Nameless Electronista Staff Member:
The iPad 2 has triggered a minor panic among PC and tablet makers, including a possible HP change in strategy for the future TouchPad, insiders said late Monday. A number of notebook designers, including Acer, ASUS, and HP, have reportedly looked at adding tablet features into what were going to be conventional designs. Digitimes cited the example of a 10-inch Eee Pad’s USB keyboard as an example of what sort of changes might take place.
The fact that the iPad only lets me see one app at a time often does not help me focus. Instead, it forces me to switch between apps constantly, thus preventing me from focusing on my task. Every time I have to deal with the iPad’s task switching, I’m interrupted.
For some tasks, letting applications take up the whole screen is useful. Applications like Garage Band or Writer make good use of the screen. But a lot of the time, allowing more than one app to occupy the screen can actually help people focus, because human tasks are often not as simple as computer tasks, and may require people to be able to see more than just a single application.
10 years ago a browser was born.
Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.
This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.
Currently, worldwide usage of IE 6 is at 12 percent, with 34.5 percent of China’s web traffic being generated with the browser.
What Simperium will eventually offer is an easy-to-use platform for building apps that sync. I’m happy to announce that I’m now an advisor to and a (very minor) investor in Simperium. I haven’t worked on sync systems, but I am hoping that I can provide some insight to the Simperium team on building a developer platform and scaling out their backend systems.
If you’re a Simplenote user, expect the app to get better and better. If you’re developing an app that needs to sync, Simperium is building a platform you’ll want to use. If you rely on apps that sync, you’ll be using Simperium-powered tools before you know it. Fred, Mike, and their team are up to great things, and I feel privileged to be able to support them as best I can as they take their company to the next level.
Tom Poston, on Twitter about iPad 2:
This is Apple’s Empire Strikes Back: going from popular solo hit to enduring cultural dominance & change. So many parallels…
In this new world, Apple no longer has to compete on specs and features, nor does it want to. There is no Mac vs. PC here – only “the future” versus “the past.” It won’t be a debate about displays, memory, wireless options – it will be a debate about the quality of the experience. Apple is not just eschewing the spec conversation in favor of a different conversation – it’s rendering those former conversations useless. It would be like trying to compare a race car to a deeply satisfying book. In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It’s not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device.
If you want to hear Josh, Marilyn and I talk forever about the new iPad and some clips of my daughter crying in the background, you’ll love this week’s Macgasm podcast.
Brent Simmons has released a great new version of the venerable RSS app for the Mac. I can’t wait for the full version.
Jay Parkinson has posted a link to the Mutatoes project, a charming collection of oddball fruits and vegetables.
Creation really is wonderful, isn’t it?
Kyle Baxter, on what curating means:
The web means there is always more supply than we can handle, so what we need is groups that can sift through the muck and find the people worth reading. Instead of publishers being merely the people who provide printing and distribution, completely irrelevant to the end-user, they should become someone whose taste we trust.
Podcasting has taken off. While its been around for years, in the last 8 months or so, it seems to have really grown in popularity, at least in our corner of the Internet.
Here’s a list of the podcasts I currently subscribe to:
Only two of those are video podcasts — the rest are just audio.
I’ve recently performed an audit of my next actions list and found that several entries weren’t actionable. For example, “interview questions” and “FaceTime poll” are poor action steps.
Why? No verbs. In fact, “interview questions” and “FaceTime poll” are both projects, not actions.
I’m terrible at this. My action lists are full of nouns.
(In other news, go buy Dave’s book!)