Guessing the Wall Street Journal Agenda for Apple
I’m not a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal, but I have noted the past few months that the WSJ seems to issue regular negative news, no, opinions, no, rumors, no, rubbish on Apple.
So I ran a test, I Googled wsj apple.
Here are the headlines that came up. I only read the blurb because the content is behind a paywall, and so include my guess as to what I expect would be in the article (and know wasn’t):
Sharing Bash Profiles across Computers
If you use more than one computer, keeping your dotfiles in sync is difficult. You either need to run a sync program like ChronoSync or set up your own rsync scripts. And then remember to run them.
I’m lazy, I just want it to work. So here is a lightweight way to share your key dotfiles across computers using Dropbox.
Create a folder in Dropbox called Scripts and save your dotfiles there:
Better Bash Shell Expansion
I’ve been doing a lot of work on TextMate 2 plugins recently and the way shell expansion works in the terminal has been annoying me. Here are some tips to
- speed up access to the
Application Supportfolder, - create case insensitive tab completions,
- reduce typing to
cdto common folders - and to reuse the TAB key for additional completions.
Getting to Application Support
The TextMate bundles I am working on are hidden in the Library → Application Support Folder. If you type this in your shell (⇥ is the TAB key):
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.
- New: Gist from Selection command to create a new gist with the selected text. This command, like all the others, leaves the URL of the gist on the clipboard so it’s easy to create a gist from selection, then paste the URL into a blog post or email. Note that gists from selections are not cached as they have no file names.
This Gists bundle is now part of the standard TextMate Bundle distribution. You can find this bundle in TextMate → Preferences → Bundles → Gist where it can be enabled.
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface) to keep it all together:
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. And these days, people are purchasing tablets and mobile computing devices in droves that do not and can not run MS Office and they don’t seem to care about it.
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. Start at part 1 first.
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. Striving for excellence, doesn’t mean striving for perfection.
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.app. Copy an email address and you get an email address: