The newest version of my favorite RSS reader is full of goodies.
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The Weekly Briefly: Kids and Touchscreens⇢
I joined Shawn Blanc on his weekly podcast to talk about parenting in the 21st century.
The Touch-Screen Generation⇢
If you’re at all interested in the whole parenting and technology thing, don’t miss this great Atlantic article by Hanna Rosin.
What the Freedom of Speech actually means⇢
We all hear people complaining that their right to free speech is being taken away, or that if some jerk on TV says something terrible and is fired, their First Amendment rights have been violated by a television network.
In reality, however, the right to free speech is a contract between the federal government and its citizens. It says nothing — and offers no protection — from real-world consequences for saying something others disagree with or find inflammatory.
How to have Dropbox ignore a local folder within its synced directory
As I’ve written about before, I store all of my images on Dropbox. As I sync photos to my iOS devices from iTunes, however, I have a bit of a problem: a 42 GB iPod Photo Cache taking up a ton of room on my Dropbox account:
What is in this folder? Here’s what Apple says:
When you use iTunes to sync photos to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod, iTunes creates a folder called iPod Photo Cache. The iPod Photo Cache stores photos that are optimized for display on your device. The location of this folder depends on the syncing options you select. In iTunes, if you change the selection in the Sync Photos From menu, a new iPod Photo Cache folder will be created (and the previous folder will remain).
Loom joins Dropbox⇢
Today’s the day for photo management news, I suppose. Loom, the cloud-powered photo storage system has joined Dropbox:
We’ve been working hard to create a photo management solution for people just like us. People who have too many photos in too many places, taking up space, collecting dust on our phones, our computers and our external hard drives. It’s big problem and a common one that many have been grinding hard to solve!
Flickr 3.0 for iPhone and Android introduced⇢
Flickr’s Bernardo Hernandez:
On Flickr, everyone gets 1,000 gigabytes of storage free, enough space for more than 500,000 photos, pretty much all the space you’ll ever need. Our new Auto Sync feature lets you seamlessly upload all your original quality photos from your phone automatically to your account, so that Flickr can be your camera roll in the cloud.
Today we are also introducing a new way to rediscover and explore your images. Even if you have thousands of photos, our intelligent search engine will help you find what you’re looking for fast. Flickr’s understanding of your photo’s date and time (ex: “January 2014”), place (ex: “San Francisco”), and even scenes and objects (ex: “car,” “sunset,” “beach,” “portrait”) helps organize your images so you don’t have to.
Photos+ 1.1 adds Dropbox support⇢
Federico Viticci:
Photos+ 1.1 has kept the app’s straightforward approach and visualization of photos, but thanks to Dropbox integration it can now look for photos inside a Dropbox folder. Photos loaded from the Dropbox retain the same options of local photos: you can view metadata, share photos, and open a location panel to see where a photo was taken on a map. Obviously, the app requires a few extra seconds to load a full-resolution photo from Dropbox — thumbnails are loaded at a lower-res to speed up the experience — but everything else works just like the old app.
The Sweet Setup’s complete backup guide⇢
Over the last several weeks, Shawn, Jeffrey and I have been working on what evolved into an epic 5-part series on backing up your Mac:
- Backing up your computer is easy
- The easiest way to back up your Mac: Time Machine
- The best app for making bootable backups of your Mac: SuperDuper
- Our favorite external hard drive: WD My Book Hard Drive for Mac
- The best cloud backup service: Backblaze
There’s no excuse for not backing up your Mac, so if you don’t have a plan in place, or want to brush up on what the best tools on the market are, be sure to flip through these articles.
The Problem and the Solution⇢
This week on The Prompt, Federico, Myke and I re-visit Carousel, Greg Christie’s departure from Apple and CarPlay. Then, Federico buys a shirt on the air and leads a discussion about boredom with apps, tinkering with setups and feature creep in apps and services.
The more things change...
My post from earlier earned me a stack of email. A lot of was in agreement, but one email from a reader named Larry jumped out at me:
At a restaurant, for example, don’t kids have crayons and a placemat to color? Hasn’t this been common for decades? How is that inherently any different than an iPad? Isn’t the point to give a child something to do? Certainly we can question specific things kids might be doing on an iPad, but isn’t the concept of offering a distraction to a child in public really pretty normal and common and not really that bad?
On Kids and Touchscreens
But the ever-present touchscreens make me incredibly uneasy—probably because they make parenting so easy. There is always one at hand to make restaurants and long drives and air travel much more pleasant. The tablet is the new pacifier.
I agree with Honan’s concluding paragraph that there isn’t a clear-cut answer for appropriate boundaries when it comes to our kids and their usage of iOS devices.