We don't need roads

mrgan compares his iMac with his wife’s Mac Pro:

Marco compares his Mac Pro with his wife’s iMac:

While the Mac Pro costs a lot more up front, high-performance users also get a lot more value and versatility over its lifespan, which is likely to be much longer and end much more gracefully.

[…]

I have no major complaints about my computer. It’s the best Mac I’ve ever had. I may replace it with a swanky new MacBook Air if they’re as cool as I’ve heard - just to live the laptop lifestyle again. I don’t see myself buying a Mac Pro for any reason.

My turn.

I’m a student in Software Engineering, which means I need to work both at school and at home with various OSes, thus my setup of choice is a two-year old 13” unibody MacBook (now called the MacBook Pro), a five-year old 22” Samsung screen, an Apple Wireless Keyboard, a Magic Mouse and a simple Logitech Alto stand.

Pretty cheap comparing to a 15” MacBook Pro, it allows me to be mobile while having a great desktop configuration with two monitors.

I have 4GB of RAM, which is enough for running two or three Windows XP virtual machines at the same time, but I’ll buy an SSD soon. I really don’t need more computing power: Rails programming, iPhoto, TV shows… When I’ll buy the SSD, I don’t see why I should change my MacBook for another two or three years. Then, I’ll probably won’t need a laptop anymore, and I’ll happily switch for a 27” iMac and an iPad.

Last week-end, my non-geek friends asked me why they couldn’t play Flash games on their iPhones. I tried to explain them both why Apple won’t support Flash and still earn tons of money, and why most of iPhone users can play games made for the iPhone by downloading them from the App Store, then something illustrated my point better than I could expect: Robot Unicorn Attack.

My friend Louis pointed out that his iPhone can’t run the best Flash game ever created. I told him there was an iPhone version of it available in the App Store for only 2€. Then another friend, Guillaume, grabbed his Android phone and proudly showed us Robot Unicorn Attack, the free, Flash one, running. “Why would I pay for an iPhone version while I could play it for free?”, Louis asked.

Then Guillaume said he didn’t understand how to play: he was complaining about that stupid unicorn which wouldn’t stop falling… because he couldn’t play without a keyboard.

Spot on.

• A 3.5” Multi-Touch display
• One main button below the screen
• Lock button on the top-right corner
• Jack conector on the top-left corner
• Ring/silent switch and two volume buttons on the left side

I like the fact that, after four different models over three years and a half, the iPhone form factor hasn’t changed.

I keep up to date:

• a list of the albums I have to listen to (with iTunes)
• a list of the albums I haven’t listen to in a year (with iTunes’ smart playlists)
• a list of the concerts I’ve been to
• a list of the artists I have to see live otherwise my life would be worthless
• a list of articles I plan to read (with Instapaper)
• a list of mystical-but-broadly-accepted things Lost writers use to explain time-traveling, polar bears, plane crashes and resuscitating people (such as magnetic fields, the seventies, gestation, storms, Latin, thunder, Korea, rich people…)
• a list of the projects I have to complete (with Things for Mac, iPad and iPhone)
• a list of the movies I want to watch
• a list of the movies I have seen
• a list of the cool MySpaces I find
• a list of the songs I posted on this blog
• a list of the cool places I found on the Internet
• a list of features of the virtual world I’d love to use in the real world (such as iWork magnetic grids to align stuff, Command-Option-H to hide everything but what I’m trying to focus on, the Mute button…)
• a list of my favorites Flickr pictures
• a list of the e-mails I have to read and process (with Gmail)
• a list of the cool tech companies of New York City, for when I’ll move there (with AuthenticJobs)
• a list of the things I unreasonably hate (eyes, spiders, that kind of creepy things)
• a list of the people I would punch in the face if I had the occasion
• a list of the people I personally know in the computer world (with LinkedIn)
• a list of my favorite jokes retweeted by Favstar
• a list of my favorite tweets
• a list of my tweets, retweeted (with Twitter)
• a list of the Russian dolls I had to open until I found the one I was looking for
• a list of stuff I have to buy next time I’ll go to the supermarket (with Things)
• a list of the fun Facebook groups I find (I don’t know what I want to do with my life but I like beer)
• a list of things I’d love to get from Amazon (thanks)
• a list of New Year’s resolutions I try to commit to
• a list of the bugs I have to fix (with GitHub Issue Tracker)
• a list of the domain names I bought
• a list of the icanhaz.com URLs I created (fu-)
• a list of the features I have to implement to WatchThis (with Basecamp)
• a list of tabs: beers I owe them, kebab they owe me
• a list of things I love more than anything but still less than Her
• a list of the serials for the software I bought
• a list of the websites I go everyday (with start.io)
• a list of the songs I once learned to play (because I hate when I take my guitar and don’t know what to play)
• a list of all the song you can play with the same four chords (Zombie, Let it be, No Woman no cry, Save tonight…)

So, yeah, I had to write a list of my lists.

valhallaisland:

The mainstream media has recently picked up on what the internet media has been complaining about for years: Facebook has a lot of information about you which it can use almost however it wants. Complaining about this baffles me.

Facebook is not mandatory and nor is it a right. There’s a simple way to completely eliminate the risk of Facebook exploiting your data: don’t give it your data. If you like Facebook and find utility in what it offers the risk might be worth the reward.

Finally someone making sense in here.

Also, keep in mind that if you still want to keep your Facebook account (or any other service), you don’t have to publish details of your real life on the Internet. You can publish whatever you want people think about you.

I have a few Facebook friends with fake names and fake profile pictures. None of them is tagged in any binge-drinking picture.

I’m surprised Microsoft sells Visual Studio to developers who want to create Windows app.

And that developers need a page to compare the four different editions.

And that it took me a Google request to find out there are four free editions of Visual Studio Express 2010. And another product comparison chart.

Actually, I’m not surprised.

Microsoft controls the Xbox hardware and software. They require game developers to register themselves, and all Xbox games must be approved by Microsoft. You can’t even develop games using the Xbox.

Would you say the Xbox represents the end of video games?

Alex on the news rules for iPhone developers:

The major problem Apple is facing with the App Store is a struggle between quantity and quality.

Let’s not forget that, when Apple was struggling in the ’90s, their main argument was that while Windows had thousands of applications, you could do everything with a Mac, and better. Mac OS has always been the platform with the less applications, but these applications were better designed.

At a time you couldn’t become rich selling an iFart app, Apple used to value quality instead of quantity.

Among the forty software engineering students I see every day, there are:

• Mac OS X users
• Ubuntu users
• Windows XP users
• Windows 7 users

We installed these OSes on our laptops, netbooks, desktops computers and smartphones. We don’t share the same point of view about how easy, intuitive or powerful our filesystem should be to use. We all have different user interfaces, we all joke about the ugliness or the lack of features of the other ones.

We all have to work in groups so we have to share files everyday and keep these files synced. We all use Dropbox: it’s free, simple, automatic, cross-platform and provides backup and versioning.

It’s not just a tool for groups: it became ridiculous to watch someone use a USB key for transferring a PowerPoint presentation from his own desktop computer to his own laptop.

I’m really amazed how Dropbox fits the needs of a very demanding and heterogeneous group of students. It’s like a feature every OS should have.

Dropbox should be a standard.

I’m currently in last year of EPITA, a Software Engineering school in Paris. Our main projects include Management courses in order to produce GANTT charts. Since Basecamp doesn’t offer the possibility to create GANTT charts, we recently had to switch from this great tool to Collabtive, a free solution so buggy that we usually have to spend time to fix bugs ourselves before we can actually use it.

The more I use Collabtive, the more I think the switch wasn’t worth it. I Googled some random “Basecamp” and “GANTT” associations and stumbled upon this public complaint from Mike Schinkel:

It’s a damn shame to find a product like BaseCamp that does 90% of what I need but, because of IMO blind ideology, its owner Jason Fried won’t even consider adding a feature for which arguably 65% of people would benefit. Jason’s last comment to me was: “Look at it this way… Go use another tool, get the Gantt charts, but miss the other 90%. Which tradeoff is worth more to you?“

Here’s the thing: the projects I’m working on are simulations of industrial engineering. We’re talking about Microsoft-size projects, where there are tens of middle-managers between the CEO and the employees, where the whole project is outsourced, where you have regular physical meetings… The kind of projects where you build a plane, a train, a nuclear submarine. Where GANTT charts may actually be useful for security reasons, but certainly not for productivity.

I’m convinced that “4999500 of the Fortune 5000000 companies” (as Jason Fried says) don’t need GANTT charts to produce good work. I stay convinced that Basecamp was the most useful tool for my workgroup but, since it doesn’t correspond to our project management requirements anymore, we had to switch. I don’t think I’ll ever work for a company that needs me to use this kind of heavy management methods.

If you look at Schinkel’s article, you’ll find Jason Fried in the comments, arguing that Basecamp won’t support GANTT charts because almost all of its users don’t. I’m glad I’m paying for a service that Jason Fried assures is going for the quality and not for the features quantity. What if Apple had kept floppy drive ten years ago because some people were convinced they couldn’t lived without?