While SSDs are all the rage — for good reason — MacBook Pro users looking for the maximum amount of storage possible should be rejoicing tonight, as WD has launched a 1TB drive that will fit into Apple’s notebooks.
Category: General Tech
nvAlt Updated for Lion
This version adds a plethora of new features, including better MultiMarkdown 3 support, Simplenote tag sync (and a fix for Lion syncing), the ability to lock a note to the preview window while editing another, auto-pairing and wrapping and quite a few bug fixes.
So glad to be able to put this back in my Dock.
Push Notifications are Killing People
Ok, that was an extreme headline. But still, those little red badges and popups are changing the way we interact with our devices.
Backblaze Shows Off Again
Adobe is Really Good at Testing Its Software Products
Wait, that’s not right:
We saw that there were some questions today related to Flash Player 11 support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7) related to hardware video acceleration. To avoid any more confusion, we wanted to clarify:
The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” described in a tech note suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.
Adobe and Lion
This is why you don’t ever upgrade your production machine on Day One.
The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer
From our experience, it’s entirely possible that all the revenue for a product can be eaten up by legal fees. After years of pouring your heart and soul into that product, it’s devastating. It makes you question why the hell you’re in the business: when you can’t pay salaries from product sales, there’s no point in building it in the first place.
So, just as in the days of magnetic media, the independent developer now finds him or herself at a point where it is again becoming very expensive to distribute their products to a mass market. This time the retail channel itself is very cheap, but the ancillary costs, both financially and emotionally, are very high.
Inside RIM
The three-year roadmap for RIM products focused on refining the technology in phones had already been released, rather than looking at where to add major new component or trying to identify or even shape future trends. “One of the main reasons RIM missed the mark with the browser was because they were always proud of how little data usage a user would use,” a former executive said. “There was no three-year plan at RIM.” RIM would be proud of the fact that someone would only use 1MB of data in a month in 2005, and as a result, there wasn’t ever any extensive R&D done within the browser space. Over time, that misstep affected BlackBerry tremendously as competing devices began to deliver desktop-like Web experiences.
The More Things Change...
Dave Feldman, unveiling the TechCrunch redesign:
TechCrunch is bold. It’s raw. It’s fast-paced. With 50 articles crossing the home page daily we couldn’t simply redesign the reader-facing site; we had to think about the CMS too. We wanted to support you, the readers, because you read every article we post. We wanted to give you better context across posts and topics, new ways to slice and dice content so you can dig into what interests you. We get a huge amount of RSS traffic and wanted to keep providing a full experience to those readers too.
‘The Dark Knight Rises’
I can’t wait for this film. Is there any doubt this is the best Batman series ever?
[via Justin Blanton]
The Shortening Distance Between Thought and Action
One thing I actively work on, and have been actively working on for sometime, is maintaining a non-reactive mode of working. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as technology continues its steady advance promising “convenience”, I believe it’s not really a convenience which it delivers. Rather, it’s a shortening of a distance between thought and action. If I’m not careful, this can lead to a more reactive way of working - checking email, twitter, and the like reflexively.
New OmniFocus Theme
I love OmniFocus, but the Mac app lacks a certain amount of polish. Thankfully, creating themes for OmniFocus is quite easy.
I’ve created one that I have been using for a while, and decided it was time to share it. It uses Helvetica Neue all over the place, with red background and red type for overdue items, with orange for upcoming items, like the default theme.