Steve Sinofsky:

When using a competitive product you need to use it like it was intended to be used by the designers. Don’t get the product and use the customization tools to morph it into the familiar. Even if a product has a mode to make it work like the familiar (as a competitive bridge they offer) don’t use it. Use native file formats. Use defaults in the UI and functionality. Follow the designed workflow. They key is to let loose of your muscle memory and develop new memory.

Scratch out the word "competitive" and this argument is still pure gold.

I used to be the type that would customize the hell out of my computer. Customizing, hacking, tweaking...doing everything I could just to get things exactly the way I wanted.

But over time, I'd notice that my favorite third-party hacks would get updated less and less. Next thing I know, it'd just stop working. I'd find myself completely dependent on a hack that no longer existed.

That's when I learned to stop tweaking my software and start using things as designed.

Appreciate the design. Enjoy the reliability of a native solution. If you're gonna grow dependent on a feature, let it be a native feature that is here to stay and you know will be improved over time.

Good software is opinionated software. It should work great for people that share the same opinions as the designer.

• Mac mini with 1TB Fusion Drive — For a $1,100 Mac, this baby is FAST. It gives me all the performance I need to open large Photoshop files while coding sites, and plenty of space for my massive iPhoto library.

• iPhone 4S — My iPhone is my communications hub where all of my notifications are pushed to. And the outstanding 8 megapixel camera lets me capture precious moments that I want to carry with me for the rest of my life.

• iPad mini — For a few months, I was iPadless because I sold my first-gen iPad in anticipation of the mini. What happened? I compensated by overusing my 4S, which had a significant affect on battery life. I see my iPad mini as my primary mobile consumption device, and a way to "extend" the battery life of my iPhone.

• Google — Chrome has the right balance of feature robustness and simplicity. Gmail is still king of email. Google Reader is an absolute must-have (I don't care if bloggers say Twitter is the new RSS). Google Voice development has been extremely stagnant for the past couple years but having web access to all of my text messages has saved my ass countless times.

• Flipboard for iPad/iPhone — still, by far, the best way to stay up-to-date with Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and now Tumblr.

• Instagram — If I had to give up all social networks except one, I would keep Instagram. It's by far the most personal social network out there because everyone post things that make them happy, unlike Twitter/Facebook where some people only use for passive-aggression, bitching and whining.

• Tweetbot for iPad — the best Twitter app out there. For me, the killer features are cross-device placeholder syncing (i.e. Tweet Marker) and being able to retweet as a different Twitter account.

• ProCamera for iPhone — This is my secret weapon for taking great photos. Specifically, I love how I can lock exposure and enable image stabilization with one hand for close-up shots (e.g. food, lol).

• Facebook — Simply because all of my friends are on it. Most of my friends don't have Twitter so Facebook is still the best way for me to reach everyone in my life.

• Pinboard — This has become a big part of my consumption workflow. When I find an interesting link on Tweetbot or Chrome, I'll save it to Pinboard, which will push to my Google Reader via RSS to read for later.

• Instapaper — While Google Reader is my inbox, Instapaper is my "Save for Later" bin where I'll dump long articles that aren't time-sensitive. Recently, it's been filled out with a lot of How To's and Quora posts.

• Dropbox — I always need a way to share large files across people and devices. Been a loyal user since 2006.

• Drafts App — This summer, I retired my iOS app experiment, PostMate for iPhone. Drafts shares the same workflow as PostMate for quickly drafting and sharing text, but supports a lot more external apps/services.

• Backblaze — online backup solution. This thing has saved my ass a few times this year.

• Bitcasa — infinite online storage. It's still in beta but I've been dumping a TON of stuff on here. I don't put anything mission critical on here because it hasn't earned that much of my trust yet, but for now, I use it to store things like movies, TV shows, etc.

• Imgur — Tumblr used to be a very important source of entertainment for me but I figured out that 90% of viral posts on Tumblr come from Imgur. Now I just go straight to the source.

Honorable Mentions: ForkLift for Mac, DayOne, Slingbox, Siri, iTunes Match, Skype

Heating Up for 2013: 1Password, Pinterest, App.Net, New Myspace, GitHub

Cooling Down: Tumblr, Trillian, Voxer

Dismissed: Path, because none of my actual close friends are on it.

Virtual Pants:

The moral of the story is that you should go to a store and try out a Surface if it is something that interests you. Don’t listen to other people’s views and opinions. You might hate it. You might like it. Everyone’s needs and expectations are different.

I couldn't agree more.

Recently I saw one of my friends tweet that she was still debating on upgrading her 3GS to either the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 5.

Umm, duh! It's a NO BRAINER. iPhone 5 is twice as fast, offers 4G LTE, sports a better camera. And the thing just feels mind-boggling ability to look big but feel small in your hand.

But when I talked to her about it, she brought up a totally valid point: the iPhone 5's new Lightning dock connector will not work on any of her accessories. (Well, she could buy adapters but seriously, who wants to spend that much money?)

So if she gets an iPhone 4S, she'll essentially be getting an extra two years out of her accessories. Assuming she upgrades to the next iPhone in two years, she'll be faced with the same dilemma. But hey, she would've gotten an extra two years out of use out of her accessories.

I've been in this situation before and I've learned to protect myself.

When I'm looking at buying a new device, I don't simply think of it as a device — I look at it as an investment into a platform.

Back when I was still in college, before the modern smartphone, I was big on the Windows Pocket PCs. Specifically, I had the Compaq iPAQ. I loved the thing. It could play music, videos, games…and it developed a nice ecosystem of "sleeve" accessories that I could slide onto it for extra functionality (e.g. GPS).

At one point, on top of the $500 device, I had dropped another $500 on accessories.

And a year after, they changed the design of the next-gen iPAQ; just like that, my iPAQ and $500 worth of accessories were outdated.

From that point on, I vowed to never lock myself to a hardware platform like that again.

As of today, I'm running on my third iPhone. I've also had three iPod shuffles and three iPod classics. And the only accessories I've ever bought for any of these devices are:

• cases
• USB chargers
• external battery
• replacement headphones
• iPod-enabled car stereo adapter

For the most part, these accessories are either under $30 or they can be used over the span of multiple generations. (The iPod-enabled car stereo adapter has an additional auxiliary port.)

As an early adopter that loves to stay on the cutting edge of devices, I've made a conscious effort to never commit myself too much to any one platform.

Even with my Mac, where I have spent a few hundred dollars on apps, I know that all of my data — music, photos, photoshop files, etc — can be liberated at any time and can be used on any other platform.

All of this forward thinking, in a sense, grants me a lot of freedom. So in times like this when Apple moves to a totally new Lightning dock connector, I know I can stay on the cutting edge without pissing away a few hundred dollars worth of accessories.

TUAW summarizes Mat Honan's night:

They used that access to reset his iCloud password, reset his Gmail password, gain control of his Twitter account (which in turn gave them access to Gizmodo's Twitter feed and 400K followers) and generally wreak mayhem.

Unfortunately, Honan's iCloud account was tied to his iPhone and iPad, which both had Find my iPhone/iPad turned on. In the attackers' hands, the FMI utility was turned against Honan and both devices were remotely wiped. It got worse: his MacBook Air had Find My Mac enabled, which meant the hackers could erase his SSD... and they did.

Ouch.

I've always believed that your email should be they most secure password out of all your accounts. But man, it never occurred to me how much havoc can be caused when someone hacks your iCloud.

Lesson learned.

General Rules

• Always keep one row empty to keep the screen uncluttered and give me a natural spot to swipe there when switching homescreens.

• No bright wallpapers for the homescreen and especially not the lock screen. iOS keeps the lock screen at full brightness, regardless of your brightness settings. This takes a toll on the battery when push notifications come in throughout the day.

Apps

• Calendar app is at the top-left and requires farthest reach for my right thumb. Its my least-used app on the homescreen, but I need it there to quickly see today's date.

• Maps towards the top-right because I need them easily accessible while I'm driving. (Looking forward to the upcoming turn-by-turn feature in iOS6!)

• Foursquare, Facebook, PostMate and Tweetbot are my most-used, most-accessible apps, placed strategically where my right thumb feels most comfortable tapping.

• PostMate is an app I designed. I use it to quickly draft & post to my Twitter accounts, Facebook Profile/Pages, and Foursquare all in one shot.

• ProCamera is on the dock because I take a lot of photos (of my food, lol). Its image stabilization mode is my favorite over all of the other camera apps out there.

What's Missing?

• Phone — moved off-screen because I use Siri to initiate 95% of my outgoing calls and the lock screen for calling back missed calls.

• Weather — moved off-screen, thanks to Siri and the Weather widget in Notification Center.

• Mail, Facebook Messenger — I hardly initiate conversations on the iPhone so I just use Notification Center and the lock screen to stay up-to-date of new messages.

• Google Voice — I have GV text messages forwarded to the Messages app; this saves me a LOT of battery compared to using the official GV app for text conversations.

• Reminders - I use Siri to create tasks and location-based notifications to stay on top of them.

• Music - moved off-screen because with Siri on iOS 6, I can launch this app, specific songs, and specific playlists by voice command. I mainly use this app while I'm driving anyway.

What does your homescreen look like?

Share on Homescreen.me

It's ridiculous how much time I spend on organizing my homescreen, lol. But hey, the smartphone is the most personal computer we'll ever have. So it's only right that this much attention is spent on personalizing it.

Last night I got an invite for Homescreen.me and it's nice to see a community of iPhone users that believe in the same thing. Here's my first post on there:

General Rules

• Always keep one row empty to keep the screen uncluttered and give me a natural spot to swipe there when switching homescreens.

• No bright wallpapers for the homescreen and especially not the lock screen. iOS keeps the lock screen at full brightness, regardless of your brightness settings. This takes a toll on the battery when push notifications come in throughout the day.

Apps

• Calendar app is at the top-left and requires farthest reach for my right thumb. Its my least-used app on the homescreen, but I need it there to quickly see today's date.

• Maps and Music at the top-right because I need them easily accessible while I'm driving. (Looking forward to the upcoming turn-by-turn feature in iOS6!)

• Foursquare, Facebook, PostMate and Tweetbot are my most-used, most-accessible apps, placed strategically where my right thumb feels most comfortable tapping.

• **PostMate is an app I designed. I use it to quickly draft & post to my Twitter accounts, Facebook Profile/Pages, and Foursquare all in one shot.

• ProCamera is on the dock because I take a lot of photos (of my food, lol). Its image stabilization mode is my favorite over all of the other camera apps out there.

• Voxer is docked, keeping it handy for communicating with friends while I'm driving.

What's Missing?

• Phone — moved off-screen because I use Siri to initiate 95% of my outgoing calls and the lock screen for calling back missed calls.

• Weather — moved off-screen, thanks to Siri and the Weather widget in Notification Center.

• Mail, Facebook Messenger — I hardly initiate conversations on the iPhone so I just use Notification Center and the lock screen to stay up-to-date of new messages.

• Google Voice — I have GV text messages forwarded to the Messages app; this saves me a LOT of battery compared to using the official GV app for text conversations.

• Reminders - I use Siri to create tasks and location-based notifications to stay on top of them.

Inspired by Michael Arrington's 2009: Products I Can't Live Without, here are my vital tech products of last year:

• iPhone 4S — specifically the 8 megapixel camera, iCloud, and Siri. I take a LOT more pictures now. iCloud has saved me a couple times when I had to hard reset my iPhone while on the road. Siri has allowed me to move several apps off of my homescreen, including Phone, Find My Friends, Reminders, Notes, Clock, Weather.

• iPad — to save money, I limited my traveling and stopped paying for the 3G data plan. The iPad became more of a household device that I'd use in bed or on the couch. I also started using it as I stretch before my morning runs to make the stretching routine more enjoyable.

• Google — Chrome, Gmail, Reader, Voice

• Flipboard for iPad/iPhone — still, by far, the best way to stay up-to-date with Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and now Tumblr.

• Trillian — Replaced Adium as my default chat client because of its seamless chat syncing and chat logging in the cloud. While chatting, I could easily switch to a different device and not worry about missing any IMs.

• Instagram — started using this even more when I got the 4S (8 megapixels, baby!)

• Tweetbot — the best Twitter iPhone app out there; its push notifications replaced my Boxcar app

• Facebook

• Instapaper — because I was overseas for 10 weeks in a country with spotty internet, I started downloading articles and blog posts to read offline. Also kept me amused on my 16 hour flight.

• Tumblr

• Skype — absolutely necessary for sharing intimate moments with someone that you can't be with physically.

• Dropbox — came in really handy when I constantly needed to share large files with my friends.

Honorable Mentions: Backblaze, Find My Friends, PostMate for iPhone (shameless plug), Slingbox

Heating Up for 2012: bitcasa, iTunes Match, Siri, Voxer

Cooling Down: BlogTV, Foursquare, Path

Dismissed: Adium, Boxcar for iPhone, Mozy, TokBox, Twitter for iPad, Hootsuite

Last year I attended two reunions -- one with my childhood friends and the other being my High School reunion. While I've done a pretty good job of keeping in touch with my childhood friends, most of my high school friends I hadn't talked to since graduation.

But if there is one thing that I have in common with both groups of friends, it's Facebook.

It came up several times in conversation. Friends would tell me how much they loved my status updates.

"Mel, I saw your status about a bee attacking you while you were peeing. HILARIOUS!"

"Mel, I love your food pics! Keep posting those!"

Sweet! I'm e-popular at my high school reunion, hahah. But not all of it was positive. One of my friends came up to me:

"Mel, I don't fucking understand half of your status updates. What the hell is 'RT'? And what's up with the '@' signs? And what are the #'s for?"

At the time I was pushing all of my Tweets from my personal account straight to my Facebook. I spent 15 minutes trying to explain to her the concepts of retweets, hashtags and @mentions...but she ended up even more confused and walked away.

So that's when it hit me. That is when I realized that even though most of my Twitter followers are my personal friends on Facebook, the two are very different audiences. Or rather, different social graphs.

The reality is we have a social network for just about every possible social graph these days:

• Personal friends? Got "˜em on Facebook.

• Colleagues and business contacts? Got "˜em on LinkedIn.

• Friends that enjoy my food pics? Instagram (for me, anyway)

• Local friends that wanna know where the party is at? Foursquare.

Even with Twitter, I have two very distinct accounts. One that is for professional topics and the other for personal tweeting"¦kinda like having a Facebook Profile for personal friends and a Facebook Page for fans.

It's something that I started doing because I realized that most of my personal friends don't have an interest in my professional/geek side. The few friends of mine that are interested? They'll follow both of my accounts. And the few times that a tweet overlaps both social graphs? I'll tweet it on one and retweet it on the other. Or I'll just tweet the same thing on both.

@AndyBudd once asked, "[is there a right way to tweet?](* http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2011/03/is_there_a_righ)"

My response? There is a time and a place for everything -- the wisdom comes from knowing when and where.

Before you start whipping me with "it's my Twitter account, I can tweet whatever I want!" ask yourself this:

Do my Facebook friends really care about #FollowFriday?

Do my Twitter followers really care if I check into a gas station to fill up gas?

Do my Twitter followers really care to click a non-descriptive "Photo: http://tumblr.com/asdfghj"?

There are so many damn social graphs, some of us don't know what to do with all of them. But, these graphs are separate for a reason, so we should treat them as such.

If a person is really interested in your location, they'll follow you on Foursquare. If they're really interested on your Tumblr posts, they'll follow you on Tumblr.

So disable all that cross-site auto-posting stuff. Be selective when cross-posting on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Tumblr. Realize the context of who are you talking to, why the follow you and what you are sharing with them. Or simply, before sharing anything on any social network, just ask yourself:

"Who would care about this?"

Karol: The show starts at 7pm, right?

Mel: Yeah. I'm heading there 5:45ish with Marlo.

Mel: Ness, are we supposed to save seats for you or you guys gonna be backstage the whole time?

Nessa: We're in the first act, so we'll sit with you guys after intermission.

Krystal: Save two seats for Karol.

That is a texting conversation I had with my friends on Saturday with the group texting app, GroupMe. We actually started playing with the app a couple nights before, but Saturday we finally saw its true value.

GroupMe as a Utility

As shown in the conversation above, GroupMe comes in super handy when going out with friends. Simple situations like, "Hey, I just got parked. Where are you guys?" can be easily addressed with GroupMe.

Without a group texting app, how would you solve this situation?

Twitter? You can, but you'll easily piss off your mutual followers because you're spamming their timelines with a private conversation that doesn't concern them.

Call/Text people individually? Messy and inefficient. Plus, it leaves the possibility of someone accidentally getting left in the dark.

With group texting, you're in touch with everyone that needs to be informed. Everyone is on the same page. Everyone is in sync.

GroupMe as Entertainment

During the concert, GroupMe switched from being a utility to pure entertainment. In a setting where it's rude to talk to each other while the performer is on stage, GroupMe gave us the freedom we wanted.

(Okay, texting each other during a performance isn't exactly the most polite thing to do either, but hey, at least it's discrete.)

Because the chat is private and everything goes directly to everyone's phones, the experience is a lot more intimate than Twitter ever could be.

What about Beluga, Disco, Fast Society, etc?

One thing that made GroupMe stand out to me over its competitors: it's compatible with Google Voice.

Personally, I am a very, very loyal user of Google Voice. It's the only number that I give out. I am absolutely addicted to how I can type out & send text messages from my computer. And so far with all of the competing apps I've tested, GroupMe is the only app the lets me use my GV number.

This is important to me because when friends install GroupMe and the app scans their Address Books, I will actually show up as a suggested friend.

With the competing apps, I simply couldn't use my GV number; I was forced to use my cell phone number, which is the number that nobody has.

Closing Thoughts

With just one full day of using GroupMe in the real world, I can tell this app has serious potential for my nights out with friends.

Will it go mainstream? I hope so but I'm not sure.

There is always the possibility that Facebook might integrate their Messages 2.0 feature with Groups, Places, Events, etc. And we all know how Facebook has a knack for making early adopter ideas into mainstream hits.

Google has the opportunity to come up with something too. They have all the pieces: Gmail, GTalk, Google Voice, Disco for iPhone...I'd LOVE to see them integrate all of those technologies into one seamless experience.

Hell, Apple has the same opportunity as well, with Facetime, iChat, and iPhones. It'd be like adding that Steve Jobs magic to RIM's precious BlackBerry Messenger.

But those are all pipe dreams of mine; 100% speculation on my part based on zero insider information.

In the meantime, I've got a group of close friends on GroupMe. The cool thing is, if I want more friends to get on this, I don't even have to wait for them to install the app -- I can just add them to a group.

Even if the app never catches on with the rest of my friends, I've already got my closest friends on it.

That's good enough for me.