Category: software

  • What we have here is a failure of redundancy

    I think it was scheduled maintenance or announced-in-advance downtime (or maybe it was just deja vu when I saw it), but Bloglines was offline for a while over the New Year’s weekend. I might never have known as I wasn’t online much but Monday night I fired up my trusty new feed reader,Netnewswire, and got…

  • Shrook, shrook not quite Shrook

    Well, the Shrook feed reading experiment is over and the NetNewsWire experiment begins. Shrook is an offline reader that synchronizes with its own online web-based reader. Re-inventing the wheel (in this case, re-inventing Bloglines) is not a winning strategy. Ah, but NetNewsWire, another offline reader, actually synchronizes with Bloglines. It also uses my .Mac account…

  • Good bye iBlog, hello WordPress

    Well, after making some changes in hosting plans, domain name pointers etc etc, it’s time to abandon the easy but less functional blogging program iBlog and switch to full-featured heaven aka WordPress running a site hosted by Bluehost. Couldn’t find a way to easily import the old entries (another weakness of iBlog?) so I’m reloading…

  • Down goes Palm, yet another notch on Gates’ belt

    (Updated 9/28) The depressing news that a once innovative and leading software company has been vanquished by Microsoft is hardly surprising. Palm, now called PalmSource, revolutionized the “personal digital assistant” by shedding features and focusing on simplicity and a good user experience. Now it lives to see the day that its own hardware unit, called…

  • Is Shrook the great, hoped-for answer to reading RSS feeds?

    (Updated 9/23) I’ve been pretty happy keeping up with Blog RSS feeds using the online Bloglines service. It works from within any browser, updates feeds pretty frequently, lets me publish my subscription list on the web and allows easy export of my list for backup or to pull into another reader. The interface is excellent,…

  • The future of Microsoft Office is not pretty

    You almost have to laugh when Microsoft unveils screen shots of its next update in the creaky Office franchise. Just wait, just wait one more year, and we’ll make Word really great. Really, really great. We promise. Based on the screen shots, it look more likely to cause head aches than upgrades. Somehow this mishmash…

  • Gruber’s in rare form on iTunes 5

    John Gruber’s on a hilarious, Entourage-inspired rant about the wacky new user interface Apple put on the latest version of iTunes. Make sure your mouth isn’t full when you read it.

  • Comparing Windows Vista and Mac OS X

    The ever-thoughtful Paul Thurrott has a typically thoughtful and nuanced comparison of Windows Vista Beta 1 and Mac OS X Tiger. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s a useful and informative essay.

  • Wasting away again in Panther-ita-ville

    Om Malik is switching back — from Mac OS X 10.4 aka Tiger to Mac OS X 10.3 aka Panther. Problems with overheating Powerbooks, Mail and VPNs. As I said back in April, you have to wait out the bugs, but it’s a huge bummer that this many months past launch, I’m still stuck in…

  • Motorola e815 – best of a sorry lot for Macs

    Verizon — just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Years ago in New York City, I subscribed with Verizon Wireless but when I moved back to Massachusetts, they had little to offer in terms of cool phones that played nice with Macs and their prices were substantially higher than everyone…