Category Archives: Tech

Google + “open” = big joke

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Google + “open” = big joke

For some reason, a lot of people think Google is a benevolent champion of openness. Open platforms, open data, open source, open everything.

Marco Arment hasn’t fallen for it, and neither should you:

If they really cared about being so “open”, they’d open up a nontrivial part of their business that hasn’t already been commoditized, like their searching or advertising algorithms.

Click through for more of his ranty goodness.

Fraser Speirs on iPads for consumption and creation

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Fraser Speirs on iPads for consumption and creation

This has already done the rounds, but if you haven’t seen it yet, click through for a helpful analysis of the iPad’s suitability for tasks based on their complexity and duration. As usual, Fraser is spot-on.

Also, Apple has just posted a 5-minute video showcasing a school that’s using student iPads REALLY well. (For consumption AND creation.) Worth a watch.

A world without Adobe

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Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign. If you believe the hype (and the masses), they’re all “industry-standard”. They also happen to be Adobe’s flagship products, and in my view, they don’t deserve to be industry-standard-anything. Here’s why:

  • Pricing. Leaving aside the breathtaking cost of commercial licenses for Adobe software (which only ever creates a scenario where relatively few legitimate license-holders cover the cost of relatively many pirates), the difference between Adobe’s US pricing and Australian pricing – even for downloadable products with no domestic support options – can be massive. It’s less of a problem than it used to be (thanks to media attention and parliamentary inquiries, no doubt), but this price-gouging remains a blight on Adobe as a corporation.
  • Hostile takeovers. Adobe buys its competitors and destroys their products, either by halting development or by butchering code. Heard of Macromedia? Flash? Pixmantec RawShooter? You know what I’m talking about, then. Adobe is a Big Bad Bully.
  • (Lack of) innovation, bad software engineering. AIR was never fast enough for serious development. Flash didn’t evolve (e.g. by becoming an “open” platform) and was similarly inefficient (hence no mobile Flash on any platform in 2013). As these were used in frontline products (e.g. Photoshop), they became slower, hungrier and buggier. One can only assume that no-one at Adobe knows how to write good code! (Have you ever opened a Lightroom catalog in a SQLite browser? Least. Efficient. Data structures. Ever.)
  • Good alternatives actually exist. No, I’m not talking about GIMP. There’s Pixelmator, iDraw, Acorn, Aperture and a bunch of other fast, affordable, serious alternatives to Adobe’s big-name products. And they’re rapidly getting better.

I own several licenses of Lightroom and Photoshop, and have passively endured each version’s decline in performance and stability. That’s over now. I’m moving to better products, from better-behaved corporations, and I intend to take my school with me.

“Industry-standard” is so last decade.

Daring Fireball on “Innovation through simplicity”

Daring Fireball on “Innovation through simplicity”

One of the more common critiques I hear of iOS is that its home screen is boring / featureless / widgetless / uncustomisable.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see customisable widgets in the notifications pull-down of iOS. But the simplicity and consistency of its home screen is a win, in my opinion.

Daring Fireball agrees:

The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity.

For writers and editors: CriticMarkup

For writers and editors: CriticMarkup

I’ve only recently started using Markdown, but CriticMarkup looks like a useful, non-trivial extension to the syntax. Compatibility with HTML and even LaTeX should make it especially versatile. Hopefully my writing and editing friends will weigh in as the project evolves!

From the linked review:

For someone who writes in Markdown and works with a team on a daily basis, CriticMarkup is the missing piece of a puzzle that required using clunky software like Word for Mac to do any sort of change tracking or markup. CriticMarkup feels like an extension of Markdown in that it allows you, through a simple and easily understandable syntax, to insert additions, deletions, substitutions, comments, and highlights into plain text.

WordPress, Lightbox Plus ColorBox, native galleries and captions

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Last night, I posted my first ever native WordPress gallery (old dog, new tricks, etc). The thumbnails were pretty enough, but clicking through to a clunky WordPress “attachment page” – or worse, a raw JPEG file – was too much hard work, so I went looking for a Lightbox plugin for WordPress.

Enter Lightbox Plus ColorBox. Install, check the “Use for WordPress Galleries” option, enable Fancypants styling, done!

Well, almost. It turns out ColorBox doesn’t play nice with captions as rendered by WordPress. I needed to insert this above the wp_footer() call in the theme:

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function($){
    $(".gallery img").each(function(){
        var alt = $(this).attr("alt");
        $(this).parent().attr("title",function(i,val){
            return val == alt ? "" : alt;
        });
    });
});
</script>

It replaces image titles with their respective captions, unless the caption and title are the same, which would suggest no caption has been specified.

You’re welcome.

Windows apps on Android: because that would be, ah, awesome

Windows apps on Android: because that would be, ah, awesome

My inner geek loves the idea of running Windows apps on phones and tablets via WINE on Android, but I can’t help putting it through my will-this-actually-help-any-end-users filter, and, ah, yeah. WINE on Android is going to be completely and utterly useless. (Except maybe for my dad, who’s a sucker for any modern environment capable of running WordStar.)

Most Windows software is unintuitive with a large, 72dpi screen, full-size keyboard and two-button mouse. Who in their right mind would want to run any of it on a small device optimised for touch-based UI’s?

Not even Android sets its usability bar that low.

But you have fun, Alexandre Julliard. It looks like you know how to:

“Julliard uses an Apple MacBook for development of his software that runs on Linux to run Windows software… Android was emulated for his demo.”