The most interesting part of reading this article was learning of the gap between established scientific knowledge and standard typographic practice. From the author's conclusion:
"During my first year with the (ClearType) team I gave a series of talks on relevant psychological topics, some of which instigated strong disagreement. At the crux of the disagreement was that the team believed that we recognized words by looking at the outline that goes around a whole word, while I believed that we recognize individual letters. In my young career as a reading psychologist I had never encountered a model of reading that used word shape as perceptual units, and knew of no psychologists who were working on such a model. But it turns out that the model had a very long history that I was unfamiliar with."
I was actually just at a Verizon store and got a chance to see both Kin devices in person. I wasn't expecting to be blown away by any means, but I was amazed at how bad they were.
The physical construction seemed fine, but the interface was so choppy it was hardly usable, and the colors looked really washed out. Noticeably worse than the LG and Samsung dumbphones sitting next to it.
With a browser and reasonably powerful components, it could have been a nice complement to the Zune lines. My guess was that it was just a field test for MS cloud services for mobile users, and for some reason they didn't want to do it with Windows Mobile.
The automatic updating is really nice. I'd like to see this around for more events. Also, almost.at was mentioned here a long time ago, and it's another great tool for live events http://almost.at/#wwdc
Definitely a huge improvement over the stock Android player. Another player worth checking out is Cubed (an exponent "3") http://jkontherun.com/2010/03/30/android-music-player-cubed/
A few things I miss coming from Cubed are the ability to queue to the current playlist and last.fm integration.
Using "mplayer -vo caca MovieName.avi" to play a video file in a Linux terminal is awesome - even if maybe it doesn't quite belong in an article about Windows tricks.
Just installed it. The background animation is a nice touch, although there's a bit of choppiness at first. It can be disabled if it's an issue, so I don't see it being a problem. I've been using Seesmic for the last few months and like it, and there aren't any options I feel I'm missing with this, and it definitely seems easier to access lists, trending topics, and profiles.
I'm wondering what an official Twitter client is going to mean for third party clients like Seesmic and Twidroid. My guess is that it will just coexist with them, just like twitter.com exists with all of the desktop apps and Brizzly, etc.
I've missed Vimperator https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4891 since moving primarily to Chrome. It's so nice to not have to go back and forth to the mouse when coding and testing, and my brain doesn't have to shift gears as much.
The cost of devices themselves are so heavily subsidized by the carriers, that unless the data plan was significantly cheaper than a full smartphone, I would have a hard time seeing the Kins finding a niche to fit in above regular phones.
What finally convinced me to get a smartphone was that I was essentially paying for it anyway over the term of the contract just to access trivial amounts of data on a device that could barely display it.
I can only speak for myself, but I definitely use task switching all the time. I spent a lot of time with a Nokia N810 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N810 before I had a smartphone, and its interface was more like a regular desktop, with a taskbar, etc.
I bought some cables from http://www.bluejeanscable.com/ a few months later. I needed to make a few longer than normal runs, and they had reasonable prices and were direct about the capabilities of their different products outside of spec.
I have been using Qik happily over the default Droid video camera for awhile. One of the best Android apps I've used. I have heard their iPhone versions are great too, especially since they add previously nonexistent video functionality to the older models. I would like to think that a startup's chances of success are at least partly based on the ability to deliver quality products, not simply a quick glance at the pedigree of the cofounders and VC firm.
It's interesting to me that this showed up on HN, as I remember Monty Python being a huge part of my first experiences with the internet. Before searching was so easy, I would spend hours looking up quotes, scripts, clips, and so on.
I might be tempted to say something else that 'Life of Brian' did for us was give people like me reasons to become more familiar with the internet, leading to careers in programming, etc.
If you don't look through the whole website, at least skim their vision for use cases: http://camlistore.org/docs/uses
The single feature of being able to keep a private store of different web services could make this really take off for a lot of people.