Evan Luzi over at The Black and Blue on operating a clapboard:

Holding the slate seems like an obvious act — and it largely is — but you should take these five tips into consideration before stepping in front of the camera.

I’ve often wanted to reach through a monitor and shout these tips at the camera crew. Great list.

If you’ve ever dipped your toes into hacking OmniFocus (or spent even a moment on Omni’s excellent forums) then you’ve heard of RobTrew. His scripts are essential, doubly so if you ever find yourself suddenly becoming an edgecase. When MobileMe closed down on June 30th, with it went his scripts.

Of course, Rob was on top of it. You can find all of his scripts here, though his original Omni Group forum post implies they may be moving eventually. Get ’em while they’re hot.

And thanks, RobTrew. These are awesome.

Unless I have to, I don’t buy paper books anymore. I don’t read a lot of books (Instapaper has handily overtaken my attention) but when I do I prefer to buy them from Amazon. Well, I did until recently.

Far and away Amazon offers the most compelling electronic reading experience. Almost anywhere I can access the Internet, I can read a Kindle book. That’s huge. There’s only one problem. As pointed out by Bryan Larrick over at Daily Exhaust¹ last week, Amazon recently updated the Kindle for iOS app with the following adjustment:

Improved reading experience on iPad: Smaller margins and a cleaner look help you focus on the author’s words.

Larrick goes into detail, with great illustrations, about why this update makes reading worse, but here’s the short of his take on those new margins:

What Amazon has done is create a solid mass of text that has no breathing room. It’s claustrophobic. It’s stressed. It’s like standing three feet in front of a brick wall and pretending you’re appreciating the architecture of a building.

When it comes to issues of design and typography, I try to make sure I’m not overthinking things, that I’m not just being a princess nagged by a pea. Still, I’ve given the new Kindle app a little over a week of daily use and it is absolutely abysmal. My eyes get tired more quickly and I have to look away from the screen more often. In turn it takes me longer to get through a book. And that annoys me.

Over time, iBooks has grown into my favorite reading app. The font choices are excellent and the fullscreen view fixes the app’s formerly skeuomorphic/fetishistic paper feel. Apple even gives you option to align your text left, or “ragged right” in printspeak, and toggle hyphenation on and off, which helps avoid the massive “rivers” of whitespace running down the page that plague the newest Kindle app. Even the page and notes sync between iBooks on iPad and iPhone, powered by iCloud, is far more intuitive than Amazon’s “Whispersync”² system. So shouldn’t I just switch to iBooks?

The trouble is that I’ve been spoiled by Amazon’s ecosystem. I love that I can get a few pages in on a Mac or in a Web browser.³ If ever I need to quote a book or go back to notes, their kindle.amazon.com is a total treat.

But for now, I loathe reading with these new margins on my iPad. And that makes me never want to buy a Kindle book again.

I switched to Sparrow on my Mac and iOS for email earlier this year and I absolutely love it. The gang at Sparrow now maintains two Tumblrs listing tips about both the Mac and iOS versions of the app: Sparrowtips and Sparrow iPhone Tips.

Sparrow is an extremely powerful mail application on any platform, but the tips listed on these sites are little nuances that took me weeks and months to discover. Glad to see they’ll be easy to find and visualize on day one.

Nick Bilton over at The New York Times (who I criticized way before it was cool) was on the receiving end of some harsh words this week after his June 19th blog post, “Microsoft Surface Allows People to Create.”

The iPad, for all its glory, suffers from one very distinct flaw: It’s very difficult to use for creation. The keyboard on the screen, although pretty to look at, is abysmal for typing anything over 140 characters.

Apple bloggers, naturally, took Bilton to task. After all, his Apple slags came in the reflected praise he was heaping on Microsoft’s just-announced Surface tablet. At best, Bilton’s piece was a crock. Take his closing line:

Yet many budget-conscious consumers who pass on the iPad and go for a computer instead may now have a choice to buy a device that doubles as both.

Microsoft has kept mum on Surface’s pricing, so either he’s got a real source (in which case he should commit some journalism and report on it) or he’s just making shit up. I’ll put my money on the latter.

Yesterday he responded to the criticism in another post, “When Zealots Attack.”¹ Here’s Nick’s defense of his iPad-isn’t-for-creation stance:

I absolutely love typing on my iPhone, where I can pummel my thumbs at the screen with the speed of Superman and the accuracy of an Olympic archer. But, for me, typing long form on the iPad is much more difficult. Maybe it’s a simple problem of the keyboard design on the iPad.

Others have pointed out in great detail how many people have used the iPad for creating artwork, music, books and so forth. But Nick doesn’t use his iPad for any of that, so it isn’t a creation device for him.

Which is all well and good, only that’s not what he said in his original post. Where does Bilton let us know that he is offering a personal opinion when he says things like “The keyboard…is abysmal” and “Apple doesn’t seem to want the iPad to be a creator”? He can’t have it both ways, wrapping opinions up as facts on a Tuesday and then explaining what he meant on a Friday.

So Bilton is trying on the “Apple Fanboys are mean” defense. Hell, he even tried an anti-corporate approach…to back up a piece he wrote about a Microsoft product:

But guys, these are products. They are products we buy, with our own money, from Apple — a company that makes a very hefty profit from those transactions.

He doesn’t get it. What he did this week was chip away not only at his own credibility but also at that of the publication he writes for. This wasn’t journalism, it was a cheap attempt at link-bait (which worked, twice), the kind of bullshit we’ve gotten used to over at Business Insider and The Huffington Post.

So Nick, I don’t think you’re an idiot, but you sure acted like one this week. Now do you have anything original to write for America’s paper of record, or are you just going to clack out the first idea that comes to you? That is, if there’s a Surface nearby.

I interviewed Todd Solondz for Heeb. On working with Christopher Walken in his new film, Dark Horse:

Chris [Walken], he, I think was eager, as I was told, to play a human being. He is cast in so many larger than life sorts of characters. He wanted to play something that was more grounded. And so he embraced the toupée and the change in his eyes and muting him, turning him into a sort of regular kind of guy. I mean his face is powerful and iconic as it is so I was all about restraining that.

Go read the whole thing, please.

This weekend Emily White, a twenty year-old intern at NPR’s All Songs Considered, wrote a blog post defending her music library, which contains over 11,000 songs she mostly hasn’t paid for.

On Tuesday, David Lowery published a devastating, 4000 word response to her post over at The Trichordist.

I also find this all this sort of sad. Many in your generation are willing to pay a little extra to buy “fair trade” coffee that insures the workers that harvested the coffee were paid fairly. Many in your generation will pay a little more to buy clothing and shoes from manufacturers that certify they don’t use sweatshops. Many in your generation pressured Apple to examine working conditions at Foxconn in China. Your generation is largely responsible for the recent cultural changes that has given more equality to same sex couples. On nearly every count your generation is much more ethical and fair than my generation. Except for one thing. Artist rights.

Piracy is the third rail on blogs, but Lowery injects the conversation with a healthy dose of humanity, an element usually lacking from these sorts of diatribes.

Read the whole thing. It’ll make you want to buy an album or five.

Austin Lindberg reporting for Car and Driver:

It’s important to first point out that Siri is a software change, both for the car and the phone, and not one that affects hardware—existing voice-command buttons will be used to access the system through a Bluetooth connection. According to an engineer we spoke to, Apple’s software development includes a refinement in how Siri deals with high amounts of background noise—the in-car’s single mic can pick up road, wind, and engine noise that makes it difficult for Siri to comprehend commands.

I love the idea of a Siri-enabled car. Apple and app developers are much nimbler than car manufacturers. If all the carmakers have to do is change the way their bluetooth button actuates, it could open up the in-car software landscape completely.

The same article has Chevy and Mercedes boasting they can add the integration by year’s end if not early 2013. Their sources seem excited to get this working.

{% blockquote -Richard Ziade, Readability CEO http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/ Readability Blog %} Today, we’re announcing the end of one of those: As of June 30, 2012, Readability will no longer accept reader fees.

[…]

What if we’re not able to get every dollar back into every deserving writer’s hands? We’re going to do the next best thing we can think of. All remaining money that was put aside to be claimed by domain owners will be given to non-profit organizations that speak to the spirit of supporting reading and writing. {% endblockquote %}

Readability is now a free service, and they’re trying to figure out what to do with $150,000 of unclaimed funds earmarked for publishers. The comments on Richard’s post quickly turned into a riot. People want their money back, people feel duped, people feel the whole charity thing is noble yet sleazy, etc.

I interviewed Ziade back when Readability’s iOS app debuted and again with the release of Readlists. While many people may be relieved the pay service is over, since it clearly became a second-class citizen once the service became free earlier this year, this backlash is sure to persist at least for a few weeks. But then what?

On the second episode of “The Backlot,” Ryan and I discussed the E3 announcements of this past week and the rumors and expectations for next week’s Apple WWDC keynote presentation. There’s a lot swirling around about what Apple’s next move might be, but I think a lot of it is just noise.

Remember, just last week CEO Tim Cook said, “We’re going to double down on secrecy on products.” I think that’s proving to be quite accurate so far. As John Gruber pointed out on last week’s Talk Show, the entire tech press was blindsided by the company’s introduction of their next OS, 10.8 Mountain Lion. No one saw it coming, and it seems Apple’s road-map is proving to be more elusive than ever.

The biggest rumors people are thinking will appear at WWDC are:

• iOS 6
  • With brand new maps!
• More Mountain Lion Details
• New Mac Pros
• Revamped AppleTV Interface
• Apple-branded Television

I think it’s a given that we’re going to see a lot of iOS 6 and Mountain Lion at WWDC. It is a developer’s convention after all, and the best way to keep them satisfied is by letting them peek up Apple’s skirt once a year.

New Mac Pros might be a centerpiece of WWDC, but it’s rarely a hardware-centric keynote. The only way we’re going to hear anything about a new Mac Pro from the Moscone stage is if the form factor, which hasn’t seen an overhaul since 2003, is something radically different. If it’s a spec-boost (new processors, perhaps redesigned interiors) then Cook will either make a quick mention of the Mac Pro line or ignore it completely. Then one night the store will go down and when it comes back up there will be new systems to snag.

Now, about all the AppleTV rumors…

I don’t see Apple announcing any kind of updated hardware in this line at WWDC. The newest AppleTV set-top-box was introduced in March of this year. It’s doubtful that they will have a new version of the current AppleTV a mere three months after its introduction.

Now, it’s possible, I suppose, that Apple will introduce a new segment in their set-top-box line, something along the lines of an AppleTV Pro, offering a more expensive, more refined experience. But when I look at what the current AppleTV does for its $99 price-tag, I can’t think of anything it should do that would be worth spending more money on. Consumers have said loud and clear, notably to Logitech with their miserable GoogleTV Revue, that they do not want to spent more than $100 on a streaming set-top-box.

If AppleTV is mentioned at WWDC this year, the announcement will most certainly be software-related. The area where the AppleTV is lacking is in third-party support, which is to say there is none. While Apple has major content partnerships with Netflix, MLB.TV and the NBA among others, not just anyone can come along and stream video through the box. For that, Apple would have to open the platform up and allow developers to build apps. And you can bet that is something that will happen eventually, if not next week.

WWDC seems like the perfect opportunity to bring the company’s wildly successful App Store to the AppleTV. If it does happen, and there’s a major update to the AppleTV’s interface, I believe it will be software only, much like an update to Mac OS X. Current users will be able to update their AppleTVs from home, while new customers will have fresh installs of the new software.

There is the matter of storage, of course. The current AppleTV has 8GB of flash memory inside of it, though Apple doesn’t advertise it. That seems like ample space to hold enough apps to keep the average viewer happy, since all of the AppleTV’s content is streamed and/or cached temporarily. Perhaps future iterations of the device will sport more storage to handle the glut of apps that come to the platform.

I would love to see Apple integrate iOS games more tightly with the AppleTV. Since there is still a storage limitation on the current AppleTV, I doubt we’ll be seeing it turn into a full-fledged gaming console anytime soon. However, any update that includes third-party apps will have to take gaming into account given its success on the iPad and iPhone. Perhaps better AirPlay integration with games will save on storage but still allow developers to offer a unique gaming experience on the AppleTV.

Finally, there’s this whole rumor of an Apple television set. I don’t think this is a product that will be coming out any time soon, and honestly I still don’t see why Apple would enter such a competitive business. Maybe when they actually do introduce a television set I’ll smack myself on the forehead and say, “Oooooooh, that makes perfect sense,” but for now I don’t see the advantages either for Apple or for me, as a user.

Apple’s product lines are notoriously focused. When I think of them building a television, I have to assume they’ll only build one or two sizes, at least to start. But what sizes? 27 inches? 42? 50? Where’s the sweet spot for Apple? The reason other manufacturers offer so many television sizes is that consumers demand it. Depending on the room size and the couch distance and any number of other factors, consumers want very specific television dimensions to their specific needs. If Apple comes in and offers one television with premium AppleTV integration, I don’t know that will be an attractive enough proposition for most people.

My gut tells me that this year’s WWDC will be entirely software focused. AppleTV may be a topic of conversation, but I won’t be surprised if WWDC comes and goes with no mention of the platform whatsoever. Either way, I’m sure we’re going to see some nice improvements next week.

And hopefully I’m wrong; hopefully there will be some big, exciting surprises.