Good article from Steve Best about how he has rethought his iOS home screen and simplified it. I’ve been slowly doing the same, but never cut it as drastically as he has.
However, I think I might need to take the scythe out and start to mow down the apps I have. Too much cruft and too many distractions.
J. D. Bentley over at Digital Asceticism pretty much mirrors my initial reaction to Google Glass from what I have seen, heard, and read.
One thing I had not put a lot of thought into is the why portion. He nails it pretty much on the head:
But what’s notable about Google Glass is that my dislike for it isn’t sustained primarily by my own unwillingness to use it, but my adamant opposition to being around those who do.
I will take another second to recommend his blog because it really is full of some really good insights into the intersection of technology and our lives.
Instacast for Mac (Public Beta) has been released for the public! I’m pretty excited for this, and I already have it downloaded onto my Mac and am using it.
Seriously. Cool.
Right now I work between two (sometimes three) different machines.
In the past I worked mainly on a single laptop, my MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011). Admittedly, this is a minor gripe, but an annoying part of using one machine between work and home was that I had no less than six cables to plug and unplug each time I moved desks.
However, something like the CalDigit Thunderbolt station might be exactly what I am looking for to alleviate those minor issues and maybe force me to using a single machine both at home and at work.
A single Thunderbolt cable handles all of the following:
That’s pretty nice and essentially handles all of my peripheral needs. Have a USB 3.0 port on the front is an added bonus. The only thing missing would be a FireWire 800 port, but those peripherals are hard enough to find.
That would be really cool. A single cable and you are up and running.
Of course, the real issue is whether it would work or not. I’d like to get my hands on one as soon as it is released … so time will tell.
Last night, Marco Arment announced that he had sold Instapaper to Betaworks.
I have been a big fan of Instapaper for quite some time, but recently I have been looking around at alternatives because it seemed that Marco had moved onto other things (The Magazine being the main one) and did not have the interest in Instapaper anymore.
This made me quite sad because part of the reason I had supported Instapaper was to support the independent iOS development scene. Now, with Instapaper being sold to “A New Medium Company” (that’s directly from Betaworks’s header on their website), I don’t feel nearly as bad about looking at other applications.
Betaworks has quite a few products, including Digg and bitly, which really makes me fear what a very focused application like Instapaper might become in the future.
On the plus side, it looks like Instapaper will be getting some love in the near future. On the minus side, it is now in the hands of a much larger company with a still-unclear future.
Of course, I don’t bemoan Marco’s decision at all. It is his product after all and he is free to do as he likes.
As a user of Instapaper, this makes me more nervous than before. For now I am trying out Pocket, but there are issues I have had with Pocket as well. I’ll probably look at Readability and might even end up back with Instapaper, but I won’t have the same loyalty to the app as I used to have.