Dr. Drang on the coverage and over analysis of Apple’s quarterly earnings:

I don’t use a Mac or an iPhone because of Apple’s balance sheet. I use them because they (usually) work for me, and I save my anger and frustration for when they don’t.

I’m far more affected by an iCloud screwup than by the iPhone’s market share, by Lion’s removal of Save As… than by Apple’s stock price, and by Preview’s lack of AppleScript support than by anything Rob Enderle says.

Another useful set of scripts for Panic’s Status Board app..

This time, these scripts let you download And display App Store Sales, Downloads And IAP’s in The Status Board App

During Apple’s quarter earnings call, CEO Tim Cook took a question on whether or not Apple would consider shipping an iPhone with a 5-inch display.

The question is pertinent not only because of sporadic rumors that Apple was considering a larger iPhone, but because so many of the iPhone’s top-tier competitors have larger displays.

Cook began as you’d expect, praising the current iPhone 5′s screen, “iPhone 5 has the absolute best display in the industry,” he said. Cook then began a small session about what sorts of “tradeoffs” to into a smartphone display, including “resolution, color quality, brightness, reflectivity, screen longevity, power consumption, portability, compatibility with apps, many things.”

Although Cook didn’t rule out the possibility, he said that Apple “would not ship a larger display iPhone while these trade offs exist.” Presumably the biggest on on that list would be “compatibility with apps,” as Apple just recently made developers create new versions of their apps for the iPhone 5 and would likely prefer not to do it again so quickly.

Cook also pointedly took a shot at other devices that ship with larger displays, saying “our competitors have made tradeoffs to ship a larger display.” Surprisingly, he didn’t mention one-handed use as one of those tradeoffs, instead implying that they fell short in the factors already mentioned.

Although Cook may be right that many Android smartphones ship with disappointing screens, it’s not as if the relatively worse color fidelity and white balance on the Samsung Galaxy S3 have stemmed its sales.

Apple says no bigger iPhone right now.. Doesn’t say.. No bigger iPhone ever..

Craig Hockenberry:

So, the next time you’re seeing general slowness on your Mac, don’t forget to give Launch Services a kick in the pants. Guaranteed to be more effective than zapping your PRAM.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -r

Useful tip.. I ran into this on the MacBook Pro I use at the office and my air..

This is the last Status Board link for today I promise..

This handy PHP scripts uses Basecamp’s API to return recent activity from your BaseCamp account..

Handy for tracking comments from clients, etc.

I admit, I prefer Things over OmniFocus.

I’ve used them both, but keep returning to Things.

So this handy set of scripts worked well for displaying upcoming tasks in my Status Board via CSV export and a regularly scheduled script that runs and checks what’s due soon..

I’ve been running this for a few days, and it’s been working well, so thought I’d share.

Microsoft is bringing back the Start button in Windows 8.1. Mary Jo Foleyof ZDNet first reported the coming return of the button, and Tom Warrenof the Verge today confirmed it. According to Tom, the returning Start button will in fact send users directly to the Start Screen.

Thus, its reemergence is meaningless.

The Start button once led to the Start Menu, which was an entity in and of itself, with search, shortcuts, and an app list. Microsoft has built new tools to deliver those services, and is sharpening them in Windows Blue, the funner name of Windows 8.1. Thus Microsoft is bringing the Start button back in name only, as its functionality has been stripped and handed to Charms and the Start Screen.

A good question.. Why bother with the start button at all if it just loads the start screen?

Andy Baio:

So, Yahoo’s finally decided to close Upcoming.org, the events community I started nearly ten years ago. And, in Yahoo’s typical fuck-off-and-die style, they’re doing it with 11 days notice, no on-site announcement, and no way to back up past events.

[…]

In hindsight, selling Upcoming to Yahoo was a horrible mistake. Selling your company always means sacrificing control and risking its fate, and as we now know, online communities almost always fail after acquisition. (YouTube is the rare exception, albeit one with billion-dollar momentum.) But Yahoo was a particularly horrible steward for the community.

 

Seth Godin:

Yes, it’s far easier to get understanding or buy in quickly (from investors, in-laws and users) when you take the shortcut of making your digital thing look and work just like the trusted and proven non-digital thing. But over and over again, we see that the winner doesn’t look at all like the old thing. eBay doesn’t look like Sotheby’s. Amazon doesn’t look like a bookstore.

According to Apple’s Muller, the company takes steps to ensure that the data is anonymized and only collects the Siri voice clips in order to improve Siri itself. “Our customers’ privacy is very important to us,” she says.

Here’s what happens. Whenever you speak into Apple’s voice activated personal digital assistant, it ships it off to Apple’s data farm for analysis. Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number — not your Apple user ID or email address — represents you as far as Siri’s back-end voice analysis system is concerned.

Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes.

“Apple may keep anonymized Siri data for up to two years,” Muller says “If a user turns Siri off, both identifiers are deleted immediately along with any associated data.”

Apple keeps data collected from queries to Siri for up to two years…

My biggest question is actually more of why are people surprised by this?

Siri works by remembering more of what you ask it.. It uses people’s queries to build its database and become more useful to the user.. So why are people surprised by how long it stores that information?