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Wiskus on Design

Thu, 24 May 2012 13:40:20 -0700

I enjoyed the video of Dave’s talk from The Next Web Conference.

Old Fart Nick

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:51:54 -0700

One thing I love about my company of six people: three are over 40, and the youngest is 30. (Nick is the oldest by about 10 months.)

I prefer working with software veterans — they have more and better scars and lessons learned from those scars.

(Metaphor switch alert.) Have you ever drawn with charcoal? You know how you use your fingers to smudge the lines to get things to look good?

New developers are those crisp and clean lines. Veteran developers have been smudged just right.

Guy on Apple

Thu, 24 May 2012 11:09:44 -0700

Guy English:

It’s fun to pick on the idiots, and we do tune in for the affirmation that engenders, but that’s not insight. It’s a tag team wedgie patrol.

Guy writes up the three things that should trouble Apple.

Big Pages

Thu, 24 May 2012 01:11:50 -0700

Joshua Bixby on GigaOM: The growing epidemic of page bloat:

There’s a huge body of research that shows that when people visit slow sites, they spend less, view fewer pages, click fewer ads, and spend less time on site.

The average page has grown to 1MB.

Michael Wolff on Facebook

Wed, 23 May 2012 23:43:50 -0700

The Facebook Fallacy:

The growth of its user base and its ever-expanding page views means an almost infinite inventory to sell. But the expanding supply, together with an equivocal demand, means ever-lowering costs. The math is sickeningly inevitable. Absent an earth-shaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile. Facebook isn’t Google; it’s Yahoo or AOL.

Also see Doc Searls: After Facebook Fails:

But totally personalized advertising is icky and oxymoronic. And, after half a decade or more at the business of making maximally-personalized ads, the main result is what Michael calls “the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people’s Facebook profiles.”

new

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:48:13 -0700

I’ve been a Cocoa developer for ten years. (Less than some, but more than most.) And whenever I see new in someone’s code, I assume they’re new to Objective-C, that they’ve just gotten here from Java or C++.

But now, because of ARC, I’ve started using new as a replacement for alloc/init, just because it’s more compact.

In other words, I’ll type [NSCache new] instead of [[NSCache alloc] init].

Total surprise to me.

Simpler WordPress

Wed, 23 May 2012 14:52:21 -0700

Matt Mullenweg:

As John Borthwick put beautifully today, “A tablet is an incredible device that you can put in front of babies or 95-year-olds and they know how to use it.” How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

AppleScript and FastScripts to the Rescue

Tue, 22 May 2012 21:09:37 -0700

I wrote about a thing that bugged me — and Daniel Jalkut wrote an AppleScript that solved the problem for me.

I put the script into FastScripts (Daniel’s product, which I use every day) and gave the script a cmd-H keystroke — and it works. Problem solved!

Nick on Android Fragmentation

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:06:06 -0700

Nick Bradbury:

Android’s “fragmentation” problem is miniscule. It’s overstated in the tech press because it generates traffic.

Have I linked to Nick enough recently? You should subscribe to his feed.

Hiding the Last App

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:45:33 -0700

A long time ago — in the system 7 or 8 days, I’m sure — you could do this sequence in app…

Hide Others.
Do some things in that app.
Hide [app-name].

…and end up in the Finder, with all other apps hidden.

It hasn’t worked this way for ten years or so. But I still hit cmd-H many times a day expecting to end up in the Finder. Instead nothing happens. (The Hide command is disabled in this situation.)

It made sense to me because the Finder feels like it’s behind everything else. It feels like it’s the computer itself.

So now I get frustrated — many times a day — and option-click on the desktop. (I’m not a frequent cmd-tabber, though I realize that would get me out of using the mouse in this situation.)

Let’s Sing!

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:36:34 -0700

Let’s Sing! and Let’s Sing! Free are like karaoke Draw Something. The apps are by Lex Friedman and Marco Tabini.

Apple Artifact from a Forgotten World: It Shipped!

Mon, 21 May 2012 16:02:39 -0700

Found in my closet. (Click thumbnail for full version.)

Here’s the explanation:

In 1995 I went indie. My company was called World Wide Power & Light. (Another company already had a similar name, so we renamed the company to Ranchero Software later in 1996. In those days all the cool domain names ended with a vowel: Tango, Marimba, etc.)

Our first main product was a search engine CGI for Macs running WebSTAR (originally MacHTTP). It glued together Frontier and Filemaker Pro to index files on the hard drive and make them searchable.

The price was $99 and we sold 9 copies.

The plaque is from Apple and signed by Heidi Roizen (formerly of T/Maker; then VP of Apple Developer Relations). I’ve never seen any other plaques like this, so I don’t know how many they gave out.

But I was brand-new to all this, and I loved it.

(It looks like our product page is still on the Wayback Machine.)

Update 4:05 pm: Yes, our search engine was called Spotlight. This was long before there was a Spotlight feature on Macs.

Mule App

Sat, 19 May 2012 13:37:09 -0700

Earlier today I downloaded the Mule Radio Syndicate iPhone app. Good podcasts. Made by Black Pixel. All good.

Bradbury on Shoe Farts

Sat, 19 May 2012 11:07:10 -0700

How to deal with them.

Twitter Tracking You

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:46:09 -0700

Dustin Curtis writes about how Twitter is tracking you on the web. (Via Daring Fireball.)

This shit makes me terrifically angry. I recently quit Facebook — deleted my account. I don’t want to quit Twitter too, but it’s on my mind now.

Browsers and Apps

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:08:25 -0700

Tim Bray:

It seems very likely to me that there’s something simple and beautiful lurking inside the browser platform that will hit the greatest 80/20 point in software history. But I’ve been thinking that for a decade or more, now.

Because I’m a Cocoa developer you might (might) assume I’m a partisan in a browser vs. apps war. But I’m not, and I think it’s an imaginary war. (I spent a couple months working on websites around the beginning of this year. And enjoyed it.)

I do think that Tim’s right when he says it’s complicated and there are reasons to use and not-use both.

It also seems as if partisans tend to assume that the other technology is standing still. It’s not.

The Loop on Blogging

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:29:06 -0700

Blogging is not a thing, it’s an attitude:

After almost 20 years of writing news stories and blogs about Apple, it’s become very clear to me that large media companies do not get blogging.

iCloud and Core Data

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:00:45 -0700

Drew McCormack pops the hood to see how iCloud and Core Data syncing works.

Twitter’s New Weekly Email Digest Thing

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:53:56 -0700

I opted out. Here’s how.

New FeedDemon Release

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:26:59 -0700

For Windows users: Nick Bradbury just released FeedDemon 4.1.