De Fault with Default
The word default has many meanings: To a geek means the value set for a preference by the developer, as in “the default value for the web server port is 80”. To a finance person means the failure to fulfill an obligation, like pay off a security, as in “the company’s corporate bond is in default”. To a sports person means the failure of a team to arrive in time to participate in a sports match, thereby losing the match, as in “Qatar lose the soccer game by default to Uzbekistan”.
On Customer and Developer Entitlements
en·ti·tle·ment /enˈtītlmənt/ Noun The fact of having a right to something, or the amount to which a person has a right. There has been a huge amount written this year about software pricing, availability and support, especially in light of the “race to the bottom” pricing and lack of trials and upgrade pricing in the Apple App Stores. Developers feel they are entitled to more money and respect for the effort they put in, customers feel entitled to free upgrades, multiple platforms and cheaper prices.
Forced Arbitration and the Right to Sue
One of the things that is bothering me these days is the number of vendors changing their contracts unilaterally to require us to use their own arbitration and giving up our right to sue. You can ‘opt out’ of this change, where ‘opt out’ means they will immediately terminate service. The mobile carriers in the USA have had these for a while, as have the credit card companies and many employers.
Apple, Please make a Touchscreen Laptop
I think Sean Hollister gets it right in The Verge article Surprisingly, touchscreen laptops don’t suck. In short, Windows 8 challenges the idea that they do not work, and proves that they do. The argument against touchscreen laptops and desktops has always been Gorilla Arm, the idea that users will get tired holding their arms up in the air for longer interactions, they will look and feel like Gorillas. But the theory of Gorilla Arm only makes sense when you consider it for longer interactions (for example typing or drawing).
Bills Doubled in 8 Years
While shredding old, unnecessary paperwork today, I noticed that the cost of our monthly utilities have more than doubled in 8 years, yet almost nothing in our way of life has changed. We live in exactly the same apartment. We still have no kids. We still have only 1 TV, but the new one uses less juice. We both use modern laptops and iPads, which also use less juice, so our monthly kWh has not gone up, but our power bill has more than doubled.
Yahoo Finance Logger for Slogger
One thing I find myself doing every once in a while is trying to find out the $AAPL share price for a given date. This usually requires a trip to Google Finance or Yahoo Finance and a need to download a data table to find what I need. Wouldn’t it be nice if this information was in my journal? So I spun up a simple Slogger plugin to do it. This plugin:
Inbox Kinda Zero
The idea behind Inbox Zero is to manage email overload. Basically, you aggressively process your email inbox by Deleting everything you don’t need, want, care about, don’t care about, couldn’t be bothered with or is too old to act on. Respond and file what you can process quickly. Queue, by filing, emails that you need to get back to. Schedule tasks and time to process the queue folder. With Inbox Zero, if there is an email in the inbox, it needs to be processed away.
Back to Byword from iA Writer
For as long as it has been available, I have been using Byword for writing in Markdown. All blog posts, all knowledge base notes, all written using Byword. But I really liked the look of iA Writer, so I made Byword’s font look more like iA Writer’s (see Text Editing Fonts and Colors). Perfect. I even started a “why I prefer one over the other” post, but it only contained one item:
Workflow is Functionality
Functionality, the range of operations that can be run in a computer system, is the foundation upon which all software product collateral, designs, discussions and comparisons are based. Customers buy on functionality. Developers create functionality. Users question what the product can do. That is fine, but it’s not the whole story. The right question is not what operations exist (or should exist), it’s how these operations work together, how the functionality flows.
Multi-Platform Editing is Sublime
One of the best things about the Sublime Text 2 license is that it’s a per-user license. This allows you to run it on all computers where you are the primary user. And since Sublime Text 2 is multi-platform, that means on all the operating systems you use as well. For example, in my case, I can and do run Sublime Text 2 on My laptop Macintosh which is my regular workhorse.