Photoshop CS6 Beta hits over half a million download
We have not officially announced the release date yet but we can confirm it is scheduled for the first half of 2012.
Very curious to know how many people upgrade once the beta is revoked.
The Easy Way to Get iOS Screenshots On Your Mac
Nice trick. Even if you don’t do screenshots, you can set this search to look for JPG’s instead which will show all your photos in Photo Stream.
An Upgrade for the Show Before the Show
A good way to use the time spent before the movie to engage rather than just bore the audience.
USA Network teams up with Viggle for ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’
There’s something here for PBS to learn. A way to turn check-in points into cash donations?!
Project Glass: One day… (by Google)
Just a concept for now, but pretty cool.
I think they are missing a few ‘features’, so let me fix that (my additions in italics):A video released by Google on Wednesday, which can be seen below, showed potential uses for Project Glass. A man wanders around the streets of New York City seeing ads for condoms, communicating with friends while seeing ads for escorts, seeing maps and information like nearby deals, sponsored by American Express, and snapping pictures while being delivered ads for the products in the pictures. It concludes with him video-chatting with a girlfriend as the sun sets over the city and an ad for Dawn dish washing soap scrolls across his girlfriends face. All of this is seen through the augmented-reality glasses.
Source: The New York Times
Highlight’s Privacy Issues
I have finally found an app that scared me enough to delete it. It’s called Highlight.
In Highlight’s own words:
Highlight quietly runs in the background, surfacing information about the people around you.
In other words, you give Highlight access to your social networks and it looks for other people around you that might have similar interests. When someone is nearby the app thinks might have similar interests, it alerts you. You’re then able to see their profile, interests, etc. and determine if you’d like to contact them.
Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, it is. And lots of people at SXSW this year along with me also thought so. That is, till I saw how I was seen by other users who view my profile. In my opinion, the app provides a few too many pieces of myself that I’d rather not share.
First, it provides, not just my general city location (Washington, DC) - it gives my local neighborhood (Glover Park). OK, that piece of information I can simply change to something arbitrary and feel better. Though, I bet 90% of users wouldn’t think of that and simply give over their own neighborhood details.
The issue that got me very concerned had to do with my profile photo. Unbeknownst to me, adding my Facebook profile (I think) allowed the app to grab all my profile photos from Facebook. And not just my current photo, but ALL the photos I’d ever used as my profile picture were available for anyone to see. Fifteen in all. This cannot be un-done. The solution might be to delete your Facebook profile, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to do that within the app. I suppose you might be able to log into Facebook and delete the offending photos there as well, but I didn’t test this theory.
There is a privacy setting within the app, but it’s an all or nothing type of filter. Either you share everything with everybody or everything with ”friends of friends” only.
The idea of a ”smart” app that can help you forge relationships with people around you that have similar interests is intriguing. But the information the app currently shares with them about you is too much for me. For now, I’m deleting this app and my account. I hope Highlight will find a way to curb these types of ”over-sharing” elements for some users and still find a way to produce a great user experience.
UPDATE
I tried to contact Highlight via their privacy email address but it doesn’t seem to be valid.
Recipient address: privacy@highlig.ht
Reason: Remote SMTP server has rejected address
Diagnostic code: smtp;550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.
I believe the only way to disable the service is to delete the app in my Facebook settings, which is what I did.
[Updated] Readability Directs Shared Articles To Own Servers, Cuts Out Original Publishers
The title should read:
Readability Caves To Greedy Bloggers/Publishers & Craps On Users
But that’s not what happened. Here’s what happened…
I’m a fan of Readability, but I’ve never liked how sharing an article from within its native or web app uses a self-hosted, Readability-ized version of that article. It doesn’t send your recipients to the original article on the original publisher’s site.
This is bad practice.
As a publisher, though, there are other practices I don’t like about any of these services or, more accurately, how they’re implemented in third-party apps. For example: in most Twitter clients, you can tap or right-click a link to send it to your reading service of choice without ever actually visiting the page and giving the publisher a visit and pageview.
Yes, it can be a pain in the ass to visit a page before saving it to read later if you’re on a crappy 3G connection, or you’re simply in a rush and don’t have time. But it still means an article is getting sucked off a publisher’s site without anything of value exchanged in return.
via Marco Arment
Update: The company responded to these complaints later this morning. Its app and web sharing features now link directly to publisher sites.
I’m probably the one person who actually preferred what Readability was originally doing. Why? Because I’m a user first. And users don’t care about seeing the original site.
Source: chartier
Fluent.io
-an email client for GMAIL that is laid out similar to how you read your social networks.
The video is pretty impressive but it’s GMAIL only for now where as I only have iCloud & Exchange accounts. But it looks pretty promising, a breath of fresh air much like Sparrow is. But they gotta get a new logo - yuck!
Source: fluent.io
10.7: Remove the Dock's display delay
While reverse engineering the Dock for HyperDock, I stumbled over this useful hidden setting that removes the display delay when the Dock is hidden. To remove the delay, open Terminal, type or copy and paste the following line and hit return:
defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall DockTo restore the default behavior, enter:
defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay && killall Dock
I just used this hint and it’s amazing how fast the Dock feels now.
Apple clarifies the new iPad battery overcharging non-issue
Apple does in fact display the iPad (and iPhone and iPod Touch) as 100 percent charged just before a device reaches a completely charged state. At that point, it will continue charging to 100 percent, then discharge a bit and charge back up to 100 percent, repeating that process until the device is unplugged. Doing so allows devices to maintain an optimum charge, Apple VP Michael Tchao told AllThingsD today. “That circuitry is designed so you can keep your device plugged in as long as you would like,” Tchao said. “It’s a great feature that’s always been in iOS.”
Can we put #BatteryGate to rest now?
How Many Clicks to Report Twitter Spam?
I’ve not had too big a problem with spam, but I’m guessing a lot of big name bloggers/users do.
I’ve often thought of doing a comparison like this for twitter apps in regards to reading and posting. There’s a big difference in how each app shows different information.
Retweets - Classic vs. New Style
I came across an article that details reasons why a user should avoid Twitter’s native retweet and I couldn’t help myself.
First, for anyone who isn’t aware - a ‘retweet’ is when a user reposts another user’s original tweet on Twitter. It developed naturally out of users desire to share other people’s thoughts & ideas with their own followers and it developed a type of language to go along with each retweet.
The classic way of retweeting involved putting an ‘RT @username’ in front of the original tweet and then the tweet itself. This inevitably led to people changing the original tweet for a variety of reasons (spelling, grammar, to add their own comments, etc.). This can drastically alter an original tweets intention. So, Twitter implemented what we now call the new retweet style. If you retweet someone’s original post using any one of Twitter’s native apps, Twitter simply copies the original post word for word and posts it to all your followers. You can read more about it here.
I believe in Twitter’s new retweet style pretty strongly. To me, if you’re adding commentary, that’s a mention and should be tweeted with a ‘MT @username’ before the part of the tweet your mentioning or modifying along with your comment to let everyone know you’re adding or subtracting something from the original.
Source: rays20.blogspot.com
He Quit Path
Yeah, I thought. I should get out of here.
And then I realized I couldn’t. Months of my life are beautifully recorded inside this app, lured out of me by my selfish lust for an audience, and I can’t get them out. Path has stolen my journal, and it won’t give it back.
…
If we have any data we should host ourselves, it’s our personal journals. I don’t care whether it’s digital or analog, paper or plastic, but journaling is important.
That’s a quote from an interesting article about one person’s realization that he’s been giving away all his thoughts, ideas, pictures, etc. over to a company he has no control over.
I wrote about this back in May with a post entitled Post Out, Not In:
What seemed like a simple idea is now starting to dawn on more people as they use different services. Any link or photo I post should come back to one central site that I control. The flow of content should be outward and in one direction - “Post Out, Not In”.
Some of us don’t have the luxury of creating our own server or blogging platform for sharing, so in some respects, we’re still trapped if we want to continue doing what we do. Facebook and Tumblr have my life in their hands. But as of today, I do try to limit where an image, thought, or idea is originally posted. And only then, do I share it out.
