Marco Arment wrote yesterday about mobile computing being more exciting than what he called “Desk” computing. I’m a fan of Marco’s writing, and I usually agree with him, but that post got me thinking. I can’t argue that mobile isn’t exciting, but I disagree with his assertion that desktop computing is a solved problem. He’s [...]

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I share what I’ve learned about writing a Launchd agent that is mostly written in Python. This includes a link to a sample project hosted on bitbucket.

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This is something that had been on my old blog in 2006 and went away, so I’m reposting something I wrote to the macsb list a few years ago:

For the BibDesk open source project, we wanted to have legit in-app apple help, as well as a web page (and PDF), without maintaining separate sources, since we were [...]

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I chime in on the reactions to the iPad as a new wave of pleasantly functional but closed computing.

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I just saw Brent’s post from a couple weeks ago about an App History App – I think that’d be really cool. I especially like the screen shot idea, since I love seeing posts from a developer showing what an app looked like along the progression. It’s too easy to forget to document that kind [...]

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I love it when I can guess how to do something new in a program. Skim just did this for me – I needed to figure out how big the rectangle of text in a paper I’m working on is, in inches. I looked for rulers, and then decided I’d just see if I get any [...]

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If your childhood memories include an SGI Indy set up underneath the coat rack downstairs, maybe you’ll get the same time-traveling wonder out of the Electropaint Screensaver. I found a Universal Build of ElectropaintOSX at vonBelow.com, and it’s just how I remembered. There’s a picture there, but you have to see it in motion. It’s [...]

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I’d like to see a community-run version of the Apple Design Awards.

Anyone could nominate an app, and the developer community would vote on who wins, in just a few categories.

I’m thinking the categories could be a little more user-centric than Apple’s. For instance, I don’t really care about best adoption of OS X technologies, but [...]

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A recent Wall Street Journal article noted (pay link) the rise of alternatives to email. The article itself is balanced and mentions that new ways of communicating are likely to just add to how much time we spend with this stuff, not replace email and cure its problems. Whether that’s good or bad depends on [...]

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From Merlin Mann’s flickr stream, I noticed the book “Time Management for System Administrators” hiding under there, and went over to the O’Reilly site to take a look – there’s a full google preview of the book, and it has a chapter with some good advice about handling email.

I’ll highlight the one piece of advice [...]

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