512 Pixels

Scott McNulty for Macworld:

Who doesn’t love going to the Apple Store?

Well, me, for one.

Sure, I’ve waited in line at an Apple Store opening—I got a t-shirt!—and I’ve also waited in line for the special holiday sale at an Apple Store—I got Mac-themed magnetic poetry!—but instead, I now just wait for the urge to visit an Apple Store to pass. I’m still a fan of what Apple makes, but the retail experience has become less akin to shopping at a high-end boutique and more like going to Walmart (albeit, a well-designed Walmart).

Today I feel like a jilted lover stalking their ex. I continue to check the developer discussion board and see many repeat complaints about bad syncing and data corruption. If you want to get a feel for how well a service is doing, Twitter searches are a great way to do it. Because I miss the halcyon days of great Simplenote syncing, I search Twitter for “simplenote” regularly. I see a lot of people leaving Simplenote because of corrupted data. That has the smell of rot and makes me sad.

Now Automattic has a chance to throw some money at solving Simplenote’s problems. My hope is that money is the easy solution. The Simperium team have good ideas about how plain text syncing should work. I’ll eagerly read about every improvement in the future. I’ll continue to check the developer discussion boards and search Twitter. It will take a lot to bring me back in to the fold though. Dropbox syncing is almost flawless and that’s a pretty high bar. While tags and fast full-text searching are wonderful features of Simplenote, in the end data integrity wins the day.

Apple:

For the past seven years, Apple has been publishing reports on the audits we perform in our supply chain. We do this because we believe in honestly sharing our findings — the good and the bad. We’re fixing problems and tackling issues that our entire industry faces, such as excessive work hours and underage labor. We’re going deeper into the supply chain than any other company we know of, and we’re reporting at a level of detail that is unparalleled in our industry.

To end the practice of excessive overtime, we now track weekly work hours for 1 million workers across our supply chain and publish the results on our website every month. And we share our work-hour strategy and tools with others inside and outside our industry. Although underage labor is rare in our supply chain, we report all incidents we find, as well as the actions taken to correct problems and prevent future occurrences. We also give our suppliers the names of labor agents known to recruit underage workers. In addition, we are publishing the names and addresses of our top 200 production suppliers.

I really respect Apple for releasing these things. While there is always more to be done to protect workers and their rights, the company is leading the way with these reports.

While bringing back this guy would be hilarious, I’m not sure anything could save Apple Dell at this point.

The Apple PR Machine:

Apple today announced financial results for its 13-week fiscal 2013 first quarter ended December 29, 2012. The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $54.5 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.1 billion, or $13.81 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $46.3 billion and net profit of $13.1 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share, in the 14-week year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 38.6 percent compared to 44.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 61 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Hot damn.

I don’t even care anymore.

I’m a huge weather nerd. In high school, I got certified via Skywarn. Some buddies and I almost got killed one night chasing a tornado an hour or so east of Memphis. (That’s a story for a different time.)

That said, I’ve never been really happy with a weather app on my iPhone until I came across the simply-named Check the Weather.

The app uses GPS (or pre-saved locations) to pull up the correct weather information. The main screen shows the current state of things, with a look ahead at the day, as well as the next three days.

There’s a lot more to the app than just that, however.

Gesturing in from the left shows an hourly forecast, complete with sunrise and sunset times, while pulling in from the right reveals an extended 16-day outlook.

The real magic, however, occurs when pulling in from the bottom, which reveals a Dark Sky-powered radar.

Here’s the app, laid out in separate screenshots:

The gestures work perfectly, and the panes slide in and out very smoothly, but Check the Weather is as handsome as it is useful. The app can be set in a number of color schemes, with numerous font choices, but I think most nerds will choose Futura or Helvetica.

All in all, David Smith did a great job building this app, and it’s enjoyed a place on my homescreen for some time. If you like weather and well-designed apps, it’s well worth the 99¢.

Well, this is cool. This package of Google Drive and Twitter API magic keeps an auto-updating copy of your Twitter archive on Drive. If you sync your Drive back to your local machine, you’ll local copy will stay updated, too.

I made my archive public. It’s pretty crazy how easy this was to setup.

This is too stupid to link to just one article.

Michael Grothaus at TUAW:

When it first went on sale shipping times for all but the first-day buyers were quoted as seven to 10 days. Shipping times remained at seven to 10 days through the busy holiday season as well. Today, shipping times for the new 21.5-inch iMac have increased to between two and three weeks.

Well, this is exciting, or super, super disappointing.

Editor’s Note: This appeared in the Read and Trust newsletter exactly one year ago today.

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By the time you’re reading this essay, it’s been re-written twice.

Most of the time, I don’t re-write pieces. I edit and re-arrange them often, but rarely do I open a new text document and just start over.

Needless to say, it was discouraging. The handful of people who read the earlier versions of this all said the same thing:

What are you trying to say here?

I guess I didn’t get my point across in the previous versions. Maybe I didn’t have a point. Who knows. But all of this got me thinking about the topic at hand this month — resolutions.

I’m not sure why I picked this month to write an edition of the newsletter. I usually don’t make New Year’s Resolutions.

The last one I made was in 2009, actually. It was to work out more often. I joined a gym with my brother, and three days a week, we worked out together in the evenings. It was great. I got to spend time with hanging out with him, and I could notice the effects of working out after just a few weeks. I had no complaints about it, besides a sore muscle here and there. It was — by far — the most successful resolution I’ve had.

(I use the term “muscle” loosely, okay?)

It lasted five months, then life threw me and my family a tumor-sized curveball, and I had to sit it aside.

To be perfectly honest, I haven’t been to the gym since.

So, why share a story about how I haven’t had success with resolutions, and given up on them completely?

Because now, here at the end of January, you’re right on the edge of failing. Experts claim that it takes at least 21 days to form a habit. Check the calendar, bro.

Now, I’m not going to sit here behind my MacBook Pro’s keyboard and preach to you about how vital this (and the coming) weeks are in making your resolution a habit. I simply can’t do that.

What I can do is talk about what happens if you fail to make the transition.

Failure can be caused by all sorts of things. For me, it was a large, external force than (quite frankly) derailed my entire life. For you, it might be caused by something much simpler, like a trip out of town for work, or a new budgetary restriction that makes Activity X too expensive to keep doing. This list can go on and on, really.

Now, I didn’t have the luxury to examine my failure. Again, hopefully, you do. And that’s really my point with this. If you fail to keep your resolution, take the opportunity to examine it.

Not to get all Merlin Mann on your ass, but if you don’t examine failure, you can’t learn from it.

So, in reflecting ask yourself some questions:

• Was the reason I failed within my control?
• Did I respond to the reason correctly?
• Could I have put safety-nets in place to keep me from failing?

If you fail this year, you might not get totally ripped at the gym, but don’t make that an excuse for not learning something.