In its attempt to hide the nitty-gritty details of Mac OS X from regular users, Apple set the user’s Library folder (~/Library) to hidden in Lion, which means it doesn’t show up in Finder anymore. This can be quite annoying when you, for example, want to delete the preferences file of an application that’s acting up.

It’s fairly easy to unhide the Library folder: Just enter chflags nohidden ~/Library in a Terminal session and the folder shows up in Finder again. The problem: every OS update re-hides the folder.

The easiest way around this is to have that command execute every time you login. Here’s how.

Update: This actually only works if you open a Terminal session after logging in either manually or via a Login Item in System Preferences. For an alternate solution, see below.

1. Open Terminal
2. Navigate to your user’s home folder: cd↩
3. Make a backup copy of your .profile file: cp .profile .profile.backup↩
4. open .profile in a plain-text editor like vim: vim .profile↩
5. Add the following line to the end of the file: chflags nohidden ~/Library
6. Save the file

The commands in the .profile file are executed every time you login to your Maca Terminal session. So even if an OS update hides ~/Library, after the mandatory reboot the command in .profile will unhide it again.

Note: You need to edit the .profile file with a plain-text editor, such as TextMate, TextWrangler or vim. vim can be hard to use if you’ve never used it before, so if, for example, you have TextMate, just enter the following command instead of the no. 4 above:
open /Applications/TextMate.app/ --args .profile↩.

Alternate solution: As mentioned in the update above, the .profile file is only “executed” when you open a Terminal session, but not when you login to your Mac via the regular login screen. So here’s an even easier way to unhide the ~/Library folder each time you log on to your Mac:

1. Download this file.
2. Unzip the file and move the contained file Unhide Library Folder to your user’s home folder or any folder therein.
3. Open System Preferences->Users and Groups->Login Items.
4. Click the + sign below the list of login items, find the Unhide Library Folder file, and click Add.

This application is a simple Applescript that executes the command chflags unhidden ~/Library. I needed to make it an actual application instead of an AppleScript, because adding a .scpt file to the login items just opens the script in AppleScript Editor instead of executing the script.

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I recently launched Tap to Create, a blog about using the iPad to create things. Initially, I didn’t even think twice about powering the site with WordPress as it’s what powers most of my other sites (including this one). But I decided I wanted to walk the talk and use the iPad for research, writing, image editing and even small tweaks to the site. I also wanted to be able to use my favorite iPad text editor to write the posts because I wasn’t going to deal with the feature-laden, clumsy posting interfaces of the few dedicated blogging apps that are available for the iPad.

So I started looking for alternatives and quickly grew fond of the idea of a “baked blog”. One of the downsides of WordPress is that each page is dynamically generated upon being requested, which can put a rather heavy load on your server and also has some prerequisites regarding your web hosting package (namely: PHP, a database (e.g. MySQL) and mod_rewrite support). You can circumvent the performance problems at least to some extent by employing caching plugins, but that increases the complexity of an already fairly complex system. In any case, static HTML files are definitely easier to handle and hard to beat in terms of performance.

Pelican

There are several static blogging systems out there, such as Jekyll, Stacey and Laguna. You can even use desktop software such as VoodooPad to generate HTML and upload it to your server. What I ended up using is the Python-based Pelican. The main reasons for my choice were that it seemed fairly straightforward to setup, it uses a scripting language that’s easy to deploy and it’s actively maintained and supported.

Pelican lets you write your posts in either reStructured Text (which I frankly hadn’t heard of before finding out about Pelican) or Markdown and transform your source files into HTML by running them through a Jinja2-based templating engine. Upload the generated HTML files and the template to your web server, and you’re done.

Setup

First off, I installed Dropbox on my CentOS-based VPS. That way, the posts I write on the iPad in a Dropbox-enabled text editor get synced to my web server automatically. I could just as well install Pelican on my desktop Mac and generate the HTML output files there, but that would mean I’d have to upload them from there to my server, resulting in a rather cumbersome and not iPad-only workflow.

Then I installed Pelican on my web server. Pelican needs at least Python 2.6. If your web server runs an older version, like many CentOS–5-based VPS do (they run Python 2.4.3), you’ll have to install Python 2.6 or newer alongside the older version. You can’t just update Python on a CentOS 5 server as that will break systems that rely on Python 2.4.3, namely the package manager yum and cPanel.

With Python installed, installing Pelican was a matter of seconds via the package manager pip. I initially installed the latest “stable” version of Pelican (2.8), but after running into some issues I switched to using the latest master branch version from Pelican’s GitHub repository.

Workflow

I wanted my publishing workflow to be as streamlined as possible. I didn’t want to have to fiddle around with copying and pasting text from an editing app into a blogging app (the blogging apps themselves actually pretty much suck for writing; go figure) and I wanted to write as little HTML code as possible. I wanted to be able to write my posts in Markdown and then, at the press of a button, publish them. And I wanted to be able to do everything using just my iPad. In the end, I arrived at a setup similar to the Pelican-powered Calepin only that I host everything myself and I can use my own theme (Calepin doesn’t let you change the look & feel of your site). Here’s how it works.

I write my posts in Elements using Markdown and save them to a dedicated folder inside my Dropbox folder. If I want to include any images in my post, I stick them into the iPad’s camera roll and first use OneEdit to resize them and create thumbnails, if necessary. I then use iFiles to upload the image files to the images subfolder of the Dropbox folder I use for my posts. Pelican is configured to always copy this folder with its entire contents when it generates the site. I then just have to make sure that I include the right links to the images in my Markdown file.

Finally, I ssh into my server from my iPad using Prompt and run a shell script that runs Pelican with a config file that contains all the necessary parameters for creating the site. The output directory is set to the actual folder that contains all the files of the taptocreate.com site. I could just as well use a temporary directory to check things first and then use a shell script to copy everything into the final directory, but I’m lazy.

Conclusion

As you can see, the workflow of my setup is pretty straightforward. The hard part was setting everything up. Since CentOS 5 is fairly old I was constantly running into problems trying to get stuff to run. Then I was running into some quirks of the rather dated “stable” version of Pelican, which is version 2.8. After switching to the latest version from Github, my problems disappeared. So, at least in my case, the latest version should be considered stable.

What this little experiment has showed me is that it’s worth looking beyond WordPress. WordPress has its advantages, like a huge community, tons of plug-ins, themes, etc. But it also comes with lots of downsides like slow performance and high demands on your web server. And the iPad app is – still – pretty unusable. If you’re looking for a way to blog using just your iPad, I recommend you check out Pelican or one of the other baked-blog solutions out there. The worst thing that can happen is that you learn something new.

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Beautiful timelapse video by Shawn Reeder. Be sure to click the fullscreen button and turn on your speakers.

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Apple responds to the New York Times’ article about the company’s tax evasion practices.

Apple’s tax strategies are apparently all totally legal and Apple isn’t the only company minimizing taxes this way. But apparently Apple feels the need to justify their strategies and the way they’re doing it is by pointing out how many jobs they’ve created in the US. If I wanted to be cynical, this would read: We may be (legally) evading taxes to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, but we’ve created hundreds of thousands of jobs for people who have no choice but to pay taxes. So taxes are being paid, just not by us.

I’m being unfair, though. What Apple and many other companies are doing is perfectly legal and I don’t think companies have any moral obligation to pay more taxes than they’re legally required to. It just shows who, in the end, pays all the taxes: wage slaves.

Update: Here’s an interesting Forbes article from 2010 about why US corporations sometimes pay so little taxes. And here’s the same data as a nice infographic. Spoiler: Apple isn’t the worst of the bunch, by far.

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I wrote about my own iPhone battery issues a while ago and while disabling Wifi sync in iTunes solved that particular problem, I’ve still had intermittent battery drain issues. A few days ago my iPhone 4S went from a full charge to 50% in less than a day and it was on standby 90% of the time.

What “solved” it this time was a simple restart of the phone. I’ve never restarted or turned off my iPhone simply because so far it hasn’t been necessary. Now it seems that background processes and apps can go haywire and drain the battery, at least that’s my uninformed guess as to what’s happening. Because after a restart the phone went from a full charge to 90% in the same time it had previously gone to 50%.

So at least it seems it’s a software issue, which Apple should be able to solve. But telling customers to go back to square one with their iPhones is a pretty helpless and unacceptable move.

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I agree to the extent that paying for a valuable service is a good thing. Money is how value gets exchanged in an economy and if something is “free” that just means it’ll have to be paid for indirectly.

What I don’t agree with is that freemium is bad per se:

There are a many shiny examples of widely successful freemium companies that killed it. But they are exceptions, and unfortunately they set a bad example.

ThreeFour companies that immediately came to my mind: Dropbox, Clicky, Vimeo and MailChimp. I think these companies set great examples for how to make freemium work.

There’s two sides to freemium: From the customer’s side it’s a free service with paid plans that offer more features. But from the business side it’s about a full-featured paid service that subsidizes a free plan that’s designed to get more users to opt for the paid plan. Many freemium services even offer the paid feature set for a limited time and then automatically drop back to a basic feature set after the trial period. In any case, I think these services are being very smart about how to acquire new paying customers.

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While I agree with many of the iPad’s advantages Shawn lists, I think it greatly depends on what you mainly use your computer for if you could get by (mostly) using the iPad. I know I couldn’t. Many of the things I do with a computer either aren’t possible on the iPad or they’re cumbersome.

For me, the best creative use for my iPad is for writing. I like the focussed environment iOS puts me in and I like the writing apps that don’t dump hundreds features I don’t need on me. But even for writing I need an external keyboard, the virtual keyboard is hardly more than a crutch.

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Ben:

Like the Brydge Kickstarter campaign this is another instance of people wanting to make their iPad into a Mac.

While I agree that that multitasking hack is idiotic, the Brydge and other products and Kickstarter projects aren’t about turning your iPad into a Mac. They’re about improving the limited usability of the iPad’s virtual keyboard by adding an optional physical one. For everyday use the virtual keyboard is fine, but for longform writing you can’t really beat a physical keyboard. It’s lag-free, has tactile feedback and supports keyboard shortcuts.

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With Nokia’s share price dropping to new lows after a downgrade by Moody’s yesterday, the company is increasingly becoming a target for acquisition. At a market valuation of now $15B it’s a purchase many could afford. After all, Facebook just paid $1B for a 13-person company with no revenue model.

So what if the most likely company to buy Nokia – Microsoft – actually did? Here’s my “business plan on a napkin” for Microsoft:

1. Kill all Symbian phones.
2. Make the best Windows Phone phone they can. ONE model.

The Metro UI is a unique and well-designed take on mobile device UIs which could breath some much-needed fresh air into a market dominated by an increasingly dated-looking iOS and the convoluted mess that is Android. But I doubt Windows Phone will make a dent in the universe if Microsoft just leans back, collects the licensing fees from Nokia and hopes for the best.

It would take some cojones to execute a radical plan like this. And success of course isn’t guaranteed. But if Microsoft really wanted to compete with the iPhone and Android, a hyper-focussed plan like this could go a long way. Steve Jobs famously quoted Alan Kay saying that “people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” And what better way to make your own hardware than buying a company that’s already doing so? Nokia doesn’t make bad phones. They’re just not focussed. They’re trying to be everything to everyone, trying to squeeze every penny out of every customer in as many markets as possible. Nokia certainly has a huge market share. But market share won’t help you survive, profits will.

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Idiocracy is just a movie, but I fear it’ll soon be reality.

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