via Automobile Magazine

My wife got us both Nike FuelBands recently and I started using mine today. Mike Mulvey enters the age of the quantified self.

The first step is setting up your Nike+ account, letting the system know your age, height, weight and sex. You wear the FuelBand around your wrist and it tracks your movements throughout the day via accelerometer sensors not unlike like the ones detecting orientation in iPhones and iPads. Your body stats, combined with your movements, translate to a Nike ‘Fuel’ score along with calories burned and steps taken.

Continue…

So good.

Jerry Seinfeld and Sony Pictures Television are doing a second season of “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee”.

Daily Exhaust rejoices.

The NDP Group says, “Despite the hype, and hope, around the launch of Windows 8, the new operating system did little to boost holiday sales or improve the year-long Windows notebook sales decline.”

Was Steve Jobs not clear when he said we were entering the Post-PC era back in 2010 (jump to 45 minutes 20 seconds)?

Windows 8 isn’t going to change that. Deal with it.

Link via The Verge

Nick Bilton writing about the F.A.A.’s bullshit rules for electronic devices on planes:

Dealing with the F.A.A. on this topic is like arguing with a stubborn teenager. The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane’s avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims, spreading irrational fear among millions of fliers.

My frustrations with flying rise in direct correlation with each year that passes without changes to F.A.A. regulations as it pertains to “portable electronics” on planes. Watch the first minute of the film, The Graduate. We’re still stuck in the 1960’s when it comes to flying.

If cellphones and iPads and laptops had the potential to cause disruptions to a plane’s communications systems they wouldn’t just trust passengers to power down their devices. They’d implement hardware and/or software to guarantee nothing interfered with the plane’s avionics. In my mind, it would be something along the lines of how magnetic shielding works.

I rarely power down my iPhone, let alone my iPad before take-off and I’m willing to bet money half, if not more, of the passengers on any given flight don’t either.It’s a horseshit, antiquated rule and it needs to change.

A little New Year’s Day tip: Don’t try to watch Steven Spielberg’s two-and-a-half-hour-long Lincoln New Year’s Morning.

I found my brain was unable to comprehend at least 90% of it—even while laying down in my big, comfortable hotel bed.

And if you’re like me and love pretty much any movie Daniel Day-Lewis touches, don’t be surprised if you find yourself unengaged with Lincoln. This has less to do with the quality of Mr. Lewis’s acting (which is still top-notch) and more with how dense the plot is.

I think Lincoln is an amazing character study, but a bad movie. For pure entertainment purposes (and less historical accuracy) I’ll take Gangs of New York or There Will Be Blood over Lincoln any day of the week.

MacRumors is reporting some troubling news for 2013:

Some iOS 6 users who use Apple’s scheduled “Do Not Disturb” feature may find that their iPhone, iPad or iPod touch hasn’t automatically disabled the feature on New Year’s morning.

First world problems.

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Over the last few days I’ve been updating the pages of this site to be responsive. Whether you’re viewing it on a laptop, tablet or smartphone, the text and images should adjust in scale for optimal reading.

The starting point for the design was taken from 37Signals recently redesigned company blog(embrace the remix). I feel the same way the guys at 37Signals do in regards to priorities with Daily Exhaust. I want the reading experience to be great and I’ve always had problems with sidebar columns on sites. Sidebars are usually good for the first 600-700 pixels down the page, but after that, all you have is a big, empty gap next to posts. It’s always driven me nuts.

It’s been a while since I’ve messed with HTML and CSS so it’s taking me some time to understand exactly how all the code works, but I’m getting there. The layout will continue to evolve over the next month. At this point I’ve only been able to tackle the landing page and individual entry pages. There’s still a lot of work to be done.

So if you’re reading this from the RSS feed, I invite you to check it out in a browser.

It’s a good day to be a New Yorker. A beta version of MTA Subway Time hit the app store today. For years, the MTA has been slowly, oh ever so slowly, installing countdown clocks in stations to let riders know when the next train is arriving. It’s not a perfect system, but nothing about this city’s subways is. With today’s app release, the info collected and displayed on the clocks is now available on iphones. But, there’s a catch. The countdown clocks have yet to be installed on all the subway lines, so Subway Time only has data for 7 lines. (Conspicuously absent is data for the L train, which was the first line to have the countdown clocks. Apparently, the clocks on the L use a more advanced technology, and that is what is keeping it from…hell, who knows. It’s the most advanced, so it was implemented first? Whatever, the MTA said it’s coming to the app in 6 to 12 months.)

Open the app, and this is what a user sees:

The interface is ugly, and it’s not optimized for retina screens. But I’m willing to let that slide. Does it work? Yes, it does. A user selects a line and a screen appears showing all the station stops on that line:

Choose a stop, and the data from the clocks is displayed:

It’s not bad, and does what it’s supposed to do. Besides the ugly design, though, the interface does have its issues. The information isn’t organized all that well. A user gets the name of the line and the destination, but it could use a header pointing out if it’s an uptown train or a downtown train, if it’s Bronx-bound, Brooklyn-bound, etc., and if it’s an express or a local. Also, the image above results from clicking on the 14th St. Union Square station, which has multiple lines stopping on a single platform, so a user gets the info for the 4, 5, and 6, even if they only tapped on, say, info for the 6 train. This is a good start, but the MTA has a lot of work to do to make this a tip-top app. And, there’s a lot of this nonsense:

Loading screens and poor transitions. That shouldn’t be a hard fix, but this is brought to you by the same people that can’t prevent subway cars from smelling like feces.

Taken from The Combustion Chamber

TheNextWeb: Google Finds Its Design Voice On iOS:

The string of well designed, if not exactly perfect, app updates continued. In no particular order, YouTube, Chrome, Google Search, YouTube Capture and of course, Google Maps all displayed a much surer design hand on Apple’s platform. They obeyed the right conventions for things like the back button and the bottom-oriented navigation bar, but they maintained a sense of what Google has been about from the beginning.

Because Apple established strong human interface guidelines*, Google knows where to break them to make apps that feel both at home on iOS and ‘Google-y’. Once you know the guidelines, you can break them.

When you have no design guidelines you have no foil act against. This is why it’s taken Android’s UI design so long to evolve. While far from perfect, Apple App Store Rules and Human Interface Guidelines have made developers a ton of money and created thousands of well-designed mobile applications. Android can be as open as the ocean but restrictions can be a good thing too.

*Notice how Apple refers to them as guidelines, not rules. You get in trouble for breaking rules, whereas guidelines are just, guidelines.

And seriously, if you haven’t read through the HIG yet, do it. You’ll see there’s a method to Apple’s madness. It’s not all bevels and drop shadows.

America, home of the free[ly monitored]:

The federal government will continue to access Americans’ emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval.

What bullshit.