Analyst Expectations
Lets take a look at the Widget market. It’s maturing but still expanding, with sales growing to about 2 million a quarter.
An experienced investor, looking at fundamentals, history and buyer preferences, will expect Peach to sell 1 million Widgets and Pear to sell about 250 thousand, with the remaining Widgets being sold by others.
But lets assume the presence of an Analyst that wants to drive Peach’s stock down, and wants to promote Pear. They want to do this because that Analyst’s firm makes more money when Pear shares, securities and derivatives trade.
Apple's Scheduled Releases are a Mistake
I think Apple’s recent move to annual releases for major products like iOS, OS X, iPhone and iPad is a huge mistake. It opens up too many cans of worms and is hurting the company’s public image and stock price.
Slogger after 6 Months
I have been using Brett Terpstra’s (@ttscoff) Slogger for the last six months, and I think it’s time to review it. Slogger is a script and a set of plugins that log your online activity each day into Day One, the best journaling application for OS X, or in Markdown files if you prefer. It’s a core part of my Backing up your Online Life process.
TL;DR: It’s totally worth taking the time to set it up and get it going. The data captured is so useful and often hard to gain access to, especially as we operate across many services, and as these services come and go.
Have to Have It Just to Have It
I often come across users who tell me they just have to have something in the software I am designing for them: some data or a report or an export. When I ask them how they use this requested item, or why they need it, they usually answer that they just have to have it. Sometimes, they even try to justify the request using the excuse that they have always had it, so they should continue to have it.
The people who love something are its best critics
I have been accused of being an Apple fan-something as if this was a bad thing, a blinkered delusional existence, a sign of mental degradation. I could come back that it is a Stockholm Syndrome like relationship that binds Windows users to Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Or declare that Linux-on-the-desktop users are hallucinating when they claim productivity and usability in a sea of incomprehensibly complex, buggy and mediocre open source software.
18 Months of Octopress
A lot of reviews are written by people who played with the product for a few hours and report their first impressions. This is all about a product I have been using for 18 months every day: Octopress, the blogging platform behind hiltmon.com.
Before Octopress
I consolidated to hiltmon.com from a series of sites based on Wordpress and a static site generated by RapidWeaver.
The Wordpress sites drove me crazy. Wordpress itself was (and still is) buggy, inexplicably complicated and slow to render. Even though I became “expert” at Wordpress customization, I still found the experience of updates, fixes and customization to be heinous and painful.
Add GA OS and Browser to Status Board
Google has finally deprecated their GAPI interface which this used to talk to Google Analytics, sorry folks, it will no longer work. See the New Google Analytics for Status Board Server Edition for an updated version.
Reader Brandon Cozart (@brandoncozart) asked if it were possible to add Browser and OS statistics to the Google Analytics for Status Board scripts. So I gave it a shot.
Update: Download again if you use these scripts, a null value bug and sorting bugs have been fixed.
My TextMate 2 Setup
I switched back to TextMate 2 from Sublime Text 2 full time a while back and I am really happy with the way I have it looking and working. My “My Sublime Text 2 Setup” post is quite popular, so I though I’d create the same for TextMate 2.
Hourly Analytics for Status Board
Google has finally deprecated their GAPI interface which this used to talk to Google Analytics, sorry folks, it will no longer work. See the New Google Analytics for Status Board Server Edition for an updated version.
Following up last week’s Google Analytics for Status Board graph and Top Pages table on Status Board, a reader asked for hourly stats instead of daily, so I created it (see the bottom-right graph).
See also Top Pages in Status Board, Daily Stats and OS and Browser Stats.
Natsukashii - iPulse Sighting
Natsukashii (懐かしい) is a Japanese word for “feeling nostalgic” or “with fond memories”.
I happened to click on a Mike Zornek (@zorn) link today and noticed that he is still running iPulse on his desktop. I used to run it back in the early days of OS X on my Titanium Powerbook.
Back then, I had already returned to the Mac. But in 2003 or so, OS X was still very buggy and slow. I wanted to know where the bottleneck was, disk, network, CPU or RAM? Also, with PC hardware at the time, they still had the light that flashed when the disk was being accessed, the Mac did not have this.