Top Posts
Holy amazing: >Retinizer is a small app I wrote that allows apps that aren’t retina ready and are displayed pixelated at 1x to display their UI widgets at 2x. That way, only their custom images will look bad and not the whole app. I just used it to force Word 2008 to show retina text…
Holy amazing:
>Retinizer is a small app I wrote that allows apps that aren’t retina ready and are displayed pixelated at 1x to display their UI widgets at 2x. That way, only their custom images will look bad and not the whole app.
I just used it to force Word 2008 to show retina text in Word documents instead of pixelated crap — it worked. What a simple little app that works well (note not to use it on Adobe apps). I wish I could pay this guy for the app.
Just a quick update to let you know about a couple new things with the paywall. 1. I’ve added the ability to subscribe yearly instead of monthly — doing so will net you 2 free months as the yearly subscription is $40/year versus the $4/month monthly subscription. I view your payment for a full year…
Just a quick update to let you know about a couple new things with the paywall.
1. I’ve added the ability to subscribe yearly instead of monthly — doing so will net you 2 free months as the yearly subscription is $40/year versus the $4/month monthly subscription. I view your payment for a full year with the time value of money approach and thus it makes sense for me to discount your pre-payments for a year’s subscription. Additionally current users can change their plan by going to https://brooksreview.net/join while logged in and entering their credit card data and choosing the new plan — be sure to cancel your monthly plan first. Get in touch with me if you run into any issues and I can correct those for you right away.
2. Receipts and payment failure emails. The paywall was launched without members getting a receipt of any kind — this also meant they received no notification if a payment failed. Both of these have now been corrected and you should receive notices as necessary. Sorry that this is increased email, but it’s better than no notice if you ask me. (We’ll see if Google marks these as SPAM too.)
That is all the housekeeping for today. Thanks to all of you that are members, and if you aren’t but want to know what it is all about — [take a look](https://brooksreview.net/members/).
Ryan Block is thinking along [the same lines I am](https://brooksreview.net/2012/09/iphone-changes/): >These product don’t always look revolutionary on day one. In fact, they can even be pretty hard to spot at first blush. But they’re always easy to identify in hindsight — once they’ve fundamentally changed how we do something, once they’ve caused us to question…
Ryan Block is thinking along [the same lines I am](https://brooksreview.net/2012/09/iphone-changes/):
>These product don’t always look revolutionary on day one. In fact, they can even be pretty hard to spot at first blush. But they’re always easy to identify in hindsight — once they’ve fundamentally changed how we do something, once they’ve caused us to question how we ever went without them.
I like his over arching point of asking the question: “Is it a great product?”. I used to be a spec sheet guy when I bought computers way back in the day, but I’ve been able to change my thinking to look at the overall product, not just the spec sheet. I think all too often many of us still want to compare based on spec sheets, because it’s the easiest way to make that comparison. Any review that offers a checklist of side-by-side features of any device, has already missed the point in my book.
[Shawn Blanc is thinking along the same lines too](http://shawnblanc.net/2012/09/function-form-future/):
>The easier and more enjoyable it is to use, the more you’ll want to use it and thus the more utility you’ll get out of it.
You either get “it”, or you buy an Android — at least that’s what I have noticed.
Horace Dediu does a fantastic analysis of how Apple is determining whether they have reached the point of “good enough” with the iPhone, eventually concluding: >By ranging products which are older and at lower price points it can measure whether the improvements are valued. His point is that by keeping older iPhones selling at a…
Horace Dediu does a fantastic analysis of how Apple is determining whether they have reached the point of “good enough” with the iPhone, eventually concluding:
>By ranging products which are older and at lower price points it can measure whether the improvements are valued.
His point is that by keeping older iPhones selling at a lower price along side the new iPhones, Apple can compare the sales of the different models. So if the iPhone 4S outsells the iPhone 5, then Apple can conclude that the *new* features in the iPhone 5 are not valued by consumers. It’s a very clever way of doing business — not only does it open up lower-priced markets for Apple, but it provides them with robust data.
This is a killer update, and I am linking to David Sparks post on it because Sparks (as always) offers some killer thoughts about how best to use this. Personally it means never having to type out ridiculously long property names any longer. A side note: At some point OmniFocus for iPhone added the ability…
This is a killer update, and I am linking to David Sparks post on it because Sparks (as always) offers some killer thoughts about how best to use this. Personally it means never having to type out ridiculously long property names any longer.
A side note: At some point OmniFocus for iPhone added the ability to set the geofencing size for a location based reminder. I don’t know when they did that, but I just found it and tightened all my geofencing reminders up to maximum.
Nice list of WordPress themes, I’m often asked about my theme and about the design of new blogs, so let me give two tips I always hand out: 1. Make your site the best reading experience you can make it. 2. You don’t want my theme because you won’t understand how to use it. That…
Nice list of WordPress themes, I’m often asked about my theme and about the design of new blogs, so let me give two tips I always hand out:
1. Make your site the best reading experience you can make it.
2. You don’t want my theme because you won’t understand how to use it.
That said, I took a look at this list and if I was starting out again and didn’t know how to make my own theme, here’s the two I would be torn between:
– [Duet](http://thethemefoundry.com/wordpress/duet/): I’m not a fan of two column articles on the web, but that’s easy enough to change that I’d still go with this theme.
– [Manifest](http://themes.jimbarraud.com/manifest/): A close second, but I’m leery of how it would work on iOS devices compared to Duet.
This morning I was thinking about the iPhone 5 that many of us would soon have in our hands (if not already) and I had a funny thought: I wonder if anyone who bought the original iPhone, on day one, still uses that phone? And if so, I wonder what it looks like… [I’ve seen…
This morning I was thinking about the iPhone 5 that many of us would soon have in our hands (if not already) and I had a funny thought: I wonder if anyone who bought the original iPhone, on day one, still uses that phone? And if so, I wonder what it looks like…
[I’ve seen pictures of a well worn original iPhone back, but that was *so* last year](http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/aged-to-perfection.html), what does it look like now?
All of this got me to thinking about the evolution of the iPhone and how stupid it is when people say that Apple didn’t release impressive features, because looking back at it the most impressive features made for the least impressive demos.
Let’s look at a few of those features.
### The Home Button
The simple home button. Pre-iPhone if you had told me that there would be a phone with only one button to control the UI with — I would have said: “good luck with that”. Pre-iPhone just one button for UI control was a ridiculous idea, post-iPhone more than one button seems downright complicated. Just watch a long time iOS user (has iOS been around long enough to say this?) try and figure out the Android back button and right there you see why the home button is so powerful in its simplicity.
So while the home button was pretty boring demo material, it has stood the test of time and proven itself as a damned impressive feature — if not an industry shaping feature.
### Oleophobic Coatings
Inventing a new screen coating that doesn’t eliminate fingerprint smudges, but that does reduce them, is also inventing something both difficult to demo and at the same time risky to demo. It’s not impressive to show a phone that gets *less* fingerprints in the same way it would be to show one that gets none. Yet the oleophobic coating Apple has been applying to iPhones and iPads is nothing short of fantastic.
Any pre-oleophobic iOS user can attest to not only how smudged screens used to get, but more importantly how difficult those screens were to clean. I used to clean my iPhone 3-5 times a day before this coating.
Now it’s a rare event to clean it, most of the time just the lining of my pants pocket is enough to keep the screen reasonably clean. So yes, it took Bill Nye “The Science Guy” to explain Apple’s feat on CNN, but then again we don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it. We also don’t ever need to think much about how clean our iPhone screens are.
### Mobile Safari
Of these three items though, Mobile Safari is handily going to go down as one of the best features of the iPhone, period. When demoed we thought: “Hey, that looks great.” But in reality the demoes were fairly boring, because watching someone surf the web with ease is typically a pretty boring affair.
What I think none of us realized at that time was just how altering having a powerful, stable, web browser on our phones would be. For instance I don’t remember bars being particularly worried about people searching for answers on their phones pre-iPhone, but now it seems that an announcement is made every time. A small anecdote for sure, but a telling one nonetheless.
This web browser not only changed the way users use their phones, but the way the web is designed.
### Go Ahead and Whine
So go ahead and whine about there not being “significant” updates to iPhones — you whine about it every year — but just keep in mind that a year from now things you thought were trivial in the iPhone 5, just may change the mobile world we all live in for the better. Just like the home button, oleophobic coatings, and full-featured mobile web browsers did before.
John Herman: >Twitter will soon remove support for third-party image hosts, such as Twitpic and yfrog, from its official apps, according to a person who was briefed on the company’s plans. The changes will be coming fairly soon — likely in the next updates to each client. This makes more senses than killing third-party clients.…
John Herman:
>Twitter will soon remove support for third-party image hosts, such as Twitpic and yfrog, from its official apps, according to a person who was briefed on the company’s plans. The changes will be coming fairly soon — likely in the next updates to each client.
This makes more senses than killing third-party clients. Because this *is* a part of the content being uploaded to Twitter — so they likely want to “own” that data. What will be interesting is to see if Twitter changes (or already has) terms in the Terms of Service (for Twitter) that by default grants Twitter the rights to use the images you upload via their service. I know this has long been something Facebook tries to get away with, so we will see just how evil Twitter wants to go on this one.
Nice and simple tip from Justin, but there’s actually a couple of other ways to do this if you don’t want to go the TextExpander route: the two I use are LaunchBar and Keyboard Maestro. ### LaunchBar Dead simple, just activate `Clipboard History` in your LaunchBar preferences and check the box `As Plain Text`, setup…
Nice and simple tip from Justin, but there’s actually a couple of other ways to do this if you don’t want to go the TextExpander route: the two I use are LaunchBar and Keyboard Maestro.
### LaunchBar
Dead simple, just activate `Clipboard History` in your LaunchBar preferences and check the box `As Plain Text`, setup your shortcut to invoke clipboard history and you are done. I am using `OPT+Commoand+\` and `Command+\` on my machine — makes for copying and pasting plain text pretty fast.
### Keyboard Maestro
Of course if you really want to be fast about it, you can use a macro in Keyboard Maestro that strips formatting. Actually this is a default macro that comes with Keyboard Maestro — not something I made. The shortcut I have set for it is `Shift+Command+V` and boom, no formatting. In case you deleted the macro, just go to `File > Import to Macro Library` in Keyboard Maestro, close the file chooser dialog that pops up and find the macro to re-add it to your library.
I think you’ll be amazed at how handy plain text formatted clipboard items really are.
“High-speed chases look like fun because they are.” — Tim Dees
With the iPhone 5, I’m switching to Verizon. I’ve been an AT&T customer since I got my first cell phone circa 1996, and have been loyal to them the entire time, but their lack of actual LTE in my area and insistence that their “4G” *is* 4G [just pisses me off](https://brooksreview.net/2012/03/marketing-bullshit/) so this time around…
With the iPhone 5, I’m switching to Verizon. I’ve been an AT&T customer since I got my first cell phone circa 1996, and have been loyal to them the entire time, but their lack of actual LTE in my area and insistence that their “4G” *is* 4G [just pisses me off](https://brooksreview.net/2012/03/marketing-bullshit/) so this time around I am going with Verizon.
I have a few varying thoughts about this, so I thought I would share them here.
### Simultaneous Data
The Verizon iPhone cannot do simultaneous data (where you talk on the phone and use the internet). This sucks, because even though it is not a feature I use often, it *is* a feature that I do use from time to time. I have a ton of questions about this, but the biggest of them is: what happens when you are using turn-by-turn navigation, get a phone call, and need to keep getting directions?
I have no clue what the answer is, but I hope the answer doesn’t suck.
### Non-LTE Speed
LTE speed on Verizon is fantastic — my iPad is a Verizon LTE iPad — but non-LTE speed on Verizon is no where near as fast as AT&T’s speeds. So the gamble I am taking is that LTE will be expanded fast enough that the times I am not on LTE are far and few between (I hope I am right).
The flip side is that AT&T actually gets going on rolling out LTE and covers my area faster and better than Verizon — however I think history has shown that staking Verizon is a smarter play.
### AT&T Hates Its Users
I’m more and more convinced that AT&T is greedy as hell and sees the need from its customers for better features and more data as their number one threat. They drug their feet with tethering, and now they sound like they are dragging their feet with FaceTime over 3G/4G.
While I doubt Verizon is much better, they do seem like the lesser of two evils right now.
### Tethering to an iPad for LTE
A few people have mentioned that they would get an AT&T iPhone and tether to their Verizon LTE iPad when they need LTE speed. I’m going to call bullshit on this one.
It’s a great idea, but highly impractical. I’ve had that setup now since the iPad (3) came out and have yet to do it once, despite several times when I could have actually used the speed boost. I always just switched to the iPad instead of tethering. I would guess that most people would just switch devices too, rather than tether if they had both with them — it just makes more sense.
Honestly though, the times that I need the LTE speed on my iPhone are also the times when the iPhone is likely the *only* device I have with me. It’s a convenience factor and I am willing to sacrifice things to have that.
### AT&T Family Plan
Right now my wife and I are on a family plan, and my number is the primary account number — I do wonder what happens when I switch to Verizon. To be safe I am going to call in and try to switch our accounts to separate accounts without signing a new contract — if I can’t do that I will try to assign my wife’s number as primary. Either way I suspect this will be a huge pain in the ass.
### Friday
I’ve no clue how this will all shake out on the 21st, but I’m hoping it goes better than the 4S launch — that was a fiasco for me.
A great overview of the different techniques that you can utilize to make your websites retina ready. On this site I had been using the double-resolution (actually 2048px on the long side) picture trick — meaning everyone gets to download huge images. This has slowed down site load times, significantly, but it was the easiest…
A great overview of the different techniques that you can utilize to make your websites retina ready. On this site I had been using the double-resolution (actually 2048px on the long side) picture trick — meaning everyone gets to download huge images. This has slowed down site load times, significantly, but it was the easiest to implement and has kept the site looking great.
I used [Icon Slate](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/icon-slate/id439697913?mt=12) (hat tip to [Gruber](http://daringfireball.net) to create a retina favicon. Those are the only images I use, everything else is just CSS and text.
Now, the biggest downside to this is that in Reeder on the Mac (and I think Google Reader) images from my site shoot out of their bounds and look crazy big.
I’ve since installed [Retina.js](http://retinajs.com) to use and try out, but it occurs to me that all these tricks are just nasty hacks for something that is just going to have to be standardized in the browser itself. That is, we need a standard file name attribute that tells the web browser when there is a retina asset available, the browser knows it needs the retina asset, and grabs that first.
Jessica Dolcourt: >Yet its lack of a “gotcha” feature gives shoppers considering other powerful alternatives — like the intriguing Lumia 920, the larger-than-life Samsung Galaxy Note 2, or even the won’t-quit Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD — fewer reasons to stick with Apple. Oh boy. Let me get this straight, the iPhone 5 is just…
Jessica Dolcourt:
>Yet its lack of a “gotcha” feature gives shoppers considering other powerful alternatives — like the intriguing Lumia 920, the larger-than-life Samsung Galaxy Note 2, or even the won’t-quit Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD — fewer reasons to stick with Apple.
Oh boy. Let me get this straight, the iPhone 5 is just an ok option, but will sell well while opening the door to competitors? And Dolcourt’s proof of this is that she found three separate Android phones that each have one feature better than the iPhone 5. Right, so I could carry all three other phones (which are huge phones) and have a better offering, or just carry the iPhone 5. But I *totally* see where they left the door open, why didn’t they add those made up features you spoke about earlier in your article:
>[…] an innovative camera feature that lets you drag and drop subjects around the screen, or other far-out concepts come to life.
Yeah, Apple, what the hell. I bet no one pre-orders this piece of junk — [oh wait](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/14/iphone-5-pre-order-sells-out-20x-faster-than-4-and-4s-further-highlighting-apples-dominance/).
MG Siegler writing about people who are “disappointed” that the iPhone 5 looks the same as the iPhone 4S: >Apple is not and will not change things just for the sake of change. And while some may now be clamoring for this change, the paradox is that if Apple did make some big changes, many…
MG Siegler writing about people who are “disappointed” that the iPhone 5 looks the same as the iPhone 4S:
>Apple is not and will not change things just for the sake of change. And while some may now be clamoring for this change, the paradox is that if Apple did make some big changes, many of the same people would bitch and moan about them. Apple is smart enough to know that in this case, most people don’t really want change, they just think that they do because that’s the easiest way to perceive value: visual newness.
Siegler’s post is fantastic and worth a read, but I have a counter point to his argument that is something to be mindful of. That is, RIM was very good at ever so slightly making the BlackBerry devices better — iterating design — but in the end they got pigeoned holed into thinking the same.
I don’t see Apple doing this at all, but I think it’s important to remember that iterating to perfection is fantastic just so long as you recognize that perfection may be a completely different device than what you are iterating on today. This in my mind is what explains the move to a 4-inch screen. I am sure that in 2007 3.5 inches seemed fantastically big, but Apple kept their eyes opened (and their minds) realizing that 4 inches maybe a better device.
This is counter to what RIM did, deciding that a trackball was better than a jog dial and color screens better than monochrome — so we have nothing to worry about with Apple right now. I just want to point out that there’s two types of iteration: iteration for the sake of perfection and iteration for the sake of selling new devices. It’s the latter that we need to be worried about, Apple’s still well in the iterating to perfection mode.
Really fun show this week that only runs 30 seconds over the 30 minute mark that Shawn and I want to hit or be under. Shawn and I talk about tips and tricks for LaunchBar, teaching each other some new ones along the way. If you’ve given up on our podcast, or podcasts in general,…
Really fun show this week that only runs 30 seconds over the 30 minute mark that Shawn and I want to hit or be under. Shawn and I talk about tips and tricks for LaunchBar, teaching each other some new ones along the way.
If you’ve given up on our podcast, or podcasts in general, I’d urge you to give this one a listen — we’ve worked hard to try and make the show fit better into busy schedules and I really think this is a fun episode.
[We also recorded a nice After Dark about switching from AT&T to Verizon](http://5by5.tv/afterdark/231) — for those not familiar an “After Dark” is 5by5 network lingo for the conversations that happen after we stop recording the episode.
“Either you’re a big business or you can piss off. Small developers have been told they can play no part in this brave new world.” — Terence Eden
Shawn Blanc on the iPhone 5 event: >It was like the whole internet had the run sheet for today’s event. >Earlier this year Tim Cook said Apple was doubling down on secrecy, and yet virtually every single thing announced today was called by the rumor mill. The rumors were so accurate and consistent (well the…
Shawn Blanc on the iPhone 5 event:
>It was like the whole internet had the run sheet for today’s event.
>Earlier this year Tim Cook said Apple was doubling down on secrecy, and yet virtually every single thing announced today was called by the rumor mill.
The rumors were so accurate and consistent (well the sane rumors) that I thought for sure they all had to be wrong. I guess there’s going to be some job openings at Apple.
However, as un-Apple as the lack of secrecy was, I think it paid off better for Apple. Typically after an big announcement event their stock takes a dive because Apple never “meets” rumors, however this time around Apple *did* meet the rumors — and Apple’s stock immediately climbed (continues climbing as of this writing). So there’s an interesting case to be made for getting rumor-mongers more accurate leaks.
Richard Koopmann, found a backdoor into the member-only posts on TBR: >Back to the point, in my bit.ly network is an account held by Ben Brooks that tweets out a link whenever a new post hits his website. And as I found out, converting a bit.ly user page into an RSS feed is as simple…
Richard Koopmann, found a backdoor into the member-only posts on TBR:
>Back to the point, in my bit.ly network is an account held by Ben Brooks that tweets out a link whenever a new post hits his website. And as I found out, converting a bit.ly user page into an RSS feed is as simple as appending .rss to the end of the URL.
Koopmann was kind enough to contact me before posting this so that I could fix the hole, but it’s certainly one I had never even thought about. Since launching the paywall I have had quite a few people email me about backdoors they found into the content — none sounded malicious, most found their way in accidentally.
When designing the paywall I knew one thing: there will always be ways around the paywall, always. I can’t stop it, so I just accept it as fact.
“Nothing about it was obvious.” — Farhad Manjoo
While reading the live-blogs for Apple’s iPhone 5 event, I stopped to think about why Apple continues to improve cameras and microphones in the iPhone — and not in little ways, and certainly not in cheap ways. It occurs to me that perhaps Apple improves these factors because they are one of the most outward…
While reading the live-blogs for Apple’s iPhone 5 event, I stopped to think about why Apple continues to improve cameras and microphones in the iPhone — and not in little ways, and certainly not in cheap ways. It occurs to me that perhaps Apple improves these factors because they are one of the most outward facing images of Apple’s brand that potential consumers will see.
In other words: People share photos, and Apple doesn’t want photos from their iPhones looking like crap. Likewise the owner of iPhones don’t really notice better sounding microphones, but the people on the other end of the call *do*.
So my theory is that Apple wants consumers to always think things like: “Man you can really tell when someone is talking to you from an iPhone — they sound great.”
Apple wants this as it’s a fantastic boost in value to their brand and something that sticks in your head when you go to buy your next phone.
The iPhone camera — and it’s popularity on Flickr — is evidence of the power that the quality of the photos taken with iPhones must be good. Apple’s been very good at not focusing on jazzy features for the camera, things like higher megapixels, instead Apple improves the camera in the spot that cameras are weakest in: low light.
I bet most of you have had this scenario happen to you:
– You show Uncle Bob a great photo you took.
– Uncle Bob loves it, and asks: “What kind of camera you have, Neb?”
Apple wants you to answer, with pride, “an iPhone”.
Because in the consumer mind it’s not the photographer, but the camera — so if Apple makes the camera really great at the really tough photos, then people will notice and ask the same question Uncle Bob asked. Apple wants to be your answer.
And consumers will remember this the next time they buy a phone: “Neb’s iPhone takes such great photos, I haven’t seen any photos people take with the `Samsung EEw577 S™ REPPPER`, so maybe I should get the iPhone.”
The photos you take with your iPhone are, themselves, a lasting marketing tool for Apple to sell more iPhones — so it only makes sense that they spend so much time improving the camera with each version. ((A bit of anecdotal evidence I had never given second thought about, is that my Wife will often say: “Can you take the picture with your iPhone, it takes better pictures.” My wife is always one generation behind with her iPhones.))