Realmac Software has a nice post on their blog, outlining a few tips on how to keep your iOS device secure. The one I didn't know about involves the passcode lock:

Before you Turn Passcode On you should consider whether to turn Simple Passcode off. With Simple Passcode on you will set a 4-digit number, with it off you can set a longer alphanumeric passcode. Longer alphanumeric passcodes are more secure but also a little more fiddly to enter on the lock screen as you'll be presented with the full keyboard instead of the numeric keypad. But here's a pro tip where you can get best of both worlds. If you have Simple Passcode off and set a long passcode that only contains numbers the lock screen will now present the numeric keypad instead of the full keyboard. Now you can choose a longer, more secure numeric passcode which is both easier to remember and quicker to enter that an alphanumeric one.

Pretty nifty if you ask me. Head over to the post on the Realmac Software blog for the other tips.

I'm currently translating two scientific texts that I need for my Master's Thesis from Chinese to German. It's difficult stuff, because both texts deal with concepts about internet memes and often feature fairly new words that haven't yet found their way into dictionaries and sometimes aren't even used widely enough to have reliable translations in user generated online dictionaries.

At times like this I sit here hugging my iPhone or iPad because they run Pleco. It's an application for learners and users of Chinese that I've been using since I started studying sinology (back then on a Palm Treo 650).
This piece of software has made my life so much easier, I really don't want to imagine studying Chinese without it. Lately the built-in document reader and the plethora of paid and free dictionaries have become the main reasons for my love of this application.

It's worth every cent and available for both iOS devices and a number of Android devices.
If you're a student of Chinese and don't use this software I consider you a masochist.

I simply cannot understand how politicians like him have wives that don't divorce them and (grand-) daughters that don't disown them, when they make misogynistic and criminally moronic statements that negate the reality of womanhood in general and the reality of female rape victims in particular.

Amazing letter by the father CNN founder Ted Turner to his son. Morals of the story: Study what you're interested in. Well worth a read.

via Jonas Wisser

First of all; I love this guy's videos.
Second of all; science is awesome, even on this scale.

During the Game Horizon conference on 27 Jun 2012 Natural Motion CEO Torsten Reil told industry peers that mobile games marketing is ineffective.

We learnt the hard way that we really needed to rethink marketing. I don't think it works at all.

Given how many developers have only just learned that you need to know your way around marketing terms and advertise your work, this is a daunting prospect.
Fortunately Mr. Reil also told the audience that judging from his experience when dealing with mobile devices and AppStores the icon and name of the application are immensly important, and;

You can go viral in the old fashioned way on these devices. People will go out to a pub and show your game to their friends if they really like it. Very often it's because of production values and overall graphics. This is where we have a huge opportunity. We always want to wow people.

In other words: Quality is what it's all about.

Source: gamesindustry via Peter Cohen

As we've found out yesterday, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is going to be released to the public today.

This year I've decided to take a slightly more relaxed approach — e.g. I don't plan on doing a clean reinstall — but certain steps should always be taken before a major OS update. So here's what I did:

1. Check if the apps that I use on a daily basis are Mountain Lion compatible. This can be easily done using the site RoaringApps.

2. Backup my user data with Time Machine. This works pretty fast in my case, because I do TM backups on my Mac mini's secondary internal drive.

3. Clone my Mac mini's primary HDD with SuperDuper!, twice. I have one backup that goes to a FW800 HDD, usually updated daily and a secondary backup on a USB2.0 HDD that I won't touch until I'm fairly certain that 10.8 works fine. Of course, I checked the integrity of both backups, by booting from them.

That's it. Mountain Lion can come.

Vor Jahren, zu einer Zeit als die Topmodelle unter den Handys noch solch tolle Namen hatten wie Ericsson T39m, Siemens SL45, Nokia 8810 und Motorola Razr gab es den Spruch; "Handys sind das Einzige bei dem Männer sich darüber streiten wer das kleinere hat."

Vor wenigen Minuten habe ich zu hören bekommen, wie peinlich das iPhone 4S mit seinem 3,5 Zoll Display doch sei; vom Besitzer eines Samsung Galaxy Tab. Dessen Display hat eine Diagonale von über fünf Zoll.

Ich mochte diesen Spruch.

The appointment of Marissa Mayer as Yahoo's new CEO caught almost everybody by surprise. Even more surprising was the shockingly small number of proclamations of doom, despair and disaster for Yahoo as a result of her appointment.

Most seem to think that Mayer, having been one of Google's best, is capable of at least turning Yahoo around, making it relevant again. Her initial memo to the company's employees certainly makes her seem more level-headed than most CEOs these days; it looks as if she knows what's at stake.

(If you want to listen to a good discussion about Ms. Mayer and what she might mean for Yahoo, listen to last week's episode of Amplified.)

I wish her all the success in the world, but to be honest, I really only want Yahoo to fix Flickr.
I wasn't upset when Yahoo bought the service, even forcing me to log-in with my Yahoo credentials didn't really phase me. What bothers me is the state of the service that has gone from the photo sharing site on the internet, to a spam-overrun site that people only use because there's no real alternative. At least there's none for those of us who just want an easy way to store and share our photos — 500px is nice, but feels more like a portfolio for professional photgraphers and ambitious amateurs.

Flickr needs to rethink these three things:

1. UI: This is the most obvious one. It's clunky, impractical, not optimised for anything and it takes to many steps to get anything done. The entire user experience is frustrating.

2. Community and sharing: While the sharing features have become better, Flickr's insistance on adding links to their service anywhere and everywhere when posting one's pictures online is annoying. Integration with third party services for sharing is rudimentary at best, the commenting system is close to useless and SPAM is abundant.

3. Orientation of the service: What's Flickr for? A portfolio for photographers? A place to save all your photos? A site to share your snapshots with the world? Else? Can it be all at once?

I realise that everyone has different needs and expectations of a service like Flickr, but these are the things I'd change had I any say in the future of Flickr:

• A user interface that puts my content left, front and center, giving me an easy way to showcase everything from quick snapshots to photographs I'm actually proud of. Hire some talent for the UI revamp. Off the top of my head I can think of a decent number of designers who'd be up to the task of helping make Flickr better, the Iconfactory, Impending, Pacific Helm, Robocat and Blackpixel being among them.
• Show photos in a way that gives the people I share them with the best quality whichever device they view them on.
• Give the user the option to hide metadata, tags and other information on the site. This could be done as a per-user setting (Always show metadata or Never show metadata) or by making it visible at the tap/click of a button. It's the photo that's important, the EXIF stuff is uninteresting for regular users and secondary even for most geeks.
• Make it easy for me to get my photos on Flickr by optimising the uploading process.
• Offer an API for Twitter clients (and other services) that lets me push photos to Flickr from anywhere, retaining not only the photo's metadata but also information that puts the photo into context (like the tweet it was posted in initially). A second step would be to allow hotlinking in tweets, so photos shared via Twitter don't result in the client opening a slow and shitty mobile site that gives the user a picture not much bigger than a thumbnail.
• Offer native apps that take advantage of devices's strengths and have their shortcomings in mind. For example: I'd expect an iPad app to deliver close to the same functionality the website does, while the iPhone app should let me easily view photos, upload and share them, as well as making it easy to edit/add basic information.
• Emphasise sharing and commenting by pulling reactions to my photos from Facebook, Twitter and showing them alongside comments on Flickr. Oh and tell me when someone has commented on them — the current implementation of an activity stream on the site is pretty much useless.
• Do something about mindless spam. Let me allow certain people to comment on photos, let me restrict the possibility for others to add my photos to groups, etc.
• Most of my photos are important to me, they capture memorable moments and losing them would be disastrous. Allow me to backup my photos easily, giving me peace of mind that they're safe from things like harddrive failure on the one hand and prying eyes on the other hand.

The only thing I wouldn't change is the pricing scheme: A simple but limited free account and a pro account with all the bells and whistles for around $ 25,- (I wouldn't even mind it being a bit more expensive).

I was very close to deleting my account with Flickr a few months ago, but now I feel that there's hope for the service to become useful again. I guess we'll just have to be patient.

Peter Cohen of The Loop has a few comments on the whole "Google has bought Sparrow" situation, referring to a smart article by  Marco Tabini. Unfortunately there's one point in Tabini's piece that I believe ignores the reality of buying software licences.

I encourage you to read both posts. My take on the situation can be found below and in the comments of the article on The Loop.

I can get behind most of what Tabini wrote in his article, but not the quoted passage. In it he warps what he calls "the simple reality of commerce". By definition customers who buy your products are stakeholders, they take a chance with your product and thus a stake in your business. This especially holds true for licensable goods like software as they are durables and not consumables like, say, toilet paper (here your business relationship and expectation ends once you've wiped you butt with it).

Tabini says that you should buy software that suits your needs, not because you have some hopes about its future, yet when a person invests in software by form of a licence, they expect to get a certain use out of it that extends beyond using it once or twice. Buying and using software is more akin to a service relationship than to buying physical goods.

Now to be perfectly clear: I don't expect developers to support a piece of software indefinitely — not for free at least. The question of "How long is long enough?" leads to a wholly different world of pain, but as JimD has correctly pointed out, OS updates do tend to break software and Sparrow for the Mac and iOS haven't been on the market for very long.

The same holds true for Pulp for the iPad by Acrylic Software, an app that hasn't been around very long either and that I bought — yup, my fucking luck — three hours before the announcement of the acquisition by Facebook. After purchasing the app, I found out that certain essential aspects of the software didn't work as advertised, something I'd expect the developer to improve on. Now that they've been purchased none of this will happen and I basically have a dud sitting on my iPad.