The Rounded Corners of iOS

Warning: This post is more of just an observation than anything with a real point. Just thought I would let you know.

Running up to the release of the next iPhone, it seems everyone is speculating on what the physical device is going to look like. WWDC is sooner than the next iPhone release, and to be honest, I'm more curious about what iOS 6 will look like than I am about the next iPhone.

I wonder how many of you noticed this, but there are certain parts of iOS in which the screen edges are rounded. The two most obvious ones are Notification Center and Spotlight. Try pulling down the Notification Center and watch as both the top and bottom corners round themselves off. You can actually watch this happening as they are their usually square, pointed selves for about a second before they smoothly round out. If you take a look at the keyboard when you swipe over to Spotlight you will notice the same thing.

What I'm curious about is why Apple chose to do this for these two parts of iOS, and if we will see any more of this throughout the rest of iOS in iOS 6.

What do you think?

'Tell': A Great Online Short Film

I've always loved Film Riot and I want to congratulate Ryan, the show's host, on the relase of his short film. He's been talking about it since the first episode of Film Riot, and it's hard to believe that it's finally here.

"Tell" is in such a different league to most other videos watched online. It was so professional and well done that it felt weird to be watching it on YouTube. It's no Kubrick's "The Shining" to be sure, but it's a wonderful example of the even more wonderful things the internet can give to us. I enjoyed watching it and think you will too. "Tell" is true, online quality entertainment of the highest grade.

Two Buggy Apps: A Rant

TGC is hosted and built on Squarespace. I love it, and would never in a million years think of going back to WordPress or Tumblr.

That being said, one of the (supposedly) great things about Squarespace as a service is that they have a great iOS app.

False.

The app is buggy beyond belief. For a company who's site is so polished, with every tiny little detail accounted for, the Squarespace iOS app is a huge disappointment. Comments that I read weeks before randomly show up as being new. The app crashes if opened through notification center. It lags and sometimes simply refuses to update my stats. And this is all not to mention the app's icon which is still not retina optimized (although it does appear as such in the App Store).

Now, they did get some things right. The editing interface is pretty nice and straightforward. You can add pictures and even edit offline. You can preview your site as well. It even supports Markdown natively. At it's core, it's just a simple blogging app. In fact, I would even wager to say that once they iron out all these stupid bugs, the app would probably be pretty decent. But the problem is, that even after all this time, they still have yet to fix these annoying bugs.

And boy do they really need to. The app is not up to the usual Squarespace par.

And then there's Instacast. My absolute, without a doubt, favorite podcatcher of choice. It is, in my mind, by far and away the best option in the App Store. And they recently came out with a new update making it ever better.

But the bugs. Oh man, the bugs. There are so many that I often find myself infuriated when using the app.

To name a few:

• The app lags horrendously while it's updating rendering the app pretty much useless during that time.
• The play position randomly gets stuck.
• Not that this is a huge deal, but the "Unplayed" pop-up you see when you hit the little circle to mark an episode as unplayed is not even in English. I couldn't tell you why.
• I randomly get a pop-up asking me to "Authenticate". I have zero idea why, or what it's for, but it's incredibly annoying.
• The new archive feature is either incredibly confusing, or it just flat-out does not yet actually work. Either way, it's bad. Despite me setting episodes to automatically archive after they are played, my "Downloaded" playlist always seems to have more episodes in it than my "Unplayed" playlist.

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Now again, I really do use both of these apps on a daily basis. And I like them both. But I like them when they work. Do to the quality of the design of both of the apps, I expect more from their actual performance.

And look, I'm taking a computer programming course in school. I know how difficult it is to debug even the most stupidly-basic of programs.

But I wouldn't be complaining about these apps if I didn't love them enough to want them to get better.

'Everybody Dies': My Take on the Last-Ever Episode of House

Spoiler Alert

So that's it, then.

After a fantastic run of 8 seasons, and a very well done hour-long retrospective, the final episode — "Everybody Dies" — of House, one of my favorite TV shows, aired.

During some interview about ending House, Hugh Laurie — the actor that plays House — explained why the eight season was the last. He said something to the effect of "when you have a suicidal character like House, at some point he's either going to have to jump, or get back in the building — you can't keep the tension going forever", only in his usual, far more eloquent, way. And that's just the thing. I think the tension of House's character was finally dissipating, and before the show went from simply being "not as good as it used to be" to "bad", it should end. And so that's what they did.

The finale last night did not bring me the closure that I wanted, though. House neither jumped, nor got back inside the building. Yes, he did indeed do something for Wilson that could be seen as completely selfless — faking his death and being on the run to be there for Wilson's final days. And he did say in that burning building that he could "change".

But the question still stands: Will he actually change? And what will he do after Wilson dies? Will he really move on and develop a conscience of his own? Or will House always be the guy Wilson ended up describing in his (fake) eulogy? Maybe the writers wanted it left up in the air. Open for interpretation. Or maybe this is as far as they wanted to take the story.

But I don't think so. I think that the episode was rather weak. It was a cop-out and lazy. Even the whole "fake death" plot was taken from Sherlock Holmes. We knew that House would toy with death in the finale, but the way they ended up doing it was just plain out lazy. In a show that usually pushes the boundaries of great TV, the finale had no risks. It played things almost boringly safe.

When House supposedly died my mind was racing, my heart pounding. I was thinking of how crazy it will be to talk to people about. And that's how the best House episodes usually leave me feeling after they end. They can be incredibly exhilarating. By the end of the finale though, I felt almost apathetic.

I almost would rather have seen House die. That would have been pretty insane, and would have satisfied my desire for a truly thrilling episode. Instead, there was practically nothing that was in any way shocking. The teaser promos promised it to be unforgettable, but there are far more unforgettable episodes than the finale.

The writing of the finale was just not great — they hardly even explained how the building caught fire (although it's reasonable to assume that it was the patient — as you see at the beginning of the show, he was prone to dropping cigarettes as he dozed off). The dialogue was as great as always, sure (I particularly loved the bit about swallowing the sun), but the finale was not what I was expecting from a show where the writing is usually impeccable.

The finale ended in a place that feels like it should not be the end of House's tale. It was just simply unsatisfying. It's not a great way to say goodbye to House. There was no grand, master plan here. The show just ended wherever it ended up in it's last season.

So am I a little disappointed with the finale? Yeah, I am. But I want to make it clear that I did not think it was bad. Despite all I've said, in truth, it wasn't in any way bad. It was just simply good. But I wanted it to be great, fantastic, mind-blowing. I wanted it to leave me all emotional. Instead it was just good. I wouldn't even put it in the top ten. It was just plain good. That's it.

In summary, there was nothing at all epic about this conclusion. But I really wanted there to be.

But then when you think that this was the last episode ever of House. The end of one of the most well developed characters on TV. The end of one of my favorite shows — a show that I really love — well, it's almost surreal. And I suppose that's mind-blowing enough for me.

The $100 iTunes Gift Card for $80 Is Back

$100 Apple iTunes eGift Card for $80

Assuming that you'll spend more than $100 in iTunes before you die, this is like free money. Kind of. I know, it's still hard to drop $100 on something like this…

Are you going to get one?

Via Benjamin Brooks

The Email Newsletter You Should Be Subscribed To

NextDraft: The Day's Most Fascinating News by Dave Pell

This is a truly excellent newsletter. It's geeky, interesting, fun, and is something to look forward to in your inbox.

While you're at it, you should also subscribe to Dave Pell's — the author of the newsletter — blog.

Hat tip to Alex Leiphart for reminding me of this great newsletter.

Continuing the Saga of the Falling Quality of Apple's Genius Bar

As you may already know, a few weeks back there was quite some talk about how Apple Geniuses were telling customers that they had to manually manage the multitasking tray to achieve optimal battery life. And of course, how wrong they were.

And of course, it was such a big problem because it shows that these geniuses were completely and totally uninformed. The very people who were supposed to know everything about Apple products were giving out wrong information. And it was widespread — I can't tell you how many people I see doing this, and how many of them, when asked, tell me it's because the "people at the Apple store" told them to.

Where at Apple is this misinformation coming from?

Well, to add to this, I'd like to share an experience my mother recently had at our local Apple store:

The speaker on her phone seemed to intermittently stop working. Not the speaker that plays music, but the speaker for calls. Often, if not usually, she would only be able to speak during calls, but not actually hear the person on the other end. Needless to say, she needed to get her iPhone replaced. And replace it the Apple store did (although not, despite her protests, without a fee — she was indeed out of warranty, though).

When my mother got home, she did what the Genius told her to restore her phone, and then texted me after she was done all upset that the phone was restored to sometime in October — the most recent backup that iTunes had — and that she had lost months of pictures and work.

Of course, the fix for this was simple. When I got home, I simply wiped her phone and restored it from an iCloud backup from the day before she went to the Apple store. She lost nothing.

The problem is this: why the heck was the first question the Genius asked not "Do you have an iCloud backup"? Instead, he told her to restore from iTunes. Totally and completely wrong. My mother had a 24 hour old backup on iCloud, and had it not been for me, she would have been stuck with restoring from a backup that was almost half a year old.

iCloud is Apple's future. Why wasn't it their first question? Why didn't they even offer to turn on the phone with her in the gosh-darned store and restore it right there on the spot! It's ridiculous. Why are they still telling people to restore from iTunes when they have been using iCloud for months already?

What's with all this misinformation being dished out at Genius bars?

The Best Trick for Getting Great Deals on Clothes

The single best trick for getting clothing well below its original price-point is this: buy them at the end of the season, and do it in an actual brick-and-mortar store.

You may not have a huge selection of items or sizes (so if there's something in particular you definitely want, buy it during a regular sale), but the things that the store does still have will be ridiculously cheaper than they were originally. And the reason you want to go to an actual retail location is because the stores will often have racks or bins of stuff that are even more reduced — and these things are never listed online. You can sometimes find some insane deals when you go to the actual store that you never would have found online.

For example, I was once at an Express store and got myself a 3-piece suit, shirt, and tie for right around $180. More recently, I was at a Banana Republic store and picked up a nice sweater for $11.

It's simple: buy at the end of the season when the stores are trying to get rid of things, and make sure you go to an actual storefront.

Launchwriter

Launchwrite is a pretty cool writing app for your Mac. It blurs out your desktop wallpaper — just like Launchpad in Lion — and simply allows you to write. When you're done, you hit escape and you return to your desktop. It's a kind of obvious writing app in hindsight.

It's incredibly nice to write in. It rivals even the incredibly simple iA Writer. It is a fantastic idea, and I love writing in it. It feels like a digital typewriter. And I love how it's full screen and will have a different background every time you change your wallpaper. But I wish it had a better way to save to places so that I could use it as a true alternative to iA Writer when I want to.

Which is just the problem here. You cannot save, nor can you even use it as an editor for nvAlt. You just write. There is no integration with the file system or Dropbox. Nothing. It is literally just a screen in which you write in. The only way to get text out of the app is to copy and paste it. It seems like it's better for a quick note than long form writing — which is backwards. The app needs better integration so I don't have to write in Launchwrite and then paste it into another application to save it. And I know that it's trying to be all minimalist and things, but this is too far. I should be able to save my work somewhere.

It's kind of like a Drafts iOS/Pop for iOS — and you know how I feel about apps like that — except that you can't even have multiple "drafts", but rather only one at a time. When you're done, you copy and paste it into another app, and then delete it from Launchwrite to wipe it clean. This limits you to only being able to use it for one document at a time. You have to write something, finish it, and get all the text out before you can start something else in Launchwrite. There isn't even a built-in setting for a hotkey, which would make total sense (although you can always make one using an app like Alfred) It is literally just a beautiful, elegant, and simple place to write text — and do absolutely nothing with it. It's both wonderful, and stupidly limited.

And then the glitches and oddities. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but despite the fact that I have it turned off system-wide, the auto-correct of Lion persist in Launchwrite. Also, Launchwrite seems to sometimes use an old desktop wallpaper and not the current one I have set. There are also glitches when it comes to text selection as well, with the cursor jumping all over the place. I'm sure all these bugs will be ironed out with time, but for now, they're quite annoying.

Now, none of this is to say that I will never use Launchwrite (this review was fittingly written using it), but it will not be my go-to writing app on the Mac. It can't even really fit into my workflow. Instead, it will have to be reserved for the occasional use every once in a while when either I am simply in the mood, or do indeed just need a quick place to jot down some ideas.

'Drive' Review

Welcome to Popcorn, TGC's entertainment section where I'll be writing (usually) bite sized (get it?) reviews of the movies I've seen recently, as well as TV shows, music, books, and more. I'm really excited about this new section. I don't claim to be an expert on any of this stuff but I do really love a good movie and all. As all geeks do, no doubt.

So welcome to the first entertainment section of a magazine just for geeks.

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Spoiler Alert: Key plot points and more are probably going to be revealed in this post. If you have not seen the movie, do not read on.

I really liked "Drive". It had a strange feel to it — like some 80s movie that was somehow blended with GoodFellas. And the music and title sequence only added to the feel of it. Indeed, the entire style of the movie worked towards this noir-like effect. It was almost unsettling — in a good way.

I loved Ryan Gosling as "the driver". He played the part perfectly. He was a mysterious man of few words, and didn't even have a name. I love it. And a main character having no name is very hard to do and still maintain pretty good dialogue.

I also found the frequent shots of "the driver's" scorpion jacket to be intriguing. He never really takes it off for the second half of the movie. Despite it getting increasingly very dirty. He started out as a good guy (save for his job as a getaway man), and as he got slowly caught up in gang business, he began to get "dirty". And so did his jacket. But the jacket stayed on, until finally, in the final scenes of the movie, "the driver's" own blood pours all over it.

And then the movie ends with the lyrics of the strange music providing some form of closure and explanation to "the driver's" character.

The truth is, while the few car chases were brilliant, there weren't many. It was, or at least turned into, more of a gang movie. I didn't expect that. Either way, it's a great movie that I absolutely recommend.

Bookmarks Anyone?

I've got a question for all of you: does anyone use bookmarks anymore?

I mean, with services like Pinboard and apps like Evernote or — my preference (at least for now) — Yojimbo, does anybody actually still use the regular old bookmarks feature built into Safari (and other browsers)?

I throw any website that I want to "bookmark" into Yojimbo as just that — a bookmark. (There is also an option in Yojimbo for Web Archives but I found that they took too long and are not always necessary — although every once in a while if I find a webpage that I want to make sure I'll have forever to reference, I'll throw it in Yojimbo as a Web Archive). But in Safari itself, the only bookmarks I have are the ones in the Bookmarks Bar.

Of course, iCloud syncs bookmarks which is certainly handy for that Bookmarks Bar, but, considering that I don't have any other bookmarks in Safari, it doesn't really do much else for me in that regard.

Once again, I think we ourselves a case of the Pro vs. Consumer model. A typical user probably bookmarks everything right within Safari while just about every Pro user that I know uses something else.

What do you say?

Quickly Lock Your MacBook

If you want to walk away from your laptop for a second and want to keep it secure, there's a super fast way to lock/password-protect your screen. It's an oldie, but a goodie:

Difficulty

Super Easy

Step 1

Open Keychain Access and pop open the preferences.

Step 2

Under the "General" tab, check the box to "Show keychain status in menubar".

Step 3

Now, when you want to quickly lock your screen, just go to the lock icon in the menu bar and select "Lock Screen".

My iPhone Homescreen as of May 2012

Apps/changes of note this month:

1. As you can see since last month I have added another row of apps to my homescreen. I'm still not sure if I prefer it this way, but I've been giving it a shot. The truth is, I don't actually use every app on my homescreen in this configuration ever day, so I doubt it will last long.
2. I have been using Reminders for, well, reminders (do XYZ at such-and-such time — not ToDos, but reminders. Many people like the app Due for this sort of a thing, but I've been happy with Reminders for now.). I used to simply put those sorts of things in my calendar, but realized that as they were not actually events, they didn't belong there. Plus, it was a pain to enter them in to create just a simple reminder. The Reminders app is built for reminders and makes the process easier — and just makes more sense.

Also, you can now click on the image above to see it in full resolution.

Wallpaper is the new iPad wallpaper cropped for my iPhone.

Expensive Things

While Dress the Part is generally about dressing well for cheap, I'd like to make a point of saying that sometimes it pays to buy more expensive things as well.

Instead of buying a bunch of cheaper things, save up and splurge on something of much higher quality. It's better to have only two pairs of really nice shoes than a bunch of rather crappy ones.

Again, this is not a rule that you should always apply. Sometimes you can get things that are pretty darned good quality for much cheaper than the more expensive name brands. But then again, sometimes you can't and it pays to go with the more expensive choice.

But more important than all of this is that even if you decide that it's time to buy something more expensive, never pay full retail. Whatever it is you want to buy, the price will come down eventually if you watch for sales and, while it may still be pricey, it'll be less so.

It's all about the retail game and getting high-quality, expensive things for cheap(er).

Brian Regan: 'All By Myself'

I have always been a huge fan of Brian Regan. I think he's absolutely hysterical and have always respected him greatly for the fact that he can be so funny while also being clean. He seems to share my exact sense of humor and makes me laugh harder than pretty much anything else.

And he's done it all again on his latest CD "All By Myself". No, audio recordings of comedians are never as good as the videos (especially when it comes to Brian Regan's facial expressions), but this CD is as funny as ever.

I highly recommend it.

You can buy it/preview it here, and you can also find pretty much the entire thing on YouTube as well.

Auto-Number an iTunes Album That is Missing Track Numbers

Every once in a while I will import a CD (or obtain it otherwise) that, for one reason or another, does not have track numbers. Before the following Applescript, you would have to hit Command + I and set the number for each track individually — an incredible waste of time. The last time I had to do this, I figured there had to be a better way. And indeed, there is:

Difficulty

Medium

Step 1

Download and unzip the Applescript linked to here.

Step 2

(The following is all documented in the README file along with the Applescript).

Making sure iTunes is quit, navigate to your Home folder —> Library —> iTunes. (Note: Since Lion, the fastest way to get to your Library folder would be to hold down the Alt key and click "Go" in the menubar when in the Finder. Then select "Library" from the menu).

Step 3

Make a new folder called "Scripts"

Step 4

Put the downloaded script from Step 1 in this new folder.

Step 5

Open up iTunes and navigate to the particular album that is missing the track numbers. (I like to do this from the album view, and then double click the album in question to open it up). Then, from the new scripts menu in the menubar for iTunes (the one that look like a little scroll), select "Auto track# to selection" and watch the magic happen.

Golden Balls

Golden Balls, Game Theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the cold rationality of human behavior! | Economics in Plain English

My math teacher sent me this. An incredibly cool game show based on an incredibly cool mathematical concept. I love this kind of logic...

A Better Mess

A Better Mess: Productivity, Creativity, Geekery and Struggle with Michael Schechter

I have been meaning to post about this site for a while.

Not only does Michael, the creator of the site, write a boatload on just about everything, I find that — better than most other places — goes into the real minutia of the how and why. Instead of simply reporting on a new feature he'll explain why it's such a great new feature and how he plans on using it. It's a great site and I absolutely love it. And I think you will as well.

The site has truly made me a "better mess".

Text Navigation

COMMAND + RIGHT/LEFT ARROW

OPTION + RIGHT/LEFT ARROW

These make working with text so much faster. Using COMMAND and the ARROW keys, you can jump to either the end or the begging of entire lines (you can also use the UP or DOWN arrows to jump to the beginning or end of an entire document). The OPTION and ARROWS keys allows you to jump from word to word.

Finally, if you throw the SHIFT key into the mix, you will select the words/lines instead of jump navigating through them.

Make Marked Even Better

Open the preferences and check this box:

Now Marked will auto-scroll to the place that you last changed your document.