When you look at it one way, the tech industry is about constant innovation, steady progress. Of course some things will become obsolete. Of course there will be new features that your older computer can’t exploit.
But if you look at it another way, the whole thing is a scam to make us keep buying new stuff over and over again. A new phone every two years. A new computer every four. Bad for our wallets, bad for the environment.
Mathias Bynens has posted a shell script with lots of commands (defaults write and otherwise) for tweaking OS X settings (via Clark Goble). There are a bunch that I hadn’t seen before, but I want to draw particular attention to the use of /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy, which somehow I’d never seen before. I had been using /usr/bin/defaults to manipulate arbitrary property list files (by passing a full path, minus the .plist), but I’ve recently been advised not to use it for that.
Paul Kim (via Nicholas Riley):
Apparently this will sound strange to a certain segment of people, but I’m also not interested in having a huge number of customers, in and of itself. I don’t really get satisfaction from people who buy the product in a promo or based on hype and don’t use it. I’m not hit-driven. I want users buying my product, not consumers. What really motivates me is when I hear about people that have been using it for years and it’s one the first things they install whenever they get a new machine. It’s when people get excited as I am about new features. It’s when users comes up with unique ways of using the product that I wouldn’t have come up with myself.
Ditto.
Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s oldtweets is a search engine for the first year of Twitter (via Core Intuition). It doesn’t seem to have found any of my tweets, but I already archived them via Tweet Nest a while ago.
I’ve already linked to Daniel Jalkut’s Subscribe to Feed—which adds an RSS button back to Safari 6—in my Mountain Lion notes, but I wanted to give it its own post. It’s a great piece of work and the first solid reason I’ve had for enabling Safari extensions.
Optimistic attempts by various Apple boosters to justify this astonishing behavior have not, in my view, met with any success. The best that can be said for it is that, given the existence of additional Lion and Mountain Lion features such as Auto Save and Resume (which, together, allow an application’s state to be restored the next time it is launched), the distinction between whether an application is running or not is of diminished importance. That might be the case, if an automatically terminated application’s icon remained in the Dock and the Command-Tab switcher, so that you could conveniently relaunch it; and some pundits have suggested that the icon’s failure in this regard was just a minor bug which Apple would fix in due course. But the fact is that throughout all versions of Lion, and now in Mountain Lion, Apple has not altered this aspect of Automatic Termination’s behavior; an automatically terminated application’s icon is still removed from the Dock and the Command-Tab switcher, just as it would be if the user had quit the application deliberately. And so the user, who did not quit the application deliberately, is puzzled and annoyed, and in order to continue using this application must now search for it and relaunch it all over again.
Mail in Lion properly responded from the same email address that received the email. Mail in Mountain Lion does not and instead replies from the default email address, regardless of the setting(s) chosen in the preferences.
Generally, if you have multiple e-mail accounts, when you reply to a message, your reply uses the same account the message was sent to. But I’ve been finding that Mail does not correctly choose the account, and have seen a number of messages bouncing because the selected account is not a member of the mailing lists.
Update (2012-08-08): Joe Kissell:
However, in Mountain Lion, Apple significantly changed the rules by which Mail chooses the default From account for outgoing messages. As a result, if you don’t carefully (and manually) check each outgoing message, you might find that you’re sending messages from an unintended account. This can have serious consequences if, for example, you end up sending work email from a personal account or vice-versa.
Update (2013-03-14): This is apparently fixed in Mac OS X 10.8.3.
