apple is taking my advice

Back on June 16 after the press conference WiFi issues and hub-bub with the iPhone 4 announcement, I offered Apple some advice. In summary:

Stream the keynote live yourselves!

Well, it appears as though they’ve taken my advice.

canned

Do you have certain text messages you send frequently?

“I’m leaving work.”
“Can’t talk now, I’ll call back soon.”
“Running late, be there in a few.”

Well, we do too, so we made an app for that. It’s called Canned, and it lets you author SMS message templates and groups so you can send off those frequent messages as quickly as possible. It’s available now on the App Store for one fourth the cost of your latte.

micro frog discovered

And I thought I’d seen everything when they discovered the pygmy marmoset!

homescreen wallpaper

Earlier this morning I linked to a list of iPhone 4 wallpapers on twitter (via Beautiful Pixels). There are some really gorgeous wallpapers there, but I’ve decided for the meantime to stick with my current background which you can see posted on my homescreen.me page. I made the background after seeing something similar in a PC desktop wallpaper, but I wanted something more suitable for the iPhone. I thought I’d post it in case anyone else would be interested in using it so you can download it at iPhone 4 resolution here.

voogle wireless

Let Google know where we want them to stand on net neutrality. This link contains an email template to get the point across.

I say we should all send them from our GMail accounts so it really hits home.

follow the futon

Do you need some more laughter today? If you don’t recognize the name Motherfuton, then I have a treat for you.

Noah Stokes is a web designer/developer in San Francisco. From 2005 to 2008 he ran the delightfully sarcastic Motherfuton.com. It’s worth taking a look at for some serious laughs. I’d recommend hitting up the archives, and starting from the bottom. But if you don’t have a few spare hours to kill, at least read Countach, a sterling example of what you’ll find on the site.

More recently, he’s been writing at his freshly redesigned blog, Es Bueno. It’s decidedly more focused on web design and development, but his Friday Futon segments, a throwback to Motherfuton.com, are golden. Also, if you’re one of us twitter peoples, you can follow him on twitter at motherfuton.

restless chopsticks

Unfortunately, I don’t cook very much chopstick worthy food at home, but these look fantastic!

pull-to-refresh

Recently, many words have been shared on the pull-to-refresh action first seen in Tweetie on the iPhone. Gruber just linked to this post quoting the following:

If pull-to-refresh stayed exclusive to Twitter for iPhone, I wouldn’t mind it as much, but like most popular things, my disdain grows as I see more poorly implemented or misguided variations of the feature.

To me this is a hollow argument. You can’t deride a feature for people using it incorrectly. If developers make poor design decisions in their usage or implementation of the pull-to-refresh feature, they are no less likely to make similar poor decisions if the action had never existed. It’s true, implementing pull-to-refresh because it’s the new must-have feature is a terrible idea. But well implemented, as it is in Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone), it’s a well-reasoned feature that shines in both discoverability and usability.


@skoda on App.net @technochocolate on App.net