Dear teleconference vendors: When I’m supposed to enter the call ID and press #, let me press * if I screw up the number. Please?
Best. Spam. Ever.
Fresh coat of paint
Just did a minor visual refresh on the blog at utilware.com, with a tip of the hat to the Tumblr dashboard - feels all spring fresh now. Also, wired up the Ask Me Anything page - try it out.
Bringing iOSness to the Mac
It’s been interesting watching the Mac App Store grow over the past few months. Initially, it generally leaned towards the apps that any Mac aficionado would expect to see in there: primarily apps from Apple and the usual gang of indie developers.
Lately, however, there has been an increasing amount of crossover from the iOS App Store. And with third-party frameworks like Chameleon from The Icon Factory, we can expect to see even more of the hundreds of thousands of iOS apps start to make the transition.
This leads to an interesting switch in perspective. While iOS is indeed a full-fledged operating system, it could arguably be considered the less powerful sibling to desktop OS X due to limitations in memory, storage, and so forth. But if you look at some of the apps that are making the jump onto OS X, there’s something new going on here: OS X is the one that seems less powerful - because Mac apps don’t have access (for now) to a litany of goodies that you get on the mobile platform:
- Always-on connectivity
- Compass orientation
- GPS location*
- Direct tactile interaction with the screen
This is especially evident in an app like Angry Birds, where the touch-to-drag - no matter how well executed on the large Mac trackpad - is no match for the sensory experience of direct manipulation, even on my lag-tastic Motorola Charm.
Do these additional ‘senses’ make sense on a laptop? Two years ago the answer would probably have been a resounding “no” - a phone is a phone, and a laptop is a laptop - and we didn’t want our laptops knowing where we were or what we were doing. However, as we become increasingly dependent on our devices knowing about the world around us, this might just change.
And that would make a trip to maps.google.com that much more pleasant. **
—
* It appears that OS X Lion will have gross (IP-based) location sensing, but still not a full GPS chipset
** Of course, this opens up a whole can of worms around privacy and trust, which is something we’re focused on at Create with Context for a good part of this year
On iOS app updating
There are two competing strategies in my household around updating apps on the iPhone:
1. “Oh boy, new functionality! Must check it out!”
2. “That red circle with ‘49’ in it has never entered my consciousness”
I fall firmly in camp number 1. I do not understand how people live in camp 2.
Like its big brother on the Mac, OmmWriter for iPad is a new text editor that focuses on not just eliminating distractions, but providing a unique writing experience. You get a custom keyboard, relaxing audio accompaniment, and can write against your choice of soothing canvases.
via TUAW
I want to create a dedicated writing app for the iPad and iOS that has a grizzlied Jack Nicholson and a Cranked up Chev Chelios staring over your shoulder, yelling at you to “just finish the g-d-mn thing already!”
Feeling all meta. Want to buy a Barnes & Noble Nook, rewire it to run standard Android OS, and then install the Amazon Kindle reader app on it.
“HP’s WebOS, on the other hand, will feature only a few thousand apps at launch on July 1, with just hundreds designed specifically for the tablet itself. “Let me be clear: For TouchPad apps, we’ll have a little more than 300 at launch that are written just for the TouchPad—quite honestly, Honeycomb doesn’t even have the numbers that we’ll have to start,” Kerris says.”
Interesting point from Richard Kerris at HP/Palm
HP: TouchPad’s WebOS Threatens Android, Apple iOS | Fast Company
