Winscape: Your Mac-powered Virtual Window

Technology applied to real life can be awesome. Most of times it can be weird and dangerous. I really don’t know what to think about the Winscape, but it’s interesting for sure.

Basically, it’s a software running on a Mac Pro that creates fake, 3D landscapes in fake windows. There are two plasma televisions that receive the signal from the Mac Pro and “play” beautiful landscape on screen. The whole thing comes with an iPhone remote app and a sensor that checks your position in front of the screens and tells the software to rotate the scene when you move.

Seriously, check out the videos after the break.

Read more

Articles for iPad: Wikipedia Where It Was Meant To Be

Some applications make more sense on the iPad, some don’t. When I first reviewed Articles from Sophiestication in its iPhone version, I said it was the best Wikipedia app for iPhone out there. I still think it is, as no other application has managed to get even near to the sheer amount of quality Sophia has put into that tiny Wikipedia client. But one could argue whether the iPhone is any good for reading, and that’s a complete different story. Once you try an iPad, you realize how much it is better for reading and consuming content than the iPhone, which is meant for accessing that content on the go.

As you try an iPad you realize how much a previously iPhone-only application makes more sense on it, and Articles is no exception.

Read more

Icebird: Best New Twitter Client for iPhone.

Right after Twitter announced the acquisition of the popular Tweetie app from Atebits’ Loren Brichter, many third party developers of Twitter clients started complaining that Twitter just killed the platform by entering the market itself. We may have different positions on this, but that’s not the point.

Point is, there are lots of developers out there who don’t care about “the big names”, they just want to keep developing for the sake of it and for the user base they’ve managed to build. I respect these guys. There’s a problem though: what about those that come up with new apps now? It shouldn’t be easy, knowing that you’re just getting started and Twitter is about to release the best mobile Twitter client ever made…for free. It’s a difficult situation, but fortunately there are some developers who love challenges and are releasing their apps anyway.

Meet Icebird, a new Twitter client for iPhone which I’m falling in love with.

Read more

Steve Jobs Doesn’t Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I

Mike Rundle:

“Steve Jobs wants Apple to be the arbiter of quality in the App Store, denying apps that are ugly, poorly-thought, lame, explicit or featureless. He can’t say that in the Terms and Conditions so instead they’re using carefully-worded language that excludes certain technologies associated with the kinds of apps he doesn’t like. Steve Jobs doesn’t want shit in his App Store. If you’re a developer who may be interested in building shit, there’s another platform right down the street.”

Amen.

An Ode To Clipmenu

There are two kinds of desktop applications: those that work and require you to pay attention to them, and those that work and you don’t even notice them.

I have many applications on my Mac, many of them for reviewing purposes, but I tend to keep a very few in the dock and some running in the menubar. Of all these applications I have most of them belong to the first category, they are apps that require me to look at them and perform actions basing on their user interface. 1Password needs me to input some letters in a text field to unlock its database, and Cyberduck wants me to select the proper folder to upload pictures. My action is needed, always and immediately. Without my action, these applications are lost like an empty car. I have to drive them to go somewhere (working with them), but I also had to learn driving them in the past to get used to their system.

Then there are applications that live quietly in the background, do their job without requiring my attention and are there when I need them. From a technology standpoint, they’re not that different. I use these “quiet” apps just like I use the other ones. But from a user point of view, there’s an immensely huge advantage when using the quiet apps: even if you actually use them, you don’t notice them. So I guess that their biggest feature is that of melting with the OS and become an invisible layer of your workflow.

Clipmenu is an application I’ve been using for many years now and, just like the Finder or Mail, is an application I’m highly dependent on, mainly because it’s become so well integrated with the OS that I don’t even notice using it anymore. Any Mac that doesn’t have Clipmenu installed doesn’t feel like a real Mac to me.

Read more