halfwayhouse

[the-halfway-house]

Unpacking

You may have noticed a bit of radio silence around here lately, which has certainly not happened without good reason; namely, these two:

The Galapagos Islands are/were/will be stunning, and I’m only just now (some 4 days after arriving back on the mainland) coming to terms with what I saw out there. “Speechless” is only the beginning. We’ll be back to our regular programming schedule soon, first I need to hike to the top of Machu Picchu - see you on the other side!

[yimmyayo]

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More Awkward Creepiness From Microsoft

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Menacing..

Marco Arment, on the new Twitter client developer rules of the road, announced on the twitter developer blog:

While I applaud Twitter-client developers for making Twitter awesome for me and a lot of others, I’m glad I’m not in that business right now.

“making twitter awesome”.

I’m with Brent Simmons on this one, who’s up for creating a better twitter-like service, one that doesn’t require Twitter itself?

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Please RT

But all contemporary publications tend toward the condition of blogs, and soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.

N+1 Magazine, on the state of contemporary writing, and well, you know, tweets and stuff.

Via inessential

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Close

A nice and concise set of lessons learnt pointers, by iOS and Mac developer, Collin Donnell:

Price what the market will bear for the kind of [thing] you’re releasing, not what you’d like to sell for.

Pick ideas that don’t need to be explained and that solve a problem you know others are having.

Break up your ideas into smaller [things], rather than going a long time between updates.

These things Collin discovered, whilst selling his app Closeby on the app store, yet I think these ideas could be applied to almost any business type. I’ve replaced two software specific words with [things], to help with the translation to whatever it is you do (or would like to do. You’re welcome).

Via inessential.

[paulgulyas]

Sometimes I really, really love Tumblr

I would like to take this moment to say “Holy shit” to all of this, but especially to Jon Snow. HOLY SHIT JON SNOW

[mundy-deactivated20140227]

Jon Snow still looks like a bastard.

[chriscantwell-deactivated201211]

This is… this is just something else. When was this taken? Last year or 1996?

[spytap]

What’s J. J. Abrams doing in the corner?

Also, wanna know something even weirder? When you look at Theon Greyjoy, you’re actually looking ay Lily Allen’s brother. She even wrote a song (named “Alfie”) about how much of a lazy stoner he was.

[caterpillarcowboy-deactivated20]

Theon even looks like a little shit in real life.

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Via Nonchalantrepreneur.

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The Story Behind Graphing Calculator

Wow, what an amazing story, the history behind graphing calculator. A lot of this calls to mind the mammoth achievements made possible by the open source software community, over the last 30 years - and yet this all happened within the bloated, bureaucratic monster that was Apple in the 90’s.

Next, we needed help writing software to draw the three-dimensional images that our software produced. A friend with expertise in this area took a weekend off from his startup company to write all of this software. He did in two days what would have taken me a month.

***

My skunkworks project was beginning to look real with help from these professionals as well as others in graphic design, documentation, programming, mathematics, and user interface. The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends.

***

Apple at that time had a strong tradition of skunkworks projects, in which engineers continued to work on canceled projects in hopes of producing demos that would inspire management to revive them. On occasion, they succeeded. One project, appropriately code-named Spectre, was canceled and restarted no fewer than five times. Engineers worked after hours on their skunkworks, in addition to working full time on their assigned projects. Greg and I, as nonemployees who had no daytime responsibilities, were merely extending this tradition to the next level.

Best line:

We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.

The whole story is so good, worthy of any young software hacker underdog. Check it out here.

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Friends like these

Maybe think twice before bragging about your vacation on Facebook, complete with sun-and-sand photos, lest your shadier friends or members of the general public decide to burgle your house. Two Facebook users in Anderson County, South Carolina were arrested Sunday for using Facebook to find out which of their friends were out of town so they could rob “several” of the empty houses over the course of two months, according to WFMY News.

With friends like these, eh?

This article gave me cause to reconsider all the online travel bragging I’ve been doing so far, then I remembered that I don’t actually have a home to burgle. You win some, you lose some.

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Slow show

Recently I bought a mac mini, for reasons I’ve mentioned before, primarily to take care of a little bit of iOS app-making. I was tempted at one point to splash out and buy one of the nice and light macbook airs, but at the time I wanted the best bang for buck, so I went with a compromise machine, the low-end mac mini. This is the one I eventually went with;

You might notice the price ($8,999!) and the language (spanish) being slightly different to the norm. That’s because I decided to buy this machine whilst on the road, at this point somewhere in Mexico. I went with the lowest end machine possible, really, though I wasn’t expecting to be as wowed (in both the positive or negative) as has been my experience to date.

I noticed Ben Brooks posting his thoughts on a similar purchase, made recently to replace a broken mac laptop. Given how closely his experience has matched mine (and given how we’ve both been spoilt using iPads and Macbook Airs), I thought I’d share some of that with you here;

On the mini every single thing I did felt like it was being bogged down by the hard drive. Want to search for a file, sure thing, just let me think about that for 15 seconds.

Boot up and shut down was slow.

Search was slow.

Opening apps was slow.

Scrolling large lists of files in a Finder was slow.

To which, I might add;

Emptying the trash is slow.

Writing text is slow.

Having two windows open at the same time is slow.

In short, the mac mini has not been the whiz kid I hoped for, nor even the mildly lazy teenager I’d anticipated. It’s been sloooow. Switching from the SSD iPad, or the lovely Air, it’s a clunky beast, unhappy and unwilling to help me out. It probably doesn’t help that I’m (as often as not) using the machine through a funky screen sharing app on the iPad, but still, even when I’m on a dedicated monitor/keyboard/mouse setup, it’s a pain. I expect I’ll do some upgrades when I get back (the RAM for one), though at this point it’s hard to justify the cost of a 500GB SSD - so it’s likely that I’ll be mentioning this issue again at some point in the future.

Overall, I’m not unhappy with this machine. It’s given me the tools I needed to pull off a spot of iOS development (I can’t wait until the day that it’s possible to write, review, compile and distribute all from the iPad), and it’s been reasonably reliable. Unlike Ben, I’m not going to send it back for the refund (it’s too bloody hard to do that in Mexico, anyway!).

I’m generally happy with the Mac Mini, once given a bit of a speed boost (via RAM), it will certainly make a welcome addition to the apple commercial our household is becoming.

[the-halfway-house]

One Minute In Salento

One Minute In Salento from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

Hummingbird central. Lazy buggers, sitting down to drink…

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Gimonster

Wicked.  That's me on the left, circa last Saturday night in Medellin (former drug capital and present day hipster hangout in Colombia). Next to me is Chris (aka Gimonster), an incredibly interesting, passionate, gentle-minded Venezuelan guy we met, over a game of pool. Chris made my birthday just that much more awesome! I'm looking forward to catching up with him again in Europe, in only (shudder) 6 weeks time. Wow, time flies!

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A Long Seven Years

What a fascinating thought, would Twitter exist today if Apple hadn’t kickstarted podcasting?

See also: The history behind Audion and iTunes as told by Cabel Sasser (co-founder of Panic, creators of transmit, coda, unison and prompt - all great apps, used and loved by yours truly).

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The most important distinction between an iPad and a Microsoft Surface

This completely caught me by surprise, now I can’t imagine how I didn’t think of it sooner:

Looks like it includes the Touch Cover at that price but not, of course, two important features of the iPad: a Retina display and the security of knowing that the device has never been down Steve Ballmer’s pants.

I’m not saying Ballmer puts every Surface down his pants. I’m just saying that if you buy an iPad, you know it has never been down his pants.

That’s all I’m saying.

Fair ‘nuf. Tip of the hat to brooks review

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Shift-Command-Tab

Actually, scrap that. I loved it for about 30 seconds, then promptly hated it and switched back. By all means, give it a try (no jailbreak, hack or other difficult setup needed), but for sure — it’s not for me.

Oscillation over now, back to your regular scheduled programming.

[the-halfway-house]

Command + Tab Your iPad

Whaaaaaaat?

But, again, the ability to simply task switch to and fro at the press of a couple of keys just like on a Mac makes an astounding difference2, and Apple should capitalize on that - especially now that Surface is touting their fancy keyboard covers.

You can turn on command+tab as a setting in iOS? That’s great, one of the small things I would love to have when using the Bluetooth keyboard with this iPad (which is, well, quite a lot).

Done. Done, 5 times over. Awesome. Via TBR.