Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
All these rumors of a Mac for $899. Even photos. Steve Jobs is supposed to do the big reveal tomorrow. Are you excited by this prospect?
Will it keep you from buying a $499 Dell and allow you to add a Mac to your life? Let’s face it, Windows is still the king of the world because Macs are two to three times as costly as a lot of Windows machines. Do you think getting under the thousand dollar price point is going to make a difference to Apple?
My iPod serves as my step counter. And I’m no where near 10,000 steps a day. Here’s my story.
I love the NPR show Fresh Air. My local public radio station doesn’t carry it, so I listen to the podcasts. Everytime I go for a walk, I play a Fresh Air podcast. Today is September 25. When I picked up my iPod for a walk this morning, I was ready to listen to a podcast from July 14. That means I’m over two months behind. Translated into exercise terms, it means I missed the daily walk so many times I really shouldn’t call it a daily walk.
There is no chance of skipping a podcast. Every one is too interesting to miss. My iPod is nagging me to be a healthier person.
I’m still amused by Apple’s Mac vs. PC guy ads, especially the one where PC pokes his head up out of a pizza box and explains he wants to attract college students.
Microsoft apparently decided it was time to try it’s own version of funny ads. Microsoft has teamed up Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld in a series of ads, that so far, only hint at anything Windows or Vista related. Gizmodo calls Gates and Seinfeld
the new Laural and Hardy of ambiguous advertising
The public hasn’t seen many of the minute and a half ads yet, but there’s a four and a half minute version that Karen at Unterekless Thoughts declares
New Gates/Seinfeld/Microsoft ad made me laugh so it must be good
You can see the long version at YouTube. In the long version, Bill and Jerry attempt to live with a normal (as in not filthy rich like them) family. They attempt a few normal things, like eating scalloped potatoes and playing ping pong before they get kicked out.
There are some funny lines, which is all there is to evaluate the ads on at this point—nothing technical is getting mentioned. Abbey Klaassen at Advertising Age agreed in Gates, Seinfeld Funnier Second Time Around. Klaassen pointed out,
What the latest spot brings – which seemed unlikely with the first spot, dubbed “The Conquistador,” that broke last week – is the potential for the ad to go viral. An extended version of the new commercial, which is called “New Family” and broke last night on CBS during “Big Brother,” is already being passed around on the web.
Even though I’m an avowed Mac person, I’m contributing to that “going viral” effect by talking about the ads here. This either proves A) it’s going viral, or B) a $300 million contract between Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad agency, and Microsoft is paying off for Microsoft.
Alice Hill at RealTechNews commented
It’s a much, much better ad that the first one. And it makes Bill G almost lovable, if such a thing could be possible. But with Bill and Jerry retired, what does it really say about what they left behind?
Mary Jo Foley, in Keep the faith: More Windows-specific consumer ads coming soon quoted a Microsoft spokesperson who said that the ads will quickly move to being more about Windows, including desktop, laptop and mobile.
I’ve always been amused by the PC guy vs. Mac guy ads. It has done nothing to change my buying behavior. I thought the full four and a half minute ad on YouTube was amusing, too. I have a feeling that it won’t change my buying behavior either. What is your reaction? Does it affect what you buy?
Cross posted at BlogHer
I take a lot of screen shots. Daily. Sometimes dozens a day, depending on what I’m writing about.
I use SnapzPro for this work. I save the image to the desktop and later move it into a folder.
I can be sailing along, have 12 or 15 screen shots, and suddenly they stop appearing on the desktop. Turns out this is a known OS X bug. The file is there, you just can’t see it.
I’ve used spotlight to search for it and open it in preview. Then I do save as and replace it. That pops it into place on the desktop. It also works to do the same shot again and click Replace when the Mac tells you the item is already on the desktop. Again, this pops up the image icon on the desktop. You can also select Go > Desktop when in the Finder or select Desktop in a Finder window. When the Desktop folder opens, click the item to make it appear.
No matter which method you use, it’s a pain and several extra clicks to get what you need to show up on the desktop.
Migrating from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 by Roger Hudson at the Web Industry Professionals Association website is a well organized summary of the changes.
Even if you aren’t an iPhone user, you may be a .Mac user. Apple announced today, along with a bunch of stuff about the new iPhone, that .Mac is becoming MobileMe at me.com. Me.com works for both Mac and Windows users to sync everything from your iPhone or iPod touch with the stuff in your computer’s email, calendar, etc. Another announcement I thought was important that might be overlooked in all the 3G, price drop hoopla—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are all now fully functional on an iPhone.
For several days I have been unable to see this web site. I thought it was down, but other people could see it and my hosting company, Pair.com, couldn’t find anything wrong. After a few conversations with Pair support, I tried my local service provider, Comcast. They said they would never block an individual site a wouldn’t even create a ticket. Comcast sent me to Apple. By the time I was finished talking with Apple, I had no Internet service at all.
To try to recover my internet connection, Apple support had me reinstall Leopard using something called Archive and Install. I’ve never used that install option and had no idea what was going to happen to me. That was the start of the terrible, horrible, awful, really bad day. (While waiting 3 hours for Leopard to install, I dragged out an old computer and found that I did have internet service, although I still couldn’t bring up this web site. So I called Comcast again and they finally opened a ticket. Maybe they did something, because here I am using the site.)
The archive type of Mac OS install turned out to be a horrible mistake. Everything disappeared. I had to call Apple again to find out what to do. And the solution for getting things back out of the archive and replaced where belonged was only partial. I had to reinstall software and spent a good 16 hours trying to recover to the point where I could work again. And the reinstalled software is, of course, missing any updates and fixes.
I don’t cry easily, but seeing what using the archive install of Leopard did to me made me want to cry. Why the hell does Apple even have such a terrible, horrible, awful installation option?
Macworld was a bit of a letdown this year. Or maybe there’s just no topping the world-changing iPhone announcement from last year. This year the big announcement was the Air, an ultra thin computer.
If a really thin computer would improve your life, this is great. It is pretty—and really, really thin. Keira Knightley is thin, too, but you can’t look at her without wanting to give her a hunk of double chocolate cake with ice cream. Now, I’m not saying that Air is too thin. I’m just saying I don’t get what the actual benefit of this thinness is. Can you ‘splain that one to me?