Okay, I admit I only watched the video. But in all fairness The Verge’s video reviews are very, very well done.

Marco Arment:

Like many of the people likely to be reading this, I bought a digital SLR a few years ago and developed a photography hobby. Then, also like many of you, my iPhone’s camera slowly took over my casual photography needs, and I stopped bringing the big SLR with me most of the time. The iPhone camera was good enough for most uses.

I have never owned a nice camera. One day I may spring for something like a GX1, but right now my iPhone is not only “the camera I have with me,” it’s also the best camera I own.

The iPhone’s abilities as a camera have significantly improved over the years. If your budget or your interest in photography don’t warrant a high-quality camera, fortunately it’s safe to say that Apple will continue to make the iPhone into a great camera.

Several of the columns written by young Ernest Hemingway during his time writing for The Toronto Star have been put online:

[The Hemingway Papers] showcases the columns Ernest Hemingway wrote while reporting for The Toronto Star in the early 1920s. He joined the paper at the age of 20, sending dispatches from Toronto, Chicago, and across Europe. His relationship with the city, the newspaper, and the stories he told would have an enormous impact on his literary style.

Hemingway wrote 191 articles for the Toronto Star, and 19 of them are currently showcased in the archives. A bigger selection of the collection (70 articles) is available in newsprint for $20.

My thanks to Paste Interactive for again sponsoring the RSS feed to promote their web app, Jumpchart.

Jumpchart’s tagline is “plan websites”, but it is so, so much more than that. If you work with a team building websites, or if you do client work, Jumpchart could prove to be a fine tool helping you build, organize, swap, edit, and agree upon the content, design, and information architecture of a new site.

Ian Bogost:

Today, all our wives and husbands have Blackberries or iPhones or Android devices or whatever—the progeny of those original 950 and 957 models that put data in our pockets. Now we all check their email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or…) compulsively at the dinner table, or the traffic light. Now we all stow our devices on the nightstand before bed, and check them first thing in the morning. We all do. It’s not abnormal, and it’s not just for business. It’s just what people do. Like smoking in 1965, it’s just life.

For episode 67 of The B&B Podcast, John Moltz sat in for me. (Thanks, John!) I’m told that he and Ben discussed the latest Google announcements, and how those compare with Microsoft’s foray into the tablet space. They also discuss computing setups and the lives of Windows users.

Colorado is no stranger to summertime wildfires, but that doesn’t make them any less sobering or incredible. My in-laws live about 50 miles northeast of Manitou Springs, and last night, while we were eating dinner on their back deck, a western wind blew in and the whole neighborhood began to fill with smoke and smell like campfire. The Front Range is like a giant tinderbox right now — we could sure use some rain.

Google’s new 7-inch tablet has lots of cores.

Talk about an extreme demo.

Interesting article from singer/songwriter Derek Webb on the economics of being an independent artist and why he prefers to give his music away for free instead of selling it on iTunes, and why Spotify is his least favorite distribution channel of all, even compared to illegal piracy.

This strikes me as being a big deal. For one, it means Apple is taking the listening of podcasts on mobile devices seriously. Until today syncing and subscribing to podcasts between your Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad was an abysmal experience unless you were using a 3rd-party app like Instacast. Secondly, is this a turn signal for the future of iTunes on the Mac?

As for the app itself, there are some very fun design elements. I especially like the dial for browsing “stations” and the tape player that’s hidden behind the currently-playing-podcast’s artwork.

One other note: it doesn’t look like you can manually add podcasts which are not listed in iTunes directory.

My thanks to Jumpchart for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Plan websites with the newly redesigned Jumpchart. Now including design mockup approval. Try it free today!

Chuck Skoda:

The keyboard cover does one thing critical to the design of Windows 8, enable classic Windows apps.

Relatedly, something I tweeted a few days ago:

If your tablet doesn’t have a gangbusters App Store, build a cover with a build-in keyboard and trackpad.

Danny Sullivan:

They’d swing them around with a pretty picture on the front, I guess so we’d go “ooh” and “ahh.” If we were lucky, we were allowed to hold one for a few seconds. But if you tried to do anything with it, bang, it was gone.

When the Surface does launch it may be a success and everyone will look back at the Microsoft press event and think, “that was odd.” And if the surface does poorly we’ll say, “I guess they were hiding something after all.”

(Via Matthew Panzarino.)