It was fun. At first.

But it turns out, I just don’t like working in big companies.

Big companies are like big machines. Inertia maintains whatever direction they’re going in, and this big company is going in a lot of different directions at once. Some people love this, for whatever reasons, but I don’t. It just makes communication too damn hard, and when communication is hard, I just can’t make the awesome things I got into this industry to make.

So, I’m going smaller. A group of incredible people that constantly put out awesome products. I’m going to get thrown into technologies I’ve never used, and hopefully get deeper on some that I already know and love.

It’s going to be awesome.

How long, on average, does it take for a Google product to leave beta?

Gmail was notorious for having a prolonged beta period, but is that typical of the company’s products?

I’d really like to know.

Primarily, beta software is shipped out to a relatively few people (compared to the developer’s full customer base), to get real world feedback on what does and doesn’t work for the customers before the software ships. Maybe they’ll uncover a few or more bugs that didn’t come up in your internal testing. This is great feedback for a developer to get.

The idea can hold in web apps, where the deliverable may be access, as well as more traditionally delivered native applications, libraries, etc. where the deliverable may be a executable binary or whatever.

But, I just can’t abide the perpetual beta idea.

Look, I just don’t see why any of this stuff:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models.

—Perpetual Beta – Wikipedia

requires you to stay in beta forever. Shipping doesn’t magically remove your ability to rapidly iterate a design, and leaving software in beta forever just gives you an excuse to not support your users, and they deserve better.

Not the smallest of which is a new log indexing implementation that’s faster and actually works¹. So, if you want to take the risk, download the nightly and reindex your logs². That will blow away your old index and generate a new one (yes, it’s faster, but depending on how many logs you have it still may take a while).

Just remember, the Adium team makes no guarantee that nightly releases will be stable or actually released nightly, so backup your Adium folder in ~/Library/Application Support. Download and run at your own risk. You can always revert to a stable version of Adium by downloading the version linked to from the Adium homepage.

For the unfamiliar, Growl is a system that can give you notifications about events that happen on your system. The list of things that it can tell you about is quite extensive and range from when you get a new email or IM to when your system mounts a volume¹. It’s kinda a fiddily thing, but if you use an app like Adium or Dropbox² you probably have some version of it installed.

It’s a great product, some great people work on it, and it’s a valuable service when you need to be notified that a thing happened. It’s also easy for that value to be lost when you’re buried in notifications.

But I noticed something: constantly being notified of the myriad of things happening on a modern computer were taking their toll. One by one each sign-out event chipping away at my concentration. And the email. Oh God, the email!

Ultimately, I was spending more time reacting to notifications then I was actually making things.

Notifications are like a candy bowl for your attention span

When your environment makes it easy to consume a given thing chances are, you’ll consume it at a higher rate than if it was more difficult to obtain. For example, if there’s a candy bowl next to your desk, you’ll be likely to eat more candy than if that bowl was across the room³.

Notifications are that candy bowl shoved into your face. They appear over other windows, they stack down the screen, They’re relatively large and obvious in your peripheral vision. In short: they’re disruptive by design.

You don’t need to know everything to make something

Most of the things you can be notified about when doing creative and information work aren’t really things you need to respond to right away. IMs, email, iTunes track changes⁴. The most important thing is that code, design, spec or whatever else I’m making right now, bar none⁵.

Anything that takes away form that has little value. So Growl goes until I find something that legitimately needs to be disruptive (but that’s not a lot).

What is important, at this very moment, is that I’ve adapted it (and my former Coda Plugin) to a system-wide service for Snow Leopard.

This lets you turn any (editable) text, anywhere in the system, into a linkified string: RTFs get clickable link attributes, and plain text gets a HTML A tag.

The code is here: http://bitbucket.org/sholt/autolink-service/

The binary is here: http://bitbucket.org/sholt/autolink-service/downloads/AutoLink.service.zip

Just drop it into Library/Services and go.

Issue 32 – maccode – Build PSMTabBarControl as 64Bit (patch included) – via Google Code:

The future is 64-bits, and that means leaving our 32-bit build processes behind.

Posting this as a patch just so we don’t break people building from trunk, as this patch requires the 10.5 SDK.

Every step forward is an important one: Any kind of help is needed and appreciated.

Well, not if you’re developing professionally, anyway.

Sure, there’s the occasional luddite out there who’s just afraid of upgrading their computers (hi mom!), but that alone can’t account for the ~20% of users still using IE6¹. You can’t ignore 20% of your user base.

Who makes up that ~20%? Corporate and government users are tied to IE6 by legacy internal webapps that are incompatible with other browsers—even IE7—and who are locked out of upgrading IE or installing a second browser by their enterprise security policy.

There is some hope, a thin, microscopic, atomicly thin sliver of hope. Vista ships with IE7 in it’s baseline distribution². But, unless those enterprises update those webapps, they’ll be stuck on good ‘ol IE6.

So, if you work at one of theses places, please try to make the case to do the updates necessary to get everyone onto at least IE7. It’ll be hard though, MS policy obliges them to support WinXP SP3 (and thusly IE6) with security updates through the year 2014³.

What does this mean for web developers and programmers now that IE8 is out? We have to support 3 versions of Internet Explorer now.

Is it 2014 yet?

First, my first reaction is absolutely we could do better. —Jim Cramer

You’ve seen the video by now, if not go and see it in all its 3 part glory. What gets me about this whole thing is two fold:

1. It was never about Cramer in the first place.
2. What does it say about the state of our media, when John Stewart is lauded for his journalism?

The interview was certainly timely and culturally relevant, and by all means interesting and revealing. After all, how often do you have a journalist¹ sound so apologetic at the hands of a mere comedian², while openly admiting that he knowingly has guests spread bold faced lies on his show which he allows to go unchallenged? Certainly, Cramer bears the culpability for allowing his show to become it’s own parody and misguiding his viewer’s investments, and there’s no denying the schadenfreude from watching Cramer fold, but that’s not what this is about.

“He brings me in, lies to me, lies to me, lies to me.”

I’m under the assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but I’m under the assumption that you don’t just take their word for it at face value. That you actually then go around and try and figure it out. —John Stewart

The television media is, by nature, a conglomeration of talking heads and news anchors—positions that typically require a greater breadth of knowledge than depth. But even that isn’t problematic by itself. The news anchor may not be a scientist, but must present scientific news. What is an issue is the prominence television is taking in our digestion of daily news.

Aside from the occasional truly investigative report, TV news is all about the glamor. Sure, you can edit down the boring parts of an interview before air, but an interview is a singular event. It alone won’t reveal a pattern of lies, and it alone cannot shake a well trained spokesman³ out of a well rehearsed party-line when he knows the interview will be over in an hour. But, hey, it gets the eyeballs if you can get a high profile name in your studio chair.

As we demand evermore concise, unambiguous and timely news reports, more and more lies, fibs and other untruths are allowed to go unchallenged. Good reporting needs time to ask questions, digest the answers, and repeat until the full story is revealed. TV doesn’t exclude that process, but it’s emphasis on a visually interesting story can supersede the need for thoughtful reporting.

It’s not about Cramer, it’s not about CNBC, it’s not even about the 24 hour news cycle: It’s about our insatiable appetites for clean sound bites and definitive advice that drive us to graze at quick news anecdotes, rather than rich news stories.

Snakeoil Salesman

So maybe we could remove the financial expert and the “In Cramer we Trust” and start getting back to fundamentals on reporting as well. And I can go back to making fart noises and funny faces. —John Stewart

John Stewart has always been a stalwart critic of the media, and it’s never been undeserved. But, like all good comedians, what Stewart excels at isn’t reporting or investigating, it’s observation. The only weapons a Stewart has against you is your own words. He is smart, he is perceptive, and his criticisms manage to reveal some truth about his subjects. But, he’s no journalist. Stewart does not “go around and try and figure it out;” his comments are strictly reactionary.

So, how does someone who does so little reporting receive allacodes from both the public and media for his journalism? Has the field sunk so low that the confused and angry ramblings of a TV jester qualify as award-winning journalism?

Fundamentals

I’m not the only one, Colin asks:

Does Woodward really have to be the Woodward of our time?

It’s not glamorous, it’s all about the fought for quotes, and the hours of phone calls just to get past a receptionist. All for a story that spans across multiple installments and weaves it’s way to the truth.

It still happens, I’m sure, but it doesn’t seem to get the attention it should. I’m just glad I’m not a journalist myself, otherwise If I wasn’t angry, I’d be extremely discouraged to see the industry have one good rant misinterpreted as good journalism.