Recent Articles

Dan Miller:

> So if you swipe up on the dash, you get an em dash. Swipe up on the dollar sign and you get the cents symbol. One thing I like is that this is one way to get smart quotation marks.

I had no clue.

Yes, none of these icons will make sense to my daughter if she stops to try and figure what each picture is, but it also won’t matter. All that really matters is that people know that a floppy disk picture means `save` — so while us “old people” may be the only ones that have seen the real life objects these icons depict, it doesn’t matter as long as people know what they mean.

Still, interesting to think about.

It’s $149 in the Mac App Store and it is *the* RAW photo editor that I use. Aperture is nice, but Lightroom is great. I have only been on version 4 for a little while, but it is a nice upgrade. Lightroom is still the absolute best tool to use for reducing noise in your images — hands down.

One important note (that I didn’t know) is that buying the Mac App Store version only grants you a license to use it on a Mac, whereas buying the downloadable version from Adobe (same price) grants you a license to use it on Mac or Windows. So if you like to use Macs and *have* to use Windows, this is something to think about.

Update: [Jim Dalrymple notes some more caveats](http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/05/10/lightroom-4-available-on-mac-app-store-with-caveats/) with Lightroom 4 in the Mac App Store — so many I would recommend that you buy it from Adobe’s website instead.

A very eye-opening post by Dustin Curtis on how to properly scale images for use on the web by ‘pixel-fitting’. His examples are great and this is a must read for anyone who puts graphics on the web.

Looks great and I think it is really neat that Amazon is wanting offices in downtown Seattle instead of moving out of the city core — which I am sure would be cheaper.

A fantastic post that asks what journalism really is today, and if defining journalism matters anymore. The post is a must read and there are so many good bits to quote that I have to limit myself to just this one:

>The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

Michael Lopp:
>This is about how these two universes should collide and that means what I’m really talking about is gamification. There’s a reason I didn’t mention this until paragraph 17 because there are a lot of folks who think gamification means pulling the worst aspects out of games and shoving them into an application. It’s not. Don’t think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate someone to learn so they can have fun being productive.

Great point, and one that I hadn’t thought of when we talk about gamification. The type of gamification that Lopp is referring to sounds fantastic, but rare.

David Sparks is *the man* when it comes to getting to paperless and automating that workflow. Haven’t had a chance to read this book, but his description made it an instant buy for me:

>Paperless takes the mystery (and fear) out of going paperless with your Apple technology. The book includes 32 screencasts, 4 movies, over 26,000 words, and other rich-media assets to turn you into a paperless ninja.

Sold.

Great post by Craig Grannell that [responds to Jason Pontin’s thoughts](http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40319/) about magazines creating native apps. Most magazine apps are just terrible to use, plain and simple. When something is terrible to us, people don’t use it.

If I was a magazine publisher I would figure out how to get an iPad app that updated to the latest content in less than 30 seconds.

That’d be goal one.

Goal two would be to whittle that time down to 10 seconds.

Most current iPad magazines fail before readers even get a chance to view them.

Paul Ford:
>Facebook also has a CEO concerned about rivals usurping it. If you had a huge pile of data about websites and services that might pose a competitive threat and billions of dollars in cash at hand, what would you do? Right: You’d buy Instagram. And you’d be able to make a very informed decision without consulting anyone, because, well, math.

Great article.

Remember [this statement](http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/business-of-it/2012/04/25/apples-cook-i-hate-litigation-40155095/) by Apple CEO, Tim Cook:

>I’ve always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it

A lot of people took that to mean that perhaps Cook was more open to settling a lawsuit than Jobs was.

Here’s Florian Mueller, [today](http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/05/apple-and-samsung-drop-claims-against.html), quoting an Apple legal filing against Samsung:

>Samsung’s infringement of Apple’s intellectual property has already resulted in damages that reach billions of dollars. […] It is critical to Apple to start trial on July 30, to put an end to Samsung’s continuing infringement.

So, yes, perhaps Cook is willing to settle, but if this filing is any indication — the settlement amount and terms will be massive to Samsung.

I bought this exact fan (refurb too) from Woot! last week for $99. It’s a great fan and works like a factory new fan — now I just need to find a reason to buy more of them (and I need to find the cash to do so).