512 Pixels

This morning, Apple launched their “1 Billion App Countdown” campaign:

As of today, nearly one billion apps have been downloaded around the globe. So we just want to say thanks — a billion. Download an app and you’ll automatically get the chance to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro. Just go to the iTunes Store, browse the App Store, and download your best app yet.

It’s taken the App Store less than a year to reach 1 billion downloads. For comparison, it was almost 3 years before 1 billion items were downloaded from the iTunes Music Store.

Pretty damn impressive.

CNET has posted a link to a video from a Houston TV station that is of their “consumer reporter” complaining that sweat can kill iPhones. Here’s the segment transcribed, via CNET:

“I never would’ve bought a phone if I knew it would ruin the first time I got it out at the gym,” Stacie Keneker said.

“They sell all these accessories that you are supposed to be able to use at the gym to make it convenient,” Lee Pittman complained.

But “convenient” is the last word Pittman and Keneker said they’d use to describe their iPhone experience.

“I would like a phone that works,” Keneker said, holding up her iPhone that constantly resets itself.

“This phone is worthless to me now. It’s useless,” said Pittman, whose iPhone will no longer let him make calls.

When their iPhones stopped working properly, both said Apple employees told them a moisture sensor on their devices had been tripped.

“It happens all the time,” said Pittman, repeating what he said an Apple employee at the Willowbrook, Texas, store told him. “He said they have this issue all the time.”

What happens? Apparently sweat happens.

Both Keneker and Pittman use their iPhones at the gym to listen to music or use the calorie-counting fitness applications that actually come with the phone. They said Apple employees told them their sweaty palms are the likely culprit here.

“If this was going to be sensitive enough where you can’t use it at the gym, why don’t they have a cover there?” asked Pittman, pointing to the opening where the charger plugs into the iPhone.

And here’s CNET’s analysis of the story:

I discussed the consumer complaints with Amy and decided that the iPhone failure in one case was probably an honest accident–the user apparently has sweaty hands and tripped the sensor on the bottom of the iPhone 3G. It is hard to believe that this alone would kill the only-three-week-old iPhone. I hope that the Apple Store employees are only voiding warranties if both sensors are tripped, but I was not able to verify this either with Apple.

I realized something else when speaking to Amy about the iPhone and any Apple product with a water damage sensor: unlike on other cell phones, the moisture sensors are very accessible. On most cell phones, the sensors are located underneath a removable battery and enclosed by the cover that usually locked the battery into place. One would suspect that since those sensors were deep inside of the device, that they were better judges of whether or not you dropped the cell phone in a puddle.

In comparison, Apple’s sensor (at the bottom of the iPhone) could easily be set off by sweat from your hands. You can see the sensor locations for a iPhone 3G in the photo above and a Nokia cell phone below for comparison.

There are a few things about this that make me mad. First of all, it’s a news story about someone who has sour grapes over their iPhone getting damaged - that’s not news.

My second concern comes from CNET’s problem about where the iPhone liquid damage indicators are. The case is solid - so it’d be pointless to have a liquid indicator inside the iPhone somewhere. The 3G model has two liquid indicators - one in the headphone jack (like the first iPhone) and one tucked up inside the case above the dock connector.

That indicator couldn’t be tripped “easily… by sweat from your hands” unless you held the iPhone upside down. Or y our sweat can crawl around on its own.

And why did there compare an iPhone to a Nokia?

Gizmodo:

Yeah, I’ve used Windows machines for essentially my entire life, but switching turned out to be not that big a deal. Why? Because an OS isn’t that important.

What’s kept me from switching all these years isn’t because I loved Windows or hated Macs. No, it was more a combination of laziness and self-identification. That’s to say I didn’t want to switch because I didn’t want to deal with learning the ins and outs of a new OS, and also I identified myself as a “Windows guy” and didn’t want to become a “Mac guy.” Both reasons are essentially bullshit.

Macworld:

… here’s the bottom line: Strictly on the basis of specs and features, your money will go further with a Windows laptop than with an Apple laptop, whether you have $1000 or $2000 to spend.

But does that mean MacBooks aren’t a good value? That’s where subjectivity comes into play. In my opinion, MacBooks, with the exception of the white $999 model, are indeed good values. I’ve owned both Macs and Windows PCs since the early 90s, and my Macs have tended to last longer and give me far fewer problems. And Macs are simply a joy to use, thanks to the Mac OS’s many ingenious features and Apple’s design savvy. I’ve rarely felt that way about a Windows computer.

Apple’s rack-mounted, often-forgotten server offering - the Xserve - got updated today with some serious new hardware. Here’s Macworld on what is probably the most interesting option*:

For the first time, Apple has included a solid state drive in the Xserve. The 128GB SSD boot drive option is faster than regular hard disks and it doesn’t take up one of the three available drive bays. The drive bays support 7200 rpm SATA and 15,000 rpm SAS drives and can be configured with up to 3TB of internal storage.

Having the boot the drive separate from the 3 drive bays frees up those three drives for more interesting and beneficial configurations - like RAID 5, giving users the best setup for speed and redundancy.

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*From Macworld’s article, you’d think that the SSD is on all models, but according to Apple’s tech spec page and the “Configure your Xserve” page on the online Apple Store, it is indeed optional.

Edible Apple:

Apple is pretty adept at getting its products onto some of TV’s most popular shows, but no show can top Futurama when it comes to a sprinkling of both well-known and obscure Apple references. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise given the fact that series co-founder David X. Cohen is a huge Apple fan whose favorite piece of technology is the Apple II - Cohen even named the character “Dr. Zoidberg” after a computer game he originally created for the Apple II in assembly language.

I don’t actually own a television, but I can appreciate this a whole lot - I literally cheered out loud when WALL•E chimed* after he was done charging each morning.

*WALL•E’s chiming is funnier than it appears on the surface - a Pixar character acting like an Apple product. That’s funny simply because Steve Jobs has huge roles in both companies - having help found and lead both of them. That chime is the signal a OS X-running machine gives that it has passed POST (Power On Self Test) - meaning the basic hardware requirements for boot are present. WALL•E ’s battery wasn’t just fully charged - he was prepared to work, knowing his major systems were good to go.

Since the introduction of the 2.0 version of the iPhone software, Apple, users and developers have enjoyed the App Store - the mechanism that allows customers to purchase third-party applications for their devices anytime, anywhere. It has generated millions of dollars for developers and for Apple, who gets 30% of each purchase.

Naturally, other mobile phone companies have wanted a piece of the pie, and now almost every major player - RIM, Windows Mobile, Android and Palm - have a mobile application store in one stage or another of deployment. Gizmodo takes a look:

The first thing you’ll notice about these efforts—coming from such traditionally competitive companies as Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia and Microsoft—is just how similar they all sound. App World? App Catalog? App Market? Mobile Marketplace? This outward likeness actually runs pretty deep—these stores are advertising uncannily similar feature sets, for both users and developer.

Matt Haughey, via John Gruber:

I mention this entire story because there are thousands of people all over twitter and blogs that think throwing thousands of dollars at people that describe themselves as a “marketing guru” is the way to increase their company sales. I’m here to say I think that may very well be a waste of money, time, and energy. The Rainbow company makes awesome stuff, has a great website (pretty damn slick all-CSS one at that), and helpful catalog materials (both online and off). They got on my radar when a friend dug up their details for a blog post, in a way no marketing budget could influence.

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

My thoughts exactly:

The simple truth is that people don’t really change all that much. Business doesn’t change that much. Accounting is accounting, if it’s done with QuickBooks or with a pen on a ledger. Social media doesn’t have the power to alter the world in the way some of the “experts” would have us believe.

I think the public may be getting tired of getting ambushed by social media evangelists. And that’s not a bad thing at all, especially when social media is used to cover up a crappy service, product, or thought. A rotten sandwich will always stink, even if in a nice container.

Boing Boing:

The 22nd Annual Rube Goldberg machine contest saw many fun attempts at comical inefficiency this year, including this Super Mario machine entry from engineers at Penn State.

This makes me happy on so many levels.

It’s pretty cool.

An Overview and A Realization:

Back in October, I wrote about how I manage tasks on a daily basis:

After puttering around with Notes on the iPhone, OmniFocus, Evernote and a few more, I just gave up… until a friend showed me Remember The Milk (RTM), an on-line task management system that is easy to use, and has an iPhone-friendly web version (for a fee).

[…]

Then, I read about a iPhone app called (simply) Todo, by a company named Appigo. (Here’s the iTunes link.) It’s a simple, powerful GTD application that syncs with RTM.

After some heavy usage today, I’m impressed with Todo. It syncs back to RTM very quickly, and lets me add things on the go, or copy and paste large chunks into my GTD world via the RTM website from any Mac or PC. I can categorize things by list and/or tags, or leave them in the “Inbox” for later.

A few things have changed since then. First of all, the RTM team has built and released its own iPhone app that leaves others in the dust. Other factors include that life has become more hectic (babies have a way of doing that, we’re finding out), and I’m on my iPhone far more than ever before throughout the day.

So as I considered how I was staying organized, I came to the conclusion that I have two types of information: Tasks and Notes. Here’s how I define them:

Task: A single action that is taken one time and is completed.

Note: A piece of information that will need to be referenced again in the future, but doesn’t necessarily require any action.

Breaking the Mold:

RTM is all about tasks. The website and the iPhone app are centered around single actions that can be checked off a list. Add the fact that RTM supports tagging, categorizing and adding due dates to tasks, it’s the list-maker’s dream come true. But RTM doesn’t do a single thing with Notes - all entries into the system follow the same form. To get around this, I setup a list called “Notes” and was simply making tasks look like notes - giving them a title and using the description field for my information - and leaving off any due dates or tags. I love RTM on the iPhone, but there’s not a native Mac application that syncs with the service. They’re a few Adobe Air-based apps, and a couple of Dashboard widgets, but these just offer a fraction of what their website offers. Sadly, RTM’s site can be tricky to use - the way the sidebar (where a task’s details can be edited) is tied to the main content is troublesome. It’s hard to explain, but the sidebar is dependent on what task is selected, and if another one is hovered over by the mouse on the way to the sidebar, that task is selected. It’s not intuitive.

Trying Something New:

I had grown frustrated with this setup, and decided to try Evernote - a system much like RTM, but based around (as you’ve guessed) notes. Evernote’s entries are more like emails then lists - I can put screenshots (the service can even covert images to text), links and more into the system. Tagging and categories (called notebooks) are present, just like in RTM, and the info can be synced between Macs, PCs, iPhones and the web easily.

Like RTM, however, Evernote is somewhat a one-trick pony: it does notes really well, but sucks when it comes to tasks. The Mac version of the software allows notes to have checkboxes in them (notes faking as tasks), but those don’t seem to work in the iPhone app. Not to mention the application is slow and clunky - especially compared to RTM’s iPhone app.

Old Dog, Old Tricks:

Even though Evernote’s ability to hold images and covert those images to text is handy, most of what I do is task-based - and Evernote simply doesn’t handle tasks well. So after experimenting and branching out, I’m still an RTM guy. My notes live masked as tasks, but I can do everything I need to from my iPhone easily and quickly or my Macs (almost as easily and quickly) - and that’s the point, isn’t it?

Gizmodo:

iPhoto’s face detection isn’t perfect, but we can’t blame the software for spotting a face in this unbaked batch of cookies.

I mean, c’mon, it looks like just a teddy bear! And maybe a teddy bear face doesn’t constitute a human face to some of you in the audience, but I like to think that our world has grown beyond such prejudices. I like to believe that we live in a world in which any face can be considered a face.

Hit the link for a photo that will make you lick your screen.