RSS Sponsor: Fantastical →

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Thanks to Flexibits for sponsoring the 512 Pixels RSS feed this week. – SH

Fantastical is the Mac calendar app you’ll actually love to use. Type in that you have “Lunch with John on Friday at 1pm” and Fantastical will schedule it! Or type in that you need to “Buy milk by Tuesday” and Fantastical will create a reminder with a due date!

Fantastical’s natural language event/reminder creation, beautiful calendar, and gorgeous list make it the best calendar you’ll ever use. Stay on top of your schedule with features like native CalDAV support, automatic alarms for new events, iCal and iOS reminder support, and instant search.

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University of Oregon Student Newspaper Transforming to Online Media Company

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Curt Hopkins at Ars Technica:

This coming school year, the University of Oregon’s 92-year-old Oregon Daily Emerald, first a daily student newspaper, then one with a website, will stop publishing altogether except for a Monday “weekly” style publication devoted to news and sports anchored by a 1,200-word cover feature and a Thursday culture and entertainment edition. The rest of the emphasis, effort, time and resources are going to be devoted not simply to a Web presence but to an information and media company called the Emerald Media Group (EMG).

I know at my college paper at least, the web was very often a second thought, but times are changing.

The Battle of the Styli

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When showing off the original iPhone, Steve Jobs famously said, “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” We’re born with ten fingers, and Apple says that’s all we need to operate their Multi-Touch devices.

That said, there are cases where a stylus is nice to have. For me, having a pen to use with my iPad is nice when annotating PDFs and sketching in apps like Paper.

But which stylus is best? To find out, I picked three well-known models and spent some time with each of them.

The Studio Neat Cosmonaut

In many ways, the Cosmonaut is the stylus to beat. Studio Neat is well-known among Mac nerds, and the company’s chunky black stylus is easy to use.

About the size of a child’s magic marker, the Cosmonaut is made of soft-touch rubber wrapped around a hard central core. The end of the stylus is rubber, and has a slight give when pressed.

The size is odd among its competitors, but I like it. It’s easy to grip.

I actually own two Cosmonauts. One I keep in my bag, and the other we use at home as a physical therapy aid for my son, whose left side is weak as a side effect of his cancer. The large shaft is great for him to hold on to with his left hand.

It’s $25 on Amazon.

The Just Mobile AluPen

As good as the Cosmonaut is, the AluPen might hit a broader section of consumer, as some might be thrown off by the former’s size.

The AluPen gets it name from the aluminum used in the body. Shaped like the No. 2 pencils we all used in grade school, it’s still a little on the wide side, sitting (thickness-wise) between the other two models in this review.

The end — like the Cosmonaut — is a rubber bubble, but compresses far more than the Cosmonaut’s, as there doesn’t seem to be anything solid behind it. This makes me worry that the tip might wear out faster than it should.

I really like the AluPen. The Cosmonaut’s size can make it difficult to see around (if that makes sense), but the AluPen doesn’t suffer from the same problem.

It’s on Amazon for $17.

The Adonit Jot Pro

The Jot Pro made news at its release due to its tip. Unlike the other two products, the tip isn’t rubber at all. Rather, it has a clear plastic disc surrounding a tiny touch-triggering point.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was scratching my iPad to hell when I was using it.

Note that I haven’t scratched my iPad with any of these products. But I just don’t feel comfortable with the Jot Pro’s design.

The Jot Pro has a magnet in its slender body, meaning it can stay attached to the front of the iPad when not in use. Which is clever. The screw-on cap is also clever, as it attached to the top of the stylus when not in use.

You can pick it up on Amazon for about $20.

Conclusion

As much as I like the Cosmonaut, I think the AluPen is going to be my go-to stylus from now on. While I don’t use one often, the AluPen’s lightweight, medium-thickness body is a pleasure to use.

‘Fiddling’

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I wrote a guest post over at Frictionless, and I think you might enjoy it:

Many will say that friction is bad, and that we must do everything we can to eliminate it from our workflows, our setups and our lives.

Of course, fiddling for fiddling’s sake is bad. It introduces unjustified friction.

But sometimes, the friction is worth it. If the end result was worth it.

On iOS 6 Mockups

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MacStories linked to this post over in The Verge’s forums, in which “gizmosachin” mocked up what (s)he thinks iOS 6 might look like.

All in all, I like the look. I agree with Marco that the blue default look within iOS and apps is dated. It’s time for a change, and I think the silver look used in the WWDC 2012 app is a great candidate for something new.

While I initially thought that June would be too early for an iOS 6 preview, if something as basic as UIKit is going to be updated, I expect Scott Forstall to be on stage at some point during the company’s keynote.

Windows Phone 7: More Than Just a Stick in the Mud?

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With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is pretty much dead last when it comes to the smartphone wars. They are even behind RIM.

While devices like the Lumia 900 are attractive and well-built, consumers haven’t fallen in love with Windows Phone 7.

But why?

I decided to try to answer that question by spending several weeks with the operating system, running on the year-old HTC Arrive.

Microsoft’s philosophy when it comes to hardware is somewhere in between Apple’s and Google’s. The company allows third party OEMs to build phones that run their OS, but Microsoft dictates to them exact specs, so that every WP7 device should run at the same speed, resolution and more.

OEMs are allowed to pick some options, like whether or not to include a hardware keyboard (HTC did so with the Arrive sitting on my desk), and whether or not to upgrade the camera.

I think Microsoft’s solution is better than Google’s. Google, of course, seems to want Android on as many phones as possible, regardless of the specs. With its plan, Microsoft is still in charge of the experience, while still allowing the consumer some choices when it comes to form factor.

While hardware nerds might pick a phone because of its keyboard or curves, the majority of smartphone buyers will pick a device because of the software running on it.

(Hence the custom skins on top of Android.)

On the surface, WP7 seems like a winner. It’s very different from iOS and Android. With their rows of icons, the two main mobile operating systems look like desktop platforms.

With WP7, Microsoft tossed that idea out the window. WP7’s UI — dubbed Metro — is basically a set of tiles, arranged on a grid. These tiles can be static or “live” — showing information fed from the apps behind them.

(Metro, of course, is coming to tablets, notebooks and desktops with Windows 8. I’m not convinced Metro will scale up all that well, based on my time with the Windows 8 betas.)

When it introduced WP7, Microsoft touted Metro as an easy way to get in and get out of the smartphone quickly, as the UI offered “glancable information.” The tagline: WP7 could “save us from our phones.”

Of course, Android’s widgets offer similar features, but with iOS, hardly anything can be gleaned from the home screen in terms of useful information. However, iOS’ lock screen in iOS 5 is more helpful than the lock screens on WP7 or Android.

In reality, Metro is pretty good. It’s quick and smooth, thanks to Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements. It’s quite customizable, allowing users to change colors, layout and more. Third-party apps can add tiles, bringing even more info to the home screen.

And with that, we’re at the core of the problem facing Microsoft’s mobile OS.

Apps.

The simple truth is this: there aren’t many decent applications for Windows Phone 7.

In 2012, that’s the kiss of death to a platform.

When I used Android in 2010, the app selection wasn’t great. There weren’t official apps for things like Dropbox or Twitter. The third-party apps that were available were often crude and sluggish.

While Google’s been able to turn this around to a degree, Microsoft hasn’t.

Of course, this problem isn’t a simple one to solve. While its easy for me to suggest to Microsoft to drop a pile of cash off at Dropbox and ask them for an official client, without a decent SDK, marketplace and customer base, it won’t be worth Dropbox’s time to build a client for the platform.

While I’m no developer (and can’t speak to what the tools are like for building WP7), I do know what Microsoft’s market share is. And that alone is a good reason not to invest in the platform.

This creates a circular problem for Microsoft. Without good apps, the platform isn’t going to grow. Without new customers, developers aren’t going to invest in building apps for the platform.

I’m not sure what the solution is.

Google broke this cycle with Android by enjoying massive growth. With an influx of customers, developers are now seeing that Android is worth their time and attention.

(That said, Android users don’t seem willing to pay for apps as readily as iOS users are. That fact — coupled with Android’s fragmentation issues — is too much for some developers to swallow still.)

Maybe with Windows 8, developers will have more incentives to build for Windows Phone, but to my knowledge, Microsoft hasn’t given a broad overview of how cross-platform apps will (or could) work.

As it stands today, I can’t recommend Windows Phone 7 to anyone. With a severe lack of apps, running on old hardware, it just feels like WP7 is a stick in the mud.

I truly hope Microsoft can turn things around, though. Metro is unlike anything else out there, and I enjoyed my time with it. But consumers need more than a pretty face.