Marco Arment is understandably peeved that Business Insider is exploiting Marco’s generous license to lift and reproduce his writings wholesale. Regarding the license, he writes:
Business Insider’s mass replication of my writing is the only downside that has ever made me reconsider my Creative Commons license. If they’ve had any beneficial effect whatsoever, I haven’t noticed.
Reconsider it, he should. Such abuse is why GPL-style share-alike licenses are better than more “liberal” or “open” licenses.
Link: A Business Insider retrospective – Marco.org.
Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced his resignation from Apple. This has prompted an outpouring of touchingly sentimental stories from those who have interacted with the man. John Gruber has been collecting a bunch of them at his blog, from which I have reproduced a few links:
Alongside these personal anecdotes have emerged the usual superlative-laden hagiographies that, however well-intentioned, force Jobs into the standard mould – visionary, innovator, tireless leader, so on. In my opinion this is all wrong, and dangerously wrong. Jobs is interesting because his style flies against these impressive but ill-defined terms. He is unabashedly common-sensical and bullshit-free.
Consider this conversation reported by Rob Walker writing in the New York Times in 2003:
After half an hour of this, my inquiries really did start to fall apart, so I didn’t expect much when I resorted to asking, in so many words, whether he thinks consciously about innovation. “No,” he said, peevishly. “We consciously think about making great products. We don’t think, ‘Let’s be innovative!'” He waved his hands for effect. “Let’s take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let’s put them up all over the company!”
After half an hour of this, my inquiries really did start to fall apart, so I didn’t expect much when I resorted to asking, in so many words, whether he thinks consciously about innovation.
“No,” he said, peevishly. “We consciously think about making great products. We don’t think, ‘Let’s be innovative!'” He waved his hands for effect. “Let’s take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let’s put them up all over the company!”
The emperor has no clothes. That is his great value. Resist the urge to gussy him up!
And while we are at it, let’s try to stop writing about him in the past tense.
Google has progressed since the days of 41 shades of blue. At least in the user interface of their products. I had no insight into whether this reflects a change in the underlying process. But now there is some news on that front. Yesterday Chris Wiggins (Creative Director at Google) made a post to the “Official Google Blog” to explain the “new and improved Google experience … founded on three key design principles”: Focus, Elasticity, Effortlessness. I think the man, and the company, are serious, and I sincerely applaud them for it and wish them well. Read the rest of this entry »
Up in northern New Jersey is Pyramid Mountain, a trek up which yields a pretty amazing sight: Tripod Rock, a “glacial erratic” – a 160 ton boulder, to put it in simpler terms – abandoned by the receding Wisconsin glacier. What makes this massive rock amazing is that it is perched atop three comparatively tiny rocks, and this seemingly impossible arrangement has survived thousands of years.
On the left is a photograph of it, taken by me (click on the image for a larger version). Even to an amateur like me, it is evident that this is not a great photograph – among other failings, it is low on detail and sharpness. It has however one thing going for it on the photo sharing service Fotopedia: it is the only photograph of Tripod Rock that has been submitted to the site.
Read the rest of this entry »
It is I think by now well known that Google’s IMAP interface was an afterthought that was awkwardly grafted onto their splendidly useful label paradigm, and as a result promises chronic annoyances for those actually using it full-time. You could follow Google’s prescriptions for client configuration — here I will be talking about the OS X Mail app — to the dot, but find scant alleviation of your woes. Read the rest of this entry »
Via MacApper:
“In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article. “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”
“In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”
The question that follows naturally: after replacing MobileMe executives in retaliation for launch time SNAFUs, did Jobs find that the service attracted more customers or net greater love from existing users? I do not have the data, but I suspect not. If I am correct, this might be a rare case where Apple and Steve Jobs serve as a negative example: it’s easy to play the tough guy (ask Steve Ballmer) than try to identify the root causes of failure.
UPDATE: On MacOS Sierra, after you have set your language preference using System Preferences -> Language and Region, you can then go to Text Preferences under Keyboard settings to follow step 3 (and onward) from below.
If like me you have not yet learnt to drop the ‘u’ from ‘colour’, then you might have noticed that Mac OS X Snow Leopard makes it annoyingly difficult to switch the system language preference, especially for spell checking (worse, I suspect the interface for spell check language settings is buggy). To that end, below is a quick outline of the steps I used to switch to British English (click on the small images to see the full version). Read the rest of this entry »
I am fairly certain I was one of the earliest adopter of Dropbox. I loved the simplicity of the application and the free version provided a generous amount of disk space (2GB). I used it religiously, recommended it to friends, and was ready to drop down to the terminal to create symlinks to get over Dropbox’s one big weakness: it’s crippling need for all sync’ed files to be rooted under a single directory. Read the rest of this entry »
I have been searching for an app that lets me quickly write notes that also double as tasks – and therefore could use a due date/time and reminder alarm. There is the built-in “todo” capability in OS X iCal, but not only does it sport a terrible UI, it is also dismal at syncing across computers (this feat can be accomplished, as far as I know, only by the hack of storing such Todos on an IMAP server). Below is a summary of my quirky search for such a tool. Quirky because the authors of these apps could justifiably object that their app is being unfairly evaluated here. For example, Day One is a journal application, not a note-taking app, much less a task manager. At the same time, there are candidates, like JustNotes, that have a reasonable claim to appear on any such list. But nevertheless, here they are:
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.
