Woz’s Regret
David Weiss has some quotes from Steve Wozniak’s visit to Microsoft:
Regrets about Apple, no. Regrets about my own life? Yes, I wish I would have put floating point in Basic, but I wanted to get it done quick.
Archive for October 17, 2006
Jobs: Nobody’s Ever Demanded It
What pains me is that Apple has already won. They could go for interoperability now and still win, maybe win even more, because having products as good as iTunes and iPod support other formats is a customer magnet. I want to use OGG Vorbis, FLAC, DivX, Windows Media. I want iTunes to speak your crazy moon language. But most of all, I want Apple to acknowledge that I want that, beyond hiding icons.
A Better Stapler
Who would have thought it—a better stapler. This is a great example of how even the most mundane, commonplace commodity can be improved. Staplers look pretty simple and their design has not changed much, until now. Many’s the time I have had to redo a staple, pulling out the original, bad staple, and trying to do it right: push straight down, hard—but neither too slow nor too fast. Bah.
Ethnocentrism and Keyboard Shortcuts
I have recently been using a 17″ MacBook Pro with a US English keyboard layout. It’s interesting how certain keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense when you’re using this layout than a UK keyboard.
Et tu, Tim Cook?
If you haven’t seen the story in today’s Journal (page B1) you should go check it out. Big profile of what a wonderful, smart, professional guy our COO Tim Cook is. And in case you don’t know what it means to have your company’s #2 guy glowingly profiled on B1 of the Monday Wall Street Journal, let me explain it to you: I’m toast.
Flapjax
Kim Burchett introduces Flapjax, a new programming language for client-based Web applications that’s designed by Shriram Krishnamurthi and other smart people at Brown.
EagleFiler
On Friday, I released a brand-new application. EagleFiler grew out of an idea I had around 1999 of building a mail archiver that combined a standard file format with an interface like that of a real mail client. A few years later, I realized that it should also help me organize and search my piles of PDFs and Web pages, as well as other types of files.
It’s a relief to finally show people what I’ve been working on. So far, the reaction is positive, and I’ve received a lot of good feedback. Some of the requests are great ideas that I should have thought of, but didn’t. Most of them are what I was expecting—they’re for things that I’ve been planning but that weren’t done in time for 1.0. On an open-ended app like this, it’s hard but necessary to postpone more than you want until later versions. Development is more fun, and productive I think, when it’s more interactive. This is where feedback will really help shape future versions of EagleFiler. There are some things I left out of 1.0 that I thought were important, but that no one has yet requested. Other things which I thought would be nice but not essential have struck people as glaring omissions. As a result, I’m reshuffling my to-do list to address the more common requests first.
Lastly, since I’m too lazy to drag and drop, one of my favorite features in EagleFiler is the capture key. While working in another application, you press a hot key and EagleFiler determines what you were viewing and adds it to the library. A bunch of apps are already supported, and you can add support for additional apps by writing capture scripts. Of course, for this to work, the app must be scriptable, and it must provide a way of accessing the content or selection of the front window. Scriptable applications are cool.
