mangochutney

The Macalope: Weekend ruined

Too funny. Catherine Noyes is incredibly narrow-minded.

Yesterday John Gruber wrote a short article about the imminent release of the HP TouchPad.

He argues that the Touchpad seems to be the most compelling iPad competitor so far, but HP will have to wage an uphill battle:

I think the problem facing HP is summed up in the sub-head on this promotional page:

The ultimate in entertainment with Beats Audio and Adobe Flash.

That’s not a compelling answer to “Why should I buy this instead of an iPad?” I mean, who has even heard of “Beats Audio”?

I agree that the TouchPad will have to prove itself; a task not easily accomplished in a market dominated by the iPad. I don’t agree however with the assumption that the TouchPad has no differentiating features that would answer the above question.

Just like Apple had to tell consumers why the iPod/iPhone/iPad will make their lives easier, HP is going to have to educate consumers about what the TouchPad does and what it does that the iPad does not do. A consumer-centric feature like improved audio characteristics sound like a good argument to me, at the very least to grab people’s attention.

A well-made series of commercials — let’s call it Apple-y — focusing on what the TouchPad can do for the potential buyer would be a good start.

I’m quite excited for the second part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I was a late convert to the books, but have come to love them and must’ve read them each at least six times by now.

There are two things, though, that I look forward to in the movie more than anything else:

1. Witnessing Molly Weasley fight Bellatrix Lestrange in the great hall, because it was one of the greatest scenes in the entire series. The courage and determination she showed facing a witch as powerful as Bellatrix out of love for her children and the strength she projected was unequaled in the books.
2. Seeing more of Minerva McGonagall. She is by far my favourite character in the books and the essence of this character has been captured perfectly by Dame Maggie Smith. Any scene with her on screen instantly becomes a great scene.

This article neatly sums-up the “MacDefender situation”: The best protection against malware and viruses is education and common sense, in that order. The better users are educated about what their computer does and how, the better they are able to identify scams.

The smartest thing computer-savvy people can do, is teach their less adept friends and family members how to deal with these kind of situations and set-up their computers in a way that reduces the risk of being infected. The latter should happen with an explanation of what changes are being made and why, because nobody wants to feel stupid.

I greatly admire Brent Simmons and his work. NetNewsWire has been my goto RSS reader since I switched to the Mac a little over three years ago.
Even though Reeder has replace NetNewsWire for me on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, I still have paid licences for each version of NNW; they’re my backup solution.

I’m excited for the things to come, in case of NetNewsWire in the hands of Black Pixel and Brent Simmons’s next projects.