Dr.Brendan | The iphone Doc

Dr.Brendan | The iphone Doc:

During the short visit at our apartment, I learned that Dr.Brendan since has moved his business out of his living-room and opened two stores. And not only that, he has a whole army employees and they now also fix Macs. I was thrilled to hear that as my 2.5 year old iMac at work was giving me a hard time. Tony, a Dr.Brendan employee, came to promptly pick it up the next day and conveniently brought it back a few days later, fixed. Pick-up and drop-off? Yes, please!

Dr.Brendan and his team not only fix iPhones but now also repair pretty much any Apple device, do data recovery, help you set up your network and much more.

I can’t praise Brendan and his team enough. Go check out his site. And if you live either in the East Village or Park Slope, drop by their shop. And no worries, if you don’t live in NYC, you can ship your patient to Dr.Brendan.

[Cool story.]

Source: swissmiss

Honeywell sues Nest for patent infringement

Honeywell sues Nest for patent infringement:

Honeywell makes crappy, ugly thermostats. They’re the market leader, but they’ve been sitting on their asses, not doing much. So thermostat innovation and design has been pretty stagnant for years.

Nest’s is by far the most innovative thermostat we’ve seen for a long time, but it looks like they’re going to have a lot of problems with these Honeywell patents, which will probably impair (or, at worst, prevent) them from pushing this stagnant industry forward.

Remind me again how the patent system promotes innovation.

∞ Permalink

[Yeah, what he said. And shame on Honeywell…]

Source: Marco.org

Next Phase of Commercials

Next Phase of Commercials:

I predict that in a few years from now we’ll start to see 4.5-minute length commercial shorts that come after the extended-play version. Or maybe even “directors’ cut” versions. These outright unabashed commercials will run as long as a pop hit tune, and in format resemble a music video. We’ll see YouTube-ish channels that will charge you to watch them. I make this forecast based on the fact that this prime attention-niche is just one adjacent-possible step away.

[I rate this a very likely.]

Source: The Technium

Decoration is best, except when it isn’t

Decoration is best, except when it isn’t:

Decoration and module extension are both viable ways to compose objects in Ruby. Which to use is not a simple black-or-white choice; it depends on the purpose of the composition.

For applications where you want to adorn an object with some extra functionality, or modify how it presents itself, a decorator is probably the best bet. Decorators are great for creating Presenters, where we just want to change an object’s “face” in a specific context.

On the other hand, when building up a composite object at runtime object out of individual “aspects” or “facets”, module extension may make more sense. Judicious use of module extension can lead to a kind of “emergent behavior” which is hard to replicate with decoration or delegation.

Apple Adds High-DPI Versions of Pointers in OS X 10.7.3

Apple Adds High-DPI Versions of Pointers in OS X 10.7.3:



Screenshot from FinerThingsIn.com

DaringFireball notes several changes in some of the icons found in OS X 10.7.3. Several of our readers had also noticed the small changes in pointer icons in the latest version. It seems the changes run a bit deeper than on first glance. The new icons apparently come in high DPI versions that allow them to scale at high resolutions.

Have you noticed that Safari’s hovering-over-a-link pointing-finger cursor looks a little different in Mac OS X 10.7.3? It’s not just that the finger is at a slightly different angle — it’s a new UI resource that scales gracefully to larger sizes. That’s not the only new high-DPI image resource in 10.7.3: the grabby hand in Mail, the camera cursor for selecting an individual window to take a screenshot of, and a few other UI elements got the high-DPI treatment in 10.7.3.

Matt Gemmell shows an enlarged version of the icon when zoomed in Universal Access:

[Hey, wait, i just caught up to the last round…]

Source: MacRumors

Rediscovering the Beatles

Rediscovering the Beatles:

Paul McCartney was, of all the Beatles, the pure songman. He wrote music because he loved music. He really didn’t want to do anything else. For him, being a Beatle was the best deal in the world.

Now that probably still is a gross approximation of who McCartney is. But without the net, without Wikipedia, I didn’t even have that much to go on. Music is a story, like every other human art. It’s the story of one person laid out in a way that others can understand it. A song is saying here I am and this is what I say. Reading the story of the story gives me more to think, and imagine about.

I guess I just wanted to say that all along we had the idea that Lennon was the deep Beatle, and McCartney was somehow the silly one. But I think we got it wrong. As he sang later, there’s nothing wrong with a silly love song. Popular music is popular for a reason, because it engages us in a playful way that makes us feel good. Yes we feel a little silly when this point is touched. But that’s kind of nice too.

[It is also “popular” because something about that story, told that way, at that time, reaches a lot of people. It doesn’t have to be serious, or a narrowly defined “love” song. But there’s is some love or truth it will expose in a way that resonates widely. A tricky prospect on a lot of levels.]

Source: Scripting News

Will energy consumption stay private?

Will energy consumption stay private?:

A significant byproduct of the connection revolution is that things that were private because they were difficult to measure will no longer be private. When devices can talk to each other, the information rarely remains private. It’s not going to stop with energy, of course. Just about all our buying decisions are going to be shared, and that changes the marketers job.

In a world of horizontal marketing, where tribes are aware of what their members are up to, I think it’s going to happen quicker than most people expect.

[It’s not a question of “whether”, we already share this stuff a lot. It’s a question of how easy it’ll be to access it. Will you be notified if I look at your purchase history?]

Source: Seth’s Blog

Is Facebook really a good business?

Is Facebook really a good business?:

Facebook offers nothing that you can’t get elsewhere on the internet in terms of building an online presence, sharing with friends and family, and keeping up with people in an extended circle—it’s simply that right now, many people find them the most convenient way to do that. A long-term bet on Facebook is a bet that this will still be the case 15 years from now—or a bet that, 15 years from now, Facebook will have pivoted in a way that still keeps them just as relevant. That’s a very tall order.

Source: Coyote Tracks