Saturday, September 22, 2012
Developing websites for retina display
I'm not sure if this is a good idea. What about those people (currently in the majority) who have normal displays and limited bandwidth or data cap. As it is web pages are so bloated, what happens when you add web content that is made for retina displays. Suddenly these bloated pages are now an order of magnitude larger in size.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Social as a platform has failed.
Yes, IFTTT is a service beloved by tech nerds, but this change also signals something important about Twitter’s future relationship with developers — something contrary to its previous statements about its recent API changes.
Despite what twitter may or may not have said, it has been clear to me that the twitter API changes over the past few months are a clear warning for developers. This latest move of making IFTTT remove its twitter triggers has to be the death blow for the third party developers community, not just a warning. Come to think of it, the sale of Seesmic to Hootsuite may have been the death blow. In any case, twitter wants you to use its crappy interfaces and lock you in. They are not a platform.
And by the way, its not just twitter. Everyone has realized that they have to earn money. All those venture capitalist are looking for returns on their investment. Even Google is doing this with its walled garden that is Google Plus. Facebook, which always was a walled garden, has dumped HTML5 on its mobile app for a native app and are attempting to bring improved targeted advertising to the users of this native app. Companies building on top of social platforms have failed too. Zyngas stock is down in the dumps even though they actually make money from the virtual goods they sell, etc.
Social as a platform has failed.
How new versions of successful products lead to failure
Or do they?
New versions of successful products would fail in the past as customers got frustrated with the missing or altered features that they were used to. Dave Winer writes about it here:
Apple doesn't have network effects on its side, but they do have a great brand. I'm not sure if a great brand is as powerful as "network effects", but it sure seems like it is. I guess we'll see.
New versions of successful products would fail in the past as customers got frustrated with the missing or altered features that they were used to. Dave Winer writes about it here:
People thought we had removed features from ThinkTank, because they had used the Apple II or IBM PC versions. In fact this was a completely new codebase, and we shipped early because there was a lack of software on the Mac. So it didn't have a lot of the features of the earlier product. No matter, the users were outraged by this. They thought they had bought a better computer, and here was the product with less features. We totally didn't anticipate this, because from our point of view it was a major accomplishment to get something out at all.He writes about dBase and his own product ThinkTank as historical examples. I'm not sure though that we are living in the same world. dBase and ThinkTank didn't have the advantage that is brought by "Network Effect". In the case of twitter, despite the fact that new twitter clients have missing features and that twitter is actively destroying its third party developer community, I can't leave. All the people and services are "tweeting", and until they all move away en-mass to another service, I can't leave.
Apple doesn't have network effects on its side, but they do have a great brand. I'm not sure if a great brand is as powerful as "network effects", but it sure seems like it is. I guess we'll see.
Javascript API for Google drive
Google Introduces JavaScript Support for the Drive API
To further encourage developers in creating Google Drive applications, Google hasintroduced JavaScript support for the Drive API.Looks interesting. Should be fun to play around with together with Node.js.
Article on automating your powershell reports
Automating PowerShell Reports, Part 1
For those of you stuck doing the really boring but necessary work on windows server, here is a good article on automating powershell reports.
For those of you stuck doing the really boring but necessary work on windows server, here is a good article on automating powershell reports.
Gatekeeper added to OS X Lion 10.7.5
Apple Adds Gatekeeper to Lion with OS X 10.7.5
According to the article the default setting is the middle one, which is "Mac app store and identified developers". I wonder what an identified developer is. I suspect that open source developers might not be "identified". Which means you won't be able to install software like vlc without changing the setting in the control panel. But before you could do that, you would have to know about gatekeeper first. I think 10.7.5 is going to cause a lot of headaches for a lot of people.
Do you trust the operating system that comes installed on your new hardware?
Brand-new hardware -- now with malware pre-installed!
What Microsoft discovered is that electronics manufacturers' products were being compromised by insecure supply chains. In most cases, the manufacturers were buying, either knowingly or unknowingly, low-cost counterfeit software loaded with malware. Once the counterfeit software is installed, it's ultimately delivered to unsuspecting consumers.Usually when I buy a new machine, I end up wiping the operating system of the system, and installing a fresh copy of an operating system. Sometimes its because I want to replace the original OS with Linux. Other times its mostly because I want to get a fresh install of Windows without the bloatware. Now there is another reason, though the article says the problem is mostly with vendors in China, its still safer to start fresh.
Top 20 OS X command-line secrets by infoworld
They are:
airportcaffeinatecurlDNS Cachefiletreelocatelsofnetworksetupopenopendiff
Click on the article if you don’t know what some of them do.
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