Posts Tagged ‘iPhone Apps’
April 11, 2010
Updated April 21, 2010.
The world probably doesn’t really need another iPad review, does it?
There’s a glut out of them out there.
And I’m not a tech reviewer. I’m a gadget nut, so feel free to discount my enthusiasm by the appropriate percentage. After all, I did pre-order this thing sight unseen so it could be delivered on Day One.
So this post will be impressionistic, just some notes on my first week with the device.
First: It’s fast. Snappy. It makes the iPhone and the iPod Touch seem slow. It makes a Macbook seem slow.
Second: The battery life is amazing. You don’t even think about the battery. I plug it it in every night, and have used it heavily many days. It has never dropped below 50 percent.
Remarkable for an Apple product: It doesn’t get hot — unlike my Macbook Air, or my iPhone, which can get uncomfortable to the touch and sluggish with heavy use. I have often thought that Steve Jobs was trying to brand me with his products. No more.
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Posted in iPhone Apps, Social Media | 5 Comments »
Tags: Amazon, Apple, Apple TV, Books, computers, iPad, iPad apps, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPod Touch, iPods, iTunes, Kindle, Kindle for iPad, music, NYT, podcasts, Steve Jobs, technology, TiVo, Twitter
February 16, 2010
A sign of a good coffee, I think, is that you can drink a full cup readily without any added dairy, soy or other coolants and flavorings. Most of the time I drink espresso, which generally works as a concentrated shot to the stomach and central nervous system, but on a crazy snowy day — we’ve had a lot of them in New York lately — I like to linger over over a regular mug made with the refurbished Jura, which is still going strong nearly two years later.
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Posted in Coffee!, New York | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Coffee!, computers, Coopac Cooperative, drinks, espresso, iPhone Apps, Jura-Capresso Impressa F9 Espresso Machine, NYC, Rwanda, Spa Castle
October 11, 2009
I’ve enjoyed a number of Guatemalan coffees — the Finca La Folie from Ritual Roasters, Itzamna from Intelligentsia, the Nimac Kapeh and the Soma blend from Barismo — so I picked up these beans on another side trip to Stumptown’s Manhattan location at the Ace Hotel in the 20s. As always, the service was fast and pleasant, and I received a complimentary coffee because I was buying beans. (I was also playing around with Foursquare and its iPhone app, and discovered that there’s a fierce battle to become “mayor” of this location.)
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Posted in Coffee!, New York | 2 Comments »
Tags: Barismo, Coffee!, drinks, espresso, Foursquare, Guatemala, Intelligentsia, iPhone Apps, Stumptown, technology, Twitter
September 9, 2009
More often than I care to recall, I have impulsively downloaded a fancy new iPhone application, only to have it languish on my phone. That was the inspiration for the first “list of iPhone apps I actually use” last year, after the iTunes store started selling third-party applications.
Since then, the number of new applications has grown rapidly. Now there’s a cottage industry of lists, blogs and podcasts devoted to reviewing applications. Here’s a recent Techcrunch list of the “best” apps, which notes the store had 300 new apps rolling out every day. Here’s a similar post at Gizmodo, which put the total number of apps at more than 74,000. Many of the lists that try to sort out the best applications seem to focus more on flash than substance.
In August, I finally renewed my AT&T contract and upgraded to the iPhone 3GS. It seemed like the right time to reconsider the programs I had loaded onto my phone. Did I actually use them?
Here’s my revised list:
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Posted in Blogging, iPhone Apps, Moving Images, New York, Social Media | 10 Comments »
Tags: 1Password, AIM, Amazon, AOL Radio, Bento, Books, computers, dictionaries, Facebook, games, Gizmodo, Google, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPods, iTunes, Kindle, Last.FM, macs, Midomi, music, newspapers, NPR, NYC, NYT, O.E.D., Pandora, Posterous, radio, Readdle, remotes, Shakespeare, Shazam, SMS, software, Stanza, Techcrunch, technology, texting, Tweetie, Twitter, Twitterfon, UpNext, Urbanspoon, Wall Street Journal, webcams, WikiHow, Wikipanion, Wikipedia, Yelp
May 31, 2009
[Note to new visitors: You may be interested in this post about Twitter: "The Public Editor Joins the Cocktail Party."]
Updated March 13, 2011. Hello, and thanks for visiting my personal blog, which is mostly about coffee, with a little bit about social media and technology.
It is likely that you arrived at this welcome page by clicking the link on my Twitter profile. This post is my primitive method for tracking traffic from Twitter.
My name is Patrick LaForge. I have been an editor at The New York Times since 1997, after a dozen years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in upstate New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. I started using Twitter in early 2007, when Sewell Chan and I created the City Room blog for The Times. In May 2009, I left City Room and the metro desk to become the editor in charge of the copy desks.
How I Use Twitter
I generally post updates about Web content I am reading, watching or thinking about, not what I had for lunch. I follow hundreds of people who use Twitter the same way — a collection of active linkers, journalists, bloggers, New Yorkers, Times staffers and readers.
You can see what Twitter looks like to me by viewing my Twitterstream list of the 800 or so accounts I follow and read every day. I find it hard to follow more people than that and read every tweet. If you are interested in a high-signal list that is mostly links and retweets, try my list “Linkers”, the people I rely on to recommend the latest, best content on Twitter and the Web.
I do not automatically return follows, but if you engage with me and provide interesting content, the odds are I will add you to my twitterstream.
And if you are not among the people I follow directly, but you seem nice enough (and not a spammer or commercial bot), I may add you to the few thousand accounts on The Mighty List, when I get a chance. (For some reason, Twitter allows me to go above the 500-account cap on these lists, and I’m not sure why — perhaps it’s a glitch, or perhaps it’s because I was a lists beta-tester or have a verified account.)
If you are relatively new to Twitter, you might be interested in this post, “Basic Twitter Links for Journalists.”
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Posted in Social Media | 10 Comments »
Tags: Blogs, City Room, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google Reader, iPhone Apps, NYT, podcasts, Twitter
April 11, 2009
[Update! New List! New Post! See the new list of iPhone applications I actually still use in this post, from September 2009.}
I am surprised by how well this list of iPhone apps I actually use has held up over the past few months. Most of the apps I’ve added in recent months have been games, none of them particularly amazing, although my daughter swears by one, Jelly Car. I have to admit, it is fun.
The only significant new application I’ve added is the Amazon Kindle for iPhone. It has quickly become one of my favorites. I actually find reading on it preferable to the clunky Kindle 1 in some ways. (I read most of this book on the iPhone.)
The application is free, but of course you need to own an Amazon Kindle and download some books. Kindle newspaper and magazine subscriptions don’t work, nor can you read documents you have sent to yourself or ebooks from sources other than Amazon (the original Kindle allows this). Unfortunately, Amazon and publishers have recently raised the cost of new Kindle books. The page-turning is easier than the Kindle 1, and of course the phone has a backlight, while the Kindle uses e-ink that is supposedly easier on the eyes but requires outside light. The coolest feature is the Whisper Sync: You are taken to the most recent page you read, whether on the phone or the Kindle.
Posted in iPhone Apps | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Amazon, Apple, iphone, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPod, Kindle, Mac, NYT
March 8, 2009
Ah, the signs of spring — Turbotax, Daylight Saving Time and warmer weather. What better time to jump-start a moribund blog? I’ve been kicking around some ideas for posts.
For example, I am really grooving on the new Kindle for iPhone application. It is amazing to be reading a book on one device then have the phone call the same text up to the page where I left off. And the updated New York Times iPhone app is snappier than the original, which had grown slower and frustrating with new phone firmware updates. Now I can get depressing economic news right in my hand in a matter of seconds.
I also wanted to blog about some ideas I’ve been having about Twitter, and how to build a useful and effective personal network, but those thoughts haven’t gelled yet.
In the end, it all comes back to coffee, without which nothing happens, especially on this blog.
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Posted in Blogging, Coffee! | 3 Comments »
Tags: Café Grumpy, Coffee!, espresso, Intelligentsia, iPhone Apps, Kenya, Kindle, Twitter
January 26, 2009
This week’s installment is the Podcast Zeitgeist of second chances, and probably the last such post for a good long while. I’ll continue to listen to a few favorites, but a hiatus is in order. This started as an effort to make some notes about what worked for me as a listener. But it became an exhausting and time-consuming exercise, particularly since I sampled many more hours than I ever wrote about. It was cutting into my Twittering time. At some point I may summarize what I have learned, or not.[See all lists.]
Cranky Geeks 150: Big Wig Bailouts As tech podcasts go, this is one of the best, hosted by John C. Dvorak, with Sebastian Rupley of PC Magazine, Chris DiBonaof Google and Jason Cross of Extreme.com. Topics: Steve Jobs, Bernie Madoff, the fake Belkin reviews scam, disruptive technology like location apps and more. Dvorak keeps it moving. Good stuff. Running time: 31:40 minutes including several ads. Released: Jan. 21.
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Posted in Podcast Zeitgeist | 2 Comments »
Tags: 40-Year-Old Boy, Alex Lindsay, Andrew Horowitz, Andy Ihnatko, Apple, Blogs, computers, Cranky Geeks, Daisy Whitney, Dr. Kiki, economy, Geek Loves Nerd, geeks, idiotboxradio, investing, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPods, iTunes, John C. Dvorak, Jonathan Larroquette, Leo Laporte, Lisa Bettany, MacBreak Weekly, Monty Python, NYC, Pixelcorps, Podcast Zeitgeist, podcasts, recession, Scott Bourne, Seth Romatelli, Steve Jobs, Super Bowl, technology, TiVo, Twitter, Uhh Yeah Dude, Vomitus Prime, YouTube
January 19, 2009
Welcome to the Podcast Zeitgeist list: presented in apparently random order, at inconsistent intervals, its purpose obscure, its usefulness in doubt, its taste questionable, its methods and motives suspect. [See all lists.]
This Week in Tech 177: There’s a Little Shatner in All of Us and 178: Call of Doody. I’m catching up here with two episodes. A special guest on the first of these was Star Trek’s Geordi LaForge (Levar Burton). Burton held his own as a geek on a panel with Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Ryan Block, and Lisa Bettany. A lot of talk about TVs. (Block: “Plasma TVs are on the way out.”) Reviews of the “disappointing” MacWorld Expo and the Consumer Electronics Show. Whether the Palm Pre phone can save Palm (Dvorak: “They’re done.”) They end with the prospects for another Star Trek movie and a discussion of Geordi’s visor. The latest episode, recorded Sunday night, devotes 20 minutes to the news that Steve Jobs is taking a temporary leave from Apple for health reasons, with a focus on news coverage, from Ron Goldman of CNBC to this profanity-laden Gizmodo post. Dvorak predicts that Apple will go into decline in two years. This is followed bya discussion of the Downadup/Conficker worm that infected 9 million Windows computers in four days (download the security updates, people). Laporte is wiggy on this episode (“Conficker? I hardly knew her!”), perhaps because he and panelist Tom Merritt attended a concert the night before by the geek troubadour Jonathan Coulton and the improv duo Paul & Storm. (The “doody” in the podcast title refers to panelist Patrick Norton, who has to change his son’s diaper during the show and never returns.) The liquidation of Circuit City. A discussion of digital TV up-converters (Dvorak recommends a model.) Laporte recommends an audiobook: “Predictably Irrational.” United Kingdom porn filters are blocking Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine. Are Are Google layoffs and the killing of <a href="“>features like Jaiku and Dodgeball a sign of a market bottom? The episode ends with a clip of Coulton’s “Mandelbrot Set.” Running times: Both 1 hour 20 minutes, give or take a minute. Released: Jan. 11 and 18.
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Posted in Podcast Zeitgeist | 6 Comments »
Tags: 40-Year-Old Boy, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Apple, Blogs, Christian Comedy Podcast, computers, Dinner Party Download, Facebook, Futile Podcast, Geek Loves Nerd, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPods, Jonathan Larroquette, Lamont Mozier, Leo Laporte, MacBreak, macs, MacWorld, Mike Schmidt, movies, netbooks, Podcast Zeitgeist, podcasts, Seth Romatelli, technology, This Week in Tech, Twitter, Uhh Yeah Dude, Weekly
The world probably doesn’t really need another iPad review, does it? 
