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Be sure to watch the video in this linked post. Frog design has partnered with Sharp to make a new smartphone for the Japanese market. They are using Android with a high customized skin — but really the customization goes deeper than just the skin. The way to think of this is like this: base Android is a Mr. Potato head with body parts randomly put on him, this Frog version is the same Mr. Potato head with the body parts arrange correctly.

The video makes the design and interaction look fantastic — I’d love to try one out.

I’ve only been using Scratch since yesterday, but I have to say it looks to have ousted Drafts as my go to note/scratch pad app. In my testing it launches faster than Drafts, and offers a lot of little clever features.

For one, it supports Markdown with a special row of keys — but that’s almost trivial now in iOS apps. What’s really nice is that it has a special row of keys that give you other keys that would before cause you to tap and change the keyboard. In my case: the em dash is there. I use a lot — a lot — of em dashes, so for me this is a time saver.

What’s odd is that the app doesn’t have a new note button, instead a delete this note button. Which at first was annoying, but really it’s more like taking the current page of paper you are writing on and tossing it aside, only to see a new — fresh — sheet of paper.

Ok, before I wrap up this mini-review, let me point out two other features:

– You can append what you just wrote to a text file in Dropbox. Append people. Very cool.
– You can export just the text you select, again, nice touch.

Did I also mention you can customize that custom row of buttons?

The icon is blue-ish though, so that was a strike against it, but then I looked harder at it in my dock and the icon has grown on me. So note the time and date (July 17, 2012) because this is a blue icon that I like.

The biggest rub I have with the app is that when I export to Dropbox I have to navigate my entire list of Dropbox folders. I would love to setup the app so that exports to Dropbox always go to folder X and that when I append they always go to file X. That’s a nitpick though. What’s more impressive is how much this app does without ever showing a settings screen.

It’s [$2.99 in the App Store](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scratch-your-quick-input-notepad/id533320655?mt=8) and I applaud them for charging a premium price. It’s not for everyone, but — right now — it *is* for me.

My wife and I just picked up two of these over the weekend and I have two main things to say about this chair:

1. It is ridiculously inexpensive. This Amazon price is about what we paid at IKEA and it really is surprising that you can get this chair for that cheap.
2. It is a really comfortable chair. I know you may not believe this, but it is very comfortable. Not only that but it has a nice bounce to it that our daughter loves.

Every item like this that I post is an item that I have tried and really like — this is no exception. You may not like IKEA stuff, but if you need a comfortable armchair for any purpose — you could do a lot worse than this chair.

(It comes in three different wood colors and many different fusion colors and fabrics — this is just a link to one option.)

Stephen Shankland writes about how people might be using Google in the future and brings up a lot of great questions. Questions about how all of this is funded in the future, the trust problem with Google, and most importantly — to me — the privacy implications of it all.

One incredibly interesting quip that Shankland makes is about Google Glass and what ads a person sees. The Glass project doesn’t look like a cash cow product to me, but what if the intended benefit to Google is that now *they* see exactly what *you* see.

Take the grocery store for example. The loyalty card programs were developed as a research tool — telling stores what items a person buys together in different locations. Things like: when people buy tortilla chips, they also buy salsa. The more data like this that stores get, the better they can optimize their shopping aisles so that what you need is grouped together — in such a way that you end up spending more than you normally would. What if instead of knowing buy looking at an individuals purchases, stores started knowing by virtually ‘seeing’ how customers browse a store. That is exactly the kind of data that most stores would kill to have.

Same too with website owners looking to optimize content. I can see where you mouse is if I install the right software, but I cannot see where your eye is. Google Glass could change that, and as Shankland says — this both excites and terrorizes me.

Marco Arment responding to [this post from Stephen Hackett](http://512pixels.net/part-time-gig-full-time-frustration/):

>I think I’d have a hard time ever working for someone else again. Not because everyone else sucks, but because I suspect I’ve lost the ability, if I ever had it, to be a very good employee for anyone else.

Fun fact, once I graduated from college I never worked for another person. I’ve been my own boss since 2005 and even before that I only had worked for my Dad’s company — so my traditional office experience is non-existent. Since college I have had half a dozen companies.

Working for yourself isn’t for everyone, in fact the most crucial part is being able to own your fuck ups. By that I mean walking up to a client/customer/reader and saying: “I screwed up, it was my fault.” The second most crucial part is having a solution.

I don’t say that to sound like I know it all, but I’ve started and failed at my share of companies and yet I support my family, with my wife, off of a company I created (she also created her own company). I do this because literally the only thing I knew about how I was going to make money when I graduated from college was that I wasn’t going to make money working at someone else’s company.

The hardest part is making the decision to do it, everything else is just doing the work.