512 Pixels

No multitasking, no home wallpaper and no bluetooth keyboard support make up the sadder part of the list.

Horrible.

Simplenote — the simple, polished note syncing software for the Mac, web, iPhone and iPad — has just been given a new lease on life:

We’ve decided to focus full time on Simplenote. Henceforth, we’re elevating Simplenote from its humble status as one of several side projects to the lofty position of core product and service.

This has several implications. Administratively, and less importantly, we founded a new company. Simplenote is now brought to you by Simperium (@simperium on Twitter). So when you see the name Simperium here and there, don’t worry: we’re the same people.

More interestingly, we can now give Simplenote our full attention. But we’ll be careful. It’s called Simplenote for a reason, right? We won’t add new features or user interface elements unless they survive a rigorous gauntlet of checks and balances.

Simplenote is a vital part of my workflow. Now, if someone would launch an Android app…

Shawn Blanc takes a look at iOS 4.

Daniel Eran Dilger at Apple Insider:

Support for Calendar data store access from the new Calendar Event Kit, enabling apps to create and work with event information. Apple also now supports CalDAV-compliant account sync in Calendar (used by Mac OS X Server’s Calendar Server) and CardDAV-compliant account sync in Contacts (used by Address Book Server). Developers can also incorporate SMS features into their apps, add Quick Look support, and use improvements to Map Kit for drawing routes or adding overlays to map views they embed in their apps.

For small businesses wanting to go all-Apple, this is a huge selling point for Mac OS X Server.

iOS 4 should be out today for existing iPhone and iPod touch owners.

The AP:

In what one environmentalist described as “yet another public relations disaster” for embattled energy giant BP, CEO Tony Hayward took time off Saturday to attend a glitzy yacht race around England’s Isle of Wight.

[…]

Spokeswoman Sheila Williams said Hayward took a break from overseeing BP efforts to stem the undersea gusher in Gulf of Mexico so he could watch his boat “Bob” participate in the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race. The 52-foot yacht is made by the Annapolis, Maryland-based boatbuilder Farr Yacht Design.

That dude is one big jackass.

David Barboza:

Mr. Yuan (pronounced yu-wen) wakes at 6:10 p.m. at his small apartment, a 20-minute walk from Foxconn’s campus. He arrives at the factory at 6:50 for a quick free meal at the canteen, then starts work at 7:30.

His task is to help complete 1,600 hard drives — his workshop’s daily quota — and to make sure every one is perfect. Seated in the middle of the assembly line in his black Foxconn sports shirt, cotton slacks and company-mandated white plastic slippers, he waits for the conveyor belt to deliver a partly assembled rectangular hard drive to his station. He places two plastic chips inside the drive’s casing, inserts a device that redirects light in the drive and then fastens four screws with an electric screwdriver before sending the drive down the line. He has exactly one minute to complete the multistep task.

Prince McLean:

While Evo hardware features sound great, the advertised numbers (like Verizon’s inaccurate “720p screen”) and features of Android phones aren’t necessarily living up to their hype. For example, the HTC Evo really only supports WiMAX 802.16e, not the minimum WiMAX 802.16m standard that is the actual minimum for classification as a 4G network, making its claim to be the first 4G phone dubious. Sprint doesn’t even offer 4G in many cities, and even in the few where it’s available the service inhales extraordinary battery life.

It’s true that the Evo has pretty horrible battery life and that 4G is extremely limited. But the Droid X ad was a mistake — that’s all.

Dan Kois at The Awl:

Which is all to say that the first eighty minutes of Toy Story 3 make up as funny, rousing, surprising, and exciting an adventure as you’re likely to see all year. And it’s also to say that nothing in those first eighty minutes prepared me for the final fifteen minutes, which I spent bawling, as did every moviegoer around me. The tears streamed down my face as they had not since… well, since I saw Up. And then before that, the only time I cried at a movie was during… well, it was during Monsters, Inc. And so I wasn’t precisely surprised to have my waterworks turned on by a bunch of fucking toys, but still.

Each new Pixar movie is my favorite. I can’t wait to see this one.

Neven Mrgan:

It’s simply not possible to create excellent, detailed icons which can be arbitrarily scaled to very small dimensions while preserving clarity. Small icons are caricatures: they exaggerate some features, drop others, and align shapes to a sharp grid. Even if all icons could be executed as vectors, the largest size would never scale down well.

He’s done a great job at showing just how complex this all is.

CNN:

Lawmakers told BP Chief Operating Officer Tony Hayward on Thursday that they intend to grill him on what they believe to be cost-cutting measures adopted by the oil giant that compromised the safety of the Gulf of Mexico well.

“After learning of risks, BP made a decision to ignore them,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, citing documents and confidential e-mails obtained by investigators.

Waxman also said BP’s top leadership was “apparently oblivious” to the design and safety of the oil well.

One of the best tools for Apple technicians and Mac nerds is the Combo Update — a package that Apple makes available for download that can update a system to the latest version of its OS with a single installation. For example, updating from 10.6.1 to 10.6.4 without stopping and saying hello to 10.6.2 or 10.6.3.

These updates can also solve many issues. Since they include all previous updates, they can often jumpstart a Mac that hangs at boot or suffers from frequent application crashes. They are a great step before jumping to the rarely-needed Archive and Install.

I was downloading the 10.6.4 Combo Update to store on my thumb drive, and I realized something. These things have ballooned in size since I was first a Mac Genius, back in the 10.4 days. Please note these file sizes are those of the actual .pkg files, not the .dmgs they come wrapped in.

While it’s not a surprise that 10.5 is much larger than 10.4, since Leopard bundled PPC and Intel code in the same universal package, the fact that 10.6.4 is so big is a little disappointing.