Marco Arment on Apple’s software quality:
The list of exceptions to “It just works” is growing quickly.
Unfortunately, it’s true. Lion is way more buggy then Leopard used to be, and iCloud is just painfully unreliable.
Ben Brooks writes about WordPress plugins for sending links to Twitter:
There has been one problem with my site and WP to Twitter — it posts the tweet before the database cache is done updating... Whenever this happens I have to dump the cache, not hard, but annoying.
The biggest feature (for me) that WP Tweets Pro brings: a delay setting for the Tweets. Now all TBR tweets will be delayed by one minute, thus (hopefully) solving all my problems. This plugin also has some other cool features, and for $25 — why not.
Wait, what? The world’s most popular blogging platform can’t even dump its caches when they expire? This is ridiculous. And Ben writes about it as if it was OK. It’s so embarrassing for such a thing to even exist. It’s 2012, not 1997, right? And one minute delay for $25 — what an elegant solution.
If an executive at some company announces a product or any meaningful partnership with Apple or somebody says that such an announcement has been made, ignore the news. It’s easy: Apple announces all its stuff itself.
Kaspersky’s CTO says Apple asked it to analyze OS X for vulnerabilities. Resolution: bullshit. Let’s imagine for a second that Apple really did ask Kaspersky to do that. Obviously Apple would want that Kaspersky keep their mouth shut. Why would Kaspersky ignore that and speak out anyway? Only one explanation: because they are not in any relationships with Apple and never were.
Kaspersky likes to publicly say bad things about Apple and its security. It doesn’t matter if they are even right, but they surely repel Apple. Apple completely ignored their latest attempt to “help” with Flashback. Do you want help from someone who bashes you all the time?
Kaspersky is terrified that soon there will be no place for them in the world and they are desperately trying to make people think they are important. I’m sure they analyze OS X for vulnerabilities day and night without any requests from Apple in hope to find something and say: you need us. Of course security experts will always have job. But if Apple needs them, they will have a job at Apple.
Some apps don’t have “Paste unformatted” or “Paste and match style” command. So you want to convert your text to plain text before pasting. What’s the quickest way to do it on a Mac? Here’s what I do:
Now whatever you had in your clipboard is converted to plain text.
In the 1990s, Apple’s PowerBook laptops included a company logo on the lid that faced the user sitting at the computer. When the lid was opened, the logo was upside down... A few years after Steve Jobs returned in 1997, he flipped the logo for good.
Wow, I didn’t know that. What a jerk one must have looked like with an apple upside down.
A lot has been said about how bad iTunes is. What bugs me most is that some actions within iTunes prevent me from actually listening to music. Sometimes iTunes is “Looking for iPhone...” and you can’t do anything until it’s done. And it still doesn’t do the most obviously useful thing for music listener: permanently display current track name somewhere. So we had to make Emcee.
But I’d like to take a look at the iTunes Store (including the App Store). How can it be made better?
What I hate about iTunes store is that it’s clearly a web site, but I can’t use a browser to browse it. The web view of iTunes is crippled and ridiculously slow. Why not use Safari? It will not only make the store better for the user, but I believe Apple will sell more songs and apps.
I can’t open a link in new window or tab. Sometimes I want to check out several things from a chart or from search results. Unfortunately, ⌘-clicking them won’t help, I’ll have to open each, then go back. I don’t think I’m the only one who forgets about going back.
I can’t add link to bookmarks. iTunes has a “wishlist”, but it’s only available on a Mac, not iPad or iPhone (or I wasn’t able to find it there). I want to use the Safari bookmarks manager with the store like with anything else and I want it to be synced between my devices. There are also, of course, no bookmarklets in iTunes, so I can’t tweet an app and I can’t send it to Instapaper (some apps have really long descriptions). No obvious way to save and share links is bad.
Some other things I can do in Safari but not in iTunes: zoom a page, drag an image (i. e. album art), pin a portion of a page to Dashboard, search history, find in page. I’ve found myself searching for a feature in an app’s description a couple of times, and I had to use eyes for that, which is just waste of time.
iTunes is already so bloated that it isn’t even funny. So adding all this stuff to iTunes is not an option. To make iTunes store better Apple should just move it from iTunes to Safari.
In previous versions of Photoshop I’ve always set up F2 to open Layer Options dialog. The layer name field was focused by default, so that’s how I renamed layers.
For mysterious reasons in CS6 Adobe has removed Layer Options from the list of things for which you could use a keyboard shortcuts. I was upset. I had to use mouse to rename layer (which takes ages). And why on Earth out of all things would they remove this from the infinite list of configurable shortcuts?
I was almost going to file a bug report, but found a new Rename Layer... item in the Layer menu. Of course it is listed in configurable menu shortcut list, so now I have F2 as a shortcut for it:
I found out that Layer Options were removed from the keyboard setup because the very dialog was removed from Photoshop altogether. That makes sense now that you rename layer with a dedicated command and select its color from a popup menu.
So if you had the same problem, now you don’t. And if you haven’t bothered to set up a shortcut to rename a layer, it’s about time to do it: it will save you tons of time.
Here’s a short review of Blackberry 10 from The Verge:
Cool stuff:
Also, the overall UI looks quite nice.
Summer is coming to the northern hemisphere, and here’s a mix to welcome it:
It’s progressive house again, some of the sweetest tunes I’ve found lately. Enjoy!
While everyone quotes Cook’s toaster and fridge phrase from the latest earnings call, I think the most important is this:
The key thing is, it’s important that Apple not become the developer of the world. We need people to invent their own stuff.
I want that, too. Today Apple is the only company in the world that does in consumer electronics stuff that matters. Even if you like Apple (as I do), it’s a reason to be worried, not to be happy.
