512 Pixels

While I thought that Evernote/Alfred 2 thing was cool, some of the workflows in this post blow my mind.

Mat Honan:

Nobody cares what kind of smartphone you believe in. It’s not a religion. It’s not your local sports team even. Stop being a soldier. You are not a soldier. You are just wrong. Shut up. You there, with the blog, in the comments, in the pages of the newspaper or the magazine or on Twitter or Facebook. Whatever your opinion is, as soon as you employ it in partisan fashion, it’s deeply and profoundly wrong. Just by sharing it, you are wrong. And nobody cares. Except for the people who do. And they are wrong too. Myself included.

Like Matt Alexander, I think Honan’s piece comes at a perfect time. Maybe it’s just the headache I’ve had since the Samsung Galaxy 4 event or the fact that Apple’s turning up the heat, but I find the increasingly defensive views held in the technology community increasingly offensive.

I’m as guilty of it as anyone, though.

I blame Samsung.

I think I’m hallucinating. Can someone call an ambulance for me?

This week Myke and I address some Lego and 5by5 follow up, then go on to discuss Apple’s recent marketing efforts, Google Now on iOS, Google Reader and Myke’s new Mac.

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This is a huge step toward giving iCloud the type of security Gmail users can enjoy.

This looks like a great service for tracking RSS subscribers if you’re moving away from FeedBurner, and since you can pass your own URL through it, turning it off when it goes under because its free shouldn’t be a big problem.

via The Loop

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

Apple, which has received more than its share of criticism from environmental activists over the years, released its annual Environmental Progress report Thursday. The chief takeaway from this year’s issue: Apple’s corporate facilities worldwide now get 75% of their power from renewable sources — solar, wind, hydro and geothermal — up from 35% two years ago.

Daniel Pasco, over at Black Pixel:

First, we intend to bring sync to future versions of NetNewsWire. It’s too soon to go into details about this, but you should know that we recognize how extremely important it is and that it is a top priority for us.

Second, even though we’ve been quiet about it, we have been working on new versions of NetNewsWire for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. We have some great new features and a modern design that we can’t wait to show you.

The iOS version of NetNewsWire is pretty bad, and I’m sure whatever is in the pipeline will be better. While the team admits to having lost time working with iCloud for a sync engine, they are promising to fill the void that Google’s created by killing off Reader.

This is good news.

The update allows users to easily pipe audio in and out of GarageBand with other apps. Very cool.

Adrianne Jeffries at The Verge has a great interview up with Markus Spiering, the service’s lead at Yahoo. In it, he says:

The end goal for the platform is to provide users with the possibility that, as long as they have their photos on Flickr, their photos are everywhere.

That’s a bold goal, but one I can get behind. I hope they can pull it off.

The AppleTV was already the best way to browse Netflix, and now with this stunning Hulu+ redesign, I don’t know why I’d ever want to use anything else for that service, too.