Hands up if you use Dashboard on Mac OS X. I said hands up. Hello? As for me, I installed Mac OS X Lion, discovered where they shoved Dashboard, and immediately turned it off. Good riddance. Like iChat AV before it, Dashboard was one of those features in Mac OS X that I loved to… more
Cloud computing is yet another name for services that have existed for a really long time. Here’s the 2008 IEEE Internet Computing quote regarding Cloud Computing: “Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks,… more
I’ve been ripping on the mouse for years. The argument is one of precision. The mouse, while incredibly useful as a casual means of interacting with a computer, is not a productivity tool, because when you use a mouse you sometimes miss and missing isn’t productive. WAIT WHOA RANDS. PHOTOSHOP MAN. PHOTOSHOP LOVES THE MOUSE.… more
I have an unnatural fixation with pixels. For two years I was a stalwart supporter of the 17-inch PowerBook/MacBook Pro. My argument was simple and ignorant: “You need as many pixels as possible because you need to be able to see as much as possible.” This pixel fundamentalism blinded me to the simple fact that… more
I’m coming up on five years of steady Mac OS X usage and anniversaries are a time of reflection, so I went back to read my first significant article about Mac OS X. There’s something missing from this first analysis. See, there was one killer app that I’d been dying to try out on the… more
The creation of a Rands article goes like this. First, the idea strikes me at some random part of the day… usually in the car to or from work. I spend anywhere from a day to a month fine-tuning this idea in my head until it’s something I want to start writing about. It’s entirely… more
I have a thing for addiction. Based off the number of hits, the articles on my weblog which have touched the most folks deal with forms of technology addiction. The consistent theme I read in articles which refer to NADD and RII is, “Whew, there are others out there like me.” The articles themselves attempt… more
Management by Hallway is the style of management when you get out of your office and walk around the office to see who you trip over. It’s by no means a reliable or scalable management style, but it does offer you the chance to strike up a random conversation about a random topic and you… more
It’s almost 2005 and I can tell you, right this second, most of the keystrokes to format a document in Wordstar. I could also navigate a DOS-based version of XTree in my sleep. Additionally, I could explain to you the color scheme I chose for Xtree and weigh the pros’n’cons of said color scheme against… more
I can remember the exact moment when I knew Netscape was Screwed. It was an email from an engineer who attended a technology preview of Internet Explorer 3 and the bevy of other Internet technologies Microsoft had rallied behind following Bill Gates’ famous “Internet Wave” email. I don’t remember the specifics of the email, but… more
