The iPhone 4 camera...

The back of Breck, originally uploaded by steveobd.

...does a great job with these types of shots. I don't feel the need to carry a second camera anymore while skiing.

iPad and iPhone version of The Economist free for paper subscribers

The Economist is one of three paper magazines I still read.  The other two are soccer magazines.   I haven't tried this out yet, but I just received this in my inbox.   I'm curious to try it out and see if will reduce the number of paper publications I read to two.  And as a subscriber I love the model that it's included in my subscription.

Dear S Olechowski

I am delighted to announce the global launch of The Economiston iPhone®, iPad™ and iPod touch®.

From today, the full print edition will be available to download for reading on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch by 9pm London time (4pm New York time) each Thursday.

We have reformatted the newspaper to make the most of these devices while retaining the familiar feel of The Economist, with all the articles, charts, maps and images from each week's print edition.

All articles are fully cached for reading even when you don't have an internet connection. And we have included our audio edition so you can listen to every article, read by professional newscasters, with easy switching between reading and listening.

Full access to The Economist via the apps is included with your current subscription. 

To get The Economist on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, simply download our free app for your device, then log in using your Economist online e-mail address and password. 

Yours sincerely

Oscar Grut Managing director, digital editions

Another way the iPad is killing the newspapers

Truth be told, way before I worked as a digital vampire, I never really liked paper newspapers all that much.   They were big, bulky, and dirty.  The ink rubbing off on my hands made me never want to touch the stuff. Figuring out the perfect fold so that you could actually read the paper while upright, fuggetaboutit.

Growing up, the rest of my family was into reading the newspaper though, and especially the Sunday Chicago Tribune.  I don't know many people in the Chicago area who didn't group up getting the huge Sunday Tribune, in many cases on Saturday night.  However, the only part of the paper I ever really read was what we called "the Coupons", and in Chicago, that's pronounced "Q-pons."

I guess what I really liked was not the coupons themselves, but what I now know as the "Sunday Circulars" - that is, really just the ads, mostly from electronics stores like Best Buy where you could see what was coming out on "Tune-in Tuesday" and the other odd electronics that you could only see here way before Engadget existed.  I guess that's what stuck with me the most from the newspaper era.

Really, the only ones I look at these days are from Target (and still Best Buy).  I still make weekly trips to Target to get the week's family supplies.

So when I saw Target's new iPad app appear in the App Store yesterday, I was intrigued.  After loading it up, I could see what it was: an iPad version of the Sunday Circular.   Yes, I had downloaded an ad from the App Store.

At first, I felt slightly let down, but after playing with it for 5 seconds I quickly changed my mind.  This app is cool.  And useful.

It just looks like a circular ad

First, it automatically uses your location to find the nearest store to you.  From there you can not only look at the ad itself but search for anything Target carries, and it will tell you if the item is in stock there.

There's also the shopping list.  This isn't a static image like I first thought.  You can actually drag and drop any item from what you are looking at to the shopping list below.   In the screen shot below, the Assassin's Creed game is mid drag and drop.

Dragging and dropping Asssassin's Creed to the list.

Finally, when you are done, you have a shopping list, that you can email, most likely to your phone so you can go to the store and work through your list.

Your list, go ahead and mail it.

So that's pretty interesting to me - that Target got to me with their brand, I downloaded an app that is really an ad (or is it an ad that is really an app?) and the sure end result of this is that I will probably buy more from Target.   

The next step here of course, is for them to start promoting this app in other iPad apps through display ads inside of those apps.  It will be difficult for Target to track purchases from running these campaigns, but I think the number of downloads will act as a pretty good conversion indicator.

I think we've just seen the tip of the iceberg on driving transactions from tablet devices.  There's a lot of interesting thinking going on here, and this is just one example of how innovation is happening specific to these devices.

At any rate, Best Buy has an app for this too, that works with the iPhone and iPad, but isn't quite as flashy - so I guess between these two, I'm officially done with paper newspapers.   Rest in peace.

What's a "heina" in the song Santeria?

I've heard the song "Santeria" by Sublime probably a hundred times in my life, but I never stopped to listen to the words, really.   For whatever reason, XM's Lithium channel has been playing this song non-stop, so I finally decided to tune my ears in a little closer, which makes it easier to sing along at full volume in the car.

Twice in the first verse he says the word "heina" as in "Wait till I get back to find a heina of my own." Now, for better or for worse (I'm thinking better) - I'm not very plugged into the Long Beach-ska-surfer-heroin scene, but I'm guessing this is some kind a slang for girlfriend or the sort.   It's kinda Spanish, but it's not a word in Spanish.

However, phonetically, it's a word in Portuguese.   "Heina" is how Brazilians would pronounce "reina" - which means "queen" in both Spanish and Portuguese.   So I'm guessing this actually slang stolen from Portuguese.

I knew my study of Romance languages would come to good use someday.

Learning languages from soccer players on Twitter

One interesting side effect of following soccer players on Twitter is learning the languages these guys speak.  Probably more than any other professional sport, professional soccer players are often playing outside of their home country, on teams that primarily don't speak their own language.  There's a lot of Brazilians playing in Spain, and like Cesc Fabregas (pictured above at @cesc4official ), quite a few Spaniards playing in England, and many others just are trying to get a more global audience by tweeting in English.

As a result, these players tend to tweet in multiple languages for their multiple audiences.  It's a great way to learn these languages in context, as you have translations right there in front of you.

Here in the picture you have Fabregas tweeting the same thing in Catalan (the Spanish provincial language he grew up with), Castillian Spanish (that most if not all of Spain understands and speaks) , and English (as he plays in England for Arsenal, as well having many other American fans).

If you are curious here's a (non-exhaustive) list of soccer players on Twitter.

Love the new MacBook Air

Three generations of MacBook Air - newest on top, oldest on the bottom

I've been using my third generation 13" MacBook Air for a couple week now, and it's the most amazing computer machine I've owned.  I'm sure the novelty will wear off, but right now it's a total joy to use this laptop, and like many products, it's the little things that makes it great.  There's no benchmarks or anything scientific in this review.  These are just my observations, which in the end are what really count.

As a preface, I've owned and heavily used the previous two generations of MacBook Air, also thought those were great machines, but they had some serious limitations. The moment you had a few office applications up as well as a programming IDE, the machines slowed to a crawl.  Sometimes it was just as slow with a browser with 10 tabs open, which is pretty common for me.

I always buy computers fully loaded, with the maximum available RAM and hard drive space and speed available at the time, knowing it is going to be obsolete the day I receive the computer.  I am sure this puts me in some odd quadrant of whatever personality test you might wish to throw at me but I've learned to accept myself with this one defect.  So be it.

On this particular model, "About this Mac" tells me I have:

Hardware Overview:

  Model Name: MacBook Air
  Model Identifier: MacBookAir3,2
  Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed: 2.13 GHz
  Number of Processors: 1
  Total Number of Cores: 2
  L2 Cache: 6 MB
  Memory: 4 GB
  Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

I'm fairly sure the biggest difference is the amount of RAM available, but the machine certainly feels faster as well.  But on to those little things.

The Weight

The last MacBook Air was so light, I could never tell if I had it in my backpack or not.  In fact, I once left it in California and travelled the whole way home thinking I was carrying it, when I wasn't (luckily a colleague was on the plane the day after me and brought it home).   This one is even lighter, and I have the same problem...I'm always looking in my backpack to make sure I have it.

The Keyboard

I wish I could describe the keyboard but I can't.  Go to the Apple store and try it out.  But it's fast.  For whatever reason, I seem to be able to type amazingly fast on this keyboard. I guess you don't have to push down on the keys as hard.

The Battery Life

The batteries on my previous Airs probably lasted between 2-3 hours.  It typically couldn't make it through a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, yet here I am somewhere over the Rocky Mountains with over 6 hours of battery life left.

The Reboot

Holy crap this thing reboots fast.  You used to have to go get a cup of coffee every time you rebooted an old MBA.   Now, it reboots in what seems like 10 seconds.   I'll actually have to time it to find out for sure, but it's fast.

The USB Ports and Video ports

There's now 2 USB ports, and the video jack is no longer in that fold down door that was impossible to open while the MBA was flat on a table.  Yay.

The Screen

Well, hell - the 1440x900 screen is beautiful and of course has a lot more real estate than the 1280x800 version.  However, I do tend to do a lot of browsing in the "flower + '+'" mode so that I can actually read the text on most web pages.

All in all, where I thought the previous MBA's were too underpowered for anyone doing any type of programming, this generation finally supports enough RAM to make development possible.  Even if you don't do any of that, this is a great machine that I highly recommend.