The Reader's View: Best of your feedback, comments and opinions

The Reader's View is our weekly roundup of some of the most upbeat, thoughtful, or just plain good comments that have been published by TUAW readers. This week, we still have some post-Macworld Expo 2010 comments coming in, as well as discussion of several posts that attracted positive comments this week.

The first comment, from Ed P, was added to David Winograd's coverage of his interview with Roland Saekow of BearExtender. It appears that Ed was actually at Macworld watching the interview being done: "Hey, I was watching this while ya'll were broadcasting! Macworld was Haute! Really looking forward to next year!"

We are too, Ed! Next, David's interview of Mitch Waite, developer of iBird Pro for iPhone, generated some very positive words about the app from aptly-named reader nature: "iBird is one of the best apps I have ever found. The comments about the illustrations not being correct is obviously from a perfectionist who does not appreciate what a leap forward this app is. The average person does not need perfect drawings, they need great functionality and good photos and illustrations. iBird has those and a lot more. Like its amazing search engine that has taught me how to identify birds so that my life list is now at 222 in less than 3 months. It's amazing to me how the critics come out and jump all over good products rather than appreciate what has been done."

Erica Sadun's insight is always technically on target and sometimes controversial. Her recent post "TUAW redux: The future of iPhone OS and Mac OS," created its fair share of comments. One, from reader frank l, seemed to capture the essence of what what a future OS should be: "Extrapolation into the future improves with more data points. We may have further insights after the iPad and its successors are more familiar to us.

As I see it, the future of operating systems can be described in a single word, 'adaptive.' The idea is that devices will adapt to users, uses and available resources and do so in a relatively seamless fashion. In this Brave New World, there will be less for end users to learn as the sophistication of their use grows.

The OS will have a core with modules being added and jettisoned as circumstances change. The Adaptive OS."

TUAW's Michael Jones has a wonderful way of explaining things to Mac users. In his post "Mac 101: Navigating OS X with your keyboard," he spoke to Mac owners new and old about how to use your Mac without a mouse. Reader Robert gave us a tip on two useful keyboard shortcuts he uses: "I've had to work with 'mouseless Macs' every so often at the university computer labs. Here's some useful ones:

Access the Menu Bar: Control-F2
Access the Dock: Control-F3

Note that if your keyboard has an fn key, you'll need to use that in conjunction with the above key commands, or else they won't work. Then you can use the arrow keys and the return key or space bar to navigate and select menu and dock items."

Thanks for that information, Robert! Michael will be publishing a followup to that post some time soon. Next, a number of TUAW regulars made comments on my post "TUAW review: Smoother iPhone browsing with VanillaSurf." Many readers liked VanillaSurf, but couldn't get it to import bookmarks. Reader Jim figured out how to activate this feature in the app: "I finally got it to work the bookmark importing to work. I removed the profile in Firefox [v3.6] and then relaunched it so that it lets me import my Safari bookmarks [Safari is my default browser and has the latest bookmarks] Then exported the bookmarks from Firefox and tried the sync again and it worked! yay!"

Finally, it's always fun when a reader like doelcm can give the TUAW bloggers a good laugh. He responded to our post "Rumor: UK iPad pricing" with this: "Dear TUAW. Could you please put the word "rumor" (or "rumour" in this case) in the title when you're posting unsubstantiated information.

Oh, wait....never mind."

We'll be back with another edition of The Reader's View next Saturday here on TUAW. Until then, keep those cards and letters coming, folks!

Original post photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sabine01/ / CC BY-NC 2.0