Thursday, November 22, 2012

You're Holding it Wrong

Things don’t have to change the world to be important. - Steve Jobs
The saying goes that every family needs a doctor and a lawyer. Something like that. Though in this past few decades the need for the family IT technician has clearly arisen. My circle of friends tends to serve that role for our families and much as an IT professional will joke to his savvy friends about dealing with clients, so we talk with one another about the family issues and excitement that we are having. One of my favorite positive stories come from the college days when most of us we dual booting, triple booting, quadruple booting out machines. One of my friends said over the summer he walked in to find his mom on his machine happily writing up a letter in StarWriter under OS/2 with no clue that she was on the cutting edge of computing technologies. Recently I have been seeing my family slowly making the shift from Windows and Blackberries onto Apples and iPhones. It's an interesting shift. Four years ago when my dad asked what phone he should buy I told him to buy a BlackBerry Bold. One month ago when he asked, I gave him the choice between an iPhone or Galaxy S3. My in-laws upgraded to the iPhone 5 while I was at their home for the holidays. I am their extended computer support as well. When I was a PeopleSoft consulting I was taught a very interesting way of thinking by PeopleSoft. "We are experts in human resource software and human resource process. Our software is designed around the best processes and the most common processes. If you consult at a company that wants to do heavy customization to PeopleSoft to support their processes the most likely thing you need to change is no the way PeopleSoft does things." Apple expressed a similar sentiment during the iPhone antenna issues explaining how people should use a case or hold it differently, aka "you're holding it wrong." "So we've been syncing our old iPhones to this older computer. Now we got our new iPhones and we synced it the new computer. We've got most of our settings back on the new iPhone, but our Apps, Photos and Music don't seem to be there. I tried syncing the old iPhones to the new computer but it doesn't get it back." Correct. To me this thinking is trivially wrong. But how do you fix it? So you've got 100% of your music on your old computer synced to your phone. And you've re-ripped 20% of that music to your new computer plus another 20% that's brand new. If you just copy your old files to your new computer you'll have 20% duplicates. "Can't you just download the music off the old phone onto the computer?" Sorry - no. You're holding it wrong. Now my dad is making the switch from BB to iOS. This one is going to be painful. I can feel it my bones. So I told him step #1 was go to Apple store (or AT&T store) and they will plug the two phones into their magic device that will transfer stuff from one to the other. I saw these thing work wonders when it transferred Ms.Chaos' Palm data into her first iPhone at the Apple Store. The genius told me, "we have a magic elf in the back that does it." Well done magic elf.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Social Segmentation

App.net will combine the simplicity of cloud infrastructure with the power of web frameworks to deliver the best platform for developing social web applications. - Orian Marx
I generate all this content and I lose a lot of it.  There was a time when my website was fully updated using a bizarre local workflow of text files and AppleScript.  As much as it was a person Rube Goldberg machine, it made me happy to know that the system of record of all of my stuff was on my computer and that was pushed up into the cloud.  You know - so centuries after I was gone archeologists could use the forensics of my hard drive to reconstruct my life.  Assuming someone saved my hard drive for centuries after I was gone and cared.
Now I am "in the cloud."  Truly.  My website updates are pushing into the cloud.  My micro-updates are pushing into the cloud.  My nerd updates are in the cloud.  My source code?  In the cloud.  It's all up there somewhere as the system of record and sometimes it's not on my computer.  In reality, in my day-to-day living and even in the grand scheme of things, I don't know why that should make a difference to me.  But it does.  There is something about knowing all the stuff that I create is sitting in my house.  Physically.
Anyway that's how things are.  I've also now fully segregated my three "social streams."  So if you're interested in my all the nerdy stuff I'm working on in my personal time, my attendance of various Sacramento technical user groups, compliments about my Drobo or Google TV, than the right place to go is App.net (short) and Google+ (long).  If you're interested in my nieces, nephews, vacations and other commentary the place to go is Twitter (short) and Facebook (long).  If for some reason you're interested in what I do for a living, find me on LinkedIn.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Birthday Spending Spree

It's not that HTML5 is bad. I'm actually, long-term, really excited about it - Mark Zuckerberg
Coda
I'm used to getting little bits of money for my birthday from parents or my grandparents and being told that I'm supposed to spend the money on "something fun." You know how that goes, they are trying to get you to treat yourself to something you wouldn't normally buy because it would be too expensive.
This year I did a little bit of a technical shopping spree! First I got myself a subscription to App.net for no particular reason. I now segregate my online streams to personal (Twitter -> Facebook), professional (LinkedIn) and Nerd (App.net / Google+). Why not collect them all?
Second I purchased Coda from Panic Software. In my new gig I we do PHP development and I've been using Sublime Text since its basically the only text editor that supported my Retina MacBook Pro. Sublime Text is okay, but I've been avoiding purchasing it since I know at some point in nearish future TextWrangler will start supporting Retina and I would have the option to switch back to a free alternative. Yet I've been having a stare down with Coda. After getting it, I have no regrets! I've got the Git integration working for my work as well as for all my personal projects. And for my personal stuff that gets SFTP uploaded the publish action is all built in. It's fantastic.
Third and last - I got iA Writer for iOS. I've been doing a little bit of writing for NaNoWriMo and since I've been mostly using my iPad as a Desktop replacement I wanted a program that I can write in that will sync across all my devices. So iA Writer to Dropbox sync across everything? Perfect. And why not iCloud sync? Because it would require me to purchase iA Writer for Mac, and I don't see a point in that.