In case you’re not familiar with Glassboard, here’s the deal: what Pair is to the bedroom, and Path is to the rec room, Glassboard is to the board room. (Hence “board” in the name. “Glass” refers to your phone’s screen.)

In other words, it’s great for teams (whether co-workers or not). It uses the same statuses, comments, and sharing that we’re all used to from social networks — except that Glassboard is private.

It’s hard to describe what Glassboard is useful for until you find the right fit. For example, I’m in several secret societies and once I got them off of Blackberry (Blackberry has been huge for years in the secret society space) and onto the iPhone, Glassboard was a natural. Now when we’re plotting a global shortage in frozen orange juice or installing one of our members as the head of the MPAA, we do it all through Glassboard.

Huh. I probably shouldn’t have told you that.

Well, just stay where you are. We’ll send someone around.

[fires up Glassboard]

Um… no.

(via Dan Frakes and David Chartier)

Note that Jobs predicts that in the absence of credible competitors, Amazon would begin offering publishers less favorable terms.

Sure sounds all insidious-y and monopolistic-y on Apple’s part.

(via The Loop)

“Mads Christensen made a number of inappropriate and insensitive remarks about women. Dell sincerely apologizes for these comments,” Dell wrote Monday in a post to its Google+ account.

File this under “Headlines you probably don’t want to see your company making.”

Whether developers recognize it or not, users still subconsciously desire some kind of visual feedback when flipping through multiple pages of content.

Ben Brooks admits to feeling the same thing I feel:

I like the iBooks page flip — oddly enough.

I know I’m not “supposed to”, but this is at least one instance where I like the skeuomorphic design. Reading books has always been an intimate experience to me and I like a) retaining something of the original experience and b) having a visual feedback of progress. When you think about what reading text should be in a strictly non-skeuomorphic design, it’d be like reading an article, just vertically-oriented text scrolling all the way to the end. That’d be horrible.

Unless maybe it looked like a big scroll. But I don’t think that resonates with a lot of people.

From a translation of an attendee’s account of a Dell event in Copenhagen.

So here I am at Dell’s huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the – by Dell chosen – moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room.

Aaand it goes downhill from there.

Well, that’s the last time I buy anything from Dell.

…

Oh, right.

(h/t Mike Monteiro who has a NSFW Twitter background)

Sources tell 9to5Mac that Apple will abandon Google’s mapping back-end in the next major iteration of iOS, replacing it with a brand-new mapping application powered by Apple technology. We’ve independently confirmed that this is indeed the case. Sources describe the new Maps app as a forthcoming tentpole feature of iOS that will, in the words of one, “blow your head off.”

CEO of Australian television manufacturer, Ruslan Kogan, back in March:

“Without Google, Apple would be nothing. They may have great phones and tablets but the decent apps and the ones everyone uses on an iPhone and an iPad are made by Google, like Google Maps.

“Google won’t do this but they could piss off Apple by making their apps only available on Android tablets, they have the power.”

Totally.

Looking for a cheap solution for carrying around your iPad and an Apple Wireless Keyboard? I was. But no longer.

I looked at pretty much every bag on this Macworld list of iPad bags and each failed for not meeting one or more of my criteria:

1. Tall enough to hold the Apple Wireless Keyboard. Bags designed specifically for the iPad seem to be almost exclusively too small to hold a full-sized Bluetooth keyboard.
2. Not too big. All I really want to carry is the iPad and the keyboard, not a litter of kittens. I mean, I sold all those kittens at the swap meet under the freeway. Why would I need a bag big enough to carry them now?
3. Ideally less than $100. Which is how much I made on those kittens.
4. Wouldn’t make me look like a tremendous, comically foppish dandy. I only want to look a little bit like a dandy. Fopism went out in the 1700s.

After I decided none of the bags Macworld reviewed was for me, I took to trolling the web for Army-style shoulder bags, partly because that seemed the easiest way around the dandy issue.

Oh, I’m sorry, are you calling the Greatest Generation a bunch of dandies? No, I didn’t think so.

The $16 bag

Eventually I found the Rothco Vintage Canvas Military Tech Bag which, I was amused to notice, has actually been renamed to the “Vintage Canvas iPad Bag” in the two weeks since I bought it. I guess there weren’t that many people putting Blackberry Playbooks in them. Also, going with the military theme, Blackberry Playbook users seem like the kind that would get fragged by their own men, so maybe they wanted to make it clear that wasn’t a target demographic.

I’m going to cut to the chase about the key selling point of this bag: it’s sixteen dollars.

That’s right. It’s a tenth the cost of some of the bags on Macworld’s list.

Is it perfect? Nooo. Not by a long shot. But let me run the key point by you again.

It’s sixteen dollars.

OK, I know that we as Apple customers are supposed to be a more refined lot who like things that are well-made and have ease of use and a superior user experience and feel like a walk in the sun. But I frankly take my iPad and the keyboard out a couple of times a week. I wanted a bag that would fit the iPad and the Apple Wireless Keyboard that wasn’t fancy and didn’t cost a lot.

The $16 bag open with iPad, keyboard and charger

This is that bag.

As far as looks go, this bag looks about as tough as a shoulder bag holding a dainty electronic device can. It’s available in olive (pictured), black for night missions and khaki for desert warfare.

The bag has one main compartment that’s sealed at the top by a zipper and has a fold-over cover that’s held in place by a rather small piece of Velcro. There’s a zippered internal pocket in the main compartment for a power adapter, deck of vintage dirty playing cards, severed ear, what have you. The bag is padded but not a lot. If you don’t have your iPad in a cover that protects the corners, I wouldn’t drop it. Or invade Normandy with it.

But again… sixteen dollars.

Oh, and see that tab at the bottom on the inside? It seems like the cloth lip that the zipper is sewn to inside the main compartment should have been sewn in on one end but it wasn’t.

Sixteen dollars.

I give this bag three and a half yachts out of five.

Here is another shocker: Windows 8 – currently in development and expected to launch this October – will run on the same hardware as Windows 7.

That’s a 2012 OS technically capable of running on 12-year-old hardware. Compare that to Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (also in development and due for launch in Summer 2012) that will not run on 5-year-old hardware.

I’m normally pretty intolerant of people who expect Apple to support their Performa 6400, but I noticed this difference when I installed Windows 8 on my Core Solo Mac Mini, a machine I couldn’t install Lion on.

Of course, refusing to move on from this stuff is part of why Microsoft is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. There is a cost to it, whether you notice it or not.

The new restrictions, writes Dotzler, “are in direct violation of the promises [Microsoft] made to developers, users, and OEMs about browser choice.” So, while Microsoft may be aping Apple with these new application limitations, Apple has the advantage of not needing to worry about past anti-trust agreements.

On the other hand, these restrictions are on a tablet operating system and it’s not like Microsoft has a monopoly in that market. I wonder if the Justice Department would just chuckle and say “That’s OK, honey, you go ahead.”