Eta Carina Nebula (via tvdavisid)
October 18, 2009
9:18 pm
9:18 pm
September 26, 2009
7:15 pm
August 11, 2009
9:05 pm
June 15, 2009
2:20 pm
2:20 pm
June 10, 2009
Apple Snow Leopard
So Apple put out some news about Snow Leopard today. I was surprised to find that, rather than the usual barrage of flashy new features on a new OS X release, the Snow Leopard page highlights a rather subdued but loaded categories of improvement:
- Better. Faster. Easier.
- Next-generation technologies.
- More accessible than ever.
- Exchange support.
As I glanced through this list and the short explanations afforded to each on the Snow Leopard front page my first thought was “O.K. but will people pay over a $100 for this?,” which was based on the invalid assumption that the pricing would remain consistent with previous releases. I was pleased to find out that Snow Leopard will be available with an upgrade price of $29, a very reasonable price indeed. Perhaps they were merely trying to undercut Microsoft, which apparently will make an upgrade from Windows Vista Premium to Windows 7 available for $50, or perhaps the influence went both ways.
It appears that Apple and Microsoft are focusing their coming releases on on building on the foundation of the existing software, rather than introducing a slew of new features. Apple purports, for example, that many tasks done in Snow Leopard will be faster and more responsive than in Leopard based on a number of refinements, core technology improvements, and rewrites. Refined, not reinvented, they say. Snow Leopard also features a smaller footprint of up to half of the space used by Leopard for equivalent functionality, though I have not found any details to indicate how much savings an average user might see. I’m particularly elated when I see Apple putting a major effort into such topics such as significantly reducing the wake-up and network connect times, and improving the services menu by making it contextual.
As I look through the improvements, I feel as if Mac OS X has gotten an affordable spring cleaning. There are still a lot of items on my honey-do list for Apple, but I’ll take what I can get! By focusing inward on Mac OS X, I think Apple has done a great service to itself, it’s users, and the future of the operating system. Will I buy an upgrade? Maybe..
Checkout more Snow Leopard improvements in the usual spot: http://www.apple.com/macosx/
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2:58 pm
June 5, 2009
8:01 am
June 3, 2009
That paradigm shift? Yeah, it's coming
Recently I wrote Why Email Clients Need to Change which was a commentary on a post by the same name on gigaom. The gist of the post is that we are on the verge of a paradigm shift in personal information management, driven by the explosion of user generated content about which we care (ours and others). Managing all this information with our current application technology is untenable. Email clients, blogs, twitter, and so on, in their current form, won’t cut it. As ever more of our life is brought into the digital world, we will have better ways to deal with and organize this information.
As an example of the general problem, consider a well known problems with email. Email works well with linear conversations, but generally falls down when it comes to handling more realistic conversations, which tend to branch. For example, there is no good way to reply to just a specific part of a long email. We’ve made up conventions to do this which work well for short-lived threads, but these conventions quickly become a problem in long-lived threads where an email can be turned into incomprehensible alphabet soup (especially for those who are included in the conversation late in its life).
Also, consider an application which has recently had a lot of attention on the Internet: collaborative editing. Despite the upturn of good online collaborative editors, this is an application which is largely untapped by general users. I believe there are three major reasons why this is so. First, it simply has not yet become well known that this technology is readily available to us now (i.e. it has not crossed the gap). Second, the reason it has not crossed the gap is that the technology has not yet propagated to the most heavily used authoring applications, such as popular desktop word processors (and email clients. Confused about why you might want to collaborate on an email? read on). Finally, we’ve grown accustomed to working without the ability to collaborate at this level (i.e. simultaneously) for so long that the potential of collaboration is not yet realized by most users. Integration of online collaboration into a major application with a large audience is what is needed to bring it to the next stage (of course).
Google Wave looks like it may make a very large dent in these two areas, and many more. Rather than try to describe it, please take a look at the demo video from Google I/O where Google Wave was introduced a few days ago:
The video is a bit long, but until a more condensed version comes out this is the best we’ve got. I’ll be commenting a lot more on Google Wave in as time goes on, including some notes on how it solves various communication problems, but for now just watch and enjoy :)
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6:01 pm
California Cities on Google Squared
Apparently the ‘height’ of San Diego is 5’8.. never knew.. XD
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4:52 pm
