Apple has a couple of great pages (1, 2) for switchers. What they fail to tell you about are the great non-Apple apps that make the Mac experience a worthwhile switch. So, here they are (at least some of them):
All of them are free. One or two are ad-supported.
Three year olds are clever people. Take the example of my son who vehemently resisted our pleadings to ingest more food: “My stomach is full. There is just no place left for any more food”. But his resistance turned to enthusiasm when, just a few moments later, some ice cream made an appearance. Upon being reminded that by his own admission his stomach was out of room, he scoffed dismissively: “That’s my stomach for food. Ice cream goes into a different tummy“.
It is less humorous and hardly clever when a corporation adopts this line of defence. Nevertheless, time and again, this is the very approach employed by corporations both vending products and selecting them. Like most subterfuges the effect is achieved through wordplay, in this instance the [mostly] false dichotomy created using the words ‘consumer’ and ‘enterprise’. Read the rest of this entry »
Right at the outset I must admit that the title of this post is a fair bit exaggerated. Marco leaving Tumblr isn’t the sole cause of my reduced usage of Posterous. As is always the case, these things are complicated. So I shall explain.
Most important to note is that Posterous is a splendid service. It is well designed, managed, supported and its use of email as a significant interface is downright retro brilliant. To linger a bit on support, to make the point on how good Posterous is: head honcho Sachin Agarwal once spent multiple hours over many days trying to hunt down an import problem that blocked transferring my posts from a [by now] obscure CMS/blog system called Nucleus. These guys are dedicated. And I still use Posterous heavily for my family blog, where the email based interface beats anything else, to transmit the mundane activities of grandchildren to doting grandparents.
For their part, Tumblr is quick to respond to questions and offer help (though not necessarily as dedicated to fixing them). If you are shopping for a mini-blogging platform, the two platforms do offer an embarrassment of riches. But with all that, I find myself using my personal Tumblr site a lot more than my Posterous one (despite Posterous’s autopost feature which can make the content appear in both places). And I am yet to explain why.
People like lists. So here is one with three reasons why Tumblr won out for my personal mini-blogging.
Read the rest of this entry »
Douglas Crockford, in the intro to Javascript: The Good Parts:
When I was a young journeyman programmer, I would learn about every feature of the languages I was using, and I would attempt to use all of those features when I wrote. I suppose it was a way of showing off, and I suppose it worked because I was the guy you went to if you wanted to know how to use a particular feature. Eventually I figured out that some of those features were more trouble than they were worth. Some of them were poorly specified, and so were more likely to cause portability problems. Some resulted in code that was difficult to read or modify. Some induced me to write in a manner that was too tricky and error-prone. And some of those features were design errors. Sometimes language designers make mistakes.
When I was a young journeyman programmer, I would learn about every feature of the languages I was using, and I would attempt to use all of those features when I wrote. I suppose it was a way of showing off, and I suppose it worked because I was the guy you went to if you wanted to know how to use a particular feature.
Eventually I figured out that some of those features were more trouble than they were worth. Some of them were poorly specified, and so were more likely to cause portability problems. Some resulted in code that was difficult to read or modify. Some induced me to write in a manner that was too tricky and error-prone. And some of those features were design errors. Sometimes language designers make mistakes.
The fanboys have moved on. As they always do.
Just this last 2005 you bought one of the most expensive laptops in the world, a MacBook. For a year or two it was glorious. You read all the top Apple blogs, Daring Fireball, TUAW… you were part of the in crowd and with them you basked in the luxury of gorgeous hand-crafted Mac apps (like Delicious Library and Cha-Ching). It didn’t matter that you had already spent dirty dollars on grungy old Windows tools. Microsoft Office, Norton thingummy, all that icky stuff. Apple was worth it.
Then 2007 came and the iPhone happened. The fanboys moved on. The desktop became so 2006. Mobile was the future and you were the past. Lack of multi-window multi-tasking or a real screen with enough space for application content or toolbars — these were features. Revolutionary new features. Magical. Darwinian logic stepped in: app developers either adapted by sacrificing their Mac app on the $99 Developer license App Store electric chair (see: Tweetie for Mac)… or they died.
In a freakishly serendipitous development in late 2007, your trusty Blackberry device had lost all of its sexiness… as if you had gone to sleep watching A Streetcar Named Desire and woken up to Godfather. That brutish hard keyboard! That barbarous user interface! It was time, you were certain, to move on; and time as we know is money, and money… it was time to spend it on an iPhone. Promising your left kidney to AT&T you followed the fanboys to the new paradise. Oh was it joy to spin the wheel on Where To? to find a place to destress with your hipster friends. Or stay informed on worldly matters framed in consumable bits within the sweet Tweetie for iPhone (the same one you had been jilted by, on the now dreary old MacBook). And guiding you on this giddy ride was the reassuring arm of the golden fanboys.
You weathered the turbulence of the 3GS when video and HD left you motionless. You lived through the rumours of the iPhone 4. But there is but one God and that God spoke decisively in April 2010. The iPad had arrived and the followers did what they do best. They followed. “What?”, they scoffed smiling sweetly, as only an Apple fanboy can, “NetNewsWire? Tweetie? What are these primitive things you speak of so endearingly?”. A world where beings trod the ground unaware of the splendour of Flipboard on an iPad was one they found quaint and charmingly implausible. The fanboys, you see, had moved. Are you coming?
This, at length, is the new normal. The new Kierkegaardian rotation method, sans the need to rotate your pleasures. One, Infinite Loop, delivers a new pleasure every three years. The app universe and blogosphere shifts in lockstep. And all you need to keep up is a deep pocket and a quick leap of faith.
Since the commercialisation of the Internet (say around 1994) there have been many “say what?” moments for us regulars; times when the likes of Wired first made up technology via terminology and then claimed how this technology was the new revolution. Wired has lost a good bit of its sex appeal, but the terminology invention mantle has been assumed by the blogistan. So we have “Web 2.0″, “curation”, “The Internet of Things”, and other recent verbal feats.
Equally puzzling are cases where a newer service (or fad) with function X is claimed to replace an established and targeted solution for problem Y. Take this quote by John Gruber:
Dave Winer: Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares. (It’s like asking how many NYT articles you haven’t read. It would be gargantuan. I don’t bother you with the number of Scripting News posts you haven’t read, so why does Google?)
Ignore the insignificant stuff about unread counts (as Gruber and Winer should have, in my humble opinion). More of interest is the notion that Twitter can replace an RSS reader (such as Google Reader) for reading news. Whence this notion?
On the one hand you have a tool like NetNewsWire (my preference over Google Reader) which lists subscriptions by provider, publication date, title, and author, offers previews of articles, and advanced functions such as filtering, sorting … or posting to Twitter if that be your proclivity.
On the other hand you have Twitter, a short message publication tool to which news providers (among others) post untagged, unsorted content at some arbitrary frequency. The 140 character limit affords barely enough room for a headline, leave alone the short summaries that are common in print articles, also available in RSS (or Atom).
How on earth can the latter (Twitter) supplant the former (RSS feeds accessed through dedicated clients or web apps)? Winer’s answer only adds to the puzzlement: in Twitter, “You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff”. If you are a “breaking news” junkie, I suppose this (ability to serve you the latest bits) is a deal-breaking feature, but it is unclear to me why this is unachievable in an RSS reader. Even Google Reader provides ways to get this done (as also hide what to Winer is an annoyance: the unread count):
Google Reader with a customised style
It’s quite possible that Winer is aware of sorting by freshness and is speaking of some other functionality, but I cannot fathom what that might be.
Daring Fireball Linked List: Dave Winer on Unread Counts
A clever play on Apple’s exaggerated description of the iPad, from a remarkable NYRB article (with an anti-climactic poor ending):
Whether all this adds up to a game-changer able to revive magazine and print journalism will depend, not surprisingly, and as usual, on whether it’s innovative enough to lure consumers and advertisers into paying real money for content. At the moment, most of the news sites are both free and largely ad-free: while neither “revolutionary” nor “game-changing,” this is indeed “magical.”
Google has transitioned from a “growth company to a cash cow” — that’s the conclusion of Michael Copeland and Seth Weintraub, writing for Fortune:
Long-term projections for growth in the search business are more in the 15% to 17% range. Yet analysts estimate that 91% of Google’s revenue still comes from the AdWords and AdSense business model that Google built around Page and Brin’s breakthrough PageRank algorithm. Even more telling, an estimated 99% of its profit does too. This year’s projected earnings growth of 18% is a third of what Google averaged over the past five years. A lot of companies would kill for that growth, but for technology companies, and Google in particular, those numbers don’t impress. Google is rounding a corner that all the fruit smoothies at its Silicon Valley campus make it hard to pull back from. This year Google has joined the ranks of just about every great technology company before it, including IBM, eBay, Cisco, Microsoft, and Oracle. Google, against its will, and defying its massive cash hoard, is transitioning from a growth company to — and there is no kind way to put it — a cash cow.
And, they note, Marissa Mayer isn’t all too worried about Google’s inability to establish itself in the social networking space:
Marissa Mayer, head of search at Google, says the company doesn’t provide financial guidance, but contends that Google doesn’t need a huge second act, a collection of smaller businesses will suffice.
Mayer of course is one of the lead players in the infamous “41 shades of blue” episode that caused designer Doug Bowman to flee Google. I tend to mention that incident a lot because I think it points to one reason (among surely many) why Google fails frequently at engaging it’s user in a long-term relationship (see: Google Buzz).
Google is genuinely oblivious to the effect their user interfaces, spartan and devoid of styling, might have on non-technical users. Not only might an engineering-focused and engineering-driven company fall back to a comforting process where “data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision” (to quote Bowman), but alpha engineers with their hyper-dominant left brains (if you will forgive the pop science indulgence) might see the measure of aesthetics as nothing more than maximal utility. Speaking of utility, more from Fortune:
Critics question whether Google can make the leap. “They are just not that good at it,” says Tom Coates, until recently the head of product at Yahoo’s defunct Brickhouse lab. “Google is very good at building these utility-type products — search, e-mail, and messaging. They are sort of like the power company of the Internet. But what they lack is a sense of how people share and collaborate.”
In the end, Mayer’s nonchalance that search (with advertising) will remain the core and dominant part of Google’s empire might prove pragmatic and even wise. It’s not a business that’s going away and honing it and expanding on it might be a lot smarter than attempting to teach a middle-aged dog new tricks.
To repeat Coates’s thoughts, Google’s engineering strength makes it a perfect utility company. Though the prospect might be as unsexy as Google’s UIs, it might be time to embrace that strength and build on it. Amazon beat them to utility computing and storage with AWS and EC2, but Android demonstrates that Google is willing to consider a future in which their [invisible] engineering prowess underwrites the visible products of others. It’s a good sign.
The only three things guaranteed in life are death, taxes… and your periodic update to the Ahimsa theme. Fortunately only the first two are injurious to your health, while the surgeon general actively encourages use of the Ahimsa theme by pregnant women and children ages four and above.
So, here it is, Ahimsa 3.3!
What’s new?
TechCrunch thinks the privacy settings in Apple’s fledgling social networking service, Ping, is brilliant:
I haven’t used Ping enough to tell if it will actually be useful. Given that this is Apple’s first real foray into social, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise. But they’ve won the first battle: simple privacy settings. Facebook could learn a thing or two from this.
I beg to differ. Here is what the Follow preference page on Ping says (image from TC):
Take a closer look into those parentheses… that bit about “including purchases” — that’s the fatal flaw in these settings, in my view. To understand why, read the New York Times article titled “Never Listen to Céline? Radio Meter Begs to Differ“, from which I quote below:
American men have a naughty little secret. Sometimes, they like to relax with a little Céline Dion. Professed classical music fans have one, too: as it turns out, they don’t tune into classical radio nearly as much as they claim.
Do I want even my closest friends to be aware of the fact that I have recently purchased songs by Nelly Furtado and Hall & Oates? You bet I don’t. And no amount of “Liking” Miles Davis and Beethoven is going to make up for the ignominy (and ridicule) that awaits me.
// Link: The iTunes Ping Social Question: Follow, Friend, Or Lurk?
P.S: about that Nelly Furtado thing… my wife made me buy it. I swear! (which is another problem with this Apple scheme). I have no excuse for the Hall & Oates. I confess I like them.
