This subject is probably beaten to death already, but just a couple of the latest Nokia links:
Nokia links up with Groupon to promote deals on phone maps
Nokia Lumia 900 Gets Its Own Matching Pink Nail Polish
Groupon crap and nail polish? Please.
iMore has learned that Apple is planning to debut the new iPhone at a special event on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, with the release date to follow 9 days later on Friday, September 21.
And here comes Jim’s famous “yep” practically confirming the event.
As I did a fresh install of Mountain Lion the day it was released, I’ve been slowly installing the tools I usually need as I’ve needed them. I thought it’d be interesting for the like-minded geeks to se how I roll. I’m planning to release this information as a series of posts, this being the first one.
I tried the default Terminal on 10.8 but as I’ve grown so accustomed to iTerm 2, I downloaded and installed it instead. It’s a great Terminal replacement with nice features such as split panes. And page up/page down work straight away with irssi, with zero configuration.
Oh-my-zsh brings zshell with awesome default configuration. I’m sure Bash can be configured to act & look similar, but this thing just makes sense out-of-the-box, so why not? From the top of my head, some nice features:
I don’t fancy Safari. Even though I’ve bee flirting with Safari 6 that comes with 10.8 (unified location & search box! crazy fast and smooth scrolling! no Flash!) it still has some things that drive me next to crazy. For instance, Safari has a lot to learn about tab handling from Chrome. Tab duplication is nowhere to be found (except as a flaky plugin).
And Chrome just happens to be the least bad option. There are some things that I don’t like with Chrome, but it’s mostly good.
Well, Messages is the mess of ages.
I’ll be back with more apps in part two. Stay tuned, and as always, for comments & feedback you can reach me on Twitter as @anttti.
Getting Apache, MySQL and PHP up & running on Mountain Lion
Posting this mostly for my own future needs, as I seem to keep getting bitten by the MySQL sock error every single time.
Baldur’s Gate coming to iPad in September
This is great. I hardly ever play games on any other platform than iOS, and more specifically, my iPad.
Via TouchArcade.
“Emails to My Unborn Daughter”
Speaking of emails, this is such a great idea by Jeffrey Inscho:
For the past five years, I’ve been writing emails to my son. Shortly after he was born in 2007, I created an email account in his name so I could write to him throughout his childhood and then turn the account over to him when he was of age.
Definitely something I’d consider doing if we had kids.
Via Minimal Mac.
One of the three main features of the .Mail app:
Imagine finding every attachment someone sent you, sorted by date or name directly in your email client? It’s similar to the “All your files” functionality in your OSX Finder.
It seems like such a great idea! So many times have I felt utterly lost in my emails, searching for a particular attachment from someone.
But then it struck me. I seriously dislike attachment files. In addition to being next to impossible to find, they bloat my mailbox because I cannot delete them without also deleting the email. And as anyone with moderate to large sized mailbox knows, a bloated mailbox is a sluggish mailbox.
Also think about the wasted bandwidth in delivering those files! It’s not rare to see an email with a nice 10-meg Powerpoint file being delivered to 10-20 people, most of them quite liberally CC’d, “just FYI”. So what’s the solution?
I dunno. Sparrow had a great idea of automatically uploading attachments to Dropbox and pasting a link to the file in the email. Still one might argue that since the files are not delivered as part of the email, they might not be accessible if they are needed later on (the sender might have deleted the file from his/her Dropbox). But that’s clearly an edge case that I’d be very much OK with.
(by the way, did you notice the clever pun with the name of the .Mail app?)
How many people use Twitter’s own apps?
Speaking of Twitter clients, mr. Benjamin Mayo did some research on what clients people use. Not surprisingly most tweets come from the web interface and Twitter’s own native clients. Perhaps a bit surprising is to see Echofon as the biggest 3rd party client. It’s users are definitely quieter than the vocal minority using Tweetbot.
Also seeing Twitter for Mac on place 32 makes it clear why Twitter is not too interested in keeping it up to date.
Via Gruber.
Over time I’ve tried quite a few Twitter clients on OS X, some good, some not so good. I’ve been mostly using Twitter’s own Twitter.app that evolved from the good ol’ Tweetie, and for the last few months a client called Osfoora.
What would I like to see in the ultimate client? Glad you asked:
Osfoora comes close, especially the latest update with streaming support made a big difference. Still, Osfora is missing advanced muting features (foursquare and the like) and it doesn’t display both real names and nicks, and it doesn’t support gestures (the official Twitter.app is nice in this sense). So close!
Then there’s the alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac. I can tolerate it being “the most android-looking app on iOS” on my phone and on the iPad mostly because the apps are always running in full screen, but it just doesn’t sit well in OS X.
Given the stance Twitter seems to have taken on 3rd party clients, I wonder if I ever get to see a client of my dreams.
Well before the iPhone, and going back all the way to the early 2000s, Apple had been working on tablet prototypes that would eventually form the groundwork for the original iPad.
It’s referred to as the 035 mockup or prototype.