Besides his current full-time job as a student of Sinology and Marketing at the University of Trier, Germany, Alex likes to read about technology and the businesses behind it. He also has a personal blog.
For those who don’t know, WebKit is today’s predominant layout engine, used by the major web browsers on almost all platforms. Examples are Safari on OS X, Windows and iOS, or Google Chrome on OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, to name only a few (1).
Contrary to Internet Explorer 6, which was solely in the hands of Microsoft, WebKit is open source software, with many big companies and smaller developers contributing to the code base. The development of WebKit is being pushed heavily, especially by Apple and Google, and that’s where problems start to arise: Many sites, especially those in the mobile space, are developing solely for WebKit-equipped browsers and devices, leaving other browsers, and thus devices, behind. [...]
If you’re like us, iCal is constantly running on your Mac. Lion brought a few changes to iCal, mostly in terms of looks. Not getting into the debate whether the skeuomorphic design approach is good or not, we’d like to show you a nice tweak to iCal’s week view:
Sometimes it might be nice to have an overview of more than one week, especially when you have the screen real estate (like on 16:9 or 16:10 displays).
To do this, you need to enable iCal’s hidden ‘Debug’ menu; either by using an application like MacPilot, or by typing the following command in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 1
After that, just open the Debug menu, go to the ‘Top Sekret’ (sic) » ‘Days In Week View’ section and choose between 14, 21 and 28 days. After that you have to switch away from and then back to the week view.
The result should look something like this:
Have any other tips that increase productivity? Share with us in the comments.
Amazon is directly targeting Apple’s iPad 2 with its latest Kindle ad. The main argument? Price.
The ad goes like this: A man walks alongside a pool in a nice summer holiday vacation setting. He’s desperately trying to make out things on the display of his tablet, shielding it from the sun with his hand. Walking past a woman lying on a sunlounger, he notices her reading on the current eInk Kindle.
That’s when Amazon’s pitch really starts. She explains to him that she couldn’t care less about whether the sun is shining or not, as her Kindle doesn’t suffer from screen glare. He then makes an argument that at least he can watch video on his iPad — if he can see the screen, DUH! — which she counters by saying that she has a Kindle Fire for that. She continues to explain that for the price of one iPad, she bought three Kindles for her family, two eInk models and a Kindle Fire.
The ad might be petty, but it’s also smart.
Although this kind of comparison is very effective when targetting inexperienced customers, it is also petty and clearly positions both the eInk Kindles as well as the Kindle Fire as devices inferior to the iPad for anything else but the things advertised.
The reason the ad is smart? It showcases the Kindle’s strengths: readability in bright sunlight — while not mentioning that the Kindle Fire suffers from the same limitations in sunlight as the iPad — and of course, price point. This way Amazon tries to make customers associate only the positive aspects of each Kindle model with the brand Kindle.
The ad also smartly ignores that the iPad is the computationally superior device not just by its specifications, but also by the abundance of apps Apple’s ecosystem offers. Amazon doesn’t get into this, and shows — like Apple usually does — the things the Kindle is meant for and is good at.
The third thing that’s really smart from Amazon’s approach is discussing only the consumption related aspects of the devices. The fact that the iPad excels at creation, too, something which the Kindle Fire hasn’t yet proved to be useable for, is being purposefully ignored in the ad.
All in all this is a well made advertisement that’s surely going to sell a couple of Kindles to people who have trouble distinguishing tablets from one another, or don’t think they have use for an iPad.
Every couple of months articles crop up on the Internet calling Apple’s ecosystem a “walled garden” or a “golden cage” (1, 2, 3). These articles usually try to convince the reader that Apple has lured users into a trap using design/popularity/marketing, shut the door behind them and thrown away the key. The company’s recent foray into the education market, coupled with the controversy surrounding the badly worded and thus promptly misinterpreted licence agreement of its iBooks Author application, made the topic of Apple’s “draconian control” crop-up on the radar of the tech press again.
This article is supposed to serve as a dispassionate evaluation of the current situation.
Twitter has this nice feature, a way to mark certain tweets as favourites, but besides being an easy way to tell yourself that this tweet was really funny, it can be used in many helpful ways.
If you’re like me, you tend to use the feature to also bookmark tweets with interesting tips or links in them. In my case, those links contain content that doesn’t belong in Instapaper, because the content is not text-based or something that I don’t just want to “read later”.
Unfortunately, the way favourites currently work makes it easy to forget the things you have starred, because there is no good way to remind yourself of them (1).
There is a nice solution, though:
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of your own favourites, having it show up in a RSS reader of your choice, enabling you to treat your Twitter favorites as something of a to-do-list. The only thing you have to do is add this feed URL to said RSS reader, adding your own Twitter username instead of the placeholder:
http://twitter.com/favorites/~username.rss
Note: that there’s no u in favorites. Adding a u breaks this whole tip.
If you don’t use a dedicated RSS application, or simply don’t want these things to show up in your favorite reader (mine is Reeder, by the way), you have a great number of alternatives.
To name only a few:
Every major browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) has a way to handle and subscribe to RSS feeds inside the app. The feed will show up as a bookmark with badge number, indicating how many unread items there are.
The Mail application built into OS X can fetch RSS feeds, making them show up similar to notes or tasks in the app (2).
Thunderbird and Outlook offer ways of subscribing to RSS feeds, too.
Another thing I want to mention is something the service Pinboard offers: Tweet archiving. If you don’t trust Twitter to save all of your tweets forever (3), Pinboard will archive them for you. The reason I’m mentioning this is because it will also save tweets you starred, giving you easy access to a list of all the things you found worthwhile in your Twitter stream.
Do you have other tips on how to make Twitter favourites more useful? Share them with us in the comments.
Unless you’re very organised and immediately add a to-do list item for the tweet. ?
On a fresh installation of OS X, Safari is set as the default RSS reader, offering an option in the sidebar of an opened RSS page, to add the selected feed to Mail. ?
Today, a German appeals court upheld a decision by a lower court to continue the ban of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablets, FOSS Patents reports.
The original injunction by the Düsseldorf Regional Court was based on a so called ‘community design’ violation (equivalent to a U.S. design patent). The current ruling might, however, turn out to be more of a loss for Apple than for Samsung, because the court’s decision is based on a law that is pretty much unique to Germany, the German unfair competition law, which can be applied very broadly to a variety of business issues.
A continued injunction based on design-related rights would have more weight and strategic value to Apple, especially after a Dutch court didn’t find Samsung in infringement of similar rights.
Florian Mueller adds:
In my opinion, the strategic value of those design-related lawsuits is relatively low. Preliminary injunctions based on such claims can have a temporary disruptive effect, but the world-spanning dispute between Apple and Samsung primarily hinges on the outcome of the parties’ technical patent infringement claims against each other. The first two patent infringement lawsuits Samsung brought against Apple in Germany have been dismissed. Decisions on Apple’s related claims will come down in the coming months.
This whole affair is starting to look ridiculous, as there are clear similarities between Samsung’s tablets and Apple’s in design and technical execution due to the nature of the product.
Personally I think Samsung needs to take a step back and come up with more original ideas. It’s not like they don’t have great designers themselves. Until they start doing that, I think Apple should call them out for blatantly copying its products, designs, icons and ads.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have something very special in store for you today, so grab a beverage and sit down, because otherwise you might just miss the deal of the still very young year.
Do you sometimes feel the need to run a piece of Windows software, or do you simply want to play a game on your Mac that’s only available for Windows? Are you afraid to drown in all those inspiring LOLcat pictures you found on the Internet because there’s no good way to sort them? Is opening app after app just to look up some vital stats of your beloved Mac getting on your nerves? Do you feel that hand coding a website for those great stop motion videos you’re planning is just too cumbersome? Well, we have the ultimate solution for you! We here at Macgasm have put together a bundle of epic proportions for you, our readers.
You’ve seen bundles before? They weren’t majestic, but “meh!-jestic”? Well then prepare to be surprised.
For those of us who speak more than one language, writing in iOS can be somewhat annoying. To make use of features like the built-in autocorrect functionality, we need to switch between languages on the iOS keyboard (1).
On the Mac this “problem” has been solved — at least partly — for languages with Latin writing systems present in Germanic, Italic and most Balto-Slavic languages: The OS determines the language currently in use and automatically offers spell checking for this language. However, once the user switches to a non-alphabetic language (2), this functionality is gone, because the input system changes.
February 14, 2012
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