When showing off the original iPhone, Steve Jobs famously said, “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” We’re born with ten fingers, and Apple says that’s all we need to operate their Multi-Touch devices.
That said, there are cases where a stylus is nice to have. For me, having a pen to use with my iPad is nice when annotating PDFs and sketching in apps like Paper.
But which stylus is best? To find out, I picked three well-known models and spent some time with each of them.
I wrote a guest post over at Frictionless, and I think you might enjoy it:
Many will say that friction is bad, and that we must do everything we can to eliminate it from our workflows, our setups and our lives.
Of course, fiddling for fiddling’s sake is bad. It introduces unjustified friction.
But sometimes, the friction is worth it. If the end result was worth it.
If you have a podcast or app on iTunes, this app is a great way to keep up with your reviews.
MacStories linked to this post over in The Verge’s forums, in which “gizmosachin” mocked up what (s)he thinks iOS 6 might look like.
All in all, I like the look. I agree with Marco that the blue default look within iOS and apps is dated. It’s time for a change, and I think the silver look used in the WWDC 2012 app is a great candidate for something new.
While I initially thought that June would be too early for an iOS 6 preview, if something as basic as UIKit is going to be updated, I expect Scott Forstall to be on stage at some point during the company’s keynote.
With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is pretty much dead last when it comes to the smartphone wars. They are even behind RIM.
While devices like the Lumia 900 are attractive and well-built, consumers haven’t fallen in love with Windows Phone 7.
But why?
I decided to try to answer that question by spending several weeks with the operating system, running on the year-old HTC Arrive.
Microsoft’s philosophy when it comes to hardware is somewhere in between Apple’s and Google’s. The company allows third party OEMs to build phones that run their OS, but Microsoft dictates to them exact specs, so that every WP7 device should run at the same speed, resolution and more.
Depending upon whom you ask, Friday, June 1 is the best or worst thing to come to the Mac App Store since it opened its doors in 2011. As of now, new and significantly updated apps submitted to Apple’s Mac App Store must implement sandboxing.
Darren Murph at Engadget wrote a great feature on TwelveSouth, the maker of many popular accessories for the Mac, iPad and iPhone.
The thing that struck me the most about this article is how careful the guys at TwelveSouth are about becoming too big:
The next question must have felt obvious: “Well, what if you had the opportunity to branch out… to make accessories for companies other than Apple?”
“We’re not interested in that,” [TwelveSouth co-founder Andrew Green] said. In fact, he has been approached by the non-Apple world; designers looking for a design house, companies with earnings in the billions and even one particular CEO of one particularly important consumer electronics company. Green remains humble, but I’m aghast.
I laughed several times, but this is my favorite part:
“Wait,” you say, “Samuel L. Jackson isn’t lonely. He’s making a romantic dinner for date night.” Really? I’m not buying it. My guess is that he gives Siri the night off so she never learns that he spent the night sitting in his kitchen, silently crying into his risotto.
The number of Americans using Twitter has grown to 15 percent of Internet users, according to a new survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. That’s up only slightly from 13 percent a year earlier, but Pew notes the percentage of daily users has doubled from last year to 8 percent.