Shawn Blanc

Surat Lozowick asks a handful of authors who self-publish their own weblog about the pros and cons of naming the site after your own name or coming up with a unique title.

This calls for a pint of Phish Food.

Many thanks to Diacarta for sponsoring the RSS Feed this week to promote the latest update of this unique and beautiful iPhone calendar app.

I linked to Diacarta 1.0 almost a year ago when it first came out and described it as being for the non-crazy-busy person. Your plans are displayed visually using clever icons that surround an analog clock — the visual look of Diacarta is much more playful than other calendar apps (see for yourself in the promo video).

Version 2.0, which was just released, looks better, works quicker, and now syncs with the iPhone’s native calendar. And get this: for the rest of the weekend, Diacarta is on sale for just $1 in the App Store.

Nice work (as always) from Federico Viticci over at MacStories giving a high-level overview of what all Spotify offers, etc.

And speaking of Spotify, it became available in the United States yesterday. I was sent an invite and signed up for a free account.

A few months ago I signed up for Rdio (primarily for the sake of my review the different cloud music services), but Rdio really grew on me. What I like about Rdio is that I can listen to just about any album I want. And I have the premium Rdio membership so that I can sync songs to my iPhone and play them in my car.

Though I have not yet spent much time with Spotify, from what I understand of it so far it has the same underlying features as Rdio. Except that Spotify has three additional features:

• You can use it for free and suffer ads. But Spotify’s two paid plans (which cost $5 and $10 month) offer the same features as Rdio’s same-priced plans.

• Spotify adds your local DRM-free songs to your Spotify library. Rdio, though it will scan your local library, it only will add the Rdio-owned tracks to your collection if Rdio has them.

• Spotify’s native Mac app works without Flash. [Update: Good news: There’s an update to the Rdio native Mac app and it now works without Flash.]

All this to say that my initial impression of Spotify is that I like it very much.

The Iconfactory’s attractive and clever menu bar music aid, Take Five, was recently updated to include support for Rdio and Spotify.

Sure the price increase is a bummer, but Netflix is still a great deal. Or, as Pogue says, “even at $16, Netflix still gives you more than anyone else.”

The short film is absolutely charming, and the app looks equally as wonderful.

Perhaps it is the “4” in the iPhone 4 name (since the iPhone 3G was a 3G device) that leads to the false assumption that it’s a 4G iPhone. But I also wonder if it’s not an assumption about the device rather than an assumption about the network provider. As networks tout their newer, faster networks, perhaps those 34% of iPhone owners (as well as 29% Android owners and 24% BlackBerry owners) assume their phones are automatically a part of the 4G network.

(Via Macrumors.)

In short, they’re splitting up their services: getting DVDs in the mail is one service and getting instant streaming is another. If you want both, you have to pay for both.

Ben Brooks has a clever speculation that Google+ could grow into a project management and group collaboration tool:

You wrap integration with Google+ into everyone of those and you have a powerful project management system that goes beyond the walls of a ‘company’. Say you are working on project X, a website redesign with a group of people both internal to your company and external.

You create one circle for that project, collaborate on documents in Gdocs, email with Gmail, meetings with Gcal, A/B test result sharing with Analytics, and so on… That could be very big.

The biggest hurdle to group project management software is that it’s not email.

People default to email. This is one reason why Basecamp is so great: it has fantastic email-related features. You don’t always have to log in and use it to be a part of the conversation within Basecamp.

My team and I used Basecamp as our internal project management software for the three years I was marketing director at the International House of Prayer, and it was a lifesaver. There’s no way my internal team could have gotten by without it. But, Basecamp would often break down outside the walls of our office. The times when we did need our internal clients to log in so they could review some proofs or comment on a recent revision they were always forgetting their login credentials.

This is where I could see Google+ having the capability to do group collaboration and project management. It may never go toe to toe with Basecamp and its features, but I could see Google+ being very useful and adaptable.

Marco Arment:

But there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours.

This app is nerd overload.

(Also, though he’s not a nerd, if my dad had an iPad this would be his killer app — he raised me on TNG reruns and for that I am thankful.)