512 Pixels

Almost 60 percent of you read my content via RSS. All ForkBombr content is published in the feed, and will continue to be in the future. Today, however, I’ve added another way to follow Forkbombr: Twitter.

I’m not one of those guys who thinks social media will save the world, or that social media can fix all the world’s problems. It can’t and it won’t. However, Twitter does make life easier, so if you want to get notified when I post something new, simply follow @forkbombr. The RSS feeds this account and it updates about every 45 minutes or so if I have posted new content. I monitor the @replies on the account, so feel free to say hello.

My personal account remains public as well over at @ismh.

Ars Technica’s Jeremy Reimer:

Word, to this day, is still largely a digital representation of a bunch of 8½ by 11 pieces of paper. Pages have numbers which you must use to reference them, and every page has a header and a footer. Word does have a display mode called “Draft” that makes it look more like an endless stream of toilet paper than separate pages, but I always switched to “Print Layout”—partly because Draft was so ugly, but mostly as a kind of unconscious reflex, a need to “know” what the printed form would look like even though I was rarely printing things out any more. Even in Draft mode, the pages are still there, and are always the same size.

[…]

It’s not even Word’s fault, really, that these problems happen. Word was designed in a different era, for a very specific purpose. We don’t work that way anymore. Microsoft has added a metric ton of collaboration features to Word over the years to try and adapt to this reality, from Track Changes to Sharepoint integration. I’ve used almost all of them, and not only are they somewhat clunky, but getting other people to use them is like pushing a rock uphill. There has to be a better way.

For Reimer, setting up a company-wide wiki server solved his problems with Word. Most people aren’t going that far, opting for services like Google Docs, which is fundamentally a word processor, just like Word.

Macworld’s Brian Beam has posted a review of SpeedText, an iPhone app that allows users to create notes using handwriting as opposed to the iPhone’s software keyboard.

Of course, this type of app stirs up memories of the Newton. Beam:

So yes — SpeedText doesn’t approach the nerdy-coolness of the Newton. Then again, most people don’t have a Newton lying around the back of their closet. In that case then, the app is a solid note-taker, particularly if you’d prefer scribbling to the built-in keyboard of the iPhone or iPod touch and so long as your note needs remain simple. SpeedText can certainly handle simple notes — at least until something better comes along.

After using the $2 app for a while this afternoon, I’ve decided I don’t like. Handwriting worked on the Newton so well in part because of the stylus. Writing with my index finger is inexact and slower than typing.

Chris Dannen has listed seven reasons to abandon the iPhone.

They aren’t bad.

Cult of Mac has published an interesting article discussing the rumored Apple tablet:

The tablet is Apple’s answer to the exploding netbook market, but it won’t be a piece-of-junk netbook. The last thing Apple will do is glom a touchscreen onto a low-cost laptop. It won’t even put a touchscreen on a regular desktop like an iMac. It makes little sense to touch an iMac’s screen when it is sitting upright. But drop the iMac into your lap, and touching objects on the screen makes perfect sense, and seems perfectly natural.

Instead, Apple will address what people DO with their netbooks — surf the Web, watch movies, video chat. It will be capable of some light productivity work, like instant messaging, email or writing blog posts. It’ll be lightweight, easily portable, and have long battery life.

They go on to describe how Snow Leopard is shaping up to be the perfect OS for the device:

As Apple demonstrated at the WWDC programmers conference earlier this year, Snow Leopard will have a slew of “finger-friendly” features, such as Cover Flow throughout, Expose, Stacks and Quick Look.

If the tablet ends up being real, I’d be much more inclined to buy one if it ran Mac OS X, as opposed to the iPhone OS.

Dave Winer:

There’s still a ton of Woz in the Mac, I am typing this on a gorgeous unibody MacBook Pro, which is probably the most lovely computer I’ve ever used. The software I’m using has never been approved by Apple, and can be downloaded from the Internet. Next to it is an iPhone, which I use only as a phone, an IM device and a communicating camera. It sucks as a phone. The IM is okay and the camera is really nice. But as a platform it’s a complete total disappointment.

Yahoo News:

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned that excessive use of emails and mobile phone text messaging is creating shallow friendships and undermining community life, according to an interview published on Sunday.

Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, also said that popular social networking sites led young people to form “transient relationships” which put them at risk of suicide when they collapsed.

[…]

The Archbishop, 63, said too much use of electronic information was “dehumanizing,” leading to a loss in social skills and the ability to read a person’s mood through their body language.

Furthermore social networking sites encouraged children to place an excessive importance on the number of friends they had instead of the quality of their relationships, he said.

There’s some good points in there, actually, but the suicide angle is taking it to an extreme. I hope.

TUAW:

Yesterday, AT&T responded to press questions about this by sending a P.R. email:

“AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it.”

Ouch. It is going to be fun to watch how Apple handles this.

Google Voice, of course, is Google’s new online service that allows you route all your calls through a new, independent phone number. The service also transcribes and stores voicemails, SMS messages and more. It’s quite handy, but it’s complicated to use from the iPhone, as it requires a user to launch Safari and use a somewhat painful mobile site to make calls and send texts.

To remedy this, a couple of iPhone developers created apps that replicated the functionality of Google’s site but in a way much easier to use.

This week, Apple pulled every single one of those apps from the App Store. Some reports claim that the developers were then responsible for issuing refunds to their customers, which is simply horrific, as Apple keeps 30 percent of the profit for every copy of every app sold.

Needless to say, this was met with great outcry from the Apple community. It even led a high-profile Mac developers abandon the platform (on a personal level, at least) in a vocal way this week:

My position is not that every app should be approved — it’s that rejected apps should be rejected for reasons that at the very least make consistent, logical sense, without garbage form-letter rejection notices that explain nothing, and with at least some sort of guidance available to the developer about how to fix the problem instead of meeting them with a brick wall.

Ouch. Apple needs to listen to complaints like these — they are valid and honest. These problems are serious.

Unless things change, Apple will continue to piss off developers and customers, and that’s good for no one. Apple needs to get the App Store and its governing policies under control, and fast. By pulling apps months after their approved (and then blaming AT&T for it) is bad form, no matter who was behind the decision. Apple needs to be much more transparent about what they will allow and not allow in the Store, and stick to it. The longer they wait, the angrier developers and customers will become.

I’m not saying bad choices on Apple’s part are going to ruin the platform. The iPhone and App Store have so much momentum behind them, they’re about impossible to stop at this point.

Of course, the plot got a lot more serious today as news broke that the FCC is looking into the situation. Macworld:

In a letter sent Friday to Apple, the agency asked the company why Google Voice was rejected, which related applications have been rejected along with it, and what role AT&T may have played in the decision. It also asked what the difference is between Google Voice and other VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) software that has been approved for the iPhone.

More broadly the agency asked Apple what other applications have been rejected for the phone and why.

(This evening, TechCrunch posted copies of the letters the FCC sent to AT&T, Apple and Google.)

While this is a serious turn of events, it’s unknown what the consequences would be if Apple and/or AT&T are found in the wrong. Honestly, that might the best thing for everybody involved.

Reuters:

Apple Inc said on Friday it has issued a software update to fix a vulnerability that security experts said could allow hackers to take control of the iPhone and use it for identity theft.

The security flaw in Apple’s hugely popular smartphone was disclosed Thursday at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, a major forum for exchanging information on computer security threats.

Researchers showed how iPhones could be broken into by sending computer code via the phone’s Short Message Service (SMS) system. Mobile phones use SMS to send and receive text messages along with software upgrades.

In a statement, Apple said, “we appreciate the information provided to us about SMS vulnerabilities that affect several mobile phone platforms. This morning, less than 24 hours after a demonstration of this exploit, we’ve issued a free software update that eliminates the vulnerability from the iPhone.

Ladies and gentlemen, fire up your iTunes.

An awesome photoessay by Time Magazine.

The neat part is that the press had only about 30 seconds to shoot. After that, it was a private discussion.

From today’s NewsGator press release:

You spoke and we listened: in response to customer demand, NewsGator’s best-of-breed consumer RSS applications now work with Google Reader. Google Reader will become the online companion to and the synchronization platform for our award-winning RSS reader applications – FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.

In conjunction with this announcement, NewsGator is making changes to several of its consumer RSS Readers. NewsGator will continue to support all its individual end-user applications for enterprise customers. However, NewsGator will continue to develop and support only a sub-set of these applications for free consumer use. FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have new versions for consumers that we encourage you to download as soon as possible. NewsGator’s other individual end-user applications will not continue to be supported for free consumer users after August 31, 2009. Again, all of NewsGator’s individual end-user applications will continue to be supported for paying Enterprise customers.

Wow. I for one, am excited. I like Google Reader and NetNewsWire, and now I can use them both easily.