We’re back after a long summer! Today’s episode is all about games.

• Kyle has recently been playing an iOS game called Super Hexagon by Terry Cavanaugh, a simple but deceptively-challenging game where one tries to maneuver a small hexagon through a never-ending obstacle course. Available for iPhone and iPad for $2.99 on the App Store.
• Also by Terry Cavanaugh is VVVVVV, a challenging retro platformed where the action button reverses gravity instead of jumping. Available for Mac and PC on Steam for $4.99 and for the Nintendo 3DS for $7.99.
• Nathan likes playing Jetpack Joyride by Halfbrick, a single-button sidescroller with great replay value where one flies a jetpack down a hallway, avoids obstacles, and collects power ups. Available for iPhone and iPad for free, with optional in-app purchases for coins.
• Jason has been enjoying an addicting slot-machine simulator / RPG hybrid called Dungeons and Coins, by Sigma Game. Available for free on iPhone and iPad, with optional in-app purchases for coins.
• We’ve all been playing a lot of Letterpress lately. Letterpress is an engaging word game in the style of Words with Friends by ate bits where one plays against a friend to form words and gain control of the game board. Its interface and design is also excellent. Available for free on iPhone and iPad, with a $0.99 in-app purchase to unlock full functionality.
• Nathan also enjoys Puzzlejuice by Asher Vollmer, one of the inspirations for Letterpress. Puzzlejuice is a fast-paced combination of Tetris and Boggle, available for $1.99 on iPhone and iPad.

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• We’re back already from our summer hiatus! Our topic this week is CSS development on the Mac.
• The software one spends the most time in when working with CSS is, of course, a text editor. Nathan is a fan of Chocolat, which is lightweight but full featured. Kyle likes TextMate for its powerful CSS bundle features. Jason loves Vim for its many powerful shortcuts and built-in editing tools.
• The next step up from a plain text editor is a dedicated IDE for web development, which usually includes previewing and deployment tools. We’re all big fans of Coda 2; its recent update has brought its capabilities beyond those of Espresso. The Hints and Navigator panels are especially helpful for working with CSS.
• We also discuss Diet Coda, a pared-down version of Coda made for iPad. The app’s editing and terminal features are attractive, but being limited to working with files directly on a server reduces the app’s value.
• Beyond a good editor, there are a few tools that can streamline the writing process even farther. Nathan has set up TextExpander to automatically expand abbreviations of properties that are hard to type. If  a design is started in Photoshop, the CSS Hat plugin can also save time by automatically generating CSS rules to match the styling of an object.
• After writing CSS comes testing it. A tool called LiveReload streamlines this process considerably by automatically injecting new CSS into a webpage as you save, which is especially helpful when tweaking the design of a stateful web app. CodeKit is a similar tool with some compelling features, but its reloading capabilities are less robust.
• The WebKit developer tools are hugely helpful when tweaking CSS, allowing one to quickly change and test values, and when debugging, showing the cascade so one can diagnose specificity issues. Additionally, the Firefox developer tools have been greatly improved recently and are becoming comparable to the WebKit tools, even boasting a few unique capabilities.
• Returning to the process of writing CSS, we discuss two preprocessors, SASS and LESS. These languages are supersets of CSS that add helpful features like variables and nesting. LiveReload and CodeKit can automatically compile code written in these languages into standard CSS.
• After testing comes deployment, starting with minification. Smaller is a great tool that allows one to easily combine and minify all the code in a deployment folder. An IDE’s tools can be used to upload files to a deployment server, as well as dedicated apps like Transmit.
• Finally, we share one final tool that can be helpful when either working on a team or reading existing CSS. ProCSSor can prettify and un-minify CSS documents, ensuring that they adhere to the formatting rules you select.

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However, we’re not leaving the site! We simply do not have enough time to focus on projects as demanding as the podcast and this very blog. Your contributions to the blog are still welcome, and there are a handful of users reviewing and scheduling posts besides us.

We leave you with a project that has occupied some of our time in the interim. The three of us put together an automatically generated community ad that we hope will attract even more attention to questions with bounties.

Thanks for listening, we look forward to returning to the show soon.

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• We begin with more talk of the new iPad. One feature that we would have loved to see is pressure sensitivity. Apps like GarageBand are use accelerometer-based trickery to determine the pressure of a tap, but we would love to see this functionality natively integrated and made accessible to all apps. The possibilities for new gestures and states are attractive.
• We get Jason’s first impressions of the new iPad. He appreciates how much lighter it is than the original version, and loves the greatly extended battery life. The long charge time is an acceptable trade off to a battery that lasts all day. The camera is also a helpful inclusion, and Jason is looking forward to a promised update to Instatweet bringing camera integration.
• We discuss Consumer Report’s controversial claims about the temperatures that the outside of the new iPad can reach. Kyle and Jason haven’t experienced any heat issues, and the temperatures that Nathan has noticed are still nowhere near as high as they are on his plastic MacBook and iMac.
• Wil Shipley recently published an article imploring Apple to provide developers with a more robust system for app upgrades. Kyle worries that, when developers are given the option to charge for updates, every little update will begin costing money. Nathan predicts that, be it by consumer pressure or Apple restrictions, that situation could be avoided. Jason isn’t entirely decided, but agrees that the advantages of paid upgrades outweigh the potential problems.
• Kyle suggests an alternate model to App Store purchasing: leasing. Companies like Adobe are already offering this kind of ‘software-as-a-service’ arrangement. This would potentially provide a mechanism allowing users to try out an app before committing to buying it, and could fund backend services tied to apps. Jason and Nathan can see where it could be helpful, but don’t imagine it having a very wide application.

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• This episode is all about the big news of the week: the new iPad. The first interesting thing about it is its name: iPad. Not iPad 3, not iPad 4G, just iPad. Officially, it’s the iPad 3rd Generation. We discuss our opinions of and experiences with the new naming convention, as well as how we plan to handle the tagging situation on Ask Different.
• We move on to the meat of the new iPad and discuss its features. We list the major changes that were announced, and Kyle and Mike, who both have the new device, share their favorite features and the features they’re more skeptical about. Both love the Retina display, a favorite of Kyle’s for watching time lapse videos. Kyle also appreciates being able to use an AT&T 3G SIM card in a Verizon 4G iPad. The new 5MP, f2.4 camera is also a great addition.
• The first part of the iPad experiences buying it. Kyle and Mike share their experiences with purchasing new iPad, and compare them to previous launch day purchases. Mike observed some technical problems that the Apple online store seem to be experiencing. Kyle went to the Apple Store early, and had a much better experience than the last time he tried that (aside from being pressured to buy AppleCare+). A video from Kyle’s iPad launch experience can be found here.
• Some of the favorite apps that Kyle and Mike have put on their new iPads include: Tweetbot, Reeder, Garageband, 1password, Screens, Prompt, Agenda, FileMaker Go, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, Instapaper, and Twitterific.
• We conclude with some Ask Different news. The New iPad Challenge is currently taking place. This contest awards prizes to people who participate on Ask Different. If you achieve level one, you’ll be entered into a contest to win an iPad. At level two, you’ll receive an iPod touch as well as be entered into the contest. Those who make it to level three will be given an iPad! To see details and check leaderboards, go to http://thenewipadishere.com.

This episode was recorded on March 19th, 2012. You can subscribe to this podcast via RSS or iTunes. We would appreciate it if you could take a second to give us a rating on iTunes. We’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or e-mail us at podcast@askdifferent.net. Thanks for listening.

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• We begin with some important Ask Different news. Three new moderators have been elected. Congratulations to our own Jason, Daniel, and Mike! We look forward to  working with you all.
• In other Stack Exchange news, there is now another way to see a site’s top questions. The greatest hits page, accessible at /questions/greatest-hits, shows the top 1000 questions based on how popular they are to the Internet in general.
• High on that list is How can I block specific telephone numbers on my iPhone 4?, with more than 146 thousand views at the time of this writing. Jason’s solution is to create a contact with all the numbers that he wants to block and assign a silent ringtone and empty vibration pattern to it.
• Blocking numbers leads to discussion of filtering in general. Many power users want to be able to filter the content that reaches them, whether it’s calls, emails, or tweets. We agree that Gmail is best at this: spam filtering is handled automatically, and users are given powerful capabilities to do their own filtering.
• Filtering requires balance, though; it can be hard to block what you don’t want to see without also blocking some things that you do. With favorite and ignored tags on Stack Exchange, a negative overpowers a positive: if a question is tagged with something on your blacklist, it will be hidden whether or not it is also tagged with a favorited tag. Kyle and Nathan feel that the opposite should be true.
• Apple recently announced that OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion would be released this summer. This will be a smaller change than Snow Leopard to Lion was, more like Leopard to Snow Leopard. Apple also announced that they will now be releasing major versions of OS X yearly, like they currently do with iOS. Security and bug fix releases (10.8.1, 10.8.2) will happen as needed.
• One of the major new features in Mountain Lion will be integration with iCloud for Documents in the Cloud support. Unfortunately, it feels like the service is not fully developed. The limited organizational functions aren’t powerful enough for people with a large number of documents, especially when working with projects whose files span multiple apps. On the other hand, a ‘bucket of files’ would work just fine for small projects and one-off documents. Many users will certainly find that Documents in the Cloud fills their needs well.
• On a more positive note, we pick out the Mountain Lion changes we’re most looking forward to.
• Kyle is excited for AirPlay mirroring. He predicts that Apple will begin allowing other manufacturers to support AirPlay mirroring, and that it will become the standard way of connecting to projectors and monitors.
• Nathan is excited for Notification Center. He hopes that more apps will begin using notifications properly, and is looking forward to being able to easily see an overview of calendar events, reminders, new emails, etc.
• Jason is looking forward to the improvements to Screen Sharing. The ability to drag a file into a Screen Sharing session is exciting, and he thinks that there may be some other features that haven’t been announced.

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• We begin with some talk of the Ask Different 2012 Community Moderator Election that is currently in progress. This year’s election is different than last year’s for a number of reasons, most of which are directly linked to the size and participation in Ask Different. We discuss the voting process, STV, and we wish all of the candidates the best.
• Also in Stack Exchange news, Jeff Atwood has announced that he will no longer be working at Stack Exchange, beginning in March. He is leaving to spend more time with his children, including two new twins. We greatly appreciate all of the work he poured into Stack Exchange and are glad that he is able to choose to spend time with his family. You should also read Joel Spolsky’s farewell post on the Stack Exchange blog.
• The story of an iPhone interrupting the New York Philharmonic leads to a discussion of the behavior of the iPhone’s mute switch. Jason likes the current behavior where apps can choose to ignore the mute switch’s positon, but Kyle and Nathan think that all but the most important system functions should be silenced when the mute switch is set.
• It was recently discovered that the social networking app Path sent its users full address book data to its servers without telling the user. The blame for this must be placed more on Apple than on Path. Allowing all apps unrestricted access to address book data without asking the user for permission is a significant privacy risk, especially since most users believe that apps from the App Store are safe.
• The idea of Apple exposing address book data leads us to consider the alternatives. We don’t think that the current situation is secure, but we don’t all agree that apps should never have access to this info. One possibility is to have apps request access, much like location. This has the advantage of being easy and safe, but too many notifications could become bothersome. Kyle likes the idea of allowing apps access to address book data, but forcing them to request permission to send that data to a remote server.
• Kyle recently decided to jailbreak his iPhone 4, among many other reasons to try out a theme called Jaku, which was designed by Ask Different user cksum. Despite opening up a new world of features and possibilities, it does not fix certain nuisances we deal with in iOS 5 such as audio instability, and other slowdowns as the result of the many new features built into the update.
• Our Question of the Week is How do you prepare your Mac for the possibility of being stolen?, asked by Dan Surfrider on February 1, 2012. In addition to soliciting answers, Dan also talks about his use of Prey Project for recovering a stolen Mac, and the act of making the thief comfortable using the computer, in the hopes they will leave it on and not reformat it, allowing a greater chance for recovery. We talk about this and the act of securing and backing up your data for later recovery.
• Our App of the Week is Tweetbot, by Tapbots. Tweetbot recently released version 2.0 of the Twitter client Tweetbot. Along with the usual swath of bug fixes, many of it’s features have been given the usual coat of polish. You can read the Tapbots’ release notes for the iPhone version on their site. However, the bigger news by far was the release of the very first version of Tweetbot for the iPad. Tweetbot on the iPad has only ever run in iPhone/iPod compatibility 1x/2x mode, but no longer! Tweetbot for the iPad is a new binary, which means it is, unfortunately, a new $2.99 purchase on the iTunes App Store.

This episode was recorded on February 11th, 2012. You can subscribe to this podcast via RSS or iTunes. We would appreciate it if you could take a second to give us a rating on iTunes. We’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or e-mail us at podcast@askdifferent.net. Thanks for listening.

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• Welcome to the podcast, Daniel! This is the perfect week to have Daniel on the podcast because, in addition to being the #10 user on Ask Different, he’s a community college teacher.
• We begin with a discussion of Area 51 and the process of starting a Stack Exchange site. Kyle recalls that his ‘Apple’ proposal took some time to get off the ground; in many ways, that was harder than maintaining the site now. Daniel used to do something similar when he evaluated potential Usenet groups.
• Ask Different has come a long way from its Area 51 days. Our traffic and questions have been rising steadily ever since graduation, about one year ago. That’s right, on January 28th, 2012, Ask Different celebrated its 1-year anniversary! Here’s to an even greater site a year from now.
• In the time after the anniversary, we’re planning an Answer-a-Thon-style cleanup effort.
• In the first phase, the community will flag posts that should be closed or deleted (for example, incomplete questions where the asker hasn’t responded to requests for more info). Otherwise, edit questions to make them cleaner and less localized.
• In the second phase, the community will go on a campaign to answer as many of the unanswered questions on the site as possible. There will be prizes for the most productive users.
• Discussion shifts to notifications in OS X. Daniel reminds us of the hidden iTunes preference that displays a pop-up when a new song begins playing. This is a new addition to the notifications ecosystem, joining Apple’s BezelUI and Growl. Nathan hopes that this is a sign of a new notification system on the way, to bring OS X’s notifications up to the level of iOS’s.
• We now move to our topic for this week: technology in education. This week, Apple announced several new education-related products: digital textbooks, iBooks Author, and an improved version of iTunes U.
• We begin with iBooks Author, the free Mac app Apple released for building books for the iBookstore. We agree that the license agreement is the limiting factor here: prohibiting users from selling their content on their own isn’t a good move.
• Not only are iBooks made with iBooks Author only distributable through the iBookstore, they are only viewable on an iPad. Apple would love schools to buy iPads for their students, but Nathan doesn’t see it happening.
• iTunes U could, in theory, be used to support a large-scale remote course like Stanford’s recent AI class. Daniel argues against the idea that these giant classes are effective, though: learning requires students interacting directly with teachers.
• We agree with Matt Welsh, though, that there are some aspects of education that should be modernized. Lecture halls and fixed semester lengths could both be improved using the technology that is now available.
• Our app of the week is OmniGraphSketcher, a Mac app that makes it easy to create graphs (to show, for example, supply and demand). Everything just ‘works’ as expected. This app is very useful for Daniel’s economics classes. OmniGraphSketcher is available for $30 ($20 for education users) from the Omni Group. An iPad version is also available ($15).

This episode was recorded on January 25th, 2012. You can subscribe to this podcast via RSS or iTunes. We would appreciate it if you could take a second to give us a rating on iTunes. We’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or e-mail us at podcast@askdifferent.net. Thanks for listening.

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• We’ve wanted to have TJ on the show for some time now, but this week was perfect because of an upcoming contest on Ask Different with support from TUAW. We kicked things off with a flood of new users from TUAW, thanks to TJ’s recommendation.
• The contest begins on Monday, January 16th. Full details on the contest can be found *** here ***, but here’s what you need to know:
• All questions asked between Monday, January 16th and Friday, January 27th, tagged with the iOS tag, will be eligible.
• The grand prize winners will be the question with the most views and the question with the highest score.
• There will be additional prizes for questions asked by users that recently arrived on Ask Different from TUAW.
• The prizes are: your choice of a 16GB iPod Nano, or up to $150 of Apple accessories of your choosing.
• So, go ask some great iOS questions! Don’t forget to boost your question’s views by sharing it with your friends!
• TJ’s mother and mother-in-law have both recently exchanged their PCs for iPads. Both use the iPad as their primary device, and between the Camera Connection Kit, FaceTime, and iMessage, they can do just about anything they want. The limitations they’ve encountered so far have been printing without AirPrint-compatible printers (Printopia helps, but only if there’s a Mac on the network), and poor support for advanced Gmail configuration changes such as creating new labels on messages.
• As a professional writer, TJ’s tried quite a few iPad text editors. In the search for the perfect editor, he’s evaluated 39 apps, with varying feature sets. He’s still looking for an app that he loves, with the perfect blend of Dropbox support, TextExpander support, and Markdown previewing. For now, he predominantly uses WriteRoom, but also likes Elements and Simplenote.
• Text editors’ Dropbox support leads us to a discussion of Dropbox security. Jason points out that despite Dropbox’s excellent idea and support for forcing apps to work only in a specified sub-directory of your Dropbox instead of granting whole directory access, this decision is made by the developer, with no ability for the user to change it.
• Talk of Dropbox security in turn leads us to a discussion of Apple’s App Store review process. Since Apple reviews binaries instead of source code, there is always a possibility that an app with hidden malicious intentions could sneak by and be listed on the store. Apple is generally good about removing malicious apps from the App Store when they are discovered, but they are interestingly the only company that has not used their ‘remote wipe’ capability to remove apps directly from users’ devices.
• We also note that the same sandboxing requirements that iOS apps face are about to become required for apps listed in the Mac App Store as well. Beginning in March, all Mac App Store apps will be required to run from within the unprivileged sandbox. This is potentially a bit of a time bomb, as many apps will need to have existing functionality removed or scaled back. Such ‘updates’ are generally unpopular with users, and we can all think of good apps that would probably be negatively impacted by the new restrictions. The transition will present some interesting challenges for both users and developers, but we hope that not too much of value will be lost. TJ recommends Andy Ihnatko’s article on Macworld: “App sandboxing risks eroding the Mac’s identity“.
• Our Question of the Week is, “What are some best practices for a family sharing a single Apple ID?” asked by user16653 on January 11th. This question asks about good ways to handle sharing an Apple ID with a family while keeping some data separate and others together. The solution is to take advantage of the ability to use different IDs for different things. Use a shared ID for things that you want to share, like purchases, and a personal ID for things you don’t want to share, like email. TJ also recommends Spanning Sync for managing both Google cloud services and Apple cloud services.
• Our App of the Week this week is Startupizer, by Gentle Bytes. Startupizer gives you powerful control of your Mac’s login items. You can control the order and timing of login items, and set conditions based on the time/date your system is turning on, power options, such as restricting apps from starting up automatically when only on battery, and when holding modifier keys after login. Ultimately, you’ll be able to reduce the ‘traffic jam’ that occurs when you boot up your Mac and speed up login performance. Startupizer has a free Lite version, and the full version is $6 on the Mac App Store.
• Talking of apps leads us to talking of our thresholds for impulse buying on app stores. We discuss our various limits, and what kind of research (if any) we do before buying an app.

Our thanks again to TJ Luoma for being on the show, and the rest of TUAW for supporting the contest.

This episode was recorded on January 15th, 2012. You can subscribe to this podcast via RSS or iTunes. We would appreciate it if you could take a second to give us a rating on iTunes. We’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or e-mail us at podcast@askdifferent.net. Thanks for listening.

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This week we take a detour off the beaten path, and talk exclusively about best practices on Ask Different, and Stack Exchange in general.

Stack Exchange is a Question & Answer site. It is not a Wiki, Forum, Blog, or content aggregator like Reddit or Digg, but it takes many good ideas from these types of sites. For a long time Stack Exchange consisted of what we call the “Big 3″ Sites, Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User, but over the past 2 years it has expanded into a network of 31 unique topics and growing. All of these sites follow the same basic principles, but differ in their content and scope.

Stack Exchange is built around asking Questions, and providing Answers, and everything that has been built out from that reflects it. The better a Question is, the better chance you have of getting a complete and definitive answer. Things that make a good question are good spelling and grammar, with respect to the fact that Stack Exchange is a US company and a predominately English-speaking audience, and proof that your question is a legitimate issue that you have already attempted to fix. There are some very notable exceptions to the common English-speaking situation in sites such as Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and German Language and Usage.

Regarding Ask Different itself, we are a community devoted to Apple enthusiasts and power users. Questions about Apple Hardware, Software, other Apple services, and third-party hardware/software for use on Apple devices are all on-topic. Questions about programming (except AppleScript and Automator) and the Apple Developer Program (including iAd), or using Apple’s various operating systems on non-Apple Hardware are not. Other topics that are almost always restricted from discussion on Stack Exchange are shopping or buying recommendations, pre-release or other unofficially released software, and illegally obtaining software or other media. The reasons generally range from the fact that these questions are not a good fit for Stack Exchange, or are generally illegal subjects. Asking questions about pre-release software is futile because questions about bugs or missing functionality could change within a day, and does not fit well with the non-immediate nature of Stack Exchange, nor it’s intent for being a collection of factual knowledge and answers.

Over the course of this episode we go over some of the best practices for writing questions, answers, and comments, and provide some advice on editing and voting.

Some of the specific questions and pages we referenced, and those that we regularly visit for their various uses are:

• Ask Different – Our Q&A site. Of course.
• Meta Ask Different – The Meta sites are about the details involved in asking questions, and not always about actual Apple questions, except to define or address scope.
• The XY Problem – A post to Meta Ask Different regarding indirect answers to a question, and what actions should be taken in this, and similar, situations.
• Making an Airport Appear As a Computer – The question that inspired ‘The XY Problem’ post.
• Search Options on Stack Exchange – Kyle suggested simply pressing enter in the search box to get detailed search tips, but you can also simply use this link.
• How to quickly identify all eligible iTunes Match upgrades – An example of information that is completely detailed elsewhere, and how to give appropriate attribution to the source, but also preserve the content in a way that enables complete reference on Stack Exchange, just in case the link should ever stop working in the future.
• The Ask Different Blog – This link may be a bit redundant if you’re reading this, but since some of you are reading this from a Podcast client, it’s still relevant!
• Stack Exchange Chat Rooms for Ask Different – The current set of active chat rooms related to Ask Different. We do our best to be available in the Ask Different Chat room as often as possible. As do other users of Ask Different.

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• We’d like to welcome a new co-host to the Ask Different Podcast, Mike Bradshaw! Mike is the #1 user on Ask Different by reputation, and worked in an Apple Stores for 4 1/2 years. Thanks for being on the show, Mike!
• Last Friday, Apple opened a new retail store in New York’s Grand Central Terminal. The store looks beautiful, and quite different than many other Apple Stores. Some of Stack Exchange’s CHAOS team members got a chance to visit (and promote Ask Different!), and posted some photos and info on our Ask Different Blog.
• One of the interesting notes in that post is mention of Apple employee with an Android phone in his pocket leads to a discussion of how the hardware in Apple Stores has changed. We recall the old Windows CE-based point of sale devices, the transition to the iPod touch-based checkout, and the recent self-checkout options. We consider how Apple controls theft with the new system.
• Kyle thinks self-checkout is great because he wants to get in and out of the store quickly, without extra interaction with the sales people. We share experiences with launch day traffic and Apple’s ability to scale for that kind of event, and how we feel about Apple’s decision to spend lots of time with a smaller number of customers.
• Twitter has recently updated it’s flagship iOS app and web interface. Twitter is putting more emphasis on discovering content and facilitating the “global conversation”. Like many users, we’re not big fans of these changes that seem to put emphasis on featuring promoted accounts and topics, and less on usability.
• Additionally, some visual and interface changes to the iOS app make Twitter feel less like a native app. Kyle likes Tweetbot, Mike likes Twitterific. For someone like Nathan, who is a read-only Twitter user, Jason recommends TweetDeck. Kyle and Mike love the TweetMarker service, which lets you synchronize what you’ve read between supported clients.
• Conversation turns to iTunes Match. Kyle and Jason both use it frequently and enjoy it, especially the abilities to upgrade lower-quality songs and to free up space on your hard drive. iTunes Match is the logical conclusion of Apple’s cloud and music offerings, and it’s very well executed.
• While Kyle and Jason are enamored with iTunes Match’s 20-second download time, Nathan is skeptical. He uses Spotify to stream music and play downloaded music, and it’s performance seems considerably better than iTunes. After selecting a song, music starts nearly instantaneously over Wi-Fi, and with a 2-3 second delay on 3G.
• Talk of streaming music and storing things in the cloud leads to a discussion of being a ‘digital packrat’. Our habits vary from keeping everything possible to deleting when things get in the way to deleting whenever something is unlikely to be useful. One manifestation of this is Gmail’s archive vs. delete. We share our practices there, as well as with general file retention.
• The next product that we have to fall head over heels for is the Nest Thermostat. This device automatically programs itself based on how you use it, so eventually you don’t even have to use it at all. We hope that this marks the beginning of a big expansion in home automation that spreads to other things, beyond heating. Nest was founded by ex-Apple iPod SVP, Tony Fadell
• Our question of the week is Is there a real benefit to removing applications from the iOS multitasking bar?, asked by estephan500 on December 9th. This question asks whether or not there is a benefit to removing apps that you’re done with from the multitasking bar. Does it save memory or improve performance? Generally, this does little and you’re okay to just let the OS manage memory. In some situations, however, it can help clear old things out.
• Our app of the week this week is Skitch. Skitch is an app that allows you to easily take and annotate screen captures, or any other photo on your Mac. It’s principle benefit is that the drawing tools are very vivid, and take no time in producing beautiful, explanatory edits. It has seen lots of use in both questions and answers on Ask Different! Skitch is available for free on the Mac App Store.

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• After we open with talking pleasantly about weather and recount the amount of time we’ve now been doing this show, we discuss the state of iOS 5′s Notification Center and apps that don’t seem to play nice with it. And speaking of not playing nice, Facebook’s iOS app. After our round of kvetching concludes, we talk a bit about Facebook’s direction, what demographics may be most beneficial, and who they have in mind with new features.
• Upon realization of our dislike for the subject matter, we quickly move to Nathan’s recent visit to his local Seattle Microsoft Store. While there are many obvious differences, there’s also a significant amount of similarity in presentation, layout, and choice of terminology. Nathan has also elaborated on his thoughts and more in his blog post on the subject, and you can view all of his pictures from the visit in his Flickr set.
• Returning to the subject matter at hand, we discuss Apple’s announcement that by next March, all apps sold via the Mac App Store will be required to be sandboxed, and will have a defined set of privileged activities they will be allowed to use, which must also be accepted by Apple at the time of the App’s submission to the Mac App Store, called “entitlements”. We discuss the implications this has in the near term, and how this trend could continue over the course of a few years.
• Speaking of staunch principles, there is a noted decrease in Apple’s friendliness to what people generally consider “professional” users, or at the very least power users. With the rumored eventual death of the Mac Pro, following in the heels of the death of the Xserve and Xsan products, as well as software changes like the upgrade from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X, there is a noted sense that Apple is stripping out things in the name of simplicity, but at the detriment of flexibility and wider compatibility.
  • This also leads to consideration of how Apple could provide, license, or otherwise allow Mac OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, in order to allow other hardware vendors to provide “special” hardware configurations to consumers that may need them but will want to continue running OS X. A tip of the hat to the Hypercritical Podcast, Episode 41, featuring Stack Exchange’s own Jeff Atwood, for rekindling this conversation.
• We detour slightly to talk about Headphones, and notably, the heavy availability of the Monster Beats series in both the Microsoft and Apple stores and other industries entirely. Considering that we want headphones not only for music, but also have a need for active monitoring (we are podcasters after all), an expensive pair of headphones that specializes, heavily, in one particular range is not something that we could reasonably spend money on and enjoy.
• Our Question of the Week is “Is there any way to use punctuation in Siri dictation?”, asked by Evan on October 28th. Welcome to Ask Different, Evan! The only host qualified to definitively answer this question considering he’s the owner of an iPhone 4S, Nathan, explains Siri’s punctuation dictation methods and talks about how they’ve already improved since iOS 5’s release and the 4S’ debut.
• We circle back to another pertinent news item that we felt necessary to cover, the death of the Mobile Flash plugin. Flash will still continue to exist on the desktop, and also for mobile devices in the form of app development frameworks such as Adobe’s Flash Professional product, but aside from security and bug fixes, the mobile in-browser Flash Plugin will no longer get new features.
• On the same day as Adobe’s announcement, word spread that after the next release of Silverlight, Microsoft may stop development of the platform. We discuss the strengths of Silverlight as a Flash competitor and consider reasons for it’s, comparatively speaking, short-lived life.
• Our App(s) of the Week are an OS X Finder enhancer, and total replacement.
  • Total Finder is an application that keeps the Finder intact, but adds on a myriad of features such as tabbed browsing, split-pane browsing, folders on top, and file cut & pasting. Total Finder is $18, sold directly through Binary Age’s website
  • Forklift 2, is nearly the complete opposite, widely considered the Finder on steroids. Forklift is a dedicated application, meaning that is runs on it’s own and is intended to replace your need for the Finder entirely. In addition to many of the features of Total Finder, Forklift provides additional file management features such as a bevy of remote disk features (droplets, mount remote filesystems as a local volume, remote edit), one-click synchronization of two folders’ contents, batch renaming, and a greatly expanded Quick Look capability. Forklift 2 is $29.95, sold directly through Binary Nights’ website.

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• Starting with some site news, Ask Different has seen record traffic lately. On the heels of iOS 5, iCloud, and the iPhone 4S, visits have gone way up! We hope to see similar increases after future Apple updates. We encourage our users to ‘seed’ the site with questions that people are likely to have after a major software or hardware release.
• As we get more traffic, there is a noted increase of ‘help desk’ questions that specify a vague problem with few details. The Stack Exchange system works best with long, detailed questions, and detailed answers. Back-and-forth troubleshooting is not a good fit for SE. We encourage our users to edit the question (if possible), vote to close, or flag these questions.
• Concerning flagging, note that the moderators can’t review every question on the site, but we do review every flag. If you see something bad, please flag it! And if we decline your flag, don’t take that to mean that you should stop flagging. Kyle and Nathan always try to explain why a flag has been declined.
• Steve Jobs’ biography was released last week, and Jason has read the first several chapters of the book. He shares his interests, comparisons, and one of his favorite parts, where Steve Wozniak created a device to create ‘snow’ on analog TVs and used it to mess with his fellow students.
• Also within the biography was very detailed information of how Steve Jobs chose the name: “Apple Computer Co.”, and more specifically, how it stuck. In recent years however, Apple officially changed their company name to “Apple Inc.”, we talk about how best to classify all these new phones and tablets, and what exactly makes something a computer. The Super User Stack Exchange site has decided that smart phones and tablets are not a computer, and are off topic for their site. And what about a Chromebook? A laptop that is almost completely Web-based? Super User has chosen to consider these as computers.
• Wondering about tablets leads us to discussing the future of Windows. Microsoft is going to be encouraging developers to transition to develop for Metro using solely .NET, which officially means that so many classic Microsoft foundations and toolkits could be no longer supported. We discuss other major transitions that have been made, such as Apple’s switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, and more recently and also not yet complete, Carbon to Cocoa.
• Speaking of Chromebooks, we revisit the idea of cloud-based computing and what it means for clients. Although it seems outdated, more and more devices are embracing something similar to a ‘dumb-terminal and mainframe’ manner of operation. Even the iPhone 4S is moving in this direction, as most Siri commands rely on an external server. We also discuss some of the strengths and limitations of iCloud’s ability to transition iOS devices into truely simple clients.
• Amongst all of the benefit of delegating intense processing to dedicated servers, this reveals perhaps the biggest problem: privacy. Things like Amazon Silk relay lots of information to the company hosting the service, which could be used for good or bad things. Kyle suggests standardizing protocols for various cloud functions so that people could choose any company as their provider and corporations could host their own services in-house.
• Our Question of the Week is “Exactly what are the limitations of geofenced reminders in iOS5?” asked by Jish on October 19th. The question asks about how to deal with locations that are mis-represented and thus, don’t trigger reminders to alert, notably when arriving at a location. This question has one answer, but is otherwise not highly trafficked. Additionally, there is contention on whether or not the reminders ever use GPS. If you have a good grasp on iOS location features, please help out by providing a thorough answer!
• We have three related Apps of the Week this week. First is Notational Velocity. This free app makes it easy to take down quick notes on your Mac. When configured to save text files to a location in your Dropbox folder.
  • When you want to view or edit your notes on the go, Kyle uses PlainText (iOS App Store). This free, ad-supported iOS app ($2 in-app purchase to remove ads) is a Dropbox-integrated text editor. This allows you to create notes on your computer and easily read and edit them on your iPhone (and vice-versa).
  • Nathan uses a different Dropbox-integrated iPhone app for notes and text editing, called Nebulous Notes (iOS App Store). This $4 app is a very fully-featured editor which Nathan uses for coding, notes, and general word processing.
  • And finally, Jason just uses Notes, built into iOS.

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• We begin by asking Siri to introduce herself. She tells us who she is, and what she can be used for. We demo some of Siri’s core productivity functionality, as well as some more… playful things. For instance, we get Siri to call Nathan, Shirley.

• On the less playful side of Siri, we show how Siri can, by default, accessed from a locked phone without entering a passcode. That means that you can make calls, send texts, and send emails from a ‘locked’ phone. Nathan demonstrates how this could be a very effective way to mess with someone.

• Just as we’re finishing demonstrating what Siri can do, she decides to stop working! As it turns out, the day we chose to record was the same day that Apple’s Siri servers began experiencing difficulty. It seems that the issue has been resolved by now, but this is an important reminder of Siri’s complete dependence on the cloud.

• Since Siri relies on the cloud for everything, we discuss what happens when that cloud doesn’t work. Somewhat disappointingly, without a network connection (or when Apple’s servers aren’t working), Siri is actually less useful than iOS 3’s Voice Control. In an effort to find an offline fallback, we try disabling Siri. To our surprise, Voice Control a la iOS 3, and devices not named “iPhone 4S”, is then available. Kudos to Apple for including this.

• Staying on the topic of voice interaction, we discuss the transcription features of the iPhone 4S. In addition to the Siri assistant, you can have the phone transcribe your speech anywhere you have the ability to type text. Nathan shares his experience with this feature’s usefulness and accuracy, and requests a feature.

• One feature in particular, Wolfram Alpha integration, we agree that this feature is a nice idea, but not exactly ready for serious use yet. For one thing, Siri seems to have a lot of trouble recognizing when to submit something to Wolfram Alpha, especially with things involving math. The other problem is that, since Wolfram Alpha returns an image, Siri can’t read the result to you. This seriously limits usefulness if you’re trying to use your phone hands-free.

• The iPhone 4S is officially Nathan’s first iOS device. He shares what’s stood out to him in general, and what he’s noticed especially coming from an Android-based tablet. He loves the iPhone’s screen, navigation, and animation; but he misses some keyboard features from Android.

• Nathan’s appreciation of iOS’ ubiquitous, smooth animation leads us to a discussion of animation on Android. Kyle talks about experience with early Android phones and how jagged their animation was. As far as he’s seen, the situation has improved but is still far from perfect. We all agree that iOS is more optimized for animations than Android. We note that Apple seems to spend time on animations in other areas, like OS X and WebKit.

• Talking about Android’s animations turns us to their advertisements, and how their advertising emphasizes many details that generally don’t mean much to many of the individuals watching them; Processor, Memory, and to a lesser extent, Megapixels in the Camera. While many Android commercials emphasize rough raw details, every iPhone, iPod, and iPad commercial to date talks about the things you can do with them.

• An advertisement that hasn’t started yet is a soon-to-be aired series of commercials about Windows Phone with the theme: “It’s Good To Be In the Family”. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley recently discussed these commercials on TWiT’s “Windows Weekly” show, Episode 230. These commercials are intended to highlight the benefits of grouping Microsoft properties together. Despite the opinions presented, Kyle provides an example of how art actually winds up imitating real life.

• Did you know that iOS 5 is here? Did you know that you can get a 6-Day Weather Forecast in the Notification Center? Or that you can now easily figure out just which application is taking up the most disk space? Jason recently started a question on Ask Different called “What tiny thing in iOS 5 makes you smile, or has caught you off guard?”, and it has garnered some very detailed and very interesting answers with things that may never be advertised, but still carry a huge amount of benefit.

• One major con that Jason has experienced is that advanced capabilities of audio files have been slowly rendered worthless over the last few major iOS versions. AAC files have the ability to be ‘chaptered’, but sometime in the iOS 4 series the ability to select a specific chapter from within the file disappeared, and the current-chapter progress bar is now a whole file progress bar. As of iOS 5, the unique artwork feature has also disappeared. All of this has rendered Tiesto’s Club Life Podcast significantly less interesting.

• Our Question of the Week is “Why is iOS 5 draining my battery so fast?” asked by Jaydles on October 14th. Battery issues in prior versions of iOS have always had a specific series of steps; Disable anything you can (3G Radio, Bluetooth, Location Services, Push e-mail retrieval, etc.), turn brightness down, and if your battery still discharges unnecessarily fast, take it into an Apple Store. We featured this question in order to publish an interesting thought, that with the continual improvement of sync services, and the addition of Reminders, there may be wedging issues with remote storage servers such as those provided by your company’s e-mail service.

• Our App of the Week is Mou, a Markdown editor for web designers. We give our thoughts on Mou’s features as opposed to other live preview-only applications such as Marked. Mou is free during the beta releases, and donating to the developer gives you a free license after Mou 1.0 is released.

This episode was recorded on October 15th, 2011. You can subscribe to this podcast via RSS or iTunes. We’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or e-mail us at podcast@askdifferent.net. We are resuming our regular bi-weekly schedule after this episode.

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Now that we’ve had time to digest Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” event, we share our thoughts about the announcements and how they fit into the bigger Apple picture.

• We begin this show with some site news. Ask Different is now a member of Blog Overflow. You can visit our blog at apple.blogoverflow.com. We have some posts up already, but we’re searching for more contributors! If you’re interested in contributing, either regularly or on occasion, please leave an answer to this meta post or send us an email at podcast@askdifferent.net. We’re looking forward to seeing what members of our community can come up with!
• Additionally, Ask Different was given a refreshed navigation bar in honor of Steve Job’s death.
• There is disagreement among pundits about the significance of Apple’s iPhone 4S announcement. We agree that the keynote felt disappointing, but we acknowledge that there have been some hardware improvements. Jason’s guess is that, since most of the software improvements (iOS 5) have already been announced, the focus on hardware made the announcements feel underwhelming. Nathan’s guess is that people are mainly disappointed because they waited a long time for such a seemingly small change.
• We debate why the iPhone 3GS is still available. Kyle thinks that this is a Tim Cook move, and worries that Apple will start keeping around their older hardware for a long time. Does this degrade the brand so much that it isn’t worth having a low-cost offering? We discuss whether keeping old models around is a good idea for iPhones, as well as for desktops.
• We discuss the changing release cycle for iPhones. With more time between releases, it seems like development has been gradually losing speed. We predict when the next iPhone will be released, and what we expect Apple to do in the future.
• From release cycles, the discussion turns to the holidays. Is the holiday season a big selling time for iPhones? We wonder about how one goes about giving someone an iPhone without making them pay for a pricey monthly contract.
• It seems to us that the iPhone 4S was released later than Apple had hoped. We discuss potential reasons for this, and agree that it was probably software-related. Our guess is that Apple was busy fine-tuning Siri to get it ready for general use. This leads us to wonder again about how cloud-based Siri is. Are local commands that interact with first-party apps and media playback sent to Apple’s servers? Dictation only? Or are there commands whose processing in only done locally?
• We talk about voice control options on other platforms. Nathan’s old flip phone has a voice control function, but it doesn’t exactly… work. Kyle wishes that there was something like Siri for Mac, and Jason and Nathan tell him about the little-known voice functions of OS X. The built in software is lacking, but we mention some third-party alternatives, like Nuance’s Dragon Dictate. We agree that, if it existed on OS X, Siri would be much less useful than it is on a mobile device.
• Thinking more about Siri, we reiterate a point from the last episode: Siri will be much more powerful if Apple opens it to third-party developers. We discuss the technical difficulties involved in doing this, but hope that Apple gives motivated developers the opportunity to do the work and integrate their apps with Siri.
• We further compare the speech recognition software we’ve used. Our experience is varied with Google’s speech-to-text, despite their giant amount of data to analyze. We hope that Apple (and Nuance, who they’ve partnered with for Siri) can do a better job. Jason is hopeful because of his good experiences with the voice controls available on his iPhone 4. He especially likes its ability to recognize artist and album names spoken in Japanese, even if the English voice cannot speak them back.
• Our App of the Week is Growl. Growl is a Mac app that provides a framework for system-wide notifications. Lots of popular apps (like Sparrow, Spotify, and Firefox) have Growl support built in. Growl is available for $1.99 on the Mac App Store.
• Our Question of the Week is, “Is there an app that creates a system-wide audio equalizer?“, asked by Nathan. Nathan’s been using Spotify, which doesn’t have a built-in equalizer unlike iTunes, and wants to know how to create one that applies to the whole system. ioi recommends a nice app called Boom. Boom lets you boost system volume, as well as apply an equalizer to all audio output. Boom is available for $8.99 on the Mac App Store.
• We finish with the big news of the week, Steve Jobs’ death. We share our impressions of Steve and his work at Apple, and wonder a little about the future. We end the show with a moment of silence.

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Today, we cover Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” event:

• Apple announced Cards, an iPhone app for sending cards via snail mail. We talk about what the app is, but we can’t help but ask “Why?”
• Apple gave a recap today of some of the key features of iOS 5. There was very little new info today, but we do have one thing: a release date, October 12th. The iPhone 4S will ship with iOS 5 two days later.
• Also recapped today was iCloud. We learned that Apple will be expanding its Find My iPhone service to OS X, and will release Find My Friends. Find My Friends is a location-based service that tells you where your friends are at a given time, provided that they have chosen to share their location. Apple also confirmed a detail we were previously uncertain about for its iTunes Match service: music can be streamed, or downloaded to the device. iCloud ships October 12.
• The first new product announcement to come out of Cupertino today was a new iPod nano.  The new nano will have the same hardware as the previous generation, but it features much-improved software. The nano is now easier to navigate, and includes extra fitness support. Apple will add 16 additional clock faces to all versions of the current generation of nano, available via a software update. Lastly, the price on the nano dropped from $149 to $129.
• The iPod touch was not completely absent from today’s announcements: its price has dropped from $229 to $199, and now comes in your choice of black or white.
• The iPod shuffle and iPod classic were left unchanged. They have not been updated, but will continue to be sold in their current form.
• To the meat of the announcements: the new iPhone. Apple did not, in fact, announce an iPhone 5. Instead, they released the iPhone 4S, a souped-up version of the current iPhone 4. New features include an updated CPU, the dual-core Apple A5, intelligent antenna switching for faster download speeds, and the fact that the 4S is now truly a world phone, packing CDMA and GSM radios into a single device.
• The other major hardware improvement to the iPhone 4S is its camera. The new camera has an 8 megapixel sensor, and includes numerous other image quality improvements. Combined with the updates iOS 5 is bringing, the delay between opening the Camera app and taking the first picture is down to nearly one second, and the delay between taking pictures at just half a second. The 4S will record 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and uses the gyroscope to provide imagery stabilization for smoother video.
• The newest feature of the 4S is born from an acquisition Apple made over one year ago: Siri. Siri is a tool that lets you control your phone with your voice. It has numerous features that make it more powerful than the Voice Command features of the previous iPhones. For one, you can say things however you want and it will understand what you mean. Siri also has very deep OS integration: you can use it to make calls, send texts, manipulate your calendar, and many other things. Additionally, in places that would normally cause the keyboard to come up, you can tap a new microphone icon on the on-screen keyboard and Siri will allow you to type via dictation. All of these features will require the iPhone 4S, dictation requires an active internet connection.
• The iPhone 4S will be available for pre-order on October 7th, and released on October 14th. It comes in three capacities: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. The prices are $199, $299, and $399 respectively, all requiring a 2 year contract. The 4S will be available on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. With this new phone also brings a price drop to the two previous models. The iPhone 4 drops to 8GB and $99 with a 2 year contract, and the CDMA model will also become available on Sprint. And finally, the iPhone 3GS 8GB remains on sale, for free, with a 2 year contract.
• Nathan shares a final thought wondering whether the Siri service would be opened up to third-party developers. We discuss how Android provides the capability for the system to hook into third-party apps, and whether Apple will do something similar with Siri.

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• We’d like to welcome our special guest, Stack Exchange’s Valued Associate #36, and member of the MAYHEM CHAOS team, Abby Miller!
• The CHAOS team’s “Raison d’être” is community engagement and promotion, both on Stack Exchange sites and external to them. The first site Abby managed as part of CHAOS is Ask Different, and she’s now begun working with Game Development.
• In addition to the metrics that Stack Exchange provides for each site, the CHAOS team has taken site quality research to task. They compared Stack Exchange sites to other sites covering similar topics, to guage a visitor’s ability to start with a Google search and end up with their question answered as quickly as possible. Ask Different, for example, was compared against Apple’s Support Communities.
• In the early days of the CHAOS team’s involvement on Stack Exchange, a major task was to spruce up the quality of content on selected sites. They started by going through top questions and fixing up spelling and grammar, focusing on ensuring that question titles were formed as a question and not something more like an e-mail subject.
• We discuss an interesting situation that the Stack Exchange network creates, in that Stack Exchange maintains, designs, and hosts the sites, but lays no claim to any of the content that the users create, which is very unusual for a profit-seeking company. The virtues of community-driven and community-maintained sites is a staple of Stack Exchange’s philosophy.
• Abby expands on the CHAOS team’s goal of doing 80% external community promotion and 20% internal. CHAOS team members no longer edit the top 1000 questions, they shifted focus to more things like sponsorships to grow the community in terms of members and visibility. Ask Different has sponsored Daring Fireball, 52tiger, and is sponsoring the NCMUG’s upcoming Mac Computer Expo. Also, you heard it here first: there is also a not-yet-announced promotion in the works, a partnership with an Apple blog for an iPhone giveaway!
• As previously noted, the Top User swag has started arriving! We will soon schedule our Ask Different T-Shirt episode of the Ask Different Podcast. This week, we talk about our preferred sticker placement strategies.
• Abby talks about CHAOS’ 20% internal involvement in helping a user organize an event, in this case, planning and identifying the infrastructure needed to host a GameDev Game Jam developer event, in tandem with Stack Exchange’s community team. We’re also reminded of Stack Exchange’s beta tester matchmaking service, a program that Ask Different will participate in for both Mac and iOS apps.
• We slip in a quick side conversation to talk about a product Joel Spolsky, representing FogCreek software, demoed as part of Tech Crunch Disrupt San Francisco 2011, Trello. Trello is a list management system with the features you’d need in a multi-user support system. Free, instantly collaborative, painless to sign up for, and beneficial when you need rudimentary (or not-so-rudimentary) organization of tasks, for yourself or multiple parties.
• After diving into playful zealotry over the devices that your hosts do or do not own, our ire turns to Facebook as we discuss the changes made a few days prior to their developer conference, F8. Notably, the feed is now Top News only, and all non-post activity got squished into the tiny sidebar. This leads us to discuss our thoughts on and intended uses of Facebook given the latest round of changes.
• We ask Abby about her Mac hardware history. Her experience ranges from her 17” iMac (from about 5 years ago) to her current MacBook Pro (from just after the release of the unibody style) to her iPhone 4. She discusses her reasons for not using her personal hardware at work, and the initial pain of using her work-provided ThinkPad with it’s inward-bumped touchpad. We share our thoughts on this and similar ‘alternative’ touchpads on the market.
• Some of Abby’s favorite iOS apps include GoatUp, which was coincidentally featured as TUAW’s Daily iPhone App the day after this recording, Instagram, despite version 2 removing one of her favorite filters, and Agenda Calendar.

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• We have been featured on the Stack Exchange Podcast, Episode #16. We recorded a short 30 second ad that Stack Exchange offered to air. You can listen to the entire episode, and note Kyle’s comment listing our ad’s air time, at Episode #16 on Soundcloud.
• Additionally, Ask Different wants to be part of Blog Overflow! We’re looking for dedicated, dependable users able to write regularly on topics you are interested in. If you would like to be part of a team of writers, we invite you to post some details about your ideal topic(s) on the meta post on Ask Different.
• Our guest today is the Stack Exchange designer-in-residence: Jin Yang!
• We start by asking Jin how he came to be employed by Stack Exchange. Even though he knew Jeff already, he had to work hard to get the job. The first work he did for Stack Exchange. His debut was Area 51, which he created in one night! Next came Super User, and then the Stack Exchange 2.0 sites. Today, he’s designed 27 sites!
• Next, Jin goes over his design process, and we ask him about his experience designing Ask Different. He started by asking fellow designer Mike Rundle for a mockup. Jin liked it and started making some tweaks. He soon realized that it took a lot of extra CSS to make the design work. We appreciate the extra effort he put into our site!
• We also discuss a recent blog post by Mike Rundle about designers who can code. Jin tells us that he used to program, using ColdFusion and ASP/ASP.NET, though his work with Stack Exchange is dedicated as a Graphic Designer.
• We briefly talk about the visual evolution of Apple-branding that has occurred since the official launch of Ask Different, and whether or not certain Apple style changes should make their way to Ask Different in some form.
• As previously covered, we discuss the traffic-bump as a result of an Ask Different ad being placed on Daring Fireball, and how Stack Exchange could be improved to display better user referral metrics for site moderators to view.
• This brings us to note how the growth of Stack Exchange has led to many additional sources needing uniquely designed graphic work. In additional to all of the website work Jin does, he’s also begun designing logos and layouts for T-shirts, business cards, and promotional fliers.
• If you view Jin’s Twitter Profile, his biography includes the words “Professional bacon eater”. The discussion of bacon leads to Reddit, as Kyle and Jin discuss Reddit inside jokes, and the Alien Blue iOS app for Reddit.
• Jin explains more about community design involvement and other details that go into creating a Stack Exchange logo and site design. This leads to a discussion of how the design should fit into the language and culture Stack Exchange sites, such as English, Japanese, French, and Jewish Life & Learning among others.
• Since employment, Jin has not done every single site. He discusses his reasoning for contracting out the work to Alex Charchar for the English Stack Exchange site, and Dmitry Fadeyev for UX Stack Exchange. Though not covered on the show, note also that the design Ask Ubuntu was done by a graphic artist within Canonical, Ubuntu’s controlling company.
• We briefly discuss the Area 51 proposal process, how it could be intimidating to non-technical users, and how that may prevent some of the best ‘civilian’ proposals from becoming available on Stack Exchange’s network.
• Thanks so much to Jin for appearing on the show! You can find Jin on Twitter and his blog.

This episode was recorded on September 9, 2011. You can subscribe to this podcast via RSS or iTunes. We’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or e-mail us at podcast@askdifferent.net.

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• We have a special guest today: Long time Apple user, speaker, and author Tom Negrino!
• Tom was introduced to Macs by accident. He got a Macintosh after seeing the 1984 commercial, and has been using them ever since. He tells the story of how Macs have factored into his life over the years.
• Tom has been a professional writer for more than 20 years. He tells us how he accidentally started writing, and how that’s lead him to where he is today, with more than 40 books published.
• Out of us four, Tom is the only one who has been using Macs since before OS X. When asked what he misses from those days, he tells us that “OS X is so much better than the original system that there’s really no comparison.” He shares some of the things that have been drastically improved (or added altogether) with OS X.
• That’s not to say, however, that that era didn’t have its share of great hardware. Tom’s SE/30 remained in use from 1987 to 2002! Amazing for its time, that machine had an expansion slot (for a color monitor) in addition to a 9” grayscale screen. This leads us to discuss Apple’s masterful use of clean, monochrome displays.
• Tom explains how he initially learned of Ask Different during MacWorld Expo 2011. Tom had only recently learned of Ask Different after his wife, Dori, had a business meeting at MacWorld with Stack Exchange’s own Jeff Atwood back while she was a Moderator Pro Tempore.
• We touch on Tom’s opinions of the Stack Exchange engine and it’s various sites, which draws the inevitable comparison to other networks such as Yahoo! Answers, and just how dramatically different the content and demeanor of the sites are. Kyle explains his theory about this difference in intent by referencing the broken windows theory, explaining that people answer with shock value on Yahoo! Answers, but answer with quality on Stack Exchange, due to the quality of both questions and answers already on the site.
• Tom and Dori both recently attended WorldCon 2011 / Renovation both personally and also to help promote Stack Exchange and their Science Fiction and Fantasy site and Writers StackExchange as well. We talk about the attendee experience, such as one of Tom’s favorite costumes, specific qualities present in Las Vegas conventions based out of a hotel and casino, and some of Tom’s experience speaking on Renovation panels. If you’re interested in science fiction, Tom recommends the podcast The Incomparable.
• This turns us to talking about the tech, both hardware and software, used by writers not only for the literal act of writing the content, but also the choice of software and operating system used for various application screenshots. Tom mentions that he could not live, professionally speaking, without Dragon Dictate and OmniOutliner.
• We discuss the state of OS X with regard to the numerous methods of installing and updating your third-party software. What works, what doesn’t, and what gets in your way. With particular reference to the completely trivial upgrade methods employed by Panic for their software such as Coda, but also the completely different flow used by apps listed in the Mac App Store.
• Currently, Tom has a single computer upgraded to Lion, and another one still remaining on Snow Leopard. We talk about early adoption habits past and preset, beyond OS updates, also covering the release of the original iPod, the more recent release of each iPhone, and the iPad.
• We contrast the decade-long evolution of the original iPod to the current generation iOS devices, to the drastic changes that Lion suddenly brought us with regard to Natural/Momentum Scrolling, Reverse Scrolling, Hidden Scrollbars, the revamps to spaces found in Mission Control, and more. Tom has many of the same opinions that Chris Breen detailed in an opinion piece he wrote for MacWorld.
• And finally, we talk about the biggest headline of the week, the resignation of Steve Jobs as CEO. We explain the fundamental changes this brought, and the details that speak to the amount of trust placed in the new CEO Tim Cook. We talk about much of the coverage that we’ve seen since that announcement on Wednesday, including Tom’s suggested read; Glenn Fleishman’s article on how Apple has personally affected his life, and the lives of so many others.
• Tom Negrino can be found on Twitter, Facebook, on his personal site negrino.com, and of course on Ask Different. His latest book is JavaScript: Visual QuickStart Guide, 8th Edition.

This episode was recorded on August 27, 2011. You can subscribe to this podcast via RSS or iTunes. We’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or e-mail us at podcast@askdifferent.net.

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• We begin with some Ask Different news:
• On August 17, we celebrated Ask Different’s first birthday! On that date in 2010, Ask Different entered private beta. Since then we’ve seen tremendous growth, exceeding all our expectations. We’d like to give a big thanks to all of our supporters, users, and everyone else who’s helped make the site what it is. We’ve celebrated this and have more details in the the birthday meta post!
• This leads us to a discussion of moderating Ask Different. We talk about how the Stack Exchange engine makes it easy to keep a site clean while being friendly towards users. We’d like to thank all of our users who flag posts as well as encourage everyone to click flag if they see something in need of attention. We couldn’t do it without you!
• We also briefly discuss the concept of Community Wiki posts, and the recent movement to get rid of CW-style posts across Stack Exchange. While we sympathize with this point of view, we feel that there are certain types of expression that are very valuable to the community even though they don’t exactly fit the Q&A format. We cite as an example our Question of the Week from last week; “What tiny thing in Lion makes you smile or has caught you off-guard?“. We discuss why we think this is a worthwhile post to have on our site, but we also acknowledge the times when Community Wiki hasn’t worked. Please be aware that Community Wiki questions have their place, but their place is sparsely present.
• We bring you a public service announcement: Ask Different will be participating in a beta testing service! Stack Exchange will be running a service that matches developers from the community with testers from the community, including Ask Different users. All the details and forms to fill out to sign up are on Abby’s Meta Post.
• Moving on to tech news, this has been an exciting week! For starters, Google is going to acquire Motorola Mobility. We predict the implications of the sole developer of Android also being a major handset manufacturer. Will this move improve Google’s products and worsen their competitors’? We’re betting that some device manufacturers are seriously considering their other options in the mobile OS department.
• The other major event of the week comes from HP. They’ve announced what amounts to a radical shift in their focus as a company. For one, the TouchPad and webOS are both being discontinued. While HP claims they will continue to allow apps to be added to the webOS app store, there will be no more software updates and no new hardware using the OS.
• Additionally, HP, the single largest computer manufacturer in the world, announced the possibility of spinning off its consumer computing business. We discuss the possibilities ahead for their new direction, and how this could change the consumer computing landscape.
• Our main topic for this episode is Owning Your Data. With the proliferation of server-side content services (e.g. Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Music, Delicious Bookmarks), we consider it unsafe to treat these services as sole-source backup solutions. We cite examples of disaster due to loss of account access, the service closing its doors, or suffering its own disaster.
• Our Question of the Week is “Why doesn’t the red dot shut down the program?”, asked by Andrew Warner on August 10.
• We discuss the reasoning, implementation, and comparison of this feature that has existed for all of Mac OS X’s life.
• Our Apps of the Week revolve around music!
• Kyle picks AudioGalaxy, a utility that runs on your computer and let’s you stream music stored on your computer to any other computer or Smart Phone connected to the internet. AudioGalaxy is currently free, including it’s iOS client.
• Jason picks iScrobble, a utility used to submit your music listening history from your iOS device to Last.fm. iScrobble has a free version, called “iScrobble Pick and Mix” (ads and limited functionality, upgradable via in-app purchases), or $6 for “iScrobble Premium” with all features up-front and no ads.
• Nathan picks I Love Stars, a menu bar app used save time when you want to rate the song you’re currently listening to, without having to open the iTunes interface. I Love Stars is available for $1 on the Mac App Store.

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• We’re back! Our (unplanned) summer sabbatical has ended, and we begin again. The length and frequency of our previous shows was too exhausting, so we’re cutting back a bit. Our shows will not occur every single week, as we’ve chosen to focus heavily on single subjects rather than attempt to cover the every-continuous stream of Apple and related news. We are currently planning on bi-weekly shows, with exceptions for significant events and product releases.
• We begin by sharing our experiences with the fast-growing Google+. These three early adopters’ are generally impressed by the circle management features and the ability to mute posts from people in your circles, but the service has its share of rough edges including a less-than-stellar native iOS client, and post ordering that doesn’t always keep older posts below newer ones.
• Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is finally here, and sure enough we’ve dedicated the lion’s share of the show to discussing it! We share our thoughts and experiences with the changes, big and small, to the most recent version of Mac OS X.
• We discuss transitioning to Lion’s auto-hiding scroll bars and reversed scrolling direction, and debate what configurations are appropriate for various types of input devices. Everyone’s made the switch except Nathan, who’s promised to give the changes another chance.
• We love gestures! Kyle and Jason’s high praise for Lion’s gesture integration leaves Nathan wanting a multi-touch input device.
• Lion’s new native full-screen capabilities are useful and slick, but they have at least one serious limitation. We discuss when full-screen is useful and when it isn’t, especially when used in combination with the new Mission Control. Kyle also put together a short video demonstrating how trivial it is to have multiple operating systems set up, and switch seamlessly between their desktop environments leveraging multiple spaces via Mission Control, and full screen modes.
• None of us have tried out Lion Server. Jason lays out the various reasons he’s reluctant to do so. We briefly touch on the notable changes generally known, such as the removal of MySQL invariably due to legal reasons with Oracle, and the continual lack of ZFS, originally slated to appear on Snow Leopard Server. On this and other topics, Kyle highly recommends John Siracusa’s review of Lion on Ars Technica, with particular reference to the “What’s wrong with HFS+” section, and Episode #27 of Hypercritical for details on ZFS’ numerous benefits among many other topics.
• Lion’s Versions feature is promising, but has its share of limitations. We compare it to other revision tracking technologies and look at its key features and potential pitfalls. Hopefully, we’ll soon see more apps start to integrate Versions in exciting and original ways.
• Lion brings a complete overhaul to the way Mac OS X is installed and restored. We share our feelings on Apple’s decision to move everything away from restore DVDs to internet downloads and a recovery partition.
• Our question of the week is What tiny thing in Lion makes you smile or has caught you off-guard?, asked July 20 by bmike.
• Each of us pick our favorite tips that have originated on this question, and references to it from Reddit and Hacker News.
• In addition to these sources of traffic coming to our corner of the Stack Exchange network, Ask Different sponsored Daring Fireball!
• In lieu of just one single app, we talk about some of our favorite apps that have been released or updated after Lion’s release.
• Nathan revisits Coda and how the new features that Lion brings could greatly benefit the app.
• Kyle highlights BBEdit 10 as a dramatic improvement to a fantastic multi-purpose editor, which is currently on sale for $39.99 ($10-off for the next two months!).
• Jason sings praises for a post-only Twitter client known as Wren, and talks about how it takes advantage of many Lion-specific features.
• We wrap up our discussion talking about Spotify and it’s integration into our respective music and media listening habits.

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Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein.

• We begin by bringing you some podcast news: We have created an ad for the podcast (Lion-themed!) and posted it in the Community Promotions Ads meta post. In order for the ad to show up on the Ask Different homepage, we need you to vote for it! If you like the show, please take a look at the meta post and give our ad an upvote.
• The Stack Exchange Shop is now open. You can buy hoodies, shirts, beer steins, and more bearing the Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, Super User, and Server Fault logos. We hope to see some Ask Different merchandise soon.
• Also in Stack Exchange news: A new button! Not one that you can buy; one that you can click. All Stack Exchange sites now have, right along with Facebook and Twitter buttons, a button to share a question to your LinkedIn stream.
• Continuing on the subject of social network integration, we discuss the sinister side of Facebook’s sharing buttons. This leads us to compare other tracking services, like Google Analytics, to Facebook’s. and to an overall comparison of Facebook’s and Google’s security track records. And for those who don’t like being tracked across the Web, we recommend Ghostery, a free browser extension to notify you of such tracking, and optionally block it. Disconnect is another option for Chrome users.
• We discuss the increasing importance of a having a good password on your Apple account. As Apple begins tying more and more to this account, especially with the introduction of iCloud, it is more important than ever to have a secure password on your Apple account. We then discuss the limitations of entering strong passwords on mobile devices, and things Apple could do to make it easier to be more secure.
• Moving back to Facebook, we discuss the recently-discovered Project Spartan. With it, Facebook will be attempting to challenge Apple’s App Store with their own. Except that the Facebook app and its apps are used in Safari on your iOS device. Can Facebook’s HTML5 app store and apps take down Apple’s App Store?
• Google offers a service called Google Sync that provides push GMail, calendar, and contacts synchronization for mobile devices through the Exchange protocol. The service has been recently updated with support for searching mail on the server, accepting/declining calendar events, and sending mail from multiple addresses.
• We share the surprise news that Apple is now selling unlocked iPhone 4 handsets. We discuss the target market that would pay the high price, and whether future unlocked iPhones might offer the ability to switch between AT&T and Verizon.
• Kyle lays out his gadget history, and tells the story of his experience with a string of fragile iPhone 4’s. Jason and Nathan chime in with their own experiences about Apple hardware (including previous-gen iPhones), and we compare other brands’ durability to Apple’s.
• Our question of the week is Why do I have to drag my new apps into the Applications folder?, asked by Drew on June 4th. We talk about the way Mac OS X handles applications as a single package, and how this approach is better than the approaches Windows and Linux take, especially for non-administrative users. We also touch on whether a non-administrator can install apps from the Mac App Store.
• Our app of the week is Divvy, Jason’s and Nathan’s favorite window manager. We talk about what Divvy and similar apps are useful for, and discuss Mac OS X’s built-in window management capabilities. Divvy is available on the Mac App Store.

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Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein.

• Last week was WWDC, and keeping up with the coverage of the keynote was a very intense task. Not to mention the active discussion we had with our fellow Ask Different chatters. We discuss the act of covering the keynote, or more specifically attempting to keep up with the coverage across at least 4 or 5 websites, and keeping up with all of the details flowing continuously for over 2 hours straight. We also delve into what we expect to see as all the new features begin to release, and where we would like to see as time goes on.
• On Tuesday, Steve Jobs presented the next major architectural work by Apple to the Cupertino City Council. We discuss the so-called “Apple Mothership” building to be worked on for the next 4 years and the consideration that is sorely lacking in too many other architectural endeavors.
• We know that as part of iOS 5, Apple will make Twitter functionality a first-class citizen with pop-overs including location sharing, single sign-on functionality, and a dedicated Twitter account field in Contacts. What we have recently learned is that additional social networks will become first class citizens and be added as contact fields in the Address Book.
• Yet another iOS 5 feature has received more details: Wireless iPad 2 Mirroring via AirPlay. We discuss the possibilities of utilizing an Apple TV in a conference room in order to simplify the process of presentations, and how to immediately greatly improve the quality of presentations, notes, and interactivity.
• Continuing with the WWDC hangover, we discuss the state of launcher applications, and the possibilities after Lion’s release and official debut of Launchpad. We contrast the functionality offered by Apple, and the workflow exposed by launcher apps such as QuickSilver, Alfred, and LaunchBar.
• Our Question of the Week is Upgrade personal iPhone to iOS beta 5.0?, asked by Senseful on June 9. We discuss if they (or you!) should, or should not, and lament that we are not more involved in the Apple Development Community in order to make the leap ourselves.
• Our App of the Week is Soulver. Soulver is a new kind of calculator. Soulver is quick, smart, clear, and flexible. Instead of making a digital analog to a standard desk calculator, Soulver allows you to write calculations as a document, each calculation allowing you to represent a specific part of the entire series of calculations. Soulver is available for Desktop Macs on the Mac App Store, and for iPad and iPhone on the iTunes App Store.

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Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin and Jason Salaz.

We devote this entire show to the announcements from the WWDC Keynote:

• First up, the next version of Mac OS X, 10.7 “Lion”, will prominently feature multitouch gestures for moving between applications and invoking Mission Control and Launchpad (other new features in Lion). We discuss how we feel about Apple’s shift away from the mouse and if it means that desktop Macs will be sold with trackpads instead.
• Based on the successful iOS App Store, the Mac App Store has proven to be a big hit with Mac users. We discuss new App Store features in Lion and highlight the success that apps likePixelmator have had in the store.
• Following up on our earlier discussion of the idea of the Continuous Client, we discuss how it ties in with Lion’s upcoming support for saving and resuming app state, autosave, and versioning of files.
• We wrap up our discussion of Lion by talking about AirDrop, a way to drag and drop files from one Mac to another without needing to configure file sharing, and the “iPadification” of the new interface for the Mail app.
• Apple also previewed some new features of the next version of iOS, iOS 5, starting with a completely redesigned notifications interface. We discuss what’s different and how it makes it easier to read and manage multiple simultaneous notifications.
• Twitter is now deeply integrated into iOS, and features a single sign-on area in the settings. We discuss what this means for Twitter, third-party Twitter clients, and the conspicuous absence of Facebook.
• Mobile Safari has also seen multiple improvements, including a tab bar and an Instapaper-like Reading List feature. There’s also a new to-do list app called Reminders. We discuss whether the tab bar was a good idea and the usefulness of location-based reminder alerts.
• The Camera app has undergone significant improvement. We talk about the faster loading time, the ability to quickly take a picture without having to unlock your device, and how the volume button has even been configured to act as a shutter button!
• The requirement to activate an iOS device through iTunes will soon be a thing of the past – iOS 5 has cut the cord and is PC-Free. We discuss what the benefit is, and how iOS has made it possible.
• Apple has brought its Messages app to the iPad and iPod touch, and they’ve renamed it… iMessages? Yes, it’s true – we discuss use cases, the similarity to Blackberry’s BBM service, and cringe at how bad the name is.
• Move aside Mac, Apple has re-envisioned the digital hub and it now centers around iCloud.MobileMe is being phased out as well, and the Contacts, Calendars, and Mail services are being absorbed into iCloud.
• iCloud also offers a cloud-based backup service for iOS devices, allowing users to back up and restore without ever needing to involve a computer. We discuss the benefits of this, and the limitations Apple has placed on it.
• Purchases made through the App Store, iBooks Store, and iTunes Store are catalogued in one place and can be downloaded and re-downloaded to all the devices on your Apple account. We discuss our disappointment at the lack of a facility to stream music, and how the new price point - free - is sure to drive adoption.
• One More Thing… iTunes Match. For $24.99/year, you can have iCloud scan your iTunes library for music that had not been purchased through the iTunes Store. If the iTunes Store carries the file, you will be upgraded to a high-quality version. If not, iTunes will upload it to iCloud and offer the standard iTunes in the Cloud services for that music.

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Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein.

• We begin with a piece of errata from the last episode as Jason corrects a keyboard shortcut he misspoke. For the record, to sleep your computer’s displays and lock your machine, use the shortcut Ctrl ⌃ + Shift ⇧ + Eject ⏏.
• With that out of the way, Kyle brings us some site news: Stack Exchange is now an OpenID provider. That means that you now have the choice to use a Google, Facebook, other OpenID provider to login, or create a traditional e-mail and password login, in order to have your OpenID hosted by Stack Exchange. We also discuss the strict requirements that Stack Exchange places on the password for an account. We debate whether or not they are necessary or reasonable, and how they compare with the practices of both other sites and users.
• With WWDC around the corner, Kyle brings us another piece of site news: the unofficial Stack Exchange WWDC meetup. Any developers who use Stack Exchange should drop by Eddie Rickenbacker’s on June 7th. Click here for more info.
  • On a related note, as none of us can make it to WWDC, we put forth a request: We would love to have someone who goes to WWDC be present on a show to talk about their experience. If you’re interested, please send us an email at podcast@askdifferent.net.
• Moving to news, we bring you an update about the new iMacs’ hard drive temperature sensor update. We share two apps, HDD Fan Control ($10) and smcFanControl (free) that regulate the iMac’s fan speed so that you can use a third-party hard drive without listening to constant, unnecessary fan noise.
• We discuss the current state of Apple hardware and what refreshes should be on the horizon. For one, we expect to see Thunderbolt make its way onto many of the Apple machines that do not yet support it. Macrumors.com predicts that the Mac Pro will be updated with a rack-mountable form factor, and we expect it to have multiple Thunderbolt ports. Will the inclusion of Mac OS X Server in Lion mean a refresh for the Mac mini server and increased server-oriented capabilities on the Mac Pro? Will the plastic MacBooks be discontinued altogether?
• In other news, the Mac security world has been shaken up these past few weeks by a new Mac trojan called MacDefender, which is one of the first major pieces of malware written for the Mac. We talk about how one can become infected, what the malware does, and how to remove it, and we discuss Apple’s promised upcoming software update that will eliminate this particular threat. With that in mind, we discuss the state of Mac security and where it may go in the future. Will the App Store become, by default, the only way to install software on your Mac? Will Apple continue protect us from threats with software updates?
• Apple is celebrating their 10th anniversary of the opening of Apple Retail Stores. In doing so they’ve rolled out some very significant upgrades for their stores. Almost all paper in the store is gone, replaced by a fleet of iPads. iPads are placed next to every hardware product in the store (yes, even iPads) in order to serve as an interactive kiosk for product information, and for a few personal store functions. This spurns a longer discussion on how a similar system would benefit another type of business.
• Amazon has announced and released the Mac Download Store. Amazon’s store features many key retail titles for immediate digital download, similar to the Mac App Store. The difference is that everything takes place through amazon.com in any web browser, then a tailored Amazon software downloader manages retrieving and installing the software after purchase. Amazon’s store features Microsoft Office for Mac, much of Adobe’s Creative Suite (individually packaged), and more.
• Our main topic is the pending litigation between Lodsys, LLC, and various iOS app developers. In the past two weeks, Lodsys has sent infringement claims to iOS app developers such as James Thompson of pCalc fame, and Patrick McCarron of mobileAge, that due to their In-App Purchase system, they are legally obligated to pay 0.575% of their revenues to Lodsys. Our recommended coverage of this news comes courtesy of Nilay Patel at This Is My Next.
  • Apple has responded, stating that iOS app developers are covered, since they pay royalties for this patent, and since the applications were developed using Apple’s SDK, and leveraging Apple’s Distribution Platform and other features. We discuss responses we’ve heard in the Mac Development Community, our feelings on whether developers should pay or not, and our considerations on how this may affect iOS development down the road.
• Our Question of the Week is Great Apple (first and third-party) Accessories or Peripherals, asked by Steve Moser on May 16. All of us pitch in our respective answers, and elaborate on advantages and disadvantages of each.
• Our App of the Week is Handbrake. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Handbrake is an extremely simple utility that allows you to encode H.264 Video Media in a heartbeat, from DVDs or from any other video file on your computer.

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Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein.

• We begin with site discussion: What, exactly, is the scope of Ask Different? Are questions about Windows XP graphics drivers acceptable? What about Mac-compatible Unix distros? Kyle tells us the vision he had for the site when he proposed it, and how recent questions do and don’t fit in.
• The recently released iMacs ship with a new feature! A new style SATA power connector replaces a thermal sensor cable. We discuss the purpose, and the positive and negative merits of this recent change.
• We discuss the onslaught of Google I/O news, starting with Google Music. Users can upload 20,000 songs from their own computer. Google Music only works on devices supporting Flash, and Android phones.
• “Chromebooks”, based on the Cr-48 prototype, to be released next month.
  • Also announced was the Chromebook rental program. While originally announced as a flat rate $20/month rental for students, and businesses for $28/month, these prices vary depending on the exact model rented. Also, these rental programs with have a 3 year contract in tow.
  • A flat rate purchase with no contract will range from ~$350-$500 depending on vendor (ASUS / Samsung) and features (WiFi only, 3G). Currently it appears that certain models will be available from Best Buy, and all from Amazon. Engadget has all currently known details.
• The war of attrition took another step between Facebook and Google, as we learn of Facebook’sattempt at smearing Google’s over privacy claims. An ad agency hired by Facebook promised placement in major periodicals to a independent blogger, but instead of writing articles the blogger released the correspondence between him and the ad agency.
• Microsoft now owns Skype! And they paid approximately $8.5 billion in cash. Not equity, not stock, all cash. Skype will continue to support all current versions (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android) of it’s software. We also muse over separation of the Skype Engine from the desktop application GUI.
• Kyle reflects on the current state of software distribution by Apple. We talk about the current trends of shipping software digitally, the shrinking physical software selection in Apple retail stores, and how you install Mac OS X on computers devoid of an optical drive. Adding to this thatXcode and the Developer Previews of Lion are distributed via the Mac App Store, we consider how Apple may distribute Lion officially, possibly announcing it this summer at WWDC.
• Our Question of the Week is “Is There a Way to Password Protect Individual Apps”, asked byRabskatran. This question spawned a discussion on “The XY Problem” that occurs commonly on the Stack Exchange network, what it is, and what may be the best answer to officially accept in these cases.
• Our App of the Week is Reeder. An iOS and desktop RSS reader that requires the use of Google Reader, but provides a much more attractive, functional, and native interface. We debate the merit of single-site apps, and the contrast between pushing functionality to the web and making them into webapps via Fluid, or building a specifically tailored interface for it like Reeder.

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Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein.

• Kyle begins with some news about this podcast: We’ve launched! We want to thank everyone that has sent us feedback, we appreciate it. Also, we’re now featured on the Super User Blog.
• Nathan describes Stack Exchange’s recent efforts to boost voting on questions, especially relative to answers. Verdict: if you see a great question on Ask Different, vote it up!
• Jason discusses LastPass’ recent possible security breach, what this means, how LastPass is responding, and what users of the service should do as a result. Jason also brings us a correction to a previous episode regarding which features are available in the free vs paid plans.
• Nathan updates us with hard data about the white iPhone 4’s alleged width gain, and discusses whether or not the color of the actually makes a difference.
• Kyle delivers an iPhone tracking update: Official iOS update released. What it changes, and how it helps you stay more secure. Jason discusses Apple’s impressive response to the tracking issue.
• We discuss the fact that, while Android phones are more popular than the iPhone, the iPad is much more popular than the slew of available Android tablets. Do Android and iOS tablet customers expect different things from their tablets? Are the iPad’s main advantages timing and price?
• Nathan takes us through the recent upgrades to the iMac line, we discuss if it’s worth getting the 21-inch model, and whether or not the two Thunderbolt ports on the 27-inch model eliminate most of the need for a Mac Pro.
• Kyle compares how (relatively) easy it is to service the newer iMacs compared with the older iMac G3 and iMac G4.
• We share some tips on how to get Spotlight to work for you, including excluding certain directories and search paramaters (pdf) based on the file metadata.
• Our Question of the Week was asked by Carlos: Snow Leopard Server as main (everyday) OS, and we discuss whether it’s a good idea to run desktop apps on a server.
• Our App of the Week is Tiny Wings, a game for iPhone and iPad where you play as a bird and try to fly as far as you can before the sun sets. Tiny Wings is available on the App Store.

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Your hosts for this episode once again are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein.

• Jason and Kyle begin with news of Stack Exchange’s improved tag sets filters tool, which makes it easier to view your combined profile and follow subjects that interest you across the entire Stack Exchange network.
• Newly-released white iPhone 4: Thicker? We discuss the (late) release of the white iPhone 4 and the girth it’s apparently gained.
• Jason shares his experience using RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook tablet. It’s effective, and it fits in, but is it enough?
• More iPhone tracking! We discuss what’s recently come to light about the Great iPhone Tracking Scandal, including Apple’s official press release and the action it promises.
  • Apple’s claim: It isn’t tracking!
  • An upcoming software update will reduce size of location database, and stop syncing it to computers.
• Jason and Kyle discuss Marco Arment’s experience with having free and paid versions of the Instapaper app on the iOS App Store, and share their own views about free vs. paid apps.
• Nathan brings news of the new, controversial AirPush advertising service for Android. We share our views on what is and isn’t acceptable in mobile advertising and in-app purchasing.
• Kyle shares his support for the idea of a Continuous Client, a mechanism to let you pick up on one device exactly where you left off on another one. We share our experiences with various products’ and services’ good and bad support for this concept.
• Our App of the Week is Coda, one window web development, by Panic. Coda is available on the Mac App Store, and a trial version can be downloaded from Panic’s site.

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Your hosts for this episode are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein:

• We begin by discussing the return of the Stack Overflow Exchange podcast, and some of the interesting observations Joel made about where Stack Exchange users are coming from.
• Speculation abounds as we discuss iPhone tracking and the location visualizations as provided byiPhone Tracker.
• Jason provides tips for being safe on the web. Including using a strong Password Encryption/Storage service such as LastPass, and enabling always-use-SSL features on sites such as Twitter, Google Mail, and Facebook.
• Nathan talks about Mac security, such as enabling Secure Erase features, and protecting your computer at boot time by setting a Firmware Password.
• Kyle helps keep your iOS devices safe with the free “Find My iPhone” feature of MobileMe for iPhone 4 owners, and setting a passcode (or password) on your device.
• Speculation returns as we discuss the recent revelation that Dropbox is not necessarily a completely private storage service.
• Our Question of the Week was asked by nuc. “What are some great Dropbox uses?”.
  • Dropvox is $0.99 on the iTunes App Store.
  • MacDropAny is free.
  • StepMania is free (and fun!), although it is not directly related to Dropbox.
• Our App of the Week is Portal 2! Portal 1 has been Mac compatible since the day Steam was released for Mac OS X, and Portal 2 has been Mac-compatible from the very beginning.

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