Tumblr site for Douglas Johnston, marketing professional living in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. Avid Sherlockian, DIYPlanner.com founder, outdoor enthusiast, and longbow archer.

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    You’ve done this. You know you have. (Very clever.)

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    HBR's Top Blog Posts for 2011 →

    Great stuff at the Harvard Business Review blog, as usual. For bonus points, don’t forget to subscribe to their amazing IdeaCast podcast.

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    Playing with iOS5, Lion and iCloud

    Upgraded both my iPhone and my iPad2 to iOS5 yesterday, and my MacBook Pro to Lion. Aside from the infuriating reverse-direction scrolling in Lion (push up to go down and vice-versa — I’m too hardwired), I have to admit that I like the whole experience. I’m assuming that I’ll have to await more iOS apps’ use of the notification system —the only thing appearing there so far with mine is Apple Mail— but it’s a far cry better than the pop-up alerts from before. (Tap tap tap tap —what was that? Oh, dammit — tap tap tap….)

    Not fond of the app switching yet in iOS5, although it’s still better than iOS4: use all the fingers of your hand to swipe the app “off” one side or the other. It reminds me of a poor man’s webOS card system, the biggest differences being that you don’t actually flip between all the cards in a nice visual manner, and there’s no stacking of related/conjoined cards in a deck (e.g., the PDF viewer that you called up from the email app). Better than Android Gingerbread’s standard icon-based view, but nowhere near as nice as Honeycomb’s thumbnail views. Plus, I can’t seem to do much in the background yet, like how in Android I can download torrents, suck down podcast files, run installs, and put almost any app in the background and it still carries on, pushing out a notification when its job is done.

    Still wrapping my head around the tacky faux-leather-with-stitching interface of some of the apps. Really, Apple? You don’t think that’s a wee bit tacky? Like, 6 years ago, tacky?

    I haven’t played with the magazine/press shelf or the iBooks yet, since I already use platform-agnostic Zinio and Amazon for that. I don’t want to be tied into only one hardware platform.

    iCloud has a streamlined web interface of mail that’s nice and clean, very Apple-like and an improvement over the last time I used Apple dotMac Mail some 3 years ago. The calendar and contacts web apps look very much like the iPad versions, and I must admit that I don’t have Pages, Keynote or Numbers on my iPad yet, so the documents online sync is rather useless for me at the moment. (Again, I like the platform-agnostic Google Apps that allows other programs, such as Docs to Go, to synchronize with it.)

    One inevitable conclusion: you really have to want to invest in this ecosystem if you want to make the most of it. Unless you’re running a Mac full time on the desktop (me, I use Linux 80% of the time), have purchased and used mostly iWork (which isn’t available outside a Mac), and only use iOS devices (me, I use Android phones and tablets most of the time, with an occasional foray into my iPhone, iPad2 or HP webOS TouchPad), you’re not going to get the full benefit of this holy Apple Trinity of iOS5, Lion and iCloud.

    More thoughts later as I dive in.

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    A bite of the Apple

    So, we didn’t get the big iPhone 5 release for which the whole world seemed to be holding its breath. The iPhone 4S is more of the same, just with a bunch of improvements.  I have to pity the Tim Cook in a way.  Steve Jobs is a tough act to follow, and he didn’t really have the big oomph in his pocket to haul out and impress everybody.  Despite the emphasis on things like the dual processor and the new 8MB camera (both of which have been pretty standard lately on Android), the IOS5 and the iCloud bits were actually a bit more intriguing, at least to techies like myself. It addresses almost all of my major issues with iOS4. The iPhone 4S hardware, complete with its (to me) tiny screen, has absolutely nothing that might make me step away from my Galaxy S2 (which already has a great camera and a hefty dual processor) .

    iOS5, though, I’m eagerly anticipating.  Sunday night, I went so far as to declare this an iOS week.  I haven’t touched my iPhone 3GS or my iPad 2 for nearly a month, and I was getting a little worried about my ability to keep up with the Mobile Joneses. However, the lack of true multitasking, interprocess communication (e. g.,  “open this link in…”)  and especially notifications have had me ready to pitch them at the wall. I think I’ll give up on iOS4 and just wait for iOS5 to drop next week. Sounds like a plan less likely to drive me to fits of frustration.

    So,  back to My S2 and my Xoom for now….

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    Firebird X: a computerized guitar →

    Okay, this has officially intrigued the computer geek and the (earnest but terrible) guitar player in me. Wonder if I can root the thing? Though at that price, I’d just be tempted to pick up a high end classic analog guitar. Or three.

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    TechCrunch: How to enable Facebook Timeline →

    Did this last night. It seems I’m in the 20% that like it, but I don’t tend to embarrassing posts.

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    New and improved Google+… now with less testosterone!

    Now that we’re getting the great washed masses joining (that is,  the non-nerdic)  I’m curious how the Google+ dynamic is going to change.  Last I heard before the opening-up,  G+ was 80% male.  Perhaps now it’ll smell less like an all-night D&D session. (Apologies to any females reading this that have played D&D, but if you were blackmailed into playing by a boyfriend or brother,  you know what I mean.)

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    [How to] Add a Google+ Quicklist to the Unity Launcher in Ubuntu | OMG! Ubuntu! →

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    The Commodore 64 is back – and it’s running Ubuntu | OMG! Ubuntu! →

    Any old-timers like me looking for some (old-timer) geek cred?

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    "Optimized For Honeycomb" Apps List →