Year: 2012

NBC’s Live Extra Olympics iOS App  →

If you want to browse the live schedule of events from your iPhone this app seems to be the best way.

There are several websites out there with the live schedule, including the official London 2012 site (which has a mobile-friendly design). But even that site is not as easy to use as the Live Extra iOS App.

And for watching the live streams from your iPad, this app is, again, the best bet. (Note that in order to watch the live streams you’ll have to sign in with the username and password associated with your TV service provider.)

NBC’s Live Extra Olympics iOS App

Live Video Stream for the London Olympics  →

They’re estimating that 4,800,000,000 people will be tuning in to watch the Olympics. Amazing. Well, if you want to watch the London Olympics live from your computer, this is the website for it. And how convenient is it that Mountain Lion shipped just two days ago and you can now AirPlay your computer to your Apple TV? Boom.

Also, NPR has some more info about what to expect from the live stream:

NBC’s streaming video runs the gamut from unvarnished (and unhosted) feeds of competitions to fully produced coverage. So don’t freak out if there’s no sound. In fact, it might be a delightful break from chatty commentators.

Live Video Stream for the London Olympics

Photos From the Olympic Torch Relay  →

Alan Taylor’s In Focus photoblog:

Today marks the end of the 70-day Olympic Torch relay through the United Kingdom, leading to the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. Since arriving in Cornwall on May 18, the flame has been carried through villages and cities, across lakes and mountain ranges, on foot, by train, on horseback, and through the air, from Cornwall to central London. The torch has passed through the hands of more than 8,000 torchbearers on its 8,000 mile (12,800 km) journey.

Also, Taylor posted photos about a month ago from the first half of the Torch Relay.

Photos From the Olympic Torch Relay

Time-Lapse Video Showing the Construction of the London Olympics Aquatic Centre  →

Built specifically for the London Olympics, the Aquatic Centre construction began in July 2008 and finished in July 2011:

It forms part of the gateway to the Olympic Park — more than two-thirds of spectators will enter the Park at the south-east corner via a bridge that forms part of the venue’s roof.

And, of course, someone built a sweet Lego version of the Aquatic Centre’s diving pool.

Time-Lapse Video Showing the Construction of the London Olympics Aquatic Centre

The Verge Interviews iA’s Oliver Reichenstein  →

This is one of the best design-centric Q&As I’ve read in a long time. Oliver Reichenstein is extremely articulate, and his answers are packed with nuggets of wisdom and perspective about design.

It was tough to pick out just one quote, but this one stood out to me:

Nothing is more destructive to good design than group thinking and collective decision making. Why? As I said, to most people good design is invisible. Group decisions focus on the visible, bad aspects of design.

Anyone who has worked in design has, at some point, felt the pain of group-led design decisions. And though we all know it usually leads to a sub-par final product, but we don’t necessarily know why.

The Verge Interviews iA’s Oliver Reichenstein

Edges of the Fiberhood  →

On this week’s episode of The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talked about the Kansas City rollout of Google Fiber and the just-announced Google Fiber TV, internet speeds and privacy policies, Mountain Lion, the Mac App Store, Notification Center, Sparrow’s acquisition and email clients in general, and speculations about the future of Apple TV and how that could relate to either Siri and or the theoretical iPad Mini.

Edges of the Fiberhood

Google Fiber  →

The long and the short of it is that Google will begin offering Gigabit internet access to Kansas City, KS and central Kansas City, MO starting around September 9.

They’re offering three plans:

  • Gigabit Internet for $70/month.
  • Internet plus their newly-announced Google Fiber TV service for $120/month (and the TV plan comes with a free Nexus 7 to use as your remote control).
  • Or free internet (for up to 7 years) if you’ll pay for them to run the fiber optic cable to your house. It’s not gigabit speeds though; they’ll cap you at 5Mb down and 1Mb up.

Since each house that signs up for Google Fiber will have to have a fiber optic cable physically run to their home, Google is picking which neighborhoods to begin residential activation in by having people pre-register their “fiberhood”. You pay $10 to pre-register your house and then the neighborhoods with the most registrations will get set up first.

Alas, since I live on the southern edge of Kansas City, Google Fiber isn’t yet available in my neighborhood.

Google Fiber

The iPad’s Missing Price Points  →

Ryan Jones:

On a past Apple conference call, Tim Cook said “one thing we’ll make sure is that we don’t leave a price umbrella for people”. What’s that? A price umbrella is when a company with dominant market share maintains high prices, leaving an opening for new competitors to enter at lower price points. In the case of the iPad, the price umbrella until recently was at $499. Someone could enter that market at lower prices and exhibit classic disruption to push them out from the bottom up.

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

The iPad’s Missing Price Points

Mountain Lion Miscellany

As a card-carrying member of the Apple Fanboy Brotherhood™ it’s my unspoken responsibility to write something nerdy about the Mountain Lion. And so here are a few of my favorite changes, updates, and nit picks which are to be found in OS X 10.8.

(My article about Mountain Lion and the simplification of OS X is here.)

In Safari

  • The blue progress bar that loads in the Address Field has a faded out right-hand edge instead of the sharp edge. Once the page has fully loaded the blue progress bar shoots across the remainder of the Omni Box and then it all fades out from dark blue to light blue to white. And since the “Reader” button is blue, it’s as if the loading bar fills the Reader button up with color.

Interestingly, it was the animation of the blue loader that first attracted me to the Mac and OS X back in 2004. And even now it’s one of my favorite “little things” about the operating system.

  • The Syncing of iCloud Tabs is great. I only have one Mac so it’s currently of no use to me, but I’m very much looking forward to when it will sync my tabs across all my devices including my iPhone and iPad.

  • The RSS button in Safari is gone completely. If you come across a site and you want to subscribe to its RSS feed you’ll need to either have your own bookmarklet that adds the site to Google Reader or Fever, or the site will need a link to its RSS feed.

  • Click and hold on a bookmark’s name in the Bookmarks Bar and you get the option to rename it.

  • Rocking a lot of tabs? Do a pinch on the trackpad (or View → Show All Tabs) and all the tabs will turn into their own mini-window within the current window and you can scroll through them. It’s pretty great.

Safari Tabs

Regarding Notification Center

  • Without some fine tuning Notification Center could prove to be a bit distracting. While I love the implementation from a design and functionality standpoint, I’ve found that more often than not the notifications waiting for me inside Notification Center are irrelevant by the time I look at them. If it’s not showing me emails I’ve already read then it’s showing me Tweets I’ve already seen, or calendar events that are already over. While I love the growl-like pop-up notifications, I think I’m still learning how to get the most out of Notification Center itself.

  • You can define a system-wide keyboard shortcut to show/hide Notification Center by going to: System Prefs → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Mission Control → Show Notification Center.

  • You can also launch Notification Center from your trackpad by sliding two fingers onto the trackpad from the right-hand edge. And then, a two-finger swipe from left-to-right will hide Notification Center.

  • With Notification Center showing, if you scroll to reveal the top then you’ll discover a preference to not show notifications. When this is enabled, the icon fades to gray and all alert popups and banners are hidden. If a calendar reminder goes off while Notification Center is set to not show alerts and banners, then your Mac does not alert you to the event. You can also enable this by simply Option-clicking on the Notification Center icon in the Menu Bar.

  • Notifications for new emails only appear when Mail is running. So Notification Center doesn’t get new email messages on its own.

In Mail

  • New layout of the email message window: The date sent is in the top-right corner, next to an avatar of that person (If there is one. And since Mountain Lion can link your Contacts with their Twitter profile, you may start seeing some people’s email avatars as being the same as their Twitter avatars.).

  • Deleting an email takes you to the one below or above the current in-view message based on which way you were previously navigating the message list. I love having the next-below message come into view as, in my opinion, it’s better quickly processing through emails.

  • New options for emailing links from Safari: when you hit CMD+SHIFT+I to send the current web page you can send it as just a link, a PDF, the text-only version, or the whole website embedded within the email body. I always opt for just a link:

Mailing a Web Page

AirPlay

The “Display Preferences” icon that used to sit in the Menu Bar has been changed from its old Cinema Display-like icon to the AirPlay icon found also in iOS.

With AirPlay you can now mirror your Mac’s display and audio to your Apple TV. However, the system sound only channels through the HDMI cable of the Apple TV. And so, if, like me, you have video piped to your TV via HDMI but audio piped to a separate sound system via the optical audio cable, then the sound system does not receive the audio signal when doing AirPlay mirroring from the Mac.

But fortunately, if you AirPlay a video using the iTunes option (found in the lower-right-hand corner of iTunes) then the audio will go through the optical audio port.

RIP: “iCal”

iCal is now called “Calendar”. If, like me, your LaunchBar habits die hard, did you know you can tell LaunchBar that you want “ic” to be the abbreviation for Calendar.app? Yeah. Just type “Calen” (or whatever it takes until Calendar is selected), then Control click on LaunchBar and choose “Assign Abbreviation”.

Assigning a Custom Abbreviation in LaunchBar

Contacts

  • The application formerly known as Address Book threw off the horrible page-turn functionality from Lion.

  • You can send someone an iMessage from within Contacts. I hope LaunchBar adopts this functionality. It’d be great to pull up someone’s contact info and then fire off an iMessage to them all from the keyboard.

Sending an iMessage From the Contacts App

The Other Two New Apps

Believe it or not, I don’t use Reminders or Notes. I use OmniFocus and nvALT with Simplenote.

The Finder and Overall OS Miscellany

  • In a Finder window, if you choose to sort by kind, then your files and folders are, well, sorted by kind. And as you scroll, the file-type header stays at the top. Like in iOS when scrolling a list, such as Calendar and how the date sticks to the top until you scroll through to the next date and so on.

  • While downloading a file from Safari, you see a progress bar within the file icon itself and a time countdown:

Downloading a File in Safari

This in-context progress bar is for several things, such as transferring or copying files and folders.

  • A couple new Menu Bar icons: Notification Center and AirPlay. If you like to keep your Menu Bar as sparse as possible, Apple is making it an uphill battle.

  • The keyboard shortcut for “Save As” is back, but it’s different. Apple says: Use Command-Shift-Option-S to save a document using a different name and location.

Mountain Lion Miscellany