Dvyjones.com

→ Why Your New iPad Won’t Be Delivered Early

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:34:10 CET

John Brownlee:

[…] Apple has the new iPads locked up in their own private 18-wheeler trucks. These trucks are on FedEx property, and entered into FedEx’s system, but FedEx has been told that Apple will not unlock these trucks until Thursday evening.

Apple clearly didn’t like people getting their iPad 2s early. This is not what I’d expected them to do, though.

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→ Readability hubbub

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:49:23 CET

Paul Haddad:

OMG the service that used to pay people for their scraped content isn’t paying as much anymore, let’s switch to the service that never paid!

IMO Instapaper was always superior to Readability, though. And Instapaper jumps through a few hoops to make sure people get their page views.

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→ The iPad HD Sucks*

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:06:17 CET

MG Siegler:

*I haven’t actually seen it yet. I’m not actually sure what features it will have. I’m quite sure I’m a jackass for saying so right now. But hey — FIRST!!!!

This may not be the best prediction for the iPad 3/HD/2S’s success, but it is a very good prediction of the tech press’ response to said product.

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Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:38:59 CET

I’ve used Gmail for my main email hosting since I got an invite in 2005, and I’ve loved it. However, I’ve started to feel less good about not paying for my email hosting lately, and that combined with some privacy issues that has come up made me decide to move off Google alltogether. So, I thought I’d write up on what I’ve changed to. Some of these I’ve used before Google, or I didn’t use Google’s service at all, but I thought I’d list them since they can replace a Google service.

FastMail.fm

For email I’m using FastMail.fm. I have an Enhanced account set up with my own domains, and so far I really like it. They have a pretty nice web interface, which works for the few times I need it, and they provide IMAP access. They also give you some pretty powerful filtering abilities, although they aren’t as easy to configure as Gmail’s.

The Enhanced account, which is the only one that allows you to add custom domains, costs $39.95/year, which gives you 10 GB of storage. FastMail also provides an IMAP migrator that copies all your files over from an IMAP account. I’ve used it on three different accounts now, and it seems to work flawlessly.

iCloud

I use iCloud for contacts and calendars. Some might argue that Apple is no better than Google, but at least I give Apple money through buying apps and buying several of their products. Since I have a MacBook Pro, an iPhone and an iPad, the fact that they sync together nicely (I’ve never had any syncronization problems) is a huge plus.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is, according to their website, a search engine with:

Way more instant answers.
Way less spam and clutter.
Lots and lots of goodies.
Real privacy.

They’re not as instant as Google, but they’re definitely fast enough. They don’t have image searching or anything fancy like that, but 99% of the time I’m just looking for text, anyways. The fact that they don’t track or bubble you is really nice as well.

Dropbox

Dropbox is awesome. It’s as easy as that. The concept behind it is really simple: You have a folder. It synchronises. Dropbox has managed to get file synchronisation done right, and fast. If you’re using some other service to synchronise files, try them out (they’re free).

If you have any suggestions for other services, or there are some other Google services you’re trying to get rid off, send me a tweet (I’m @dvyjones), or email me.

If you sign up for Dropbox or FastMail.fm, I’d appreciate it if you use these affiliate links:

→ Easier Pull Request Creation

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:02:29 CET

Jake Boxer, on the GitHub blog:

Today, we’re rolling out a new feature that makes Pull Requests easier to create:

After pushing a branch to GitHub, you (and only you) will see that branch at the top of your repo’s page, along with buttons to create a Pull Request for it or compare it with master.

Pull requests is the best thing to happen to open source since GitHub. If your open source thing is on GitHub, and has pull requests enabled, there’s a good chance I’ll submit a pull request in addition to a bug report.

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→ Command Line Tools for Xcode

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:58:40 CET

Kenneth Reitz:

Today, Apple added a beautiful new package to their official developer tools suite: Command Line Tools for Xcode. It’s a 171 MB download that includes all of the tools a Homebrew should ever need. Best of all, it contains the proprietary headers that I couldn’t ship myself.

You can download and try it out today. All you need is a free Apple ID.

This is so cool, I don’t even know where to start. I’ve been worried lately that Apple has been stepping away from developers, but I hope this is a signal that they want us to stay with Apple.

I’ll still probably download Xcode, because I use Xcode for programming stuff, but for those of you who don’t use Xcode, this is pretty great. Also, I’m thinking of getting a MacBook Air at some point (I think I’ll wait until Mountain Lion is out, though), and not having to install all of Xcode on that is great, since the storage space is somewhat limited.

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→ Daring Fireball: Mountain Lion

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:41:36 CET

John Gruber:

“We’re starting to do some things differently,” Phil Schiller said to me.

I dare say they have been doing things differently for a while, but this is certainly quite a bit different.

Apple is definitely shifting towards iOS on the Mac, but I think they’re doing a pretty good job with it. It’s different, but different isn’t necessarily bad. This’ll take some getting used to, but I think in the end Macs will continue to be the best computers.

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→ OS X Mountain Lion

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:51:01 CET

So Mountain Lion is Lion + some iOS apps?

Looks like Apple is locking down the platform more with Gatekeeper. I wonder which setting is the default. Hopefully it’s “Mac App Store and identified developers”. (Update: That is the default, according to John Gruber.)

But seriously, except for Gatekeeper and Notification Centre, are there no new features? Or does Apple just not focus on them?

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→ Access to iOS Contacts “will require explicit user permission”

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:02:31 CET

Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr in a statement to AllThingsD:

…as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.

This is good. I’m hoping this’ll happen for calendar data too.

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→ Is Ruby interpreted or compiled?

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:56:20 CET

From a good post on Rubinius (and JRuby) internals, by Pat Shaughnessy:

However, I find Ruby internals to be fascinating… I really do like having at least a small understanding of what’s going on inside of Ruby while it’s running my code. I also believe it will help me to become a more effective and knowledgeable Ruby developer, even if I never contribute a line of internal code to Rubinius, JRuby or MRI. And studying Ruby internals has definitely lead me to a number of surprising discoveries, and forced me to rethink the mental model I have always had of the Ruby interpreter… or should I say, the Ruby compiler!

The Rubinius internals are actually quite fascinating, and not too hard to understand. A few weeks ago I fixed a bug in the VM, and it didn’t take me that long to understand how everything worked.

If you’d like to contribute to Rubinius, go for it! The people in the #rubinius IRC channel (on FreeNode) are really helpful, and it’s an awesome project.

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→ Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:36:40 CET

John Gruber on Isaacson’s Steve Jobs-biography:

You could learn more about Steve Jobs’s work by reading Rob Walker’s 2003 New York Times Magazine piece than by reading Isaacson’s book, but even then we’re left wanting for the stories behind any of Apple’s products after the iPod. Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life - his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.

Gruber’s review is a good one, well worth the read.

I haven’t read the book myself yet, but it’s on my Kindle for whenever I have the time. I have read the introduction, and it sounded like Isaacson was hesitant to write the biography. Judging by Gruber’s review, this shows in the book as well.

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→ Twitter stores full iPhone contact list for 18 months

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:57:26 CET

David Sarno:

Twitter Inc. has acknowledged that after mobile users tap the “Find friends” feature on its smartphone app, the company downloads users’ entire address book, including names, email addresses and phone numbers, and keeps the data on its servers for 18 months.

Apparently they do this to make the “Who to Follow” box more relevant even in the future. However, I would expect the “Find friends” function to find people to follow now, not in four months. It does make sense for them to upload this data (at least it does to me, as a developer). However, storing it for 18 months is just rubbish.

By the way, you can remove the data by clicking the “remove” link on this page.

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→ Pssst… your Rails application has a secret to tell you

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:28:51 CET

37signals writes yet another post about how they do things. Worth a read, especially if you like statistics as much as I do.

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→ Writing Error Messages

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:52:00 CET

Error messages should always have two parts:

A description of the problem

What the customer should do to get around the problem

And if you’re doing a really great job, the message might also include information on how to avoid the problem in the future.

Error messages truly need more attention. If the user sees an error code, you blew it. However, if you include the above, chances are your users will love you.

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