So I imagine, like me, many of you are buying your new iPhones today or at least waiting with bated breath for the New World of the iOS 4.0.
Last week, I followed the WWDC keynote, and despite all the gadget and gizmo talk, there was one thing that stuck in my head. In fact, it haunted me as nothing has since I first wrote the business plan for Pegasus News in 2004:
150 million credit cards on file from people using iTunes and/or the App Store (and now the iBooks Store). 150 Million.
As Steve Jobs said, “We have 150 million accounts — we think it’s the biggest on the web. We’re number one.”
Interestingly, he then segued into a discussion of iAds, but there was no connection.
As someone who has been obsessed with transactional ad models for the better part of this decade, this presented both a tragedy and an opportunity. That night, after mulling the problem while floating in the pool with the pups, I toddled inside and fired off an email to sjobs@apple.com: Read the rest of this entry »
For the last couple months, I’ve taken great pride in pontificating that Apple had finally created a product in which I had zero interest. I sneered that the iPad was either a mere giant iPhone sans phone or a primary computer for digital idiots.
I am typing this entry on my new iPad, purchased Saturday and already my favorite gadget ever. I’ll explain the tremendous potential and impact it has, despite a couple serious-but-fixable flaws, but I suppose I should first explain why I changed my mind and made the purchase in the first place.
While I still partially chalk this up to a global conspiracy that makes me crave Apple products fortnightly, a lot of my change of heart came from reading reviewers who lauded the iPad’s use as a simple reader for Instapaper. I don’t like reading long articles on my computer at a desk, and despite my insistance that you could read just fine on a iPhone, I had literally hundreds of articles backlogged– primarily because the truth is that reading and constantly scrolling on a 3 x 4 inch screen sucks. Add the half-dozen Kindle books I’d bought thinking I read them on the iPhone or laptop to the resolution to blog more here, and I felt I had my rationale… Read the rest of this entry »
If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:
16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.
First, some context. On average, I:
Read and react to more than a thousand emails a week
Send more than 300 emails a week
Subscribe to a couple hundred RSS feeds, for around 400 posts per day
I’m trying out a new WordPress plug-in that enhances link content. Apture, which I discovered via someone I read on Twitter, is supposed to quickly bring in outside data and media. I, Mike Orren, will be trying it out in my next few posts.
(In other words, this post is just a goofy test and should be ignored.)
Yeah, you may have a great big battle station, but if you waste the opportunity to shore it up, a rebeliion's gonna come. (Image from The Daily Yeah.)
I’m going to resist the temptation to turn this post into a therapy session over the myriad problems I’ve had with AT&T over the past month. Specific situations will crop up organically in the descriptions below, but instead of a chronological chapter-and-verse story, I’m going to focus on the lessons I’ve learned about AT&T and its processes. Read the rest of this entry »
Yes, I can probably be classified as an Apple fanboy. But if you know me, you know my allegiance doesn’t come easy. For my purposes, Apple produces the best computer and phone technology available. But there are lots of companies that produce good technology — It is my human interactions with Apple that make me a loyalist. My experience in buying the new 3G S Iphone is one of, if not the most memorable I’ve had: Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been using my Xbox 360 as a media server in our house, but there have always been a few things that made it seem inferior. Based on buzz from folks I trust I’d played with alpha-software Boxee on my Mac a bit to see if it could be an alternative. Last week, Lifehacker ran a piece on using Boxee on an Apple TV. I’d thought for a while about building my own Linux machine to run Boxee, but I found myself at the mall last weekend, and consequently in the Apple store. Having not yet contributed to the Steve Jobs medical fund, I found myself ogling the Apple TV, which I’d originally eschewed in favor of the Xbox. But dammned if Boxee didn’t make it sound more viable; and damned if we didn’t have a big TV in the bedroom that would benefit from the Xbox. Read the rest of this entry »
Partly because of my company’s new lease on life, I’m in a creative mode for the first time in, well, too long. I was making my way to work this morning, amping with coffee and good tunes and was reminded of how much I love songs where a band — usually a band that is generally technically precise — goes off the rails into a cacophony that is both sloppy and skillful. The resulting sound is loose and fun, but also suggests that it is born from an attempt to go just beyond the range of their high level of skill.
Ever seen something that you so thoroughly knew was game changing that you couldn’t even effectively articulate how? Because the language actually changed with the innovation?
My computer crapped out today, and in an effort to find a fix I noticed a huge weakness in search algorithms.
Longevity, traffic and inbound links are all favored, we know. And that generally is good in bringing reliable, complete results.
But when it comes to tech support, say looking for a way to make a bootable emergency disk, old reliable results aren’t what you need. Especially when they’re 2-3 years old and relate to OS features that are obsolete.
Meh. I just want to know that something other than my computer isn’t functioning properly.
Thank you for the latest complimentary upgrade to your Xbox 360 system firmware. I am certain that it represents a substantial investment of time, talent and tender.
Your efforts are apparent not only in the anime-without-the-art avatar that replaced the picture of my dog. There is also the achievement of making one of the most ungainly user interfaces I’ve experienced even more unfathomable. And the bonus of being able to watch Netflix movies with golfball-sized pixelation on my widescreen TV is a treat beyond measure.
If you're happy and you're stylized, put your hands on your hips...
I recently bought Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360 on the strength of its reviews. It may have been a mistake, as I haven’t been this addicted to a video game since Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. (I know that GTA 4 was empirically better, but I just never found it as engaging.) Read the rest of this entry »
I have horrible feet and ankles. I don’t mean that they’re particularly ugly — but even when I was in shape, I’ve always suffered from foot and ankle pain and a tendency to sprains and twists.
Last week, the hard drive on my MacBook Pro died. (Don’t blame Apple — it was a POS third-party drive I bought in a misergreedy bid for more space.)
I got a new drive — actually switched computers to a newer Macbook. But what amazed me in the process was that a dead computer just isn’t a big deal anymore. Sure, I had my Time Machine restore on a backup drive, but I couldn’t use it in its pure state– There was a corruption.
But anything I really cared about was in “the cloud.” My email? All backed up in my Google IMAP account. Important docs? On Google Docs and on MobileMe (which I’m testing but soon to drop). App reinstall was done via the web with serials in my Gmail archive.
The only thing that really causes me to want/need a hard drive anymore is my music library. If someone found a good, secure, cheap solution to that — one that seamlessly handled 30k+ tracks, the drive would be superfluous.
If anything, changing computers allowed me to weed out a lot of plugins and apps that I’d collected like weeds because I constantly test and discard new stuff. Maybe I need to erase my computer every six months just for spring cleaning. Certainly ’tisn’t a hardship anymore.
When I first made my return to the land of Mac n’ honey a couple years back I installed Adium as my chat client. We use Gtalk in our outfit more often than we vocalize, and Apple’s iChat couldn’t handle the underlying protocol (Jabber).
When iChat became Gtalk compatible, I gravitated to it because of its video chat capabilities. April and I thought we’d use it a lot, but it was so unreliable, it just wasn’t worth it.
In the past couple days, a new version of Adium came out with support for Facebook chat. I’ve been using FB a lot more lately, because of the iPhone app as well as the fact that the service seems to have hit the hundredth monkey stage — reconnecting me with lots of old friends in just the last month. (That’s a topic for another post.)
So I switched back to Adium today. It wasn’t until it was installed that I realized how much I had missed it. Let me count the ways:
Customization: Themes, icons, etc
Better Growl support
Better integration of disparate accounts. iChat puts them in separate windows; Adium goes for one window with sections.
Secure, OTR chat
Did I say customization?
I was also impressed with the thoughtfulness of the install: Seamlessly imported my iChat transcript archives.
I have horrible feet and ankles. I don’t mean that they’re particularly ugly — but even when I was in shape, I’ve always suffered from foot and ankle pain and a tendency to sprains and twists.