In my weekly column at Macgasm, I shared my thoughts on the hype surrounding the next iPad.
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OmniFocus Aid
OmniFocus Aid would be lightweight, easy to use, and built for the sole purpose of throwing tasks into your OmniFocus database when at your Mac. Or, put another way, it would be a utility that consisted of just the top-notch ways that OmniFocus for Mac currently lets you capture action items:
- Quick Entry Pane (not unlike the one that already ships with OmniFocus)
- It knows your projects and contexts
- Supports clippings, Mail rules, and bookmarklets
It should install in the Menu Bar to be accessible for those who don’t swear by the keyboard, and it should sync in the background. It could sell for a few bucks to anyone who purchases the iPad or iPhone versions.
Omni Group: 2011 is Gonna be Major
Why can’t companies like Cultured Code pull this off?
Twenty Third-Party Apps
Deleted. Deleted. Deleted.
Suddenly, I’d gone from having 60 third-party apps on my phone to having a mere 20. That’s enough to fit on two screens (if you stuff the Stock Apps you can’t delete and don’t use into a folder). It’s been about 15 minutes since I finished, and already I can’t remember half the apps I deleted. I think that’s a great sign that I did the right thing.
Stay Classy, Tumblr
Tumblr co-founder David Karp seems like a fun guy. This is from an article about an email he sent to a Tumblr user who was complaining about the service’s recent issues with uptime:
Karp responded abruptly, saying that “…we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team” continuing to say that this is a “…team that regularly spends their nights and weekends working feverishly to provide the best service we can against extraordinary challenges”. He signed off saying that “Plenty of services will import Tumblr blogs. Please go away.”
CNN’s 1986 Coverage of Challenger
That video is still so shocking, even after 25 years.
‘Trauma to the Nation’s Psyche’
Senator Bill Nelson, in the same NPR story:
It was a huge shock to the American people because the space shuttle had come to represent our entire technological prowess. And when people suddenly saw on their television screens, that was played over and over, the close-up shot of those solid rocket boosters going off in different directions about 10 miles high in the Florida sky — this was a trauma to the nation’s psyche.
‘Catastrophic Events’
Jon Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan, to NPR on the space shuttle Challenger:
It was such a shock, because most people thought it would never ever happen. But once you get the idea that spacecraft sometimes have catastrophic events, then it becomes less of a shock.
NASA Mission STS-51-L
Twenty-five years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after lift-off, due to an O-ring failure on one of its right-side solid booster engines. This caused a plume of fire that burned through the large external fuel tank, which disintegrated moments later, breaking up the space shuttle in the process. There was no large-scale explosion, just structural failures that were made far worse due to the velocity of the vehicle through the atmosphere.
On Adding Features
Marco Arment, talking about Instapaper development with Rands:
Generally, I know I’m done because as I’m testing the migration from the current in-store version to the new version, I cringe at how bad the in-store version is relative to my shiny new development copy. I think, “I can’t believe *that* is what customers are using right now, when they could be using *this*.”
That’s when I freeze new features, fix any known bugs, polish any rough edges, begin final testing, and prepare to issue the release.
A ‘Rocky’ Time
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson seems confident AT&T won’t suffer too badly at the hands of the Verizon iPhone:
[The coming months] may be rocky, volatile and hard to predict, but as the market stabilizes, we will work through it.
Good luck, dude.
Software Updates and the App Store
Cabel, writing about a bugfix release for Transmit:
We wrapped up Transmit 4.1.5 on January 6th, fixing some important bugs and addressing two major (and unexpected) Mac App Store issues with Transmit Disk and Amazon S3, part of the pain of the bleeding edge.
Our plan was simple: submit 4.1.5 to the Mac App Store, but don’t post it to our direct customers until it’s approved by Apple, so all customers are treated equally and get the update at the same time.