Jim Dalrymple:

People generally don’t care as much about specs as they do about what they can do with the device. You can list off the specs for the new iPad and people will just nod politely and smile.

However, if you tell them that with iCloud all of their information will be across every Apple device they own, including computers, you can see a light go off.

Patrick Rhone’s new book, Enough, is out.

Here’s how Patrick describes it:

What is enough?

Enough is a very personal metric. Like our center of gravity, each of us must find what is enough by swaying from less to more until a comfortable medium is found.

The goal, then, is not to find what is, or will be, enough forever. That is impossible. The goal is to discover the tools and strategies you need to find what is enough for you right now and provide the flexibility to adjust as the conditions change.

The series of essays in this book explore many of the ideas and strategies needed to meet this goal.

It’s a lovely book. Patrick is one of my favorite writers, because he doesn’t simply write about technology—he writes about how we should live, and technology only plays a role in it.

Peyton Manning is going to Denver.

I’ve been an (obsessive) Broncos fan since I lived in Denver when I was a kid, so I can’t help but be excited. It’s Peyton Manning, one of the best quarterbacks to ever play, and we’re going to have a good shot this season of going deep in the playoffs. But I’m not too pleased that we will be trading a potential long-term great in Tebow for immediate success now. I don’t know if Tebow will end up being great, but I have a feeling he will—and what’s almost assured now is he won’t do so playing in the Mile High city.

But on the other hand, it’s Peyton freakin’ Manning.

David Barnard, riffing on T.S. Elliot:

When you steal an idea and have the time and good taste to make it your own, it grows into something different, hopefully something greater. But as you borrow more and more from other products, there’s less and less of you in the result. Less to be proud of, less to own.

Nailed it. “Borrowing” implies quickly tacking on some idea you saw from someone else without really thinking through why it’s that way. When you borrow an idea, you’re just photocopying it.

But there’s no shame in taking other people’s good ideas. They’re good ideas, after all. But rather than tack it on, you should think through why it’s such a good idea, and how it fits with your own design’s intent. By doing so, you find the greater truth behind why they designed it that way, and you can integrate it into your own design appropriately, and even improve on it. That’s taking it and making your own, and there should be absolutely no guilt about doing so.

Bo Xilai, the son of a CCP official from when the CCP was still fighting the KMT for control of China, was removed from his position as party chief of Chongqing for a scandal surrounding his police chief. Here’s more on what happened. (It’s worth reading if you’re interested, by the way. It’s a weird story.)

Bo was, until this scandal, considered not just a rising star in Chinese politics, but almost guaranteed a seat on China’s politburo. Bo’s politics are, even by Chinese standards, far to the left—using his position, he favored state-owned enterprises and tried to create a revival of communist culture by promoting Mao quotations, singing “red” songs (including some from the Cultural Revolution), and by encouraging youth to work in the countryside. His rise in Chinese politics was seen as a possible sign that China’s next generation of leaders could move away from the relatively liberal views of current Premier Wen Jiabao and the country’s general progression toward a more free economy since Deng Xiaoping. His removal makes that shift less likely.

His fall also provides a look into China’s opaque political system that we rarely get. The Economist writes:

Welcome, too, is the little window the affair opens into the corrupt, fratricidal ways of party politics. Mr Bo’s downfall was precipitated by the flight to an American consulate of Wang Lijun, his former police chief and right hand in the anti-mafia drive. Mr Wang is now under investigation in China. Mr Bo, too, may soon find himself answering awkward questions. That Chongqing’s dirty linen was aired in front of American diplomats on his watch may matter more than the dirt itself. But his sacking will not herald a new era in which party and government officials are to account for their actions. Crimes and misdemeanours, like ideology, are merely weapons in a power struggle. Winners can still get away with it.

China’s leaders like to pretend that the party is a singular thing, and that China’s politics are very orderly and harmonious. But they’re far from it. Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but in China, threats, harassment, house arrest, being jailed and being killed are all a part of political struggles within the party. Because the party has primary power at the expense of a civil system, and political struggles happen behind closed doors, those struggles inevitably involve the rest of society. When there is no transparent system for transferring political power nor the rule of law enforced by an independent judicial system, everything in society is, necessarily, political.

While the decrease in unemployment is encouraging, it isn’t reflected in GDP data. From the Economist:

This is hardly the unshackling of a Titan. As befits a recovery characterised by such fine gradations as the distinction between modest and moderate, there are a lot of caveats. For one, gross domestic product (GDP) does not look nearly as healthy as the jobs data imply. The drop in unemployment since August is on a scale that would normally be expected only if annualised growth were up to 5%, according to Ben Herzon of Macroeconomic Advisers, a consultancy. In fact GDP grew by only 3% (annualised) in the fourth quarter. It is tracking 1-2% in the current quarter. Most economists still expect growth this year of only about 2-2.5%. That is roughly the rate needed to keep unemployment stable; it is not enough to reduce it further.

We’re in much better shape than we have been since 2008, but the recovery is tenuous indeed.

The New York Times’s iPad app was updated for the Retina display, and includes a couple new features, too: syncing for saved articles and the ability to copy and paste article text and look up word definitions.

It really is a great application. I started subscribing to their iPad app a couple months ago, and reading it each morning has been wonderful. It’s still too expensive, but they’re doing great work. And it should look fantastic on the new screen.

Brent Simmons on introductory app prices:

There’s also something to be said for stability and trustworthiness, which is reinforced by stable pricing.

Lukas Mathis:

After downloading and playing around with Apple’s new iPhoto for iOS, I felt like I was teleported back to 1998. Touching and gesturing in different ways would make seemingly random things happen. I regularly unintentionally activated features, changed views, opened or closed pictures, and got iPhoto into states I wasn’t sure how to get out of again.

Best look at iPhoto for iOS I’ve seen yet.

iPhoto for iOS is uncharted territory for touch applications because it’s so capable. While I think Apple deserves a bit of slack because of that, it’s also true that they need to think through these gestures and UI concepts, because it’s an application that could influence how people design more complex interfaces, and they should take that responsibility seriously. If we’re going to use gestures for the primary interface to application functions (and I’m not so sure that’s a good idea), we need to make sure they’re right so we can remain consistent with them.

Writing for Ars Technica, Iljitsch van Beijnum compares iTunes’s 1080p to Blu-Ray.

Spoiler: iTunes does pretty well.

Big thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed. TextExpander is on sale this week for their Syndicate promotion, so it’s a great time to pick it up if you’ve been thinking about it. It’s a great tool.

Do you type the same things again and again? TextExpander will save you time and keystrokes.

Just assign short abbreviations to your frequently-used snippets of text and TextExpander does the work for you. You can also use one of the included snippet libraries for HTML, CSS, autocorrection, accented words and URL shorteners.

Try it out – there’s a free demo at Smile Software. And you can get 20% off TextExpander through March 31. 2012. Use the coupon code SYN0312 in the Smile store.

Michael Lopp:

A healthy product company is, confusingly, one at odds with itself. There is a healthy part which is attempting to normalize and to create predictability, and there needs to be another part that is tasked with building something new that is going to disrupt and eventually destroy that normality.

Must read.

James Whittaker, while explaining why he left Google:

I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

(Via Doug Bowman/a>.)

Christopher Breen:

The point being, once you see the Apple TV for what it is—an accessory rather than The Thing Itself—it makes sense in Apple’s larger plan. You bring the content, we’ll provide the ways to move it where you want it.

That Apple included the Apple TV as an accessory when purchasing the new iPad says it all.

Ezra Klein:

The different authors focus on various ills. Yglesias’s pulse is quickened by height restrictions, like the ones here in Washington. Avent takes aim at the local coalitions who band together to fight new real estate development for all manner of parochial reasons. Glaeser is particularly eloquent about the way ordinary buildings get designated “historical” to impede new development. But all make basically the same point: Because we don’t fully appreciate how important cities are in stoking economic development, we dismiss the economic costs of regulations that make them too expensive for many to live in.

It makes sense that cities—and the concentration of people that results—leads to a higher level of productivity. When you’re surrounded by more people, doing a variety of things, there’s more opportunity to learn, because it’s right out your front door. You’re exposed to more things and when you find something that grabs you, it’s a lot easier to get started.

That’s even more important now, because most of our big gains this century will come from combining two disparate ideas that no one thought were connected before—seeing connections where no one else saw them. Concentrating people is a very effective way to allow that to happen.

We should make it as easy as possible, then, to allow people to move to cities. But it’s not. Living in many cities tends to be very expensive, and as Klein points out, it’s not due to inherent economic reasons. It’s due to public policy, and that’s absurd. We’re holding back our potential by doing so.