Why Windows Just Can’t Win
Mat Honan, writing in Wired in Why Windows Just Can’t Win, concludes:
It doesn’t matter if Microsoft creates the greatest operating system in the world if it then allows others to junk it up. And, ultimately, it means that Microsoft isn’t in control of its brand.
The Metro name, the crapware, and the horrible release dates all point to the same problem: Even when Microsoft has a great product on its hands, even when its product, engineering and design teams manage to hit one out of the park, it won’t matter once the business team comes in and ruins it for everyone. Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows Surface — these are all potentially great products. But if past is prologue, that may not matter.
Too Many Menu Bar Apps?
These days, in order to maximize my productivity, I seem to be running a lot of menu bar apps on my Macintosh OS X system. So many that I had to buy a menu bar manager, Bartender! Add what you use in the comments.
Here’s what each one is and why I use it (in no particular order):
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. They both have benefits and problems, but the balance is achievable and, in some cases, already working. We can end this war of words with knowledge, understanding and in making our own choices.
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. I had one of the early Motorola V710 phones, the ones Verizon got sued for and lost because they advertised sync on the phone, then blocked it on release. I managed to acquire the original Motorola version of the V710 operating system and installed that. Whenever the phone was within bluetooth range of my PC, I could manually sync contacts. How amazing was that, I did not need to maintain two separate address books. Surely that was the post-PC future.
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. But that depended on one fact: Microsoft could buy its way into the lead, because it always had so much more cash on hand than any of its competitors.
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.