Chris Gonzales agrees with Shawn about the iOS world being empowered by apps:

The iPad started looking more and like a suitable and legitimate replacement for a laptop, although admittedly, it couldn't have gotten there without the help of the App Store.

I’m reminded of a line from the Egg Freckles piece I just linked to:

The Windows [app] Store is void of choice and polish. Most entries appear to be experiments in Microsoft’s latest development framework. Most iOS developers benefited from years of Objective-C Mac programming experience before releasing their first iOS apps. With the release of the Surface RT, even veteran Windows developers need to tackle an entirely new application development framework, and it shows.

Boy, it does show.

Egg Freckles’ thoughts on Microsoft’s Surface RT:

It is ironic that the hardware this good would come from a software company on their first try, while the operating system and third-party apps require a second attempt.

Shawn Blanc writes a fantastic article, which (annoyingly) nails a point I always find difficult to explain when discussing the way I work to others: It’s all about apps. Shawn can get his work done with just an iPad. But it wasn’t always like that:

When the iPad was new, many of us had ambitions of one day leaving our MacBook Pros at home and traveling only with our iPads. But, at least for me, that idea quickly faded away as I ran head-on into the fact that I just couldn’t get a lot of the work done on my iPad that I needed to do. The iPad was by no means useless, it just wasn’t the laptop replacement I wanted it to be.

But that was nearly three years ago. And, like I said, a lot has changed.

The solution? Apps.

I too was an early adopter of the iPad, picking up the first generation device on impulse in June 2010. Whilst I probably could work entirely using nothing else, I would rather use what I feel most appropriate: for me, that’s OS X.

To me, iOS is more fun to use than OS X — although that gap is rapidly shrinking. My iOS devices are my “treats”, once I’ve done some serious work on the Mac.

I had the pleasure of reviewing this new app over at The Industry. Whilst it isn’t replacing Fantastical on my phone, it’s a great app which I can see many people enjoying:

If an event has an address associated with it, Sunrise offers to give you directions. This is a feature I’ve wanted in a calendar app for as long as I can remember. There’s even a preference to choose between Apple or Google Maps services, provided you have Google Maps installed on your iPhone. This saves me a lot of time — I no longer have to remember an address and copy it into Maps from my Calendar. It’s all much more seamless.

Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica:

[A] new European activist group has published evidence illustrating that significant proposed revisions have been introduced, nearly wholesale, via model legislation written by American and European corporate interests.

Disgraceful.

Whilst it isn’t possible to completely block numbers from calling an iPhone, David Smith has some tricks to help manage unwanted callers. Very clever:

You can’t prevent your phone from responding to a call (without crazy jailbreak hacks) but you can control how it responds.

Speaking of Gruber, his take on the HP/Android situation matches mine. Quoting Taylor Wimberly, John writes:

It’s a bit of a Hail Mary pass for HP, which has fallen years behind its rivals in the mobile space. It’s also a big win for Google, which adds another powerful partner to the Android ecosystem.

And a loss for Microsoft. This might add some context to Microsoft’s recent investment in Dell — HP seemingly doesn’t see a future in Windows or Windows Phone.

Microsoft’s stake in the recent Dell buyout is starting to look pretty defensive.

I wrote about how I browse Flash free on OS X and have since been doing some research to ensure I’m going about it the best way. John Gruber wrote about this exact topic a few years back. It’s worth a read, but my method covers everything I want.

Speaking of bad experiences, Tim Cook has recently gone on record talking about how Apple treats specification checklists and why people buy products:

“In the PC industry over the years, the way that companies competed were in two things: specs and price. People would say, 'I've got the largest drive,' or 'I've got the most megapixels.' The truth is that customers want a great experience and quality—they want that 'a-ha' moment,” Cook said. “These [specifications] are things that technology companies invent because they can't have a great experience, so they talk about the specs of something. […] The customer experience is always broader than that which can be defined by a simple number.”

Jacqui Cheng wrote that article and it’s all worth a read. She covers everything Tim said at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference last week.

I bet Microsoft isn’t happy.

When it comes to backups, I’m certainly not perfect, but most of the good ideas I read online are put into practice in my setup. I use Dropbox, Time Machine, SuperDuper and multiple computers, so I feel my data is pretty secure.

When it comes to my website, even though Squarespace are awesome, I feel obligated to store some kind of backup of my data myself. For this reason, every two weeks, I export my blog’s content and store it in Dropbox. It takes about a minute to do and is certainly worth the time.

The XML file Squarespace generates is fine for importing into a WordPress installation, although I have no plans to do so. Opening the file in a text editor and performing a search is likely the only use I’ll have for this feature, but I enjoy knowing it’s possible. Squarespace supports importing from WordPress, so I have to imagine an exported WordPress XML file created by Squarespace is 100% supported by Squarespace when importing. I will test this out myself.

If you use Squarespace, I highly recommend performing this export as often as you think necessary — just in case Squarespace happens to lose your data.

Squarespace updates itself surprisingly regularly, which is one of my favourite features of the platform — so long as the updates are improvements. So far, they all have been.

Google Verified Authorship is having your Google+ account tied to your Squarespace account. It’s fairly simple to set up, but I found the instructions provided in the “account settings” area of Squarespace to be quite confusing. The support team provided me with a link to this easy guide. If you’re running Squarespace 6 and would like to help improve your SEO, here’s what you have to do. It’s simple.