July 2011
1 post
10 tags
What Who Where: OS X Lion
What is it?
Any change disturbs a routine. Apple has had a big disturbance planned for some time now and it’s now almost time for its public release. It’s another major upgrade for Mac OS X. They’ve bumped the version number to 10.7 and they’re calling it Lion.
Let’s get features out of the way:
In Lion, you never have to save a file. Versions maintains file...
October 2010
1 post
Thoughts on Samsung's Bada OS
If you’ve ever bought Nokia, you would have come to accept that you’re not going to hear much from Nokia about the bad software improving over time. The only promises made are new phones that bring more unpolished features. Nokia is still in the market because people haven’t graduated to using smart phones. They aren’t willing to move away from their Nokia devices because...
July 2010
2 posts
Cellular phone subsidies and India
When cellular service providers subsidize the cost of a phone, they know they will earn that money elsewhere. For this, they hook you onto a contract for an extended period of time. They generally tend to make a lot more than what they’re losing in the subsidy. This cannot happen in India. Service providers don’t charge for receiving calls. They don’t charge us for receiving...
Think twice before posting
Quit Facebook Day clearly wasn’t a success. I dislike a lot about Facebook but deactivating my account is too drastic an action and I still don’t feel compelled to do it. I still like to use it as a directory of phone numbers sometimes. I’ve also managed to use it to find a couple of my relatives’ really good friends. So Facebook does have its plus points, but they tend to...
June 2010
2 posts
Multitasking on iOS
Battery life is going to be affected by multitasking on the iPhone. But not as much as you would expect. The reason is going to gather a lot of criticism because people will begin to realize what the apps can’t do. It isn’t multitasking as one would see it on a Mac or PC. Instead of minimizing the app and having it update a frame buffer the approach is to have only the required...
Why do we use paper, again?
iPad. It’s futuristic. It’s simple. It has no better alternatives. It isn’t wrong to call it a computer. But is it good enough to replace all the weight that you carry around everywhere? It certainly is. But you need to treat it differently. Because it isn’t a laptop replacement; and it certainly isn’t the netbook replacement people were expecting Apple to produce....
April 2010
4 posts
Apple Blooper Drive
The MacBook Pro that I had with me for the last two and a half years is gone. There was just one part that kept failing on my MacBook Pro. Ironically, that part is the one Apple calls the Super Drive.
Anyone who has faced hardware issues probably knows when hardware starts exhibiting signs of death. With Apple’s amazing Super Drive, you realize that this doesn’t happen. It...
Why Chrome is Awesome #5
If you visit a page that is in any language other than what you have chosen(or set by default) in your language preferences, Google Chrome will offer to translate it for you. Though the continuity of text seems fragmented every now and then, it does work quite well.
WatchWhy Chrome is Awesome #4
There are a lot of things that Google Chrome already does to make the Mac minimal, but this is one tip that needs to be mentioned. Chrome lets you drag URLs to the bookmarks bar and it automatically creates a bookmark that’s powered only by the favicon of the website. I love my bookmarks bar this way; so neat and minimal with room for many more bookmarks.
Why Chrome is Awesome #3
While finding text on a page, Chrome not only highlights the text, but also the positions of the text on the navigation bar with orange bands. What a neat idea that adds more value to the browser window without taking up any additional space.
March 2010
2 posts
Why Chrome is awesome #2
Another reason I like Google Chrome more than any other browser on OS X is that the update system doesn’t download the whole app again for every point update. Seriously, devs really need to learn a few things from Google Chrome. When other apps update, just seeing those huge updates progress in the background makes it look like my internet connection is slouching.
Why Chrome is awesome #1
Google Chrome Update: Download progress on the dock icon. How awesome is that?
February 2010
2 posts
Why I worshipped Flash on Windows
No amount of ClearType tweaking could get you the text antialiasing you could get with Flash on Windows. Even today, when it comes to rendering text, no operating system delivers like Mac OS X. And if people used Flash as a workaround to deliver the same experience everywhere, I wouldn’t blame them.
But things have improved now. Windows 7 is much better at rendering text than its...
January 2010
2 posts
iPads and Cars
I don’t seem to like the iPad car analogies that we’re seeing everywhere. I think the iPad fits into the computing market more like a point and shoot fits into the digital camera market.
DF:
Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift...
Apple will take your call
While dealing with Apple in India, one is bound to be connected to someone living in another timezone. Often it’s difficult to reach them because the support number is suspended during the hours that person can speak to you.
One thing stays: Your Case ID/Case Number. Here’s how you reach Apple:
Start Skype.
Open the phone dialer(no credit required).
Select ‘United...
November 2009
3 posts
6 tags
Skype and its Drawer
Drawers form an interesting UI concept on Mac OS X, used to bring infrequently accessed controls of applications into view. The idea is pretty neat, but because so many apps implement this idea in a different way there is no single correct way of displaying a window’s drawer. If one app is intelligent enough to push your window to the side or resize itself to make space for the drawer on...
On Chrome OS for the Desktop
Give educated home PC desktop users the choice between Chrome OS and Windows, and what would they choose?
Give programmers with PCs the choice between Linux and Windows for programming, and what would they choose?
Either way, Windows is the loser. In the first question, I say educated desktop user because I know average desktop user wouldn’t care enough to know that Chrome OS existed....
One Day at a Time
An idiomatic word note on ‘cliché’ in the Mac OS X Dictionary:
What goes around comes around.
I made up that phrase this morning. Do you like it? Would you like to use it? Be my guest. Help yourself. You can have your cake and eat it too. You get the best of both worlds, six of one and half a dozen of the other. But don’t bite off more than you can chew. I’ve been smoke-free now for...
October 2009
1 post
Switched to Tumblr
After hosting my blog with EHost, 1and1 and GoDaddy, I’m convinced that there is no shared hosting service that can work well for me. I didn’t use a lot of bandwidth or memory, but my site was down for a couple of hours daily. Support staff almost always sent me canned responses stating that their servers never went down. I tried working out the economics of Media Temple’s Grid...
September 2009
2 posts
Snow Leopard’s Text Recorder
Snow Leopard has a nifty secondary click menu option ‘Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track’ which lets you record text as audio.
The system voice you select in your Text to Speech preferences is the voice used to convert your text to speech while recording it. The track you see on iTunes will never sound as good as the audiobook you bought on Amazon but it only sounds as bad as our monotonous...
The opt-out checkbox and installer trickery
When I downloaded a copy of µTorrent on Windows, I noticed that there’s now a license agreement at one stage of the setup process. Whenever someone sees a license agreement on Windows, the first thing they usually do is click on ‘I agree’ to get on with the installation. I did the same thing and I noticed that after I installed uTorrent, I had actually agreed to install the Ask Toolbar and have...
August 2009
1 post
Trusting the web
Just take the internet away from me for a couple of hours and there’s this strange feeling that makes me feel crippled. The internet has become more important to me than what I use to access it. The speeds at which servers are constantly working to deliver content is the reason it has become such an indispensable tool for most computer users in today’s age. For me, the web is a filing cabinet,...