The Brooks Review

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Leica Sofort 2June 13, 2024
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  • “Apple gets back to basics in Mac OS X Lion”

    David Chartier on Lion: Just like switching between apps on an iPad or iPhone, or even restarting the device, Resume is Lion’s official support for third-party Mac apps to pick up right where they left off, even after a restart. That’s not merely a good idea in iOS, it’s just a good idea for any…

    David Chartier on Lion:

    Just like switching between apps on an iPad or iPhone, or even restarting the device, Resume is Lion’s official support for third-party Mac apps to pick up right where they left off, even after a restart. That’s not merely a good idea in iOS, it’s just a good idea for any reasonably complex computing device—especially one that is designed to multitask and juggle many apps and open windows with ease.

    That really is a killer feature — can’t wait to see Windows try and implement that one.

  • DropPhox

    I have been wanting something like this for a while: take a picture and have it instantly uploaded to DropBox. It is a great little app with a very specific user in mind: me. [via One Thing Well]

    I have been wanting something like this for a while: take a picture and have it instantly uploaded to DropBox. It is a great little app with a very specific user in mind: me.

  • Why Is Scrolling Backwards In OS X Lion?

    Leander Kahney: Confused? You will be. It undoes years of muscle memory. So why would Apple do this? Confused the heck out of me — I had to turn it off. But I do know they did this for those who are confused as to why iOS and Mac OS scroll differently.

    Leander Kahney:

    Confused? You will be. It undoes years of muscle memory. So why would Apple do this?

    Confused the heck out of me — I had to turn it off. But I do know they did this for those who are confused as to why iOS and Mac OS scroll differently.

  • 2011 MacBook Pro – CPU crunch

    Bare Feats: The fastest 2011 13″ MacBook Pro runs faster than the fastest 2010 17″ MacBook Pro. Wow and the new 17″ is really fast, impressive speed bumps.

    Bare Feats:

    The fastest 2011 13″ MacBook Pro runs faster than the fastest 2010 17″ MacBook Pro.

    Wow and the new 17″ is really fast, impressive speed bumps.

  • MLB.com At Bat 11

    It’s baseball season and that means that one of the best iOS apps is back: MLB at Bat ’11. I bought it for both the iPad and iPhone and I have to say it is just as good as ever. Go M’s

    It’s baseball season and that means that one of the best iOS apps is back: MLB at Bat ’11. I bought it for both the iPad and iPhone and I have to say it is just as good as ever.

    Go M’s

  • Moving iTunes Backup Folder

    Yesterday I was cleaning off my HD getting ready to partition it so that I could install the Lion beta. At the time I had 70 GB free and I was a little bummed that my Lion partition was going to need to be small. I started using the excellent DaisyDisk tool to analyze what…

    Yesterday I was cleaning off my HD getting ready to partition it so that I could install the Lion beta. At the time I had 70 GB free and I was a little bummed that my Lion partition was going to need to be small. I started using the excellent DaisyDisk tool to analyze what was eating all of my free space and found a culprit buried deep inside (not really) the Application Support folder.

    This folder was taking an amazing 50GB of space.

    The folder is in your user > Library > Application Support > MobileSync folder and is called ‘Backup’. I am wary of deleting any folder with the title ‘Backup’ and some research on DuckDuckGo and Twitter turned up that this is the folder iTunes uses to store iPhone backups. Mine is so large because of all the iOS beta builds that I use. I ended up deleting a bunch of the old backups (you can read the Info.plist file to see what device and sync date the file is for), but I still had over 8 GB of data in the folder.

    I don’t keep my iTunes library on my Mac, I keep it on an external drive, which means that when I sync I need to be plugged into that drive to begin with. So I wanted to move the Backup folder off of my Mac and onto that drive — luckily you can do this with a simple symbolic link and the entire operation is detailed here.

    If you are low on space I recommend taking a look at this — might save you a few GBs.

    [Updated: 2.25.11 at 10:03 AM]

    You can also delete these backups in your iTunes prefs, but I recommend getting the folder off your Mac if you can.

  • OS X Lion Adds TRIM

    TRIM support is key to the long-term viability of SSD based storage, glad to see that it has been added.

    TRIM support is key to the long-term viability of SSD based storage, glad to see that it has been added.

  • [PSA] Girl Scout Cookies

    I got lucky on Sunday and a friend of my wife’s hooked us up with a lot of Girl Scout cookies (we paid). Here’s the thing: I bought seven boxes of Thin Mints — why? Because Thin Mints are clearly the best, I don’t care what you think. The Girl Scouts should be showing up…

    I got lucky on Sunday and a friend of my wife’s hooked us up with a lot of Girl Scout cookies (we paid). Here’s the thing: I bought seven boxes of Thin Mints — why? Because Thin Mints are clearly the best, I don’t care what you think.

    The Girl Scouts should be showing up at a location near you soon and I highly recommend that you buy copious amounts of their cookies.

    A Side Note for Those in Seattle

    Say its four months from now and you really would like a Thin Mint fix, if you are in Seattle you can get Thin Mints year round — so long as you don’t mind them mixed with delicious mint ice cream. It’s called Scout Mint and you can get it here.

  • I Feel the NEED, The Need for Speed

    How do you get users to adopt a piece of software that is ugly and unintuitive? You make it stupidly fast. That’s exactly what Google has done with Chrome 10. When the beta was announced, I read up and saw what seemed to be unreal benchmarks for the javascript speed. Since removing Flash from my…

    How do you get users to adopt a piece of software that is ugly and unintuitive? You make it stupidly fast.

    That’s exactly what Google has done with Chrome 10. When the beta was announced, I read up and saw what seemed to be unreal benchmarks for the javascript speed. Since removing Flash from my Mac (thus removing it from Safari) I have kept an up-to-date version of Chrome for accessing the rare Flash site and I decided to see if I could ‘switch’ to the new Chrome 10.

    I am happy to say that Chrome 10 is much faster than Safari, but still ugly as sin and a touch unpolished in many facets. It’s not just the ugliness factor of Chrome that I find troubling, there are some very real tradeoffs that I faced in moving from Safari to Chrome.

    The UI

    I don’t love the way Safari looks, but I do like that it feels right on Mac OS X. Chrome though just looks out of place — not in the way that a ported Windows app looks, but it very much is not like the “others”. Here are the main gripes that I have with the UI:

    • Tabs at the top. I didn’t like it when the beta versions of Safari did this and I still don’t care for it in Chrome.
    • No toolbar customization. I can’t remove the back/forward and refresh buttons, even though I never click them. Likewise I can’t remove the icons that are added when I install a new extension — I don’t know what that crap is.
    • The bookmarks bar is fine, except that it insists on showing a small icon next to the name. This is probably fine for ‘normal’ users, but I have a ton of folders and bookmarklets in the bookmarks bar — meaning I see white paper icons next to the bookmarklets and goofy outdated blue folder icons for all the folders. ((Outdated in the sense that I hate the default OS X folder icon.))

    Again, for the most part these are minor annoyances, ones that I can work around and eventually learn to live with.

    Speed

    The difference in speed is unreal. It is without a doubt leaps and bounds faster than Safari in practical use. Visiting sites that utilize Typekit (like this blog) will really show you the difference — they just load faster. What really won me over though was the speed that Chrome loads my Mint stats. Those panes used to take a good while to load up in Safari, now they just snap into place — it’s surreal.

    It doesn’t matter to me if things actually are faster, or if the speed is just perceived (meaning Google is using visual tricks to make it appear to load sites faster) all I know is that everything feels faster. If you don’t believe me try it for yourself because it is noticeable right away.

    H.264

    I had forgotten that Google decided to no longer support HTML5 + H.264 as a standard. I have enabled a Flash blocking plugin for Chrome, and I really do miss all the nice smooth video playback that I got out of Safari. This is the biggest trouble spot for me so far: how do I playback video smoothly without overheating my Air? It was no problem in Safari because 99% of the time I could watch beautiful HTML5 delivered media, but Chrome throws a wrench in this process.

    So now where I used to reserve Chrome for Flash playback — I now reserve Safari for general video playback. A rather silly setup.

    Tab Behavior

    One of the greatest things that I found in Chrome (besides the speed) is that when you have multiple tabs open you can open another and when you close the new tab you are taken back to the last tab you were viewing. This is incredibly neat and very helpful when you have a bunch of stuff open. Safari does not do this and has always been a point of contention for me — I used to prefer to open a new window at times so I didn’t “lose” the tab I was reading.

    Downloads Bar

    A downloads window makes seeing downloads easy, as does a progress bar. A huge bar across the bottom of the screen, or a separate tab to view downloads, is just silly feeling. Further a dial like indicator of download progress is unhelpful. I also don’t like the way a single bit of data is displayed on the downloads page — hate it in fact.

    I don’t download a ton, but that little arrow animation that appears when you start a download isn’t helping anyone. I mean a huge bar already appears at the bottom of the screen — why do you need both?

    Opening Bookmark Folders

    This is a feature I use in Safari all the time — click on a bookmarks folder in the bookmarks bar and open all the links in tabs. I love doing that first thing in the morning to check in on a bunch of sites before I dive into email. Chrome doesn’t do this as far as I can tell — that presents a large annoyance to me every morning.

    [Updated: 2.25.11 at 6:37 AM] I am told that right clicking the folder icon will allow me to do this. So you can strike this one.

    Surprisingly, you can change the default search engine from Google to whatever you want it to be (unlike how Safari restricts the options). For me that meant changing from Google to the excellent and growing DuckDuckGo search engine — I am loving this feature.

    Extensions

    Chrome may have had extensions long before Safari, but Safari has better extensions. There were a ton of them that I couldn’t find to replace simple extensions I have for Safari.

    Result

    By the time you read this I will have switched back to Safari. I really like Chrome 10 and the speed it brings, but it still is not quite there. Don’t let the ‘10’ version number fool you, because Chrome is just now starting to feel like a 1.0 version. This is endemic to the way that Google operates, luckily version 15 is probably just around the corner.

    The bottom line is that while Chrome may load things much faster than Safari — I work much slower in Chrome and that means Safari overall is still faster for me.

  • Spotting Influencers in Big Companies

    Lauren Cox reporting a on new business tool for analyzing your internal communications network: Johnson says Syndio Social also works with companies undergoing mergers and acquisitions. “It’s making sure the right folks who hold things together aren’t fired in the merger,” he says. “If you have a company that has three people who tie things…

    Lauren Cox reporting a on new business tool for analyzing your internal communications network:

    Johnson says Syndio Social also works with companies undergoing mergers and acquisitions. “It’s making sure the right folks who hold things together aren’t fired in the merger,” he says. “If you have a company that has three people who tie things together, even if they aren’t the highest performers in numbers, you want to make sure they stay.”

    Pretty great tool if it works.

  • CrunchGear’s Motorola Xoom Review

    John Biggs: Is it – or will it be – the best Honeycomb tablet out there? I doubt it, but Motorola has offered a strong showing out of the gate and I was very impressed at the build quality and attention to detail, at least when it came to UI and physical design. From what…

    John Biggs:

    Is it – or will it be – the best Honeycomb tablet out there? I doubt it, but Motorola has offered a strong showing out of the gate and I was very impressed at the build quality and attention to detail, at least when it came to UI and physical design.

    From what I have seen that sounds like a pretty accurate summation. I found this but odd though:

    Battery life is about 18-20 hours on one charge although your mileage may vary.

    Especially when Engadget says they only got about 8 hours and 20 minutes.

    Though 18-20 hours of battery life would be killer — something tells me that CrunchGear is a little (a lot really) off.

  • Engadget’s Motorola Xoom Review

    Joshua Topolsky reviewing the Moto Xoom: One other big note: a lot of the new software feels like it isn’t quite out of beta (surprise surprise). We had our fair share of force closes and bizarre freezes, particularly in the Market app and Movie Studio. Most applications were fine, but there definitely some moments where…

    Joshua Topolsky reviewing the Moto Xoom:

    One other big note: a lot of the new software feels like it isn’t quite out of beta (surprise surprise). We had our fair share of force closes and bizarre freezes, particularly in the Market app and Movie Studio. Most applications were fine, but there definitely some moments where we felt like the whole device was teetering on the brink of a total crash.

    He later says:

    Is the Xoom a real competitor to the iPad? Absolutely. In fact, it outclasses the iPad in many ways.

    Only to later follow that up in the same paragraph saying:

    Honeycomb and the Xoom are spectacular — unfortunately they’re a spectacular work in progress.

    I am not knocking Topolsky here, but honestly you can’t say that something that is full of bugs and crashes with new apps even designed for it is a true iPad competitor at this point. A more accurate description would be that it has everything it needs to be a great competitor, but needs more stable software and more third party apps.

    Because who wants to drop $800 on a “work in progress”?

  • Using Your iPad as a Business Productivity Tool

    Dave Caolo has written a book on using your iPad as a business tool. If you don’t buy this I will be sad and Dave will be sad — so in effect buying this book makes the world a touch happier. Here’s what Dave has to say about the book: I’ll then wrap the whole…

    Dave Caolo has written a book on using your iPad as a business tool. If you don’t buy this I will be sad and Dave will be sad — so in effect buying this book makes the world a touch happier. Here’s what Dave has to say about the book:

    I’ll then wrap the whole thing up with my best tips and tricks.

    That alone is worth it.

  • The Droid is Dead

    “Droid Does” Remember seeing that tag line everywhere? I do, I used to see it on the same billboard everyday on my way into work. It was the anti-iPhone, anti-Apple statement made by the biggest U.S. wireless carrier (you know the one that just got the iPhone). It wasn’t about Android or Google — it…

    “Droid Does”

    Remember seeing that tag line everywhere? I do, I used to see it on the same billboard everyday on my way into work. It was the anti-iPhone, anti-Apple statement made by the biggest U.S. wireless carrier (you know the one that just got the iPhone). It wasn’t about Android or Google — it was about Droid and Droid was and is Verizon.((Verizon licensed the term Droid from Lucas.)) It is a play on Star Wars — a term that all geeks know means business.

    “Droid does apps.”

    “Rule the Air”

    Verizon was in PR heaven with monthly rumors of when the iPhone would finally come to Verizon — hell they were made the best wireless network in the U.S. specifically because they didn’t offer the iPhone. That is what you call a win for your company — when you don’t sell the hottest phone on the market, yet your brand recognition and strength only improves — impressive. They kept rolling out tagline after tagline in a PR blitz.

    Then…

    The inevitable finally happened and Apple announced a Verizon iPhone in front of a limitedly excited crowd — after all it wasn’t anything that new, just something we could all say “finally” about. February 10th was the day that Verizon stores around the country were preparing for lines like we have seen for previous iPhone launches. Many people predicted massive lines… then nothing. There were more tumbleweeds blowing by then people in line for the Verizon iPhone.

    Don’t get me wrong, the Verizon iPhone is certainly a hit and a welcomed addition to the family, but it didn’t spark mass hysteria. Verizon now bombards us with commercials playing to the perceived strength of their network over rival AT&T’s.

    Which only leaves me to wonder if Droid still — well — ‘does’.

    The current Verizon homepage says it all, they lead with this iPhone 4 banner:

    They follow with this one about some silly looking device from 1995:

    Then they follow with this Android banner — that amazingly doesn’t promote the Droid line:

    Finally they get to the Droid phones, but only showing them as pre-owned devices:

    That is a telling tale: Droid’s are the 4th item on the rotating banner and are seen only under the basement title of “pre-owned”. It would seem that Droid has been sent to a beautiful farm land where it can run free…

    “Droid is dead” — is basically what I am saying here.

    I don’t mean that Verizon won’t ship or sell any more Droid phones, but they aren’t interested in wasting anymore money advertising the brand. I think this is done for a very good and logical reason:

    1. The iPhone is more desired and well known than the Droid brand — why waste money on a losing cause.
    2. It’s the iPhone versus the non-iPhones — consumers don’t care if it is an HTC Whatever or Droid, they just want to know if it is a smartphone or an iPhone.
    3. If you aren’t an iPhone then you better be cheap — that’s the message Verizon is sending in the above banners. You pay big bucks for the iPhone or you can buy lesser, iPhone clones, for a lower price.

    Those are not meant to be knocks against Android, but it is what I glean to be the thought process of non-geek consumers. The same consumers that walk into a Verizon store not knowing what they want already. Verizon knows that the only phone these customers are likely to know about is the iPhone and that matters. That explains why the Droid is basically dead as a heavily promoted brand.

    With that said, Droid, welcome to the category known as “not an iPhone”.

  • Mac OS X Lion

    And now, the most important announcement today: Lion. Here are some key highlights of Lion: Mail 5: “Just like Mail on iPad, Mail 5 in Mac OS X Lion features a new layout that takes advantage of the widescreen display on your Mac.” Finally. AirDrop: “With AirDrop in Mac OS X Lion, you can send…

    And now, the most important announcement today: Lion. Here are some key highlights of Lion:

    • Mail 5: “Just like Mail on iPad, Mail 5 in Mac OS X Lion features a new layout that takes advantage of the widescreen display on your Mac.” Finally.
    • AirDrop: “With AirDrop in Mac OS X Lion, you can send files to anyone around you — wirelessly.” Sounds an awful lot like DropCopy, but I am happy to see this kind of tech make its way to the Mac.
    • OS X Server is also bundled in and comes with this gem: “Lion Server delivers wireless file sharing for iPad. Enabling WebDAV in Lion Server gives iPad users the ability to access, copy, and share documents on the server from applications such as Keynote, Numbers, and Pages.” That is sweet and makes a killer reason to have a little Mac server around for your company. ((I say little because a Mac mini should be perfectly suited.))

    The best part: Apple usually saves some juicy stuff for launch day, can’t wait.

  • New MacBook Pros

    Thunderbolt is real and should clearly be showing Apple’s hand in regard to USB 3.0 — meaning I bet the stay with Thunderbolt + USB 2.0 for a while. If Thunderbolt takes off they will never have a need for USB 3. The new Pros also feature the new FaceTime HD camera, touting 3 times…

    Thunderbolt is real and should clearly be showing Apple’s hand in regard to USB 3.0 — meaning I bet the stay with Thunderbolt + USB 2.0 for a while. If Thunderbolt takes off they will never have a need for USB 3. The new Pros also feature the new FaceTime HD camera, touting 3 times the resolution and better low-light performance — two areas that really needed improvement.

    Also: everything else is touch faster.

  • FaceTime for Mac

    Apple has released FaceTime for $0.99 in the Mac App Store. It has the additional support of HD video calling, which means FaceTime cameras should be getting a bit better. (Personally I would like to see some software side stabilization on iPhones during FaceTime calls — feels like the Blair Witch Project with all that…

    Apple has released FaceTime for $0.99 in the Mac App Store. It has the additional support of HD video calling, which means FaceTime cameras should be getting a bit better. (Personally I would like to see some software side stabilization on iPhones during FaceTime calls — feels like the Blair Witch Project with all that shakiness.)

  • Leaked Windows Phone 7 ads challenge your phone head-to-head

    Now this is closer to what I was talking about.

    Now this is closer to what I was talking about.

  • Gruber on Why In-App Subscriptions Are a Good Thing

    John Gruber: Again, if this subscription policy knocks a bunch of good apps out of the store, sure, that’ll be bad for iOS users. But that hasn’t happened, and clearly, Apple thinks it isn’t going to happen. That’s what I have been saying.

    John Gruber:

    Again, if this subscription policy knocks a bunch of good apps out of the store, sure, that’ll be bad for iOS users. But that hasn’t happened, and clearly, Apple thinks it isn’t going to happen.

    That’s what I have been saying.

  • A good demonstration of Light Peak/Thunderbolt

    Now that is cool. [via DF]

    Now that is cool.

    [via DF]