Steve Jobs, in this video linked to by All Thing D’s John Paczkowski:
This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance … to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.
Have I ever checked email, read incoming tweets or responded to a text message while behind the wheel of a car? Yes. I’m usually at a stoplight or stuck in motionless traffic when I actually use my phone’s virtual keyboard. That factor might make might my behavior slightly less risky, but it doesn’t make it any less stupid.
While I can imagine either sending or receiving a message so pressing that an action would have to be taken at that very moment, I’ve never actually experienced such a scenario. The urgency that drives me to check Twitter or read an email while in the car is entirely a creation of my own mind.
All of this data can wait until later – and much of it can wait until never.
That’s what I needed to read to push me into finally turning off my Facebook account.
The Big Picture has posted a gallery of photos from Hurricane Katrina damage:
Five years ago, Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, centered on New Orleans, as a Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 125 mph (205 km/h). More than fifty levees were breached by its storm surge, causing massive flooding. Over 1,800 Gulf Coast residents lost their lives then, and damages totaled more than $80 billion - the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Many intangible things were damaged then as well, communities were erased as their neighborhoods washed away, much of historic New Orleans was badly damaged, and frustration and anger remain towards an inadequate immediate response by the U.S. government.
Be sure to check out these Google Earth images of the area, before and after the storm.
Janie Porter at WTSP Channel 10 News in Tampa Bay:
A woman in the Philadelphia area is recovering from “Blackberry thumb” surgery.
The mortgage banker spends 12 hours a day texting clients on her iPhone.
“I’m texted out,” she said.
The constant texting put so much pressure on her hands that the tendons in her thumb became inflamed. She had to undergo surgery to remove the tendons.
Dave Lawrence at Newton Poetry linked to the NYT’s original MessagePad review earlier this week. Here’s some of that review:
The bottom line on the Newton Message Pad is that Apple promised too much and failed to deliver a useful device for everyday executive chores. On the other hand, the Message Pad practically hums with untapped potential, and six months (or moths) to a year from now it is likely to be a popular executive tool.
Of course, the Newton never really became a popular tool for executives (or anyone, really), unlike the iPhone. Lawrence drew this conclusion:
I’m just trying to think of a situation where today’s Apple would release a product that had more “untapped potential” than actual usefulness.
The original iPhone, maybe? It didn’t have apps, cut/copy/paste, or any of the things we all take for granted now. But then we didn’t have to worry about faulty handwriting recognition. Today, it seems a new Apple product must have an immediate pick-up-and-use aura. Potential comes through iteration, sure, but you’re not left holding a device that inspires a yawn – or a question of its practical aspects.
Comparing the Newton and the iPhone is a very tricky thing. The original iPhone software was plenty powerful enough for just about anyone, even without copy/paste, apps, etc. The original Newtown software could also get the job done, but wasn’t nearly straight-forward or easy to use for the public who was (at the time) unfamiliar with mobile computing devices.
A major complaint of Newton users was the difficulty they had syncing data back and forth between their devices and desktop computers. Even as the software evolved, it never was great.
Apple’s most ingenious move with the original iPhone was to make the device sync just like an iPod. It worked on Day 1, and in a way everyone could understand.
Finger-based input was also a great move. Here’s Peter H. Lewis, in that original Newton review:
And the pen-based handwriting recognition technology is frustrating, once the novelty wears off. Because it “learns” the user’s handwriting from experience, the handwriting recognition software actually gets better and yields fewer goofs as time goes by. But even when the recognition engine is well trained, it is still slow.
The handwriting recognition got a lot better in Newton OS 2.0, but by then, most people had written the Newton off. The reputation was just too much to overcome.
Nope, we’re not crazy… okay, maybe just a tiny bit (but shh, don’t tell anybody). From today, we’re making just about the entire iPhone app available free for everyone to use — yay!
What’s the catch? We’ve introduced a limit to the free app: you’ll be able to sync manually once every 24 hours with the Remember The Milk servers, which is great for backing up your tasks and notes online.
The Push Notification service is also unavailable in the free app (we can’t give you everything free, now can we? ;). But aside from that, you get all the goodness of our iPhone app… free!
I’ve been a Pro user for several years, and am really happy with the service. This made me even happier:
P.S. For those of you who’ve been wondering, yes, [we are] still working like crazy on our iPad app.
Update: Liza Daly picks apart the new feature, outlining its strengths and weaknesses.
John Gruber linked to this article on Flood Lite today:
In July 2002, Apple filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”
The average respiratory rate for adults is 12-20 breaths per minute, which is the rate that the sleep-indicator light fades in and out on most Apple laptops. Older models such as the Macintosh PowerBook, however, use a blinking LED indicator, with discrete pulses in one-second intervals.
Apple’s attention to detail is amazing, but to this day it perplexes me that the iMac doesn’t have a sleep indicator. The unibody MacBook Pros’ sleep LEDs are hidden in the aluminum; why not use a similar design on the desktop?
Dramatic changes in the media industry – as evidenced by last year’s closing of the nearby Rocky Mountain News in Denver – have prompted the University of Colorado at Boulder to review the future of its journalism program.
CU said Wednesday that on Sept. 1 a committee will start the process of “program discontinuance” for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. A separate exploratory committee will determine what a new interdisciplinary “information and communication technology” program could look like.
The future of professional journalism is in jeopardy.
Simplenote has become my main venue for thoughts, project notes and just about anything else text-based. This update includes tags, sharing and a great full-screen editing mode for the iPhone and iPad.
New features come with APIs, so tag syncing and more should hopefully show up in apps like Notational Velocity before long.
If you use an iPhone or iPad and need someplace for words to live, you’ve got to check it out.
