Speaking of Pinboard, this new-to-me Safari Extension will grab all your currently open tabs and save them as a group in Pinboard. Nice alternative to the Save Safari Tabs in OmniFocus script I’ve been using.
(Via Dr. Drang, who solved his “how to save a set of tabs” by writing a his own script. Naturally.)
Brilliant:
Bundles are named collections of tags. They are most useful for people with large numbers of tags that they wish to group by category.
A bundle lets you see all the bookmarks tagged with one or more tags in the bundle.
For example, if you had tags apple, orange and banana, you might put them in a bundle called fruit.
Dan Frommer:
Apple is going to sell out of its Christmas 2012 supply of iPad minis no matter how much it costs — $329, $200, whatever. Why leave money on the table? If it can sell 100% of its iPad mini supply for more than $329, why bother selling any to people who would only buy it for less than $329?
Consumers have chosen the $499 iPad over the $199 Kindle Fire in droves. What do you think is going to happen now that the iPad is $329? Apple will sell tons of them.
And now I know a little more than I wanted to about how the sound effects for Letterpress were created.
Tried and true wisdom from Patrick Rhone:
I have come to believe that the best and most cost effective technology upgrade that one can make is to themselves. I’m not talking cyborg implants here. I’m speaking about knowledge. That is, increasing your skill, aptitude, and understanding when it comes to any device, application, or tool.
So many of the applications which I wrote ultra-in-depth reviews of over the years are the apps I’m still using today. I chose to write those reviews not because the apps were popular but because I had been using the apps for a while and they had become an integral part in how I use my computer.
That’s why I think add-on utility apps like Keyboard Maestro and Text Expander are so great. Because they build on what Patrick is saying in his article — they allow you to set up customizations that allow you to become even more efficient and versed with the apps you use regularly.
Great piece for The Wirecutter by Allison Gibson, talking about what defines quality. She interviewed and pulled quotes from several designers. What Allison gleaned from Maria Popova was great:
“Quality is, of course, enormously subjective,” [Popova] tells me. “It’s what something gives and means to us, not an absolute. Brian Eno has said that we confer value on things, and it’s the act of conferring that makes things valuable—I believe this is true of quality, too.”
For her, the kinds of things to look for when assigning value this way include timelessness, beauty, honesty, simplicity, ethicality and joy. “There must be joy,” she says. “Otherwise, we conflate quality with convenience.”
Letterpress is a clever, addicting, and very fun game from Loren Brichter, the man behind one of the greatest iPhone apps of all time: Tweetie 2. The Magazine is a reason to use Newsstand, and Letterpress is a reason to use Game Center.
It would be great if Apple did a live stream of their special events every time. The broadcast started at noon my time, and I watched the 75-minute presentation via my Apple TV while sitting on the couch eating lunch. It was great.1
It was fun to watch Tim and Phil tag team the event, and I thought Phil Schiller’s time on stage was one of his best. These aren’t just media press events, it’s like a global show and tell. Apple is bringing something they’ve been meticulously building in secret and showing it to the world. They’re not just selling the products, they’re inviting the media into their “living room” per se.
My daily driver Mac is last year’s 13-inch MacBook Air. Usually running in clamshell mode, I have it hooked up to an inexpensive 27-inch IPS LCD monitor I got off eBay from the Korean grey market.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display will most likely be my next Mac. I love the size and portability of my Air, but the Retina Mac’s slight increase in weight is negligible to me when trading for a nice increase in power and that display. But not for a while since the Air is still doing great. Which is why I was secretly hoping for an update to the Thunderbolt displays. I would love to see a thin Thunderbolt Display that mirrors the hardware design of the new iMacs.
There was a time when I used two computers: a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro. Syncing technology has come a long way since then, but I still have little interest in returning to a 2-computer setup. However, if I were wanting (or needing) to return to a two-computer setup then you could bet a dollar that I’d be holding my breath until December to pick up the new 27-inch iMac.
I’m a laptop man. But the new iMac is superb, and it is the just-announced-today product I am most interested in. I loved nerding out over Phil’s introduction of the iMac’s specs and what went in to building and engineering it.
Something I have never liked about the iMacs (and, in turn, the Thunderbolt displays) was the thick sheet of glass covering the front of it. Primarily because of the distance the pixels sat under that glass and the reflection. In short, I much prefer matte displays. But with the new iMac, the they’ve laminated the display to the glass. The pixels are closer to the screen, and the glass is 75-percent less reflective.
This is no insignificant update to the iMac lineup. And, to make it better, Apple’s shipping them with an optional Fusion Drive. It’s a combination SSD + HDD drive, and Mountain Lion is smart enough to know which apps and documents you use on a regular basis. It then keeps those in the SSD portion, while keeping the files you use less often on the slower HDD portion. You get a considerable boost in speed compared to a spinning platter for a less-considerable boost in price compared to a solid state drive.
It’s funny to me that Apple brags about how thin the edge is, and yet the back is still a giant bubble. When comparing the edges of the new iMac side-by-side with the previous generation iMac it certainly is thinner and more attractive. Now, maybe I’m being nit picky, but every single image (save for one) on the iMac website show the computer at just the right angle to compliment its ultra-thin edge. But it’s not like the whole computer is that thin (yet).
One of the best moments of the event was when Phil Schiller moved on to introduce the new Mac mini. He said: “You knew there’d be something called mini in this presentation.”
It reminded me of when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone 4 and made the joke about maybe some of us had seen it before. Moments like that, when the Apple exec steps out into the audience for a moment and joins in the fun, are memorable.
This is the rumored product I was convinced wasn’t going to ship today. I was sure Apple wanted to keep something for the spring, and I was sure Apple wanted to keep the economies of scale on the iPad 3 and to keep their profit margins as high as possible before moving to a new hardware design and new internals. But I was wrong.
Marco Arment’s case for a pre-holiday release cycle makes sense. Sooner or later Apple needed all of their top-selling products to be brand new just in time for the holidays.
It stinks for those of us who bought an iPad 3 just a few months ago — will it be a year until the iPad 5? — but so it goes. The iPad 3 is still just as awesome and I don’t have any plans on upgrading mine.
It’s the 11-inch Air of iPads. Designed to be just as powerful as its larger-screened sibling while being even more portable.
I was somewhat taken back to see Apple bill the iPad mini as a full-fledged iPad. Focusing just as much on using it for work as they did on using it for play. Even the tagline — “Every inch an iPad” — plays to the established usability of the full-sized iPad.
Two things I think people were crossing their fingers for: a Retina display and a price point of $299 (or less). $329 is an odd price; why not $30 less or $20 more? My guess is that this is the price it has to be. It’s as low as it can go. And the non-Retina display proves that.
A Retina display in the iPad mini is just a matter of time. The price, however, will likely stay as is for quite a while.
Thinner. Lighter. Faster. And not a drop lost on quality.
What Jony Ive says in the iPad mini video stands true for all the announcements today. They didn’t take an iPad and shrink it down, they concentrated it:
There is inherent loss in just reducing a product in size. We took the time to go back to the beginning and design a product that was a concentration of, not a reduction of, the original.
In a way, nearly all of the products announced today (and last month) embody that same idea: thinner, lighter, more dense, more powerful. Concentrated.
Marco’s whole post on today’s event is great. And as for his thoughts on why the iPad 4 was announced today and why we probably won’t ever see a Spring iPad again, I think Marco’s exactly right: it pretty much boils down to factors surrounding “the cultural disaster of holiday shopping mania”.
Looking at Apple’s lineup of the 8 different hardware designs of the iMac since 1998, something I noticed is that the iMac has evolved in pairs (with the obvious exclusion of the 2002 gooseneck iMac). A similar pattern to the iPhone’s design evolution. Or perhaps I should say it the other way around: that the iPhone is following a similar design evolution pattern as the iMac.
The Apple Event doesn’t start for another two hours, which means you’ve got time to watch this trailer about 60 times in a row.
Great news for those following along at home: Apple is streaming video of today’s event live. And it gets better. As Peter Cohen points out, you can watch the live stream via a new channel on your Apple TV:
If you’re near a newer Apple TV, though, you may be able to watch the event yourself. Apple recently added a new “Apple Events” channel to the device, and that channel now lists “Apple Special Event — LIVE.” If you’re using a black Apple TV, make sure it’s running the latest software update to see the new channel and the content therein (software update 5.0.2 or later is needed).
If you can’t watch live, or if the stream gets bogged down, then Ryan Block’s liveblog coverage on gdgt is the second-best thing.
My thanks to Mutual Mobile for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.
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Why work for Mutual Mobile? We’ve grown from a core 5 people in 2009 to just over 200 at the turn of 2012, and we’re poised to double that figure over the next year. Our client list includes companies like Google, Cisco, and Audi, and your skills help build what we offer. It’s an exciting time to be in Austin’s tech scene, and we work to keep things interesting.
Joy of Tech put together a list of what our day will look like tomorrow. Seems legit.