This is the twenty-fourth episode of the Ask Different Podcast. Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein.
- We begin with some important Ask Different news. Three new moderators have been elected. Congratulations to our own Jason, Daniel, and Mike! We look forward to working with you all.
- In other Stack Exchange news, there is now another way to see a site’s top questions. The greatest hits page, accessible at /questions/greatest-hits, shows the top 1000 questions based on how popular they are to the Internet in general.
- High on that list is How can I block specific telephone numbers on my iPhone 4?, with more than 146 thousand views at the time of this writing. Jason’s solution is to create a contact with all the numbers that he wants to block and assign a silent ringtone and empty vibration pattern to it.
- Blocking numbers leads to discussion of filtering in general. Many power users want to be able to filter the content that reaches them, whether it’s calls, emails, or tweets. We agree that Gmail is best at this: spam filtering is handled automatically, and users are given powerful capabilities to do their own filtering.
- Filtering requires balance, though; it can be hard to block what you don’t want to see without also blocking some things that you do. With favorite and ignored tags on Stack Exchange, a negative overpowers a positive: if a question is tagged with something on your blacklist, it will be hidden whether or not it is also tagged with a favorited tag. Kyle and Nathan feel that the opposite should be true.
- Apple recently announced that OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion would be released this summer. This will be a smaller change than Snow Leopard to Lion was, more like Leopard to Snow Leopard. Apple also announced that they will now be releasing major versions of OS X yearly, like they currently do with iOS. Security and bug fix releases (10.8.1, 10.8.2) will happen as needed.
- One of the major new features in Mountain Lion will be integration with iCloud for Documents in the Cloud support. Unfortunately, it feels like the service is not fully developed. The limited organizational functions aren’t powerful enough for people with a large number of documents, especially when working with projects whose files span multiple apps. On the other hand, a ‘bucket of files’ would work just fine for small projects and one-off documents. Many users will certainly find that Documents in the Cloud fills their needs well.
- On a more positive note, we pick out the Mountain Lion changes we’re most looking forward to.
- Kyle is excited for AirPlay mirroring. He predicts that Apple will begin allowing other manufacturers to support AirPlay mirroring, and that it will become the standard way of connecting to projectors and monitors.
- Nathan is excited for Notification Center. He hopes that more apps will begin using notifications properly, and is looking forward to being able to easily see an overview of calendar events, reminders, new emails, etc.
- Jason is looking forward to the improvements to Screen Sharing. The ability to drag a file into a Screen Sharing session is exciting, and he thinks that there may be some other features that haven’t been announced.