d me to tell me to use Transmit and that he would be writing it up. So here it is — a great trick and an excellent Program.

  • Send your Instapaper reading log to Readability

    Marco just took the feature live, head on over to your Instapaper account screen to link the two accounts. Well done.

  • Turn Off the Clock on Your Menu Bar

    Scott Klein has written up a great post on the benefits of removing the clock from your Menubar. A few months back now I did the same thing, but the clock eventually made it back into the menubar. I loved not seeing the time, but I also hated not seeing the time.

    What I found is that it became a great way for me to not count how much time I had to do things (e.g. I have only an hour until the meeting!). I decided to put the clock back into the Menubar because sometimes you just need to know how much time you have to do something and sometimes you need a reference point for when things happened during the day.

    I highly encourage you to try removing the clock if you find yourself constantly staring at it. Since putting the clock back in my Menubar I have found that I don’t look at it nearly as much as I used to.

  • OmniFocus plugin for Mailplane

    Mailplane brings Gmail to your Mac desktop and they also have an OmniFocus plugin, very cool.

    [Thanks to @Viticci for the tip.]