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.

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?

About 40 percent of the solar energy reaching Earth’s surface lies in the near-infrared region of the spectrum — energy that conventional silicon-based solar cells are unable to harness. But a new kind of all-carbon solar cell developed by MIT researchers could tap into that unused energy, opening up the possibility of combination solar cells — incorporating both traditional silicon-based cells and the new all-carbon cells — that could make use of almost the entire range of sunlight’s energy.

That is truly exciting news.

via House of Grindlebone

Its demise was predicted so many times that some people actually believe the Dashboard is already dead. Fortunately it's not and Apple keeps including it in every release of OS X.
Personally, I find the application very useful and not a day goes by that I don't check one or another thing using one of the widgets I have installed, even though I don't use many.

Mac.AppStorm has compiled a really nice list of useful widgets for OS X's Dashboard. There's something for everybody's taste in there; I'm using the currency converter and iStat Pro. It also helped me remember the Color Burn Widget which I lost during an OS upgrade.

There are two widgets I'd like to add to that list, though:

Loremify — a one-click Lorem Ipsum generator, and
Delivery Status — the best parcel tracking widget out there.

Oh and everybody always forgets about the built-in widgets, so; multiple weather widgets, a few world clocks and the unit conversion widget never leave my dashboard.

In my post on the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display a few days ago, I wondered how many external displays the machine would be able to drive given its two Thunderbolt port and one HDMI port.

Well, the great people over at OWC have put this to the test and attached three external monitors. Head over to their blog to see a picture of this in action.

I'm pretty impressed, to be honest.

Harry Marks has posted a nice list of questions on his site Curious Rat, that he was left with after yesterday's presentation by Microsoft.

Not answering the most basic questions regarding a new device of this kind, like say " What is it going to cost?" and "How long does it typically run on one charge?" fills me with a sense of foreboding.

The thing that really angered me, though, was this:

Two separate processor architectures (Intel i5 and ARM) will give developers two separate platforms on which to build apps. Do they build for legacy Windows first, then if there’s time/resources, Windows RT? Or do they build for Windows RT and leave old-timey Windows in the past?

It shows that (1) Microsoft still hasn't developed the balls to say goodbye to the legacy crap that's been holding them back for almost a decade now, and (2) these things have little chance of becoming actual competitors to the iPad.

I predict that the only software good enough to compete with iPad apps will run on the ARM tablet; which requires developers with a willingness to do the legwork on this new platform and the slightest hint of what good UI design looks like. I hope for the sake of customers and Microsoft, that Redmond will provide developers with a good SDK for Windows RT applications and even better support.

If that doesn't happen — and I'm quite sure it won't — we'll end up with a Windows 8 tablet that isn't better than a 10-year-old Compaq TC1100 running Windows XP. Why? Because most companies and lazy independent developers will stick to their guns and continue to build powerhungry, unoptimised, legacy crap that barely even runs on the Windows 8 tablet under the guise of offering "the full Windows experience".

The only way Microsoft can achieve any relevance in the tablet/post-PC market, is if they're willing to drag their customers and developers — especially the corporate ones — kicking and screaming into the current decade.

Reeder 3.0 for the iPhone was released a few days ago, heralded by Federico Viticci's review on MacStories.net.

Reeder has been my main RSS feed reader since it was released. Actually since each separate version was released — I own licences for the iPhone, iPad and OS X version.
Despite some minor annoyances the UI of all apps is second to none and it's easily one of the most heavily used apps on all my devices.

The UI of the new iPhone version is nothing short of spectacular and works very well, even though it's a bit laggy at times (I'm sure this is something that will be improved in a future release).

I'm not going to review the entire application, Mr. Viticci has done a thoroughly good job with that. What I want to mention is the integration of Fever as the first true alternative to Google Reader since the demise of Newsgator as a publicly available RSS aggregator.

Shaun Inman's service might be a bit more difficult to set up for the average user and it requires a web server (you buy a licence for the Fever software which then has to be hosted on your server), but for me it has three advantages:

1. It works perfectly fine as a regular feed catching service,
2. it's marquee feature ranks posts by importance and popularity based on several criteria, presenting the user with a "you don't have time to read all entries, but these you shouldn't miss" listing (more on this here),
3. and using Fever is going to eliminate the last reason for me to have a Google account.

The one thing keeping me from buying some web space, a Fever licence and setting it up right this second, is the absence of a good Fever client for the iPad. As of now it's also unclear when Reeder's developer Silvio Rizzi will release Reeder for iPad 3.0.

I also hope that by the time Mr. Ricci has Reeder 3.0 for iPad ready to go, the app will also support in-app feed management for Fever accounts, which it currently doesn't and receive a better visual implementation of Fever's ranking feature (both are things the MacStories review criticises).

For the time being I'm going to enjoy reading my RSS in Reeder 3.0 for the iPhone, and I somehow get the feeling that it's going to be used more often than the iPad app.