Well. Some of us already have our kids back in school, and some don’t. Some won’t this year, but the advice here applies to a lot of people wanting to lock down their laptops a little better for public use.
One word: Amen
On an iPhone related note, there is now an app in the iPhone app store that allows you to post Worspress-based blog entries and edit them on your iPhone or iPod touch.
One of the new features that has been added that’s a no-brainer in retrospect (though none of my previous phones had it) is an ability to take screenshots of your iPhone screen. This means documenting iPhone features, showing off how cool your game looks, etc. all are much easier to do.
This also makes it very easy to note one thing that many people “know” but don’t give much thought to. If your website is Flash heavy, or worse, almost exclusively Flash, here’s what it looks like to an iPhone:
That little blue building block? That’s the “I don’t know how to play this content” icon where a website decided to have everything Flash-driven.
Yes it’s true that Google has arranged with Adobe to index flash files. This mitigates, but does not eliminate the argument that Flash-heavy content hurts your search rankings, even in Google. Nevertheless, creating Flash-heavy sites, especially sites that have no easy way to bypass the Flash, means that anyone without access to a full desktop is unlikely to dig up any useful information about your company, such as phone numbers to contact you.
Just a thought.
I’m very impressed by what the guys at Google have released so far. They’ve already addressed several obvious issues that made it an intriguing development platform in development, if you’ll pardon the expression, but useless for me. The biggest one is image resizing and manipulation.
Hearing this, I revisited it and am quite impressed. For ajax-based work (like custom coding an editor) it’s more complicated than straightforward PHP/Javascript development for small sites. This is mostly because of the need to tell at least two sets of files what’s handling a request for a web page before you even get to wiring up the python code to the template. What it gives you in return though is an absolutely stunning level of scalability, as well as a very rapid method for prototyping all of your changes.
The remaining headache is the need for some form of version control. You can have different
“versions” of an app posted, and roll back to a prior version, but there’s no integrated access to a common file repository where people can independently work on different files and see the combined changes before deploying them to the server. Guess I’ll have to figure out how to set up my own repository and how to make it so my fellow developers and I can work on it, along with a workflow that won’t cause headaches in deploying to the Google apps site.
I’ve seen this several places now but the best summary is at Ars Technica. I’ve heard plenty of people say the naysaying was just as bad when XP was introduced. Well, it was pretty bad, but not this bad. Not “We’re trying to figure out ways to sell Windows 2000 with new computers because people just want to avoid Vista and many of the businesses with custom-built apps won’t certify them on Vista without a lot more time stomping bugs” bad.
Ars Technica, the source of many fine articles related to computers, just published an excellent little primer on how to keep your computer secure. It includes information for Linux and Mac users as well.
I’ll admit. Some of my home stereo gear is old. As in better than fifteen years old. So?
It works.
It also makes no difference to what I’m about to discuss, which is: It is wayyyy too complicated for normal people (non-technical adults who are not gadget-geeks of some sort) to work their TV / home theater setup.
Case in point: Our widescreen gets cable piped directly in. It also gets the DVD player and VCR piped directly in, and echoes the sound out to the surround sound receiver.
So far so good. Unless I really want to listen to my iTunes library I never, ever change my stereo inputs. Turn on the TV and select the right input and *bam* there ya are. TV goodness.
But, we stumble into the first conceptual obstacle. You see, the TV remote, like many remotes supplied these days, is a universal remote. This means it’s universally useless for anything except perhaps the TV because the one critical feature you need for any other device (separate play-pause buttons, forex), are just not included on the remote surface, and the TV is complicated enough that little widdy biddy buttons require you to squint through bleary eyes.
The conceptual problem comes when Unsuspecting Normal Average Person with a Life picks up the remote, and, following your instructions turns on the TV and the stereo and cannot get it to change from the TV tuner.
Someone, recently handling the remote, must have hit the “dvd” button, and so neither the remote nor the TV care that you are mashing down the “source” button to change the input. The geeks response, knowing that the remote has multiple modes, will be to switch the remote back to TV mode.
This is NOT intuitively obvious to the normal average person. I’ll have to look at getting one of the programmable Logitech remotes because I’ve been told they actually really work - and divide up the settings by what you’re doing rather than by what device you need to control at the moment. The upshot is if you’re “watching a DVD” it controls the stereo volume via the volume buttons, sets the TV to the input designated as “DVD”, and the play controls manage the DVD player - all without you constantly switching modes.
The next common bugaboo, and one I’ll fix at my house with a little piece of RCA patch cable, is the famous “why is there no sound?” Receivers and pre-amps have many input selections. When my Onkyo was made, equalizers were common, and commonly hooked up at the in and out ports for “tape 2″ (in case you actually bought two separate tape decks). For the EQ to do it’s job the receiver had to route sound back out from its selected input via the tape 2 “record/out” jacks, and listen to the tape 2 input no matter what the original source was.
Needless to say, if you don’t have an EQ or a second tape deck there are probably no cables there. The secondary consequence is that accidentally turning on “Tape 2″ effectively mutes your stereo, with very little indication that it’s even in Tape 2 mode as you’ll still see the input for “Tape 1″ or “Video 1″, etc.
For a while now it’s been obvious that the Mac and Apple have been picking up more and more mindshare and steam. Yet another example comes to light today in this article at Ars Technica, a site that was formerly very MS-centric, and has gradually shifted to a more platform agnostic atmosphere.
One quote on the second page is one that’s interesting to hear from a self-professed die-hard Windows user. It’s something I’ve long felt, and a point that many mac users had made even in less popular years about quantity vs. quality when it came to available software:
…and there’s a real sense that their developers care that they don’t suck.
Windows software has never struck me as being like that. The third-party software ecosystem for Windows is big, no doubt about that. But it’s also incredibly shoddy. Most Windows applications—from both major software companies and minor ones alike—are ugly, poorly-thought-out, clunky pieces of crap. While there are a few artisan developers for Windows, most Windows devs just don’t care.
If you have time, there are a lot of in-depth articles and reviews of the various OSX releases that are perhaps the most comprehensive and best-written reviews you will find anywhere in one place.
