iphone

As usual, the iFixit team does a great job figuring out what makes this stuff tick.

This is the John Gruber I remember1 (emphasis mine): To put that in context, the iPhone 5S beats my 2008 15-inch MacBook Pro by a small measure in the Sunspider benchmark (with the MacBook Pro running the latest Safari 6.1 beta). The iPhone 5S is, in some measures, computationally superior to the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro from just five years ago. In your fucking pocket. This is the bit I don’t understand about the crap on the internet.

A nice concise review of Scraps for iPhone. It’s kind of like TextEdit for the iPhone but with iCloud sync and location. Insert text and images right in the same note. There’s password protection, note collections and a nice map view of notes. Sadly, it’s iPhone only.

The popSlate looks incredible. It almost seems too good to be true. It’s an iPhone case with an interactive E-Ink back. Take a picture and set the E-Ink on the back to display it. By way of Mike Rundle

As someone who organizes email by folders, the default mail app for iOS is awkward at best. Typically, I only read incoming and send outgoing message on iOS. I do all of my filing back on my Mac. Enter eMailGanizer.1 I’ve been using eMailGanizer for about a month and it is a perfect companion to the dumbed down default iOS Mail app. It’s not an all-in-one replacement for the Mail app, but it fills in a lot of the gaps and it’s a powerhouse for message processing.

Pinbrowser is a new app by a new developer. It does one simple thing: It allows you to browse the public Pinboard.in feeds. Take this review with a grain of salt, because I’m flattered to be included as one of the default feeds. Pinbrowser strong suit is knowing what it should be. It’s not trying to be a Pinboard.in bookmarking tool. It is strictly a browser. It comes pre-configured with the Popular feed, one tag feed and (surprisingly) my feed.

I keep most of my photos archived in an Aperture library. But I also have a good size collection in Dropbox. I’m not likely to move completely to Dropbox for my photo collection. It’s much too large and I really like the benefits I get with Aperture. Dropbox simply makes sharing and syncing easy though. I take a lot of photos of whiteboards, documents, and notes that I don’t want in my PhotoStream.

Disclosure: I helped with beta testing Tally. I also like Agile Tortoise. We all have our biases. Now you know mine. Tally is a simple app for counting. It’s as simple as counting should be. Start the app and it shows a zero count. Tap anywhere on the screen and it increments by one. But maybe you’re a power-counter. Incrementing by one is for grade school. Slide right to left and a configuration panel opens.

I dump many, many bookmarks into Pinboard.in. It’s my primary record of everything web related. I’ve been a big fan of DBD for iPad but, alas, it has ceased receiving updates. But today there is a new app for iPhone that gives me direct access to my Pinboard bookmarks. Pinbook is a $5 app that not only allows me to find old bookmarks but lets me add new bookmarks at any time.

I commute over 90 minutes a day by car.1 I spend most of that time listening to podcasts and audiobooks on my iPhone. While my car has Bluetooth connectivity and supports incoming and outgoing calls, it does not support streaming audio. To remedy this problem, I waded through six different bluetooth-to-3.5mm stereo jack adapters. Five of them sucked. The Belkin Bluetooth Kit is great. Bluetooth Setup The Belkin BT Kit is $89 on Amazon2 but it’s listed for $80 on the Belkin product page.