“This entire night, everything you’re experiencing, is stored sunlight.”
Year: 2015
Friday, May 01
Wednesday, April 22
Google Gone Carrier
I’ve read a few times in the past that one of the big ideas Steve Jobs (or someone at Apple) had about the iPhone was to release it without ties to any carriers. In other words Apple, ever wary of depending on a third party for core technologies in their modern incarnation, reportedly considered launching their own cellular network. While that seems like an endeavor that only current Apple could afford (pre-iPhone Apple wasn’t quite as flush with cash), I’d easily believe they at least considered it.
Fast forward to this week and now Google is jumping into the carrier game, though not quite in the same way. This week they officially announced what has been rumored for a few weeks or months: Project Fi. Project Fi is really an MVNO1, piggy backing off of Sprint and T-Mobile’s network along with wi-fi calling and some other pretty nifty features to optimize network speed and strength based on where you are. And to top it all off, the service offers a very Google-y pricing model: pay for what you use, no really, even if you thought you’d use more. Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica, lays out a perfect scenario for Google’s pricing model:
Project Fi is great for people with fluctuating data usage though. Take me for instance: most days, at home and at work, I’m on Wi-Fi, with barely any data usage, but there are those months where I travel a lot, and then my data usage spikes. Project Fi would give me money back for the low-data months, while flexing to a larger plan when during busy months. For a person like me, it’s perfect. I don’t need data all the time, but when I do need it, I need it to be fast and plentiful.
Who knows if Project Fi will project fizzle like some of Google’s groundbreaking projects or if it will soar into success like so many others. One thing is for certain, I’m glad we have companies like Google and Apple as the forward thinking companies of our time. They couldn’t be more different in how they approach new technology and initiatives, but having one without the other certainly wouldn’t be very exciting.
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Mobile virtual network operator. Essentially they lease carrier towers to provide their network coverage. ↩
9to5Mac: First Screenshots of top Apple Watch Apps Revealed →
I’m still on the fence about getting an Apple Watch, but there are some very enticing entries here. The most intriguing to me are RunKeeper, Chipotle1, Calcbot2, and Clear.
Sn
Sunday, April 19
Ben Thompson: Twitter and What Might Have Been →
Ben Thompson with an insightful take on Twitter’s past, present, and future paths in ‘Twitter and What Might Have Been’:
Still, even though all of Twitter’s decisions are understandable, I can’t shake the feeling that the company could have chosen a very different path.
Sn
Wednesday, April 08
Shake, Stir, and Share
Studio Neat, the team behind the Cosmonaut and the Glif, is slowly building a cocktail accessory empire. Highball, a free iOS app for saving and sharing your favorite cocktail recipes, joins the already stout cocktail friendly lineup that incluces the Neat Ice Kit and the Simple Syrup Kit1.
The app is simple, yet aesthetically pleasing; common traits for apps and hardware coming from Studio Neat. Recipes are given the common and familiar card treatment, a tried and true metaphor for something that needs to be easy to organize, access and share. And that’s exactly what you do with Highball. Provide your own favorite recipes by typing them into the card or by grabbing a recipe from a friend. You can even use the app to piece together an icon to represent your drink, complete with common glass styles, ice preferences, and beverage hues.
I don’t often venture far from the Old Fashioned / Manhattan on the rocks realm, but I assure you if and when I do find something else that I like, I’m going to keep track of it in Highball. Get Highball today in the iOS App Store.
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They also have a great Cocktail Tool Guide with links to their favorite third party cocktail accessories. ↩
Tuesday, April 07
Quotable:
“We’re a group of people who love our watches. So we’re working on something, yet have a high regard for what currently exists.”
— Jony Ive
Thursday, March 26
Fantastical 2 for Mac
My favorite calendar app for iOS is Fantastical, but I never bought into the menubar-only Fantastical for Mac. Lo and behold, the second coming, Fantastical 2 from Flexbits, is the full fledged calendar app many of us have been eagerly awaiting. It fits perfectly in with the aesthetic of Yosemite while, not surprisingly, offering a familiar look anyone accustomed to its iOS counterpart. If you’re in the market for a solid calendar app, you can’t go wrong with Fantastical 2 for both iOS and Mac. If you need some nudging, here are a couple of great reviews from MacStories, Macworld, and The Verge.
Tuesday, March 24
GoSquared Blog: Redesigning the Login Screen →
Inspiring. I strive for this level of thought and attention with every project I take on.
via @SidebarIO
Sn
Sunday, March 22
A Touch of the Future
Apple announced a new trackpad, the Force Touch Trackpad as part of the details of its new ultrathin MacBook during its Spring Forward event last week. Highlights of the new trackpad are pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback, provided by what Apple calls its Taptic Engine. Both features, headliners in their own way, work together to provide click-like feedback from a piece of glass that doesn’t actually “click”.
Although early reactions seemed to indicate Apple nailed it, I was skeptical. After all, I use a Microsoft Touch Mouse every day at work, and every smartphone I’ve ever used with haptic feedback left me wondering what purpose it really served. So, I had to try it for myself and I did just that yesterday. I went to a local Apple Store, immediately found a 13 inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display and tried it. Color me fooled. I had to do a double take to make sure I was testing the right model. My honest first impression was that it felt like a click, but not quite as deep as the click feels on my 2010 MacBook Air. Taptic Engine fooled me but it isn’t that good.
I was about to walk out when an Apple store employee walked over to the MacBook Pro next to me with a customer he was helping. He started talking about the new trackpad and he directed the customer to press normally to feel the “click”. I couldn’t see the customer’s reaction, but it felt like “so what?”. Then the Apple employee told him to press harder. So I did it. WHOA. Like Joey Lawrence WHOA.
Not only does the deeper press activate the new force press gesture, it also registers the more familiar deep click feeling I’m used to with my MacBook Air and Magic Trackpad. Mind irrevocably blown.
So what does it all mean? Well there’s some low hanging marketing fruit that Apple will be quick to tout. If the previous click trackpad ever stood in the way Apple delivering its new MacBook in that super thin form factor, it no longer does. There’s also a new gesture that Apple can add (the Force Press) which, depending on the context, can perform a variety of functions like word lookups or varying the seek/rewind speed in QuickTime. The third and final piece of low hanging fruit is that the feedback and pressure sensitivity can be tuned to your specific tastes and clicky strength. Nothing revolutionary there, just fine tuning an already delightful experience.
But maybe gestures are the key. Except, maybe it’s not about adding more input gestures that our fingers perform, but instead gestures performed by the Taptic Engine that our fingers perceive? A recent update to Apple’s own iMovie hints at the future of such feedback, signaling the end of clip with a slight bump to the user through the new trackpad. On last week’s episode of The Talk Show, Serenity Caldwell posits that similar technology could be used for accessibility enhancements. Clever.
Windows PC trackpads still haven’t caught up to Apple’s venerable trackpad and, gimmick or no gimmick, the Force Touch Trackpad puts Apple that much farther ahead.
Friday, March 20
Requiem for MagSafe
When 9to5mac first broke the rumor of the single port MacBook, I too began lamenting the alleged demise of the MagSafe adapter. Though it’s only saved my devices a handful of times, it is one of those delight in the details features of a MacBook that makes the hardware such a joy to use. My reaction to the news spanned the range of denial, mourning, revelation and acceptance. The revelation and acceptance phases are best represented by Ben Brooks’ take a few days after the official announcement:
USB-C won’t cause more crashing MacBooks, just as long as you use the MacBook as it is intended: on battery power. That’s the direction computing is headed in: devices that only need to be charged while you sleep.
Some have been clamoring for the convergence of iOS and the Mac, but they don’t recognize when it’s right under their nose. That’s because they’re thinking about it in terms of software, when in reality the true innovation will come with the hardware convergence.