Stamped

John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes:: "New social network/recommendation engine, which like Instagram, is debuting with but a single interface: a native iPhone app. The premise is simple and ambitious: you “stamp” things that you enjoy and recommend. There aren’t different types of stamps. There’s no rating from 0-5 or anything like that. Just stamped. What kind of things can you stamp? All sorts of things: restaurants, places, books, movies, music." "Stylish, distinctive, nice-branded UI, too"

Stamped describes itself as:

Stamped is a new way to recommend only what you like best—restaurants, books, movies, music and more. No noise, no strangers, just the things you and your friends love. Read their entire introductory blog post.

Siri Argument

Very funny Siri spoof from College Humor. Credit to John Gruber for pointing this one out.

Searching The Web For Planes In The Sky

Jason Kottke, writing on Kottke.org:

If you search Wolfram Alpha for "planes overhead", it returns a list of planes passing over your current location along with a sky map of where to look. This is very impressive. My next question is, since Siri searches Wolfram Alpha, will this same search produce the same results using Siri on an iPhone 4S?

Apple Releases iTunes 10.5.1 with iTunes Match

Lex Friedman, writing for Macworld:

If you have $25 to spend, you’re about to free up a lot of storage space on your iOS devices. On Monday, Apple officially released iTunes Match to the masses, with an update to iTunes for Mac and PC. The company missed its initial deadline of a late October release, but a note to developers last week indicated the feature’s launch was imminent. iTunes Match, part of the iCloud suite that launched earlier month, stores the entirety of your music library in the cloud, at a cost of $25 per year. Unlike competing cloud storage music services from Amazon and Google, iTunes Match saves a lot of bandwidth and time in your initial synchronization, because Apple can identify which songs in your iTunes library are already available in the iTunes Store. If Apple can positively match a song in your library with any of the 20 million tracks for sale in the iTunes Store, it won’t bother uploading that song; only unmatched songs get uploaded to the cloud. Once iTunes Match is finished indexing your library, you can connect to your music from other computers, along with your iOS devices. Any matched music you stream from iCloud plays back at 256-Kbps quality—even if your original copy was encoded at a lower quality. As an Apple Developer, I've had access to and have been using iTunes Match for about 3 months now. There were some bugs early on that were duplicating my playlists - but it looks as if they've fixed those. I haven't seen any problems like that for weeks now. Still though, with the sometimes shaky stability that iCloud has had so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the initial rush of users doesn't create problems of some type for the short term. Long term though, I see this service as being a winner. You need to download the new version of iTunes in order to use iTunes Match. I recommend you do so.

Adobe's Rehabilitation

Matt Drance, writing on Apple Outsider:

Adobe’s announcement clearly states that only Flash Player for mobile is going away. The tools — the things that Adobe’s customers really turn to Adobe for — can now grow freely to please creatives in new, forward-looking ways. I truly believe that a long-term Quixotic commitment to Flash Player would have destroyed Adobe from within. It was an expired product that distracted the company from its core competency of making tools for creative professionals. Adobe still has a lot of work to do if it wants to be a real leader in modern web technology, but this is the right first step.

OS X Lion has a hidden 'drop box' for easy file syncing between Macs

Chris Rawson, writing for TUAW:

Mac OS X Hints has discovered that Macs running OS X Lion and registered with iCloud have a hidden "drop box" in the user's Library folder that allows for easy document and file syncing between Macs. A folder within ~/Library (which Lion hides by default) called "Mobile Documents" contains iWork documents synced with iOS devices via iCloud. I saw this article a few weeks back and have been to busy to post it. This gives me a lot of optimism that perhaps, one day, iCloud can replace Dropbox for me. Hopefully within the next year, even.

Say Hello To Siri

The first iPhone 4S commercial is out. Better that some movie trailers.

How Many iPhones Will Be Upgraded Next Year?

Horace Dediu, writing for Asymco:

Last week I proposed that there were two significant markets for the new iPhone: 1) the existing iPhone user base 2) smartphone “non-consumers”. Today I want to dig a bit deeper into the first market to get an idea of what it amounts to. Very good analysis.