A focus on the iPad could be a boon for [Flickr]. Although a lot of people don’t take photos on their iPad, they sure do like to look at images on it. Could Flickr create a beautiful magazinelike iPad application that allows people to skim through high-resolution images on the service?
As a still-dedicated Flickr user (along with other Newton users out there), it’s nice to hear things are maybe…kind of…hopefully picking up at Flickr.
And Bilton’s idea is great: a way to browse stuff that’s somewhere, quality-wise, between Instagram and 500px. My friends and acquaintances still use Flickr for their good stuff. It’d be nice for this hypothetical iPad treatment to be a nicer version of the Contacts tab on Flickr.com. The problem is that, at least for my contacts, the quantity of stuff has decreased over the years. That’s a shame.
But I still use the hell out of Flickr, and plan to for as long as its around in something like its current form.
Thomas Brand at Egg Freckles gives us a history lesson in Apple skeuomorphism, all the way back to the beginning:
Before the Mac there was no skeuomorphism, because there was no graphical user interface. For almost thirty years the iconography of desktop objects have greeted users as they stare into their computer screens. The desktop metaphor has given new computer users a familiar foundation to ground their experiences upon, and expert users terminology such as “files” and “folders” we still use today.
Brushed metal, DVD players, and even the calculator – Brand shows that skeuomorphism is nothing new for Apple.
Even the Newton had its share of skeuomorphism, with the lined paper metaphor greeting us in the Notes app.
Seriously, after using Todoist for a few months, I switched full-bore today to Nitro
On the surface, it looks and behaves like Things for Mac: projects, drag-and-drop to-do items, automatically-generated Next Steps – lots of good GTD stuff that Todoist never gave me.
I’m using the Chrome version at work on Windows. It gives me just the right amount of flexibility and agility to get all my stuff in order. Visually, it’s just what I was looking for.
The Chrome extension is a free install, but I loved it right away and chipped in a few bucks. They give you the full functionality of the app right from the get-go – something Todoist never did. I think that’s worth rewarding.
And the Dropbox syncing is something I’m going to try, especially on the go for work stuff.
The main reason I’m surrounded by vintage tech in my studio is that these machines still serve a purpose. The fact that ‘progress’ has obsoleted them does not mean they have stopped being useful.
Amen, of course. Mori’s posts is a good part two to my On My Mac Hobby.
We all do this stuff for varying reasons. Isn’t it funny how sometimes we feel the need to defend our interests?
All in all, it’s fun experiment: take a tech journalist who has no direct experience with the Newton, and have him use it. Even better, McCracken’s MessagePad was practically new out of the box.
This section on battery life caught my eye:
20/20 hindsight may make the MessagePad’s screen look worse than it seemed in 1993; its battery life, however, benefits from a couple of decades of diminished expectations. Back in the 1990s, people squawked that the MessagePad H1000 drained its four AAA batteries too quickly. I found, however, that I could go for a couple of weeks on a set. In an age of smartphones that conk out after less than one day, that was more than enough to keep me happy.
Isn’t it something how our expectations have changed?
