The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Kourosh Dini: On Integrating Email in OmniFocus

    A great tip for Gmail users wanting to create a follow-up task in OmniFocus (or Things) that will link back to a particular email.

  • “Waiting is Death”

    John Gruber on the one minute and twenty seconds it takes to download the day’s content for the Daily: ((Note that while this is downloading you can do nothing else.))

    It is significant, because the first minute is the most important minute. That’s the minute where the reader makes their impression of The Daily. Waiting is death.

    I never got this far to see new content, but the Daily app in general is slower than a Ford Model T straight off the assembly line. In fact that Model T might have had more polish in its first iteration — that though may be a little too harsh.

    No, the Daily feels more like a Flash website scrolling on a PowerPC G4 Mac mini — yeah that’s about right.

  • I Want a Tricorder

    Curt Finch:

    The second potential tricorder is a hand-held medical scanner.  Harvard Medical School researchers have created a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) imaging machine, replacing cumbersome equipment previously used.

    We are so close…

  • Reveal Hidden Passwords in All Major Browsers

    A fantastic little bookmarklet from Andrew Worcester that removes those silly black dots so you can actually see the password you are typing. This won’t come in handy much for 1Password users, but I bet we can all relate to a time when we would really like to see what we are typing.

  • OneLessDrop

    A killer little widget to keep your charger cables from dropping off your desk. I so want to back it, but alas I am over budget on the amount of Kickstarter projects I allow myself to fund this month (and it is only 3 days into Feb.). Will you guys please fund it? ((Thanks!))

    Just look at this sexiness:

    Onelessdrophome02KS5602

  • The Daily, The Newspaper, The App, The “Newspaper App”

    Federico Viticci on The Daily app:

    Where The Daily only needs to get a lot better, though, is the app part. Put simply, The Daily as an iPad application is quite terrible. Not the “terrible” you’d expect from a Vietnamese developer who sells manga apps in the App Store, but the terrible you don’t want to see from an app that’s being heavily promoted by Apple, and that has been in the works as a strict collaboration between News Corp and Cupertino for months.

    That bit sums up my thoughts on the Daily quite nicely. In fact I think Viticci is spot on in his look at the app. There are a lot of things that I don’t get and putting aside the actual content, the app just isn’t that good. Will it improve? Who knows. Is the content worth it? Depends if you can bother to use it past the 5 infuriating minutes it takes to scroll a couple of stories.

  • Simplenote: Dropbox Syncing and Lists

    Simplenote is one of the best apps on my iOS devices. It is one of those invaluable tools and this update proves that. Buy the premium membership and thank me later.

  • Thermo

    What a cool app — I downloaded it this morning and paid the $0.99 to remove the ads. It really is beautiful and does just what you need/want it to do.

  • AOL’s Master Plan

    Nicholas Carlson reporting on the ‘AOL Way’:

    AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.

    Yeah that sounds like a great way to produce quality content. ((Sarcasm.))

  • Verizon Says It May ‘Throttle’ Heavy Data Users Ahead of iPhone

    Roger Cheng:

    Verizon Wireless adopted a new policy that gives it the right to slow down the data connection of its heaviest bandwidth users, as the No. 1 U.S. carrier began taking advance orders for the Apple Inc. iPhone.

    I told you Verizon was evil. Need more proof?

    Here ya go:

    Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said the introduction of the policy wasn’t related to the coming debut of the iPhone. “This is clearly something we’ve been looking at for some time and introducing now,” he said. “There’s nothing magic about the timing.”

    CLEARLY this timing is coincidental.

  • Repeating Tasks in Things for iOS

    Cultured Code has a new version of their iOS app out that adds repeating tasks. In looking at the screenshots it looks like a really nice and clean way to implement repeating tasks — especially compared to the way OmniFocus handles them on the iPhone. What should be telling though is that I didn’t know what the repeating task interface looked like for OmniFocus on the iPhone, nor did I know that Things didn’t have one.

    I tend to think that people just don’t really need to set that many repeating tasks on their iPhones. Having said that — don’t you think that OTA sync would have been a much more desired update? ((Come on, you saw that coming.))

  • Automattic Makes Premium Themes Available to 17 Million WordPress.com Blogs

    Matt Brian:

    With a number of premium themes becoming available later this year, WordPress.com blog owners will initially be able to install one of two premium themes: Headlines by WooThemes and Shelf by The Theme Foundry. The availability of such themes will enable blog owners to stand out from the millions of other websites on the service, that is of course when more themes become available.

    That is great news for WordPress.com users — I really think that you are better off going with a WordPress.com blog right now than you are going with Tumblr — BUT — I think this is only true if you are creating a ton of original content and want to be able to expand the blog in the future. If you just want to post funny pictures of cats and repost quotes you find on other blogs then Tumblr is the way to go. ((I do realize that my personal blog is on Tumblr still. I also still like Tumblr, but I think it is not the platform you should consider if writing is your thing.))

  • The Verizon iPhone 4

    I have read most of the boring reviews — not surprisingly Gruber does the best job. Here’s the thing: if you have no problems with AT&T in your area then the AT&T iPhone is faster. If you need a hotspot right away, then best to get the Verizon phone as AT&T may not get the feature for a couple more weeks and AT&T still needs to support it. ((Remember how long it took them to support tethering?))

    After reading all these reviews the only thing I can think of is: it must have sucked not to have lived in Seattle from 2007 until, well, today — Seattle has a damn good AT&T network in my testing.

  • “A Cheap Imitation”

    A great write up of how Google caught Bing! cheating. I am a bit late on this, but it is still humorous.

    Amit Singhal for Google:

    We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query.

    later:

    We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

    We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing.

  • Why 37signals Is Falling Into Obsolescence

    Sean Coleman reacting to the new 37signals mobile app for devices:

    The fact that 37signals has decided against native apps puts them one foot into the obsolescence grave. In order to stay competitive, web companies now must provide for all devices. 

    I don’t agree with this at all, but Coleman brings up some great points in the post.

  • The Daily for iPad on the iTunes App Store

    This is hot news — I didn’t watch the press conference nor am I impressed by this. I am happy about the forth coming subscription model. If you want me to shoot from the hip on the new Daily app, here is what it feels like to me: A slightly less annoying Wired app with slightly more annoying moving parts.

    [Updated: 2.2.11 at 9:13 AM]

    Did they decide that everything needed an animation for this thing — hideous.

  • Time to Clean the Inbox

    Sometimes if you throw a question out there on Twitter an awesome person will answer it for you. This time around I asked about getting an Applescript that would tell me if there were items in my OmniFocus inbox at given times. Jered Benoit made the script and showed how to set it as a reminder in iCal so that the script will be run.

    This is awesome and just what I needed. I forget to process the inbox regularly and this script will keep me from forgetting to process the inbox. (I have it set for an hour after I get up and an hour before I leave work)

    Thanks Jered you get a Platinum TBR membership! ((Again this is a title only membership with only two members so far!))

  • WorkAwesome Podcast: Episode 10 – Ben Brooks

    Mike Vardy was kind enough to interview me for the WorkAwesome podcast — I had a lot of fun so be sure to check it out (if podcasts are your sort of thing).

  • ‘1984’

    A fantastic story from Steve Hayden on Apple’s 1984 Superbowl ad — a story that includes this bit:

    I continued working on Apple until 1994, when it became clear that there wasn’t a single person left at the company who understood or appreciated the Apple brand. IBM was more interested in being Apple than Apple was, and I found a better audience in Armonk than I did in Cupertino.

  • Learning OmniFocus

    J. Eddie Smith, IV is moving to OmniFocus (like all the cool kids) and has a post with a ton of great links. ((Not just saying that because he linked to this site.)) He will be updating it regularly so be sure to check it out.