Jordan Merrick

BBC News:

That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.

Farewell, Neil Armstrong. You inspired a generation to look towards the stars.

My first (of hopefully many) articles over at MacTuts+ on taking advantage of OS X’s Text-to-Speech functionality, from basic usage to using the say command and creating customised ringtones.

I don’t think anyone really expected the outcome to be in favour of Samsung.

MacRumors:

Facebook has released a completely rewritten iOS app that is significantly faster than the prior version. With more and more Facebook users accessing the social network via mobile, the company views having a fast mobile app as increasingly essential.

About damn time. Don’t expect too much of a change to the UI, this is all about the performance.

Remember when dot updates were about 200MB each? This one weighs in at less than 25MB.

Link

My personal favourites are “Golden Rod” and “Misty Blue”.

Some new commands include sharing which lets you create share points and, interestingly, caffeinate which lets you prevent the system sleeping for a set amount of time. I wonder where they got the idea from.

Great tips from Marco Arment. Perfect for summer… unless you’re here in the UK where it decided to take a year off.

If you don’t have an AeroPress already, then you’re what’s wrong with the world.

Link

Sprint, who have already confirmed FaceTime 3G will be inclusive, might be getting a boat load of customers in late-September.

Verizon still tight-lipped though.

Amazon:

Glacier provides – at a cost as low as $0.01 (one US penny, one one-hundredth of a dollar) per Gigabyte, per month – extremely low cost archive storage. You can store a little bit, or you can store a lot (Terabytes, Petabytes, and beyond). There’s no upfront fee and you pay only for the storage that you use.

Very cool (no pun intended) idea from Amazon as part of Amazon Web Services as an alternative to S3 for long-term file storage, but the pricing structure is still too confusing for most people. There’s Storage Pricing, Request Pricing and Data Transfer Pricing structures to calculate. As one user on Hacker News writes:

The retrieval fee for 3TB could be as high as $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ. It’s not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it’s available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour?

I’m not convinced this is something that will find a large user base if you’re expected to perform some complex mathematics before backing up or restoring.