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Consumers need detailed app release notes so we can make informed decisions
Pinterest recently joined the (fortunately, for now) small ranks of apps that replaced their actual App Store “What’s New” release notes with a canned “we’re making the app better every couple of weeks!” message.
This practice is wrong, misleading, lazy, and it erodes consumer trust. […]
Dave nails it.
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Instapaper Launches Notes, Bringing Annotations to Articles – MacStories
Notes in Instapaper 6.4 are simple and well integrated with the rest of the app. As you’re reading, you can select text to bring up a redesigned action menu with options to copy, define, highlight, add a note, and share. Notes are comments added to highlights: you can highlight text first and then tap the highlight to add a note, or you can add a note right away and the selected text will also be highlighted.
I just switched from Pocket to Instapaper; in spite of preferring Pocket’s UI & Mac app this is a killer feature for me.
— http://www.macstories.net/ios/instapaper-launches-notes-bringing-annotations-to-articles/
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dedlr asked: the link to GitHub repo iosWorkflows shows 404. why?
Good question, it shouldn’t be doing that! The repo still exists, I can get to while I’m logged in and it’s still set to public so it should be showing up for you. However, I confirmed that it does give me the 404 error when I’m logged out and I’ve submitted a support request to GitHub to find out what’s going on.
I’ll update you as soon as we get it fixed, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
It’s fixed now, they had incorrectly flagged it as spam. I’ve got to say, wow was GitHub’s support fast! Less than 30 minutes after I sent the request they had it fixed and replied to me.
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Relaunching Soon
I’m moving to WordPress and it’s happening soon. In the meantime, check out the iosWorkflows project I’ve been working on. It made MacStories and Lifehacker!
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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) seeks to form a partnership with the software community to enhance the quality of software-related patents (Software Partnership). Members of the public are invited to participate. The Software Partnership will be an opportunity to bring stakeholders together through a series of roundtable discussions to share ideas, feedback, experiences, and insights on software-related patents.
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Thank god, please fix this.
(Source: federalregister.gov)
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Michael Cronan, a marketing executive responsible for conjuring up the names of two hugely influential consumer gadgets, TiVo and the Amazon Kindle, died Tuesday at the age of 61. Throughout his renowned career, Cronan operated his namesake branding firm along with his wife Karin Himba. […]
Then, in 2007, Amazon asked Cronan for his best naming ideas for an e-reader product. His wife told the New York Times that the creative executive sought to find a name that was “about starting something, giving birth to something.” Kindle seemed a good fit. Thus Amazon’s hugely influential brand was born and proved a monumental hit with consumers.
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Michael Cronan, marketing executive behind TiVo and Kindle brands, dies at 61 | The Verge
I’ve always thought that ‘Kindle’ was an inspired name.
(Source: theverge.com)
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'Hashtag' named word of the year by the American Dialect Society | The Verge
I think they meant to send a suggestion for Lake Superior State University’s 2013 List of Banished Words and something went horrible wrong.
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“My 2013 New Year’s resolutions: Stop taking analysts’ nonsense seriously, stop sourcing from Digitimes and do some basic fact-checking and/or engage common sense prior to publication.” –None of the Apple rumor blogs
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Rumor Roundup: Resolutions are made to be broken | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog
If only.
(Source: tuaw.com)
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The very thing the 16 skiers and snowboarders had sought — fresh, soft snow — instantly became the enemy. Somewhere above, a pristine meadow cracked in the shape of a lightning bolt, slicing a slab nearly 200 feet across and 3 feet deep. Gravity did the rest.
Snow shattered and spilled down the slope. Within seconds, the avalanche was the size of more than a thousand cars barreling down the mountain and weighed millions of pounds. Moving about 7o miles per hour, it crashed through the sturdy old-growth trees, snapping their limbs and shredding bark from their trunks.
The avalanche, in Washington’s Cascades in February, slid past some trees and rocks, like ocean swells around a ship’s prow. Others it captured and added to its violent load.
Somewhere inside, it also carried people. How many, no one knew.
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Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Multimedia Feature - NYTimes.com
Yes, I’m a little late getting to the New York Time’s Snow Fall story but it was too good to pass up mentioning, if you missed it or skipped it already now’s a good time to take a look.
The story of Snow Fall is as riveting as it is tragic; in spite of its length I couldn’t put it down until I was finished reading it.
What makes this piece so good is that starts with an exciting and emotionally charged story and then presents it in tasteful and intimate experience that’s only possible with modern technology. Every word, pixel and frame of video has been carefully crafted to complement others in a convergence of media in a way that I hope hints at the future of journalism. Bravo to the New York Times!
One quick note; while the article is responsive, you really want to read this one in a full size desktop browser as it makes use of both the additional space and some HTML5/CSS3 tricks that may not be available elsewhere.
[via: Daring Fireball]
(Source: The New York Times)
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I didn’t believe I could look forward to receiving a newsletter every day, but it happened with NextDraft. Dave Pell does an exceptional job in bringing quality news to me with a style that’s informative and friendly. More importantly, NextDraft is uniquely human, with no robots involved in link aggregation.
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It’s great to see NextDraft getting some press, I started reading it (via the iOS app) a few months ago and it’s quickly become one of my top — and certainly most entertaining — daily sources of news.
(Source: macstories.net)
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Slogger indexes various public social services and creates Day One (http://dayoneapp.com/) journal entries or plain text Markdown files for them. It allows you to keep a personal journal that collects your online social life automatically, all in one place.
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Speaking of Brett, I just fell in love with Slogger.
This is a far, far better solution than my previous IFTTT to Evernote setup.
In fact, a social log seems to fit into my usage of Day One far better than Evernote where I mostly track reference information for projects, take notes and clip webpages.
(Source: ttscoff.github.com)
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As you may have noticed, this site has changed. I find it significantly less ugly now, but the changes run much deeper than that.
The whole site is running on Jekyll now, and hosted on my own Mac mini at Macminicolo. It was previously running on WordPress and hosted at Dreamhost. Over the course of building this new site, I’ve realized that I really don’t have many issues with WordPress, and Dreamhost has always been pretty stable for me. I just get antsy and want to try new things, so I’m giving this a shot.
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A relaunch for 2013 - Brett Terpstra
Brett Terpstra’s launched a gorgeous new version of his site and it has some really interesting stuff under the hood. He’s moved away from WordPress to Jekyll, the design is responsive and it’s hosted on a Mac mini.
He also has included a really interesting feature for dyslexic readers:
Also check out the SuperReadable option, available from the gear menu in the upper right corner. It modifies the fonts and colors a bit to improve readability, and replaces the main font with OpenDyslexic. While OpenDyslexic is designed to aid dyslexic readers, I’ve actually found it increases reading speed for most people. It’s ugly, but it works.
Check out the post for more details on the changes.
If you aren’t reading Brett regularly now is the time to start, Brett is a crazy talented designer, developer and writer; you don’t want to miss anything this guy is doing.
(Source: brettterpstra.com)
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While the gaming industry has increasingly focused on mobile, Brodie and Edery say for them, it will always be browser first. “It’s so easy to iterate there, without having to worry about getting bogged down in app store approvals or device compatibility issues,” says Edery. “Once you get it to a mature place, where the game and community are really strong, then you can take it to mobile.” […]
But overall, the pair says the web is becoming more attractive with the growth of mobile, not less. ” I think a lot of people have become so dazzled by mobile that they have forgotten there is this whole other world out there,” says Edery. “We have been playing in that world for a long time and its always treated us very well. There is no reason for us to turn our back on it favor of mobile. SteamBirds reached 20 million people on the web before anyone on mobile had even heard of its existence. We literally did not pay a dime in marketing. Why wouldn’t you be doing that? It feels to us like the web is this fertile ground for gaming that other people are ignoring.”
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Simple and addictive, ‘Highgrounds’ is ‘Magic the Gathering’ for the web generation | The Verge
Nice to hear an interestingly different perspective on game development for the web vs mobile these days. I don’t necessarily agree with it, I think web games are still hampered by the necessity of clumsy plugins like Flash but Scott definitely has a point about quicker, more agile development without having to worry about the App Store process.
If you’re developing a game that can be designed to work equally well with a mouse or with touch interaction then it might make sense to start with the web, iterate quickly and get feedback without having any of the lag time and restrictions of mobile platforms.
There are definitely pros and cons to either approach, both are valid roadmaps for semi-casual game development.
Still, I can’t tell you the last time I played a web game but I can name a dozen iOS games I’ve fired up over the last month. I’m likely a pretty big outlier though.
(Source: theverge.com)
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In October, after months of pressure from the public and the news media, the F.A.A. finally said it would begin a review of its policies on electronic devices in all phases of flight, including takeoff and landing. But the agency does not have a set time frame for announcing its findings.
An F.A.A. spokeswoman told me last week that the agency was preparing to move to the next phase of its work in this area, and would appoint members to a rule-making committee that will begin meeting in January.
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F.A.A. Rules Make Electronic Devices on Planes Hazardous - NYTimes.com
It’s about time.
(Source: The New York Times)
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Adobe has acquired Behance, a privately held online social media service for creative professionals. This acquisition is designed to buttress Adobe’s Creative Cloud community strategy by joining forces with an identifiable creative hub that already has over 1 million members.
“We know that a vast number of Behance members are using Adobe tools to create content and we feel this is a really great fit because of that,” said Heidi Voltmer, Adobe’s director of product marketing. “The combination of Behance into the Creative Cloud is going to make it a true hub for creative professionals worldwide.”
Adobe plans to integrate Behance’s community and portfolio capabilities with Adobe Creative Cloud, allowing members to create content, seek feedback, showcase their work, and distribute it across devices.
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Adobe acquires Behance to augment its Creative Cloud community | TechHive
Adobe keeps making all the right moves, I’ve never been more optimistic about the company than I am now.
(Source: techhive.com)