As I’ve said repeatedly here, on Twitter and elsewhere, Alfred is simply amazing. I can’t really think of any other single app that has impacted my daily workflow so significantly for the better. Pedro Lobo over at Mac AppStorm goes over some of the baiscs.
The Verge’s Nilay Patel:
The final moments in the battle to replace the cable box will be easy to recognize — it’s when you can simply flip on an Apple TV or a PS3 or a Roku box and it’s already playing something. It’s when the streaming services start making choices for you — choices that up until now have been made by network executives acting on a hunch and a prayer. Netflix’s recommendation engine is great at showing things you might want to start watching, but imagine if Netflix was just already playing your own personal Mad Men marathon when you flipped on the TV. Or if your Xbox was smart enough to know that you’d be watching the Nets game if you only knew it was on.
Very smart article. Nilay really outdid himself with his writing here.
Macworld author Dan Moren brings up some relevant iCloud weaknesses. At its heart, there’s one huge problem:
Tying files to apps has its advantages, to be sure. But Apple’s way of implementing has a cost: Sharing files between applications is more difficult and unwieldy now than it was before.
Caitlin Johnston, reporting for Poynter:
Baan made the image Wednesday night after the storm, using the new Canon 1D X with the new 24-70mm lens on full open aperture. The camera was set at 25,000 ISO, with a 1/40th of a second shutter speed.
“[It was] the kind of shot which was impossible to take before this camera was there,” Baan said.
I knew the instant I saw that amazing Manhattan shot that it was low light and shot fairly quick. But 1/40th of a second?! Tells you how far camera technology has come.
Tech writer Bob Cringely:
What Steve Ballmer and Microsoft need to do is clean up their act, quietly trim expenses, maybe even sell a few product lines, and start to seriously stash away cash toward the post-Windows, post-Office world of 2018.
Yes, post-Office. What else can be meant by bundling Office with Windows RT than its value is headed to zero?
If Microsoft can continue to pretend it is big while actually becoming small, they might end up in 2018 with a small residual product line sitting atop $100 billion in cash.
I’m pretty hooked on a workflow of plain text lists synced with Dropbox. That said, Clear for iPhone is pretty slick and now that they actually will be introducing syncing via the Mac…it looks a bit tempting. Available next week on the Mac App Store.
If you’re a developer or designer and use a text editor regularly, knowing keyboard shortcuts is a huge productivity booster. This quick primer over at the PeepCode blog is a nice starting point.
After a day and a half without power in lower Manhattan I’m finally back for at least a few hours. My hats off to tech site The Verge – their studio and much of their staff is without power and internet and yet they are still chugging away on all the big news from Apple and Google this week.
Unbelievably they still delivered a full 90 Seconds on The Verge video episode…under what appears to be the Manhattan bridge. Nuts.
John Siracusa:
Microsoft’s mistake is subtle, but potentially fatal. It’s the seemingly reasonable assumption that defending its market position is the most important goal of any corporate strategy. Microsoft will fail by succeeding. Through its competent, intelligent, practiced execution of a well-honed plan to maintain its dominance, Microsoft will assure its eventual demise.
Put simply, to win in the long run, Microsoft must be willing to risk losing it all. It must be willing to put all its chips on the table, to throw away decades of hard-fought victories, proven technologies, and market-leading products. It must be willing to do what the long-extinct corporate giants of the past were not.
John wrote this over at Ars Technica…in 2005. Given Microsoft’s big bet on Surface, it’s a relevent piece that found itself trending high on Hacker News earlier this week.
I’ve been a big fan of the “no distractions” Twitter entry app Wren for a while now but I’ve been increasingly worried regarding its lack of recent updates.
Enter Eggy. It’s a free, super simple Mac App where with a single keyboard shortcut you can leverage Mountain Lion’s built in Twitter, Facebook and Messages functionality on demand. Super simple, but it does the job so far.