In honor and memory of Steve Jobs: 2004: I’d never owned any Apple product. 2005: I bought my first Apple product, an iPod Classic. 2007: I bought my first Apple computer, an iMac, through a friend of a friend’s Apple employee discount. As of today, I’ve already owned and retired: That original iMac 2 iPod [...]
(Me and the Woz just after I bought the first iPad 2 at the Apple Store in Los Gatos) Having carelessly left my iPad in a Southwest Airlines seat-back pocket in December, I’ve been waiting impatiently for this day to come for months! I used TaskRabbit to arrange for a runner to wait in line [...]
The promise of greater network reliability? Alluring! But I’m not switching quite yet. Here’s why: No simultaneous voice and data — This is a non-starter. I frequently access the Internet while on a call. AT&T allows it, Verizon doesn’t, because of the nature of CDMA. Limited international reach — GSM is the global standard, and [...]
Curious as I performed my religiously weekly review of Gizmodo’s “This Week’s Best Apps,” I just used WetFish Software’s App Store Expense Monitor (free download) to determine that over the past few years I’ve downloaded 269 apps for the iPhone and/or iPad, spending a grand total of $596.09 on paid ones. I daresay I’m a [...]
Without any intention of picking up the latest in consumer gadgetry, I found myself in the Apple Store in Palo Alto yesterday — hey, it’s across the street from where I get my hair cut. I took a look at a display model; I saw the large, luminous display and the familiar multi-touch UI; and [...]
It’s happening again. Last week, I was caught by captcha. I couldn’t read and therefore failed a captcha challenge when trying to forward a blog post from within Google Reader to multiple recipients. Just now the captcha death spiral happened again, but this time I think there’s a bug. I passed the first captcha challenge [...]
Doh! I’ve been forwarding a bunch of articles from my Google Account through Google Reader. Subjected to captcha challenges, I failed to read a few properly and now am locked out of Google Reader (IP block) for an indeterminate amount of time. Bummer. The user experience here could have been better in two ways: First, [...]
I’ve been very happy with my Amazon Kindle DX since I first received it in June 2009. I love books and reading but was unhappy with the clutter of three double-stacked bookshelves and stacks of books everywhere in my apartment. So space savings was the purchase trigger for an electronic reader for me. And in [...]
Core 77 released its 3rd Annual Ultimate Gift Guide (77 Design Gifts Under $77) this week. I can’t quite put my finger on why I love this stuff, but I do. Perhaps it’s the gadget freak in me. I’m tempted by the notion of assembling a silk-screening kit (make my own designer t-shirts instead of [...]
This year, I’ve been experimenting with (loosely following) David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system. With an Outlook plug-in and a BlackBerry application, I had the tools I needed, particularly at work. But when I switched to the iPhone over the summer, I needed a new set of tools. In my typical optimizer (read The [...]
