Marshall Kirkpatrick also likes it:

Big picture take-away: Google has built an attractive, intuitive, intelligent service that’s fun to use and speaks to a deep human need for contextual integrity of communication. There is not just public/private, life is more complex than that. This need, unmet by almost any other social network today, is where Google is aiming to win the hearts of users. The app the company built towards that aim is smooth and pleasing to use.

MG Siegler’s first look at the iPhone app for Google+:

If you simply point your iOS Safari browser to plus.google.com, you’ll find a solid web app written in HTML5. You can’t do quite everything you’ll be able to with the native app, such as Huddle (group chat). But it the main parts of the Google+ functionality are there. Stream, Photos, Circles, Profile, and Notifications appear in the main menu.

And there are actually some other unique features, such as the ability to check-in to a venue and see Google+ message from users nearby to your current location.

After spending several hours with Google+, MG Siegler really likes it so far:

Google has done a very good job with the early execution. Can they maintain that? Once the novelty is gone, will there be a reason to use it? And will the idea scale — meaning both in absolute size and in terms of moving beyond an early adopter market?

His mostly glowing review touches on all the major elements, as well as giving some insight into where things might be going with Google+ in the future. I’m not on Facebook or Google+, but after reading Siegler’s review, Google’s new social network actually sounds far more interesting to me than Facebook’s. Of course, the issue isn’t the features, it’s the users — will my friends and family be compelled to join Google+?

Horace Dediu:

Android and Chrome are, if successful, sustaining technologies for Google. That’s not going to be enough.

He used it to tweet the launch of news.va yesterday. (Via Lessien.)

Mike McQuade is cataloging all U.S. area codes by making hand pulled serigraph posters and smart phone socks. The posters look gorgeous; I’m waiting for 303.

Kyle Neath’s behind-the-scenes look at designing the new GitHub Mac app:

All in all I created 45 comps for 1.0 — each with about 5-10 unique states (with layer groups).

Richard Frisch gives a much better answer than the ones on this Quora question.

For the record, I bought AppleCare once. It was for my first Mac; a 12-inch PowerBook. I never needed AppleCare for that Mac, nor have I needed AppleCare for any other Apple computer or device I’ve owned since then.

Mustafa Al-Qinneh over at Teehan+Lax has also drafted up a concept for iMessage, along with some ideas for how regular text messages and incoming calls could also be incorporated with OS X. Mustafa’s concepts show some cool and interesting ideas for how things from your phone could appear and sync with your desktop. I like the idea of being able to read and respond to text messages from my computer, but I don’t like the idea of iMessage conversations appearing in the Mail app, side by side with emails. That would drive me bonkers; the last thing I want is a hook to keep my email app open for longer than it needs to be.

iMessage is awesome. Having the conversations available and synced between iOS devices is great. Having them also be available and synced on your desktop or laptop would be fantastic. I very much like this video concept that Jan-Michael Cart has put together — it is, more or less, a suped-up version of iChat that incorporates iMessage conversations.

(Via MacStories.)

John Banana produced and directed an animated short based on The Rocketeer to honor the 20th anniversary of the film.

(I just realized I haven’t seen this movie since it was in theaters; my parents took some friends and I for my 10th birthday party. Guess I need to add it to the Netflix queue.)

The OmniGroup posted a whole slew of short videos (videolets?) to their site which cover a wide range of topics and skill levels with OmniFocus. Definitely worth checking out.

(There’s a good 2-minute video on Perspectives that you may want to check out if you’re not too savvy with custom perspectives yet. They are, in my opinion, one the best and most-powerful features of OmniFocus on the Mac.)

But only for stock SSDs apparently:

The new native TRIM support does appear to limited to stock Apple drives, as users who have installed third-party SSDs into their machines have reported that TRIM is not enabled by the update.

Moreover, the developer preview of Lion, which has always had TRIM support, does not support user-installed, 3rd-party SSDS either. Well, at least not on this machine.