August 2010
15 posts
5 tags
Playing Devil's Advocate
We all want the iPhone 4 to come out on Verizon, but do Apple and Verizon want that to happen?
Let’s make these assumptions, based on what I’ve heard and read:
A sizeable amount of AT&T iPhone users would switch to Verizon if they offered the iPhone.
A sizeable amount of Verizon Android users would switch to the iPhone if offered by Verizon.
Android phones are made available...
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Google RSS Extension for Chrome →
If you’re using Google Chrome and RSS, you’re going to want this extension. It sure beats pulling feed URL’s from source code.
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Best Viewed at 125%?
Roughly a couple weeks ago, I decided to do an experiment: full-screen browsing at 125% zoom. After 12 days, here’s my thoughts.
The upsides:
Cleaner and sharper text that I can read from farther away from the screen.
It’s easy to concentrate on the browser window when there’s nothing else to look at.
The downsides:
Images are blurry and less sharp.
Javascript bugs can...
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Meijer Find-It App →
If you’re in the Grand Rapids area, give this a shot the next time you walk into Meijer. The app will allow you to pinpoint the location of any item in the store. Sounds cool, cheesy and amazing at the same time. It’s the Cheetos of iPhone apps!
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Evom →
Evom is a drag’n’drop video converter & downloader for OSX. I love anything that makes video conversion quicker and more painless.
(via onethingwell)
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The Next-Generation OS
Imagine your desktop screen was a large multitouch touchscreen, and the computer driving it was powered by iOS or Android, optimized for the desktop. You have no mouse, but you have a hardware keyboard. For things like Photoshop, you have a pen that you can use on the screen for more precise work.
Also, for the sake of argument, assume that all your favorite applications were ported over to a...
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Inkling - Interactive textbooks for iPad →
Back in April, a group of book publishers that sponsor the university program I was in held their annual event on campus. I talked to a couple of the people from them, explaining how I thought that there was so much untapped potential in interactive books on mobile devices, particularly textbooks. Most ebooks are simple streams of text, great for reading novels but hardly ideal for textbooks....
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Hibari - a More Compact Twitter App for the Mac →
I’ve been using Hibari in place of Tweetie today, and I do like its compactness compared to Tweetie, without sacrificing readability like Twitterrific. It also has a few interesting features for filtering, which Tweetie doesn’t have. It also supports retweet replacement, so that the retweeted tweet shows up instead of the “RT:” that the user posted. It’s a nice...
Mandating FM Radios in Phones? →
It sounds absurd on the surface, but when a tornado is about to level your house, there aren’t any good notification mechanisms other than radio and TV, and with people not buying radios anymore, you need something.
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My Latest Experiment
I’ve switched browsers yet again, this time to the Chrome Beta on the Mac. The thing I really like about it: a very usable full-screen view. With a dual-monitor setup, I can use one display just for browsing, and remove all the needless UI elements. If I need the monitor for something, I simply use Spaces to clear it off the screen and pull up another window.
This means that I have a...
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Awesome Twitter Buttons for Awesome Tumblr Blogs
Twitter is launching official Tweet buttons for your websites!
A little disclaimer: At time of post, there’s no official announcement from Twitter itself about these buttons, so Twitter could theoretically yank this. Also, the Mashable article I linked to above says that the ability to retweet does not work for all users, though I have no issues with it so I can’t verify that this...
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Playing With Expectations
I wish I had a mailbox that could send letters through time. (I’m pretty sure there was a romance film with that premise but I can’t remember the name of it, unfortunately. Something about a lake, I think.) Then, I would be able to plan for circumstances impossible to foresee. Right now I’d like to send a letter to 2013 that asks:
Are PC’s and Macs the same now as they...
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Google Wave Makes its Final Splash
I should caution you: the following paragraph is drowning in wave-related puns.
Today, Google announced that it has finally sunk Google Wave. It was announced with a tsunami of hype, but soon after release the internet was flooded with a deluge of confusion and bafflement. Now, it’s finally slipped beneath the waves. Why did Google’s new, titanic collaboration protocol fail to surf...