512 Pixels

Damn.

Peter Cohen at the Loop:

This past fall I got rid of my iPhone and replaced it with a “dumb” phone. It can make calls. It can, after a fashion, produce text messages. That’s it.

There are a lot of upsides.

Peter’s experience with using a dumb phone closely mirrors mine so far.

Andrew Cunningham at Ars:

Here’s our biggest problem with the new iMac: making a laptop thinner and lighter is immediately noticeable. You touch and move a laptop constantly. Not everyone wants a laptop that values its size and weight more than, say, a faster processor or larger screen. But we can all at least agree that there is a very real place in the market for those thin and light devices, just as there’s a place in the market for gaming laptops or budget laptops. To achieve a more portable laptop, compromises like a lack of an optical drive or user-upgradeable memory are acceptable and even desirable.

In a desktop computer, though, the pursuit of thinness at the cost of features makes less sense. The vast majority of the time, it’s going to be sitting on your desk, and users will be interacting with a separate keyboard and mouse, pausing only occasionally to plug something in or adjust the screen’s angle. Giving up desirable features like user-upgradeable RAM just to make a thinner desktop seems like the wrong move, even if it’s one that only IT people and power users will notice or care about.

The Pebble team:

Unfortunately we will not be able to ship out Pebble in time for the holidays. As a tiny act of compensation, we’d like to offer you this little holiday card. I know it’s not a Pebble, but I do hope that you can tell from these updates that we’re quickly moving towards the moment when Pebble will finally be on your wrist.

I dislike a lot of things about the retail sector in general, but the fact that Radio Shack used to be so badass is the saddest of them all.

You’ve got to hand it to Tim Cook — he did a great job with Brian Williams on NBC.

collectSPACE:

Apollo 17, the last of the missions to land men on the moon, began 40 years ago today with the dawning of a man-made sun.

Lifting off just after midnight (EST) on Dec. 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 mission was the final of NASA’s moon-bound manned flights — and the first night launch. The massive, 363-foot tall (111 meters) Saturn V rocket turned night into day as the long flames from its five powerful F–1 engines bathed the dark sky with a brilliant, bright-as-the-sun light that appeared to spectators to slowly climb skyward from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The photo of the Saturn V launching at night is almost as chilling as the fact that we abandoned moon exploration.

Read and Trust:

“Openness” is a word thrown around quiet a lot, lately. What does it mean and how does it impact us? These are the questions, with their surprising and varied answers, that our writers try to unpack this month.

This month’s contributing members: Stephen Hackett, David Caolo, David Chartier, Randy Murray and Adam King.

This is another great month of writing from R&T. In my article, I explain why I write so much on the Internet about my son and his battle with cancer.

The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry:

We are well aware that people are going to complain about missing features: push notifications and streaming are obvious examples. But so are trends, and video support, and in-line photos, and… well none of that matters. We believe in building opinionated software.

The product you have in your hands is what we wanted and needed it to be. As the tagline on the website says, “A simply beautiful way to tweet.” We achieved that goal.

Personally, I find myself actively disabling notifications in most of the apps I install these days. Notifications are great when used in moderation, but it’s very easy to use them to the point of distraction. Since I read Twitter as free time permits, I don’t need a reminder. Similarly, a constant flow of streaming tweets interrupting my day sounds more like a bug than a feature.

But guess what? That doesn’t matter either. I’m just one of the opinions that made this software.

In an age where some work to please as many potential costumers as they can, this is refreshing. Just like the app itself.

That said, The Iconfactory knows they don’t work in a vacuum:

And now we’re going to start listening to our customer’s opinions. We’re all excited to get feedback from a larger audience and see how that fits in with our new minimalist vision. If you think Twitterrific is good now, just wait until you see what happens with your collaboration.

I’m excited to see how this app evolves. It’s on the home screen of my iPad mini, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

This whole interview is great, but this bit really jumped out at me. Here’s Tim Cook:

Everybody in our company is responsible to be innovative, whether they’re doing operational work or product work or customer service work. So in terms of the pressure, all of us put a great deal of pressure on ourselves. And yes, part of my job is to be a cheerleader, and getting people to stop for a moment and think about everything that’s been done.

Shawn Blanc looks at the latest version of the original Twitter client for iPhone.

Speaking of Alfred, Vero Pepperrell published this today:

In version 2, Alfred will be even more polished and user-friendly than ever. To achieve this, Andrew has rewritten Alfred from the ground up to make every aspect more efficient, more powerful and more flexible, reusing only around 15% of code from v1. Of course, we’ve also taken great care to ensure existing users would still feel at home with v2.

I’m excited. Alfred is one of the most-used apps on my MacBook Pro.