Via Daring Fireball: One Year:

What strikes me is this. One year ago I was in the same hotel waiting for the same keynote to the same conference. The iPad was a distant rumor, and Steve Jobs was on medical leave, two months out from a life-saving liver transplant. Now here we are, and the iPad is an amazing industry-changing smash hit (I’m writing these words using one), Apple’s market cap has surpassed Microsoft’s, and Steve Jobs is getting ready to take the stage, in his prime and at the top of his game.

Amen!

Here’s a great interview from Just Another iPhone Blog writer Patrick Jordan, who kicked up a dust storm with this controversial post about Tweetie 2 for iPhone being a paid upgrade.

What are the factors that are driving the whole ‘race to the bottom’ in iPhone apps pricing?  (really hoping you’re not going to say ‘posts like yours’)

Haha, absolutely not.  I think posts like yours are hugely important for getting an open discussion going on things the App Store needs.  One thing it needs is a mechanism for paid upgrades.

You also get this tidbit at the end:

Oh, and by the way, Loren also got Tweetie 2 submitted for App Store approval today.

Patrick Jordan of Just Another iPhone Blog is responding to criticism over his not agreeing with $3 upgrade price for Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone:

I have just said that there should be a full price and a lower  ‘upgrade price’ for current users.  Or more accurately, because Apple does not make it possible to do things this way, there should be some equivalent of that worked out for current users.  Having seen the feedback on my post, some of it from developers, maybe this is not very viable.  If so, then it would be nice to hear from Atebits that they are at least exploring this, or have already done so.

Here’s his original post. Here’s what I wrote.

His response does little to change what was originally said, which is a generally short-sighted stance. (And I enjoy his blog, for what it’s worth. I just disagree on this.)

Stupid rant on Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone being a $3 paid upgrade.

Most excellent rebuttal.

From atebits comes this most welcome news:

Tweetie 1 set a new standard for Twitter clients and iPhone apps in general. It proved that you didn’t have to sacrifice intuitiveness for functionality. Today we have iPhone OS 3.0, 3GS, and new Twitter APIs. Tweetie 2 is built from the ground up to take advantage of these fantastic new technologies.

Tweetie is my Twitter app of choice on both the iPhone and the Mac. I’m anxiously awaiting these updates.

I talked about Patrick Jordan of Just Another iPhone Blog and his dislike of NetNewsWire’s new interface in my review. This morning they posted a second look at the app, which offers a few nice items. The best one:

Another small thing I’ve found I quite like is that within individual feeds, there are clear section dividers showing which day and date item were published. I find this very helpful.

Simply Apple – a gallery on Flickr.

H/T: Minimal Mac

Well crap.

I love Mint. I hate Intuit.

h/t: @yeraze

David Pogue published a short interview with Steve Jobs on his blog.

The leading question: Why no video camera on the iPod touch:

Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”

Jobs takes a stab at Amazon, but I didn’t think it was that pointed. If anything, it was just bluntly truthful without being disrespectful.

Jobs also talked about trying to gain 30 pounds by eating lots of ice cream.

TUAW writer Dave Caolo shares how he set up a “Writing Mac”:

I’ve also had a G5 iMac for a while, but nothing for it to do. Earlier this week, I gave it a fresh install of Mac OS 10.4 and thought I’d use it for blogging and other writing. No web browsing, Twitter, iPhoto or the like. Call it a “Writing Mac.” Here’s how I set it up.

There’s a few good ideas in there, but I don’t understand why this can’t be done on your main machine by turning off all distractions.

A nice addition to the iPod nano:

The new iPod nano comes in 8GB and 16GB models, each of which incorporates a video camera and microphone on the back of the unit, as well as a built-in speaker. The nano can display video or sync it back to your computer, where you can easily upload the clip to YouTube. The microphone can also be used with the nano’s voice recording feature.

I still haven’t purchased an iPhone 3GS because I’m not yet eligible for the upgrade price. For that reason, I’m waiting until the next release of the iPhone hardware next summer.

That said, the iPod nano with video capability is tempting. Perhaps I’ll buy it for my wife and just use it a lot until I get an iPhone with video camera.

Another nice new feature from the Apple event:

A new interface lets you list your iPhone’s home screen, rearrange the location of applications, search for apps and more.

For me, the most exciting announcement from today’s Apple event was the introduction of Home Sharing:

Home Sharing brings iTunes synchronization to a home level. Up to now, it hasn’t been easy to synchronize iTunes between multiple computers without the use of scripts or third-party applications. Now up to five authorized computers in your house can copy songs, movies, and TV shows between them. You can see each of the computers operating as part of that shared group, stream each others’ contents and drag and drop content from one library to another.

Now I can keep my laptop and MacMini synced. That allows me to tether my AppleTV to my MacMini without anything missing. Finally!

From MacOSXHints.com:

There isn’t an obvious way to add sites to Safari 4 Beta’s new Top Sites page, but this is a Mac after all, so it occurred to me that drag and drop might work, and it does

Cool. Now it might become useful. Probably not though.

A comment on Buzz Anderson’s response to Alex Payne’s post about everything buckets is just about where I am:

I’m late to this discussion… but aren’t you and Alex talking about different things?

Alex never mentions VoodooPad in his article, and if you are creating links between VoodooPad pages then aren’t you using it as more than just an everything bucket? Creating links between documents sounds like what Alex was describing when he said, “Once data is normalized and structured, finding correlations is faster and easier.”

I actually agree with Alex and have gone back to the filesystem instead of everything buckets for organizing lecture material for classes — but I still use VoodooPad for writing notes. VoodooPad lets me build an extensive cross-indexed wiki of all that I’ve learned across terms. There’s nothing “everything bucket” about this. In fact, VoodooPad is a document-based application, so it even lets me have a variety of documents with completely different contexts.

I still use Evernote for some things, but I’ve been migrating toward VoodooPad after using it to build a wiki for a specific project. For me, it became the most intuitive way to take notes and link to a myriad of data I collected on the subject. And, I find myself able to find things easier in the construct I’ve created using VoodooPad.

I love when one project leads to great discoveries with ramifications on other projects or, like in this case, my entire workflow.