Please please please please please please please let there be a version of OSX called Sabre-Toothed Tiger!
Yes, I know it’s technically a sabre-toothed cat, not a saber-toothed tiger, but I grew up on saber-toothed tiger and it just sounds so much better.
Just click the link.
Stephen Hackett’s been thinking about Linked Lists, which he doesn’t happen to use at 512 Pixels. He even did a survey of his readers, and it turns out most of them like Linked Lists. It also turns out Stephen isn’t bowing to the majority:
At this point, I am not changing the way the site works.
Now I am using Linked List style posts here, but I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about them. As a reader, I like them. It’s a clear differentiation between two different styles of post. As a writer though, I find them frustrating at times. The thing is, it’s not always easy to know when your post is a post and when your post is a link. Sure there are the extremes – one word comment linked list posts and lengthy essays that spring to your mind out of thin air – but there’s a whole lot of writing that falls somewhere in between.
Take this post for example. Is this a link because it was inspired by Stephen Hackett’s post? Or is it my own post because I’ve crossed some arbitrary threshold of word count or personal contribution.
And even worse, what if I’m writing what is essentially a short commentary, but about posts at two different sites? The Linked List format only accepts a single primary link. Sure, you can link to others in the body of the post, but that implies some kind of ranking that may not be desirable.
As a writer I despise using subject categories for blog posts because I spend so much time trying to figure out what the correct subject (or subjects) for a post may me. It’s liberating to simply write a post without worrying about the category, and I think it would be similarly liberating to be able to ignore the Link/Post distinction, which is really just another kind of category.
Update: Ben Brooks shares some of my frustration with trying to decide if something is a link or a post:
The problem I face is when I write a post like this that is somewhere between a linked list post and an article post.
He’s not concerned about categorization, but rather about how to give proper attribution when using the different formats. Still, it’s another example of how forcing something into arbitrary categories has its limitations.
Yep, this is a Linked List style post. I have no idea if that was the right decision or not.
A few months ago I “famously” (and incorrectly) predicted the then-next-now-4S iPhone would be called the iPhone 5. This was based on some assumptions about the iPhone nomenclature following a series of numbers of increasing value.
If the new iPad introduced today is any indication, those assumptions were wrong.
Not the iPad 3 or the iPad HD. The new iPad.
Stephen Hackett and Jonas Lekevicius (via Gruber) think the next iPhone is just going to be called the iPhone.
I can’t help but agree, and can’t believe this didn’t occur to me (or anybody else outside of Apple really) sooner.
Apple’s computer lines follow this nomenclature, so why not the iPhone/iPad? Sure there’s some confusion in trying to figure out if your MacBook Pro is the Early 2010 MacBook Pro or whatever, but it’s rarely a concern for most users. And frankly, it’s far preferable to the inevitable situation where we have an iPhone called the iPhone 9 in a few more years. Besides, if Apple sticks to its 1 iPhone a year schedule it will be an easy task to identify iPhone by date of introduction, at least until people confuse date of introduction and date of purchase. Maybe a clear inscription of the date on the back?
From an Inkscape tutorial at VerySimpleDesigns.com:
Make the font Arial>Italic via the ‘tool control bar’ as indicated specifically by the image, this is a nice simple choice that looks classy and professional. It is also the preferred font for buttons of a similar nature.
This description of Arial amused me greatly. I’m not especially bothered by Arial, but it’s the kind of statement that might make Gruber’s head explode.
I think it’s also the kind of thing that exemplifies the iOS/Android divide. The people who get worked up about the lack of attention to detail in Android are the same ones that get worked up over Helvetica vs. Arial. This isn’t a case of right vs. wrong, it’s simply a case of what one appreciates.
Ben Brooks, on the next version of OS X:
“Mountain Lion”? Really?
I’m with Ben on this one. A snow leopard is like a cooler version of a leopard, but a mountain lion is most definitely not a cooler version of a lion. The name makes it sound like a downgrade, not an upgrade.
I base my statements on large cats on nothing more than my opinion. One could also make the case that with the lion being the king of beasts, any other cat would be a downgrade, but calling it mountain lion is like rubbing the downgrade in our face. I also have to wonder where we are going to be with OS X nomenclature 10 or even 5 years from now. We’re running out of big cat names that people will recognize!
John Gruber, on Mountain Lion (yes, Mountain Lion):
We were sitting in a comfortable hotel suite in Manhattan just over a week ago. I’d been summoned a few days earlier by Apple PR with the offer of a private “product briefing”.
The whole time I read the post I kept thinking the punchline was going to be that he had just had the craziest dream.
Nope.
As is usual with these things, Marco Arment offers a well reasoned developer’s perspective on the whole Apple lets devs access the address book without asking for user permission business.
A particularly relevant bit, on his implementing Instapaper’s very limited use of Address Book information:
When implementing these features, I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty.
The thing is, he’s apparently in the minority as far as iOS developers go. Dustin Curtis took a survey:
I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records.
Developers are storing a shitload of personal data that they really shouldn’t be, but I can see how it happens. Apple makes you ask for permission to use a user’s location and to initiate push notifications, so if they don’t make you ask permission to scrape the entire Address Book it must be okay, right?
Wrong. Craig Grannell says it best:
Just because you can do something, that doesn’t mean you should.
Ben Brooks talks about Apple breaking our trust. I don’t buy that. Apple has shown that they are not perfect in their attempts to protect us from shitty developer practices, but it’s the developer’s that have broken our trust.
The Card Cheat, in a Metafilter thread on Tucker Max (whoever the hell that is):
Well, he’s 35 now. That seems to be the age when a lot of guys hit the wall in terms of drinking and/or womanizing and/or going out of their way to be assholes.
That’s a sad but reasonably accurate statement on our society.
Shawn Blanc, on his experience at MacWorld last week:
When I walked into the Exhibit Hall on Thursday morning, the whole room smelled like a newly-unpacked Nintendo Entertainment System — you know? that fresh gadget smell?
That can’t be good for you.
Seriously – that can’t be good for you! Gizmodo reports on a supposedly safe but rather stinky case of new gadget smell.
