Ben Brooks on the difference between the hardware experiences of the iMac and the MacBook Air compared to the Mac Pro:

As I think about everything that Apple stands for with its design and goals, I can’t help but suspect that the MacBook Air is the epitome of the Mac experience as Apple sees it. Small, quick, sleek, low-price, sealed.

The MacBook Air and the Mac Pro are polar opposites: one a marvel of engineering — the other a marvel of brute strength.

The beloved, screen-friendly fonts, Georgia and Verdana, have been officially expanded upon. The new versions have been extended to 20 styles each and are officially ready for print. This is great news. Georgia and Verdana are lovely, and print designers who didn’t know any better have been putting these typefaces to work for years.

Based on the biography, Malcolm Gladwell profiles Steve Jobs as a tweaker. Jobs had an amazing ability to take things that had been built or invented or designed already and tweak them into something far better than the original.

If a MacBook Air were as inefficient as a computer from 1991, its battery would last a mere 2.5 seconds.

Dustin Curtis:

One of the major manufacturers—Motorola, HTC, Samsung, anyone—needs to sit down their designers and engineers in the same room for a very long time to think about every aspect of the mobile experience, and then just build a generally solid, beautiful, phone, without the gimmicks.

Up until a week ago I still had all my leftover calendars from my past job. I had unique calendars for: meetings, misc, personal, open work time, and travel. Having a different color for each time of calendar event was helpful for me to quickly scan my day or week to see what I would generally be spending my time doing that week: traveling, going to meetings, open times for working on projects, etc.

But I have no need for multiple calendars now, and so last week I consolidated them all into one. I was shocked to find out that deleting a calendar would mean all of its associated events would be deleted with it, rather than having the option to re-assign them to another calendar. You’ll cringe when you hear what I did: I spent about an hour going through all my repeating and non-repeating events for the next 12 months and assigning them to my personal calendar I was consolidating to.

If I’d had even thought about this painfully-obvious-in-hindsight suggestion form Devir Kahan I could have saved myself a lot of time, and I wouldn’t have lost all of my past events that were on those calendars that got deleted. Live and learn I guess.

My Thanks to Koombea for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Koombea is a full service design and development shop that specializes in making web and mobile apps. For the past 4 years, we’ve been using agile methodologies to build lean startups. Recently, we’ve taken our same process to public companies to keep them fast and efficient. We’re on the hunt for great new clients looking to build amazing products.

Over the past 18 months we’ve seen our clients raise a combined $50M+ in early stage funding. We’ve seen an even larger figure in acquisitions and other exits. Right now, we’re working with some amazing companies in elite tech incubators such as Y Combinator, TechStars and AngelPad, just to name a few.

We’re Data Driven, Transparent and we have serious Experience building companies and shipping products. We’ve been reading Shawn for a while and getting to know his audience. If we don’t know you yet, reach out and let’s talk!

Nice, comprehensive review of the UP by Thomas Ricker. His summary assessment is about the same as Shawn Walls: nice hardware, clever activity and sleep tracking, but poor software. Fortunately, the software is the easiest part to fix, and can (and hopefully will) be updated for UP.

Shawn Wall was able to pick up a Jawbone UP on Saturday at his local Apple store. If I had known they were out a day early I could have saved myself several hours yesterday afternoon driving around Kansas City to no avail. My local Apple store had none. Nor did any of the Best Buys in the area. About half a dozen Targets in the city had received the UP, but only a small quantity, and they were all sold out by yesterday afternoon. I did finally find a few in stock at the local corporate AT&T store. By the time I got there, however, they only had two UPs left: a small and a large — and I needed a medium. Ah well.

Thomas Brand:

I like to think of Pixelmator as the version of Photoshop Adobe would have made if they still cared about designing great creative software for the Mac.

The latest Made By Hand video is so good:

Writer turned knife maker Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn talks about the human element of craft, and the potential for a skill to mature into an art.

On this week’s episode of The B&B Podcast Ben and I talk about the new site design of The Verge, iPhone battery chargers, and other mysteries.

Dan Frommer’s latest in his “Creators” series of interviews is with the sharply-dressed Adam Lisagor.