Oh look, another blog about design and technology.
Two of Orlando's Apple stores are growing: the one in the Millenia Mall will double in size and the one in the Florida Mall will triple.
MG Siegler quoted the best line from Tom Krazit's piece
In the first quarter that Verizon Wireless was on board with Apple for an iPhone launch event, the company sold 4.2 million iPhones, accounting for more than half of the 7.7 million smartphones that its customers purchased in the fourth quarter.
More than half. Absolutely amazing. Another way to read "more than half" is "sold more than all other smartphones combined."
Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows division at Microsoft, wrote this piece about the design of Windows 8, which mixes Microsoft's new "Metro" design style for mobile devices with the regular desktop version Windows. He says, 4 times in 4 different ways, "Our goal was a no compromise design." But there is no such thing, becauyse all design is compromise. Joel Spolsky wrote this great article in 2006 and he explains it very simply, with an example of designing a trashcan for use on a city sidewalk:
It has to be pretty light, because the dustboys, er, sanitation engineers come by and they have to pick it up to dump the trash in the garbage truck. Oh, and it has to be heavy, or it will blow away in the wind or get knocked over... It has to be really big. People throw away a lot of trash throughout the day and at a busy intersection if you don't make it big enough, it overflows and garbage goes everywhere... Oh, also, it needs to be pretty small, because otherwise it's going to take up room on the sidewalk... Ok, light, heavy, big, and small. What else. It should be closed on the top, so rubbish doesn't fly away in the wind. It should be open on the top, so it's easy to throw things away... Notice a trend? When you're designing something, you often have a lot of conflicting constraints. In fact, that's a key part of design: resolving all of these conflicting goals.
Steven Sinofsky:
Windows 8 brings together all the power and flexibility you have in your PC today with the ability to immerse yourself in a Metro style experience. You don’t have to compromise! ... you can seamlessly switch between Metro style apps and the improved Windows desktop.
When he says "no compromise", what he means is "we left everything in", which is very much a compromise. How can he not see that he's already made a ton of compromises? More features means more complexity. More disk space is used by the system. More things running at once hurts battery life. Putting in more battery to bring the life back makes the device heavier. Etc etc etc. He is, quite simply, 100% wrong. Design is nothing but compromise."No compromise" design simply doesn't exist. It's like non-wet water.
Data is not safe if it exists in only one place. The only feasible way to back up a large hard drive is with another large hard drive. If either drive—main drive or your backup—dies, you need to replace it ASAP because as long as one is out of commission, there is only one good copy of your data. Therefore, for every hard drive you own, you need to have a) another drive of equal or greater capacity, and b) enough money in the bank (or available credit) to replace it when needed.
Low-tech Skilcraft pens endure in a high-tech world
The original design — brass ink tube, plastic barrel not shorter than 4 5/8 inches, ball of 94 percent tungsten carbide and 6 percent cobalt — has changed little over the decades... The original 16-page specifications for the pen are still in force: It must be able to write continuously for a mile and in temperatures up to 160 degrees and down to 40 degrees below zero.
It's easy to not think about the fact that juice companies can somehow make juice that tastes the same all year. Sadly, it's heavily processed and then re-flavored. Even the brands that are advertised as "natural", aren't. Still, it's interesting to see a little of how this happens, if also a bit sad.
After the oranges are squeezed, the juice is stored in giant holding tanks and, critically, the oxygen is removed from them. That essentially allows the liquid to keep (for up to a year) without spoiling — but that liquid that we think of as orange juice tastes nothing like the Tropicana OJ that comes out of the carton. In fact, it's quite flavorless. So, the industry uses "flavor packs" to re-flavor the de-oxygenated orange juice... Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren't listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor... Since they're made from by-products that originated in oranges, they can be added to the orange juice without being considered an "ingredient," despite the fact that they are chemically altered.
I appreciate that Mac OS X will warn me the first time I run an application downloaded from the Internet. However, I don't like that a) you can't turn it off and b) it warns about things that aren't applications. The worst is when I download a .zip or .tgz with a bunch of PHP scripts—OS X will warn me about every single one. Luckily, this can be stopped with a quick trip to Terminal: just navigate to the folder with the scripts and say xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *
Tip from http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071029151619619
Or, "things that have been in Windows since 1995 and/or Classic Mac OS that have not yet made the jump to Mac OS X, the most modernest OS extant."
I had to use Time Machine to recover my 10.6 Mac. Two little issues:
1) Quick Look didn't work. It would open up the big grey rectangle but not show anything--pictures, movies, PDFs, Excel files, nothing worked. I was at 10.6.1 and 10.6.2 was out but installing that update (and all the rest available at the time) through Software Update didn't fix it. A tip here http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10398867-263.html suggested downloading and installing the combo update (also for 10.6.2) and that cleared it up. ("Combo Update" is Apple's term for "everything since the last .0", so the 10.5.8 combo update can be run on any system, 10.5.0-10.5.7, and it'll work.)
2) The system folder "/private" was visible in the Finder at the root level of my hard drive. Not a big deal, but since I never need to go there there's no need to see it all the time. Running "sudo chflags hidden /private", as suggested here http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=648139 did the trick.
Yeah. And a swimming pool is just a big bathtub.