My first impression was: it’s really nicely designed, extremely intuitive and responsive. I gotta get one. I also loved the little switch to lock the orientation. Super useful for reading while lying on your side in bed! (Unlike on the iPhone)

However, after a few minutes I started to realize that a) I don’t quite know how to hold that thing (whether with or without the Apple carrying case) and b) it’s getting damn heavy if you hold it in your hand. Those impression were shared by the owner as well as the other people who played with it.

I believe this is going to limit how much you actually want to use that device in different situations. I think it’s actually very impractical to use when you don’t sit down. Also, I believe Apple should actually drop the stupid glass screens: they’re heavy and the glare is just annoying!

Anyways, until then it looks like the Apple product segmentation goes like this:

• If you’re standing, use your iPhone
• If you’re sitting in an armchair, couch or other laid back situation, use your iPad
• If you’re sitting at a table, use your MacBook
• If you’re sitting at your workdesk, use your iMac or Mac Pro

Ah yes, also:

• If you want to watch something on your TV, use your Apple TV or better yet: Mac Mini.

• The acceleration curve of the mouse mouvement which I’ve talked about before
• maximum mouvement speed

The maximum speed can be set through the System preferences panel, but even when the slider is all the way to the right, the speed may be too slow… especially if you line up 3 monitors side by side.

You can get faster speeds through the Applications > Utilities > Terminal. To see the current setting, type in this:

defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling

To make the mouse faster, set a different value, for example:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling 6

Chances are you're using twitter by now. 140 characters max per tweet. And you don't even read them all! You just skim through them.

Way too much information of course.

And yet, many people still write incredibly long blog posts with fancy writing & diluted content. Even bloggers who tweet their posts to twitter. They should know better... I don't want to point at anyone in particular; just click on the averag elink in twitter and see if you want to read all that text...

I'm willing to bet that 95+% of the people who click through from twitter to a blog post do not read that post in its entirety. We have to make those posts shorter!

When you import video, you can save it to any drive connected to your Mac. It will go to a folder named "iMovie Events" on the selected partition.

Whenever that partition gets full and you want to move to a larger drive, you can just move the files to another partition and relaunch iMovie. it will find the files in their new location, no questions asked! And your iMovie projects will continue to work without asking where the source files are.

I wish every piece of software made things just as easy as that

Well here's a new thought: Time is just like Money! Especially: you can't just wait until you find it... if you want some, you have to make it! And in both cases: you have to develop skills to do that!

Think!

I just finished reading "the dip" by Seth Godin. I actually didn't really know what the book was about and I basically picked it up just because it was less than $10 and because I loved previous books by Seth Godin (no doubt he's one of the greatest marketers of our generation!)

Well I'm glad I did. This is a small 76 page book, so it was pretty easy and fast to read! Actually, it could probably be even shorter and still make its point! But wow! More than making a point this book will actually pep you up and motivate you to hang in with your projects... or to quit before wasting any more time. Basically it tells you that the worst thing is to stay on a dead end track...

But for me, the most interesting part was the motivational part about how the dip before success is a normal thing to experience. If a project didn't have that painful phase where nothing seems easy and where you feel like you want to quit, then that project probably wouldn't be worth pursuing anyway... since just anyone else could do the same.

This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to read right now, with the down economy and everyone around loosing their energy.

Of course, the book also made me realize that a couple of my projects were sort of dead ends and that I should quit them right away. But that's part of the process! Reading this book over the last 2 days made me feel better about prioritizing my projects and cutting dead branches!

Minimum cash & time investment. High motivational return. Check it out!

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) — Buy it now at Amazon.com

People keep advising me to just fall back to the real life method of using 43 folders. For the record, that is: 12 folders for all the months in the year + 31 folders for all the days in a month. You then rotate the folders in a way that will make them pop up whatever you need on a specific day.

I so disagree with 43 folders being a replacement for GTD!

While the 43 folders are part of David Allen's GTD method, they do not replace software. GTD software presents you with a list of next actions you can do in a specific context and you can choose from them what you want to do without forgetting anything important. It has nothing to do with dates and deadlines.

The use of 43 folders on the contrary lets you easily pop up whatever needs to be acted upon on a specific date.

Granted some GTD software also copes with dates and deadlines but that is not the gist of GTD.

Now... I bet the confusion has a lot to do with Merlin Mann's site, named 43 Folders (which is a cool name indeed) and talking a lot about... GTD!

The reason behind that is that flat rate removed the dis-incentive to surfing we had when every page we loaded added up on our bill!

The exact thing is now happening with the mobile web. Mosts carriers are now offering unlimited data plans... well at least in the US. Combine that with browsers that are actually usable like the one on the iPhone and we've got everything we need for the mobile web to thrive.

I for one, have been using the internet on the iPhone like crazy since I got it. Everytime I stand in line somewhere, I get a little netfix Don't you?

Interestingly enough though, I use connected iPhone apps just as much as the actual web browser. It doesn't change the cause though: without flat rate pricing I wouldn't use any of this.

Now the interesting thing with the apps compared to standard web pages is this: it's a new business model for the mobile web! Even if it's poised to become a nightmare when trying to support more platforms than just the iphone... (

Btw, the iPhone is the most used mobile web browser, but do you know who's #2? No it's not the BlackBerry! It's the Motorola RAZR...