Let a Professional Do It
When I posted this, the phrase “insert in post” caught my eye.
Indie+Relief
Tomorrow, January 20th, a group of 135 independent Mac and iPhone developers will be donating the sales for the day to assist Haiti in their recovery from last week’s earthquake. Each company is listed with their main application and what charity they will be donating to. My company, BitBQ, will be participating and donating to Doctors Without Borders.
There’s a lot of great software on that page, as well as great charities. If you’re the in market for any of it, tomorrow would be a great day to buy it. You get software, Haitians get help.
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
Typeface as Program
In the workshop, besides using traditional tools, students were encouraged to create their own (programable) tools. Several programming scripts were developed and tested by the students, one of them, created by David Keshavjee and Julien Tavelli resulted in a text typeface that is featured in this book and displays the characteristics of the tool that generated it. The books presents some basic idea of automated type design, breaking down the design of letters to series of parameters.
noah | networked organisms and habitats
An open-source citizen science project by three of my classmates.
I don’t have an iPhone, or even a data plan for the smartphone I do have, so I can’t submit critter spottings to Project Noah. All you people with your fancy iPhones can contribute, though, using Noah’s beta iPhone app; sign up on the site to be a tester.
quote out of context
It’s a big iPhone, but it’s not just a big iPhone.
once more, with feeling
Microsoft employee gets fired for not saying Bing!.
Don’t know if it’s true, but it’s gorgeously entertaining.
the GOP’s url shortening service
But unlike bit.ly, GOP.am includes a toolbar at the top of the screen that follows users as they click through to see whatever pages the links go to. It also sports an animation of RNC chairman Michael Steele walking around on the lower right as if he’s showing off the website — particularly awkward when that website is the alt.com bondage site.
Dragon Dictation, speech to text for the iPhone
speech to text
So, I know there is plenty of software that lets you talk and turns that into text. Does anyone know if anyone makes something that lets you transcribe recorded audio to text? Seems much more complicated.
Google Wave invites
Update: Since David Lawson has already built a proper website to handle this process, I hereby recommend that you swap Wave invitations over there instead of here: WaveShare.org. Accordingly, comments here are now closed.
Read more
If you would indulge me
Today I announced that my new company BitBQ has launched with the acquisition of two iPhone applications: FitnessTrack and Emergency Information.
While this is not going to replace my day job anytime soon, I’m very excited about having products on the App Store and I’m looking forward to adding features and supporting both applications.
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, please check them out and let me know what you think!
Anatomy Lab
A new cell phone application allows users to carry out a virtual dissection of a human body.
(thanks, Laura)
Typepad Motion
One of the lesser topics popping up in my reader today is Typepad Motion. The quickest description I can think of is a friendfeed-like group microblogging software, and Rex Sorgatz called it “a cleaner, more extensible Ning” which also works for me.
It’s a great concept, but definitely not for everyone.
Windows
I am an ecumenical OS user at the moment, but this is still funny and sort of true:
I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.
via Gruber
Dear Clusterflock
What are your essential Mac apps?
My contempt for Microsoft Word knows no bounds.
True story (via):
Because everyone uses Word, so we have to. And why does everyone use Word? Because everyone uses Word. It starts to make sense if you just hit your head on the wall enough times.
Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline
Gruber argues that Microsoft’s declining earnings are more because of their strategy and little to do with the market climate.
During the late-’90s dot-com boom, it was standard operating procedure at many companies for professional web developers and designers to have two computers on their desks: one Windows, one Mac. One for primary development, one for testing in browsers on the “other” OS. (Virtualization wasn’t yet practical.)
But which to choose as the primary platform? Many chose one, many chose the other. But it was an interesting test group, because they were exposed to both platforms. These web developers were not like the people who, in a form of tribalism, claim to despise one or the other platform without having actually used it. Web developers had to know both the Mac and Windows, at least with passing familiarity, and the truth is that many, if not most, preferred Windows.
Today that is simply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire market. People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.
It is a long article, but a must read for the computer enthusiast. Also, for the record, the only Apple product I have owned in my adult life is their phone
Walt Mossberg’s Guide to Surviving Windows 7
I actually kind of like Windows 7, despite the beta’s decision to not boot after an “update.”
iQ font
Two font designers, one race driver, interactive software, and a teeny-weeny car.
Morse-It
If you connected Morse-It to the twitter api, then it would be one hell of an interesting iPhone app.
clusterflock interviews clusterflock, #1 — updated, with answer
We have kicked around the idea for a long time of using the site to interview each other in some way. I was supposed to set something up with Andrew and totally dropped the ball. I think part of the problem was we were being too formal. I propose a simple formula: when something interesting occurs to someone that involves another flocker (or someone in some way affiliated with the site), make it a post.
So, without further ado:
Q. Kelsey, I’m curious about your experience(s) with Yahoo! Answers. You mentioned your frustration with the site a few times in comments and I was wondering if you would tell us what it was like working on that project. What it’s limitations were. What you saw as its potential. And how, presumably, it fell short. (As well as any other anecdotes you would care to share.)
A. My case against Yahoo! Answers is dated. For those who are unaware, I worked at Yahoo! from June 2005 to late 2007. The work itself was corporate — simple, predictable, complete with gym membership. It was my first job out of college and, when I showed up, I was as bright-eyed and idealistic as they come. But in order to work there, I left my apartment at seven and rarely returned before eight. After 2.5 years of a 4-6 hour daily commute, I now know how to lose myself. Commuting ever so slowly siphons away my laughter.
I promise not to fuck you with my iPhone
The PurityRing iPhone App is the brainchild of Island Wall Entertainment, which describes itself as the leading Christian iPhone App development agency.
Do the math.
On Hacker News on Monday, I was amused to read some people saying that writing StackOverflow was hilariously easy—and proceeding to back up their claim by promising to clone it over July 4th weekend. Others chimed in, pointing to existing clones as a good starting point.
Let’s assume, for sake of argument, that you decide it’s okay to write your StackOverflow clone in ASP.NET MVC, and that I, after being hypnotized with a pocket watch and a small club to the head, have decided to hand you the StackOverflow source code, page by page, so you can retype it verbatim. We’ll also assume you type like me, at a cool 100 WPM (a smidge over eight characters per second), and unlike me, you make zero mistakes. StackOverflow’s *.cs, *.sql, *.css, *.js, and *.aspx files come to 2.3 MB. So merely typing the source code back into the computer will take you about eighty hours if you make zero mistakes.
Except, of course, you’re not doing that; you’re going to implement StackOverflow from scratch. So even assuming that it took you a mere ten times longer to design, type out, and debug your own implementation than it would take you to copy the real one, that already has you coding for several weeks straight—and I don’t know about you, but I am okay admitting I write new code considerably less than one tenth as fast as I copy existing code.
—Benjamin Pollack, The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News, July 1, 2009
(Via Daring Fireball & Kottke, jointly making this 99.9ºF on Fever)
Google Chrome OS
Google has announced an operating system called Google Chrome OS targeted, initially, at netbooks.
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.