Linked List: September 13, 2009

Sunday, 13 September 2009

iFixit Takes Apart a New 32 GB iPod Touch 

From the second page:

It appears that Apple left in room for a camera in the top of the device. There is a 6mm x 6mm x 3mm space between the Broadcom chip and the wireless antenna. There isn’t enough depth for an iPhone-style autofocus still camera, but just enough room for the camera that Apple used in the 5th generation iPod nano.

Also interesting: the wi-fi chipset supports 802.11n.

Notational Velocity 2.0 Public Beta 

Notational Velocity is a hidden gem of an app for the Mac, by Zachary Schneirov. It’s a lean, mean, and truly minimal note app, with an interface that emphasizes minimizing friction. Easy to search, easy to create new notes. It sounds odd when you hear just how minimal the UI is, but in actual use, it works well. (I mentioned Notation Velocity in my “Untitled Document Syndrome” piece earlier this year.)

Version 2 has been a long time in the works and adds quite a few new features. And, the app is now open source (with a liberal BSD-style license), with a project page on GitHub.

Sebastiaan de With’s Snow Leopard UI Roundup 

Another detailed look from Sebastiaan de With at the UI changes in a major Mac OS X update.

(One comment from yours truly: I very much like Snow Leopard’s new Exposé window tiling, where windows are aligned to a strict grid. You can make the case that the old 10.5 tiling algorithm looked better and made better use of screen space when tiling just a handful of windows (such as in de With’s example screenshots, which show just three windows), but the new Snow Leopard tiling looks and works way better with many windows. And it’s with many windows that I most use Exposé, particularly Safari.)