Developers, take note. I will always support a business that’s accessible, approachable, and welcoming of feedback over a faceless, distant one. No matter how good of an ad campaign the latter can muster. And I imagine I’m not alone.
No, Ian, you’re not alone.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, the lead writer for ReadWriteWeb:
Sometimes news blogs are so real-time that it feels like 30 extra seconds of thinking more before publishing could be competitive advantage.
At The Daily launch today in NYC:
New times require new journalism. Our challenge was to take the best of conventional journalism… and combine it with the best of new technology. Simply put, the iPad demands that we completely reimagine our craft.
There is a growing segment of educated and sophisticated consumers who do not read daily newspapers, but still consume media. This restricts their interests to what has been predefined.
Derek James for Cracked, on a great theory about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:
Cameron creates Ferris in his mind. Ferris is the total opposite of Cameron: he’s fun, spontaneous and has a loving family and foxy girlfriend. At the beginning of the film, the imaginary Ferris convinces a bed-ridden Cameron to “borrow” his dad’s Ferrari 250 GT California and cruise all over Chicago. Given Cameron’s crushing social incompetence, it’s likely that Sloane is fictional too and represents a girl that he has a crush on.
Joshua Schnell, on 9 to 5 Mac’s iPad 2 LCD:
If “acquiring” an “iPad 2 Display” from someone allegedly on a “Chinese production line” counts as a leak, then we’ve got ourselves a rumor. 9 to 5 Mac has teamed up with iFixYouri to get their hands on what appears to be the iPad 2 display.
If you haven’t noticed all the “appears” and “alledgedlys” just yet, now’s the time to make sure you’re noticing them, because there’s not much proof that these things are legit. 9 to 5 Mac hasn’t even tested the device yet. They’ve just posted some photos online. Apparently “acquiring” iPad parts, which are likely stolen, is easier these days than finding someone who knows what to do with them.
Josh Wisenbake on AFP548 takes a look at the state of the world without the Xserve in it.
I’ve been doing this for months, and haven’t missed Simplenote as the middleman.
This morning, Readability announced a new service that lets users’ fees go to the content-providers they like.
Marco’s excellent Instapaper service will support Readability, allowing users Instapaper’d items to count as Readability items. This will let content providers see traffic and income, regardless of which service their readers use.
I — like almost every web writer I know — have setup my site to work with Readability’s new feature, hopefully creating a little income. I have “Send to Instapaper” links ready to go, but I am not going to implement them on ForkBombr quite yet. I think that the reader should decide what service — if any — they want to use.
Chris Foresman at Ars, discussing Omni Group’s free OTA sync service:
The cloud syncing service is built to work with any WebDAV server, so users can use iDisk, their own server, or use Omni Group’s free hosted service.
“We actually host over 10,000 users on one Mac mini,” [Omni Group CEO Ken] Case said, explaining that as long as the service can scale on such modest hardware, Omni will continue to offer free syncing. However, some corporate customers would likely prefer to host their own data for security purposes, and WebDAV gives them an easy way to do that with minimal effort.
Once Steve Jobs goes away, which is probably not far away, then Apple will have to make a strategic decision on whether to open up the platform. Ultimately a closed system just can’t go that far … If they continue to close it and let Android continue to creep up then it’s pretty difficult as I see it. Right now the closed platform has been successful for Apple because they’ve been so far ahead as thought leaders because of Steve Jobs.
While it looks like killer hardware, this thing doesn’t run OS X Server. So calling it an “Xserve replacement” is something I really can’t bring myself to do.
Why can’t companies like Cultured Code pull this off?