Totally great article about Lifehacker that talks about some myths and debunks a lot of things “non-techy” people think. Definitely a good read for anyone.
A really good list of new features that are in iOS 4. Some of these I didn’t even know about. Make sure you click the link at the bottom for even more changes.
(via Daring Fireball)
The long rumored paid version of Hulu has been announced. For $10 a month you get access to more than the five most recent episodes of a show. Also there will be other content that is only available to paying customers. I think this is going to perfect for a lot of people who don’t have TVs, but if all it gives you is recent episodes any die hards won’t really need it. It will appeal more to people who are too busy to keep up on shows all the time and will use it to get caught up when they have time. I think ultimately Hulu will have to offer no-ads or higher quality content to make it worth it.
I bought an Intel Solid State Drive (SSD) with some unexpected birthday money. It was a totally worthwhile purchase that made a massive performance improvement. In fact if I could have done it all over again I would have just bought that and put it in my old laptop instead of buying a new one. I expect prices to drop significantly in the next year, and while they will still be expensive, it will be better. If you have been considering a new machine, look into an SSD instead. The improvement, for me, was remarkable.
Best Buy selling these is going to help bring them into the mainstream.
I have/had been a long time user of the OS X text editor Smultron. I liked it better than TextWrangler and was never willing to pay for TextMate. Development on Smultron ended about a year ago. It seems unclear whether this is literally the same source code or not, but regardless it shows a lot of promise.
I have great admiration for Kevin Rose. Digg is a solid site and I thoroughly enjoyed Diggnation for the last few years (I probably started watching 3 years ago?). It’s nice to see that he is starting a new show, and I will admit Diggnation was getting a little stale, so maybe it’s for the best.
Good article from TUAW on what iOS4 multitasking really means. There are a lot of people who keep reminding the masses that there are only a few applications that will truly “multitask” with iOS4. I’ll be honest though, this isn’t that important to me. My biggest gripe with the iPhone is that it takes so long to get from one app to another and back. It appears that with developer support most apps will improve this immensely.
This article is about 10 days old but it’s just excellent. It covers a lot of thoughts I have had in the last couple weeks but have not had time to write about. I agree with what he called Good and Bad and think his points about streaming apps like Pandora are right on.
Jun 06
Side Note: I have returned from my blogging abyss. I have been busy, we just moved, and haven’t had much time to blog. But I am getting back to it.
AT&T announced last week that they are changing their data plans. A key part of this is that they finally enable tethering for US iPhone users, for $20 a month.
I was as excited as anyone about tethering when it was announced last year at WWDC. I was definitely one of those people who seemed to recall AT&T saying it would be coming by the end of last year, but apparently they claim to have never said that. My in-laws don’t have broadband, so when I am there my only internet access is my iPhone. I have thought about getting a MiFi or something similar countless times but decided it ultimately wasn’t worth the investment. I always assumed tethering would be pricey (somewhere in the $30-$60 range) but always assumed that it would include more data and hopefully be something you could turn on and off at will.
The sad part is that in order to get tethering you must switch to one of the new plans, most like the DataPro which does drop in price from $30 to $25, but also drops the data cap from 5 GB to 2 GB. In order to add tethering an additional $20 fee must be incurred. This means it will cost $55 a month for 2 GB of share data. It is completely inexcusable that AT&T would change users for a feature to be enabled on their account. The data cap stays at 2GB even with tethering, so you are literally paying $20 for them flip a switch.
I also don’t think 2 GB is enough for a shared tethering plan. 2 GB won’t go very far on a laptop and I use between 500 MB and 1 GB on my phone alone. If there is one blessing, it’s that each additional GB will only cost $10. So for example, if you have the current iPhone 5 GB plan and a Verizon MiFi, you are basically paying $90 for 5 GB of phone and 5 GB of laptop data. $90 on the new AT&T plan gets you 6 GB of shared data for $85. If you assume that you can get by with 1 GB of data on your phone (and most people can) you get the same 5 GB on your laptop for $5 less. As much as I hate AT&T for what they are doing, this isn’t a bad deal.
Part of me wants to boycott this just because it’s so ridiculous that they would charge you $20 more without giving you any extra data. Part of me wants to jailbreak just so that I can use my data without the $20 fee. But honestly, if they allow you to add it and remove it as needed I could see myself taking advantage of it the few times a year I need it. I realize that if people still pay for it AT&T will have no reason to change it, but when you look at the big picture, it’s not a horrible deal.
This is one of my big beefs with iPhone/iPad applications. The company has complete control over the software, so unless you don’t upgrade (and sometimes even if you do) you are subject to whatever changes the developer wants to make. If they want to take away features, or in this case start including advertisements, there is nothing you can do about it. I don’t agree with the decision to suddenly start including ads in an application that when you paid $15 for it, it didn’t have ads.
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