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From the Adobe Press Release: >With subscription pricing customers can use flagship products, such as Adobe Photoshop® for as little as US$35 per month, Adobe Design Premium CS5.5 for US$95 per month, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection for US$129 per month. No word yet on whether you get a pro-rated refund for every crash.
From the Adobe Press Release:
>With subscription pricing customers can use flagship products, such as Adobe Photoshop® for as little as US$35 per month, Adobe Design Premium CS5.5 for US$95 per month, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection for US$129 per month.
No word yet on whether you get a pro-rated refund for every crash.
Charbax: >World’s cheapest ARM Cortex-A9 Tablet thus far (single core), it is to be sold at $95 FOB Shenzhen, meaning for orders of at least 500 pieces. Add taxes, import, licences, profit margins and the retail price in Europe and USA may be around $149/149€. Also it has a mouse input interface, for when you…
Charbax:
>World’s cheapest ARM Cortex-A9 Tablet thus far (single core), it is to be sold at $95 FOB Shenzhen, meaning for orders of at least 500 pieces. Add taxes, import, licences, profit margins and the retail price in Europe and USA may be around $149/149€.
Also it has a mouse input interface, for when you get tired of using your finger.
*(Extra bonus is how excited the guy in the video is.)*
This is the eighth [installment](https://brooksreview.net/tag/quick/) of the Quick Takes series, where I look at five apps and tell you my thoughts on them. ### [Dealnews](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dealnews-app/id405566099?mt=8) (iPhone) ### When I first got a Mac I used to visit Dealnews every morning to see what I could afford on the little cash I had at the time.…
This is the eighth [installment](https://brooksreview.net/tag/quick/) of the Quick Takes series, where I look at five apps and tell you my thoughts on them.
### [Dealnews](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dealnews-app/id405566099?mt=8) (iPhone) ###
When I first got a Mac I used to visit Dealnews every morning to see what I could afford on the little cash I had at the time. In recent years I haven’t looked at the site, but somehow I came across the app for the iPhone. The app is easy and straightforward and still only appeals to those shoppers that like buying things because it is a ‘deal’. My biggest complaint is the way the app displays the information seems to *not* take into account its primary users.
It would seem that if you specialize in showing low priced items, that your customers would naturally be most interested in the price and the product. Instead, the point that draws your eye is the ‘hotness’ meter, the price is buried at the end of the product name, in the same font and the same color and size. That’s a little backwards if you ask me.
### [Alpine Crawler](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alpine-crawler/id416060151?mt=12) (Mac OS X) ###
This is a simple little game that is free in the Mac App Store. It reminds me a lot of Excite Bike for the Nintendo — except you are in a truck and can (apparently) kill yourself with too big of jumps. Other than that…
This game is not great, it’s not even really that good. That doesn’t mean that my buddy and I didn’t have a hell of a good time playing it the other night.
### [Battle Bears -1](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battle-bears-1-mac/id413013033?mt=12) (Mac OS X) ###
Another free one that my buddy and I grabbed from the Mac App Store the other night. It is a first person shooter where everyone is bears, luckily your bear has a variety of guns to fend off the onslaught of attacking bears that will hug you to death (bastards). I want to point out that while I don’t think this is the best game out there (not by a long shot), it is free and entertaining as all hell.
I love that the developers had a good time writing the copy for the game — it makes the entire thing that much funnier to play. One annoying thing I did notice is that this game doesn’t seem to work with the Magic Trackpad — not sure why, not that you really want to be using that for a first person shooter.
### [Bing for iPad](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bing/id345323231?mt=8) ###
It searches stuff using the Bing engine — surprising huh? It’s a very interesting app — not in a bad way, but it feels more like a home screen replacement app than a search app. When you pull up the app it shows you a ton of data that is all somewhat relevant. It really looks nice on the main view, though the search results are presented in a less than pleasing way (white background, blue links).
I also like the ‘card’ type navigation for moving back and forth between an individual search result and the list of results. I just can’t get over the feeling that this looks like what a Windows Tablet *should* look like — meaning it truly feels like it is trying to replace iOS, not compliment it. Interesting.
### [Jetsetter](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jetsetter-for-ipad/id416813861?mt=8) (iPad) ###
It doesn’t rotate — no seriously you can only use it in portrait, which almost made me uninstall it. I don’t get why you would develop for a device that rotates around and then lock your app to one orientation — stupid. Having said that, this is a great app for people looking to spend a lot of money on vacation. There has been some rumbles around my home about taking a trip to Hawaii — specifically Maui. So I searched for Maui and two hotels came up, I clicked on the Fairmont Kea Lani which boasts rooms starting at $699 a night — something I can’t afford right now. That said I really like that the app also told me that WiFi costs an additional $14.50 a day (absurd).
Another great use case for this app is if you have a specific hotel in mind that you want to know more about — if they have it in their database I can’t imagine a better way to get all that information. The pictures are stunning and the details about the hotels are unmatched by other sites I have used in the past. Including the information that a taxi will cost $70 from the Airport to the hotel (again, absurd).
*If you liked this installment be sure to check out the other installments).*
Three really great things that Dropbox needs — first things first, let’s get the icon [out](http://thebbpodcast.com/2011/04/episode-6-wonderful-people/) of the menubar.
Three really great things that Dropbox needs — first things first, let’s get the icon [out](http://thebbpodcast.com/2011/04/episode-6-wonderful-people/) of the menubar.
Mary Jo Foley: >“Immersive” is the way that Microsoft is describing the Windows 8 app experience on tablets and slates running the MoSH interface, from what I’ve been told. Inside the company, some Softies use “immersive” and “modern” or “modern client” apps as synonyms. Once a user installs an immersive application, a tile for it…
Mary Jo Foley:
>“Immersive” is the way that Microsoft is describing the Windows 8 app experience on tablets and slates running the MoSH interface, from what I’ve been told. Inside the company, some Softies use “immersive” and “modern” or “modern client” apps as synonyms. Once a user installs an immersive application, a tile for it will appear on the user’s Windows 8 dashboard.
>An immersive app is one where the navigational elements of the operating system take a back seat to the application itself.
I thought we just called this type of app, “good”? Huh, learn something new everyday I guess.
Neven Mrgan highlights the biggest frustrations users have with iPad magazines — well done.
Neven Mrgan highlights the biggest frustrations users have with iPad magazines — well done.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” — Mike Tyson
Jacques Mattheij: >What if dropbox would simply replace your local file system. On *all* your digital devices? If the future is ‘always on’ and ‘always connected’ for every device, be it a mobile phone, a desktop computer, laptop, netbook or tablet, then all those devices can synchronize their content using dropbox, without having a local…
Jacques Mattheij:
>What if dropbox would simply replace your local file system. On *all* your digital devices? If the future is ‘always on’ and ‘always connected’ for every device, be it a mobile phone, a desktop computer, laptop, netbook or tablet, then all those devices can synchronize their content using dropbox, without having a local user filesystem at all!
I could see it, Dropbox is more or less where every single file is stored on my computer — well — the ones that I create.
I have never been happy with a single instance of the archive function on a WordPress blog before — after spending hours trying to get the archive to work the way I wanted it to, I decided to hire a professional. I got in contact with [Pat Dryburgh](http://patdryburgh.com/) and asked him if he would take…
I have never been happy with a single instance of the archive function on a WordPress blog before — after spending hours trying to get the archive to work the way I wanted it to, I decided to hire a professional. I got in contact with [Pat Dryburgh](http://patdryburgh.com/) and asked him if he would take a stab at it.
It is now done, and all I can say is wow.
All you get is the Articles and Quotes (no linked list posts) and you get them in a readable and easy to digest way. Click on the month and a fancy bit of javascript magic happens that shows you all the articles from that month. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do — don’t be shy about [hiring](http://patdryburgh.com/contact/) Pat to help you!
Shawn and I discuss the 5 apps we would choose if we were so limited and other random things. Oh, and Shawn’s rule is that the OS counts as one app and nothing comes pre-installed. Thanks to the awesome [Notesy](http://notesy-app.com/) for sponsoring us.
Shawn and I discuss the 5 apps we would choose if we were so limited and other random things. Oh, and Shawn’s rule is that the OS counts as one app and nothing comes pre-installed.
Thanks to the awesome [Notesy](http://notesy-app.com/) for sponsoring us.
Mike Isaac: >And in what seems to be the beginning of a disturbing trend in tablet debuts, the A500 will support Flash eventually, but won’t ship with it. Motorola’s Xoom, which debuted six weeks ago, also launched without Flash, though a beta release is currently available for Honeycomb in the Android Market. Why is the…
Mike Isaac:
>And in what seems to be the beginning of a disturbing trend in tablet debuts, the A500 will support Flash eventually, but won’t ship with it. Motorola’s Xoom, which debuted six weeks ago, also launched without Flash, though a beta release is currently available for Honeycomb in the Android Market.
Why is the name so terrible? The price is great, just below the iPad, but where are the size specs for thickness — what’s the battery life. Lots of questions on this thing. All Best Buy’s pre-order page says is: “Weighs only 1.7 lbs. and measures just 0.5″ thin”
No listing of battery life, which is never a good sign.
Lessien: >However, I do believe that companies focused on beating Apple to market with faster processors, greater quantities of applications, and in general more stuff are bound to find themselves side-swiped by a future in which none of that matters. Spot on.
Lessien:
>However, I do believe that companies focused on beating Apple to market with faster processors, greater quantities of applications, and in general more stuff are bound to find themselves side-swiped by a future in which none of that matters.
Spot on.
You are going to see this article make the rounds today and last night. The imagery is telling, indeed the examples that he pulled the iPhone version looks better than its Android counter part. A lot is going to be said about how this tells of better developers on iPhone, or people caring about the…
You are going to see this article make the rounds today and last night. The imagery is telling, indeed the examples that he pulled the iPhone version looks better than its Android counter part. A lot is going to be said about how this tells of better developers on iPhone, or people caring about the iPhone more, or Apple’s development platform being better suited to design… it’s all crap. Sure parts and pieces may be true, and I am no defender of Android, but truthfully stuff looks different on different platforms.
The same app on Windows looks different than it does on the Mac ((Exception to Safari and iTunes, even though they are a little different, they are very similar.)) developers do this so that the UI matches the native UI. Safari on Windows doesn’t look very much like Windows — this can be both good and bad, but it is the reason things are made like this. Can you imagine how pissed a diehard Android user would be if the Facebook app was a direct port of the iPhone version?
[Updated: 4.8.11 at 7:09 AM]
Let me clarify what I am saying here. I am not saying that Android is pretty, or that these apps are ugly. I am simply saying that they are designed this way for a reason. Please also remember there are some hideous iPhone apps out there too and there are some nice looking Android apps. On a whole, yes iPhone apps generally look better, but that doesn’t mean that Android apps *can’t* look better.
“Good design isn’t about making decisions for your users, it’s about making those decisions irrelevant.” — Michael Lopp *Note: My apologies to Mr. Lopp as this quote was not attributed to him from the start, it appears that my quote logs in Yojimbo are not always 100% accurate. Thanks to @mbadger for pointing this out.*
*Note: My apologies to Mr. Lopp as this quote was not attributed to him from the start, it appears that my quote logs in Yojimbo are not always 100% accurate. Thanks to @mbadger for pointing this out.*
Nothing special, just a bunch of things that have been bugging me lately. 1. Blue makes for a great icon color and everyone else uses it — be the exception, not the rule. 2. Make the name of your app/service something that a normal person can pronounce, on first try, without help. 3. Spell the…
Nothing special, just a bunch of things that have been bugging me lately.
1. Blue makes for a great icon color and everyone else uses it — be the exception, not the rule.
2. Make the name of your app/service something that a normal person can pronounce, on first try, without help.
3. Spell the name like a normal person. Twitter works because it makes logical sense, spelled as it sounds. Tumblr is hard to explain to a non-tech user — tell your Mom to go to Tumblr.com and see what she types in. I don’t want to remember which consonant you doubled or which vowel you dropped. Things like Digg work because you can tell people: “it has a double g” — stray from the basics too far and your service/app will confuse people.
4. Ditto for your URL. 37signals couldn’t get basecamp.com, so they chose basecamphq.com — I can remember that and so can most people, more importantly I can *say* that: basecamp “H-Q” dot com. Don’t make it hard on the user.
5. If you are going to change a standard UI behavior, you better have good reason for it — looking cool doesn’t count.
6. People look for save buttons, if you don’t need your users to worry about saving — tell them that.
7. In fact if you change anything that a user would normally press button to do, best to tell the users that you don’t have the button and why.
7. If I am putting data into your app/service I damned well better be able to get it back out with a click — in some sort of useable format.
8. If you can’t come up with an innovative user interface — stick with generally accepted standards. ‘Unique’ is never a good word when a person is referring to your UI.
9. Beta testing is free, users understand this — but please charge for your product once you launch, that is, unless you have another reliable income stream setup already (e.g. a trust fund).
10. No one has a perfect version 1.0 product, just make it stable.
11. Look at what other apps do wrong, more than you look at what they do right — fill the voids, don’t clutter the market.
12. If you are replicating a stand alone product (e.g. Calculators) try to think about how it is best implemented on the particular interface you are building for — don’t focus on directly copying the device. (e.g. Soulver’s reinvention of the calculator UI)
This is a very neat looking and sounding machine, the Samsung Series 9 is thinner than the MacBook Air at the thickest point and thicker than the MacBook Air at the thinnest point. It costs a touch more and has a few hours less battery life. It is faster on paper and the screen is…
This is a very neat looking and sounding machine, the Samsung Series 9 is thinner than the MacBook Air at the thickest point and thicker than the MacBook Air at the thinnest point. It costs a touch more and has a few hours less battery life. It is faster on paper and the screen is much brighter. Windows slows it back down to being slow than the MacBook Air.
What intrigues me about this machine is that for a first rev ultra-portable is seems to have done very well. The speed tests are based on Windows performance and thus are likely to remain poor. If they get the resolution bumped up to match the 13″ MacBook Air, Samsung has a great option for frequent Windows travelers.
Zach Epstein: >So here we have a tablet that’s not even a month and a half old… doing somewhere north of $70 million in sales… in a market that is barely a year old and currently dominated by a single device… and it’s a flop. An interesting take, but I still am going to say that this…
Zach Epstein:
>So here we have a tablet that’s not even a month and a half old… doing somewhere north of $70 million in sales… in a market that is barely a year old and currently dominated by a single device… and it’s a flop.
An interesting take, but I still am going to say that this device will be forgotten in 6 months.
Peter Cohen: >Analysts with Deutsche Bank estimate that Motorola has shipped about 100,000 Xoom tablets since the device went on sale in February. Ouch. That $800 price point (w/o contract) sure makes this something only a few would care to buy it seems.
Peter Cohen:
>Analysts with Deutsche Bank estimate that Motorola has shipped about 100,000 Xoom tablets since the device went on sale in February.
Ouch. That $800 price point (w/o contract) sure makes this something only a few would care to buy it seems.
Tyler Galpin with an incredibly detailed look at how one goes about installing an SSD in their 2010 27″ iMac, while maintaining the stock HD: >First of all, I did this and it was a hugely ridiculous process. I learned a lot of things the hard way as I went along with the install, so…
Tyler Galpin with an incredibly detailed look at how one goes about installing an SSD in their 2010 27″ iMac, while maintaining the stock HD:
>First of all, I did this and it was a hugely ridiculous process. I learned a lot of things the hard way as I went along with the install, so hopefully this guide will help some of you through the process. Details: I have a mid-2010 27” iMac and installed this SSD to work alongside my HDD which was already factory installed in the iMac.
Great source of information if you want to make this upgrade.
“A perfectionist is someone who finishes the backside of a drawer, which I consider completely unnecessary.” — Helmut Krone (link to Wikipedia, not quote.) ((I had this quote in Yojimbo, don’t know where I found it.))