The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Save Icon Re-Designed

    Helveticons redesigns the save icon, interesting idea but I am not sure if it speaks ‘save’ to me.

    [via Tom Kenny on Twitter]

  • Send ‘Canned’ Text Messages on iPhones

    Lovely new iPhone app that allows you to write text messages before hand, and choose if you always will send it to the same person or not. Either way you can send the message very fast, great tool and it’s only $0.99.

    [via Shawn Blanc]

  • iWork 9.0.4 update

    Apple:

    …adds export compatibility to Pages for the standard ePub file format (for use with iBooks).

  • Keyboard Shortcuts to Speed Up Typing on an iPhone or the iPad

    Tips #8 and #9 a sweet, but #6 takes the cake:

    If you want to change the style of quotation marks or if you need to use a longer dash punctuation mark instead of the default hyphen, hold the corresponding key as show in the above screenshot.

    [via Mac OSX Hints]

  • Taylor Carrigan’s Excellent Notational Velocity Icon

    Go get this icon if you use Notational Velocity, a thing of beauty.

    notationalvelocity.png

  • Pirate Bay Receives Notice To Keep a Torrent

    So a developer sees that his software has been cracked and is being shared on The Pirate Bay, and this is his response:

    I demand that you don’t remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minimoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the better crack be made, so that it doesn’t cripple the use experience of my beautiful program…

    Now that is a great way to deal with piracy.

  • Jared Spool​ Talks About Flash Splash Pages

    A must read quote.

  • The Big Picture – iPad App

    Smoking Apples:

    It doesn’t automatically load the entire story once you open it; doesn’t even cache the next image. You have to wait through a spinner every time (which I’m afraid will be quite a while on a slow net connection). Thankfully, it caches the story once you’ve viewed each image, even through an app relaunch. But, the moment you start viewing another story, it flushes the cache of all other stories. Perhaps it has something to do with licensing issues, but I love the fact that I can pick up the Eyewitness app at any time and view past images (Big Picture doesn’t even launch without an internet connection).

    I have to agree, I was really excited for this app when I got my iPad. Having the app now though is a bit disappointing.

  • What Dave Caolo Wants From a New Apple TV

    I agree with his sentiments, and the update he posted at the bottom nails the model that needs to be in place.

    Ross Rubin via Caolo:

    …if Apple really wanted to avoid subscriptions per se, it could offer pre-paid access as it has for 3G on the iPad, with a lower fee offering a limited number of TV episode rentals per month and a higher number offering unlimited rentals during the month.

    I hate paying Comcast for 9,000,000 channels when I only watch a handful of them, I want and the industry needs, to have an a la carte subscription system. Why should someone get paid when their content is crap and I never watch it?

  • S​M​R​T

    Shaun Inman:

    Safari 5’s new “Smart” Auto-Complete has bothered me since the first day I updated. While this feature has been available in one form or another in previous versions of Safari it never ranked page titles over the urls when auto-completing and there was always a defaults write option to override the behavior.

    One annoyance solved today.

  • Apple to hold media event on September 1st

    I guess new iPod touch’s that more closely resemble the current iPhone (front camera and retina display), iPod refreshes and the new Apple TV. I do not think they will touch the iPad at this event, they may quietly drop the price while the store is down though.

  • Someone Has Way to Much Time on Thier Hands and Possibly Super Fingers

    This person claims to have beat the world record for texting speed on an iPhone 4 by a whopping 4 seconds. If true, that is damned impressive.

  • Flashback: Brad Silverberg and Bill Gates unveil Windows 95

    Say what you will about Microsoft now, but Windows 95 was a game changer for the software world. Take a look at the first two videos in this post, great stuff.

  • Step Away from the iPhone

    Matt Richtel reporting:

    “People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

    It is no surprise that our brains need down time, I think we call all agree that stepping away from our phones/computers allow us to see the world in a new light. Not to mention it really helps us to think.

    [via Hacker News]

  • Garrett Murray Sees a Problem with Facebook

    Garret Murray:

    That’s the problem with Facebook. They are slowly destroying independent web applications with boring versions that immediately win due to Facebook’s population (which at this point is the 3rd largest country on earth). There’s no demand for excellence.

    Sounds a lot like the Microsoft we knew in the 1990’s.

    [via Tyler Galpin]

  • Battle of the Drones

    As I kid I remember playing F117a-Night Hawk on DOS, I had a joystick and a keyboard and I flew around shooting targets and trying to dog fight other planes. That was the past, but it appears it may also be the future of warfare. Amazing.

  • Keeping Mint’s Unique Referrers List Clean and Useful

    If you use Mint to track your web stats you will want to do this.

  • Giz-China Does a Terrible ePad Review

    This is a horrid review of a product, take this example from the author Andi:

    The ePad is very light! Much lighter than the iPad and therefore it’s going to be much more comfortable for those with weak wimpy wrists while reading, playing and browsing the web.

    So you don’t have a scale or the tech specs that you can tell us how much it actually weighs, for instance the iPad weighs 1.5lbs, and the ePad weighs? 1.4lbs? 0.6lbs? Come one.

    Oh and this:

    The 10 inch screen maybe the same size as the iPad’s and the bezel surrounding it may mimic the little Apple tablets with mirror like detail, but looks are not all they seem.

    The screen ‘maybe’ the same size? Either it is or isn’t the same size, buy a ruler. Holy cow.

    And:

    The overall scores are 3-2 for the ePad!! Plus two ties due to personal choice regarding O.S and the material of the body.
    […]The scores are now 2-1 to the iPad, I could take a point from the iPad too for costing a hell of a lot more than the ePad, but I won’t because, like I’ve mentioned before the iPad does something all these cheap Android devices don’t…. It works and it works very very well and what’s the point in buying something that doesn’t work just because it’s cheap!!

    So the ePad is the winner, then Andi rejiggers the scores until the iPad is the winner. What the hell is going on here?

    [via Wired’s Gadget Lab Blog]

  • Leaked photos of Samsung Galaxy Tab

    Looks like a cheap piece of crap, also what is with the blatant “Dock Connector” rip off?

  • What a Mess

    Jared Newman:

    In fairness, Motorola’s not the only company to struggle with Froyo. Owners of HTC’s Droid Incredible are still waiting for their update — rumors of August 18 didn’t pan out — and the brand new Dell Streak tablet is stuck on Android 1.6 until the end of the year. Samsung’s Galaxy phones are all expected to get Froyo, but with no date announced for U.S. wireless carriers. So while Motorola gets an extra dose of shame for shutting down Droid X users, the only phone maker to truly ace the Android 2.2 launch was, of course, Google.

    This is why you let Apple control everything, so this kind of crap doesn’t happen. Amazing.

    [via DF]