From Newton to Evernote

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, in an interview Richard MacManus:

The company was founded by Stepan Pachikov, who was kind of this brilliant mad scientist from Russia. He and his team were behind a lot of the pioneering work that went into the Apple Newton, fifteen years ago. The handwriting recognition engine was built by these guys. They had a company called ParaGraph, which Apple licensed.

So the original idea really started in the Newton days. Back then it was just a device, but it grew to be more of a service that would let you keep all of your memories. [It would] just remember everything.

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Instapaper 2.3

Marco, on what has to be the most clever software update I’ve seen in a long time:

The iPhone’s font panel also got its most highly requested feature, a Light/Dark toggle without needing to leave the article:

But you won’t need to use it as often, because I’ve added a ridiculous little feature:

You can now have Instapaper automatically use dark mode at night and normal (light) mode during the day.

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On Open Letters, the Xserve and Virtualization

Dave Schroeder is an Apple Distinguished Educator, a member of the Apple University Executive Forum and is on staff at University of Wisconsin-Madison. In short, Schroeder knows what he is talking about. His open letter to Apple about the Xserve being discontiuned is brilliant, and well worth the read:

Some of our smaller departmental or lab users may be able to run Mac OS X Server on a Mac Pro or Mac mini. At a campus level, we cannot, because these systems do not have the required mounting, power, management, and other functionality. While it is possible to rack mount a Mac Pro with third-party hardware, it is a non-starter because of the lack of dual redundant power supplies, management capabilities, and spare parts kits, to say nothing of space considerations.

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On Mobile Working

Ben Brooks, on using the MacBook Air and/or the iPad:

The iPad is great for wasting small portions of time, the Air not so much. Yes, it is easy enough to pull out the Air and get working on it, but it is far easier to just pull out the iPad. It seems to me that the iPad is made for taking care of the minutia of the day when you only have a short amount of time. By that I mean things like checking RSS feeds, Twitter, Email and OmniFocus are far easier and faster to do with the iPad than they are on the Air in short bursts.

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