nick peelman

Cellular Macbooks

While I agree with Marco that only some minor changes would be needed to prepare OS X for cellular connections, the only way it would be of interest to me is if they were able to deliver a carrier-neutral device. Locking a substantial capital purchase like a decently configured Macbook Air or Pro to a single carrier just seems incredibly silly and shortsighted to me.

Phones, Tablets and netbooks are all acceptable risks in my eyes, but once you pass the $1000 mark, the idiocy of the carriers’ decisions in just the past year comes into sharp focus.

iOS App: DayOne

This particular app isn’t limited to just iPhones; I use DayOne on my Macs, iPad, and iPhone, all tied together via iCloud.

When I made my attempt at Grad School a few years back, one of the professors I was assisting introduced me to his system of keeping tabs on his work. He used a Day Planner, but instead of planning his days, he logged them. One thing I have always had a problem with is the lack of ability to truly plan my day. I never understood people who can make a rigid schedule and keep it throughout a day, let alone a week.

So during my tenure at Purdue as a SysAdmin, followed a similar system. Using an At-A-Glance Planner, I made an effort before leaving my office each day to jot down some notes of what I did that day; details were sparse, but it was enough for me to write up end-of-week notes for my boss, and to kickstart my memory when I was trying to remember when I did something.

Following the release of Halo: Reach, I became romanticized by Dr. Halsey’s Journal, a fantastic, fictional, and physical relic of the Halo universe. I eschewed the At-A-Glance planners for a traditional leather-bound journal, and took to writing longer-form entries at the end of each day. This also coincided with my job and role changing from Purdue SysAdmin to Stoneware Java Developer. The developer role was requiring me to write more thorough notes in order to keep my scatter-brained tendencies manageable.

Eventually I fell out of romance with it, and my gig at Stoneware came to a close, so I all but quit logging my days.

Enter DayOne.

This is almost like the best of both worlds. I get a daily-entry, quick-notes system, I can do multiple entries per day, and if need-be, I can do a long form entry to more thoroughly document something. I can attach pictures of whiteboards from meetings, and I have also found I use it to document personal events as well, particularly travel. And the best of all: I can type it; I hate writing by hand, and the journal exacerbated that because the of the book-form/spine problem. The At-A-Glance at least could be laid flat for writing on the left-hand pages.

And given the ubiquity of the app, it doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, when I have a few free minutes, I make an entry. Or I can just snap pictures and make the entry later, attaching the pictures from my photo roll; DayOne will prompt to automatically update the date/time stamp of the entry to match the date/time stamp of the picture. That’s one of about a dozen details that make me love the app.

parislemon:

petervidani:

iOS should automatically create an album for screenshots.

A-men.

Indeed.

iOS App: Posted

I subscribe to Amazon Prime for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is the free¹ two-day shipping. Most things we routinely need and I can by from Amazon, I do. A consequence of this the UPS guy is dropping stuff at our door 2-3 days a week (on average).

A while back I had ordered a big batch of stuff for the home office, and a around the same time we were making orders for some stuff at work, and at one time I had 7 or 8 tracking numbers I was keeping tabs on.

Enter Posted.app. You feed it tracking numbers and descriptions, it presents a concise display of their status. You even get push notifications for status changes.

The app syncs across devices, and is universal, and a web interface is coming, or so I have been told.

Give it a shot if you regularly find yourself trying to keep tabs on multiple packages at once.

¹: With the exception of the yearly fee, which I more than get my money’s worth from.

Maps on iOS: Google vs Apple

Caution: Obligatory Google Maps (gMaps) for iOS post.

I can’t say I was excited about any impending Maps app from Google. I didn’t loathe the iOS 6 Maps application nearly as much as some out there. But I have to give credit where its due: Google did a stupid-fantastic job on this. The UI is incredibly well thought out, intuitive and fluid. Drag handles seem to be all the rage lately, and Google’s use of one for layer management is much more engaging and modern-feeling than the skeuomorphic page curl used by Apple’s Maps. Oh, and while Maps and gMaps both have vector road names now, Google’s are both more prevalent and easier to read. Maps almost never gives me the name or number of a road or highway where I’m looking, I have to scroll several “pages” worth of map before I find an occurrence, and that’s if I find one at all.

Performance-wise, holy shit does it blow Maps out of the water. From routing and re-routing to simple tile loading, gMaps is 100Mb Ethernet and Maps is dialup.

I definitely had my doubts about Turn-by-Turn navigation; Apple’s unique ability to hijack the status bar and lock screen would give them an edge, or so I thought. Between the background audio directions and Google’s effective use of notifications, I was very surprised at how present directions were, regardless of the foreground activity. Even the voice is more pleasing than Siri, and the voice prompts seem to come with better timing, either earlier in general, or they adapt based on your speed. Given my ‘spirited’ driving, the Maps app always felt like it was reminding me of the upcoming turn or exit a little later than it should have.

The only two nitpicks, I could really muster after two days of use: 1) the over-eager re-routing algorithm. Stopping at a stoplight or for construction traffic isn’t reason for me to dive off on the side street or make a U-turn. 2) The “my dot” indicator could be a little easier to spot, and a little less pastel.

I wasn’t happy with the way Google and Apple parted ways on the maps thing, and while I was mostly content with Apple’s solution, gMaps bests it in every way practical. Google’s polished UI is matched by their refined mapping data. I haven’t looked at the SDK they released for iOS developers yet; but I’m looking forward to see what apps are wrought from it as well.

iTunes 11 and context awareness

So I just discovered a great feature in iTunes 11: when you grab a selection of stuff and start a drag, a list of devices and playlists pops up on the right side. It is the little things.