The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Matt Gemmell Reviews the MacBook Air 11″

    Gemmell does an excellent job reviewing the 11″ Air. Most importantly he decided the best way to talk about the limited screen space was to put together a Flickr gallery of screenshots with popular programs running. This is the type of reviewer that I love.

  • Tablets and Input

    Tim Bray:

    Tablets and handsets can displace computers as play and reading devices, but they really can’t become dominant as work tools until we have a better solution for high-speed low-friction text input. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see dramatic progress in this area; it’s so obviously the number-one usability barrier for everything that isn’t badged as a “computer”.

    Agreed — though I don’t agree with much else in his post. Reviewers take note: you need to dedicate at least 250 words to talking about how the text input experience is on each device you review — this stuff matters.

  • The Daily Post

    So you want to try and blog everyday in 2011? WordPress.com is there to help.

    WordPress.com:

    This is an experiment in blogging motivation from the folks at WordPress.com. We will post every day here with ideas, suggestions and inspiration, hoping it will help you get the most out of your blog.

  • Prevent Deactivation of Find My iPhone

    Great tip, go do it. (You need to have a MobileMe account)

    [Updated: 12/31/10 at 2:01 PM]
    Correction you just need the free account for Find my Device. I forgot that they had made this free, sorry about that.

  • Webkit Mac Antialiasing

    Some of you may have noticed that when I pushed the new site design the text looked, well shitty. Then when you scrolled around all was well in the world. Needless to say I was freaking out and when I couldn’t get it sorted out I turned off Typekit to resolve the problem. I contacted Typekit on Get Satisfaction and they sent me this link. You see that little text that says “Powered by Fusion” was set in 10px type. That was causing all the problems, a couple of CSS edits and bumping the size up to 11px seems to have solved the problem. If you still see it contact me, but we should be good now.

    This link is to an excellent technical description for the problem, along with the remedy.

  • Hotel Washes Every Coin They Get As Courtesy For Guests

    Ben Popken on a hotel that washes coins it receives:

    The practice at the St. Francis hotel in San Francisco is said to have started when hotelier Dan London observed that some coins sullied a woman’s white gloves.

    It is very cool that they still do this.

  • Daddy Days and Remote Work in the Netherlands

    Katrin Bennhold on Microsoft’s Netherlands campus:

    Ninety-five percent of Dutch Microsoft employees work from home at least one day a week; a full quarter do so four out of five days. Each team has a “physical minimum;” some meet twice a week in the office, others once a quarter. Online communication and conference calls save time, fuel and paper waste. The company says it has cut its carbon footprint by 900 tons this year.

    A great story how Dutch workers are really taking to spending more time at home and trying to cut their work days from 5 to 4. I work from home on Fridays — it is not only the best day of my work week, but it is also my most productive.

  • Macworld Reviews Postbox 2

    Nathan Alderman’s conclusion of Postbox 2:

    If you’d like a top-notch upgrade to your e-mail experience at a reasonable price, and you can live without Exchange support, the terrific and thoughtful features built into Postbox definitely deserve your consideration.

    Postbox is one of those apps that I want to love (another one is Pixelmator). I have tried Postbox many of times, including the 2.0 release after Chris Bowler posted about how much he loved it. I just can’t get into — I think I may be too stuck in my Mail.app ways.

  • Skype Video Calling for iOS over Wi-Fi and 3G Now Available

    Looks like a good update — personally I never use Skype, but this is a great way to do video chat over 3G on the iPhone. I may just have to start using Skype again.

  • 44GB is all Ian Hines Needs

    Ian Hines on how he got to only using 44GB on his MacBook:

    As I mentioned above, I didn’t get to this point out of some coordinated effort to use less. Less is not more. Enough is enough. And for me, this is enough.

    For reference I use 159.24GB on my MacBook Air, just a testament to what I said from day one about what a ‘normal’ computer user needs. If you are using more than 200GB of storage you are not in the majority.

  • QuickCursor

    A neat little utility to allow you to write in your text editor of choice and then upon closing that window have the text magically appear in say a mail message window. Clever and it supports TextMate. Here’s the thing though: there was another menubar utility that did this same thing a while back (like more than a year) bonus points if you know what it was/is.

  • Marco Arment’s Top 10 Tech Failures of 2010

    Marco Arment weighs in with a very accurate list.

  • RIM struggling

    Josh Ong after reporting on the Playbooks current 3 hour battery life:

    Despite these concerns, RIM’s Jim Balsillie has insisted that the PlayBook is “way ahead” of the iPad. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis recently said in an interview that the PlayBook OS is will lead RIM into the “next decade of mobile computing.”

    I sure hope the “next decade” of computing doesn’t mean 3 hour battery life.

  • iPhone’s Group Messaging in iOS 4

    Shawn Blanc enlightening readers about iOS group messaging:

    Since Group Messaging means messages are sent as MMS no matter what, if you’re sending to people using Blackberries or non-smartphones then they have to open and download your text message as if it contained a media attachment. They think you’re sending a picture, but you simply sent some words.

    File that under: “I had no clue”.

  • Cultured Code’s Biggest Problem Isn’t OTA Sync

    A great write up from Stephen M. Hackett on how Things’ lack of OTA sync is really going to spell trouble for the company. Just look at the reviews that he links to and ask yourself: if you didn’t know anything about Things — would you buy it today based on the app store reviews alone?

  • CNN Posts Link Bait — Loses My Respect

    I don’t care if you are going to list Apple’s iPhone 4 antenna problems as the biggest fail in tech of 2010 (though you would be wrong), but at the very least make sure you make a case for it being the biggest failure. Look at how CNN sees Apple’s “fail”, through the eyes of Doug Gross:

    Months later, the problem is all but forgotten and the phones show no sign of dipping in popularity. So “fail,” in this case, is a pretty relative term.

    So CNN is it a fail or not. Never mind I am just not going to read your crap anymore.

    I mean clearly Ping is a bigger failure, yet it only garners 10th place? WTF.

  • Apple, App Makers Sued Over User Tracking

    A couple of things stuck out at me in the article.

    1. Don’t you have to agree to allow an app to access your location?
    2. How is Apple profiting from this?

    Here let’s look at this closer, Ryan Singel:

    If an app passes along that number to an advertisers, the advertising company can use it to build up a profile of the user, as well as keep track of which ads it has shown to a user before and which of those ads a user clicked on.

    With browser cookies, however, a user can easily block them or delete them, essentially cutting off the profile. Neither is possible with apps that use UDIDs, since that number can’t be changed.

    I am not sure that this is really that big of a deal — Google does it to you all the time. I do however take stand to the second sentence quoted — in no way do I think that most users think it is easy to block browser cookies. To make such a claim would mean that walking down the street and asking any computer user how to block cookies in their browser I should get more than 50% of people asked telling me how to do that. I dare you to try and actually get that.

    “Apple knew this was an issue,” said Majed Nachawati, one of the lawyers who filed the suit. “They had a duty to warn consumers and at a minimum, if they intend to profit from this, they need to let people know and get their consent.”

    Again how is Apple profiting from this? Is iAds at fault or is this other advertising platforms? If iAds, then sue Apple. Don’t tell me that Apple is profiting because they take a 30% cut — they take that from the sales price of the app, not from revenue derived from ad sales, unless they are iAds.

    This though just made me lose all hope in humanity, I mean who wants to play “Pimple Popper Lite”:

    Other apps named in the suit include Toss It, Text4Plus, The Weather Channel, Talking Tom Cat, and Pimple Popper Lite.

  • Ulysses Holiday Sale

    Ulysses is my favorite writing software and I just found out that it is on sale right now for 50% off. That is a steal. Right now you can grab a copy for EUR 22.49.

  • 300 Million Dollars

    How much did it cost AOL in the 90s to spam us all with AOL install CDs? More than $300 million it would seem.

    Wow.

  • The Best Source for Mac/iPad/iPhone/Windows Backgrounds

    I have been a long time fan of John Carey — his writing is excellent is his photography is superb. Add to that him giving away some of his images for you to use as backgrounds on your devices and you have to love the guy. They are beautiful.