The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay. 

The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay. 

—Steve Jobs

We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

—Steve Jobs (1985)

PowerMate 3.0 volume scripts for Mac

PowerMate 3.0 volume scripts for Mac

In previous versions of Mac OS X, you could hold shift+option while pressing volume up/down keys on the keyboard, to increase or decrease the volume by minute amounts. I used this frequently and it drives me crazy that it’s absent in Lion.

There are a few possible workarounds, but as I already had a neglected PowerMate sitting on my desk, I figured I may as well dust it off.

Unfortunately, version 3.0 of the PowerMate software has lost the ability to increase or decrease system volume by small amounts, which was present in previous versions. By default, it only simulates the volume up/down key presses, like a keyboard, which is of no help to me. But, after Googling for a few minutes, I was able to combine several bits of information I found into this:

This may not be the best way to accomplish this. Please submit improvements via GitHub.

One nice thing about 3.0 is that you can paste inline AppleScript to assign to an action (if you can ever figure out how to use it - the UI is a nightmare).

Lukas Mathis on why the patent system is broken

Lukas Mathis on why the patent system is broken

Excellent, clear, and concise summary.

Also a much better response to Gruber than I wrote.

It is not the spoon that bends

Rands:

For those of you not familiar with the situation, in the latest release of Mac OS X, Apple reversed the scrolling action. Your scrolling wheel or your two-finger trackpad drag go in the opposite direction. Cruel joke, right? Did they swap the left and the right buttons on the mouse, too?

This reminds me of a story.

I was summoned to the CEO’s office to help with some kind of issue she was having with her Mac. Probably something fairly difficult, because she was already a ‘power user’ and a programmer, not to mention a self-taught mechanical engineer.

As most of us with any kind of technical skill know, the temptation in these sort of situations is to simply take over the mouse and keyboard, because you know you’ll be able to solve the problem so much faster. But I find it’s always valuable to keep your own hands off the computer, and instead relay instructions verbally (and by occasional pointing at the screen), while explaining what’s going on and your own thought process, each step of the way. Even if the other person doesn’t want to do it this way, even if they say ‘why don’t you just do it for me?’, you should still have them perform the actions, because it empowers them, and they will almost certainly benefit from having done this in the future, even if not in a way that either of you expect.

But for whatever reason, in this case, I did the wrong thing and took over the mouse and keyboard.

I clicked around for a few seconds confusedly, feeling that something was wrong. Context menus were appearing out of nowhere. The computer wasn’t doing what I told it to. Finally, I figured out that I needed to left-click on the right side, and right-click on the left side - this despite the fact that the user was right-handed, and the mouse was on the usual (right) side of the keyboard. But even after figuring this out, I still found it very difficult to continue, and kept clicking the ‘wrong’ side by accident.

Finally: ‘Your mouse buttons are backwards’, I somewhat stupidly informed her of something she obviously already knew.

Having been watching me, she quickly responded: ‘No; you’re backwards.’

It has taken me a while to realise that the people who are best to work with are those who do not hesitate to make drastic changes to their habits when they discover a better way.

Think different.

Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.

Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.

—Brad Smith, Microsoft General Consel

Gruber on Google on Patents and Products

Gruber on Google on Patents and Products

It’s OK for Google to undermine Microsoft’s for-pay OS licensing business by giving Android away for free, but it’s not OK for Microsoft to undermine Google’s attempts to give away for free an OS that violates patents belonging to Microsoft?

Yes.

The first thing is OK, the second thing is not OK. Again: Yes.

These two things are not at all comparable, but Gruber sets them apart as though it were a foregone conclusion. I don’t even see what the argument here is supposed to be.

The ‘free’ gripe apparently annoys him so much that he even reiterates it as the last sentence:

And, let’s not forget, give Android away for free.

What exactly is the problem with this?

Are we still bitter about the IE vs Netscape days? Speaking of which, let’s not have any sympathy for Microsoft on this topic, shall we?

Should all open-source software be banned, because it’s free? I’ve never heard Gruber argue this. His usual problem with open-source software is that it’s just not any good. Does that mean the problem with Android is that it is good? Good or free is OK, but good and free is not? Why?

Fine, for the sake of argument, let’s suppose Google shouldn’t be allowed to give Android away for free. How much–or rather, how little–are they allowed to charge for it? The same price as their competitors? Half the price? A quarter of the price? Where do you draw the line, and how do you draw a line that is anything but completely arbitrary?

How little is too little? How little do you have to charge before you’re being unfair (or whatever the problem is, since it’s never stated) to your competition?

I have no love for Android. (I’ve never even used it for any meaningful period of time.) But I don’t see what the argument is against it being free, especially since the argument is apparently so obvious that Gruber hasn’t bothered to write it.

Maybe his real problem here is the patents. But that being the case, even if you accept that patents are a positive for the industry (which I don’t), I still don’t see what the product being free has to do with it. And let’s not forget, Microsoft already profits handsomely from licensing parents to Android phone manufacturers - five times as much as they make from selling their own phones! Are we to believe this isn’t enough?

That is the true absurdity: that it’s more profitable to write up a patent and do nothing but demand the earnings of others, than it is to go to the work of bringing a product to market.

Edit: Removed an unfair, unsupported statement I made about Android.

YouTube: A New Way To Embed YouTube Videos

YouTube: A New Way To Embed YouTube Videos

This post is from last year, but I’ve started seeing HTML5 YouTube embeds in the wild recently, and I was curious about it. So I went to a random YouTube video and looked for the embed link, and it gave me the ‘new way’ embed code by default.

So either they’ve switched this on for good, or they’re in the process of doing so. You can never really tell with Google and their silent, slow roll-outs.

But I can confirm it works nicely with the Flash plugin uninstalled (as I’ve had it since Apple stopped shipping it with new Macs), even if you’re not in the ‘HTML5 trial’. The sad part is, though, I still don’t get the HTML5 fallback when browsing the YouTube web site itself - only if I join the HTML5 trial, which, for me, has only ever worked sporadically and randomly turns itself off.

Craig Hockenberry: Un-Trusteer-ed

Craig Hockenberry: Un-Trusteer-ed

If an installer asks for your password, you should be suspicious.

If it’s coming from the sort of entity that is known for cluelessness in technology, such as banks or government, you should be extremely suspicious.

Sometimes I think that malware is the least of our concern: it’s big, dumb¹ corporations with no accountability who assert their authority on your personal property.

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1. This is another ongoing debate I have with myself: which is worse in a business, incompetence or malice? I’m really not sure. ↩︎

Matt Legend Gemmell: Makers and Takers

Matt Legend Gemmell: Makers and Takers

Here’s what I think:

In the world, there are many people with any given skill. Once in a while, one of these people:

1. Has a great idea, and
2. Creates something great based on it.

When this happens, the other people in the world with that same skill look at it, acknowledge its greatness, but then ask themselves:

Why didn’t I do that first? I possess the same skill, and I consider myself competent enough to have created the same thing. Clearly, the only difference here is that I didn’t have the idea.

And thus begins the misplaced importance on ideas rather than creations.

But people who think this miss a crucial fact: we all have many ideas, all the time, some of them even great ideas¹; but most or all of them, we do not follow through with to create something. We let these ideas slip away, perhaps unattempted, perhaps even unwritten–forgotten.

Thus, the idea is not what makes the difference; but we want to think so, because to think otherwise would be to acknowledge our constant, ongoing failure to create great things based on those ideas. And the notion of that failure is too much to bear.

We all crave success, and as is typical of the flawed intuition of us humans, we seek a rationale that leads to the simplest path to contentment: all you have to do is have a great idea, right? And, as it turns out, that’s easy.

It is this poor rationale that has dogged us, as a people, throughout history, until it led to the patent system.

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1. In my mind, the Minority Report on this entry suggests that there might exist people to whom ideas do not regularly occur to them, and thus, to whom, ideas seem like precious currency; which would result in me drawing entirely different conclusions. The remainder of my mind insists that such people could not possibly exist. This is what I consider optimism. ↩︎