Month: June 2009

Do People Really Still Use This Stuff?

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Lifehacker:

Joining Gmail, Yahoo, and other mail services, Windows Live Hotmail launches incoming POP3 access for the U.S., Canada, and Brazil, meaning Hotmail users can aggregate all their other email accounts into one inbox.

As we’ve previously reported, Microsoft recently allowed outgoing POP3 access. While Hotmail users in the U.K., France, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Germany have had access to the incoming POP3 feature for some time, today the Western hemisphere gets their more open-ended accounts as well.

Welcome to 2003, Hotmail users.

Birdfeed: A New Way to Nourish Twitter

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Birdfeed – a new twitter application by Buzz Anderson (of PodWorks and more) and designed by Neven  Mrgan – is now in the App Store for $4.99.

Five bucks is high for a Twitter client, but Birdfeed is simply gorgeous. It fits nicely between Tweetie’s simple layout and Twitterrific’s design-heavy approach.

As a 1.0 release, Birdfeed doesn’t have all the features that other (and older) Twitter clients offer, but the app does offer some features that others don’t, such as a local cache (for offline reading), timestamps in the feed to show you when you left off, and the ability to load more tweets once you hit the bottom of the screen. The developers are saying more features are on the way, but they adhere to the “Real Artists Ship” theory crafted by Steve Jobs when working on the original Macintosh.

Scrolling is smooth, the icons are beautiful, and the typefaces are perfect. My favorite little touch is the badges that show up next to “Mentions” and “Direct Messages,” showing how many unread items are in each category. This is repeated in the menu bar, so you don’t even have to move from the timeline to see the unread count. Searches and trends are gorgeous.

There’s really not a nook or cranny of the app that isn’t polished nicely. It’s well done, all the way around.

3GS Battery Issues?

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Wired:

Just a week after the release of Apple’s new iPhone, a few owners have complained about the handset’s high temperatures, which in some cases are high enough to start browning the white plastic on the back of the phone.

Only a small number of iPhone 3GS customers have reported their handsets are reaching very high temperatures. But because more than a million iPhone 3GSes were sold in the first weekend, the issue could put tens of thousands of new iPhones at risk, a component specialist told Wired.com.

Aaron Vronko of Rapid Repair, which performs teardowns of iPhones and iPods, said overheating is likely an issue due to faulty battery cells, and said he expected it could spur a recall of up to hundreds of thousands of iPhone 3GS units.

As someone with a white 3GS on order, I hope this isn’t a widespread issue.

Jobs Back at Work

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CNN:

“Steve Jobs is back to work. He is at Apple a few days a week and working from home the other days,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. “We’re glad to have him back.”

Using .Mac HomePage One Last Time

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From Apple:

Dear MobileMe member:

As a final reminder, on July 7, 2009, the .Mac HomePage web application will be discontinued. As of this date, you will no longer be able to create new pages or edit existing pages using HomePage. Any pages you’ve already published will remain live at their current web address for as long as you like. If you need to make changes to your existing pages, please do so before July 7.

Instead of HomePage, we recommend the other sharing features of your MobileMe membership. With MobileMe Gallery, you can share photos online directly from iPhoto or the web application at www.me.com. And using iWeb on your Mac, you can create custom websites and blogs and publish them to MobileMe.

We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause. For more information, please read this FAQ. And thank you for being a MobileMe member.

Sincerely,

The MobileMe Team

I made my first website with HomePage back in 2003. I just logged in to look around one last time. I created this photo gallery of photos on my iDisk to flex HomePage’s muscles one last time.

It was so awesome in it’s day, but Apple let it languish – graphics with a white iBook G3 and brushed metal abound on the site. I’m surprised it’s lasted this long, honestly.

More MacBook Pro Hard Drive Drama?

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Remember when it came out that Apple’s new notebooks were running SATA at 1.5Gbps, instead of the 3.0 standard? Well, Apple released a firmware update to address the issue, but it looks like the update is causing issues with third-party hard drives. Gizmodo points to this thread on Apple’s discussion boards, full of posts complaining of problems.

Surely this was simply a mistake on Apple’s part.* One they need to fix immediately. Leaving users without hard drives isn’t good – especially owners of brand-new notebooks, as this only affects the Mid–2009 models.

———-

*The thought of Apple doing this to limit users to Apple-branded drives
makes me shudder.

YouTube and the 3GS

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Ars Technica:

Mobile uploads to YouTube have increased by 400 percent since last Friday’s release of the iPhone 3GS, Google announced today. The device is the first iPhone with video capabilities and is able to upload videos directly to MobileMe or YouTube, even over the 3G network. With the ability to send videos to the Internet almost immediately, it’s no surprise that users are taking the opportunity to upload videos on-the-spot from their iPhones.

Impressive, but not surprising.

Tim Cook: Rising Star at Apple

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From the Wall Street Journal – via Google News to get around the WSJ’s stupid pay wall:

“At this point, losing Tim Cook would be a bigger deal to investors than if Steve Jobs stepped aside,” says Gene Munster, an analyst for Piper Jaffray. “Just that thought makes my stomach tighten up.”

[…]

“Now it’s clear that Tim Cook can run any technology-based company,” says Stephen Mader, a co-head of the CEO practice at recruiters Korn/Ferry International. “He’s a more attractive CEO candidate both inside Apple and outside.”

Under Mr. Cook’s leadership, Apple’s stock has risen about 60% since mid-January, compared with an 18% increase in the Nasdaq Composite Index. Shares closed at $137.37, down $2.11, on Monday. In April, Apple also reported a 15% increase in quarterly profit as consumers continued to buy its iPods and iPhones.

Several people who do business with Apple say their dealings with the company have remained unchanged in recent months and that products continue to be developed and released on schedule. One tech-industry recruiter said Mr. Cook has been taking on more CEO responsibilities, such as negotiations with AT&T Inc., the exclusive U.S. carrier for Apple’s popular iPhone.

I’d be shocked if someone other than Cook is named Jobs’ successor.

It Really is that Simple

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John Welch:

All this shit, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, DoucheBlog, all of it, is just people talking to each other, in a fairly direct way. It’s analgous to a telephone. You don’t really think much about the phone system, it’s only there to allow you to talk to someone far away. Same thing for online shit. It can be a one to one, one to many, many to one, many to many, or all of the above, but it’s just people talking to each other.

If you make it more complicated than that as a concept, stop. You’re about to go off the cliff into New Media Douchebaggery, and you don’t want that. Ever.

[…]

The point is, if you can say “We should be on Twitter/Facebook/whatever, because…” and you have an easily explained reason that can be translated to “They make it easier to talk to our customers and people who we want to be our customers”, then that’s a good idea. If your reason is “Well, it seems to be popular with the kids”, stop. Don’t do it. You’ll just look like someone’s parents grinding at their kids’ prom because they want to look cool, or that guy at the club who’s too old to be acting the way he’s acting. Proper use of shit like Twitter et al can do wonders for you at high speed. Fucking it up because you’re clueless can cut your throat just as fast.

These are the best three paragraphs on social media ever.