In a world where mobile computing is obviously becoming top dog, it’s amazing how poorly Facebook has executed their iPhone app. It’s reliability seems to get worse every day. A company with their resources and talent should have the premier mobile experience, but they don’t. To me that can only speak poorly of the structure of their organization. We aren’t seeing the vast measure of their talent manifest in their product, and that doesn’t seem to present a bright future.

Are a lot of people going to invest in Facebook today? Undoubtedly. Would I recommend it? Nope.

This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation.

Readers should prefer to read things here rather than Instapaper/Readability/Safari Reader Mode/RSS Reader. That is the guiding point that I use to design this site, and of the sites I like best, I find that it’s universally true of them as well.

[post-link]

This is a very early version of Brackets, a code editor for HTML, CSS and JavaScript that’s built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I saw a demo of Brackets from Adobe a few weeks ago, and I must say it looks impressive. Even early on, there are a lot of great features and workflows that other web development tools should be taking a hard look at.

The worst thing I expect of Microsoft is that they will fail to capture my attention.

The worst thing I expect of Apple is that they will keep making things so compelling, that I can’t help but give them money.

[post-link]

iMessage is great and so is IM, and they are two very different communication methods, BUT one is the future and one is the past.

Out with the old.

[post-link]

I must say however, that I disagree with their suggestion for sending text or email templates. You should obviously use Canned and Canned Mail for this type of thing.

[post-link]

We’re left with the question, is it ok for iPhoto to have a learning curve? It does have great in-app help and tooltips, so it isn’t out of reach for someone to get well acquainted with its interfaces. Is that enough? Does the app really bring some new functionality that necessitates an interface that demands a little more investment from its users?

It’s possible that iPhoto is unnecessarily complicated. There are other photo editing apps for iOS that have had more positive critical reception. But at what point is it okay for developers to release somewhat more complex software for iOS?

There are many applications running on computers today that are beyond the usability scope for an average user. For example, I don’t have the first clue how to get up and running in Pro Tools or AutoCAD. Granted, we don’t all need to master a studio album or blueprint some schematics. Certainly a larger number of people want great photo retouching tools, but that doesn’t necessarily mean iPhoto has an infinitely varied target user.

It’s left to developers to strike a balance between maintaining high usability standards that delight our target audience, and realizing the full potential of the tasks we can address with newer computing platforms. iOS has made this huge leap in smoothing the rough edges of using a computer, and subsequently many people have drawn a conclusion about what is an acceptable level of complexity for its software. But lets not let this artificial constraint hold back the possibilities that the platform can help us realize.

So buy the new iPad. Or don’t and wait for the next one. No one cares.

[post-link]

[post-link]

The way I see it, I should credit the original author or creator of a work, without question.
…
Otherwise, I’m not going to go out of my way to credit someone for merely passing on a link. (It’s the internet, after all. It’s made of links.)

1. It makes the assumption that every picture taken or saved, along with all your screen grabs, deserves a place in the cloud.
2. Given that assumption, it still provides no way to delete those one-off images individually from the stream.

I’m happy to say as of 5.1 this is finally addressed. You can now delete photos from your Photo Stream which will propagate to all your connected devices. Photo Stream is far more useful having the ability to delete files.

One small caveat, this appears to only be true of Photo Stream images taken after installing 5.1. Deleting older images from my iPhone alerted me that the file would only be deleted from “the Photo Stream on this iPhone”. I decided to make a clean break and delete my entire stream using the iCloud web interface.

[post-link]