December 1st, 2010

With Reeder for Mac, the fantastic OS X declination of his iOS Reeder apps, Silvio Rizzi has achieved, over just a few months, what other longer-established players, such as Gruml, Socialite or the notoriously crash-prone NetNewsWire have failed to do. He has achieved this despite the quirks and general unreliability of the Google Reader API, since no official API is as yet available from Google.

November 25th, 2010

A year after they were launched in a flurry of—predictably naive—media enthusiasm a year ago, what has become of Twitter lists? It was predicted they would replace RSS, even replace blog posts themselves. Somehow, journalists and bloggers, at the time, were paradoxically predicting that Twitter would eventually result in the demise of their own profession or hobby. This has not happened, for a variety of reasons inluding the—typical—absence of a clear strategy by Twitter itself, as well as third party developers in its ecosystem, in deciding exactly how they were meant to be used; their lack of granularity compared with RSS; and the overwhelmingly irrelevant content that they generate. They have, however, proved invaluable in one segment: developers, who, in contrast to journalists and bloggers, aren’t naturally inclined to write—but are adept at adopting a new, geeky tool and immediately making optimal use of it. Twitter lists have thus become an excellent , and very welcome, tool for keeping abreast of trends in the tech sector, while journalists have proved to be relatively uninspired and awkward tweeters.

November 23rd, 2010

The Pope’s recent comments on the justification of using contraception whenever not doing so may result in taking a life—something his predecessor should have done, but never did— are nothing more than the reaffirmation of traditional Christian doctrine, just as was his restoration of the traditional mass. Its implications are huge.

November 21st, 2010

Mac is among the most difficult systems to backup and restore correctly: Macs have peculiarities; resource forks and packages, for example, are unique to the Mac, and not every service handles them well. My experience of the more popular commercial backup services has not been good: they’re unreliable, slow and raise privacy and data safety concerns. Using Amazon S3, in combination with a robust yet simple backup tool provided by small startup Arq, which I’ve just discovered, provides a much more reliable alternative.

November 16th, 2010

Using Posterous to send images and videos to Twitter, Facebook or any other social network is an enormous time-saver, and the resulting posts are prettily stored. Some people even use Posterous as their main blog. But unless you’re posting from a mobile device (for which dedicated client apps exist), Posterous, for some reason, expects you to send them an email with details of their post, which a lot of people find time-consuming or even confusing. Here we’ll see how to automate the whole process using OS X to create an Automator workflow, associated with a folder sitting on the Desktop. All you need to do is drag or save whatever you want to post to the folder, and Automator will post it to Posterous after prompting you for its title. Posterous in turn will send it on to Twitter or anywhere else you specify.

November 13th, 2010

Barriers to entry in email are high, and it’s pretty well impossible to make money in it. Even leaving privacy issues aside, rumours of Facebook’s impending entry into this sector leave one wondering whether it can seriously be targeted at anything other than a niche sector: teenagers who still haven’t committed to one of the Major existing email providers.

November 6th, 2010

Markdown has become a noticeably more popular tool for drafting texts in the past year. The development of iOS has led to a number of developers integrating it into iTunes Store apps, notably Elements and MarkdownMail. On the Mac, WriteRoom still remains the best option for drafting posts, especially since these can now be stored in a Dropbox folder in Markdown format, ready for sharing with iOS apps. You can also set up a Services Menu on Automator to streamline the conversion from Markdown into HTML.

November 2nd, 2010

Britain and France have a long and distinguished history of military cooperation, stretching back to the Greek liberation war in 1827 and spanning two centuries during which their action has regularly turned the balance of events decisively in favour of progress and democracy while simultaneously advancing both our ancient nations’ individual interests. The recent announcement by both governments that they would be pooling parts of the defence capacity falls neatly in that tradition and is thus a cause for rejoicing: yet it can also, unfortunately, be seen as the consequence of both our countries’ relative fall in influence, already well underway when we jointly embarked on the Suez expedition in 1956 and which has sadly gone much further since.

October 28th, 2010

Until about 1996, Microsoft was the most significant company in tech, arguably the only significant one. Then Mr Bill Gates misread the emergence of the Internet, and by that one fateful mistake embarked the once-exciting company he had built from nothing on a long path towards decline and irrelevance. Facebook’s history since it hit the mainstream, propelled by the technologically sophisticated users who endorsed it at the time, has shown abundant evidence it is treading the same path: building its own walled garden in an attempt to shut its users—most of whom will not care or even welcome that trend—out from using external services for sharing links, photographs, email and,perhaps at some point, voice calls and web browsing itself. While this will unquestionaly generate revenue and, perhaps, profits, in the longer term it can only detract from Facebook’s relevance to the more thinking segment of its users. Eeventually, therefore, Facebook’s choice of an increasingly closed platform threatens its own future in much the same way that Microsoft’s earlier strategic mistakes sealed its fate.

October 23rd, 2010

I’ve been test-driving the new MacBook Air for just over a day and I’m thrilled with it. It’s a fully working computer weighing just a couple of pounds, its superior GPU and SSD drive give it snappier performance than other machines in the range with better stats on paper and, above all, it’s incredibly cute and sexy.