More on bad installers
Posted on December 10, 2008
| Erik
I just finished reading John C Welch’s article regarding the cost of bad installers, specifically highlighting some of the issues surrounding Adobe products.
The basic key point is:> For most people, a less-than-optimal installer is something they think of only once when they first install the application. Once that’s done, then so’s the installer, unless something goes wrong, forcing you to reinstall an application. Of course, that line of thought ignores a rather significant issue—updates.
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Up to here with MS Office
Posted on December 8, 2008
| Erik
This has been a couple of weeks dealing MS Office issues without end for me and I’m now at the point of saying it’s just not worth it to me any more. On top of all of the horrible UI issues and outright bugs that are carefully documented by Pierre Igot over at the Betalogue, it’s just not sufficiently stable for me to use as a tool for managing documents professionally.
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Moral/Ethical Dilemmas around eBooks
Posted on December 5, 2008
| Erik
A very interesting set of questions and options surrounding the various choices available to someone thinking about downloading an eBook given that the original book is out of print, but not yet in the expired copyright status (author still living+70).
I highly recommend putting aside a bunch of time to read the article, reflect on it and then spend some time going through the (almost exclusively) thoughtful and interesting responses in the comments.
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Re: More iTunes complaints
Posted on December 3, 2008
| Erik
In response to the following post from Chris Evans over at the Storage Architect:
iTunes has to be one of the worst applications Apple make. It is truly awful.
I find it incredibly difficult to track where files came from, what’s on my iPod Touch and not, what are duplicates and so on. The poor interface means I have files littered about my hard drive and on my iPod which I can’t be sure I’ve listened to.
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The new iPhone contexts
Posted on December 3, 2008
| Erik
Very interesting article from Fraser Speirs, the developer of the Exposure iPhone application for interacting with Flickr.
I agree that we are just at the beginning of what Spiers identifies as the Type 3 or laptop replacement type applications. Sufficiently feature complete to let you do what you need to do without recourse to a full fledged computer, yet optimized for the touch interface rather than just being a simple port of an existing desktop application.
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ZFS & Apple - Idea of the day
Posted on November 25, 2008
| Erik
Hmmm - after reading up on the new storage bays offered by SUN and plunging into even more detail into the architecture possibilities of ZFS I was struck by an idea for next generation notebooks.
ZFS offers the ability to designate specific volumes as read and write caching devices and while the bigger SSD devices are beyond the budget of mere mortals for primary storage, prices are falling on some of the original devices in the 16-64Gb capacities.
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Sun Unified Storage - So close to perfect
Posted on November 21, 2008
| Erik
The cool
I’ve been trawling through all of the online marketing material concerning the new Sun™ Storage 7000 Series Family and overall I’m liking what I see from a general architecture standpoint. They appear to have found a simple, effective means towards mixing different tiers of storage (price/performance/capacity) that spans SSHD, SAS 10K and SATA 7K. You put create pools of SSHD devices for Logging (Write) and Pre-fetch (Read) operations in front of your primary physical disk storage.
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TouchFLO and related systems
Posted on November 20, 2008
| Erik
This pretty much sums up the experience of a colleague of mine:
The hardware from HTC just keeps getting better and better, but it’s hobbled by an awful user experience. It’s all about the software these days, but there simply aren’t enough really good developers that understand how to build a great experience. Those who are truly fanatical about this kind of thing are already developing for Apple, OS X and the iPhone because their fanaticism and perfectionism is recognized as a good thing in these communities.
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Review: FastMac iV for iPhone
Posted on November 19, 2008
| Erik
It’s been on back order forever, but my FastMac iV finally showed up last week at the office. Of course that’s the week I was running all over the place so I had to wait until this week to pick it up. But now it’s here and I’m quite happy with it.
I’d originally pre-ordered the model for the 1G iPhone, but since I upgraded, I had to change the order and wait for them to ramp up the manufacturing for the latest model.
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RE: Nokia firms up touchscreen phone plans, says it will focus on 'mid-range' markets
Posted on November 18, 2008
| Erik
Nokia firms up touchscreen phone plans, says it will focus on ‘mid-range’ markets: “Kai Oistamo, the phone-maker says it will be launching a series of touchscreen devices in the second half the year, with the first model – likely the Tube – aimed at the ‘volume market.’ Oistamo claims that the mid-range market (not the high-end sector that devices like the iPhone 3G occupy) account for 50 percent of the total value of the touchscreen phone game.
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