Upon Leopard’s launch, some people found the new Stacks feature of the OS X Dock as generally useless. Some simply do not use Stacks at all, others just keep the default Downloads and Documents. Myself, I have taken to using stacks as simple application launchers, useful for grouping together related programs and not forgetting about them1.
Many of the new and exciting services offered to us by start-ups and established companies alike are, often times, dressed-up versions of things we could already do. Video-sharing, messaging, chat and social networks take old and geeky technologies and polish them up for ease-of-use.
Live Mesh, MobileMe and Dropbox are but some examples (and all quite new). I have been excitedly using Dropbox for a bit right now and I know that it is mostly WebDAV, complete with version control1 and a simple-to-use interface. Even if the underlying technology may be different (e.g. rsync) the end result is all the same, and this is technology we have had available for us for a long time, though clearly underutilised.
However, the need for and adoption of these kinds of tools hint at how unfriendly our existing solutions are for mass-use. Again, form is function, and it helps sell these products. All that is excellent, really, since unused technology is a sad state to be in. My only worry is that, while WebDAV is more or less a kind of standard, these new tools do their own thing, in their own way, and keep fragmenting the ways in which we use technology in general. I try to avoid depending on many of the things that I cannot easily control, and while playing with tech is fun, I would rather take my time and wait for a solution to really mature before jumping ‘all-in’.
I am somewhere between Scoble and Enterprise.
I think this was more an issue of ‘how long’, not ‘if’ it happens, but Apple’s FairPlay DRM has been cracked for the applications they provide via the AppStore, which means that tutorials exist on how to get cracked versions of any application on iPhone. Yes, you need a jailbroken iPhone (the jailbreak has code that will bypass the signature check, allowing us to run apps not distributed through the AppStore) with SSH access to the device enabled, although that process is bound to get easier. Meanwhile, I am quite curious to see how Apple will now justify the $99 tax to their developers.
The first app to have been removed from Apple’s AppStore is Aurora Feint, an exciting and well-done (and free) game. The reason is that AF did something weird and insecure with your contact list, submitting it to a centralized server, unecrypted and without user intervention.
Apple pulled it for the time being, and very good that they did, until the developers manage to fix the issue. There are, however, a few other points worth making.
Another issue I ran into after upgrading to 2.0 was that Mail.app was crashing, no matter what I did. Again, not content with simply resetting the phone1, I set to investigate. Again, log into via SSH and delete the /private/var/mobile/Library/Mail folder. Then sync again, so that iTunes will re-add your mail account information to the phone. Back in business.
Unfortunately, if you have not jailbroken your phone, this fix does not work for you — rather, it is rather impossible to delete the folder. You need to reset the phone. Since these settings are saved by iTunes’ backup procedure, they should be someplace on your filesystem, and theoretically you should be able to change them there and restore from that backup, but I have not attempted to do this.
So very eager to update my iPhone to 2.0, once Pwnage Tool was released, I forgot completely I had disabled my EDGE from BossPrefs (seeing how I was at home, with Wi-Fi) and proceeded with the update. This had the unpleasant effect and completely leaving me without any way of enabling EDGE, post-update. Well, most of ‘any way’. If you have done something similarly stupid (out of, I am sure, excitement) here is my quick and dirty fix for the problem, inspired by some older posts from ModMyIfone.com1
In all other respects, it is pretty much a piece of crap: low cooking power, an annoying beep marking that it has finished its job, and I would bet it has a radiation leak. The colour I could do without, it is not white but one feels it should be (and so it is just dirty.) But when it comes to its design — the looks — there is another story to tell. Even if it is neither particularly attractive, revolutionary or avant-garde insofar as its lines and curves flow.
My microwave only has one button to open the door, and one dial to set the time, and because of this I love it. No “Start” button, no useless keypad or electronic display. A microwave does not need all of that bullshit. The features have been added by manufacturers to somehow make their wares seem better than the rest, while in effect it was just feature creep detracting from the real purpose that a microwave serves. To heat things up. And for that, ideally, you would only need one button; alas, having a button and a dial is something I can live with. In this case, the dial is both input and output, as it winds down to show the time left. It is an effective way of representing the only piece of information one really wants to know when they are using the microwave: How much till the chow is ready? And this dial does everything that a keypad could, only far more elegantly because of its simplicity.
It is easy for designers of interfaces or of software to get sidetracked. It happens, lots of times because of upper echelons, sometimes because we forget we are not the typical user. So we have feature bloat, design that needs a user manual to operate, software that has a lot of features and all broken, keypads on microwaves. In all these ways, we show how much we forget our purpose and our goals.
This was posted on some forum regarding a game:
My son has been greatly enjoying Postal, so I’m sure he’ll like the zombies and the midgets, but can I somehow remove the nudity scenes? And how exactly nude are they?
Is it just me, or are people far more concerned with keeping kids away from nudity than from extreme violence? I can understand that both can he harmful, but I would like for someone to explain to me in what way is sexuality (partial nudity, references etc) more damaging to a child’s psyche than violence? After all, sex is something we all discover and enjoy at some point, whereas violence could be considered more… unnatural1.
This comes up in video games repeatedly, but movies and other forms of entertainment also meet with the problem. Why is it that sex is so much less tolerable than violence2?
I was not aware that Ferret had been updated to version 1.1.3. Anyway, I made the code changes to get it compiling and running on OS X, so grab it from the usual place and let me know how it works for you. Linux and Windows version are available directly from Errata’s website.
While Firefox may be an excellent browser for a large number of reasons, in time I have started using Safari more and more. The excellent support for standards, fast rendering capability and complete Mac OS X integration make it my first choice on Apple’s platform. However, I still like to have a bit more control over browsing than either vanilla Firefox or plain Safari offer, so here’s what’s extra on my machine1. Mac OS X only.
