File This Under ‘Obsessive’

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Mark Gurman at 9 to 5 Mac:

After taking a closer look at Apple’s latest iPhone 4 Retina Display ad, we noticed the scene about Twitter. We thought it would be interesting to plug the Twitter profile username from the ad into the actual Twitter to see if it was legit. Sure enough it is, and has a whole army of people with headshot-grade picture followers. Meet Apple’s fake Twitter army, full of perfect profile portraits, perfect names, and perfect tweets.

It speaks volumes about a company when it puts this much work into something that takes less than 10 seconds in an ad. Amazing.

Another Reason to Leave Comments Off

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Erik Sass:

Forget all those pleas for civility based on simple respect for other human beings. There’s an even better reason to watch what you say about other people online: one of them might just snap and try to kill you. And don’t assume simple things like distance or sanity will protect you.

These are the lessons of the saga of Breana Greathouse, 25, who drove several hundred miles from Kansas City, Missouri to Ottumwa, Iowa, to shoot a certain Forrest Jamison, whom she blamed for posting derogatory comments about her on the Internet. Fortunately her Midwestern odyssey, which the Coen Bros. might want to consider adapting for the screen, ended in failure when she was arrested by Ottumwa police for waving her gun around like the unhinged maniac she is.

Yikes.

[via Kevin Lipe]

‘The Chokehold of Calendars’

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Mike Monteiro:

Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.

In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.

The Macintosh TV

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Benj Edwards:

The Macintosh TV, released in October 1993, incorporated a 68030-powered Macintosh computer, a cable-ready TV set, and a CD-playing stereo system into one device. The Mac TV could display cable TV stations or an AV video signal on the computer’s 14-inch color monitor, play audio CDs through its integrated stereo speakers, and allow users to power on/off the computer and change channels with its bundled remote control.

I totally had a draft blog post about this machine.

Apps Sharing UUIDs?

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Slash Lane:

A review of the “Most Popular” and “Top Free” categories on the iPhone App Store found that 68 percent of software would transmit UDIDs from devices. In addition, 18 percent of applications encrypted their communications, so it could not be determined what kind of data is being shared.

Snap.

My Test Drive of Sparrow for Gmail [Beta]

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From their website:

Sparrow is a minimalist mail application for Mac. It was designed to keep things simple and efficient. No fancy stuff here… just your mail and nothing else.

Here is my experience:

11:15 AM — Downloading .dmg from their site. Disk images is named “Sparrow-latest.dmg” and clocks in at 7 MB.

11:16 AM — The disk image is named Sparrow–298. I assume 298 is the build number. No installer, just an .app file and a shortcut to drop it into /Applications. Nice and simple.

11:18 AM — Setup seems simple:

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11:19 AM — My emails came in very quickly. The app icon is too short and looks dumb in the App Switcher.

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11:21 AM — There are no labels; just the generic Archive. I know most people don’t use labels, but I use the crap out of them, as you can see here:

The interface feels just like Tweetie for Mac. Which isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s quick and responsive. It’s really, really pretty:

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You can turn the message preview on or off. In the above screenshot, it is turned on, so messages slide out of the list, instead of popping up in a separate window.

11:27 AM — Just wrote my first email in Sparrow. I can’t tell if it is pulling addresses from my local Address Book or from Google Contacts. While that doesn’t matter to me, it may to some people.

11:28 AM — Drafts seem broken in this beta:

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11:30 AM — Email sent with no issues. There aren’t any IMAP or SMTP settings that I can find, making this feel more like an iOS app than a Mac app, if that makes any sense. In fact, the only settings I can find allow me to add more accounts, to make Sparrow my default Mail program, to turn on Growl and to turn on a sound to play when new mail arrives. This is an automatic transmission to Mail’s clanky manual gearbox.

In Conclusion

So far, I like Sparrow. I need label support, and until that happens, can’t use it full-time. But in a world with very few third-party e-mail clients, this is impressive. It is smooth, and for a beta has very few rough edges. It handles threads like Gmail, which is something Mail just can’t pull off. It’s not leaving my Dock anytime soon.

Update: After a re-launch, it won’t send messages. Which is a bummer. Hopefully there will be a new build out before long. I’m not going to give up on it.

‘The MobileMe Potential’

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While the idea of Apple owning Dropbox makes me nervous, Shawn’s right about this:

In its current state as “exchange for the rest of us” MobileMe seems neither exciting nor ambitious. As a web-app, me.com is beautiful and extremely functional. But I for one never use it. Instead I use the native OS X apps. And iDisk? Well, that is also collecting dust.

What would be exciting is an open service that bridged the gap for all the data which is shared between our Macs, iPhones, and iPads. What could be more ambitious than killing the USB cable?

‘We Missed a Cycle’

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Steve Ballmer, to the WSJ about Windows Phone 7:

In a sense, you could say we missed a cycle. We had some execution issues from an R&D perspective. In the time frame since the last significant release certainly the industry has moved, the technology has moved, the hardware has moved.

We said, we’ve got to move forward, not shoot for yesterday. We’ve got to shoot ahead in a way that’s delightful to users, accessible to developers and prioritize everything else we do around those elements.

The interview is an interesting look into where Microsoft is these days in the smart phone world. Here’s another chunk:

Do I think the world’s going to live all on small-screen devices? No. I think people are going to have small-, medium-, and large-screen devices.

Will the technology that powers those be absolutely 100% radically all different? No, I think there will be a lot of shared technology across the devices. You don’t want the same user interface, actually, on every one of these devices because they do have different modalities of operation. I think you’re happy you’ve got a full-sized keyboard right now, for example.

I don’t think any part of the market stops being healthy. What’s the most popular smart device on the planet? It remains the PC. 350 million PCs sold this year, and smartphones might be—what?—a little less than half of that. So smartphones are very important, so are PCs.

On the J. Crew Ringspun Jersey Hoodie

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Background

One weekend four years ago, my best friend from high school was in town, visiting from Nashville, where he went to college. We had breakfast before I had to go into work at the Apple Store.

Our Apple Store in Memphis is in an outdoor mall that consists mostly of clothing stores. Since we wrapped up early, we decided to meander around the mall chatting before my shift. We ended up in J. Crew killing some time. As we wandered around the store, we came across a rack of clothes on clearance. As I was looking for a new lightweight jacket, I decided to sift through the rack, when I came across a medium, long-sleeved, zippered Ringspun jersey cotton jacket. The price was right, and we each bought one.

And ever since, it’s been my favorite article of clothing.

Fit & Finish

The cotton jersey is lightweight but warm. The color — a warm gray — matches a large amount of my wardrobe.

I love that there is no tag. I love the typefaces printed on the inside where the tag would be.

Stains wash out easily, and other than a few cigarette burns from my smoking days in college, it’s in pristine shape.

The zipper is large and robust. I’ve never had an issue with it sticking or jumping. There’s no stupid string through the hoodie to catch on things or get bunched up. The pockets are big enough for me jam my hands in them.

I bought the medium, as I am a pretty average-sized guy. It’s a little big for a medium, which is perfect for a jacket that is often worn over long-sleeve shirts. Exact on-size jackets are annoying. Even though it’s 100% cotton, I haven’t seen much (if any) shrinking over the years.

I hate long-sleeve T-shirts with thick, snug elastic ends. While this jacket has elastic bands at the end of the sleeves, they are very loose, leaving plenty of room for my watch. The sleeves are also a little longer than on my other jackets, covering more of my hands, which I like.

The whole thing is comfortable. They got it just right.

The Hoodie

Historically, I have been an anti-hoodie guy. Often, they are too short to wear comfortably or too bulky when not in use, bunching up annoyingly while sitting in the car, for example.

I’m happy to say the hoodie on my J. Crew jacket is just perfect. It’s nice and big, making it comfortable to wear, even on my bicycle. It has enough spare material to allow me to look around without choking. Remarkably, the large hood folds back almost flat, due to the magical properties of the jersey-style cotton. It’s there when I want it, and forgettable when I don’t.

In Closing

So why review a jacket? Put simply, I love it. It has followed me through many chapters of life. I basically lived in it in college, wearing it for days on end. It went to Cupertino with me when I trained at Apple’s headquarters. I’ve ridden miles on my bike in it, and have fallen asleep on couches at St. Jude using it as a blanket. I would have gotten married wearing it if my wife would have let me.

Now that I have to look nice at work during the week, my old friend just makes it out of the closet (or the backseat of my car) on the weekends or after work. But that doesn’t make me enjoy it any less; I still get excited every fall because I know I get to wear my hoodie.

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Photos by my lovely wife, Merri.