Letters of Note: "This is my son. He speaks Greek."
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
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:
Check if the apps that I use on a daily basis are Mountain Lion compatible. This can be easily done using the site RoaringApps.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
On my way home from work I witnessed the hubbub surrounding Google's acquisition of the fairly popular email client Sparrow, thinking to myself how much this must suck for people that have bought a licence for Sparrow on iOS or OS X.
Well, a few minutes ago I stumbled on this post by John Moltz: Why can't we have nice things?
In it he quotes from this TNW piece:
The Mac development house Acrylic has announced that they have been acqui-hired by Facebook.
[…] Acrylic says that Pulp and Wallet have not themselves been acquired by Facebook, but there are no plans to keep developing them.
I purchased Pulp for the iPad today. Sigh.
There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person?s lawful prey.
It is unwise to pay too much, but it is also unwise to pay too little.
When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all.
When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing you bought it to do.
The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot? It can't be done.
If you deal with the lowest bidder it is well to add something for the risk you run.
And if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.
— By John Ruskin (1819-1900), English author, artist, art historian and social thinker.
This is something that has become increasingly relevant in the smartphone and PC markets in recent years. Getting a cheap Android phone instead of an iPhone, or instead of a higher quality (read: supported directly by Google) Android phone might save the buyer a few bucks in the beginning, but will potentially result in greater frustration afterwards. The same holds true for laptops, especially the oh-so-great Ultrabooks.
I'm not even going to go into the topic of how at this point people pay a negative Apple tax for most of their products, compared to other vendors.
Every time the frequency of "reports" about rumoured new Apple products starts to increase, the phrase "Where there's smoke, there's fire." can be found in many an article. It's usually done in a self-assuring/self-deluding manner — take your pick — by the respective author when there is not even a bit of proof or an actual source, but loads of other New Media Douchebags "reporting" the same thing.
My only question is this: Are you sure you're that's smoke and not just very dense vapour?