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  • [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]

  • An interview with Rob Janoff, designer of the Apple logo

    Great stuff.

    Great stuff.

  • “OmniFocus Barriers to Entry”

    J. Eddie Smith, IV on why you should and shouldn’t buy OmniFocus: Like any power tool, OmniFocus’s features are best appreciated if you come to OmniFocus with a real need for those features. It will probably fail in utility if you try to fit your workflow to the features. Don’t buy bandaids so you can…

    J. Eddie Smith, IV on why you should and shouldn’t buy OmniFocus:

    Like any power tool, OmniFocus’s features are best appreciated if you come to OmniFocus with a real need for those features. It will probably fail in utility if you try to fit your workflow to the features. Don’t buy bandaids so you can cut your arm.

    I think he is dead wrong here. One of the greatest assets of OmniFocus is the fact that it is an incredibly flexible piece of software that can — and will — adapt to most user’s workflows. You don’t need to understand action versus project, or even know what a context is, you just need to understand how those parts of the app work together with each other.

    I can guarantee you that I don’t use OmniFocus in the same way that someone like Merlin Mann uses it and that he uses it differently than the next guy — that is precisely why I an unequivocally recommend the app to anyone. I know that OmniFocus will transform into what any user needs it to be in order to get work done.

    Beyond price, the real barrier to entry for OmniFocus is not a lack of GTD understanding — it is a lack of OmniFocus understanding. You absolutely must take time and use the app, once you do that you will begin to see just how you can slot it right into your workflow.

    (I buy bandaids in case of a cut on my arm, because I know that I will need them at some point.)

  • Three Reasons I Don’t Use Twitterrific

    Dave Caolo lists three reasons that he uses Twitterrific on the Mac, which is funny because I think they are three reasons why you shouldn’t use Twitterrific.

    Dave Caolo lists three reasons that he uses Twitterrific on the Mac, which is funny because I think they are three reasons why you shouldn’t use Twitterrific.

  • Sprint & T-Mobile’s Fate

    A quick visit to both Sprint and T-Mobile’s websites will show you two companies that are hocking cheap Android phones — no exclusive brands that are set to entice anybody born in the last 40 years. The last big “win” for T-Mobile was getting the first “Google” phone, the G1, way back when. The last…

    A quick visit to both Sprint and T-Mobile’s websites will show you two companies that are hocking cheap Android phones — no exclusive brands that are set to entice anybody born in the last 40 years. The last big “win” for T-Mobile was getting the first “Google” phone, the G1, way back when. The last win for Sprint was the EVO — and that was only because it was hilariously large, with a power hungry 4G antenna in it.

    Fast forward to right now and both companies provoke a contagious *YAWN* effect on me. Before they could team up with Verizon and berate AT&T for crappy coverage and push Android phones on to unsuspecting consumers, but now they are relegated to being two smaller carriers with no iPhone.

    Not a comfortable position to be in.

    Sprint has a ton of corporate customers that stem back to the days when they had the best mobile coverage in D.C. and when they merged with Nextel (you know the original push to talk guys). T-Mobile has a bunch of fans of Catherine Zeta-Jones and magenta lovers. ((Not really, please don’t email me about this.))

    I think T-Mobile will be fine in the long run, they have a small but loyal following and a network that is already compatible with the iPhone. It would be simple for Apple to get the iPhone on T-Mobile and my guess would be that the next version of the iPhone will be available on T-Mobile — it just makes sense at this point. ((Not to mention that once people started unlocking their iPhones they began using them on T-Mobile and, surprisingly, T-Mobile has always embraced this practice.))

    Sprint’s story is a different one though. They are making a hard push for 4G devices and they run on a CDMA network. While the Verizon version of the iPhone should be able to work on Sprint, it isn’t as simple of an argument for Sprint to get the iPhone. For one Sprint seems like a stodgy antiquated company ((Their CEO walks around in B&W on the commercials for crying out loud.)) and I am not sure that they see an immediate need to get the iPhone. Perhaps they wait until a 4G one comes out, perhaps not. While I am not saying that there won’t be a Sprint iPhone, I am saying that it doesn’t seem to match the feature set the company has been pushing for quite a while now. Sprint likes to tout 4G speed (they own part of Clear that provides a lot of that speed) and they like to tout rugged construction type phones and lastly at the opposite end they like to show smart business savvy phones. What they don’t ever show is fun — and fun is what the iPhone is all about.

    Carrying the iPhone would go against what both companies seem to be marketing right now: faster phones on faster networks. They aren’t marketing reliability or snazzy phones, but they are dinging AT&T and Verizon on network speeds. All of the major U.S. carriers are trying to roll out their version of “4G” networks as fast as they can, but it is T-Mobile that has now really gone on the offensive against AT&T about network speed.

    How can T-Mobile go back on this now if they were to offer the iPhone that only does 3G speeds? Their 3G network is, in use, slower than AT&T’s. It seems funny that a industry that used to be everyone versus AT&T and the iPhone has now become one that is the little guys versus AT&T and Verizon.

    The way I see it Sprint and T-Mobile have two options:

    1. Continue this silly fight the way it is right now, where you attack the slower competitors networks, to only fold eventually when Apple grants you access to the iPhone. Then hope that the iPhone keeps your customer base intact for the next five years.
    2. Accept that customers don’t care about anything you have to offer and figure out what to give them that they actually care about. I would start with pricing and customer service. From there I would call Microsoft and start to get some sweet Windows Phone 7 exclusives on my network. Then I would call HP and get some hot ass WebOS devices too. The iPhone only wins if everyone decides it’s not worth fighting against.

    Choose option 2 — please.

  • More on iPad Usage in Meetings

    David Sparks weighs in on how he uses the iPad in meetings: Instead, I use it to make me look brilliant. I’m okay with that.

    David Sparks weighs in on how he uses the iPad in meetings:

    Instead, I use it to make me look brilliant. I’m okay with that.

  • Matt Drance on the Subscription Mess

    Matt Drance: Are Apple staffers seriously going to check every vendor website for sale prices on a regular basis? A great question. The short answer: no way.

    Matt Drance:

    Are Apple staffers seriously going to check every vendor website for sale prices on a regular basis?

    A great question. The short answer: no way.

  • Quick Response (QR) Codes on Permits

    Mayor (of New York) Mike Bloomberg’s Blog: By scanning the QR code on these documents, New Yorkers will learn more information about who is performing this work, including the addresses and telephone numbers of property owners and job applicants, which is typically a licensed architect or engineer or general contractor on the project. That’s a…

    Mayor (of New York) Mike Bloomberg’s Blog:

    By scanning the QR code on these documents, New Yorkers will learn more information about who is performing this work, including the addresses and telephone numbers of property owners and job applicants, which is typically a licensed architect or engineer or general contractor on the project.

    That’s a clever use.