A Computer for Your Parents

This post in Forbes today, “Apple’s Secret Weapon: Your Mom” came across Techmeme a little while ago. While the post centers around Apple’s financials and quarterly earnings report due this week, it interested me because I’m currently planning to bring my parents into the now with a Macbook Pro. A few months ago, they finally… Read More

Everything is a Journey

The year I started with Oracle (1996) was the year the Network Computer (NC) was announced. The NC was about a decade ahead of its time due to a number of factors, and it’s funny to me that netbooks are the latest rage. The promise of netbooks is essentially the promise of the NC, i.e.… Read More

Why It Just Works

So John suggested I delve into why “it just works“. He suggests that Apple’s tight control of their products, from design to software and hardware development and third party components allows them to do what “open” systems cannot. I agree. Beyond control, this approach both limits the possible combinations software needs to support and allows… Read More

It Just Works

I’ve had a smidge of blogger’s block lately, and from experience, I know nothing gets people talking like a discussion about operating systems. With Windows 7 RC on the horizon, Snow Leopard due later this year, and Jaunty already in RC and ready to drop any day, the next year or so will be full… Read More

New iMac, Still New to Me

Update: Turns out Best Buy, where we bought the iMac, doesn’t have the new models in stock yet, but to make room in their inventory, they’ve lowered the prices on the remaining ones by $400. They were nice enough to honor the new price and refund the difference. Win-win, since I wasn’t all that excited… Read More

Who Does Your Support?

So, I had an eventful morning. Automatic updates on my Macbook kindly let me know that there was a security update available for Tiger (yes, I’m still on Tiger). As I’ve done many times in the past, I agreed to take the update, entered my credentials and went about my morning email checking. The update… Read More

What Makes UI Good?

Thanks to a comment from Terry on my post about locking your smart phone, I’ve been digging around looking for ways to make my beloved iPhone more secure. Surprisingly or not, Apple has made it maddeningly difficult to even the simplest precautions. Terry’s comment, which I read a bit hastily, mentions changing the root password… Read More

Good and Bad iPhone News

A few items from last week caught my iPhone-centric eye. I figured you were all jonesing for iPhone stuff, so here they come. Push Notification I think by now, everyone with an iPhone running 2.0 firmware and a few apps understands why apps should run in the background. Seriously, how useful is AIM if you… Read More

Your First Computer?

Rich’s semi-nostalgic post yesterday has some of our readers reminiscing about their first computers, ones they owned or ones they first used for geeking out, ahem, I mean programming. For example: Sounds like Floyd had a Radio Shack/Tandy TRS-80, but he says he worked with card batches in college. Raimonds used a real classic, the… Read More

The Future is iPhone-tastic

Lately, I’ve been bummed that the SDK announcement underwhelmed, handcuffing would-be developers with restrictions that make apps significantly less functional than expected. As a user, I want more apps that do more. And then a couple nights ago, I got a reminder of how sweet the iPhone really is. I was at Nicholas Restaurant, a… Read More