You weren’t able to make it to Macworld this year? No problem. Audio and slides of all the presentations are available for free online. My weekend is shot.
Thoughts on the Macworld announcements
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The big story out of Macworld to me, is the revamped Apple TV. I’ve been on the fence about getting one since it came out, but now it looks like it’s a no-brainer (especially with the price drop to $229). Before it was basically just a big iPod. You downloaded content on your Mac and then synced it. Now you can browse straight from your TV. That’s great in itself, but the killer feature is the podcasting support.
I watch and listen to podcasts more than I watch TV. I simply prefer the niche content to the generally bland greatest-common-denominator stuff on TV. I think most people would if they could easily access it and watch it on a big screen. Streaming video Podcast support on the Apple TV basically adds a hundred thousand new channels to your cable line-up. No doubt more producers will jump into video-podcasting because they now have a viable way to get into people’s living rooms.
Biggest disappointment: the iPhone update. Yeah, location detection is great, but come on, my notes still don’t sync to my Mac? Seriously? No to-dos on this putative “smartphone”? Please throw me a bone here.
Yojimbo rant
Bare Bones software recently released a new version of Yojimbo. It’s been described as having “[t]ons of new features and improvements[.]” That’s true and it’s really a great application, but I’m sad to see that what I think is a very needed feature is still missing. I’m talking about truly smart collections to take advantage of Yojimbo’s tagging power.
Apart from filetype folders (that are called “Smart Collections” in the app), Yojimbo lets users create two other kinds of file “collections.” The first type is a regular “collection,” which is basically just a folder into which you can drop any of your files. The second is a “tag collection.” These are akin to smart folders because they display any file tagged with the keywords you choose. Here’s what creating a new “tag collection” looks like:
The problem here is that you can only make collections that contain all tags you list. There is no way for you to get a collection with any of the tags you list. This almost makes the program useless to me.
As an academic research, I use Yojimbo to keep track of source material. One topic I study are spectrum commons. In my research I have turned up many articles relevant to my work that deal with commons, though not necessarily spectrum commons (i.e. land or water commons). I tag these with the keyword “commons.” I’ve also turned up relevant papers that are about spectrum but have nothing to do with commons, so I tag these “spectrum.” Now, you’d think that I’d be able to create a smart tag collection that would display everything tagged either “spectrum” or “commons,” or both “spectrum” and “commons,” but no dice.
Over a year ago I sent a feature request to Bare Bones and they replied saying that they were working on this. The issue was also brought up on the Yojimbo discussion list last November. It’s been ten months since the last time Bare Bones software updated Yojimbo, and the new 1.5 update is the first point upgrade in almost a year. Please, Bare Bones, throw me a bone.
I really want to love Pages and use it over crappy Carbon-on-Rosetta Word, but until it has cross-referencing of footnotes it’s not a serious word processor.
Steve Jobs oral history
Check out this oral history of Steve Jobs from the Computer History Collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It’s basically an extended interview in which he talks about his biography, Apple’s origins, NeXT, Pixar, and much else. The neat thing is the interview was conducted on April 20, 1995 while Jobs was still in exile from Apple. Apple would buy NeXT a year later to use it as the core of Mac OS X and Jobs would return to eventually take over. Here’s one of his perspectives at the time:The Macintosh will die in another few years and its really sad. The problem is this: no one at Apple has a clue as to how to create the next Macintosh because no one running any part of Apple was there when the Macintosh was made–or any other product at Apple. They’ve just been living off that one thing now for over a decade and the last attempt was the Newton and you know what happened to that. It’s kind of tragic, but as unemotionally as I can be, that’s what’s happening. Unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, companies tend to have long glide slopes because of the installed bases.
Hello, I’m a Chrisitan
Great parody of the “I’m a Mac” ads by “with it” Christian church. They can all be found here.
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This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
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