Jennifer Valentino-Devries for the WSJ on using the iPad to help special needs people:
“We’re not having to fight to prove to people that she is a smart little girl anymore, because it’s there once they see her using the iPad,” said Caleigh’s mother, Holly Gray, who said her daughter can use the tablet to identify colors or ask to go outside.
Forget about what it is doing for the mother – imagine how empowering that is for the child.
Daniel Indiviglio takes a look at how you can get data for your iPad. In the end he doesn’t declare a winner. Here is the answer though:
If price is the biggest factor for you then you get more bang for your buck if you go with Verizon’s $20 1gb a month plan. If you have crap Verizon service in your area then go with AT&T and vice versa.
If money is no object and you get great service from both companies (like we do here in Seattle) then why would you want to have to carry around the MiFi and your iPad? I hate doing it, but I didn’t want to wait for the 3G model (probably will for the 2nd gen version though).
They are going to bundle the Wi-Fi only iPad with the MiFi (which I use and love) for the same price as the 3G iPads. This is great – but what is insane is that they are offering a new data plan for the iPad-MiFi which is $20/mo for 1gb of data. I don’t care if you have to buy a contract, that is a hell of a deal.
When I bought my MiFi you could get 250mb/mo for a monthly fee of $39.99 or 5gb/mo for a monthly fee of $59.99 (which is the one I chose). I am calling on the 28th to see if I can change my plan to the new 1gb plan. That would be sweet.
The Cult of Mac blog has a full interview with former Apple CEO John Sculley – this interview I believe is the first one he has given since his departure from Apple that specifically talks about Steve Jobs. It is long and given that it is not quite 7a right now I have yet to read it. Giving it a quick skim I did see this quote from John Sculley:
Steve believed that if you opened the system up people would start to make little changes and those changes would be compromises in the experience and he would not be able to deliver the kind of experience that he wanted.
I wonder how much of that quote is influenced by how Sculley perceives Steve Jobs to be today, and how much is actually historically accurate.
If you aren’t already listening to The Talk Show with Dan Benjamin and John Gruber then you are missing out. Just finished listening to it live and what a great show it is – better live, second best while commuting.
First native Basecamp app for the iPad that I know of. Expensive given that the website works just fine on the iPad – but it actually is very nicely done. With exception of how the file viewing works – if you use that a lot probably best not to buy this app.
Thibaut Sailly on the new Windows Phone 7 Ad:
If I understood the product description well, the home screen of the Windows phone is going to be the dashboard of your digital life. Each part of it will reflect on the activity of your friends and other content your care most about. Wishfull thinking, but each part of it will be a reminder that you are missing something in your connected life. Each part of it will be an invitation to get sucked in. All the time.
It’s a big push notifications agregrator right in your face as soon as you get your phone out of your pocket. Not really what’s advertised.
This is precisely the reason I turn off all ‘badges’ for app icons in iOS (the ones that I can atleast) those badges are just way too distracting.
Have you had a chance to see Apple’s stock lately, in case you haven’t here you go with a convienent comparison of RIM’s, Microsoft’s, Nokia’s and Adobe’s over the last six months time. Bottom line: Apple is up 24% at the time of this writing and the others are done on average 23.5% or everything Apple has increased the others have lost. Bummer for them.
As a side note do you see that nasty drop that Adobe had – ouch.
Engadget got an invite stating “Back to the Mac.” with an Apple logo cutting away to reveal a lion. Leaving many to speculate that Apple will release Mac OS X 10.7 and that they will call it ‘lion’. Though to be honest at this point they could call it ‘Kitteh’ and get away with it – I mean have you checked their stock price lately?
Mark Sweney for PaidContent.org on the Financial Times iPad app:
Ben Hughes, who is also the paper’s global commercial director, said more than 400,000 subscribers have signed up for the app. He added that it now accounts for 10% of the paper’s new digital subscriptions.
He also notes that print advertising only makes up 40% of the overall revenue now. The Financial Times app is good, but incredibly expensive to be a subscriber to. That said it appears to be working for them, though it will be interesting to see what the trend on this will be over the next year.
Stephen Hackett has put together a great guide on how to get Gmail to work really well with Mac Mail. There are more than a couple of tips in here that I didn’t know about – what a great guide.
Chris Legeros reporting for Kiro 7 News in Seattle:
“Yellow pages” publishers may sue the city of Seattle, because of an ordinance that passed Monday. The ordinance requires yellow pages publishers to be licensed, penalizes publishers up to $125 per book if they’re delivered to people who don’t want them and requires the industry to pay for recycling all the paper it distributes.
and later on:
Yellow pages publishers also believe the ordinance is a violation of their right to free speech and they are considering a lawsuit to challenge it.
Let me respond by saying good job to Seattle as these books are a huge waste and secondly to the above complaining about a violation to their rights: I am sure spammers feel the same way, you guys should get together and have a conference or something.
I don’t normally talk about health related things, but this is such great news I felt I needed to share it. I used to be a Pepsi addict on a 4-6can a day schedule. My wife has changed that and now I only drink a few cans a week (for the better). Pepsi Throwback though is amazing, it has no high fructose corn syrup (which if you didn’t know already is very bad for you) and instead uses cane sugar to sweeten it.
The end result is a much better tasting soda pop. I know a few places in the Seattle-Tacoma area that you can regularly find Pepsi Throwback, but until now it was a seasonal item. This is really great news – soda pop is still not good for you, but cane sugar is much better for you than high fructose corn syrup.
(Plus the retro styling on the cans is much better than the current looking cans – carrying a fashionable soda can is important to some.)
Jacqui Cheng for Ars Technica following-up about how fast/well Facebook deletes its old photos:
It seems we haven’t quite found the limits of that “limited amount of time” just yet—after all, 16 months is quite a while.
So 16-months after Ars deleted some photos from Facebook you can still access them if you have the direct link to that image file (which is easy enough to get). This is just absurd – if you aren’t going to delete the photo then don’t tell the user that they can delete it, instead say something like ‘archive’.
Very neat listing of 12 ‘Hall of Fame’ apps as voted by a fairly large group of people. I agree with every single selection on the initial list – with exception of one.
I cannot agree that Evernote is of Hall of Fame quality. I know a lot of people use it, but it is just not that great in my opinion. Though a bunch of people say it is, so I guess I am in the minority on this one.
Engadget has a nice listing of all the new Windows Phone 7 phones announced today – for my money I would go with the HTC 7 Trophy, not that I am leaving iOS.
Also, what is up with the names of these things? They. Are. Terrible.
Not only is he right about just how important it is to have a good looking iOS app icon, I would stress that more people need to make app icons that are not blue. There are other colors out there (or so I am told, my home screen just looks like a blue pool of water).
Mashable’s Amy-Mae Elliott posted up 10 tips/tricks for iPad users, most of are very basic, but I had no clue that the iPad did this:
The spacebar will create as many spaces as there are fingers on it, so one finger will produce one space, two fingers two spaces and so on.
Clever.
So Microsoft out up the Angry Birds icon on the Windows Phone 7 site and Rovio the guys that make Angry Birds tweeted this:
We have NOT committed to doing a Windows Phone 7 version. Microsoft put the Angry Birds icon on their site without our permission.
Comical.
MG Siegler with a great translation of Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin talking about how Google could sell an unlocked phone again:
Translation: we have to figure out how to do this without pissing off our carrier partners.