512 Pixels

Its like Federico Viticci reached into my mind and wrote what I’ve been thinking all day.

The WSJ, in a look at Apple COO Tim Cook:

Several people who do business with Apple say their dealings with the company during Mr. Jobs’s 2009 leave remained unchanged and that products continue to be developed and released on schedule.

Apple is going to be fine, without Steve Jobs, even in the long term.

If you ever needed more proof that Michael Arrington is off his rocker and that Joshua Topolsky is a real journalist, go read this.

John Brownlee:

As a computer, my new MacBook Air is everything I could have ever asked for as a writer. Like a bicycle, it’s a perfect machine, imbued with its function to efficiently accelerate thought and motion into speed. In its perfection, though, the new MacBook Air also denounces the way we tend to think about gadgets. Gadgets aren’t extensions of self, they are — at best — an augmentation of self. The difference is important, because the perfect gadget doesn’t make you perfect, and all of the hardware in the world is never going to do the work of making you the person you want to be. In my case, that was to be a writer, but I only became one professionally by accident, and I only became successful at it because otherwise I would have starved. I still don’t write fiction. The MacBook Air might be the perfect device, but it makes me despair that I will always come up short.

[via Boing Boing]

Stephen Colbert:

Because if this is gonna be a Christian nation that DOESN’T help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition—and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

I would argue that we aren’t a Christian nation, and that the Church does a really terrible job most of the time when it comes to serving the poor. One thing that makes my job at the Salvation Army so attractive to me is the group’s passion in this very area.

[via Ian Hines]

More from Cultured Code on OTA sync:

We have tried many things, from underpowered technologies to over-engineered solutions. The approach we finally settled on is one that strikes the right balance, and in our next article we’ll be sharing more information about what that means.

Some people said we shouldn’t have pursued cloud sync with this level of ambition. But then, that wouldn’t be us. It is not how we developed Things. We know that people are coming to Cultured Code because we take this approach. They like companies that care, companies that try – and that is what we will keep doing.

So many words for so little information. Looks like this still stands.

Ben Brooks:

The Apple TV won’t be replacing my trusty Mac mini at any point in the near future, but it certainly is pretty cool. For $99 you get a tiny little black box that you would be hard pressed to say is anything but worth the money. There are certainly cheaper places to get a lot of the same content, but not a single other place to get as good of an experience and as quickly as you can with the Apple TV.

I don’t have a television, but if I did, I think I’d come to the same conclusion.

Frank Chimero:

Being interviewed online via email is an interesting proposition: all the questions are usually rendered before hand, making the interview more of a test or a MadLib than a conversation. It usually feels like you’re talking to a wall. Ideas don’t develop very well, they don’t flow any where. If conversations flow like rivers, this is hanging out in the kid die pool.

I’m currently interviewing several people for an upcoming feature on ForkBombr, and while it is slower, having an actual conversation is just so much better. It is crazy to think anyone would use a standard set of questions in most circumstances.

[via Ian Hines]

Benj Edwards:

As Apple introduced newer models in the Mac line, the company continued to discount the Mac Plus, positioning it as the lowest-end Mac until the Macintosh Classic debuted in 1990. The venerable Mac Plus continued to see heavy use in the real world far beyond its astounding 4.5-year production lifespan. No other single Mac model has been produced for that length of time.

The Plus really was a great machine.

This is my new favorite Safari extension. It blocks links to apps (and more) from opening iTunes, halting the link at the browser.

Wayne Dixon:

As announced, the Verizon iPhone is based on CDMA. The current GSM-based iPhone allows for both Data and Voice simultaneously. CDMA, in its current state, cannot replicate this feature of GSM. This means that you cannot talk and be surfing the web at the same time.

[…]

It’s not just that tethering and hotspot will not work. Absolutely NO data will work while on a phone call. No apps can be sending or receiving data while on a phone call. This means no Email, no Twitter, no Pandora and no tethering while on a phone call.

Few people seemed to care that much when the original iPhone had the same limitation.

Even fewer people complain that every single non-LTE Android and RIM device on Verizon has the same limitation. It never bothered me on the Droid, and I’m sure it won’t bug me on my new iPhone — especially since I spend so much time in places with Wi-Fi networks in place.

As @MacfusionGirl pointed out on Twitter, this may be a bigger deal to AT&T customers looking to jump ship.

Chairman Gruber:

These gestures do mean that you don’t have to use the Home button. But there’s a serious discoverability problem with them. The physical Home button is impossible to miss. That it is the one and only button on the faces of these devices is a big part of why normal people are able to pick them up, start playing with them, and figure out how to get around with no help. How in the world would a normal person figure out or guess that they need to do a “five-finger pinch” to get back to the home screen?

Bingo.

Chris Foreman at Ars:

Another reason it is unlikely to happen this year is that new products are probably just a few months away from shipping, and likely to begin production in just a couple weeks, and have had their designs locked in for some time now. It’s doubtful Apple would ship the iPad with such a radical change in user interaction without thoroughly testing that the multitouch gestures work as well as (or better than) the various home button clicks.

Apple tests things before popping them into beta firmware. I don’t think the home button is going anywhere anytime soon, but if Apple is planning the next generation of hardware to go button-less, I’d bet my next paycheck that its been in the works a lot longer than any of us have known about this new gesture system.