06.29.12 |
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At least on a hardware level, this is pretty crazy stuff. Quoting from the review on its build quality:
The Nexus 7’s construction is downright impressive. While I haven’t been doing regular tablet reviews (that has become Anand’s domain largely), I have handled a number of recent tablets big and small, and some feel downright cheap to me thanks to the back plastic. I would not have guessed that the Nexus 7 is a $199 device based on how it feels. There’s no flex or creaking at all, it feels absolutely rigid.
and on the display:
ASUS notes that the panel is an LED backlit IPS panel with 10 point multitouch and 400 nits maximum brightness. Resolution is of course WXGA (1280 x 800) at 7″. If you do the math out, that’s a pretty high PPI, and in person it looks great – I can’t see pixels unless I look very closely.
Speed tests on the browser benchmark are very impressive, occasionally even beating the iPad 3rd gen.
06.28.12 |
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I’m a bit intrigued by this new paid venture by music journalist David Greenwald, the founder of Rawkblog. For three bucks a month you get two recommended albums sent to your Spotify inbox every week, along with a “custom made personal mixtape” that’s curated for you by a human being based off your Spotify or last.fm profile.
In this era of digital curation based on complex algorithms, there’s something refreshing about Mercury’s endeavor. I might give it a try.
06.28.12 |
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The New York Times’ David Segal:
By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay — well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour. The company also offers very good benefits for a retailer, including health care, 401(k) contributions and the chance to buy company stock, as well as Apple products, at a discount.
But Apple is not selling polo shirts or yoga pants. Divide revenue by total number of employees and you find that last year, each Apple store employee — that includes non-sales staff like technicians and people stocking shelves — brought in $473,000.
“These are sales rates for a consulting company,” said Horace Dediu, an analyst who blogged about the calculation on the site Asymco. Electronics and appliance stores typically post $206,000 in revenue per employee, according to the latest figures from the National Retail Federation.
Excellent article. It’s pleasing to see how treating your customers like decent human beings can double revenue per employee. Yet, as the article suggests, a lot more could be done for Apple Store employees. This problem is really more political than technical; Apple is far from alone on keeping their employee wages fairly low. Yet as with the Foxconn workers, I hold Apple to a higher standard. They can do more
06.27.12 |
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I can’t really agree with Jacob Penderworth much at all here – I’ve found Twitter’s web client enhancements heavy on the discovery side, which isn’t high on my priority list. Compare that with what Osfoora for Mac already has – super quick list switching, Instapaper native support, Tweet Marker – it’s already heads and above more useful than the default web experience.
That said, Jacob’s article is interesting. I completely agree that a simple Fluid app could be a solid solution for many, especially for more casual Twitter users.
06.26.12 |
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The Macdrifter:
Twitter is great. I funnel a lot of stuff from Twitter into Instapaper and Pinboard. But Twitter is a flowing river. I am not on Twitter all day so I miss the clever banter and people complaining about Twitter. RSS is time-shifted.
He’s dead on here. I get so sick of people deeming RSS “worthless.” At least a third of the links I post here derive from RSS, along with much of my Instapaper queue. I find scanning through a long (occasionally 300 plus) single list of unread RSS items still the most efficient way to keep up with tech and film news. Flipboard, Pulse and every other alternative out there can’t come close to its speed.
06.25.12 |
Miscellany |
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Writer/blogger Kyle Baxter on the ideal newspaper for the future:
Here’s what it is: an organization whose goal is to be the only place readers need to go to find out what’s going on that’s important (coverage) and what’s meaningful about news events and relevant issues (insight and context). Go deep on certain subjects (politics, technology, sports) and make their writing on it so good that anyone interested in the subject has no choice but to read it.
I use to read The New York Times obsessively – the headlines every morning, usually at least fifteen articles out of the Saturday and Sunday edition when I had more time. No more. I rely on Reuters and BBC more for headlines, RSS, blogs and Twitter for deep dives in subjects like tech, politics, gaming and film. If I could somehow segment off just the NYT politics and film section for a reduced price, I would.
06.19.12 |
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Developer Nicholas Zakas:
I have a theory. That theory is that software engineers see themselves very differently than those with whom they work. I’ve come to this conclusion after over a decade in the software industry working at companies large and small. Companies (product managers, designers, other managers) tend to look at software engineers as builders. It’s the job of the product manager to dream up what to build, the job of the designer to make it aesthetically pleasing, and the job of the engineer to build what they came up with. Basically, engineers are looked at as the short-order cooks of the industry.
Great article. As Nick goes on to argue, good developers are much more than “builders”. We’re creative minds and demand to be treated as such.
06.18.12 |
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If you use Sublime Text 2, mastering keyboard shortcuts is essential. Programmer Josh Earl’s primer is a great start; if you’re a CSS guy, Sublime’s shortcut for swapping lines saves massive time.
06.15.12 |
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I read all the time how the cable, TV and movie industry will collapse under the weight of the internet and other new tech…but, as analyst Dan Frommer writes, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. (It’s all about who holds the content.)
06.14.12 |
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Tim Stevens likes it, but there’s a problem:
The primary Apple apps — Safari, Mail, the address book, etc. — have all been tweaked to make use of all these wonderful pixels. Sadly, little else has. While we got assurances that third-party apps like Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD are in the process of being refined, right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible.
Yes, terrible. Unlike a PC, where getting a higher-res display just means tinier buttons to click on, here OS X is actively scaling things up so that they maintain their size. This means that non-optimized apps, which would otherwise be displayed as tiny things, instead are displayed in their normal physical dimensions with blurry, muddy edges.
This is a serious issue, one I hope Apple makes easily correctable for Mac developers. A even bigger issue is web imagery; i’m seeing many designers on my Twitter feed complain about the sharpness of web images up against well defined text.