“So the focus on MarsEdit 3.6 was instantly sidelined, and MarsEdit 3.5.3 was brought to existence in the space of about an hour today, taking this critical bug fix and a couple other less urgent fixes that didn’t make it in time for 3.5.2.”

(Via The Red Sweater Blog.)

I love when developers are this communicative and up-front about their mistakes. Amazing how the little one-person shops tend to do this way better than the big corporate powerhouses.

I didn’t run into this bug, but if I had, I would still feel good about the way it was handled. Everyone makes mistakes; it’s all about what you do to fix them.

The infographic below shows each carrier’s average LTE speed in the cities we tested where both LTE services are offered. The cities are ranked according to a composite score of AT&T and Verizon LTE download speed.

(Via Tech Hive)

The problem with average speeds in tests like this is that they mean almost nothing compared to your real-world performance. Now that I’m carrying an AT&T phone and a Verizon iPad, I have to say, Verizon is hands-down the better choice for me personally. And I’m very often getting faster speeds than this average on LTE with my iPad.

More importantly, I’m getting extremely fast speeds in places where I get zero signal on AT&T. And many of them are places I frequent.

But that’s me. I know other people who live in other places where AT&T is absolutely the right choice. I know people who live in San Francisco for whom AT&T is a better choice. Cell coverage is still a very touch and go thing.

So, as always, your mileage may vary. You have to take that into consideration before charts like this sway your decision-making, interesting as they are.

Results make up for awkwardness of iPhoto for iPad – Chicago Sun-Times: “iPhoto represents the second generation of iPad apps. It’s not merely a ‘mobile’ photo editor. It’s a photo editor. A less-ambitious photo app like Snapseed is something you play with. iPhoto is an app that you can actually rely on.”

(Via. Chicago Sun-Times)

I have to completely agree with Andy Ihnatko here. When I first started using iPhoto for iPad, I immediately thought, like everyone else, that it was a UI nightmare. But the more I used it, the more I ended up liking it. And more importantly, the more I ended up using it as my go-to app for photo organizing and experimentation. In a few days, I had already used iPhoto on my iPad far more than I ever had any of the other iOS iLife apps. 

iPhoto for iPad truly is as capable, and far more enjoyable to use once you learn it, than its desktop counterpart.

We are entering a second stage of iPad software, as Mr. Ihnatko suggests. One where people start to recognize that the iPad is eventually going to be the laptop replacement, not just a casual consumption device. This is what the Kindle Fire and the Android tablets are all missing. The iPad is so much more than the competition thinks it is. 

And who better than Apple to lead the way with a new generation of apps that go beyond consumption? True, the iPad versions of the iWork apps were heavily compromised for the sake of an easier user experience. But the newer Apple apps, Garageband, iMovie, and now iPhoto, are pushing the boundaries and demonstrating that over time, iOS will become just as capable as OS X on the Mac for most people. 

The trick is figuring out how do these things with our fingers. So yes, user experience is not quite as easy to figure out on these more robust apps yet. But it took several years for the mouse and the original GUI to evolve into tools capable of rivaling text-based user interfaces. It’ll get there. Developers have to be willing to experiment until they find what works. And Apple, of course, has more at stake than anyone in leading that charge. 

Compelling idea for moving files from Mac to iPhone | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog: “There’s iCloud, Dropbox and a host of other services to help us tranfer these files, but there are no solutions as elegant as the concept devised by interaction designer Ishac Bertran.”

(Via. TUAW)

Elegant? I’d say this is anything but elegant. For starters, how is manually holding a phone in one hand while pinching and dragging with the other on a vertical screen more elegant than iCloud automatically syncing the files with no user interaction whatsoever? 

Even Palm solved this problem already much more elegantly with the “bump” feature on the WebOS tablet a few years ago. You see a file on the tablet you want on your phone, or vice versa? Just bump the devices together on the side of the screen, and the file transfers. 

But again, even that isn’t as simple as putting your files in iCloud, where they will simply be available on all devices at all times. Make an update on your phone, your laptop will have it in a few seconds. Make a change on your laptop, and the phone will have it in a few seconds. 

I realize that Apple is just getting started with iCloud, and that they haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, but they’ve clearly demonstrated that this is the plan for the future. There will be no need for the user to ever “sync” anything, because synchronization will be constant and automatic. 

Why you’d try and solve this problem when it’s already been solved is beyond me. 

Quasar was not designed, but rather only implemented. It’s the classic outcome of closed, engineer-based thinking.

(Via Matt Legend Gemmell)

Matt Gemmell sums up my thoughts on Quasar perfectly. The iPad doesn’t present multiple apps on screen at once for a reason, and that reason isn’t because of some hardware limitation, or because Apple wanted to “dumb it down” for users. It wasn’t an arbitrary decision. Apple designed the iPad that way, and I believe it’s a better device for it. You can argue that other systems like Windows Metro or Palm’s Web OS handle this sort of thing better, but you can’t just haphazardly let people fall back into their worst desktop habits and call it an improvement.

A collection of little rotating “tout” graphics we had at the top of the old site.

The oldest modification date? 2002 — 10 years ago.

Through these touts, you can basically see everything we’ve done over the last 10 years. The passage of time generally freaks me out, so it’s a little overwhelming for me to see these all in one place, but it’s also kind of nice and comforting to see that, man, we’ve done a lot of stuff.

(Via Panic Blog)

Not a bad-looking graphic in the whole bunch. It says a lot when you can go 10 years and nothing you do looks dated. 

With so much of the management and design team being people who were there under Jobs, they retain a lot of the good aspects of that era—and while Jobs was undoubtedly a huge direct influence as a tastemaker, there’s a case to be made that having a CEO who employees arenot terrified of being trapped in an elevator with is, in the long run, a good thing.

(Via Coyote Tracks)

This is a brave assertion, but I have to agree. The only thing about Tim Cook that will need to play out over time is his sense of vision. Will he see the next big thing when the time comes? So far, we have no evidence that he’ll be able to match Jobs’ sense of that. But we have no evidence that he won’t be able to, either.

As far as running the company goes, he’s going to be just fine. And no one else would do it better.

The biggest thing Apple has to watch out for now is its own sense of complacency. Once you’re the top dog, and Apple is certainly going to be top dog for at least the next half decade, you become your own worst enemy. I think Tim Cook knows this well. Forget the competition, focus on what makes you great, and resist the urge to own every market, even when those markets make no sense.

This is a short tribute to my Aeropress. Two years ago, one was given to me, and it changed everything.

For a little more than $20, this marvel of science will produce arguably the best cup of coffee you’ve ever made in your home. It makes no sense.

(Via Shawn Blanc)

The only part of this I can’t approve is the use of a metal kettle. Don’t ever let your hot water touch metal, man. Glass is the only way to go.

The Naive Optimist, We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m: “We believe that smart folks can get five days of work done in four days. Simple as that.”

(Via. The Naive Optimist)

I applaud this mentality. We have such a skewed view of how to achieve success these days, especially in the U.S. I often think how disappointed our grandparents would be if they knew we traded the 40-hour work week they had to fight so hard to achieve for a couple of extra thousand dollars a year to spend on slightly bigger houses and cars. 

More companies should really consider implementing the 4-day work week. I worked at a place that had this schedule once, and it was the biggest thing I missed when I left. And I talked recently with folks who are still there, and they won’t leave because they won’t give up their “day off” every week. Absolutely the best retention strategy ever invented. And productivity has been proven to go up, not down, in places where this has been instituted.

It’s easy to implement, too. Just stagger the days off. Have a lottery, or base it on seniority. Some people get Mondays, some Fridays, some Wednesdays. Some Thursdays. Save one day a week, such as Tuesday, as a day where everyone has to be in the office, so that you can always schedule all-hands meetings if necessary. 

Believe me, even the people who get “stuck” with Thursday off will be grateful. 

Teams will have no trouble finding time to meet when they have to. They will go to great lengths to make sure the work keeps getting done, because they won’t want to lose this awesome new thing you handed them.

Of course, before we can get people on the 4-day week, I guess we’d have to get most of them to stop working weekends, first. So sad.

If you don’t own a direct major stake in the company, if you’re not at least a part owner, you’re screwing yourself by working more than 40 hours a week anywhere, no matter how many promotions you get. Senior VPs might look like they have it made, but even the ones making several hundred thousand a year and up are still getting the shaft, because they have no real stake in the company’s future. Whatever they make is crap compared to what they should be making. There’s always a handful of people at the top taking the lion’s share of everything. And you can’t work your way into that group. You have to start your own thing to get that. 

So why are you letting someone else take most of the value you generate? Save that for your personal passions, your family, your creativity, whatever you want. That’s yours, not theirs.

Fun.

 ★ 

(Via Daring Fireball)

If youre a fan of Dan Benjamin's 5by5 Network of podcasts, this is pretty funny.