Manton Reece: Technology

Flip Ultra

I first heard of the Flip a few months ago, but it wasn't until this 37signals post that I started paying attention. I was attracted to the simplicity of the video camera: few buttons, decent quality, and kid-proof design. Here... Read More
April 24, 2008 08:07 AM

MacBook Air and Europe trip

The MacBook Air is the first Apple product to come along in years that I don't want to buy. It looks great, the multi-touch trackpad is cool and unexpected, and I like Remote Disk. But it's just not significantly different... Read More
January 17, 2008 02:38 PM

Give us a tablet already

I'm going to skip the usual Macworld predictions and cut straight to the good stuff: Apple needs a tablet for the huge numbers of artists and creative professionals who have stuck with the Mac for so long, or who are... Read More
January 15, 2008 10:31 AM

Android and getting real

Steven Frank on Google's phone announcement: "Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling... Read More
November 9, 2007 07:45 AM

Welch on iPhone ringtones

Ambrosia Software's Andrew Welch in a TUAW interview: "The tack they are taking with the ringtones, though, is not 'We'll provide such great ringtones that you'll want to buy from us' but rather 'This is all you're ever going to... Read More
October 3, 2007 10:38 AM

The Talk Show ad and porting to Windows

Episode 11 of The Talk Show is up, and I'm happy to say that Wii Transfer is this week's sponsor. Even if you've been subscribed since the first show, click over to see the new site design by Airbag Industries.... Read More
October 1, 2007 01:28 AM

Not a C4 wrap-up post (iPhone!)

Soundtrack for this blog post: The Touch from the 1980s Transformers feature. Yesterday Apple announced new iPods, plus cool stuff like the Starbucks integration and iTunes Wi-fi Store. I was out at lunch and errands, so I followed the announcements... Read More
September 7, 2007 02:21 AM

Professional email app

Ignore that this post is a week late. While I was out sick last week there was a great discussion across blogs about email clients, starting with Brent Simmons and then to Paul Kafasis while passing through several good blogs... Read More
July 13, 2007 03:42 PM

Apple announcements and Flash video

If you are wondering why I haven't posted here in over a month, it's because I've been getting my writing fix over on Twitter, in 140 characters or less a couple times a day. Still trying to figure out the... Read More
May 30, 2007 11:09 PM

Spoiled by iTunes, and the future of music

I have been iTunes-free for four weeks now, and I hate it. It must be like quitting smoking, except without the fear of dying always at your back. I stopped by a Best Buy the other day and couldn't find... Read More
February 7, 2007 11:37 PM

I hate domains

There is a story behind the name Riverfold, but it's probably not a very good one and I won't go on a tangent by telling it here. What I will say is that I hate domain names. Maybe it's because... Read More
January 29, 2007 11:21 PM

Macworld 2007 predictions

Dan covers his Macworld predictions in great detail. Instead of predictions, since mine will probably be wrong, I'm going to list what I want to see: Tablet. I tend to agree with Steven Frank's analysis more than this former Apple... Read More
January 5, 2007 07:27 AM

Goodbye iTMS

When I started on the music sharing feature in the upcoming 2.0 release of Wii Transfer, I knew it couldn't support protected songs from the iTunes Music Store. Still, it was disappointing when I started using it and such a... Read More
January 3, 2007 11:36 PM

The web is incomplete

When we use Google everyday and mostly work with technology and related topics that are well indexed, it's easy to forget the truth: the web is horribly incomplete. I've been doing some research for an upcoming podcast and it's very... Read More
September 2, 2006 10:34 PM

RailsConf 2006

I attended RailsConf in Chicago last month. There's a lot of excitement in the Rails community right now, and it was nice to be there for the first year before it explodes to the even bigger event that the... Read More
July 20, 2006 09:31 AM

Three text editors

I love reading about the setup for other Mac users: what kind of desks, computers, and software they use. The full list of applications usually overlaps quite a bit with my own Dock, but every once in a while there... Read More
April 20, 2006 11:13 PM

Happy Easter, and TextDrive to DreamHost

Easter is a time of rebirth and starting over. So today I’m flipping over two new things. The first, to fulfill a new year’s resolution that died before February. I rearranged my office and drawing desk yesterday to make... Read More
April 16, 2006 09:21 PM

iPods, videos, and U2

Steve Jobs in yesterday’s special event, discussing the white iPods: “It’s been a huge success for us, and therefore it’s time to replace it.” The new iPods look great. At first I was disappointed by the $1.99 price for music... Read More
October 13, 2005 02:50 PM

Transitions

Even before I arrived in San Francisco, and even before the rumors surfaced of Apple switching to Intel, this WWDC looked to be a unique one. For the first time since I can remember, the conference was mostly going to... Read More
June 7, 2005 12:18 AM

Integrating web applications

We all use web apps. Google Maps or Mapquest, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, Basecamp and FogBugz. The ubiquity of these services has reached the point where it is increasingly useful to point to them from other applications, web or native.... Read More
May 17, 2005 08:32 PM

WebTV in the trash

The other day I went for a walk and on the way back picked up a candy wrapper on the sidewalk, to throw away when I got home. If I pick up other people’s trash (not a frequent activity, but... Read More
May 9, 2005 12:04 AM

Respect to Dave

Dave Winer turned 50 today. I first met Dave over 9 years ago, back when the free release of Frontier ruled web application development and automation on the Mac. I ran the frontier-talk mailing list for a time, was... Read More
May 2, 2005 09:16 PM

Ajax, Flash, and web standards

We should all be weary of new acronyms lest we promote and give significance to half-baked ideas and fads. But Jesse James Garrett’s Ajax essay is a good read — a concise, high-level look at how JavaScript and XML will... Read More
February 22, 2005 01:51 PM

Google and the great apps to come

Google Desktop Search is a neat app. The integration of local and global results is brilliant. But it’s not the future of desktop search. David Galbraith said something interesting in a post titled “Google lock in”: “Whatever Microsoft do, Google... Read More
December 10, 2004 08:57 PM

Voice recording

I bought a Griffin iTalk earlier this week. Not entirely an impulse buy, but I did drive over to the local Apple Store instead of ordering online. I’ve been wanting the ability to record on my iPod since I received... Read More
October 14, 2004 02:36 PM

Lowercase web

Wired News will no longer capitalize internet, web, or net: “But in the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and... Read More
August 20, 2004 12:07 PM

The iTunes Platform

It’s no secret that iTunes is one of Apple’s best apps. Of all the iApps, iTunes remains the only one I have no critical feature requests for. With version 4.5, Apple adds to what was already a solid app, and... Read More
May 12, 2004 03:54 PM

Thank you Radio, and TypeKey

After two years of using Radio Userland, I decided to migrate this weblog to Movable Type. I wrote a UserTalk script to export my data for importing into Movable Type, and everything went about as well as could be expected.... Read More
March 20, 2004 11:27 PM

Reading, ASCII, and PDF

I started reading the electronic version of Eastern Standard Tribe. Hoping to get through some of it by SXSW and pick up a hard-copy there. I've also been reviewing my Cocoa books, since I've been porting the user interface of... Read More
March 10, 2004 08:46 PM

VoodooPad

Something interesting is going on with VoodooPad, winner of O'Reilly's Mac OS X Innovators Content. It's the best front-end to a Wiki I've seen, but more than that, the implementation for talking to servers is XML-RPC based and open (overview... Read More
November 17, 2003 09:36 AM

G5 vs. Power Mac 9600

My new G5 arrived last week. This machine replaces (supplements) my old TiBook, which was really showing signs of age even with Panther. It is an understatement to say the G5 is a fast machine, and it makes programming a... Read More
November 15, 2003 09:36 AM

New and old web standards

Jeffrey Veen argues for the practical advantages of new web standards: "Huge interfaces squeezed through plodding modem connections have been a plague since the Web's inception. The increasing dominance of broadband has only helped a bit. A hotel phone line... Read More
September 19, 2003 11:14 AM

Email mistakes

John Gruber: "The elephant in the middle of the room, of course, is Apple Mail." For a while now I have regretted switching to Apple Mail. But this is not unusual, because I have regretted switching to every single email... Read More
June 23, 2003 01:38 PM

Simple friendly formats

SXSW has wrapped up for me, although many others will still be out partying long after I post this. I've had the chance to meet some interesting people. Some of them I have names and URLs for, some just faces... Read More
March 11, 2003 09:29 PM

HTML 3.2 forever

In My Experience: "I still use html tables": "Fully abstracting your UI from its content takes skill and time. If you don't follow thru, you can negate much of the benefit you seek to create. Now stop and think. Do... Read More
January 13, 2003 10:56 AM

Zopey OpenDoc

Jeffrey Shell is building an OpenDoc-inspired framework on top of Zope.... Read More
November 12, 2002 09:29 AM

Jeffrey Veen: Standards Still Matter.

Jeffrey Veen: Standards Still Matter. "Will there ever be a day when we can just assume that browsers will render our code correctly? Can we imagine a future in which we don't budget an extra 40 percent to ensure our... Read More
September 5, 2002 01:31 PM

Yahoo Mail reset

I have used Yahoo for almost a decade. It wasn't long ago that I pointed to Yahoo and Google as great successes -- sites based on the idea that a simple, functional interface is what users want rather than some... Read More
July 18, 2002 04:41 PM