One thing that’s really bugging me is how often tech pundits and blogs are misusing the word freedom in these Apple-Adobe-Google debates that have gripped the blogosphere. I see a lot of charges that Apple is destroying freedom with their restrictive app store policies. There’s a big hangup people have over the word freedom. In [...]
DigitalDaily has a fascinating interview with Adobe’s co-founders. Go read the whole thing. I’m going to talk about two exchanges that I think are quite illuminating. Here’s the first: John Paczkowski : Cross-platform mobile apps tend not to take advantage of native features unique to each device. What do you have to say about complaints [...]
I’ve tried to keep quiet about the whole Apple vs Adobe thing, but this is just too true: The $600 Flash authoring tool is the only way to produce Flash applications. The free Mac OS X Developer tools (that require an $800+ Mac computer) are the only way to produce iPhone and iPad applications. Both [...]
I’m a big fan of WordPress. It’s lightweight, super-flexible, and it has an awesome community that churns out plugins and themes to make setting up a website a cinch. This site itself is based on WordPress and I couldn’t be happier with it. The WordPress people also let you have a blog as a subdomain [...]
URL shorteners have been all the rage for the last few years now due to the rise of Twitter and other character-limited communications systems, where traditional URLs with their “http://www.” can’t help but waste space. But while these short URLs do indeed save space, their drawbacks were illustrated very personally when I friend of mine [...]
Sebastian is absolutely right: I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just [a] boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less [...]
I’m really digging Boxee, a free, open-source media center program. Basically, it’s a piece of software that turns your computer into a TV by aggregating online videos and such from places like YouTube, the Onion Online (which is hilarious, by the way), ComedyCentral.com, and other places that have lots of awesome free content. It also [...]
I think we’re still in the dark age of scanning. You line up your document, do a butt-slow preview scan at low resolution, see if it’s lined up, re-align until it’s not, and repeat until you either get the piece of paper where you want it or else set your hair on fire out of [...]
I just started using ExpanDrive and it has changed my life. A goodly portion of my job involved SSHing into remote servers and editing text files. This limits me to command-line tools and doesn’t allow me to take advantage of any of the GUI workflow enhancements and productivity boosters I’ve built up over the years, [...]
Rarely have I laughed so loudly and so hard as when I read through Adobe Gripes, a user-submitted image blog of all the galling user interface cock-ups in today’s “professional” Adobe software. I like it because I have to use that crap and it’s cathartic to see that others as as annoyed as I am [...]