Showcase Your iPhone First Page: #sharethe1st [Jan 14th]

I am always curious about how people effectively manage their Macs or iPhones. As a matter of fact, I’m always looking for suggestions, idea..inspiration. To satisfy my curiosity, I made a quick poll on Twitter and I asked my followers to send me their first page of their iPhone springboard, including the #sharethe1st hashtag.

So, feel free to @reply me on Twitter with a screenshot of your 1st Springboard page. Please also include the #sharethe1st hashtag. The pics you send me will make it into a post, together with a link to your Twitter profile and website. Even you’ve already sent me a screenshot but you made some changes, you can send me the new one.

Enjoy!

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A Day’s Sales For Haiti

Link & Link

“In the spirit of OneFingerDiscount and MacSanta, I’d like to aggregate all of the participating companies onto a single site that customers can go to, see the products being offered and make their purchasing decision. You would handle the sales of your product on your store and at the end of the day donate the sales to your charity of choice.”

Now you understand why the Mac community is so great. Looking forward to January 20th.

LittleSnapper: Putting Finder to Shame Since 2008

I knew this was going to happen. The day my “Images” folder would become too big to manage in the Finder and I should switch to a 3rd party software to collect and organize all the images I have on my Mac. I’m that kind of guy that saves very cool and interesting image he finds during the day: it could be a screenshost of an app website, it could be some “fail pic” found on Twitter or even a screenshot of a bug somewhere on a web app. I save everything on my hard drive and organize the new stuff before going to sleep. Then, it came the day I realized I needed a more powerful and efficient tool to manage my Library (yeah, as time passed by it became a library of lots of GBs) as the Finder didn’t offer the features I wanted in order to effectively sort thousands of images and screenshots. I felt the need of tags, a more structured folder organization, I wanted to be able to quickly attach metadata to everything in a few easy steps, I wanted to divide all the files into “type”.

Turns out LittleSnapper was aimed at me.

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A Case for Mac OS Consistency

There’s something many Mac-heads love about Mac OS X, and that’s consistency. Consistency in the UI, consistency in the applications, consistency in how users can perform a large variety of actions in different applications - in the same way. Take a look at Smart Albums: you can create them in then same way in every app (including the Finder) that supports them. Regardless of the reason you want to create a smart collection on your desktop or in LittleSnapper, Mac OS X presents you the same menu.

But when I switched to Mac OS, I just didn’t notice this.

I didn’t even understand why I should actually create smart collections, when the good old normal folder structure was still working fine to me. And that’s the case of many users out there: they don’t get the importance of an operating system that can guide them through the process of having a consistent experience, no matter what they’re doing or would like to.

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Spring-Loading and Scrolling in Mailbox Drawer

So true:

“Unfortunately, because of the overlap between the area that triggers scrolling and the area that triggers spring-loading, I cannot have one without the other. And the end result is that I have to scroll down through the list of sub-subfolders first before I can reach the rest of the list of subfolders.

Fortunately, Mail doesn’t continue this silly behaviour ad infinitum. Otherwise, it would be a nightmare. It only confuses scrolling and spring-loading once, presumably because after that, since the drawer is scrolling down, I am not longer lingering on any given position long enough to trigger spring-loading, until I actually choose to stop the scrolling by lifting my selection back up a bit.

And once I’ve actually dropped what I was dragging in the desired location and released the mouse button, of course Mail collapses everything back up and I am back to normal.”


How do you solve this problem? Do you use Mail Act-on, Fastscripts or other utilities that integrate with Mail.app?

Stage Winners Announced

Thanks everyone for the support and the comments! Also, I’d like to thank the iPhone360 team for giving us these 4 promo codes to give away.

Now, here are the winners:

knox

Sam Morrell

Davide85

Aifonit

You’ll receive the promo code straight in your inbox in a matter of a few hours.

Cheers!

An Amalgamation of Predictions and Questions Regarding the Apple Tablet

Thoughtful piece by Shawn Blanc, outlining many aspects of the rumored, upcoming yet nonexistent Apple tablet.

“While Patrick Rhone and John Gruber think the Tablet may be nothing short of the reinvention of personal computing, I’m with John Siracusa, who thinks the software will be so obvious it’s boring. Meaning: it will certainly be awesome, but not as breakthrough as the iPhone was.

[…]

Take the new Nexus One as a comparison. The Nexus One has great hardware when compared to the latest iPhone: faster processor, more RAM, gorgeous screen, better camera. For all intents and purposes it should be the best smartphone in the world. But it’s not because it runs second-tier software.

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone he said he’d been waiting two and a half years for that moment. He also boasted the iPhone OS as being “5 years ahead of any other mobile software.” And after three years so far he’s still right. It’s amazing that even an original, 3-year-old iPhone is still one of the most advanced, powerful, and user-friendly mobile phones available today.”

Whether or not it will as breakthrough as the iPhone was, I’m sure Apple won’t release a “normal” product. Hopefully, we’ll know everything about it in just two weeks from today.