Hey Siri, Call Google
WWDC ’26 biggest winners were Google, Liquid Glass haters, iPhone 11 owners, and foldable-iPhone speculation enjoyers.
Tech Thoughts
Software, gadgets, and the web — a running notebook of how technology actually feels to use.
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Claude Opus is a Bore
You too can have your very own killjoy — just $200/month!
The Unworthy, Ungrateful Manchildren of Tech
Matt Mullenweg’s fight with WP Engine is a reminder of how little accountability tech founders face for abusing their power.
Claude’s Walled Garden
Anthropic’s new rules for third-party Claude usage turn subscription discounts into a tool for locking users into its own apps.
Bazzite is the Linux You Should Use
Bazzite makes trying Linux easier with a polished gaming setup, familiar developer tools, and fewer ways to break the system.
Make the most of any monitor with BetterDisplay
BetterDisplay fixes the monitor scaling and management problems that macOS leaves unsolved, especially on screens that fall short of 4K.
Why are webcams so cursed?
Reviewers say the camera on Apple’s new display is horrible. Not surprised, tbh.
Panic’s ‘Code Editor’, and the Lack of Pro Apps for iPad
Panic’s discontinued Code Editor exposes how iPad restrictions and App Store economics keep powerful hardware from getting professional software.
Thoughts on Apple’s “Spring Loaded” Event
If you were hoping for Apple to sell you a $350 keychain, I have good news!
Let Me Tell You About My Boat
More than you ever wanted to know about my WFH setup.
Where The Web Fonts Go
Some simple best practices for self-hosting web fonts in the cloud
Parcel Post
Recapturing the magic of early web development with modern tools
Apple Watch Strikes Back
Thoughts on 2015’s most iconic product design, plus more on the Sept 2020 Apple Event
No More Masters
It’s time to change your Git repo’s default branch.
Blogging is a Pain in the Ass
Thoughts on blogging, or trying to blog, in 2018
Demaree vs MacBook Pro
I just got a brand-new 2016 MacBook Pro, with a Touch Bar, Thunderbolt 3, and all that goodness. I’ll be collecting my impressions here.
Trying out Medium’s photo post thingy.
Three photos from Adobe’s Union Square office the day Typekit Marketplace launched.
On “On Mast Brothers”
Sometimes, [someone is wrong on the Internet](https://xkcd.com/386/) and, in my self-appointed role as Twitter Batman, I seek justice by countering one wrong link or tweet with several (I would say) right ones. This time, about halfway…
Earlier today I played with iPad Pro at the mall (super briefly because I had a bored toddler waiting for me)
Earlier today I played with iPad Pro at the mall (super briefly because I had a bored toddler waiting for me). These are my impressions:
Apple’s new keyboard and mouse, reviewed
A same-day review of Apple’s 2015 Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2.
Windows 10 Launched Last Tuesday. Or Did It?
Windows 10 officially shipped two days ago, on 29 July. As I write these words, today is 31 July, and I just got the following email from Microsoft:
Fear of a Chrome planet
*A response to* [*Nolan Lawson’s post “Safari is the new IE”*](http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/)
Google Photos’ unguessable URLs
The Verge’s Russell Brandom on what, at first blush, looked like a security hole in Google Photos: when you right-click an image, you get URLs that appear to be fully public and accessible by anyone. It’s not as big a deal as it seems:…
Ben Thompson on Apple’s Privacy Stance
Ben Thompson makes a good point in today’s Stratechery Daily Update (paywalled) about Tim Cook’s privacy stance, and his comments about Google’s business model that I previously and half-jokingly described as “throwing shade”. Thompson…
Elliot Jay Stocks’ 1 month with the Apple Watch
Elliot begins thus: Yesterday afternoon, I realised that I wasn’t wearing my Apple Watch. In fact, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been wearing it for the entire day. It was back in my bedroom, still attached to its charger and very much…
Jeremy Keith on Web vs Native
Peter-Paul Koch wrote a post suggesting it was time for web developers and advocates to “concede defeat — or, at least, concede that the web cannot, and should not, compete with native when it comes to complex, app-like structures.” In…
The Kindle “Finally” Gets Better Typography
I’m very excited for this update. I bought an e-ink Kindle for bedtime reading earlier this year, and while I love the simplicity, small size, and the reduced eyestrain from not staring at yet another LCD screen for hours, the layout and…
Apple Watch, 12″ MacBook, and Force Touch Trackpads
On Wednesday I went to the SoHo Apple Store in NYC for an Apple Watch try-on appointment. I signed up two days in advance, but showed up fifteen minutes early to find the try-on area almost empty—I got to start looking at Watches right…
For a few dollars more
Apple Watch pricing, expressed in terms of upgrades relative to other models: Sport models only come with Sport Bands, and both the space gray and silver cost the same. The 42mm cases are always more expensive, but for us mere mortals,…
Living With Two Laptops (and Two Platforms)
Now I have two laptops. My MacBook Pro is relatively huge, but not that big, and it does absolutely everything I could want it to do, in style. My Surface Pro is smaller, thinner, and lighter. It does virtually everything—certainly…
I Got a Microsoft Surface Pro 3
And I’m surprised to say I really like it. Granted, it’s a second computer—I feel permission to like it, because if the going gets rough I can always retreat to the safety of my fully loaded MacBook Pro. But as a lightweight, powerful…
Paul Ford on File Formats
Paul Ford writes for The Manual about some of his favorite file formats, and along the way discusses the difference between WordPerfect, a good word processor that ultimately failed with users, and Microsoft Word, which is Microsoft Word.…
Using Custom Fonts in iOS 7+
Something a lot of people don’t know about iOS is that, since the release of iOS 7 last year, it’s finally possible to install third-party fonts and use them in apps. The catch is that fonts can only be installed via a configuration…
Blogging from Drafts on iOS 8
Having laid the philosophical groundwork for how I want to blog, let’s talk tools. I wrote the last post in Drafts. I’ve done all my recent writing in Drafts; it’s good and, more importantly, conveniently available in my pocket. Writing…
Microsoft Word Adds Dropbox Sync
Last week, Microsoft released a major update to Office for iOS, adding support for iPhones (including the new large-screen models) and, even more importantly, adding support for Dropbox as a place to open and save documents in the Office…
Notes from the OS X Yosemite beta
About a week ago, I broke one of my own rules and installed an early developer preview of OS X Yosemite on my regular, day-to-day, work-issued Mac laptop. I had previously promised myself I’d at least wait until the public beta, on the…
iA Writer Pro’s Patent Debacle
Last week, Oliver Reichenstein from iA — makers of iA Writer, a popular, lovely Mac app for writing Markdown text — made some comments on Twitter implying that he would go after other text editors for copying the signature “Syntax…
My TYPO Berlin Talk: “The Weight of the Web”
Slides from the talk I just finished presenting at TYPO Berlin 2013. I was a ball of jet lag and nerves, based on the live-tweeting from @mfacomdes I think I got across what I wanted to, and that the bits that were interesting and…
Hi-DPI web typography on the Typekit Blog
A little something I wrote for the Typekit blog about high-density displays and their impact on readability. You could call this a preview for my talk at TYPO Berlin 2013 Touch, two weeks from tomorrow.
“Why Nobody Can Copy Apple”
From Charlie Kindel: I assert there’s something else that makes Apple is unique amongst its (asymmetric) competitors (e.g. Google, MS, Samsung): It only focuses on one customer: The Consumer. In my experience, the behaviors and culture of…
U.S. Internet Users Pay More For Worse Service
Susan Crawford for Bloomberg: The Internet has taken the place of the telephone as the world’s basic, general-purpose, two-way communication medium. All Americans need high-speed access, just as they need clean water, clean air and…
Google Kills Free Version of Google Apps
If nothing else, my blog post on configuring multiple Google Apps domains on a single account just got a lot more useful.
Evan Gotlib Buys A Microsoft Surface
evangotlib: I bought a Microsoft Surface yesterday. Long story, don’t ask why, it wasn’t for me. This is the story of the purchase. It started with a phone call to the Microsoft Pop-Up store at the Shops at Columbus Circle… Evan: “Hi, do…
Firefox 18, with Retina Support, Enters Beta Channel
Finally. FYI, new Firefox builds support the proposed new dppx unit for resolution media queries, so if you want to target this new Firefox for serving hi-dpi images, use this:
Marco Arment reviews the Retina MacBook Pro
He calls it the best computer he's ever used. And he's a hardcore Mac Pro devotee, one of those guys who wants a 12-core monstrosity at home and the tiniest possible Air on the go. Last week work surprised me with an upgrade to a…
Windows 8 To Be Priced At $199, Then $69, Also Maybe $99
The Verge: Microsoft's Windows 8 Pro software will be priced at $199 after a promotional price of $69.99 expires on January 31st 2013, according to one source familiar with Microsoft's plans. The software maker will also offer a Windows 8…
Tapbots: Don’t Panic
Paul Haddad explains what Twitter's new guidelines (which I discussed a bit in my last post) mean for the future of Tweetbot. If the title wasn't enough indication, while Haddad doesn't sound thrilled, in short they're not worried about it.
What Twitter’s API Announcement Could Have Said
Anil Dash polishes Michael Sippey's pre-announcement of Twitter's new API v1.1, which has the entire internet throwing a tremendous (if possibly justifiable) hissy fit: We have awesome news for Twitter developers: Today we're announcing…
TextMate is now open-source
OMFG. This isn't just an interesting move, it was probably the only way the TextMate 2 story could end, apart from the whole project—and TextMate's six-year legacy as the first great OS X-native editor—being abandoned and dying out.…
Steve Klabnik on Ruby testing with factories
Steve Klabnik writes about how the popular pattern of using object factories (via a library such as FactoryGirl or Fabrication) to build and save objects in tests has, in his opinion, set Ruby testing practices back two years or more. I…
Google Chrome for iOS
Those are four words I never thought I'd use in the same sentence, unless that sentence went on to say "will never happen". Announced today at Google I/O, Chrome is — like nearly every other third-party browser for iOS — just a wrapper…
Apple Releases “Podcasts” App
Finally. Podcasts is a standalone podcast-listening app similar in concept to Instacast, only instead of 99 cents this one costs nothing. And being from Apple, it's officially the only podcatcher or music app on the App Store that can…
Shawn Blanc Reviews Reeder 3
I've been beta testing this new version for weeks, and pretty much everything Blanc writes is accurate. This is a major upgrade that makes reading RSS feeds on your iPhone a lot nicer. Available now on the App Store for $3; current users…
iPhoto & Aperture Now Use The Same Data Format
Sure sure, yesterday's Apple announcements — iOS 6, Mountain Lion, the new MacBook Pro with Retina display — were really cool and amazing and all that. But what really made me jump out of my chair with excitement was the news that…
Coda 2 & Diet Coda
Hell yes. I've been beta testing Coda 2 for a few weeks — it's a fantastic update, still very much the same Coda I've enjoyed using for years, but totally cleaned up and refreshed. It's still the best way to edit static/PHP web sites on…
Please Don’t Learn To Code
Jeff Atwood writes about the deeply frustrating "everyone should learn to code" movement, which also frustrates me because it feels symptomatic of a broader trend: a general cultural focus on how software is made over why we make it. So…
Show How, Don’t Tell What
Ryan Tomayko on how he manages engineers at GitHub: I actually don't show people how to make decisions and ship product in any real direct way. There's no How To Ship Product training class or anything like that. Instead, I just do work.…
Why Facebook Bought Instagram
Om Malik: Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and…
Facebook Buys Instagram
You know this acquisition is different because Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post about it: For years, we've focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we'll be able to work even more closely…
TechCrunch: Pair Programming Considered Harmful
I agree with most of this. In my experience, pair programming is very useful as an occasional tool for transferring knowledge (i.e., when one developer knows a lot about something another developer needs to know a lot about). Other than…
Facebook May Sue Employers Who Demand Passwords
This in response to recent reports of employers demanding access to job seekers' private Facebook profiles. In a blog post, Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, spelled out why demanding a social network password is an even bigger…
Job seekers getting asked for Facebook passwords
USA Today reports that employers have moved past requiring job candidates to friend their HR managers, to requiring access to their private news feeds and profiles as a condition of employment: Asking for a candidate's password is more…
Where to get Retina iPad wallpapers
UI designer Louie Mantia, whose "Andy's Room" background I use on literally all of my devices, has started upconverting his wallpapers to Retina format. Only a few of them have been done so far, including all of the ones in the slideshow…
Mislav Marohnic on Apple in China
Mislav Marohnic: Apple’s staff can design the magical gadgets you have in your hand. They can even program all the software, and run the services such as iCloud and Siri in the U.S. But they can’t produce the hardware fast enough and…
Daring Fireball on China and Mike Daisey
John Gruber: Daisey impugned the integrity of Apple, and the journalism of the New York Times and ABC News in order to work people up regarding problems that don’t exist. This only served to draw attention away from the labor, health, and…
“This American Life” Retracts Mike Daisey/Apple Episode
In short, Daisey made shit up. Not everything, but TAL aired the piece on the basic assumption that things in it were true that it turns out were not. This weekend's new episode of TAL is a full hour detailing the errors in the original…
Where’s \_why?
Slate's Annie Lowrey looks into the 2009 disappearance of Why the Lucky Stiff, and his impact on Ruby and the world. For a mainstream magazine-style article on programming and developer culture, this was pretty good.
Objective-C Literals, Part 1
Nice write-up from Mark Dalrymple on a new, very long overdue feature in Objective-C: literal syntax for creating numbers, arrays, and dictionaries. In current Objective-C, to create a NSNumber object you have to write (for example)…
Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264
Funny how Mozilla's idealistic, world-changing mission has shifted since everything started going mobile. Supporting H.264 will not save them, but they'll look somewhat less ridiculous on their way out.
iPhoto’s Mystery Meat Gestures
Great critique by Lukas Mathis of the many confusing, non-obvious buttons and gesture controls in iPhoto for iOS. I haven't used the app on an iPad yet, but I found it maddening to use on an iPhone. Not only is the UI as confusing as…
Byword for iOS
My favorite Markdown writing app for Mac, now available for iPhone/iPad for a introductory price of $2.99. There's iCloud syncing and Markdown preview, but its killer feature so far is its super-nice editing toolbar: you can change…
Two Experiments
I'm trying a couple of new things this week: Last week, after hearing John Gruber talk about his Das Keyboard on The Talk Show, I thought it might be (ironic) fun to get my old Happy Hacking Keyboard out of the closet and use it for a few…
Adobe Shadow
A seriously cool new app for web designers who design sites for mobile devices, that lets you preview and inspect your work on many different devices all at once. The demo video is pretty awesome. (via Jason Santa Maria)
Ben Brooks on Readability
A more detailed, thoughtful reaction to Readability's "pivot" away from paid subscriptions: I know exactly who Instapaper’s customers are: the app users. Knowing that allows me to know Instapaper’s motives: make the app users happy. In…
Readability, Revisisted
Last Thursday the folks at Readability finally released their long-awaited iPhone/iPad app. Having switched back to Readability for a few days in order to give the app a fair trial, in general I think it's well executed, with high…
How I Work, Part 1: Ruby
Since the first of the year I've been trying to write one of that sort of post where the blogger describes the tools they use. Obviously, I haven't succeeded yet. And what's more, it's taken me until now to precisely identify why it's…
Two Domains, One Google Apps
Since almost the beginning, Google Apps has worked like this: Every account has one domain name (let's call it yourdomain.com) that users use to log into their mail/calendars/etc, which Google calls the primary domain name. You set this…
Developing Facebook’s New Photo Viewer
Yesterday I spent a few hours building an elaborate web photo gallery for our wedding photos before my wife and I realized we're more interested in seeing everyone's likes and comments than in building yet another elaborate web thing for…
Heroku Supports PHP! Yay! (Yes, Yay!)
This week I (re-)discovered that Heroku's polyglot Cedar stack supports PHP. The PHP support was launched a while back in partnership with Facebook, to attract developers of Facebook apps to Heroku's cloud. While it's not listed on their…
Siri Failures, Illustrated
As a software developer currently working on a search feature, I understand why Siri falls short. I acknowledge it's logical to expect that an electronic brain capable of understanding the semantic relationship between "broke a tooth" and…
Gaug.es for iPhone
A really nice, simple iPhone interface for the really nice, simple website analytics service from GitHub (who acquired it a couple of weeks ago along with its developers, Ordered List). I tried using their web interface to look at my…
The Failed Promise of ‘The Verge’
Verge, the new project from the former Engadget editors who left to start their own site after theirs was acquired by AOL, is probably the best shitty gadget rag out there. But it's still a shitty gadget rag, and Ben Brooks wanted more:…
Facebook Acquires Gowalla’s Team; Gowalla Itself Not So Much
Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams: About two months ago, my co-founder Scott [Raymond] and I attended F8. We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team…
No, Siri Isn’t Pro-Life
Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS: In a move reminiscent of how Greenpeace harangued Apple for the PR value, MoveOn.org even sent out email encouraging people to sign a petition asking Apple to modify how Siri works, claiming that Siri…
Code Blog: Sexy instance\_eval proxies in Ruby
Some of the most mind-blowing language features in popular Ruby libraries/frameworks are made possible through the use of delegate proxies: objects that invisibly intercept method and variable calls in your code and forward them to one or…
Little Printer
People I know who aren't even web people are tweeting and posting about this Little Printer thing. I agree, it looks really, really cute. It's hard to design an electronic gadget with that much personality that doesn't look like a…
Readability Now (Mostly) Free, with iOS Apps On The Way
Rich Ziade: With this release, Readability is available at no cost. Sign-up and you’ll have your own profile and reading list in no time. Both Readability accounts and our companion apps will always be completely free, but we also offer a…
Knyle style recruiting
GitHub's Kyle Neath has had it up to here with recruiters and their shenanigans: Here’s the thing: recruiters do not give a fuck about doing good in the world. They do not care about making people happy. They do not care about building a…
On Categories and “Shit Work”
As a developer I spend a lot of time thinking about names, categories, and relationships. And as a product person, I also spend a lot of time trying to look at products from the perspective of someone who (unlike me) isn't steeped in…
Mobile FontFonts: Awesome Fonts for iOS Apps
Now this is interesting: FontFont have released a series of 14 of their best fonts — including Basic Gothic, Tisa, and Yoga — as iOS-optimized TTF/OTF files, for developers to include in iOS apps. Including a custom font in an iOS project…
Upcoming events
I'm excited to announce the following upcoming events, at which I shall talk about nerdy things and answer your questions about said things: ChicagoRuby Downtown, Tuesday 10/4 at 6 pm I'll be giving this month's featured talk at the…
Kyle Neath’s Design Hacks
GitHub's lead designer shares some simple tricks that can help anyone build better UIs and presentations.
Better web font loading with JavaScript
In my epic-length debut post for the Typekit blog, I explain why we use JavaScript (instead of just CSS) to load web fonts, what our JavaScript does at load time, some of the problems this method helps us solve, and how we've solved them.…
Rands on Focus & Context-Switching in Lion
Once again, Michael Lopp says it better than I ever could: Context isn’t just the art of knowing where you are, but the illusory and friction-free belief that you know where everything is. Questions like: “Where is that?”, “How do I find…
The Desktop Transition
Michael Lopp, explaining why the Exposé and Spaces features of Mac OS X never really caught on, and why Apple's completely re-imagined them in Lion: How would you react if, whenever you were wondering where something was on your desktop,…
Frames of Interaction
Matt Gemmell explains one major reason why native apps have an edge on web apps: The calculator web app is running in the frontmost tab of a web browser app, which in turn is running on a smartphone. The device’s screen is no longer…
“You Interact with the Content, Not the OS”
Joseph Cohen gets it: They reversed the direction of mouse scrolling! Crazy! But really, they needed to. With Lion, Apple is trying to change the user experience metaphor that has governed OS design since the 80s. It was a symbolic move,…
Focus on my favorite OS X Lion features
The just-released Mac OS X Lion has a lot of killer features, but so far, for me, the most killer is the ability to easily toggle any app that supports it into a distraction-free, full-screen mode. Apple's marketing page for the feature…
Google+ and cognitive overhead
Are you tired of hearing about it yet? I'm getting there. There's more chatter about Google+ right now than there is on Google+, and most of what's on Google+ is conversations about Google+. I'm sure Google didn't set out to build the…
Richard Dreyfuss Reads an Apple EULA
Hilarious.
Marco Arment on Safari’s Reading List
In short, he's not (too) worried: If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve…
Ethan Marcotte’s “Responsive Web Design”
Almost as exciting as whatever comes out of today's WWDC announcements: A Book Apart's newest title launches tomorrow, on how web designs can (and should) adapt to the devices used to look at them, rather than force users to pan, scan and…
WWDC Predictions
There's something a little distasteful about writing an Apple predictions post. Practically, what I'm doing right now is giving one of the richest, best-known companies in the world some free advertising, and at the same time taking an…
On Grouponzi
M.G. Siegler on why calling Groupon a ponzi scheme misses the point of why they're chasing such an aggressive growth strategy: If you look at the actual breakdown, most of the money is being spent internationally. In the U.S., they’re…
Google Apps Dropping IE7 Support on Aug 1
This is big: For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. … For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers.…
Programming style guides
On this week's Build & Analyze Marco Arment talks about good and bad programming languages, and building on that, how a good, consistent coding style helps programmers write good, consistent, maintainable code. This is very true, and…
Adobe ‘CSS Regions’
Because heaven forbid they figure out how to make useful tools for the Web we have before trying to shove a bunch of print layout conventions into CSS.
‘Inflate’ Web Type with FitText
A new jQuery plugin for creating ginormous headlines that scale to fit the width of their parent elements, especially useful in fluid or responsive layouts. Just beware: Don't you dare let us catch you using FitText on paragraph text.…
Microsoft Buying Skype for Some Reason
David Chartier and some other folks are worried what this will mean for the Skype user experience on Apple platforms, but they may be overstating the problem somewhat. I mean, could Skype 5 for Mac really get any worse? The Office 2011…
Adobe Releases ‘Photoshop Touch’ Apps for iPad
Don't be fooled: Adobe hasn't released a standalone 'Photoshop for iPad' image/photo editing tool, but rather a suite of three add-ons that let you use your iPad as a control pad for Photoshop CS5 running on your desktop computer. Of the…
Introducing Vico
It's a brand-new (and very, very rough) Mac OS X text editor that wraps a slick GUI similar to the semi-abandoned Espresso around an editing engine with support for TextMate bundles and — this is the crazy part — Vim's editing modes and…
Pow! Zero-Config Rack Serving for Mac OS X
There is no non-nerdy way to talk about this, so non-developers feel free to sit this one out. Pow is a Ruby/Rack application server written in Node.js, with CoffeeScript, by Sam Stephenson. Through a series of small hacks, Pow lets you…
Lunchy, A Friendly launchctl Wrapper
If you develop software on a Mac, you probably need this right now.
Amazon Launches CloudDrive Media Storage
Online file storage and backup on Amazon's servers, and if you upload MP3s you can play them from any computer—or at least any computer that has Flash Player installed. There's a 5 GB free tier, and you can buy up to 1 TB of storage…
WWDC 2011 Announced, Sells Out, May Not Feature a New iPhone
The rumor mill is saying not to expect a new iPhone to be announced at WWDC in June, even though Apple has announced new iPhone models there three years in a row. It's also saying iOS 5 will be announced (not released) at the show, OS X…
Things Cloud Sync Inches Closer To Reality
There's finally a date—a Mac-only (no iOS) pilot program launches May 2, and you can sign up today to be invited to the beta when it opens. Cloud syncing will replace, not complement, the existing Wi-Fi sync. For people who still want…
Tweet Nest
A really nice lightweight PHP app for archiving and browsing your Tweets on your own server. Installed it on my personal site in less than 5 minutes, then lost at least half an hour exploring the stuff I was tweeting about in 2009. For…
New MacBook Pros Have a Freezing Problem
Ars Technica: Numerous owners of the latest 15" and 17" MacBook Pro models have taken to Apple's support forums to report an issue that causes their systems to freeze, with one user going so far as to successfully reproduce the problem on…
NYT Announces Expensive, Confusing, Easily Avoided Paywall
You get 20 articles a month, unless you're following a link from Google, social media like Facebook or Twitter, or from blogs, in which case you can view the linked article for free. If you want to view more than 20 articles a month, you…
Did Twitter just tell client-app developers to stop?
Brent Simmons responds to yesterday's baffling announcement by Twitter's platform head Ryan Sarver that third-party developers are now (at the very least) actively discouraged from making new client apps. It's baffling because third-party…
Anatomy of a Crushing
Maciej Cieglowski describes what happened once Yahoo! let it slip they were thinking of shutting down Delicious, and thousands of users all started moving to his competing service Pinboard all at once. Pinboard is a PHP app that Maciej…
Out Today: The Elements of Content Strategy, from A Book Apart
It's amazing how every time ABA launches a new title about making websites it feels like an event, one that smart people worth paying attention to are genuinely excited about. Erin Kissane's Elements of Content Strategy is (naturally)…
Readability’s iOS App Rejected
This is bullshit: under Apple's "new" policy rejecting apps that ask/require users to have a paid subscription, even if the iOS app is clearly a companion UI to a mostly non-mobile product, Readability's app has been rejected. This is the…
Well, That’s One Way To React
So apparently John Casasanta from tap tap tap had a bad experience with a contract iOS programmer. Any sane, properly socialized person in his situation should have followed one of two paths: Sue the guy for breach of contract (they did…
Regarding Happy Cog Hosting
When I was a full-time freelancer, doing agency-type work, a big chunk of my business involved setting up and managing my clients' servers for them. In fact, this was part of my sales pitch to clients. I'm not just going to build you a…
Getting Hardboiled with CSS3 2D Transforms
Andy Clarke demonstrates one of the hottest CSS3 features: using transform to manipulate the size, placement and even rotation of elements. (And, as if that weren’t enough, tosses in some cool :nth-of-type pseudo selector action,…
OAuth Will Murder Your Children
Or maybe not. But you probably at least gave it permission to read those private Twitter DMs you've been trading with whoever, and didn't realize it.
Amazon Simple Email Service
Yes, children, Amazon is doing for email what they did for data storage. SES provides app developers with a robust, scalable way to send bulk or transactional emails using a simple, RESTful API. Java or .NET clients are provided; I bet…
Back to the Mac?
Like many folks I was delighted to hear that not only was Twitter for Mac 2.0 (née Tweetie) still alive, and not only was Twitter Inc. finally behind the project (and not just in the sense of letting Loren Brichter work on it in his spare…
E-Mail Use Falls as Young Chat and Text
The NYT discovers teens and young adults, who think the relative slowness and formality of e-mail is "so lame," are texting like maniacs. Facebook's new Messages product (which I've tried out—it's pretty good) tries to adapt to the new…
Thomas Hawk’s Open Letter to Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz
Yahoo! is laying off a bunch of people in order to better focus on "our strengths (like email, the homepage, search, mobile, advertising, content and more)". Photographer & blogger Thomas Hawk is upset by this new focus, because it…
It’s December, and 24 Ways is Back
24 Ways, "the advent calendar for Web geeks", is back with an article by Drew McLellan on progressive enhancement for embedded maps. There's always tons of good stuff posted here during the holiday season. Highly recommended for people…
Ageism? Really?
Scrunchup is a "web magazine" (some would call it a "blog") by and for young web professionals, where by "young" we mean "21 or younger". Anna Debenham is one of the founders and wrote a post about her experiences being discriminated…
Instapaper 2.3’s Adaptive Dark Mode
Marco Arment's Instapaper iOS app has long been able to switch into a light-text-on-dark-background mode for easier nighttime reading. That's useful, but not so interesting. Other apps, such as Amazon's Kindle app for iOS, do the same…
danah boyd: Risk Reduction Strategies on Facebook
Short version: teens (and some adults) in high-risk social situations don't like to leave an online history, and don't like anything happening to their profiles when they're not around to respond to them in real-time. Fascinating stuff.
All 4 Major U.S. Networks Now Blocking Google TV
What if a huge internet company developed a software platform for TVs, got some huge device makers involved to make and sell the hardware with a big, splashy holiday-time launch, but forgot to check with the content providers to make sure…
The Most Popular Phone in the World
Gizmodo profiles the Nokia 1100, the 7-year-old model used by more than 250,000,000 people in (mostly) developing nations. It's easy for us here in the first world to mock Nokia for being (so far) a non-participant in the smartphone…
In Which I Cut My Hosting Costs by 89% By Switching to Heroku
This morning/afternoon, I needed to make a long, long, long overdue change to my dear friend Lucy Knisley's web site. It was a simple change, literally just adding two images to a static HTML file. But I'm me, and that's not heroic…
Chicago’s “Significant” New Apple Store
Tomorrow Apple is opening its second Chicago retail store, more than seven years after the existing Michigan Ave. location. That's seven years of Chicago residents having only one place to line up on iPhone day, only one Genius Bar to get…
Ewww, You Use PHP?
One of MailChimp developers strikes back against programming language elitism: You can imagine the horror and surprise we see when we try to tell a good developer that we use PHP to solve cool and interesting problems. So here’s my best…
The .ly Domain Space To Be Considered Unsafe
Short version: Ben Galbraith and his partner, sex blogger Violet Blue, were using vb.ly as a URL shortener for sexy web content and the Libyan government cancelled their domain registration. Additionally, the Libyans have decided to stop…
You Can’t Innovate Like Apple (Just Cause You Want To Make Money)
The article is full of great anecdotes and insights, mostly from a Michael Lopp/John Gruber panel at SXSW, but the factoid I've been repeating most this week is this one (bolds mine): Apple designers expect to design 10 different mockups…
Foursquare on Tuesday’s Outage: “So, That Was A Bummer…
In a nutshell, they'd tried to shard their database by user ID on the assumption that both halves of their database would grow at a similar rate, i.e., that each shard had a similar mix of light and heavy users. But as it turned out,…
Anil Dash on the new Gourmet Live
Speaking of Condé Nast properties, internet hipsters, and the iPad: Anil Dash describes the all-star team of nerds (Paul Ford! Garrett Murray! Andre Torrez! Liz Spiers! And don't forget: Anil Dash!) who brought Gourmet back as a…
‘The Secret to Apple’s Success is That There Are No Secrets.’
Jeremy Toeman and Greg Franzese: Apple is dominating its competition in customer service because the company cares about creating a quality customer experience at every brand touchpoint. And they do this for a reason – it’s called…
Amazon’s New EC2 Micro Instances, Benchmarked
Not surprisingly they're slower, but so cheap they're still worth considering if you can afford to wait a few extra minutes for a job to finish.
iOS 4.2 Beta Drops, and Apple Announces ‘AirPrint’
The first developer beta of iOS 4.2—the first 4.x release that's compatible with the iPad—is now available to registered iOS Developer Program members. The new software will include a new wireless printing technology called 'AirPrint';…
10 Things You Didn’t Know About The New Twitter.com
Of interest to Twitter Platform developers: the new site uses a new version of the @anywhere JavaScript SDK announced at the Chirp conference in April. And the other big Chirp announcement—Annotations, which would allow API developers to…
In Case You Were Wishing GitHub Had Some Competition…
I totally missed this back in March, but Beanstalk—who've been known until now as strictly a Subversion hosting service—has expanded their offering to include Git repositories as well. From their announcement: It’s our firm belief that…
Gruber Breaks Down Today’s Big App Store Changes
The new developer agreement and App Store Guidelines are now live on Apple's developer portal. In short: third-party developer tools are fine (but using private APIs still isn't), interpreted code is fine (but downloading it at runtime…
Apple Shocks The World, Announces Big, Helpful Policy Changes for App Store
Apple has revised some of the most controversial provisions of the App Store developer agreement — including section 3.3.1, which banned apps created using third-party tools like Flash. Executing JavaScript, Python, or other code on the…
Amazon Now Offering EC2 “Micro” Instances
Less than 1/4th the cost of a standard "small" instance, but there are catches: the CPU is "burstable" but defaults to less than one full core, and you get no local storage—your server's filesystem has to live in Amazon's Elastic Block…
This Guy Has An Analog Meter for His Google Reader Unread Count
Based on Arduino (of course). It polls for updates once a minute, so he can see the needle steadily drop as he marks items read.
Twitter of the Day: @English50cent
He retweets Fitty, then translates the tweet into the Queen's English. For example, when @50cent says Busta still has the best show in hip-hop I'm not shiting on him. And I aint dissing serena either I said i gotta workout!yal be buggin…
Eight Ways to Completely Misunderstand the Economics of App Stores
FastCompany "expert blogger" Aaron Shapiro says we're in an "app bubble", based on crackerjack analysis like this: Apps don't generate profit for developers. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said, the App Store has generated more than $1 billion…
How Backblaze was almost, but not, acquired
Backblaze is an online backup service; you install some software on your computer, and it'll continually back up your hard drive to their secure servers. They're a small company, but profitable and growing, and unlike a lot of startups…
Motorola Buys 280 North, Whose Technology is Basically Apple Stuff Ported to JavaScript, to Help “Foster the Android Ecosystem”
280 North's products are: 280 Slides, a web-based clone of Apple's Keynote slideshow app Atlas, a web-based clone of Apple's Interface Builder tool Objective-J, a port of Apple's Objective-C language to JavaScript And Cappuccino, a…
Google’s Creep Executive Officer
John Gruber speculates that if Google has become creepy in the last year or two, that may be attributable to the creepiness of CEO Eric Schmidt. Where by "creepy", he means "amoral" and "willing to sacrifice privacy for mobile or ad…
Paul Graham: “What Happened to Yahoo”
I didn't leave out a question mark or anything; Graham's not asking what happened to Yahoo, a company whose brightest talents have all left and who's best chance for long-term survival is as a unit of Microsoft. He's telling us it's…
Oh Hey Look, GitHub is Running a Job Board
Same basic idea as the 37signals one: $300 buys you a 30-day job listing. If you're a GitHub user, you can opt into seeing targeted job listings on your dashboard by marking yourself "available for hire" in your account settings. Targeted…
“Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong”
Yehuda Katz has switched to Vim in spite of all the people recommending he switch to Vim: The last few times someone tried to get me to switch to vim, I issued them a simple challenge. Can you tell me a way to switch that will not…
Neven Mrgan Compares iMac, HP & Dell’s Websites
Turns out almost everything you need to know about the differences between these companies can be found out by just looking at how differently they show off their flagship products on the Web. Apple's iMac site is clean, focused, and…
BBB Punk’d Into Giving An A- Rating to Hamas
Reputation isn't something you can pay for, but a positive BBB rating (apparently) is: The author of the website BBBRoundup went a step further to illustrate just how easy it is for an entity to earn the BBB's seal of approval. He…
Meditations in a 4.0-mergency
All of my biggest iPhone OS feature wishes were, let's face it, pretty boring: Multiple Exchange accounts (or: wanting Google to ActiveSync my calendars without getting cockblocked by work meetings) Unified e-mail inbox And, no kidding,…
Starbucks Switching to Free Wi-Fi on July 1
As announced on Starbucks's Twitter feed: We're very excited to announce that coming July 1st: Free. 1 click. No registration WIFI at all US locations! 🙂 This is apparently part of an exciting new business strategy for SBUX—"free access…
Ad hoc custom templates in Pages for iPad
This morning I've been writing a longer post about the fact that I've not really been using my iPad as much as I expected. There are a few explanations, some more valid than others. One of them is that I love using Pages to add a touch of…
Flash Player 10.1 is Made of Cocoa
Flash Player engineering manager Paul Betlem, as relayed by John Mack: First and foremost, Flash Player 10.1 is a full-fledged Cocoa app (though legacy Carbon support remains for some browsers that require it). We now leverage Cocoa…
Big Changes to AT&T’s 3G Data Plans
In a nutshell: AT&T is expanding the iPad 3G's fair, easy-to-understand data pricing to their entire network, tethering will cost $45/mo (including the required 2 GB data plan), and iPhones will finally finally finally be able to tether…
Rethinking Routes
Geoffrey Grosenbach is wondering how to bring the URL back into Rails: This epiphany came while writing a few Sinatra applications. The exact URL for a handler sits right in front of my eyes as I write the code for it. I can’t ignore it.…
“You Wouldn’t Drink 9-Year-Old Milk”
A delightful PSA from your friends at Microsoft Australia, about finally throwing out a certain 9-year-old browser. Note that this is from Australia—Microsoft's U.S. mothership has never been this direct.
Before You Get Too Excited About A Verizon iPhone…
Matt Drance: Right now, every iPhone in the world uses GSM technology, regardless of the carrier. Adding Verizon [who use a different technology, CDMA] would mean building, testing, and forecasting new hardware for a CDMA model. It would…
Chrome for Mac is Out of Beta
From David Chartier at Macworld: Chrome for Mac left beta at the rather unceremonious version number of 5.0.375.55. It boasts many of Chrome’s most popular cross-platform features too, including syncing of both bookmarks and browser…
Gruber, Paczkowski, Geschke, Flash
John Gruber comments on an interview by John Paczkowski with Adobe co-founder Chuck Geschke, in which the following exchange happened: JP: Why isn't Flash an open standard? CG: It is. What are you talking about? I would like to join the…
Steve Jobs vs. Gawker Blogger
Gawker's Ryan Tate e-mailed Steve Jobs to ask him a simple, direct, incredibly inane question: if Bob Dylan were 20 today, how would he feel about Apple's iPad "revolution"? "Revolutions are about freedom," wrote Tate. Jobs, to his…
Changes at TypeKit
A welcome surprise: TypeKit, responding to customer feedback, has made some nice changes to their account structure. Full library accounts now can use TypeKit fonts on unlimited domains, and usage limits are measured in full pageviews,…
Eames + House at the Eames House
How is it that House Industries made and released a font/graphics series based on the work of Charles & Ray Eames, and I was not informed?
Dustin Curtis: “The Death of Files”
This guy gets it: When you want to eat, you go to the refrigerator. When you want to listen to music, you go to your stereo system. Completing these actions just requires knowing the locations of the things you want to use. If you want to…
Fun with HTTP
Following a series of events I won't recap here, this morning I launched Echofon for Mac to discover my password had been cleared out and instead of tweets Twitter was sending back a 401 Unauthorized response code. I clicked on the error…
How Wired.com Found the iPhone Finder
Brian X. Chen tells the inside story of how they found Brian Hogan, and determined he was the guy who took Gray Powell's iPhone out of the Gourmet Haus Staudt.
Microsoft Cancels ‘Courier’ Tablet Project
Remember right before the iPad was announced, when Microsoft was all like, "whoa, dude, hold on there—what about our secret tablet project?" Yeah, that's been cancelled. (Though they say technically they never planned to ship it as a…
From 2006: How Odeo Screwed Up
Blast from the past: The interesting part is Odeo still exists, and Williams is still CEO. So what’s he doing to fix these mistakes? Not refunding the VCs their investment, that’s for sure. And not even trying to earn revenue; Williams…
iPhone 4G “Finder” Has Been Found
The guy who originally found Gizmodo's infamous iPhone 4G prototype has spoken: Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California, says although he was paid by tech site Gizmodo, he believed the payment was for allowing…
Elements of Twitter Style
Daniel Jalkut: Twitter’s 140 character limitation beguiles and infuriates its users. At its best, it forces users to come up with the most concise, purest of language expressions for their thoughts. At its worst, it leaves users “just a…
Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Flash”
The boss speaks: Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever…
Cub Scouts Give New Meaning To “Achivement Unlocked”
The Boy Scouts of America now offer 'Video Games' awards for Tiger, Cub and Webelos Scouts. Among the criteria: With your parents, create a plan to buy a video game that is right for your age group. Compare two game systems (for example,…
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
Think your office is too reliant on PowerPoint decks? Could be worse, you could be trying to manage U.S. military operations: Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of…
Apple Announces WWDC ’10 Dates: June 7–11
First thing I thought when I saw this: "huh, so for all that trouble Gizmodo only beat the iPhone 4G announcement by what, 7 weeks?" (It's expected Steve Jobs will announce the next iPhone at WWDC, as he's done the last two years in a…
No, Actually, It’s Not Like That At All
Last night I had the following brief Twitter exchange with a fellow about the whole Gizmodo-stolen iPhone affair: ddemaree_old: @esoneill @chartier Property != information. If the seller had sold them photos of the stolen iPhone, they…
Ten Weeks Later…
Yesterday was the iPad's launch day. It's a new beginning, and the consensus so far seems to be that the iPad really is a new kind of device, that the future of computing will look more like this magical multi-touch gadget than the clunky…
The Soloist
Zach Holman hypothesizes that the iPad's lack of multitasking as we know it — its single-window UI paradigm — isn't a bug, or just a feature, but the secret sauce that makes iPhone OS apps so tasty. You play differently when you're on…
Simple Elegance.
TechCrunch says the upcoming Foursquare app for Windows Phone 7 “destroys” its iPhone counterpart with its “simple elegance.” I have to admit, the WP7S version is a lot simpler. None of that pesky “information” to clutter the display,…
Am I The Only One Who Uses a Text Editor to Edit Files?
Geoffrey Grosenbach: If I had no experience with computers and were to guess which group of people had the best software tools to do their job, I would guess “computer programmers.” And if I were to guess what task would have been…
37signals Launches Highrise for iPhone
I've only used the app for 5 minutes, and it's obvious how much thought they put into the design. The feature set and presentation are exactly right; when I say they left room for improvement, I mean they did a great job and left me…
Steve Jobs Fires Up iPad For E-mail
Never let it be said Apple's CEO doesn't use his own products: for the second time recently an Apple customer reports having gotten a one-word e-mail answer to a question from Jobs himself. The latest question: will the iPhone OS get a…
No more computers.
Most people wouldn't even think of file management as a feature of traditional computers; files are just always there, like grass or rocks, part of the landscape. It's not just that filesystems are ubiquitous. From a technical standpoint,…
Apple Lets Out a Few More iPad Details
Not only can you now [pre-order][ippo] or [reserve][ipr] the iPad, Apple has updated their site with some fresh info about the device. The biggest news is about the iBooks app: yes, it will support DRM-free ePub books from any publisher,…
Ars Technica vs. ad blockers
Ars Technica editor-in-chief Ken Fisher, following up on a failed experiment in blocking users of ad-blocking software from the site: As ad revenues go down, many sites are lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature.…
Yelp’s CEO Responds to Extortion Charges with Not One, But Two Straw-Man Arguments
Jeremy Stoppelman, on the Yelp company blog: We'll be the first to admit that, by conventional standards, Yelp can seem weird. We're different than other review sites and that can throw people off. The main basis for confusion: Yelp has…
iPad Has a Ship Date: April 3
That's just the regular Wi-Fi model; Wi-Fi + 3G ones aren't out until "late April." Both versions will be available for pre-order (either for shipping, or for in-store pickup at an Apple Retail Store) starting next Friday, March 12. Note…
The iPad is smaller than you think.
Dave Pell: “I Can’t Read Anything Longer Than This Headline” The introduction of the iPad has re-energized an ongoing technology debate. Is it better to have one device that does a whole lot of things, or do certain activities require a…
“A conversation I have every month or so”
Man vs. Flash-based restaurant website. Guess who wins. (via DF)
Marco.org: Side effects of developing for yourself
Marco has more self-awareness and discipline than most of us: Instapaper is a one-person operation, and all of its development needs to fit into my free time. I originally made it for myself, because I had a need for it, and I didn’t even…
Google Admits Buzz Wasn’t User Tested Prior To Launch
News flash: Googlers and Gmail users have different ideas of how social software should behave! Says Todd Johnson, Google's product manager for Buzz: We've been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback…
Man Checks-In Everywhere But Foursquare Rehab
TechCrunch's MG Siegler: KrazyDad was a man on a mission: to show the holes in Foursquare’s check-in based system. And boy did he. To be clear, anyone who has used Foursquare quite a bit is likely well aware of these holes. For example,…
Custom time descriptions in Rails
From the helpful dudes at Thoughtbot: thanks to the new internationalization framework in Rails 2.2 and later, ends up you can easily override the text used by relative date/time helpers like time_ago_in_words by just adding some lines to…
Why TextMate 2 Isn’t Being Developed in the Open
If you weren't convinced already that TextMate 2 will never ship, this January 6 blog post from TM creator Allan Odgaard may seal the deal: I got a letter asking me why I didn’t use the 1.0 model for developing 2.0, that is, released 1.0…
Stupid Search Tricks, No. 2: “Cancel Google”
Remember those people who left a lot of angry comments on a ReadWriteWeb post that happened to be the first Google result for the phrase “Facebook login?” Well, today's search fail is even better: a blog post that happens to be the top…
Google Responds To Criticism, Makes Buzz Easier To Kill
Someone in Mountain View has seen that post about the woman auto-followed by her ex one too many times. Google has announced the following changes to Buzz: Buzz is now opt-in, and users who've never turned it on are now given a prominent…
‘Facebook login’
Web designers' worst nightmare come true: Fascinating. ReadWriteWeb has a weblog post that ranks highly in Google’s search results for “Facebook login”. The comments on the post are filled with complaints from confused people who think…
Woman Auto-Followed by Abusive Husband on Google Buzz
This could be a thing. She writes: I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother. There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts. You know who my third most frequent contact is? My abusive…
Adobe’s CTO: Flash Player is Fine, Thank You, We’re Fixing It Anyway
So, they don't have any known crashing bugs, and until now haven't seen much need to actually write a Mac-optimized version of Flash Player. Except now they're rewriting Flash's graphics engine, going from a direct port of the Windows…
Yehuda Katz Reflects on Rails 3
Here wycats explains not only what's changed in the beta release, but also why it's changed, in a clear, thoughtful way that makes me feel I've been both wrong, and an asshole, about Rails 3. To wit: One of the things that most surprised…
Jonah Lehrer on Loss Aversion
The amygdala, the part of the brain believed to be responsible for fear, is likely also related to the human aversion to loss. Researchers at UCL and Caltech have found evidence that people with damaged amygdalas are willing to make…
John Nack: Adobe isn’t in the Flash business
From Adobe's John Nack, who's this reasonable probably because he works on Photoshop rather than, y'know, that other app: [Adobe's] in the helping people communicate business. We'd all do well to remember that, because it means that the…
Zeldman: Flash, iPad, Standards
Jeffrey Zeldman: Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to…
DF: What if Flash Were an Open Standard?
Gruber, in discussing the current blogstorm over Apple's continued non-support for Adobe Flash in iPhone OS, touches on why Apple—who certainly have no problem with proprietary technology so long as it's theirs—are being such champs about…
OmniGroup: iPad or Bust
Omni CEO Ken Case: We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and we want to make all of our products available for it as soon as we can. Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product…
WSJ: Sharp Expands Its TV Color Palette With Yellow
Whoa: While televisions have transformed from bulky and boxy to slim and sleek over the last decade, one thing hasn't changed. The basics of displaying color on TVs still derive from the same three fundamental building blocks: red, green…
Jason Calacanis Says Apple Gave Him A Tablet
Calacanis says it has an OLED screen, a solar panel for recharging, an HDTV tuner and a DVR built-in. He also says there's a Farmville app for the Tablet, that Steve Jobs himself is going to demo it onstage today, and it's "insane." (Note…
Dustin Curtis has pictures of The Tablet.
Well, maybe. They look real, and they look right. The Tablet could just be a gigantic iPod touch, or this could be a gigantic hoax. 24 hours to go until we find out.
Predictions for Wednesday’s Apple Event
When writing about things I'm passionate about, such as Apple products, I tend to be long-winded in a misguided attempt to demonstrate just how much I know about the subject at hand. This usually results in me spending days crafting a…
OkCupid on the 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures
Once again, the math geniuses at OkCupid mined their users' data and struck gold, drawing some interesting connections between message/response rates and profile pics: Now, you’re always told to look happy and make eye contact in social…
Show and Sell
Joel Johnson on the secret to Apple’s magic: Outwardly Apple’s showmanship is competent, workmanlike. Jobs-as-performer wears an understated uniform that does not distract from the act. His humor, when it exists, is subtle. The closest an…
Apple Sees New Money in Old Media
The WSJ: Apple has recently been in discussions with book, magazine and newspaper publishers about how they can work together. The company has talked with New York Times Co., Condé Nast Publications Inc. and HarperCollins Publishers and…
Pleased to Meet You, Won’t You Guess My Name?
While working on a little Rails project this week, I discovered something very interesting (and little-documented) in ActiveSupport: Module.model_name. It's a core extension to support Rails's handling of models as RESTful resources, as…
What Google Chrome could still learn from Safari
Chrome (or Chromium) has been my default browser for about two weeks now. (I was using Chromium nightlies, with bookmark syncing and Extensions, until a few days ago when those features trickled down to dev channel builds of reg'lar old…
Maybe I Needing Later
“If you don’t paying, then I delete files that I send you,” he responded, “I don’t want deleting your web, but it is not fair for me. I know you changing my password and I can’t logging on, but I don’t needing SQL or server password to…