Recent Articles

Bruce Lawson:
>The vital point is that you never know better than your users what content they want. When Nielsen writes that mobile websites should “cut features, to eliminate things that are not core to the mobile use case; [and] cut content, to reduce word count and defer secondary information to secondary pages,” he forgets this fact.

[Amen](https://brooksreview.net/2011/06/the-mobile-web/).

I bet this was the last move Microsoft wanted to make, but it’s smart on the part of both parties. The local news in Microsoft country was talking up two things:

1. That this would bring a Nook app to Windows Phones and Windows 8;
2. That this would enable Nook to use Windows 8 as it’s backbone.

The first makes sense and Microsoft has already said that, but the second is really odd. Would BN just dump Android and head over to Windows 8? I can’t imagine they could produce the devices at a low price point without sacrificing performance even more if they used Win 8.

I bet the Nook stays with Android for the next few years at least.

Zach Epstein:
>“What has been holding Apple back from becoming a wireless provider already, according to Bluestein, are the enormous handset subsidies paid by mobile operators (AT&T, VZW and Sprint in the US), which amount to about $381 for each iPhone sold today,” Bluestein noted. ”That has been a short-term stumbling block for Apple, but the company has its well-known cash reserves and could seize the initiative at any point.”

Seriously, that’s what you think is holding Apple back? How about the fact that they would have to build a wireless network and get the spectrum to do that from the FCC? Apple can figure out the phone subsidies, but magically making a cell network infrastructure appear is likely to be much harder.

Apple could lease access from existing carriers, but what motivation would carriers have to lease this to Apple? None.

I must be missing something here.

Mor Naaman makes the case for Apple buying Foursquare and Square — it’s a compelling case and it would likely be Google’s worst nightmare (short of Facebook buying these two companies).

>To summarize: after the deal, Apple will immediately become a giant payments company, with an installation base that is expected to encompass half of all mobile devices sold. The company will have the best local search abilities, far exceeding any existing recommendation engine. And due to its enormous reach, it will possess a payment system that merchants will line up to support.

Fantastic idea.

Om Malik citing a Actix press release:
>95% of iPad usage is indoors.

Not surprising, even in the gray overcast that is western Washington, it’s not easy to use an iPad outside.

Tip number five has been a long time favorite of mine.

Dan Byler has a neat Keybaord Maestro macro to hide apps after a certain amount of time. He is using it to keep distractions to a minimum, but I think it would be pretty neat to do the same with my accounting apps so that prying eyes don’t get to pry too much data. There’s some other neat use cases I can think of too.

New app to file complaints directly to the TSA & DHS. Something tells me the TSA/DHS is not going to enjoy this app being out there. I don’t know — call me crazy — I just get that sense.

John Moltz:
>Basically, you dock your phone and it becomes your desktop computer. Which surely couldn’t lead to any kind of compromised user experience.

I wonder what it would be like playing back a Flash YouTube video from your phone that is powering a 24″ screen — I mean phones don’t have fans, so the phone would just, erm, melt — right?

Man is this response seething with contempt… Love it.

A new “feature” of Dropbox is that it shows a nag screen when it detects a photo card being attached to your Mac — it’s an annoying and B.S. move if you ask me.

See also:

This Dropbox BS where they highjacked the auto-sync from device to Aperture/iPhoto to display an ad is crap. Thinking about canceling.

— Chris Parrish (@twenty3) April 30, 2012

Shawn Blanc:
>Suppose our iPhones only had apps like Simplenote, Agenda, OmniFocus, the camera, maps, and the SMS and phone apps. If that were the case, would we still be so prone to pull our phones out? How often would we reach for our iPhones if they were absent of any and all apps that are ripe for casually checking (such as email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and RSS)?

I think back to before the App Store, and how much I used my first — the first — iPhone. Answer: a lot. Not as much as now, but I used it a lot. The reason? Mobile Safari.

Take away some of the third party apps and I am still going to be nose first in my iPhone, take away Safari? Well that’d suck.

Isaiah with a counter to Shawn’s (and others’s) post about the iPad [replacing a laptop](https://brooksreview.net/2012/04/ipad-mac/):
>The problem is that writing, posting to a blog, and reading blogs are some of the tasks that an iPad is perfectly suited to do. So there seems to be no end to the number of writers that can tell us about their iPad productivity. It’s a bit of a self selecting bunch, though.

The funny part about this post is the Isaiah thinks we (writers) are writing to ourselves here, but Isaiah is coming at it from a programming and design aspect.

What we really need to do is look at using the iPad as a general purpose computer from the standpoint of the average computer user. Which means the iPad needs to be able to do three things:

1. Check email.
2. Check Facebook.
3. Get photos off of another device.

Personally, I think the iPad excels at all three, and that is why I advocate for it to be the first and/or *next* computer that most people buy.

Shawn Blanc:
>It is not a sacrifice to use the iPad as a primary device.

Indeed, it is not. For me it works fantastically well as my portable computer — so much so that my next computer probably won’t be a laptop.