Crooked Spin

Don Reisinger:

While Vista was originally touted by Microsoft as the operating system savior we’ve all been waiting for, it has turned out to be one of the biggest blunders in technology. With a host of issues that are inexcusable and features that are taken from the Mac OS X and Linux playbook, Microsoft has once again lost sight of what we really want.

How can you not like an article that starts out like that. He makes a few good points in the article and is spot on for the most part, but I don’t think Microsoft will be taking his advice any time soon. I don’t think Gates and Balmer could stand to loose that much face. Plus the economic impact from the stock nosedive would be huge. Instead they’ll do what they’ve always. Stay pushing a 3rd rate product down everyone’s throat and tell us how great it is. Then patch it until it’s “good enough” to keep people from leaving en masse.

From now through October 1st you can get Cyndicate bundled with EagleFiler for just $55 through Mac News Junkie Bundle. Hopefully everyone reading this already knows about Cyndicate, my feed reader. EagleFiler is a great archiving app from Michael Tsai of C-Command Software. In a nutshell, it gives you the ability to hit F1 while reading an article in Cyndicate and add the selection as a web archive to your EagleFiler library. It can then be filed, tagged, and searched along with the rest of your documents and mail. Very handy for long term archiving and reference.

News hit the various rumor sites that Apple allegedly seeded a small update through System Update today for Leopard. A couple people commented that they were concerned about another possible delay in the release date. Going on past history, they frequency of seeds usually goes up as GM status nears and that it usually takes 3-4 weeks from GM to release due to DVD duplication time. Both valid points that would lead one to believe we may see another delay in Leopard’s ship date. This observation was followed up by the usual hysterics about how they have to get leopard as soon as possible and that Apple better not delay it again. Some are even comparing Leopard to Vista.

All I can say is get over it. Let Apple finish up development and get it out when it is ready. It’s not the end of the world if they have to push it back a couple more weeks or even a month or two. I want to see it released as much as the next guy. It has a ton of cool new stuff in it, especially for developers. But I’d rather them release a good, stable product for 10.5.0 then to get something that’s still full of bugs just to make a goal that was made 6 month earlier. People will bitch and moan either way, so Apple please go with the stable release scenario. It doesn’t do anyone, any good to get it right away if it isn’t usable until 10.5.1 due to the issues that were left in to get it out the door on time.

And to the folks comparing it to Vista, it’s no even close. Vista was delayed 4 years, not 6 months. Leopard also has not had almost every big feature stripped from it in order to finally get it out the door like Vista did. It still has everything that was announced. It’s just taking a little longer then the initial estimate, which is tricky do do in software to begin with, thought it would to get all of the bugs and issues worked out. If it was like Vista we would be getting it in 2010 without time machine, boot camp, core animation, and spaces.

Wil Shipley:

We suffer from increased prices and decreased competition and innovation. We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money. The core of Apple users has supported Apple for years — we were there when Apple was hurting, we stuck with it, we nursed her back to health. It’s our money she has now, and she’s turning on us now that she’s rich off it.

Wil has up a great article on Apple becoming pompous and losing their soul by getting into bed with “two of the most cock-thirsty and money-grubbing conglomerates in the United States — the movie and record industries”.

And another reason I’m a Mac user from the newly outed Mac user Mark Cubank:

Then I upgraded my PC to Vista. What a disaster. I had grown accustomed to my PC freezing every now and then. Enter Vista and my PC was frozen more often than it was working. The biggest culprit was MicroSoft Outlook.

…

The 2nd is that it [his mac] rarely freezes up. Maybe 3 or 4 times in months.

Steven Frank:

There’s one final insult, which is that Sony has scattered the installers across two DVDs so that the restore process requires manual intervention in the form of 5 or 6 disc swaps, not at all unlike trying to copy a floppy disk 20 years ago.

Steven has a great post about Windows running better on Apple hardaware then on “native” hardware and the trials of reinstalling Windows on his VAIO. It’s a nice refresher on some of the reasons why I’m a Mac user.

Bill Bumgarner:

Ten years ago, Wired published an issue of their silly ‘zine that claimed Apple was pretty much dead and listed 100 ways to save the company.

Some of them are completely ridiculous like abandon mach for the WinNT kernel when the article was published a few months after buying NeXT or holding a telethon, but there were a few good suggestions too. A few of them Apple actually did right away, “Rent space in a computer store, flood it with Apple products (especially software), staff it with Apple salespeople” with CompUSA’s store within a store, and other that eventually came, moving to intel. Reading through the entire list through if felt like the hits were on accident rather then good insight.

ByteCellar:

I ran across a story of a user who had put an Apple Newton eMate 300 to similar duty on his Sun box. Being an eMate owner myself and having a vacant Mac-style serial port on my dual-port Keyspan USB-to-serial adapter, I felt I must get this going as well.

I wish I had a serial adapter laying around to put my old eMate to work doing this. I’m not sure it’s worth going out and buying one for this though. It would just be a toy to play around with every once in awhile.

Joel writes about the The Perils of JavaSchools and I couldn’t agree with him more.  It is something that I’ve thought for awhile now due to my education.  I was about half way though my college career when ASU made the switch from C/C++ to Java and I saw a big decline in the quality of my classmates.
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Daniel over at Red Sweater gives a nice little tip for adding a favorites section at the top of Xcode’s new file window.  Since 95% of the time I’m using 1 of 3 templates it should save a couple seconds here and there.  Plus hunting through the list is a pain sometimes.