“I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
The good news first: We are living in a new golden age of television. Right now, you can enjoy some of the best, most original, most groundbreaking programming in the history of the medium. I should know—after all, I’m part of it, with no less than two shows: NBC’s Community and E!’s The Soup. So it must be a golden age.
Now for the bad news: We have no effing clue how to actually watch TV anymore. Thanks to all this newfangled digital innovation, the interaction of eyeballs and screen is more challenging than ever. Do I stream it or TiVo it? Do I need a set-top box or an Xbox? Roku—what is that, some sort of martial art? How the hell do I watch TV?”
This month, Wired presents a Guide to Picking Your Perfect TV Setup, alongside a look at the Building Blocks of Prime Time. Both provide an interesting look into the present and future of TV, a medium that is so popular that its lack of innovation both in medium and content over the last several decades is incredibly surprising.
Gadgets like Google TV and Apple TV are coming along, attempting to change how we watch TV. Hulu and Netflix already have. But, in all likelihood, we’re at the beginning of a landslide of change in how we create, find, and watch TV. I, for one, am excited.
From The New York Times, about Twitter’s new iPad app:
“Twitter has surprised its founders with how useful it has become to a wide variety of people — but the founders are also the first to admit that Twitter’s own Web site has not been the easiest, prettiest or most intuitive to use. ‘It’s amazing it’s grown so fast given how hard it is to use,’ Twitter’s chief executive and co-founder, Evan Williams, said last spring.”
I like this article a lot, because it hits on what’s so interesting about the Twitter for iPad app: it’s an app about reading, watching and looking as much as it is about actually tweeting.
This is, I think, the first app Twitter’s ever developed itself from the ground up, and it says a lot about what they think Twitter’s good for, and the direction I bet you’ll see a lot of Twitter clients going. It’s about easier ways of seeing what people are sharing, rather than just making it easier to pontificate about nothing. Twitter wants you to share ideas, information and news, and they’re making that experience as good as possible.
My favorite feature of the iPad app, and the reason I’m now using this app as my primary venue to Twitter:
By pinching on a Twitter post on the iPad screen, users can read more about an author and reply to a post. By putting two fingers together and pulling down on a post, people can view the rest of the conversation around the post.
For more about the app, see some screenshots, download it, or read Twitter’s post about it.
Great tip from Lifehacker. Basically what it does is add a stack of recently used documents, applications, servers, or volumes to your dock, so you can get at the few things you used most recently with only a couple of clicks.
It’s super easy, too. Here’s how to do it – what you type is below, with actions you take in bold and parentheses. Don’t type that part.
(Open Terminal app – go to Spotlight and type “Terminal”)
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add { “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }
(Hit Enter)
killall Dock
(Hit Enter)
You’re done!
It’s an easy thing to do, and creates a quick way of finding what you were working on. Here’s what my Stack looks like now:
From Lifehacker:
This is the concept to think about when you plan your playlist. If you’re running steady on a treadmill, building your songs by BPM is an easy option. That way youll end up on the fastest song and, in theory, pace yourself to gain speed as you gain distance. If youre dealing with varied incline and might want that additional motivation when youre hitting a hill or greater resistance on the treadmill/stationary bike/elliptical/etc. you may want to time the high BPM songs for those moments instead. Think about your run and when you need those “power songs” so you can build a playlist that fits your workout best.
Lots of good tips, with impressive science to back them up, for how to create a perfect workout playlist. Definitely worth a read.
From iPhone.AppStorm, 25 great apps for waking up, going to sleep, and even in between. A great list (though a tad alarm-clock heavy).
If you’re looking for just a couple of apps, try MyZeo to learn how you sleep, A Story Before Bed for reading to your kids, and Sleep Phase Wakeup Clock to wake up at the perfect time.
From the Official Google Blog:
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you.
It hasn’t rolled out to me yet, but I love this idea – getting the Groupons, Twitter notifications, and newsletters to stay in my inbox, but somewhere where I won’t miss the important stuff. It’s a tough thing to do automatically, though, without risking missing something critical. The first time Priority Inbox does miss something critical, you’ll stop using it – or at least I will. Very curious to see with this one.
In true Google excellence, here’s a video of Priority Inbox:
I saw this today, on CBS Sunday Morning. It’s a great look into and behind the Google Doodles, all the great art that shows up on the homepage of Google’s website where the logo should be.
Leo Babauta, at mnmlist, on undistracted reading:
3. Focused browsing. If you open a bunch of tabs, keep things focused by using a little service I discovered called Instapaper (I don’t think anyone else knows about this, so feel free to leave 5 cents on your way out for the tip). Instapaper all your open tabs for reading later, then read one at a time when you have some undistracted reading time.
4. Email, Twitter, Facebook. Basically, open these as little as possible. They lead to distractions for other reading, for work, etc. Open them for 5 minutes, do a quick scan, post an update or reply if necessary, then get out. Only open one at a time, do them with focus, and close the tab. Give yourself some time to do this on a regular basis — 5 minutes at the top of each hour, or at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., or whatever works for you.
I had trouble picking only two paragraphs to share here, because all the advice in this article is so good – employing some of Leo’s tips has been the only thing that’s kept me able to read for more than a few seconds at a time. A must-read, especially if you’re running toward burnout as quickly as I frequently am.
The great Liz Danzico, on Bobulate:
While it may seem presumptuous, proposing — diplomatically — a specific date to a busy person is welcome. “How does 11 a.m. on Tuesday, September 17 work for you?” with proper lead time and an alternate. This specificity is wonderfully refreshing and leaves the door open for an alternate suggestion, or simply a single-word email response:
“Perfect.”
In our house, notes and scribbles were written on the same 3”x5” scraps of paper, physically limiting choice. Proposing what we mean and want gives people, busy or not, the opportunity to respond. If they need an alternate, they’ll ask.
Brilliant. And something I hope to see much, much more of in my own communication. “Perfect” would be a much easier email to write than most of the ones I write, and most of the ones I force other people to write.
From ReadWriteWeb:
If you are a Gmail user in the U.S., you can now make free Web-based phone calls to any phone in the U.S. and Canada right from the Gmail interface. You can also make International calls for fees starting at $0.02 per minute.
To use this new feature, you will have to install a new version of the Google Talk plugin, which is available here. Google plans to roll this functionality out over the next few days, so it might be a bit before you see it in your Gmail account. In addition, Google Apps accounts won’t have access to this feature yet.
If you are a Google voice user, your Google Voice number will appear as the outbound called ID number on calls made from Gmail. You can also opt to receive inbound Google Voice calls from inside the GMail interface.
Here’s Google’s video explaining how it works (in a manner of speaking):
Your computer just became your desk phone. Go get it.