Walled Gardens are Permeable
There is an incredible amount of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) on the internet about walled gardens, or closed ecosystems, especially focussed on Apple and ignoring everyone else. The open versus closed ecosystem holy war is in full force, with a lot of words written in absolute and extreme terms. Yet the so-called walled garden systems appear to be most popular and most successful. I believe that in reality these closed ecosystems actually have very permeable walls and that we’re really working in the middle ground between open and closed.
The Post-PC future, iCloud turns one
Apple’s iCloud service turned 1-year old on October 12, 2012. The day passed with a whimper in a tech press focussed on irrelevant issues such scratching, purple flares, maps and other Apple so-called “failures”. I think it’s a big deal, because with iCloud, Apple may finally be getting internet services right and the post-PC era just got real for most people. And no-one seems to have noticed. As an early adopter, though, post-PC started early for me.
Fixing Open With in OS X
If you use the Open With… contextual menu on OS X (right-click on a file in Finder), you may find a lot of applications get duplicated or are just plain wrong. This is how you reset this menu. In my case I had this for Markdown files: What a mess. Open a Terminal session from Applications/Utilities and type the following command: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user Make sure the whole thing is on a single line and wait for it to finish.
Scratched iPhones
There’s a big brouhaha in the news these days that new iPhone 5’s come scratched out of the box, and that the new aluminium backs scratch too easily. So much noise that Apple is trying to “fix” the problem by not shipping pre-scratched ones, and by telling people that scratching is normal for aluminium products. I prefer Remy Labesque’s take back in 2011 in Aged to Perfection, the back of scratched iPhones can and does look beautiful.
Spent more on Patents than R&D?
Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge takes the New York Times down in Did Apple and Google really spend more on patents than R&D?, in response to the NYT article The iEconomy: Apple and Technology Manufacturing (Subscription required): Read the NYT piece, and you would think that the technology market has shifted from being about research and development of new products to being about acquisition of patents. Given that this is based on a single year, when some very big patent portfolios came on the market in one-off deals that aren’t likely to be repeated in the future, that’s a long way from the truth.
Microsoft Lost its Mojo
Another well written article today in Vanity Faire, How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline, which visits Microsoft’s lost decade and current structural problems. Well worth Instapering (Is that a word?). Ballmer’s key business philosophy for Microsoft was so antiquated as to be irrelevant. The Microsoft C.E.O. used to proclaim that it would not be first to be cool, but would be first to profit—in other words, it would be the first to make money by selling its own version of new technologies.
BBEdit still Rules
Lovely article on how the stalwart classic BBEdit still rules by Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko) on Macworld today, entitled Mac classics: Why BBEdit rules “BBEdit’s still important because at its essential core, it’s a tool for working with text,” says Rich Siegel, Bare Bones Software’s founder and CEO. “Not text for presentation, as in a word processor or page-layout application, but rather text as data supplied to other software: code for compilers and interpreters, markup and Web applications for Web browsers, log files and data tables for analysis, and for any tool that inhales raw text and turns it into something else.
Stop with the old Text Editors already
Over the past few years, it has become a thing to stop using IDE’s and modern text editors in favor of Vim. I understand older programmers using Vim out of habit, but the new generation of programmers? I don’t get it. Every-time I write about text editors, this growing group tweets to give modern GUI editors up and switch to old trusty rusty crusty terminal-based Vim. Stop it! I’m not going to do that.
Minimize the Glue
Glue is bad. Too much glue and your systems and processes become rigid, inflexible and incomprehensible. In technology and in business, you need to minimize the glue. Let’s start with a few definitions. Lets call a potential interconnection between two systems a path. An interface is code to import or export data from an application. Now we can define an integration as a process whereby data is pulled from one interface, travels down a path and is loaded into another interface.
Export to Excel is a Red Flag
As a developer, I often get requests from clients asking me if I could deliver them a spreadsheet using their data from their systems that contains X and Y and Z. As a maker of software products, I often get asked whether my product supports ‘Export to Excel’. Most developers say yes, here is your spreadsheet and yes, the product has ‘Export to Excel’. My answer is different, it’s sometimes and no, and this is why.