Ah. No landscape mode for typing. That's not ideal....

Anyway, I definitely like the new Posterous Spaces so far, at least in concept and general design. It's still got some bugs and things to improve, as you'd expect, but I'm not sure yet if it's enough to make me come back and use the service regularly again.

I'll keep playing around a bit and we'll see.

This is a great little app that makes me wonder how I ever got by with a measly mouse. Setting app-specific gestures is especially cool!

Amplify’d from www.tuaw.com

BetterTouchTool makes multi-touch infinitely more useful, for free

there's another free utility called BetterTouchTool that works with both trackpads and Magic Mice, providing a huge number of gestures and infinite possibilities for configuration. BetterTouchTool is a fork of the MultiClutch project, built for Snow Leopard and expanding the feature set greatly. It's the work of Andreas Hegenberg (also the author of SecondBar), and it's come a long way since the first alpha version

Groups of gestures can be assigned to specific applications, or made global. The latest version includes presets (which you can switch between), import, and export. Separate gestures are available for the trackpad and the Magic Mouse, and the new "Live View" feature makes it very easy to gain precise control over sensitivity settings and to test out gestures. BetterTouchTool is free, and is likely to remain that way, according to the author Read more at www.tuaw.com

I'm not overly enamored by Apple Mail, so I'd happily make the switch to an app that's got a better overall user experience (UX). Sparrow does have a cool interface and I can wait a bit for it to support MobileMe, but I simply can't switch to any e-mail app that can't filter incoming mail based on Address Book Groups. I can't switch to Postbox for the same reason.

Why is it that none of the hot mail apps out there do this?

BTW, what's up with MailTags? Is it no longer being developed? It hasn't updated in quite a while, and there's no sign of version 3.0 that was supposed to be out several months ago.

Amplify’d from techcrunch.com

Sparrow, The Beautiful Mac Email Client Flies Into The Mac App Store — And Into Funding

Back in October of last year, we wrote about Sparrow, a beautiful new mail client for the Mac. But whereas most mail clients are now web-based, Sparrow decided it was time to focus on making a great native email experience once again. And today that gamble appears to be paying off. Sparrow 1.0 has just launched in the Mac App Store and it has immediately shot to the number one paid app in many countries around the world, including the U.S. Read more at techcrunch.com

This article in The Economist is interesting, but I'm not sure software will be able to translate natural language well enough any time soon.

Amplify’d from www.economist.com

English as she was spoke

The days of English as the world’s second language may (slowly) be ending

ENGLISH is the most successful language in the history of the world. It is spoken on every continent, is learnt as a second language by schoolchildren and is the vehicle of science, global business and popular culture. Many think it will spread without end. But Nicholas Ostler, a scholar of the rise and fall of languages, makes a surprising prediction in his latest book: the days of English as the world’s lingua-franca may be numbered.

Conquest, trade and religion were the biggest forces behind the spread of earlier lingua-francas (the author uses a hyphen to distinguish the phrase from Lingua Franca, an Italian-based trade language used during the Renaissance). A linguist of astonishing voracity, Mr Ostler plunges happily into his tales from ancient history.

English is expanding as a lingua-franca but not as a mother tongue. More than 1 billion people speak English worldwide but only about 330m of them as a first language, and this population is not spreading. The future of English is in the hands of countries outside the core Anglophone group. Will they always learn English?

Mr Ostler suggests that two new factors—modern nationalism and technology—will check the spread of English.

English will fade as a lingua-franca, Mr Ostler argues, but not because some other language will take its place. No pretender is pan-regional enough, and only Africa’s linguistic situation may be sufficiently fluid to have its future choices influenced by outsiders. Rather, English will have no successor because none will be needed. Technology, Mr Ostler believes, will fill the need. Read more at www.economist.com

So I wonder if there's any chance of some #Amplify #mobile goodness arriving this week.... /cc: @egoldstein

The author does, however, gloss over the difference between "green" in the environmentalist sense and "green" in the Spiral Dynamics / #Integral sense, but in the end, the points made are sound.

Amplify’d from www.vancouversun.com

Who's self-righteous now?   Some worry we're seeing the rise of 'mean greens' -- ecological-and community-minded people who dismiss all world views but their own   By Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun November 25, 2010 Comments (2)

When they're not recycling or buying organic food, protecting salmon habitats or hiking, they are standing up for individual freedom and respecting diverse ethnicities and sexual orientations. These environmentally friendly "greens" tend to be egalitarian, thinking no human is superior to another. Some, for that matter, think whales and tigers are of the same worth as people.

They are post-modern -- rejecting authority and embracing outsiders and indigenous cultures, because they don't believe anyone should be so arrogant as to claim they've pinned down the truth.

I don't know how to put this gently, since some of my proverbial best friends are "green" and I share many of their values, but sometimes some greens can be, how shall we say, a tad, ahem, self-righteous.

This is not just my theory. Few people have developed the concept of the "mean green" further than American philosopher Ken Wilber and psychologist Don Beck.

It's a paradox. Post-modern people find it important to emphasize egalitarianism. Yet, at the same time, they can think they're better than the rest. They can get a bit pious and nasty about it, too.

While it's not new for conservatives to lambaste liberals and greens for treating environmentalism like a fundamentalist religion, Don Beck and Ken Wilber are different -- they get their jabs in with almost affectionate self-criticism.

Beck and Wilber have developed an elaborate, colour-coded psychosocial system called "spiral dynamics," which maintains that greens are relatively evolved human beings -- but that they have a few steps yet to climb on the developmental ladder.

Among other things, Beck and Wilber believe greens need to overcome their subtle self-righteousness if they hope to reach higher, more "integral" stages of consciousness and service.

The world would be worse off if we dismissed everyone who stood up for the environment and struggling fellow humans as merely "smug." Read more at www.vancouversun.com

Love the way he tried to hide the shove as just raising his arms to block the shot, but then had no problem owning up to it.

Amplify’d from www.redsarmy.com

Shaq: No [expletive] layups

"That’s what I do: No [expletive] layups," said O'Neal. "Print it just like that and, if you get fined, come see me, and I’ll reimburse you... No layups."

"I can get grabbed around the neck and it’s not flagrant, but as soon as i body-check somebody... ," O'Neal said trailing off. "Hey, man, I'm used to it. But, yeah, no layups. Guys in our league, they know that. They know I'm serious about that."

"You're supposed to take the bump and fall," explained O'Neal. "I'm not going to do that because they're not going to call it anyway. With [LeBron] coming full speed like that, you're probably not going to block his shot, so you gotta chuck him. I think he missed, what, one of those free throws? So yeah, you just gotta chuck him. He's a tough kid, he can take it. There's a difference between a hard foul and trying to hurt somebody."

Preach on Diesel... preach on.  That line... "You're probably not going to block his shot, so you gotta chuck him" might be one of my favorite lines of all time.   Read more at www.redsarmy.com

Lazyscope has a very attractive UX and makes scanning your Twitter stream much nicer than in most other clients. I especially like that the link previews make it easy to skip past the tweets without links, which are usually nothing I care about reading anyway (i.e. follow-friday nonsense, yet another quote of somebody famous, etc.). And the in-app full-page content pane is nice, too.

Amplify’d from blog.louisgray.com

Lazyscope RSS and Twitter Client Slims Down, Speeds Up

Last week's launch of Lazyscope brought an intriguing new Twitter and RSS client into the world which allowed for full story viewing in a right pane that supported rich media, effectively replicating Twitter's iPad experience on the desktop in a versatile Adobe AIR application. Just over a week later, the application has already seen significant updates that show its potential to become an option for Twitter power users - with the adoption of real-time user streams, a new "mini" single column size and keyboard shortcuts.

In addition to these two updates, Lazyscope, from the makers of Lazyfeed, has turned on keyboard shortcuts, letting you navigate the stream with arrow keys, reposting with the enter key, and my personal favorite, scrolling to the top of the screen with the space bar.

See more at blog.louisgray.com