This is the nineteenth episode of the Ask Different Podcast. Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, Nathan Greenstein, and Mike Bradshaw.

• We’d like to welcome a new co-host to the Ask Different Podcast, Mike Bradshaw! Mike is the #1 user on Ask Different by reputation, and worked in an Apple Store for 4 1/2 years. Thanks for being on the show, Mike!
• Last Friday, Apple opened a new retail store in New York’s Grand Central Terminal. The store looks beautiful, and quite different than many other Apple Stores. Some of Stack Exchange’s CHAOS team members got a chance to visit (and promote Ask Different!), and posted some photos and info on our Ask Different Blog.
• One of the interesting notes in that post is mention of Apple employee with an Android phone in his pocket leads to a discussion of how the hardware in Apple Stores has changed. We recall the old Windows CE-based point of sale devices, the transition to the iPod touch-based checkout, and the recent self-checkout options. We consider how Apple controls theft with the new system.

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I did my Wikipedia research on the train before I stepped foot in Grand Central Terminal for the inaugural opening of the largest Apple store in the United States.

The iconic opal clock above the central information booth is valued between $10 to $20 million. The building is properly referred to as Grand Central Terminal, not Grand Central Station. During World War II, soldiers were instructed to shoot on sight anyone who gained unauthorized access to the hidden AC to DC converters, which powered tracks along the entire Eastern Seaboard. The ceiling zodiac, originally painted in 1912 and scraped clean of tobacco soot in 1998, is painted backwards, as if onlookers are glancing in on the universe from the outside — from God’s perspective.

On a typical day, 750,000 people pass through Grand Central Terminal. Today, Friday December 9 was not typical.

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Making a photo editor for iPhone is a tricky thing. Attempts to make something like Photoshop or Pixelmator for iOS all fail terribly, simply because you can’t put that many features onto a tiny touchscreen and end up with an app that’s pleasant to use. One way to interpret this limitation is that any photo editor for iPhone must be very simple and basic. Another way to interpret it is that any photo editor for iPhone must think outside the box in order to provide powerful editing capabilities that are pleasant to use.
Snapseed does the latter.

Snapseed is a $5 app from Nik Software that allows you to do some rather advanced editing from your iPhone. Because of how the app is organized and how the edit process works, the app is easy to use and— dare I say it— even fun.

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This is the eighteenth episode of the Ask Different Podcast. Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, Nathan Greenstein.

• After we open with talking pleasantly about weather and recount the amount of time we’ve now been doing this show, we discuss the state of iOS 5’s Notification Center and apps that don’t seem to play nice with it. And speaking of not playing nice, Facebook’s iOS app. After our round of kvetching concludes, we talk a bit about Facebook’s direction, what demographics may be most beneficial, and who they have in mind with new features.
• Upon realization of our dislike for the subject matter, we quickly move to Nathan’s recent visit to his local Seattle Microsoft Store. While there are many obvious differences, there’s also a significant amount of similarity in presentation, layout, and choice of terminology. Nathan has also elaborated on his thoughts and more in his blog post on the subject, and you can view all of his pictures from the visit in his Flickr set.
• Returning to the subject matter at hand, we discuss Apple’s announcement that by next March, all apps sold via the Mac App Store will be required to be sandboxed, and will have a defined set of privileged activities they will be allowed to use, which must also be accepted by Apple at the time of the App’s submission to the Mac App Store, called “entitlements”. We discuss the implications this has in the near term, and how this trend could continue over the course of a few years.
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Seattle’s Apple Store is located in the University Village shopping center. As of late October, so is the Microsoft Store.

Perhaps because Seattle is near Microsoft’s hometown Redmond, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into promoting this new store. Before the store opened, Microsoft opened a tent for people to play with Kinects and Windows Phones. If you visited the store on grand opening day, you got free tickets to a Black Keys concert.
So, overall, a very aggressive promotion strategy. But that isn’t the only aspect of the store that has been aggressive. Take, for example, the location.

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Background

On older Macs, startup can take a long time. One of the main causes of this is apps that launch at startup. These apps can take the form of menu-bar apps like Dropbox and Growl, or full-fledged apps that you always use and have set to open at login.

Chances are, you don’t need to use all of those apps immediately after you log in. Today I’m going to share a way to use AppleScript to stagger the launch of these apps. That way, the apps you need first can start launching before the apps that you need later. Apps open faster when there is less ‘competition’ from others opening at the same time, so you’ll be able to use the apps you want first sooner after you log in.

On my older MacBook, the time from showing my desktop to loading all my startup items was shortened from 42 seconds to 35 seconds.

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This is the seventeenth episode of the Ask Different Podcast. Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, Nathan Greenstein.

• Starting with some site news, Ask Different has seen record traffic lately. On the heels of iOS 5, iCloud, and the iPhone 4S, visits have gone way up! We hope to see similar increases after future Apple updates. We encourage our users to ‘seed’ the site with questions that people are likely to have after a major software or hardware release.
• As we get more traffic, there is a noted increase of ‘help desk’ questions that specify a vague problem with few details. The Stack Exchange system works best with long, detailed questions, and detailed answers. Back-and-forth troubleshooting is not a good fit for SE. We encourage our users to edit the question (if possible), vote to close, or flag these questions.
• Concerning flagging, note that the moderators can’t review every question on the site, but we do review every flag. If you see something bad, please flag it! And if we decline your flag, don’t take that to mean that you should stop flagging. Kyle and Nathan always try to explain why a flag has been declined.
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According to iTrivia: All About Apple, I probably love Windows Vista.

Interestingly enough, I do love Windows Vista and use it as my primary operating system at home.  My next computer will be a Macbook, but until the budget allows it I’m stuck with what I have.  Fact is, I got Windows Vista with my computer and have never had any issues with it.

Anyway, iTrivia: All about Apple is a multiple choice trivia game for iOS  from the developer ‘the binary family GmbH’.

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Welcome back to AppleScripting! To see what we’ve done so far, take a look at the AppleScript category. We’re jumping ahead a bit, but you should be able to catch on fine. As always, if you have questions you can ask in the comments and on Ask Different.

Today we’ll be making a workspace-based app launcher. Once we’re done, you’ll be able to choose a workspace (e.g., “Programming”) from a list and automatically have AppleScript launch the apps you use in that workspace.
The scirpt will use many different parts of AppleScript; including loops, lists of records, and tell blocks.

To begin, create a new script in AppleScript editor. See the Introduction to AppleScript post if you need a reminder of how to do that.
Let’s get right into the code.

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This is the sixteenth episode of the Ask Different Podcast. Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, Nathan Greenstein.

• We begin by asking Siri to introduce herself. She tells us who she is, and what she can be used for. We demo some of Siri’s core productivity functionality, as well as some more… playful things. For instance, we get Siri to call Nathan, Shirley.

• On the less playful side of Siri, we show how Siri can, by default, accessed from a locked phone without entering a passcode. That means that you can make calls, send texts, and send emails from a ‘locked’ phone. Nathan demonstrates how this could be a very effective way to mess with someone.

• Just as we’re finishing demonstrating what Siri can do, she decides to stop working! As it turns out, the day we chose to record was the same day that Apple’s Siri servers began experiencing difficulty. It seems that the issue has been resolved by now, but this is an important reminder of Siri’s complete dependence on the cloud.

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