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There's a difference — David Chartier
If you use, buy or talk about apps this is the most important thing you’ll read this week.
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Another iPhone Template?
There are a lot of those templates out there, but for one reason or another, I’ve been a little disappointed by all of them. Without naming names, they’re all decent-to-good, but I always feel like something’s a little off.
Some tend to be inconsistent with the rendering Apple uses in its own iPhone product images. With others, the proportions are off. Or the buttons are in the wrong positions. Or the image is rasterized and unscalable. Or it’s made of vectors but riddled with split pixels.
For a whole host of reasons, I haven’t been satisfied with the existing options. So I made my own with these goals in mind: [cont’d after the link…]
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Marshall Bock’s Blog: iPhone 4S Template
These look lovely.
via TThor - Issue 15 — which is, by the way, an essential subscription for anyone who cares about design.
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I do read quite a bit out of Instapaper but not as much as I put in. And I’m okay with that because, in part, Instapaper works as a placebo for me. Saving it to read later relieves me of any stress about having to deal with the article that minute, and I’ve also found that articles which seemed important at the time are no longer important when I get around to my Instapaper queue. So in that regard Instapaper saves me peace of mind as well as time.
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A Ode to Software — Shawn Blanc
Shawn beautiful describes exactly how I use Instapaper. I love the observation that Instapaper works as a placebo.
Hit the full article for some more interesting thoughts on what apps Shawn uses and how they fit into his workflow.
You are subscribed to his feed, right?
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It’s a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don’t understand, recognize, or care about. It’s nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it will confuse.
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Marco.org - Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive
Glad I switched to Twitterrific & Weet long before the dickbar happened.
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I’m so done with apps that don’t auto update in-app.
So, Quicksilver reborn or Alfred?
I really do love LaunchBar, there’s a good chance I’ll stick with it after trying the other two, but this is rather annoying.
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The predicament with feed reading apps is most certainly not in the quantity of the selections; rather, the quality. This is not to say that most of the legitimate feed reading apps on the iPhone have not been developed with care — but as agents of delivery for my favorite authors, and as contrivances meant for enjoying lengthy bits of text, I prefer a simple app that does less and does it better.
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On the whole, it’s actually rather un-Apple-like that they’re even allowing iPhone apps to run unmodified on the iPad. It’s a huge compatibility win, of course: an instant market of thousands and thousands of titles. Given the runaway success of the App Store and the fundamental technical similarities between the iPhone and iPad, it’s the sort of decision that most companies wouldn’t even think twice about. But it’s undeniably a sub-optimal user experience. iPhone apps on the iPad are a “good enough” thing, not an “exactly right” thing. Most companies — the ones that wouldn’t even see it as a tough decision whether to allow iPhone apps to run on the iPad — settle for “good enough” all the time. Apple, on the other hand, usually goes for “exactly right”.
