We’ve been managing our photos together for almost a decade now. Things were nice and simple at the start and we both knew what to expect from each other - I pulled my photos off my camera on the computer, imported them into iPhoto and arranged them. Life was good.
But then you came and…
Dr. Dang:
What separates Fantastical from these others is that its window shows both the free-form entry field and the individual time/date/etc. fields, and as you type in the free-form field, animations show you how Fantastical is interpreting what you’re typing.
This is not just eye candy. The animations are providing instant feedback on how Fantastical is parsing your words and, more important, they’re teaching you Fantastical’s syntax. This is tremendously useful because, despite the wonderful flexibility of NLP, there’s always a syntax and you need to learn it if you’re going to use the product.
It’s a subtle, but extremely important detail of one of the best pieces of software out there today.
Jean-Louis Gassée:
My belief is that Apple TV sales numbers will continue to increase as the device is slowly, patiently improved and the ecosystem is enhanced. In a not-too-distant future we’ll see explicit Apple TV apps, similar to those on iPhones and iPads.
And someday, Apple will reach a limited agreement with a carrier such as Comcast. The enhanced experience will create a wedge — and will spur competitors. As a result, TV will at last become “modern” — sitting down in front of your TV set will no longer send you time traveling to 1992.
That’s my guess how this plays out as well. First we’ll get a third-party app SDK for the existing Apple TVs, perhaps next year. That will set the stage for the next generation hardware, which may still be less of a TV and more of a powerful set-top box. Then comes a deal with someone like Comcast, which will Apple will try to use as leverage to get other cable companies in line with their undoubtedly strict terms. And then perhaps actual television hardware.
In other words, the iPhone strategy.
That’s the easiest way I see all this happening, but it won’t be as “easy” as it was with the carriers because the cable guys are all regional and have de-facto monopolies over their regions. In other words, it’s going to be even hard to negotiate with them.
Argh! It’s not the iPhone strategy at all. The iPhone strategy was to use the Steve Jobs magic charm to con a big carrier (AT&T) to hand the whole experience over to Apple. That will not happen with TV. No, it’s the XBOX strategy, chipping away at the living room piece by piece, which is actually working pretty well for the XBOX. It’s also probably a 10-year play.
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Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the…
Ni**as In Paris At Midnight. Internet, you never let us down.
Over the last year, you have told us about the ways you’ve been recording and sharing your lives on Path — things like summer road trips and high school graduations, a baby’s first words, and hundreds of sunsets. You also used Path in ways we could have never imagined. You shared screenshots of…
