The Broken Promise of Blogging on the iPad

Blogging on the iPad sucks. A good quote I read today and forgot where (sorry) is that the iPad is made for media consumption, not creation. Wise words. 

  • February 15, 2011, 1:41pm

          1 note

“Companies of all sizes are embracing—or at least considering embracing—the Apple tablet for a variety of roles.”
Zendesk app turns iPad into mobile help desk | Business | iOS Central | Macworld

NoteSlate /// intuitively simple monochrome paper alike tablet device

This is the only tablet I’ve been excited about besides the iPad. 

“Everyone is given an acre of attitudes at birth. It’s yours to tend and garden and weed and live with. You can plant bitterness or good humor. Feel free to fertilize and tend the feelings and approaches that you want to spend time with. Unless you hurt someone, this acre is all yours.”
Seth’s Blog: An acre of attitudes

MORE/REAL Stylus Cap by Don Lehman — Kickstarter

Really good idea. 

52 Tiger » OmniFocus and the Printable CEO

I am just now reading this. Interesting way of using paper and the all encompassing Omnifocus. 

Android vs. iOS; the missing argument

Interesting article on Lifehacker today on how the iPad compares to the Android counterpart. 

The Android vs. iOS fight isn’t relegated to cellphones anymore. Google’s tablet-focused Android operating system is introducing several great new features to Android-based tablets that we like considerably more than their feature-counterparts on the iPad. 

Five Ways the Android-Powered Google Tablet Is Better than the iPad


I’m not going to break down why I think the iPad is better. That’s easy and you can find that argument everywhere. 

What I don’t see very often is reversing the argument that Apple is evil to Google. 

Apple is a software and hardware company. It is a publicly traded company. It’s goal, one that it is legally bound to, is to make money for its shareholders. 

To do that, the company creates amazing hardware products that integrates perfectly with its software products. 

Why would Apple make Airplay integrate with your Boxee box? To try and sell more Boxee boxes? No. They have a media center product and it makes business sense to make features work with their own products and it meets Apple’s goal to make the user experience easy, simple. 

I get the argument on open standards and that more people might buy Apple products if its devices were more open, but comparing them to Microsoft, Linux and Android is ridiculous. 

Microsoft makes software. If it didn’t integrate with a bunch of different hardware, it would be screwed since it doesn’t make hardware on its own. 

Linux is cool, free and open source. But if you bought stock in Linux, you need to call your broker because he stole your money. 

That leaves us with Google, the friendly, green-robot making, Gmail hosting, free phone call providing information thief that will own the world in the foreseeable future. 

Google made Android because they want to eventually track and understand what people do on their phone. 

That’s cool with me and I’m not paranoid about it. I just wish someone, anyone would point out during an Apple bashing article that Google is a FAR more evil company than Apple. 

In the next 10 years if not sooner, Google will control and track your web habits, your buying habits, your phone calls, your text messages, your location and where you go, your business, where you eat, and EVERYTHING else. 

That’s evil. 

#rant

A harrowing, historic week in Egypt - The Big Picture - Boston.com

A harrowing, historic week in Egypt - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Groundhog day All the ned scenes (via TheCableGuy0125)

Instapaper kills Elephants

I’ve laid out all my reasons for deleting Evernote from my life except one. A better alternative.

I found something much better or better for me in Instapaper.

Now I fully admit my hypocrisy for slamming Evernote and replacing it with another cloud-syncing service, but Instapaper is different and its subtle differences are big deal to me.

The major difference is the goal of the two applications. Evernote’s is to make you remember everything. No thank you.

Instapaper simply wants you to save a news article, blog posts or bit of code so you can look at it later on another device that may or may not have Internet access.

That’s it. Once I log in, I can read it, delete it, star it (nice idea for Gmail lovers) or put it in a folder. I’m not asked to create separate notebooks, create tags, add photos, run OCR, add attributes, create saved searches, etc., etc.

Instapaper keeps me focused by saying, “Dude, you don’t need to clip every portable hard drive you found on Amazon for comparing later, just send me some interesting news you didn’t have time to read today.”

This has really allowed me to change how I use services like Instapaper and Evernote. Today, Instapaper is an iPad news application. That’s what I use it for.

It sits in my iPad news folder and every day I open it up to read articles that I didn’t have time to read at some other point of time. That’s it.

I don’t have to worry about seeing photos of business cards or notebooks friends have shared with me.

Simple and effective, it’s every thing I need and nothing else to tempt me into using it for some other time-sucking information orgy sync.

I’ll finish this piece off with this, as I think it best proves my point and how a useful applications like Evernote can become too much if it tries to do too much.

For this series, I opened my online Evernote account and found that I have 38 folders, one of which includes 72 wallpapers from 4chan.

That means that over the years, I’ve amassed over 70 wallpapers that have never been used on any device I own.

What would posses me to save such garbage? I’ll give you a hint. It’s green and has a trunk.