FaceNow: Handy FaceTime Shortcuts

I haven’t used FaceTime that much until now, mainly because none of my friends managed to find an iPhone 4 with 3 Italia. Last night, though, I found out that two of them bought one earlier this week (“finally”, they said) and 2 hours ago I got a call from my town’s 3 store about the availability of the 32GB model for my girlfriend. This means that starting tomorrow I’ll use FaceTime a lot. An awful lot.

Thanks to a free app called “FaceNow”, the FaceTime experience will be a lot faster and easier to setup. Read more

HimmelBar Lets You Launch Apps From Your Mac Menubar

Mac users have been debating for years whether applications should be launched from the dock, from the appropriate Finder window, from an app launcher (Launchbar, Quicksilver, Alfred) or even via keyboard-triggered Applescripts. The truth is you can’t find a “better way” for everyone, as a user’s specific workflow is always to be considered and it’s impossible (and silly) to make people agree on a particular way of doing something with a computer.

Debates aside, here’s neat little app I didn’t about before and I’ve just discovered thanks to One Thing Well: HimmelBar lets you launch (and browse) installed applications directly from the menubar. Read more

Ten Dollars And The App Store→

Ten Dollars And The App Store

What did $10 get you 15 years ago? All the games that would fit on a disk. A 5-inch floppy disk. Considering the massive improvements to the user experience, and the amount of utility that an app like Tweet Library offers, that copy of Duke Nukem 3D isn’t looking as expensive anymore. Toss in inflation, and your getting a Rolls Royce for the price of a VW Bug. Or, in more reasonable terms, two of those caramel soy moccachino things you drink every day.

The same happened when OmniFocus for iPad came out. And that app is priced at $40. What is the problem with these people that can’t do anything besides complaining and asking for discounts in forum posts? Why do they keep on criticizing developers when they price professional software (yes, Tweet Library and OmniFocus for iPad are professional apps. That’s it) at anything more than .99 cents?

These hypocrites pay $500 for an iPad an they expect every kind of app to be free / priced at less than a dollar. The real problem is the App Store gives too much visibility to games, and less importance to niche, more focused applications. It’s like go looking for a great bottle of red in a candy shop.

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Do We Need an iTunes Server Version?→

Do We Need an iTunes Server Version?

iTunes Server would allow each user to set up an account and build a personal library. These accounts would ensure that the server program knows exactly which files each user wants to access. Users’ library files would remain on their individual computers, and they would be able to create their own playlists, add ratings, and keep track of their play counts and last played dates.

When the server is first set up, users would be able to choose which files they see in their copies of iTunes; this would also affect what they can sync to their iOS devices.

Sounds interesting, but my money is on iTunes in the cloud making the whole process easier, faster and, overall, better.

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iPad in the Dark→

iPad in the Dark

Then I discovered a feature of the Kindle app that the Apple iBook app lacks: reversed fonts – white type on black pages. This is a silly idea for paper books: hard to read and a colossal waste of ink. It is also a silly idea for ordinary Kindles that, like paper books, are read by reflected light. But with a self-lit, back-lit device like an iPad, it becomes a new way to experience books. Even with very low light levels, the contrast of the white letters against the black page is outstanding. In a dark room, it is very readable.

Funny how with all the advanced technology, all it takes is one tiny feature to change the experience: there is practically no excess light to bother other people.

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Seven Steps To Mastering Your Web Browser→

Seven Steps To Mastering Your Web Browser

Thing is, the stock installation of any browser is only telling you half the story; it’s perfectly serviceable right out of the box, but there is a metric poop-ton of additional functionality and efficiency available. Thankfully, nerdy goofballs like myself have, mostly through trial and error, stumbled upon a host of great ways to make your browser work better and faster.

And lots of great tips in there. I agree: bookmarklets are little miracles.

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How To: Display WebP Images On Your Mac Browser

WebP is a new image format announced by Google last week which aims at making the web faster by providing the tools to use high-quality, yet lightweight, images. While preserving quality and resolution, Google’s engineers figured out a way to compress images so to make them even smaller than usual .JPEG files. About the technical details:

WebP uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same methodology used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively. The residuals are then transformed, quantized and entropy-coded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.

Being a new file format, it’s not officially supported in browsers yet. Maybe it’ll be very soon, but right now it’s just a cool developer preview that shows what it’s possible to do with Google’s technology. Here’s how you can enable WebP in your Mac browser right now. Read more