512 Pixels

“Don’t be evil” doesn’t apply to business partners, it seems.

Mike Wall:

The golf-cart-size Spirit rover landed on the Red Planet eight years ago today (Jan. 3). Its twin, Opportunity, touched down three weeks later, on Jan. 25, 2004. The two robots were originally supposed to spend 90 days searching for signs of past water activity on Mars.

They found plenty of such evidence, dramatically reshaping scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet and its history. And the rovers just kept chugging along, continuing to make observations years after their warranties expired. NASA declared Spirit dead just last year, and Opportunity is still going strong.

I propose this set of rovers may be the best-designed thing mankind has ever built.

This two-part series over at Engadget shows just how deeply carriers are involved with new phones. Reading this really helped me understand why the Android market is such a mess, and how different the iPhone really is.

This is a dark look at Apple retail and how it has changed over the years.

Granted, the writer has every reason to be jaded, as he says he was “bullied by managers into resigning.”

2011 brought a lot of resources to the Newton community. I love it.

There are a lot of writing apps for the iPad. So many, in fact, I usually gloss over new releases, assuming they won’t offer much over my current setup of text files syncing with Dropbox and Notesy.

Enter Phraseology, by Agile Tortoise. While Dropbox syncing support is coming, this app is about far more than taking notes. It’s designed as a writing tool, from the ground up.

Take re-rearranging paragraphs for example. When I’m working on a long piece (like this review), I often re-order my paragraphs more than once, to find the flow I want to portray in my writing.

In short, this feature makes it a lot easier to work how I work, using conventuals iOS controls instead of copy, cut and paste. I’ve lost a lot of text over the years to mis-typed shortcuts, but Phraseology eases that fear.

Here’s how it looks:

Each section has a word and character count, which is nice. It’s easy to get document-wide stats, as well:

Phraseology can be used with the developer’s great dictionary app, Terminology. If you aren’t using this app on your iPhone or iPad, you really should be. Here’s how the integration works:

The default text-selection pop-over has gained a few tricks:

Tapping Define will bring up the definition as a pop-over, in the app. Tapping Lookup or Replace will open Terminology (if it’s installed) in the dictionary or thesaurus mode, as needed. A link appears on the bottom right of the UI, which will slingshot you back to Phraseology.

This combination of apps is unique and powerful.

If written in Markdown, the document can be previewed with a single tap. Once done, the document can be exported as plain text to numerous app (including GoodReader, Dropbox, and Pages, to name a few.) or emailed out. If you’re old-school or want a hard copy, it can also be printed – including from the Markdown preview, so all of you markup is included.

Nice, huh? This app was built for writers, and it shows.

That means I can forgive things like American Typewriter being used as the default typeface. (It’s easy to switch to something like Helvetica Neue or my favorite, Palatino.) I’m not a huge fan of Agile Tortoise’s “sandy” color choices in the UI, but it’s consistent with Terminology, so I can live with it.

All in all, this is now my go-to app for writing long-form content on my iPad. Go drop the $1.99 on this and start writing.

Fraser Speirs:

Except in a few cases, which I’ll explain, the apps that appear in the multitasking bar are not currently running. When you press the home button, iOS will tell the app to quit. In almost all cases, it quits, it stops using CPU time (and hence battery) and the memory it was using is eventually recovered if required.

The thought that apps in the multi-tasking tray are running seems to be growing. I think Apple’s UI for this could be a little more clear.

That said, if people go through and “quit” all these apps every once in a while, is that a big deal?

Drew Schuster has posted a nice alternative to the Pinboard backup solution I posted about the other day.

Frank Warren, the man behind PostSecret:

99% of the secrets created were in the spirit of PostSecret. Unfortunately, the scale of secrets was so large that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening.

Bad content caused users to complain to me, Apple and the FBI. I was contacted by law enforcement about bad content on the App. Threats were made against users, moderators and my family. (Two specific threats were made that I am unable to talk about). As much as we tried, we were unable to maintain a bully-free environment. Weeks ago I had to remove the App from my daughter’s phone.

Simply terrible.

This thing will you give you nightmares.

My son would have a heart attack if he saw this video.

Terence Chea:

In the interview, Steve Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs recall a seminal moment in Silicon Valley history - how they named their upstart computer company some 35 years ago.

[…]

The interview, recorded for an in-house video for company employees in the mid–1980s, was among a storehouse of materials Apple had been collecting for a company museum. But in 1997, soon after Jobs returned to the company, Apple officials contacted Stanford University and offered to donate the collection to the school’s Silicon Valley Archives.

Within a few days, Stanford curators were at Apple headquarters in nearby Cupertino, packing two moving trucks full of documents, books, software, videotapes and marketing materials that now make up the core of Stanford’s Apple Collection.

According to this article, the collection has tons of neat stuff in it. I really wish Stanford would open this collection up for documentation and sharing.

via MacRumors