The startup culture is similar to professional sports in that it requires a fleet of fresh-out-of-college kids to trade their lives and their health for the potential of short-term glory.
“Old farts” are often excluded from that culture, not because we’re lousy coders but because we won’t put up with that shit. We have lives, we have families, we have other things that are important to us.
I never put up with that shit, even in my twenties, and it definitely damaged my relationship with various bosses that expected it.
In addition to the sexism that has been discussed a lot recently, software engineering suffers from extreme ageism and workaholism.
I’m about to turn 30, I’m married, and we just had a baby. This will implicitly (and illegally, of course) disqualify me from working at almost any startup.
So, you code for the web. And in Coda 1, we revolutionized that process, and put everything you needed in one place. An editor. Terminal. CSS. File management. SVN. But we knew we could do more.
Now, with Coda 2, we went beyond expectations. We added tons of highly-requested features, and a few nobody expected, then wrapped it all up in a shiny, groundbreaking UI fit for the future.
Today it’s half-price from Panic’s site or the Mac App Store.
And the new, perfectly named Diet Coda for iPad looks like an amazing app itself.
I’ve previously done all of my web development in TextMate, but I bought both Codas today and I’m going to give them a shot. Panic’s other apps are so great that I trust them enough to take the chance.
I’ve known about this for about a week (thanks, various Twitter and email tips). I wouldn’t be surprised if offline support showed up in iOS 6, too. It’s a glaring feature omission, and it’s far more important on iOS than on Macs.
Like today’s Reading List, it will certainly prevent some people from buying Instapaper, but might encourage more customers to seek out a more robust app to solve this problem.
Since Reading List’s release in Lion and iOS 5 last year, a lot of people have asked me about its effect on Instapaper. It’s effectively impossible to correlate long-term App Store sales trends to their causes, so I really can’t be sure. So far, Instapaper’s sales are still strong despite far more (and far stronger, and all free) competition this year. Maybe sales would have been stronger without Reading List, but I doubt it.
I predict approximately the same effect — nothing obvious — when Mountain Lion and presumably iOS add offline saving to Reading List this year.
Newton Academy is a revolutionary school training students for careers developing apps for iPhone and iPad. Apple is selling more than 500,000 of these magical devices every day. The App Economy is skyrocketing, and iOS app developers are in incredibly high demand, with over 5,000 jobs available now.
Our training program takes about a year to complete, and does not require any prior programming experience. You can learn on your own time, at your own pace, in your own space. Our immersive video lessons include graphics, animations, diagrams, and tutorials. Collaboration with fellow students is encouraged in our Virtual Workshop. You’ll also have real time support from your instructor available for exercises and assignments. Our graduates have been very successful, in large part because we offer every student an apprenticeship, during which we’ll mentor and guide you through every step of the process of completing your first full-fledged app. We can even help you find a job, or if you prefer, set up shop as an independent or indie aiming for fame and fortune. Available spots are filling fast, so apply today.
Thanks to Newton Academy for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week.
We know of two next-generation iPhones in testing with a larger display: the iPhone 5,1 and iPhone 5,2. These phones are in the PreEVT stage of development and are codenamed N41AP (5,1) and N42AP (5,2). … Both of these phones sport a new, larger display that is 3.999 inches diagonally. … The new iPhone display resolution will be 640 x 1136. That’s an extra 176 pixels longer of a display. The screen will be the same 1.9632 inches wide, but will grow to 3.484 inches tall. This new resolution is very close to a 16:9 screen ratio, so this means that 16:9 videos can play full screen at their native aspect ratio.
The rumors about a taller-screened iPhone are piling up so much recently that it’s looking fairly likely. I’ll reserve final judgment until I use an iPhone with this display shape, but tentatively, I’m skeptical.
Why do people like larger-screened phones? My guesses on the biggest reasons:
Photos look much better.
They look better in the store.
To get LTE, which in practice still requires a larger phone and battery, and therefore, a larger screen.
The rumored ≈16:9 iPhone doesn’t really solve any of these. And I still think it would look weird in portrait.
Speaking of ways I recently said things that were easier than writing, on today’s podcast, Dan and I discussed Flattr, API versioning, web frameworks, and my formerly secret App Store experiment.
On the After Dark: USB 3 chipsets, follow-up on BMW 1-series cup holders, and my grim political philosophy.
I like the proposed <picture> markup except for the tag name. “Picture” is much more specific than “image”, and I bet a very large portion of images used on the web are not pictures. “Photo” would be worse, but “picture” still implies a complete photo, illustration, or diagram, whereas “image” encompasses those plus patterns, textures, gradients, and every other use of image data in use on the web today.
How about using that proposed <picture> markup but instead calling the top-level tag <image>?
And you might work on a lot of devices – a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad – in a lot of places. You might work on the road or maybe from home (with your Aeropress and clickity keyboard). And that makes it hard to securely use a shared drive, coordinate with clients and collaborate with your team.
Igloo offers a complete digital workplace – you get full access to all your files, project discussions and plans for world domination. The information you need to work is available anywhere in the world, literally at your fingertips.
Igloo has a space for your team. Each team gets dedicated file sharing, Twitter-like microblogs, activity streams and a host of other collaboration tools in one cloud-based platform. Plans start at just $4/user/month.
The AeroPress recipe (really) at the World AeroPress Championship (yes, really) that took home the Gold AeroPress (these are all real things) this year is remarkably simple.
I tried it, and the result isn’t really my style, but it’s quite different than what I usually drink. It’s nice to know that today, almost two years in, I still haven’t explored every brew that the AeroPress is capable of.
9to5 Mac posted a rumor about the next 15” MacBook Pro being in a much thinner (but not wedge-shaped) case, having a Retina display of an unspecified resolution, and having USB 3 ports.
It sounds plausible. Assuming that’s all or mostly true:
Thin case
The optical drive’s gone, but at this point, that’s neither radical nor newsworthy. Its removal saves a lot of space, which is nice, but it won’t save much weight — the optical drive is extremely lightweight.
To achieve the thinner case and reduce the weight, I’m curious to see if they finally removed the glass in front of the screen. On the current 15” design, the glass adds around 0.4 pounds over the matte option, and its extremely high reflectivity is problematic for a lot of people. If the new 15” offers a plastic-glossy screen instead, like the MacBook Air’s screen, that would save a lot of weight and be far less reflective for people (myself included) who don’t like glass screens.
The 13” MacBook Air is 3 pounds and the current 15” MacBook Pro is 5.6. Assuming Apple drops the optical drive and glass screen, they continue to offer at least the same battery life, and they continue to use 45W CPUs and discrete GPUs, I’d expect the new model to weigh 4.5 to 5 pounds. If they drop the GPU and pursue lower-wattage CPUs, they might get a more significant reduction, and the reduced power demands and heat output would result in a better computer for most use.
The thin case also means that Gigabit Ethernet and Firewire 800 won’t fit and are probably just being dropped. Expect video pros to complain.
USB 3
I suspect USB 3 is going to do to Thunderbolt what USB 2 did to Firewire 800: serve as the dominant interconnect for most peripherals, with the more-expensive Thunderbolt being relegated only to high-end niches.
Thunderbolt has been out for over a year, but there’s still a disappointing lack of peripherals. The few that are available are very expensive, and many potentially useful ones — such as Gigabit Ethernet or Firewire 800 adapters — don’t exist yet as standalone peripherals. (You can get a Thunderbolt-to-Gigabit-and-FW800 adapter for $1000 with a free Apple Cinema Display attached.)
It will be interesting to see if Apple addresses this rumored MacBook Pro’s lack of Firewire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet by making adapters available, and if so, whether those adapters use USB 3 or Thunderbolt.1
Retina Display
I’m not sure I’d want a Retina MacBook Pro yet. I suspect that adoption of Retina assets among Mac apps will be slower than we saw with Retina iOS devices, and more importantly, Retina graphics for websites will likely take significantly longer.
Since non-Retina graphics look worse on Retina screens than on older screens, Retina MacBook users would have significantly worse-looking web browsing for a while — probably years, not months. So I don’t think I’d rush out to get a Retina Mac, but I wouldn’t necessarily avoid a Retina screen when it comes time to upgrade for other reasons.
Apple has sold a 10/100 USB Ethernet Adapter for years, but since it’s limited to USB 2, it’s extremely slow. A modern MacBook Air can generally transfer files faster over wireless (if it’s 802.11n) than over the USB Ethernet Adapter. ↩
This week’s podcast: the new 5by5 Radio app, why Apple may not want to add paid upgrades to the App Store, the infinite market for podcast clients and to-do apps, Instacast’s in-app-purchase backlash, how and why to remove features from an app, the new 15” MacBook Pro rumors, Thunderbolt’s likely overshadowing by USB 3, and near-future concerns for a Retina laptop.
On the After Dark, we discuss horrible German cup holders, and my wife and baby son make their podcasting debuts.
Adobe released a security upgrade for Adobe Photoshop CS5 and earlier for Windows and Macintosh. This upgrade addresses vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system. …
Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop CS6, which addresses these vulnerabilities. For users who cannot upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe recommends users follow security best practices and exercise caution when opening files from unknown or untrusted sources.
Note the euphemism, “released a security upgrade”: this is not an update, but a paid upgrade. This is not a “Security Bulletin”, it’s a giant middle finger.
In English: Photoshop CS5 will not be patched for this vulnerability. The only way to remain secure is to upgrade to Photoshop CS6 for $200.1
My wife and I each bought copies of Photoshop CS5 two years ago, since we both use it for our professions. It is now unsafe for us to use this $700-each professional app, and the only responsible course of action is to pay another $200 each for an upgrade that we weren’t planning on buying because we were perfectly happy with the version we have.
Adobe’s message is clear: if you need or want to continue using Photoshop, the only responsible course of action is to buy every new version, which most Photoshop customers never needed to do before.
Maybe the right course of action is to stop using Photoshop. My wife can’t, so Adobe is just robbing her of $200. But I might be able to.
For the first time, the upgrade is only available directly from Adobe’s site, and fewer old versions are eligible for upgrade pricing than previous Photoshop upgrades. ↩
The data for 4 days shows a clear and very consistent progression. Users are updating at a rate of roughly 7.5%/day, leading to a total adoption of around 30% so far.
30% of his userbase has upgraded to the four-day-old, no-new-features, not-marketed iOS 5.1.1 release. That’s incredible.
Also, if you’re a developer, listen to his podcast.
Our source has indicated, however, that the 7-inch iPad will be identical to the current 9.7-inch iPad, just scaled down. That seems to include a 2048x1536 resolution display, just like the new iPad.
All of this sounds plausible except that screen resolution. A 7” display is so much smaller by total area than the iPad’s 10” that most apps’ interfaces will need to be manually adjusted or redesigned. You can’t get reliably usable results by just scaling down 10” apps to a 7” screen automatically.
And if they can’t reuse 10” apps without modification, why would they need to make the display so dense to keep the same resolution? They’re having enough trouble cramming that resolution into a 10” device and getting enough of the panels manufactured to keep up with demand.
If this 7” iPad is real, maybe it has a 1024x768 resolution, yielding a logically 512x384 area, in half of the 10” iPad’s screen area. Effectively, it’d be the iPad 3’s screen cut in half. (Then apps could keep a consistent scale for interface elements, which would make development a lot easier.)
That sounds a lot more likely if they want to hit a $249 price and make a profit.
