Farktronix

Jan 12

Who's Afraid of the Verizon iPhone?

The decision that people were discussing wasn’t “Do I get an iPhone or an Android whatever?”

It was always “Do I get an iPhone or do I stay on Verizon?”

Nailed it.

(via marco)

Nov 19

The Confusatory: Path: what the fuck?

cbowns:

Path’s model is far stranger than this. If I want to follow Bailey, I’m stuck hoping she chooses to push her updates to me. And I sure hope she likes seeing all my cat photos, because I’m pushing my updates to her, possibly against her will. She could choose to “pause” her updates, but she can’t make me completely disappear from her “friends sharing things with you” list.

I didn’t realize how busted Path was until I finally posted a picture on it. cbowns summarizes it well.

Nov 15

thesrirachacookbook:

Sriracha should be in the Food Pyramid

Jul 26

“I’m always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who’d have guessed sophistication brought such noise?”

Dick Gabriel

(via Rob Pike’s OSCON 2010 talk)

May 6

Wallpaper

jimray:

A bit ago, I quipped about how I don’t really like the new wallpaper feature in iPhone OS 4. For some reason, it doesn’t bug me much on my iPad but on the phone it’s awful, especially the vibrant images that ship by default.

So I made a better one. Originally, I just wanted my black background back but decided to add just a touch of panaché — a little Fireball Gray rising from the bottom. It’s nothing fancy and was all of a few minutes of dinking around in Acorn to get the gradient just right. No logos or icons getting in the way.

Right-click and save fanboy.jpg to wherever it is your phone looks for photos on your computer or, if you’re reading this on your phone, just go there and save with a tap-hold. Do with it what you will, no rights reserved on my part. Now breathe a sweet sigh of relief.

Excellent. This almost looks nicer than a plain black background.

Apr 29

“But let me explain something to you. The telephone was an aberation in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else’s life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone’s living room and start shouting. it was never okay. It’s less okay now. Telephone calls are rude. They are interruptive. Technology has solved this brief aberration in human behavior. We have a thing now called THE TEXT MESSAGE. It is magical, non-intrusive, optional, and, just like human speech originally was meant to be, is turn based and two way. You talk. I talk next. Then you talk. And we do it when it’s convenient for both of us.” (via rickwebb)

Nov 18

I just want to drop files onto my Dock icon!

sulciphur:

I’ve spent days reading post after post after post after post that purported to solve the mystery of how to hook up the magic pieces just right to enable files to be dropped onto your app’s icon.

However, since none of the links I trawled included both up-to-date and complete examples, I figured I’d put one together for whoever has to fight this battle in the future. Caveat emptor, but really, it’s as simple as hell, so you can’t go wrong.

DockDrop.zip, 19KB, version 1.0 - GitHub

If you’re interested, the nitty gritty magic bits that need be plumbed up just right:
Make sure your delegate implements NSApplicationDelegate, and that it is set as the delegate of NSApp.

Implement application:openFile: in said delegate.

Ensure you have a proper CFBundleDocumentTypes entry in your app’s Info.plist (see the example’s plist).

Speaking of dock shenanigans, John Winter, the Dropzone author, wrote about how the Chrome browser launches itself without bouncing the dock icon. It’s not for every app, but it’s perfect for Dropzone. If you want to be able to drag a file onto your dock icon, this trick may also be for you.

Nov 13

And in case you have trouble remembering: “There’s no ‘i’ in team, and there’s no ‘h’ in sync.”

Apple Publications Style Guide

Oct 31

“It actually makes a lot of sense to me that Apple would be in favor of equal rights for homosexuals. After all, I never wanted to have sex with a dude until I got my iPhone. Because my iPhone is a man and I want to have sex with it. I want to gay marry my iPhone. Of course, I’ll need to have the size of the headphone jack increased before we can consummate our bond. Just kidding. It’s already big enough.” Colbert Destroys His iPhone to Fight Gay Marriage

Oct 21

“For Windows 7, management decided to alter the engineering structure of the Windows organization, especially in the WEX [Windows Experience] division where I work. Instead of being fairly hierarchical, Steven has 3 direct reports, each representing a particular discipline: Development, Test and Program Management. Under each of the discipline leads, there are 6 development/test/program management managers, one for each of the major groups in WEX. Those 2nd level managers in turn have a half a dozen or so leads, each one with between 5 and 15 direct reports. This reporting structure has been somewhat controversial, but so far IMHO it’s been remarkably successful.”

Engineering Windows 7 : Engineering 7: A view from the bottom

That’s a lot of people- if I did the math right, it’s about 1,000 people just in that division of Windows.

I understand that writing Windows is a huge undertaking, but when you have that many cooks in the kitchen things are going to move a lot slower.