#ThankYouSteve
The iPhone 4S
Everything has been said about it. Except:
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There are two types of Apple users: the hipsters: “look at my shiny toy! Apple is sooo coool!” and geeks: “just my perfect tool”. For the former category, hardware upgrades are not shiny. As far as I could count the latter are already preparing to pre-order or to line up for it.
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Then there are the analysts and “journalists”. The firsts must talk BS. The latter must spread it.
The Writer's Block
Seth Godin:
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.
Trusting Corporate Talks, “Terms of Use”, PR
Just 3 statements about Facebook tracking users outside their website. Hat tip Michael Arrington.
TextMate’s Rewrite of the Boy Who Cried Wolf
They cried TextMate 2 at least three times already: June 2009, January 2010, and September 2011. But people are ready to pay for it again.
When migrating to Lion, I’ve made the decision to leave TextMate behind. Even before that I’ve been trying to get rid of it by learning to use MacVim. Then on Lion, I got BBEdit and I’m still learning it.
Even if TextMate 2 will actually become available at some point and even if I’ll get it for free, I’m not going to use it. And even if I’ll figure out BBEdit is not the best solution for what I need, I won’t go back to TextMate. I’ll try Sublime Text 2 next and then any other text editor that is alive and that gets updated on a regular basis.
When I Use Amazon Silk, What Does Amazon Know About My Internet Usage?
From the Amazon Silk FAQ:
Amazon Silk optimizes and accelerates the delivery of web content by using Amazon’s cloud computing services. To do this, the content of web pages you visit using Amazon Silk may be cached to improve performance and certain web address information will be collected to help troubleshoot and diagnose Amazon Silk technical issues.
TL;DR: everything.
Alfred File Search Filters: Alfred vs LaunchBar
With the Search Filter Extension you can easily set up keywords that trigger a special, limited, type of search that will filter out where and for what file types Alfred looks.
Starting today I’m giving LaunchBar a try. What I’ve discovered is that it supports a similar feature, but it doesn’t seem to be as configurable as Alfred’s.
While it’s too early to write about it, my first impression is that while both these apps are offering the same functionality they took opposite routes to achieve it.
Must-Have Mac Apps: Federico Viticci’s Lists
MacStories’ Frederico Viticci updated the list of his must-have Mac apps. I don’t want to spoil your pleasure of comparing these lists against yours, but while going through them I wrote down some comments:
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Clipmenu: I’ve never used a clipboard manager and I cannot imagine the scenarios to use one for. Any ideas?
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OmniFocus: I’ve only used it for an extended trial period and it came close to my perfect task manager. The Hit List is showing a lot of potential, if only its developer would be more active.
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Sparrow: I love this new email client, but hate its lack of scriptability. You cannot really integrate it with either OmniFocus or The Hit List and that made me go back to using a specialized bookmarklet.
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Reeder: even if I had it installed on my iOS devices and my Mac since its launch, on my laptop I still go back to using Google Reader with Pure Reader as it gives me access to all Google Reader functionality.
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Keyboard Maestro and Hazel: I briefly tried both of these apps. I have concluded that with some (advanced) AppleScript wizardry you can get exactly what these two applications give you.
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If you are using Lion, you must try BetterTouchTool
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I totally hate services that are available only to some countries.
Agenda 2.0 Gets Native, Elegant iPad Version
With a free 2.0 update released today, Agenda becomes a Universal app that runs natively on the iPad.
Agenda is the best calendar app I’ve used on my iPhone. And from now I can use it on my iPad too.
Plus Agenda Calendar is currently on sale for $0.99.
The Third Dimension of Computing: Sync
J. Eddie Smith, IV:
Before sync became such a reliable reality, computing was basically a two-dimensional concept: you chose hardware, and then you chose the software to run on your hardware (not necessarily in that order).
This only if you never had two or more computers. Those that had to manage a multi-computer environment have invested a lot of energy into solving this problem.
The cloud is indeed making things easier as it takes the role of the reference version or the master, while most of the previous solutions were more or less peer to peer setups that had to manually address conflicts. The more machines you had the more chances to run into conflicts. That’s not to say that conflicts are not possible in a cloud environment though. But if you always consider the remote version the master, then things will be slightly simpler.
