Marco Arment shares a wonderful bit of feedback from Instapaper user Aaron Lammer:
[T]hank you for creating something that encourages, rather than replaces, thought.
Wonderfully put. Great advice for anyone creating an application. Don’t treat your users like idiots. Let them be smart, and create something to help them be smart.
Michael Lopp said similar things on this subject about Dropbox. Although he describes this kind of software as “dumb”.
To my knowledge, Joost is the first free application to stream TV shows, or mainstream video content in general, to the iPhone.
A couple catches: 1) Joost has a less-than-spectacular catalog, 2) it’s buggy as hell (crashed several times when I attempted to watch feature films), and 3) only works on wi-fi.
Joel Johnson at Boing Boing Gadgets has a roundup of BlackBerry Storm reviews, RIM’s latest phone which was obviously meant to disrupt the iPhone’s growth as it rockets past RIM.
Simon Pegg, well-know british actor, effectively dismantles the recent fast-zombie trend in a guest article for The Guardian. Pegg is a better writer then I expected:
More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.
Pegg became one of my favorite actors after the release of Shaun of the Dead in 2004, it’s a brilliant and hilarious zombie romantic comedy (or as they call it,”RomZomCom”), and I highly recommend it.
A free iTunes controller for OS X, customizable with HTML CSS and Javascript. Beautiful and simple.
Mac desktop application unifies Twitter, Flickr and feed subscriptions (among other services like Facebook and Digg). It has some very annoying quirks, but overall it’s a useful combination of three services I use regularly.
Via Kyle Baxter.
Say what you will about President-elect Barack Obama, but if there is one leader to leverage the greatest information network in history to serve democracy, he’s that leader.
I recommend reading the page regarding Obama’s agenda for technology. You can even submit your own ideas from the web.
Bonafide
November 4 2008I’m very pleased to announce advertising is available for Cameron.io. I’ve joined Fusion Ads, a high-quality, invite-only ad network with ten other great websites like my friends Shawnblanc.net and Nobody Wants A Stylus.
Fusion Ads displays one simple, tasteful, advertisement on each page, comprised of a small image and a line of text. Fusion Ads is headed by Michael Mistretta, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with him this past month creating the layout and logo for Fusion.
I’ve always hoped Cameron.io would eventually sustain itself, and thanks to Fusion Ads, I can devote more time here.
Thank each and every one of you for reading and visiting Cameron.io to make this a reality.
Matt Legend Gemmell presents every single — and I mean every — UI detail of his iPhone application Favorites. Simply wonderful.
October 28 2008Anyone who’s tried to use most cross-compiling UI libraries knows that eventually what you end up with is an app that’s ugly and unruly on both platforms. At least with Cocotron, you end up with a beautiful Mac app, and hey, Windows apps are kind of ugly anyway so there’s no loss there.
Glen Aspeslagh on Cocotron, an open-source project to easily port Mac applications to Windows. So true.
Macbook and Pro
October 17 2008I got a chance to see the latest notebook line from Apple last night, and I’m very impressed. Personally, I’ve always been a desktop kind of person; I prefer larger screens and power over portability. But I’m certain my next computer will be an Apple notebook. I’m incredibly impressed with the solid case and build quality of both Apple’s new MacBooks.
But that’s not the biggest impression I had.
For the first time, there’s no clear distinguishing feature1 between the MacBook and MacBook Pro. There’s no consumer model. The MacBook is high-end, and the MacBook Pro is simply more so. Sharing the same name is no longer awkward or misleading. The new MacBook is exactly what its name suggests: less pro.
Also, the white plastic MacBook model was on display next to the new aluminum model and it looked like crap in comparison.
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Except maybe Firewire. ↩
A web pilot written by John August, starring Ze Frank and others. A few studios are reviewing it, considering continuing the pilot into a web series, but until then, you can preview two minutes of the pilot.
Update: John August has posted the script (in PDF) with character bios. I’ve read two pages, and I already love it.
The complete history of the website Muxtape, the ensuing legal problems, dealings with major labels and the RIAA, and Justin Ouellette’s decision to relaunch the service exclusively for bands.
An upcoming text editor from the company who created CSSEdit, which I use, and love, on a weekly basis.