This week on Connected, Federico, Myke and I follow up on the history of the iPod, then discusses software and hardware that are helping them get in better shape.
Sponsored by:
Quote keeping is a problem with a thousand possible solutions.
Quotes can be stored in apps like Vesper, Simplenote, Evernote or even Google Docs. But the data entry sucks, and there’s no relationships built across pieces of data. There’s no structure to the data, leading to messy storage.
Take Evernote for example. I rely on it daily as my Anything Bucket. It does a good job at doing lots of things. It’s a generalist.
Maia Olson at Smile Software:
We’ve been hard at work since Apple announced the new and exciting extensions and custom keyboards available in iOS 8.
TextExpander touch 3, coming on the heels of iOS 8 this fall, includes a TextExpander keyboard which can expand snippets in any app on the iPhone or iPad, including built-in apps such as Mail and Safari.
Hot damn, my iOS devices are about to get a lot more useful at work.
This morning, Dropbox announced a revamped approach to the company’s Pro offering.
Instead of the tiered structure in place before, all Dropbox Pro users will now have 1 TB of space on the service for $9.99/month or $99/year.
The new monthly price matches Google Drive’s monthly cost for the same amount of storage. Paid annually, Dropbox is actually cheaper.
In addition to the increased space, Pro users can set passwords and expiration dates for shared links and view-only permissions for shared folders. Lastly, Dropbox Pro customers can remotely unlink and remove a Dropbox folder from a lost computer.
Matt Richman really wants Apple to ship ARM-based Macs. Let’s look at his latest points:
Richman — who discloses that he owns 56 shares of Apple and 50 shares of ARM — writes:
If Apple’s chip design team can create a phone processor that performs on par with Intel’s fastest tablet chip, the company’s “highest priority”, then there’s no reason to believe that the same team at Apple can’t design chips powerful enough for any Mac in the company’s lineup.
Bradley Chambers over on The Sweet Setup:
Public Wi-Fi is great way to download podcasts, movies, and music when on the go without burning through your data cap. Even checking Twitter and sending emails can start to add up if you’re away from home a lot. Public Wi-Fi isn’t always secure, though.
The solution? A VPN service, and Bradley has some great advice on which one to use.
John Siracusa discusses his OS X reviews.
Project Pingback is a free tool that lets companies find and convert potential customers on Twitter.
Our algorithm uses the power of predictive searching to find customers who want to buy what you offer but don’t know you exist. For example, if you sell web hosting, we’ll send you all the posts we can find by people who want to buy web hosting. It’s as simple as that.
You can tweet to those people and convert them directly - which, aside from earning you a customer, makes your brand seem more connected and friendly.
My friend Thomas Brand rounds out yesterday’s article on control interactions within MacOS and OS X with a feature I totally overlooked.
The original Macintosh shipped with a very simple control panel that allowed users to adjust their computer’s volume, mouse tracking speed and desktop background, among other things:
Today, System Preferences is a bloated mess compared to Susan Kare’s 1984 masterpiece:
However, the history from the original Macintosh Control Panel to Maverick’s System Preferences isn’t a linear one.
In 1994, with the System 7.1-running PowerBook 500 series of notebooks and the Duo 280c, 1 Apple introduced the Control Strip, which can be seen in the lower left of this screenshot:
Zach Hamed:
Ask any Mac power user about their menubar and you’ll get a different list of 5-10 must-have applications and utilities that boost productivity. The menubar is the mission control of a user’s computer, giving them an at-a-glance view of stats and apps that are important to them. The menubar can become so crowded, in fact, that’s there’s a menubar app that collects menubar apps. So meta.
Hamed’s breakdown of popular menu bar (Apple uses it as two words) apps is an excellent example of how parts of OS X feel out of control.
On Monday, Relay FM went live. We published the first episode of each of our five shows first thing in the morning.
Myke interviewed Marco Arment on Inquisitive, we spoke about the history of the iPod on Connected while the Nintendo DS and PS 4 were the topics of choice on Virtual.
Since Analog(ue) with Casey Liss is a new show, he and Myke spoke about launching things. However on the venerable Pen Addict podcast, Myke and Brad jumped right back in.