Scroll reversal.

You see, in Lion, Apple is trying to bring the style of scrolling found on its touch screen devices (the iPhone and iPad) to its desktop OS. So when using your Macbook’s trackpad, or the mouse’s scroll wheel, the direction stuff moves on your screen has been reversed.

Previously we pulled our fingers down to scroll down a webpage, for example. But if you were using an iPhone or iPad, you would actually drag your finger up to scroll, because the touchscreen technology gives you the sensation of actually grabbing and moving the page.

You can switch the scroll direction back to normal, but I’ve decided to give it a chance and after a weekend of Lion usage I’ve gotten fairly used to where my stuff is going when I scroll. But when I go to work, I get messed up because you can’t reverse the scrolling in Snow Leopard – at least not without some help.

That’s where this gem comes in. It’s a lightweight menu bar item that lets you reverse your scrolling and quickly switch between the two if you wish. It’s perfect for me right now as I try to retrain my brain to reversed (or “natural” as Apple is either rightfully or wrongfully calling it) scrolling.

So go download it if you’re trying to learn to reverse your scrolling habits on a non-Lion Mac machine.

Google has brand recognition. It’s the same reason why the people in the audience of Jimmy Fallon went bonkers when Josh Topolsky said they were all leaving with a new Google Chromebook! Google made it? It must be special!

I think there are something like 1 billion Google Accounts, and it’s so easy for them to simply notice Google+ and go check it out or get an invite. It’s a different structure for growth, so the numbers shouldn’t really be comparable yet. It’s also the very beginning of a new service, so it’s bound to be more popular now as people come to see what it’s all about.

I bet most of those invitations were shared via Facebook or Twitter anyhow.

Either the growth will plateau or if it’s good enough people will keep using it, but based on my own experience thus far, I don’t see Google+ rocketing into competition with Facebook. Even at this pace of 10 million people in 16 days, it would take between 3 and 4 years to equal where Facebook is at right now. And by then Facebook will have long since passed 1 billion users.

I’d rather see data like posts/day to compare to, though I bet Facebook/Twitter are getting way more out of 10 million users than Google+ is. Kevin Rose did an interesting experiment where he posted two different Bit.ly links to the same content on Twitter and Google+ to see which link was clicked more. The volume of engagement was nearly identical despite the fact that he has more than a million Twitter followers and something like ~30k Google+ followers.

But then again, it’s Kevin Rose, so he’s not the most accurate barometer of engagement for the average user.

I kid, but all the “fandroids” that got on Apple’s case when the earlier story broke are like Knicks fans getting excited when their team takes a late lead over the Celtics. Premature celebration.

No I’m not an Apple fanboy, but I saw some misleading headlines about the whole iPhone tracking issue along the lines of “Apple is tracking you” or “Apple knows where you are” that irked me.

The truth is Apple doesn’t know where you’ve been, your iPhone (and your computer) does. This word choice can lead casual readers and headlines browsers to misunderstand the situation. This is how conspiracies are fed.

Is the fact that the iPhone dumps a file onto your computer recording your every move a little unsettling? Yes. Should you be afraid of that? Not necessarily.

The data is not being secretly beamed back to Cupertino and used to control the “collective” or secretly glean trends about iPhone users. The data is contained entirely on the iPhone and on your computer, so the only way this kind of data is going to “fall into the wrong hands” is if you lose your phone or computer.

And trust me, you’ve got far more sensitive data of a much higher value to evil-doers on your phone and computer than a massive database of longitude and latitudes. Maybe I’m just a technology apologist, but what evil as ever really come of these “scares.”

So that’s why headlines about “Apple” tracking you and “Why You Should Be Scared Shitless About the iPhone Tracker Fiasco” (I’m paraphrasing) are irresponsible.

And I’m just as surprised that Android devices track location as I am that iPhones do – which is to say, not at all.

I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my former ReadWriteStart partner-in-crime, Dana Oshiro, who literally (read: figuratively) showed me the ropes by taking me under her wing. Another shout-out certainly needs to go to Marshall, who has been a mentor to me in this business ever since I was a lowly research intern. He is a great friend, a strong leader, and yes, one monster of an editor. There are so many other thanks I owe to dozens of people, but I don’t want to go on for too long.

Earlier this week I accepted a full-time position with Layar – a company which specializes in augmented reality. I’ve researched and covered the area since my grad school days, experimenting with mobile app prototypes in the New Media Innovation Lab at ASU’s Cronkite School. Little did I know that our experiments would eventually lead to me writing RWW’s premium report on the subject and making a small name for myself in the community. For Layar, I will be serving the role of Web producer and copywriter, and I will be doing some social media stuff too. If you really want to, you can read the job description on the Layar home page.

But the “what” of the job may not be as intriguing as the “where.”

Layar is headquartered in Amsterdam. Yes, the Netherlands. That’s the office in the picture above. In a short time (probably in late October) I will be shipping off to Amsterdam to work with Layar. It’s a huge transition, and it’s a bit anxiety-inducing, but it’s going to be a blast and I’m so incredibly thrilled. My mom is freaking out, but I know it’s going to be a great time and a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I can’t turn down.

To my friends and family in the states, and particularly, Arizona – I’m going to miss you all terribly. I’ve told a few of you about my news already and some (including my Mom) are already planning your visits. Please, the more the merrier. I’m sure I’ll be in touch with many of you over the coming weeks, and we’ll celebrate accordingly, on more than one occasion, no doubt.

The timing of this feels very right for me. I’m about to turn 25, and while I’ve been hoping to move to San Francisco, the chance to travel abroad and experience Europe beyond the fenced-in school trip I took in high-school is incredible. Also, Dave Matthews Band is taking next year off, so I won’t miss any shows.

It’s going to be a crazy next few weeks, but it’s going to be a blast. I’m sure a bunch of you have questions so here’s a quick FAQ I’ve gathered from sharing my news with people thusfar.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

• Amsterdam? Really? – Yes, really. This is no joke. I’m really moving to the Netherlands.
• Isn’t it cold there? – The temperature in Amsterdam gets down to around 30 F in the winter and around 80 F in the summer. It’s a big change from the 115 F summers in Phoenix, but hey I was born in Boston, I can handle a little cold. Yes, it snows there. And it’s wet and drizzly a lot too.
• Do you speak Dutch? – No. But from what I understand, most of the people there also speak English (and German and French). I’m looking forward to picking up bits and pieces as I immerse myself there and flexing my French chops (it’s been nearly 7 years since I’ve used it, yikes). Actually, part of the reason I was hired is because I’m a fluent English speaker (or so I’d like to believe).
• Do they have Chipotle in Amsterdam? – No. No Subway either. I’m going to die a little bit inside each day. But they do have McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Domino’s etc…
• When are you leaving? – Not certain yet, but probably around the end of October, or early November. It all depends on how long it takes to get all the visa/immigration stuff taken care of.
• What are you doing with all of your stuff? – I’m selling my car (2001 Ford Escort ZX2, 90k miles, cosmetic condition: fair). It won’t go for much, but it will be some nice change in my pocket. I am also looking to sell my 2008 24” iMac. If you’re interested in either let me know. Other stuff will be stored at my mom’s place pending my return to the states (whenever that is).
• How long will you be gone? – Again, uncertain. I could stay there for a while, or I may find myself back in the states if the company decides to open an office here. Anything is possible at this point, but for my mother’s sake I said I’d be back soon. In the meantime, I should be back for a few planned vacations (my father and my friend Marilyn are getting married in February and April respectively).
• Can I come visit? – Yes! Please do! In fact a few of you have already expressed interest. You’re welcome to stay with me at my Amsterdam apartment (I don’t know what the place will be like yet, but I’m sure we can figure something out). One at a time please. But in all seriousness, I’ll be quite lonely for a while, and likely homesick. Please come see me if you, I’d love it.

Photo by Flickr user digitalgold.

A demo video from Adobe (embedded below) has photographers, digital artists and tech enthusiasts dropping their jaws, but in case you don’t feel like watching it, here’s what it does. Basically the content-aware fill lets you select an area that you’d like to touch-up or an object you’d like to remove from an image and with a few clicks, it disappears. Seems magical right? That’s exactly why people are freaking out.

In the video example below, the user is able to remove a tree from a picture by simply drawing a rough selection around it and selecting content-aware fill. It also allows him to remove trash and tee markers from the grass with relative quickness. In a more extreme example, the demonstater takes a picture of a road in a desert and makes the road disappear.

The thing about this is, yeah, it could be done before, with painstaking effort going inch by inch across the screen. This does all that hard work for you (or most of it at least). A popular tool in Photoshop for removing things like zits or blemishes is the clone stamp or the patch tool. With content-aware fill, there is no painting involved; you just select the area you want to remove and it does the rest.

The thing missing from the demo for me is how they are managing to do this. Obviously their algorithms are getting smart enough to be able to tell what an area looks like and to recreate images that fit with it. I just wonder what level of sampling vs. creation is being used. Anyway, check out the video below to have your mind blown by the near future of digital photo editing.

Marshall and I interviewed CEOs and executives from some the top vendors of AR technology and ran a survey on popular AR blog Games Alfresco. The report, available for purchase now from ReadWriteWeb, features profiles of what we determined to be the top 10 vendors on the space, as well as the findings of our survey. Here’s what RWW is saying about it:

Become an expert on Augmented Reality (AR) in one quick read. Decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters of this new technology. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. In the ReadWriteWeb Premium Report Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future, we profile successful companies and their campaigns as well as development lessons learned.

The report is aimed at businesses considering taking their first steps into the AR marketing space, hence the $300 price tag. In other words, the report isn’t meant to be an enthusiast’s introduction to the topic, but if you’re willing to pony up the cash, go right ahead! I’m very proud to have my name on the cover of the report, but I couldn’t have completed it without the help of Marshall and the numerous individuals who helped us gather information.

If you are in any way part of the augmented reality community and have feedback for me, please feel free to email me; I would love to discuss this with anyone. Also, if you want the 411 on augmented reality and can’t afford the report, watch for my AR-related articles on ReadWriteWeb (usually around Thursday or Friday each week). Or just email me with questions.

On a related note: three months into working with RWW, who thought I would like writing so much?

Rumor has it that Apple has been shopping around the idea of a $30/month subscription TV service to various television networks.  But instead of offering up the service on the Apple TV (as was previously speculated) Apple is reportedly implanting the service into the massive iTunes ecosystem.

But Apple could be taking this one step further.

Just recently Apple released a brand new 27” iMac with a massive 2,560 x 1,440 pixel 16:10 screen and 1 TB of storage.  All the iMac needs is a highly anticipated integrated Blu-ray player and the all-in-one behemoth could compete with flat-panel televisions with this proposed TV subscription model.

Some have speculated that Apple could start producing their own TV’s, but this subscription service puts them in the position to gradually mold their iMacs into the TVs of tomorrow.

Last August, I joined the social networking site Twitter, where millions of people share their thoughts about everything and anything.  I wanted to know if anyone on Twitter was talking about my topic, so I threw a few word combinations at Twitter’s search engine.

Nothing much came up in my first few searches but eventually I got a few results by searching for “citizenship AND military.”  One of the results was particularly interesting.  It said:

“My heart breaks for him that can’t go in the military. He should B able to  serve the 4 yrs and B given the opportunity to get citizenship.”

The message was posted on April 9 by a user named “Yankeelin” and was the third “tweet” in a series about this individual.  Prior messages from the same user said:

“My daughters boyfriend Alberto is from Mexico too. He’s been here since he was 5.”

and

“…and he graduated H.S. as the top ranking ROTC cadet in NC, but his family and him are not legal. So he can’t go in the military!”

I found the story compelling, so I saved the links to the posts and forwarded them in an e-mail to my reporting partner for the summer project. The subject line was: “Maybe we can use Twitter to find stories?”

On May 18th, the first day of the News21 program at Arizona State, I decided to follow up on this story but I wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed.  How does one approach a complete stranger on the Internet?

Yankeelin’s Twitter profile revealed that her name was Linda and lived in North Carolina.  A White Pages search of her name and hometown returned one result with a phone number, but I decided a less forward method of first contact might be more appropriate in this case.

On Twitter, you can send a message to other users by beginning a message with the “@” symbol followed by the person’s username.  One problem with this method is if the user does not log onto the service frequently, he or she could easily overlook this kind of direct message.

The other challenge was that Twitter limits each message you send to 140 characters, 11 of which I would be using up with “@yankeelin” and a space before my message.  So cramming an introduction and an explanation and a request to talk was going to be tough to do in 129 characters.  However, I managed to squeeze in the following message:

“@yankeelin Im a student studying latinos in milit, love to chat about ur daughters bf Alberto (saw ur tweet from april)- chcameron@gmail.com”

By sacrificing some punctuation (”I’m” became “Im”) and with the use of some well known Internet abbreviations (”ur” for “your” and “bf” for “boyfriend”), I was able to get my message across in exactly 140 characters.

A few days went by and I considered calling the phone number that the white pages search had turned up, but to my surprise, just before noon on May 20, I received an e-mail from Linda in response to my tweet:

“Hi I saw your ‘tweet’ to me about my daughter’s boyfriend wanting to go into the military.  You were writing me in reference to a tweet I wrote back in April.  My daughter’s e-mail is attached, and the two of you can communicate about it.  Her name is Jo Beth.”

A few emails to Jo Beth eventually led to some phone calls with Alberto, the JROTC superstar with dreams of joining the military.  He mentioned that his girlfriend had explained how we found him and we shared a laugh over this unorthodox way of reporting.

The more my reporting partner and I chatted with Alberto the more interested we became in his story.  Here is a kid who was the top JROTC cadet in the state and all he wants is to serve his country in the military, but he can’t due to his citizenship status.

We pitched his story to our editor and the decision was made: we HAD to talk to this young man.  So we booked our flights to North Carolina.

Next thing we knew we were sitting in Alberto and Jo Beth’s living room with two cameras, a lighting kit and a notebook full of questions.  We emerged a few hours later having squeezed every last detail out of Alberto and feeling very confident about the story.

As we flew home from the East Coast, it was amazing to think that the opportunity to interview Alberto started with a successful search on Twitter.

Celebrities and others have given Twitter a reputation for obnoxious and pointless messages about what someone ate for breakfast, but in terms of connecting with REAL people with REAL stories, it was the perfect tool.

I too have seen this trend when I talk to kids in high school (which I do on a somewhat regular basis with a part-time job).  They often are unaware of many “mainstream” news items that would interest a younger audience, such as advances in cool gadget technology and video games.

But when you think about it, who can blame them? A teen’s life is consumed by their friendships and their schoolwork, so how can they find the time to stay on top of the things that matter to them when they are doing a few hours of homework each night?

These teens represent a nearly unreachable demographic of media consumers in terms of getting news.  They don’t read newspapers, they don’t listen to the radio, and they don’t watch TV, and when they do it’s not for news.  And when they go online, they stick to social networks like Facebook and Myspace to keep up with their school friends.

In my generation, kids always wanted their own phone to chat with friends, which gave way to kids wanting their own cell phone.  Now, every house has a computer with internet and along with their cell phones, the teens continue their schoolyard discussions on the Web.

So how does new media find a way to reach teens? If teens can’t grab onto Twitter, what innovation is going to steal their attention away from their everyday lives with their REAL friends?

Apple boasts the new iPhone’s ability to send multimedia messages through MMS (including pictures and video) and the new tethering feature which allows users to turn their iPhone’s in portable 3G modems for their laptops.

AT&T is still in the process of upgrading its system to allow for a greater flow of data from devices like the new iPhone, and features like MMS and tethering will likely not be available until they finish.  When will they finish? AT&T has arbitrarily said, “later this summer”, but that both features WILL be supported.  Eventually.

And as if that wasn’t enough to boil the blood of its subscribers (like myself), AT&T has set higher purchase points for those who already own an iPhone 3G.  While the new iPhone tops out at $299 for new subscribers, existing users could have to pay as much as $699 to upgrade. This is likely because AT&T offered a discount with a 2-year contract for the iPhone 3G, and allowing those users to upgrade their plans at another discounted price would cost them the difference.

In response to outrage over the charges, AT&T said that “an iPhone 3G customer in most cases can early upgrade at $399 [16GB] or $499 [32GB]“.  Still, $200 extra for a new phone and new contract?  I could understand a $100 boost (equal to the discount attained by purchasing the 3G at a subsidised price), but why $200?

Perhaps AT&T is anticipating the fact that Apple wants to move the iPhone to other carriers (such as Verizon) in the near future.  The extra $200 to switch from 3G to 3GS is more than AT&T’s $175 early termination fee, so at this point, its more economical to switch to Sprint and get the new iPhone-worthy Palm Pre (with a cheaper monthly plan also).

For me, the possibility of Apple developing an iPhone for Verizon in the near future is enough to give me pause on jumping on the new 3GS.  I need the 3GS.  I want the 3GS.  But at this point it may be a bad deal.  I may just have to settle with the new iPhone OS on my 3G, or bite the bullet and pay the extra $200 to get the 3GS, and I know many other 3G users in my position are thinking the same thing.

AT&T also announced plans to allow for pre-ordering of iPhones, and will have a separate line for pre-orders at its stores when the phone launches.  I doubt we will see the insane mad-rush of AT&T and Apple stores we saw last year when the new phone goes on sale.  The fact that it was as crazy as it was last year attests to the fact that Apple is drying up the “going to buy an iPhone” market.  A lot of those who were going to get one have bought one already, and my guess is a lot of 3G owners will not want to pony up $200 extra to get a 3GS.