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Freelance Freedom #175: Client Types

Freelance Freedom #175: Client Types: "



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What 10 years of Apple did to its main product

What 10 years of Apple did to its main product: "


How time flies! In the year 2000, I was just finishing high school, listening to Bush, and becoming acquainted with Windows 2000. Back then, I knew very little about Apple, and I'd certainly not heard of the Bondi Bubble iMac (the first iMac was released in 1998). In 2010, well...how things have changed for me!



And, as illustrated by Brett Jordan in the graphic above, things have also changed at Apple.



It's incredible to think that the iPhone has taken center stage at Apple over the last three years. As noted by some of our commentators, there has been a real lack of Mac-centric news recently. Sure, there was the update to the iMac a few months ago, but it's glaringly obvious that the Mac has taken a back seat to the iPhone -- certainly in the limelight department. In fact, I'm reveling in the fact that I'm writing about the iPhone and the iMac at the same time!



Today, the Mac is the center of our digital hub, but it's no longer the center of our digital world. When we leave the house / office / room where the Mac lives, it's the iPhone ( iPad / iPod touch) that is constantly in our hands, and Apple knows it!



Of course, we have to come back to our Macs eventually (in my case, repeatedly, everyday) because the iPhone can't do everything that we want it to, or even some of the things that we want done well, yet. But just looking at this picture shows how far things have come, and how the direction taken by personal computing is becoming even more personal.



The only feature of the iPhone 4 that doesn't beat the iMac of yesteryear is screen real estate. The processor and RAM are double the capacity of the iMac, the iPhone's storage is 2 gigabytes larger, and it's flash-based memory. And of course, it's tiny in comparison. As noted by Obama Pacman, it's Moore's law in effect.



But when will it end? In 10 years time, will we have an iPhone that's five times smaller than the current one, but more powerful than the personal computers of today? Who knows? That might be a weird phone, but anything could happen. For now, I'm still stuck with my iPhone 3G, and I think it might still have some Bush on it. In the meantime, I'm just looking forward to getting the iPhone 4!

TUAWWhat 10 years of Apple did to its main product originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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General Web Content: CAPTCHArt

General Web Content: CAPTCHArt: "

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CAPTCHA-related humor began with the widespread use of CAPTCHA (and more recently reCAPTCHA) on popular blogging and forum sites. The technology is intended to stop spam by asking the user to verify a pair of distorted words, thereby proving they are not a bot. In the case of reCAPTCHA these words are pulled somewhat randomly from an archive of textual documents requiring digitization, and that random pairing of words often produces strange and comical combinations. While simple reCAPTCHA screengrabs have appeared on sites such as lamebook, and 'draw your CAPTCHA' threads have been around on the Something Awful forums for well over a year, the practice really took off when Moot implemented reCAPTCHA on the 4chan boards. Users took their extensive MS Paint skills and trollface comic generators and produced a wide variety of CAPTCHA related art and images, a sample of which we have included here.




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Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You. And It’s Fantastic.

Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You. And It’s Fantastic.: "



Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.


The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time.



The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time.



I’ve been using the service since late last week and have found it to work very well. Occasionally messages that shouldn’t have been marked ‘Important’ are flagged, but I’ve yet to encounter an urgent message that slipped into the ‘everything else’ section. My colleague MG Siegler, who has also had the feature active, has had similar success.


It’s great. I love it. But it isn’t perfect.


My biggest gripe so far is the fact that there’s no way to tell why a given message has been deemed important. Oftentimes it’s obvious — emails from my coworkers are generally given the golden arrows, as are messages from PR contacts whom I frequently communicate with. But occasionally there are oddballs that have been marked important for no apparent reason.


Sure, it’s easy to tell Gmail that ‘this message is not important’ and strip its golden badge. But what if the message was marked important for a reason that is usually sound (perhaps it contains a reference to TechCrunch Disrupt, for example)? It would be nice if I could tell Gmail something to the effect of “this sender is never important”, but not to start frowning on whatever keywords the message contained. Still, it’s a great start.


Of course, this introduces a new dynamic to the way a lot of people are going to be reading email. Email intros will become ever more important, because you’ll want to ensure that your message gets marked with coveted ‘important’ tag.  It also has much broader implications. Increasingly, content will be displayed to you based on its importance rather than its time stamp — not just when it comes to browsing email, but for social networks and other content as well.


Priority Inbox will be rolling out to Gmail and Google Apps users alike over the course of the week.


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Ruchit Shah Headline Animator

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