I just got an email from Amazon letting me know that my Kindle Touch would be arriving early this week instead of next. The Kindle Fire is also shipping this week. If you haven’t pre-ordered yours yet, do so using either of these links and I’ll get a small kickback.
Speaking of the Honor System →
John Gruber, back in 2007, wrote about the pre-orders of Leopard via his Amazon affiliate links and the breakdown between single-license copies and family packs. Nearly a third of the sales John saw of OS X were for the family packs, despite the fact that most DF readers were surely aware that Apple did not require any code activation to install the OS. In short, those who knew they did not need the family pack to install Leopard on multiple machines did the right thing and bought it anyway.
It’s encouraging to see Apple taking the same attitude and trust towards the customer that they used with OS X distribution and applying it to their retail stores with the EasyPay system.
“Basically, it’s just the honor system right now.” →
Garrett Murray’s experience of Apple’s new EasyPay system:
Apple is, at least for now, choosing customer convenience over easy security.
It reminds me of the old days when OS X was sold as physical media in a box and the single-license and the family-license boxes had the same disc inside and nobody ever had to enter in a 25-digit activation key. Apple chose customer convenience over theft deterrent security then as well.
Old and Unread →
This week on The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talk about the Jawbone UP that I have had since Monday, email management and email bankruptcy, the lack of a logo on Ben’s site, and more.
Scalability and Maintenance
Some of the most useful applications on my Mac are the ones I can use without the need to maintain and tinker with the contents of the app.
Applications with the primary function of holding and managing a library of items — such as “anything buckets“, bookmarking services, RSS readers, to-do managers, and even the computer’s file system itself — can become convoluted and difficult to use as the number of items in their library grows. The grace with which apps such as these scale speaks volumes to their long-term usefulness.
An application that does not scale well requires that as new items are added old items must be removed or rearranged, else the value of all the items is slightly degraded. Applications like this require regular maintenance by the user in order to preserve their usefulness.
An application that does scale well is one in which regardless of the amount of items added to the app, they all carry the same value and ability to be found as when they were first added. An application like this requires little to no regular maintenance by the user in order to preserve the app’s usefulness.
Yojimbo is, in my opinion, a great examples of a maintenance-free application.
I have been using Yojimbo for several years, and it is no less useful today with its thousands of items than it was when I first began using it. Adding a new item to Yojimbo does not require that I take an old item out. When I add a new item to Yojimbo I know that it will not affect all the other items — a year from now I know I will still easily be able to find the item I just added, and that by adding a new item the difficulty of finding other items is not massively affected. The only limit to my Yojimbo library is my hard drive.
Likewise with Notational Velocity and Simplenote. A new note added to Notational Velocity does not devalue the other notes which are already in there. Also, a new note in NV does not make finding past notes significantly more difficult of a task.
Moreover, this is why having just one folder to keep all archived email can be so beneficial when it comes to managing emails. Admittedly, I am very poor at email management, but, one thing that does help me is that I place 99% of all my emails into just one folder. And I use search to find old emails when the need arises.
An example of a system that does not scale well without maintenance from the user? The iPhone Home screen. This thing does not scale well at all. The more apps I add the more I have to fiddle with the placement of the apps which were already there. More apps means more Home screens to flick through and more folders to hide the non-regularly-used apps.
In fact, I now use Spotlight on my iPhone to find apps that are not on my first two Home screens. There are apps on my iPhone which I use but I do not know what folder they are in.
The file-system itself is perhaps the most maintenance-heavy system of all. I think this is why application launchers are so fantastic. They serve as a single point of entry that helps you search for and navigate directly to the file, bookmark, or application you are searching for.
Search is, in fact, a critical component to applications and systems that scale well without maintenance. It’s why Yojimbo and Notational Velocity are still so useful even though they are full of notes and items.
We also see Apple trying to address the issue of the Finder’s maintenance needs by OS X’s tools such as the Dock, and Spotlight, and Launchpad. We see them doing a much better job of addressing the file system on iOS by abstracting it away altogether. From the user’s perspective, iOS has no file system — only apps and the files and media which are in those apps.
The list of apps and systems that scale well are, of course, different for different users. Some people may feel compelled to keep their Instapaper queue empty and thus find it to be an app that does not scale well. Some applications scale well (or not) because of the attitude and approach of the user; others scale well by design thanks to the developer.
Apps which are low maintenance are the apps which end up getting used most frequently. Choosing software and systems that scale well without needing regular maintenance is one way to help ensure that you will actually make use of your tools at hand. Apps that require too much maintenance and tinkering will eventually cease to get used — unless there is an external reason which requires you use that app — and in their place an alternative will arise.
Top 10 Things to Do in Colorado Before You Die →
A valid list for sure — I’ve done all but three (which is embarrassing to admit in public) — but I am wary about just how native the person who wrote this list is. I mean, how does skiing Colorado not make it into the top 10?
Here’s my list of what to do in Colorado before you die:
- Snowboard in Blue Sky Basin
- Drive west-bound I-70 past the Eisenhower during a blizzard
- Spend a weekend in Glenwood Springs
- Go to a Bronco’s game
- Attend a concert at Red Rocks
- Visit Mesa Verde
- Have an Americano from Crowfoot Valley Coffee Company
- Go camping anywhere along the Front Range or Rockies
- Visit Pikes Peak
- Watch a sunset over the Rocky Mountains
The Extraordinary Revolution of Media Choice →
Seth Godin:
In a world where everything is a click away, and in a world where everyone can have their own YouTube channel, ten blogs and a thousand email accounts… the only thing that’s scarce is attention.
A Sans-Flash Web Future →
Dan Frommer:
But the reality is that the mobile browser is the future of the web. So anyone who is using Flash today for anything should start working on a plan to eventually stop using it.
This is another reason the ending of Flash is good for the future of the Web experience. Here’s an example: Say you go to a campaign page on Kickstarter from your iPad. The Kickstarter website knows you’re on an iPad and so the campaign video is served up in HTML5. However, say you’re on your Flashless MacBook Air and you go to that Kickstarter campaign page. When you go to watch the video, you instead get an error message prompting you to install Flash.
As I mentioned earlier this morning, I had this same experience with the HP TouchPad. If I disabled Flash, websites wouldn’t serve me HTML5 video, but instead would tell me that I need Flash.
Here’s hoping that the change Adobe is making will have an effect beyond the mobile browser and onto the desktop browser. (Which would be ironic because one of they’re stated goals for ditching mobile Flash is so they can improve Flash on the PC.)
Everybody Wins →
John Gruber:
Apple didn’t win. Everybody won. Flash hasn’t been superseded in mobile by any sort of Apple technology. It’s been superseded by truly open web technologies. Dumping Flash will make Android better, it will make BlackBerrys better, it will make the entire web better. iOS users have been benefitting from this ever since day one, in June 2007.
This is the proper perspective. Adobe’s ceasing of mobile Flash player development will hopefully be a boost for the continued advancement of mobile browser technology and therefore the enhancement of the mobile experience, no matter the platform or device.
An Excuse of a Feature →
Matt Alexander writing at The Loop on why mobile Flash was never as great as advertised:
Hardware manufacturers continue to tout Mobile Flash’s relevance. Best Buy clerks try to sell you on the advantages of Flash over sans-Flash platforms. Ads flaunt the apparent benefits of a Flash-enabled web on your tablet and phone. Meanwhile, reviewers across the web grapple with its usefulness and buggy implementation. So, the question is, why has there been such prominent exposure of one feature?
Remember six months ago when the HP TouchPad was a new thing and one of its big deals was that you got “the whole web”? When I used the HP TouchPad for a week, my experience was that Flash worked better than I had expected it to, but worse than I’d wanted it to. Or, put another way: it did work, but barely.
What I found especially frustrating about Flash on the TouchPad was that if I disabled it, video sites would simply say I need to install the Flash plugin rather than serve me the HTML5 video. If I were to visit that site on my iPad the site would know I was on an iPad and would serve sans-Flash video. But it seemed they only would sniff for iPad or not. And if not, then I needed Flash.
Hopefully, websites will begin serving HTML5 video whenever it’s supported, falling back to Flash if HTML5 video support is absent.
What Comes After the MacBook Air? →
Speaking of the MacBook Air, Erica Ogg speculates on what possible ways everyone’s favorite laptop can be advanced now that it is already so thin, so fast, and so affordable:
It’s very hard to get much thinner than the Air and still have a traditional notebook form factor. Take away too much and you essentially wind up with the iPad.
So it’s going to have to come with advances in software, in interfaces and new forms of input, like voice and touch, and the continual improvement in battery size, life, and — while we know chips will regularly get faster — how manufacturers deal with heat dissipation and battery life in conjunction with those chips’ advances.
Erica is so close, and yet so far. I think she’s right that we’ll see Siri come to the Mac, and she’s right that if you take much more away from the Air you’ll start to get near to an iPad. But she cites that as something to be avoided. I think that is exactly where things are headed. Not that the Airs will cease to exist, but that the ways in which an iPad can replace a laptop are daily become more prevalent, and the gap between an Air and an iPad is only going to get smaller — and that is all by design.
A Marvel of Brute Strength →
Ben Brooks on the difference between the hardware experiences of the iMac and the MacBook Air compared to the Mac Pro:
As I think about everything that Apple stands for with its design and goals, I can’t help but suspect that the MacBook Air is the epitome of the Mac experience as Apple sees it. Small, quick, sleek, low-price, sealed.
The MacBook Air and the Mac Pro are polar opposites: one a marvel of engineering — the other a marvel of brute strength.
Georgia and Verdana go Pro →
The beloved, screen-friendly fonts, Georgia and Verdana, have been officially expanded upon. The new versions have been extended to 20 styles each and are officially ready for print. This is great news. Georgia and Verdana are lovely, and print designers who didn’t know any better have been putting these typefaces to work for years.
“I’ll know it when I see it.” →
Based on the biography, Malcolm Gladwell profiles Steve Jobs as a tweaker. Jobs had an amazing ability to take things that had been built or invented or designed already and tweak them into something far better than the original.