Drafting this one for 2014, because we like to write our blog posts a couple years early at Impending. Let’s hope I’ll never have to dig it up again.

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After having weathered a couple of years and hundreds of scams, fraud apps, hoaxes, and clones that have hit the top of the charts, the atmosphere in 2014 among both App Store customers and app developers can only be described as cynical.

[…]

Customers have also in turn begun to rely more and more heavily on existing giant brands, and are avoiding less trustworthy upstarts, independent developers and studios, and apps that stray from the familiar. As a result innovation in the App Store is in a slow death spiral.

Great read from the team at Impending, they were involved with the development of Clear with Realmac Software, and of course the scammy rip off app that I wrote about last week.

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Over at the Centives economic blog, they figured out how much it would cost to build the Death Star in 2012 dollars. Spoiler: A lot. It would cost a lot.

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I just finished reading James Patterson’s book Kill Alex Cross. It’s a very good read if you’re into the Alex Cross series of books, possibly one of the best Alex Cross books so far. Great plot, a reasonable amount of setting up in each action, plenty of intense scenes.

The only way
Detective Alex Cross is one of the first on the scene of the biggest case he’s ever been part of. The President’s son and daughter have been abducted from their school – an impossible crime, but somehow the kidnapper has done it. Alex does everything he can but is shunted to the fringes of the investigation. Someone powerful doesn’t want Cross too close.
To stop Alex Cross
A deadly contagion in the DC water supply threatens to cripple the capital, and Alex sees the looming shape of the most devastating attack the United States has ever experienced. He is already working flat-out on the abduction, and this massive assault pushes Cross completely over the edge.
Is to kill him
With each hour that passes, the chance of finding the children alive diminishes. In an emotional private meeting, the First Lady asks Alex to please save her kids. Even the highest security clearance doesn’t get him any closer to the kidnapper – and Alex makes a desperate decision that goes against everything he believes. A full-throttle thriller with unstoppable action, unrestrained emotion, and relentless suspense, Kill Alex Cross is the most gripping Alex Cross novel James Patterson has ever written.

(disclosure: the book link goes to Amazon)

I love a good looking wallet, and the bellroy Note Sleeve wallet is a very good looking wallet. Apart from being Australian made, from very nice leather, they also have a really cool pull-tab for accessing those cards normally tucked away in the depths of your wallet.

The Travel Wallet is also very good looking, and with a reasonable amount of overseas travel upcoming I’m finding it very difficult not to add one of these to bellroy’s shopping cart.

(via Acquire)

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It’s sad, really. For years, I spent tons of time on Flickr. I added photos, wrote comments, joined groups and made friends.

No one I used to interact with is there anymore. I don’t upload large photo sets anymore. I don’t visit groups anymore, or read comments or favorite things.

Stephen Hackett deleted his flickr account, and based on his reasoning above I cannot blame him as I’ve had the same things kicking around in my head for a while.

flickr feels old and tired now. It’s tough to do something completely new with a photo hosting and sharing website, and of course flickr still does those things quite well, but I’ve found myself getting involved in the ‘social’ side increasingly less and less.

Of late I have mostly been using flickr for backing up photos that I’ve completed editing, and for a handful of images I use on the blog here. Since I picked up a Drobo Pro recently, and have a pretty rock solid backup routine in place, that final bit of value flickr has held for me has all but disappeared.

Time to delete….err once I finish uploading the photos used on the blog here to S3 or somewhere.

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MG Seigler had this to say as commentary on Dan Frakes’s Macworld article, Mountain Lion: Hands on with Mail.

Previously, a (shitty) RSS reader was built into Mail. And Safari would sniff for RSS feeds. Both functionalities are now gone.

Good riddance.

Good riddance to RSS, or good riddance to OS X’s inbuilt crappy RSS ‘reading’ options?

If RSS is all but dead as a distribution method, what is the likely preferred distribution / delivery method for content? Should we be pushing all our content through twitter, Facebook, email subscriptions, apps, something else? Or all of the above?

How do non-geeks find and subscribe to content on the web, aside from Google? Do non-geeks even want to subscribe to websites, or is it a case of Google and forget?

Recently, as I’ve upped my article / link blog output I’ve noticed I’m receiving more traffic from twitter and Facebook.

I’ve been thinking about whether or not I should set up a separate twitter account, and a Facebook page, so that I’m not spamming my current follower and friend base. Whilst Facebook gives readers a quick overview of the post as well as any images I add in, plus also an easy way for them to comment, twitter’s 140 character limitation isn’t quite so forgiving.

I don’t know that there’s an actual single correct answer to all of this, tech and trends change every 5 minutes online, especially when it comes to social networking stuff¹, however the one constant for a long while now for geeks and non-geeks alike, has been Google….so for now I reckon it’s a case of writing good content and making sure you keyword and what not well enough so that Google indexes it well enough.

1. Yes I know twitter and Facebook have lasted longer than 5 minutes, and likely will last a while longer

The guys over at Cult of Mac have put together a rapid-fire overview of some of the new features in Apple’s upcoming operating system, Mountain Lion.

I put together this quick video for all of Cult Of Mac’s great readers detailing 30 of the best new features of Mountain Lion, all jam packed into just two minutes.

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With Apple’s overnight announcement of Mountain Lion, and all the iCloud integration it’s bringing to OS X, there’s likely to be a whole bunch of apps that were once very useful (ie. Simplenote) that will likely end up being removed from iOS devices around the world.

Personally speaking, I’ve already started copying all my notes out of Simplenote into Notes app. I used to use Simplenote in combination with NV Alt to write notes, and keep them all in sync, however of late I’ve found that I keep a lot less in Simplenote.

I wonder, will Brett Terpstra’s Marked work with Notes app?

Amazeballs!

Open the 1Password app on your Mac and click over to the Logins area. You’ll see a big ass list of all of the logins currently stored in 1Password (duh). Now, I want you to position the main 1Password window right next to your favorite web browser.

Next, click and drag one of your commonly used 1Password logins onto your browser’s bookmark bar

Thanks Brett

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There’s a new update to everyone’s favourite iPhone ye olde photography social network app out, Instagram. And it’s quite nice. There’s a new feature, Lux. A new filter, Sierra. And there’s been a few tweaks to the UI.

Go update now, it’s definitely worth it.

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Earlier today I blogged about the complete and utter rip off of a really cool iPhone app from Realmac Software, Clear. Well the rip off version has been removed from the App Store quick smart, and the ‘not dev’ had this to say.

Clear app wasn’t my fault. Apologies to everyone upset. The acc was shared & unfortunately has my name in the Dev. Its been removed.

— Samuel (@carbonr) February 13, 2012

And that’s all she wrote….for now.

I posted the other week about an upcoming iPhone app named Clear, from Realmac, that looked really awesome and had a very unique UI (user interface). Well it seems that someone has gone and directly ripped off the UI of Clear, all of it’s functionality, named itself Clear-Todo, and has somehow managed to launch first….wtf

This is likely to get very messy seeing as Clear is currently going through the App Store approval process now, and is likely to launch later this week. Also, considering Apple’s recent push to kill off copy-cat applications, who is copying who?

Wow, the classiness of the Clear-Todo developer is amazing!

via Federico Viticci

Swipe the Linen is a website where you can upload your iOS home screen for others to see and talk about your favorite apps.

A new tumblr for people’s iPhone home screens. I dig this stuff. Shawn Blanc‘s is a fav.

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When I give talks or have students at my workshop there are a few questions that always surface, and a very common one is “What is a typical day for you like?” My immediate response is “Depends on which day you’re talking about. Pick one: Blogger, Photographer, Troublemaker, Traveler.” Of course I know they want to know what being a photographer is like so I thought I’d take Demaris’ lead and create A Day In The Life for myself.

Matt creates one of my favourite cooking blogs, and his photography skills are pretty much second to none in the food business. It’s quite interesting to get a glimpse of an average day for him. 4am starts though, ouch! Early to bed, early to rise….I guess.

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If you’re like me, your Mac’s Downloads folder is full of long-forgotten mystery items, much like a college student’s refrigerator.

I bought Hazel ages ago, and while I have used it plenty of times to re-sort images into different folders, rename files, I’ve never thought to use the app it for something so simple, and so obvious. Doh!

Thanks Dave.

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“Since” refers to time. “Because” refers to causation. e.g., Since I quit drinking I’ve married and had two children. e.g., Because I quit drinking I no longer wake up in my own vomit.

This is one I use incorrectly, not all that often but often enough that I should know better by now.

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New iPhone 4S ads from Apple today, simple but effective, and not a spec in sight.

Sources say the company has chosen the first week in March to debut the successor to the iPad 2, and will do so at one of its trademark special events.

I’d suggest it is a reasonably safe bet that we’ll see a new iPad some time early on in March, most likely known as iPad 3.

I would definitely be avoiding buying any expensive accessories for your current iPad if you’re anything like me and likely to buy the iPad 3 near launch date. I wouldn’t mind betting we see a slightly different design / dimension this time around with the likelihood of a new A6 processor, higher resolution display, etc. potentially adding a little thickness to the iPad 3.

Of course this is all pure speculation and we won’t know anything for sure until Tim Cook and his colleagues get up on stage and announce it.

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Thank you for your honesty in this little “debacle”.

I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty.

And this is yet another reason why you should pay good, honest, hard working, developers, money for their apps.

And developers, we users appreciate this sort of candidness, I guess you could call it open-ness, or full disclosure. It makes us trust you. It makes us feel like we matter. I guess it’s kind of like a relationship, there’s some give, some take, but at the end of the day neither of us feels like we’re giving up, or settling.

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It seems there’s a bunch of whinging going on about Tweetbot not being a Universal App; see articles from Macstories and Culture Milk defending Tapbots decision to not make Tweetbot a Universal App.

After reading both these articles, and the linked tweets, a thought hit me.

Now that OS X is steadily being iOS-ified, and that numerous applications that were released on iOS have successfully been launched on OS X, does that mean that the future definition of Universal App will be adjusted so that it not only includes iPhone and iPad, but also Mac? And if that is the case, will users then expect developers to give them 3 separate versions of the app for the one price?

God help the devs if that is the expectation!

Seriously people, this is such a dumb argument. Pay developers for good applications, plain and simple. If these guys and girls don’t make an income off of their hard work then they won’t continue to bother putting the effort in, and in some instances they may abandon developing apps altogether, and we will all get stuck with a bunch of crappy apps that won’t be supported at all and all the innovation will be gone.

Does anyone remember how much you had to pay on average for Palm apps in the Handango store?