Gist.tmbundle Updates
I just pushed a few small updates to my Gists bundle for TextMate 2. These include: Adding progress bars for network access (Thanks for the suggestion and tip from Allan Odgaard). New: Add file to Gist command to add the current file to an existing Gist to create multi-file Gists. For example, use this to gist the header and implementation code files in the same gist. This gets cached so you can blindly update any of the files in a multi-file gist without remembering the gist ID.
Modular Mac Pros, the new Burroughs B20?
I’ve been watching a conversation on APP.NET speculating about the next Mac Pro form factor, triggered by Dan Frakes’s article The time is (finally) right for a Mac minitower in MacWorld. All we know about it is that Tim Cook said they were coming. One of the speculative themes in the discussion is a “modular” Mac Pro, where adding CPU’s, drives or expansion cards would be a simple case of stacking another module on and using [thunderbolt](http://en.
The diminishing relevance of MS Office
It used to be a given that we purchased our computers to run MS Office, because that’s all the software we used on our computers. But over the years, we started to use our computing devices for more than work and the use and need for MS Office has declined in importance. We still regularly need to use MS Office file formats to share documents, but lots of software happily reads and writes these formats.
TimeToCall - After One Month
TimeToCall is a simple, universal iOS application I developed to help people choose the best time to call when calling internationally. This is a follow-on to a 10 part (and growing) series I wrote about the thinking and work done. My goal is to share just how much effort it really does take to craft an iPhone app and ship it. I hope this series helps you to understand why it costs so much and takes so long to create beautiful software.
Defend your Livelihood
Adii Pienaar, of WooThemes, in Don’t Be Defensive, But Defend Your Livelihood on dealing with negative reviews: 1. Be Transparent. The honest truth about all companies (and businesses in general) is that it’s impossible to please every single customer. I could’ve been defensive, tried to respond to the specific critique, but that would not have served any purpose. I don’t try to be perfect as an individual and I don’t expect Woo to be either.
We unfortunately can’t pay you for it
Nate Thayer, in A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 reports on an email conversation with The Atlantic, a news organization with 13 million subscribers, responding to their request for him to write something for them but “We unfortunately can’t pay you for it”: I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children.
Fix Copy Address from Mail on OS X
In Apple’s Mail.app, when you right click on an email address and choose “Copy Address”, Apple decided that you would inexplicably also want the name part, so the string copied looks like this: Hilton Lipschitz <me@hiltmon.com> I have yet to find a single occasion when I wanted anything but the email address part. To correct this issue, jump into a terminal session and use: defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO Quit and restart Mail.
On Ihnatko Switching to Android
Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko) is writing one of his usual clear and cogent articles on his choice to switch from the iPhone to Android at TechHive, see Part One and Part Two. Good for him. But somehow the haters have come out in droves, even though Andy himself tried to head them off at the pass: This isn’t the story about how Apple has lost its way and no longer innovates. It hasn’t and it still does.
TimeToCall Demo Video
In preparation for the massive PR campaign that will never happen, I created a demo video of TimeToCall, showing off the new “drag down slider”, and added it to the product page. I am hoping v1.0.1 gets approved soon so you can all play with time. Why make a Video? There is no trial on the App Store, so the next best thing is a quick video to help people decide whether the App does what they want.
Better?
We all seem to spend a lot of time looking for better things, writing about them and arguing that our choices are better than others’ choices of things. These jeans are better than those jeans, this laptop is better that that laptop, this app is better than that app, this coffee is better than that one. We’re all wrong, what is better for one is not better for all, because we all have different utility functions.