Tag: Apple

AT&T Takes the Fall for the iPhone’s Glitches

Yeah, I’m sure everybody want’s this to happen:

AT&T, send some engineers to redesign the iPhone to make better use of the country’s fastest wireless network.

From the New York Times of all places.

The Season of Stuff

Words of wisdom:

Just try to remember that there are plenty of ways to deal with this stuff. You can pledge to get rid of an amount of stuff equal to the amount you receive. You can let those who love you know that you do not want more stuff but want something less tangible instead (breakfast in bed, money for a favorite charity, etc.). Ask for specific stuff you really truly need that will add years of value to your life on a daily basis… and stuff. The point is, control the stuff. Don’t let the stuff control you.

Cable management and ergonomics

So jealous of this setup from Chris Bowler. What’s funny is that I own that same desk set up although since my was handed down through a series of college kids it no longer has the shelf element that’d be crucial for the stand-up desk.

Gruber vs. Lyons

A great response from Gruber to Dan “Fake Steve” Lyons post “Dear Gruber: You’ve Been Pwned”:

I say, “Look, don’t sweat it, Dan. You’re writing for Newsweek, the premiere magazine Americans turn to for week-old news when they’re sold out of Time. That’s what counts.”

Go read the whole thing, it’s worth it.

The little things in an interface

You know that you’re making good software when you obsess over a 1 pixel abnormality:

Table headers are one of those things we have wanted to ‘fix’ for a long time, but somehow never got around to earlier.  By default, table views in Cocoa apps show a little separator on the right-hand side of every column header, even in the rightmost one when theres a scrollbar under it.  It has always bugged me to no end that in this situation, that rightmost 1px gray line – which, by the way, is completely unneeded – is exactly one pixel off to the left compared to the scrollbar drawn below it.

Creating a community wiki for MobileMe support

I’m not a MobileMe user but to me this sounds like a great idea:

It certainly suggests though that a community wiki of some sort is in order, some kind of centralized resource that can help us all cope with the very real — and very frustrating — disruptions that, for many of us, are part and parcel of dealing with MobileMe. Of course, the mere existence of such a thing would be a damning indictment of Apple’s efforts with this product, and perhaps it might spur the company to pay some real attention to these problems after all. But I’m less interested in that than I am in a support net for users like myself; like I said, at this point it’s folly to hope for any meaningful help from our friends in Cupertino. With MobileMe, Apple is the absentee landlord, so to speak, and we tenants only have each other.

I do think that it would take some serious guts from Apple to do this, but the existence of such a wiki would make me more inclined to foot the annual bill for the service.

This is not a Roadmap (but it’s insightful)

It’s not a roadmap but it’s great insight into Cultured Code:

Believe it or not, we have been working on over-the-air sync since the beginning of this year. In the meantime, our goal changed from “something that works” check out our competition if you want to know what we mean by that to “a really sweet solution”. The tough challenge here is to develop a highly performance-oriented solution that works for everybody. In particular, we wanted it to work for Mac and iPhone users alike, without requiring a MobileMe account or any WebDAV disk for that matter.

The whole issue is indeed complex and interesting enough to warrant its own blog post, but suffice it here to say that we are well under way to providing the above-mentioned “really sweet solution”

This is great news to me and is the key reason why I recently switched from The Hit List back to Things. Ultimately I trust that the people behind Things will continue to advance the app at a pace and in a way that I will be happy with. My only gripe with Things is that it doesn’t support nested items, but in the scheme of things that’s a fairly small issue.

Switching Season

Alex Payne on the inevitable urge to find better technology:

It’s about computer usage as a creative act, something that becomes harder and harder to experience the more proficient one gets with a computer.

Geeks who go through the same thing every year – and I know you’re out there – understand what I’m describing. The slickness of the Apple platform is at once brilliant and constricting, a sports car that even a veteran mechanic wouldn’t dare pop the hood of. It gives one the feeling that there’s nothing left to do because Apple has done it all. Most days, that’s exactly what I want, so I can focus on doing what Apple doesn’t. During Switching Season, though, I can’t escape wanting to do it all myself.

Searching for openness, simplicity, and a hackable sense of experimentation in the modern personal computing landscape is a fruitless endeavor, or at least one incompatible with also having a tool to get real work done.