Coffee Joulies, the Kickstarter Project

  Due to the fact that my wife has had a lot of time on her hands lately, she discovered this kickstarter project last week called Coffee Joulies. The video above is from their Kickstarter project page. The concept is cool - or hot, I should probably say: > Coffee Joulies work with your coffee to achieve two goals. First, they absorb extra thermal energy in your coffee when it’s served too hot, cooling it down to a drinkable temperature three times faster than normal. Next, they release that stored energy back into your coffee keeping it in the right temperature range twice as long.

> This amazing feat of thermodynamics happens thanks to a special non-toxic material sealed within the polished stainless steel shell. This material is designed to melt at 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and absorbs a lot of energy as it melts. This is how Joulies cool your coffee down three times faster than normal. Once it reaches this temperature, the special material begins to solidify again, releasing the energy it stored when it melted. This is how Joulies keep your coffee warm twice as long. > When we first spotted the project, it was on it's first day. If I remember correctly, approximately $2000 had been contributed. As of this writing, they've raised $88,197. It is now April 6. The project doesn't end until May 2. I predict this project could be as big as some of the other big Kickstarter projects.

We Believe

Apple has released their first commercial for the iPad 2. Stunningly good.

WWDC Sells Out In 10 Hours

As an Apple iOS Developer, I received my email from Apple this morning just like everyone else. Because I happened to be watching Twitter, I saw that WWDC had been announced and conference passes were on sale for about an hour previous. How long did Google I/O take to sell out? How about RIM's Developer conference? Oh right, there isn't one. WebOS? Again, there isn't one I'm aware of. Yes, Apple is doomed because Android is so much of a juggernaut that all of the developers are sure to switch to it, despite the fact that developers are coming to realize that Android users don't want to pay for apps. Come back in 12 months and tell me how that's working out for you.

Trivial Mac App Store Observation

A few weeks ago, on our anniversary no less, I did this. As a surprise for Steffanie when she got home from the hospital, my family had came to the rescue and bought her a new 15.4" MacBook Pro. Monday night while she was in the NCCU, I turned on her old Mac along with her new Mac and using a spare Firewire 800 cable with Migration Assistant, I moved all of her data over to her new machine. It worked wonderfully. This was my first time using Migration Assistant, not ever having fully trusted it before, I usually manually copied over any data when moving to new machines. Everything worked great. Fast forwarding two days, Steff was home and using her MacBook Pro. She launched Twitterrific for the first time but the Mac App Store login prompt popped up. Not having ever logged into the MAS on this machine, it needed to verify her identity before allowing Twitterrific, a MAS purchased app, to launch. I wasn't aware it would do this, but it makes sense diving the DRM attached to these apps. It surprised me but I thought it was neat.

iPad: The Microwave Oven of Computing

Matthew Guay at techinch writes:

And then customers bought them, took them home, and something special happened. They realized that reading eBooks or browsing the internet from their couch was nice on a tablet. They found things they would have never thought to do on a computer were fun and simple. Apps that never made sense on computers with keyboards and mice, like GarageBand and finger paint apps and eReaders, suddenly found life on a 9.7″ slate of glass and metal. Flipboard would have never become as popular on a desktop, and who would have thought of Twitter for iPad’s interface without an iPad? People that would have never touched a computer suddenly found ways a computing device could help their lives, and techies that spent 10+ hours a day in front of their glaring monitors could now break away from their hefty PCs easier. Not doing the same old stuff, but new, innovative things that you would have never thought of on a traditional PC with a screen, keyboard, and mouse on a desk. As Marco Arment said, it’s time to move on from office productivity apps; the iPad opens the window for all types of creative, interactive, personal programs. Finally, the term Personal Computer actually makes sense.

The Fragility of Free

Ben Brooks writes:

The fragility of free is a catchy term that describes what happens when the free money runs out. Or — perhaps more accurately — when the investors/founders/venture capitalists run out of cash, or patience, or both. Because at some point Twitter and all other companies have to make the move from ‘charity’ to ‘business’ — or, put another way, they have to make the move from spending tons of money to making slightly more money than they spend. Kyle Baxter wrote a follow-up to Ben Brooks' article: Twitter’s value lies in it being a communication utility, where anyone and everyone can quickly communicate information. That’s incredibly powerful, and it simply couldn’t exist if it wasn’t a free service. This doesn’t mean the strategy Twitter pursued is correct; rather, it means their error was in being so cavalier about a business model. They assumed if they reached a critical mass of users, turning it into a profitable business would be easy—and they’ve discovered that isn’t really true. It takes just as much thinking as building the actual product does. Read the first article, and then the second one. Done? Good. You may now resume your normal #dickbar bitching.

The $1799 Glass Of Water

Last Sunday, March 6, was my first anniversary with my lovely wife, Steffanie. We had just gotten back from sending a relaxing weekend at the 1804 Inn at Barboursville Vineyards just outside of Charlottesville VA. Steffanie was suffering from one of her headaches (which will hopefully be gone soon) and I was crawling around on the living room floor assembling a new coffee table that we had purchased from IKEA on the way back from our trip. Steffanie was lying on the couch napping with a fresh glass of ice water resting on a coaster on the old coffee table. The lights were off in the room, with only the shades open (the lighting was dim) because it was raining outside. While I was putting together this piece of furniture, I was simultaneously installing Snow Leopard on the media center Mac Mini (I had installed thew OS X Lion Developer Preview on it to test it out, but due to it breaking a few important 3rd party apps, I needed to reinstall 10.6). While going through the Snow Leopard install screen, I did something very stupid. I attempted to sit on the edge of the old coffee table while holding my combo Apple bluetooth wireless keyboard & Magic trackpad (with Twelve South's Magic Wand to attach them). When I did this, I leaned back slightly and tipped this glass of ice water over causing its cold, and very wet, contents to spill across the coffee table. The water spread fast, sloshing up against the closed lid of Steff's MacBook Pro and a bit went into the rear exhaust vent. At the time, I had no idea that water had gotten inside the case, which I will figure out later on - after it was too late. Panicking, I leapt to my seat, setting aside the keyboard/trackpad combo and grabbing the MacBook Pro. I immediately turned it so that the side facing the water was towards the ground and rushed to grab paper towels to absorb any water. The first thing I did was to check any cracks or crevices for water, running the thin edge of a paper towel in all I could find. After searching and drying, for several minutes, I thought I had gotten it all. Me, being an idiot, neglected to unscrew the bottom cover and check the inside for water before attempting to turn it on. Instead, I decided to put it on the kitchen counter and turn it on. Bad move. The screen flickered to life and the Mac began to try to wake from sleep. About half-way into lighting up, the screen flickered and the computer powered down. Uh oh. Pressing the power button again...nothing happened. At this point I flipped it over and grabbed my Torx multi-screwdriver made specifically for servicing Macs. After removing the bottom cover, I found a few small flecks of water here and there around the case. I carefully dried all of these off, and fetched a can of air, to blow air in every crack or crevice I could towards the exhaust vent. After several more minutes of thorough checking, I was sure I had gotten any remaining water out. I quickly put the case-cover back on, flipped the machine over, and tried to turn it on once more. Nothing. I then plugged in the MacBook Pro into the Magsafe and, to my surprise, it booted just fine. Once in OS X, a cursory check of the Battery menubar UI showed that OS X reported the batter as "Not Charging" (later reboots would have it also randomly display "No Battery). To skip several more paragraphs of detailed trial and error, I can say that at this point the MacBook Pro only works when plugged in. If you unplug it, it will die. No battery capability what-so-ever. If you put it to sleep, unplug it, move it to another location, and then plug it back in, it will boot up as if it was completely off. Needless to say, Steffanie was not happy with me at this point. I made a Genius Bar appointment at our closest Apple Store for the next day after work. The Genius was very nice, helpful and sympathetic. He attempted to switch out the battery, but no luck. Apple's estimated cost to service/replace the logic board (the next most likely culprit of the problem) comes in at around $1250.00. Well, there went my plans to have acquired an iPad 2 on launch day. I feel incredibly guilty for what I did to my wife's one and only Mac. She uses this computer for everything - it's her main workstation. I can't just go out and buy myself a new iPad 2 given that I currently have a 27" iMac, iPhone 4, iPad 1, and Mac Mini, while she is stuck with, what I now jokingly call, a DeskBook Pro. Also to further pour salt in the wound (as if the $1799 replacement cost for a new MBP wasn't enough), by my having missed the launch day, it will now likely be 3-4 weeks before I can now even buy an iPad 2 due to stock shortages. As some of you may have previously seen from my tweets or her blog post, she is set to have brain surgery in 9 days. I was looking forward to being able to use the iPad 2 to take my mind off of worrying as I undoubtedly will be spending a lot of time in waiting rooms, hospital rooms, or at her bed side while she is recovering. I do have an idea though. One that she doesn't get to know about. And yes, honey, I know you'll read this so don't bother asking me.

Instapaper 3.0

Thursday night, Marco Arment released Instapaper 3.0. For a complete list of changes to 3.0, see the 3.0 release notes. Out of all the new features, I'm most a fan of its the new and improved sharing & social features. In previous versions, you had to know someone's Instapaper username in order to subscribe to their favorites folder. Many people did not want to share their usernames because Marco recently began requiring people to make their usernames their email address. In 3.0, a user is now able to search their address book, Twitter followers or Facebook friends, for other Instapaper users who have made their Instapaper profiles public. Once you've added some friends, you can go go to your friends' "liked" stream where you can see all the articles that your friends have liked. This makes finding quality articles very easy, depending on how picky you are when selecting the people you follow - and their taste in articles, of course. The new version release has not been without its own problems though. On the night of the release, Instapaper's servers suffered an outage. I am unclear about exactly what happened, but my guess is that due to everyone downloading 3.0 and re-syncing their entire article repository, it flooded the server with an amount of requests that it couldn't handle. Marco has since put new, beefier hardware in place that should be able to handle Instapaper's load now. Another problem that Marco has ran into is a vocal percentage of the user-base who is not as enthusiastic as I am about the new social features. Some complain about the UI changes with regards to the new social buttons. On the iPad app, I see no problem, but on the iPhone app the buttons are rather large and take up a lot of screen real-estate, shortening how many total articles you can see in your list. I can see, if you aren't a fan of these new features, how this would be frustrating. I agree that I think Marco could have implemented the bar a bit better on the iPhone than he did on the iPad, but thats just a minor issue for me (I also confess that I mainly use Instapaper on my iPad so it affects me less). Marco has expressed his frustration with how vocal this group of users has been and has promised an update which would allow them to turn these new features off. Overall I think Instapaper 3.0 is a very nice, major update, to an already indispensable app. Now that the server issues has been resolved, I'm sure Marco will iterate, as he always does, to refine the new Social UI and features. If you don't already have this app, then 1). what the hell is wrong with you?; 2). Have you been living under a rock for the past 2 years? Get this app now. You'll thank me later.