Category: General Tech

My buddy Dave over at TUAW, on Fantastical, a new calendar app by Flexibits:

This handy app lives in your menu bar, providing quick access to your many appointments across calendars (including iCal or Outlook 2011). Fantastical supports incredibly rapid and natural full-text entry for appointments, making it easier than ever to get your events where you need them. It looks great, works well and is definitely worth your time.

Every review I’ve read of this app is positive. It seems to work well, and it looks great. However, I’m not convinced of why it exists. Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:

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A poor, unnamed Reuters writer:

The number of households in the United States that own television sets is estimated to have declined for the first time in 20 years, according to forecast figures from the Nielsen Co that were released on Tuesday.

The switch from analog to digital broadcast in 2009, the economic downturn and the trend among consumers to watch TV programs across other platforms, including computers and tablet devices, were given as reasons for the shift.

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Patrick Rhone:

My Mac is nothing more than a overpriced pocket knife for me to scrawl stuff into it. And if I did not have that I would find a way. Because I have something to say. It’s what I do.

Find that thing that you do and do it. If it is, in fact, what you do, no tool will make you and no tool will stop you.

What I believe in.

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Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by friend Kevin Lipe, after a discussion over beer and pizza about writing on the Mac, and how it has changed over the years. Longtime reader may remember that Kevin is the guy I bought this domain name from. Kevin is a native Memphian, a musician and a great writer.

The First Cut is the Deepest

The first word processor I ever used seriously for any amount of time was ClarisWorks 2.1. We had a Performa 578 running System 7.5.5, and ClarisWorks was all I had. I spent hour after hour writing “books” — usually twenty pages or so of fiction, or, well, a seven-year-old’s idea of fiction — and printing them out, reading them to my parents and to myself and to anyone else who would listen. I was a writer, the world’s youngest important author. I knew how to do everything ClarisWorks could do. I even tried to wrap my head around Publishers, which were a weird feature I still don’t understand.

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Thomas Brand:

The eMate is not a netbook. Wikipedia defines a netbook as a category of small, lightweight, legacy-free, and inexpensive laptop computers. Although the eMate has a small 6.81 inch display, weights just 4 lbs., lacks an optical drive, and cost $800 in 1997 it is not a netbook. The word netbook implies a clamshell computer with a network connection, and out of the box the eMate 300 has none.

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Thomas Husson:

The mobile Web and apps offer different benefits and serve different audiences. For now, mobile apps make the most of smartphone features because they integrate more deeply and more widely with the unique features of smart mobile devices that use an operating system. However, mobile websites cost less to reach a wider audience. The majority of consumers don’t own a smartphone and don’t access app stores; they are more likely to use a mobile browser and to access the Internet from their mobile phones. The barriers to accessing a site via a browser are lower than those to downloading an app—even for smartphone owners. Also, the fragmented nature of the mobile industry means that porting apps to different platform environments costs money—particularly when including maintenance and promotion costs.

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Myke Hurley:

What I am enjoying about Grandview is the way that it’s getting me to concentrate on what I am currently writing. I know there is a web browser and a Twitter client behind these HUGE words, but I can’t see them. I mainly get distracted because I see a new tweet pop up or notice a tab I have yet to fully investigate and not having that visual distraction is quite useful to me.

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I get emails pretty often about how I added the “Send to Instapaper” link next to the date on single post pages here on Forkbombr.

First of all, there is a great Wordpress plugin named Instapaper Read Later Links that will add a “Read Later” button to posts. This button’s placement can be adjusted via CSS fairly easily.

However, I couldn’t find a place where the button didn’t seem massively out of place with Forkbombr’s design. After digging through Marco Arment’s documentation for publishers and asking around a bit, I got the text links working.

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Joshua Topolsky:

RIM seems to have two distinct problems: the first is that it doesn’t seem to adapt quickly to a changing market, and the second is that when it finally does make a move, the results too often feel half baked. The company and its leaders seem almost indignant about the fact that they no longer lead in a field which they clearly feel they created. The unfortunate reality for RIM is that it’s in the process of trading first place for third, and in an increasingly crowded market, it’s not battling to win, it’s battling to stay alive.

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The Omni Group has lots of goodies on the way.

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“ Bad helicopter-proofing” is my favorite.

[via TechCrunch]

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The company’s page about the beta instills confidence:

<img style=“display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; margin-top:10px”“ src=”https://media.512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/S3/Screen-shot–2011–05–02-at–12.47.08-PM11.png“ alt=”Screen shot 2011 05 02 at 12 47 08 PM“ border=”0“ width=”536“ height=”233" />

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