Megalomania.me

Does any of this sound familiar?

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSj8GUZDuac

David Pogue:

Still, the WWDC announcements reminded small software companies everywhere that their efforts could be duplicated by Apple at any time. Think of Growl (very similar to the new Notifications feature of Mountain Lion); the Classics app (whose bookshelf design was borrowed for iBooks); Instapaper (now made obsolete by a new feature in Mountain Lion’s version of Safari); and so on.

I talk about Instapaper a lot, about how I love it and about how it’s the app I use most on my iPad (and how Instapaper for iPad accounted for more than half of my decision to get an iPad), but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about how I started using Instapaper. It happened because Apple announced Reading List last year, and when I looked into it I learned that there was a much better app for the web and iOS that did the same thing but in a cooler way.

Development of Safari is quite a bit behind that of Chrome and Firefox now. I’d love to switch back to Safari if there was a way to write decent extensions for it that could rival what Chrome can do, let alone what Firefox can do. But I doubt that will happen any time soon. I’m sure some people will use the Safari Reading List feature, but I doubt it makes even a dent in Instapaper’s sales/subscriptions.

Streetsblog:

The new, Apple-developed map application will include driving directions and walking directions, but no transit information, at least not standard. Instead, if you want to figure out how to get somewhere without driving, users will have to download a third-party application.

I wondered whether Apple was switching from Google-provided maps data to other data as a giant FUCK YOU to Google or whether maps was really something strategic that Apple felt it should be controlling in its users iOS devices. The answer has arrived: Apple doesn’t care about doing a better job than Google in maps; they care primarily about not using Google’s maps.

A woman named Dr. Kaayla Daniel has taken the time to go through the entire new Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs and pull every reference to food, diets, eating, &c.

It comes to 39 roughly chronological instances, spanning across Jobs’ life from his youth to his death.

Reading these 39 passages was pretty troubling. Interspersed in a massive biography, they might be lost or seem fundamentally repetitive enough to skin, but isolated and presented back-to-back, they paint a picture of a guy who was very troubled by food and who was obsessed with it in a totally unhealthy way.

Perhaps it’s true that his obsession was fueled by the mental anguish of his adoption and perhaps his ridiculous and insane practices caused or contributed to his cancer. Tough to say. What’s clear is that it’s more in line with mental illness when pickiness degenerates into a fierce anti-food ideology and paranoia about foods.

I just tried to use Google Offers to buy something ($100 massage for $50). Google Offers would only let me pay through Google Wallet. But I don’t use Google Wallet. So I went to turn Google Wallet on in my Google account, and it wouldn’t let me turn it on because it didn’t like the cookie settings in Google Chrome. I block cookies from third-party sites, which I believe is the default setting, but I added an exception to allow cookies from google.com, and it still didn’t work. No cookie settings approval means no Google Wallet, which means no Google Offers, which means no half-price massage.

This is not how a service works when its developers actually want it to succeed.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8OEuj6-pVg

http://malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/

I wouldn’t be surprised if Malcolm Gladwell himself is behind this.

My favorite one:

Zappos gives me these four shipping options:

1-Business Day Shipping – FREE!

Standard Shipping (4-5 business days) – FREE!

Priority Mail (3 or more business days) – $7.00

2-Business Day Shipping – $15.00

So if I want to pay nothing, I can get it in one day. Or I could pay nothing and wait four or five days for it. And for those people who insist on paying for something that’s free, there’s the option to pay $15 for it to take twice as long, or $7 for at least three times as long.

I want to be a fly on the wall in the conference room where they come up with this.