MobileUs

MobileMeApple’s MobileMe is such a shoddy, poorly implemented product that I’m long past hoping that any complaining about it will help the situation. It is what it is, and I make my own bed every year when I renew my subscription to it.

At the same time, I also feel that there is a nontrivial subset of the Macintosh population who, like me, are beholden to MobileMe, who rely on it and continue to renew annually in spite of Apple’s flagrant neglect. Some might say that we should vote with our wallets and leave the service altogether. But for whatever personal or professional reasons, MobileMe is the best solution we have. For those folks, I kind of think we owe it to one another to fill in the gaps that Apple leaves.

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Livraria da Vila

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

This astonishing example of retail architecture in Sao Paolo, Brazil — designed by local architect Isay Weinfeld — is probably the most visually stunning commercial space I’ve ever seen, and certainly the most impressive book selling environment. If it’s real, that is. The pictures make it seem ingenious, futuristic and ideal, which makes me wonder how (and whether) it really works in practice as a bookstore. Still, there’s no denying: the pictures are beautiful.

Livraria da Vila

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Reference Guide on Netflix’s Freedom & Responsibility Culture

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“This slide deck is our current best thinking about maximizing our likelihood of continued success.” A massive, ambitious and remarkably thoughtful corporate manifesto on the culture and business that Netflix is building. At one-hundred and twenty-eight slides, its main fault is perhaps that it’s too long to consume easily, but every slide seems worthwhile. This, to me, is further evidence that Netflix is quietly building one of the best brands of the next decade, and that it will soon become as readily referenced as Apple on lists of most admired businesses. Raise your hand if you wish your company would adopt these same principles. Via TechCrunch

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The Situation

The Situation

This picture was taken on Sunday. Compare it to this picture from January.

According to conventional pregnancy calculations, our first baby’s due date is today, 4 August 2009. Having managed the past nine months like a trooper, Laura is clearly ready for this to happen sooner rather than later. I’m in awe of how well she’s held up, how thoroughly and thoughtfully and what a physically generous a job she’s done giving life to this baby so far, and so I’m as anxious as she is for things to get going, for us to finally arrive at this destination we’ve been looking forward to for so long.

However, we’re told that the first baby almost always comes sometime after the official due date, so we probably won’t induce labor for at least a few days, and then preferably only through acupuncture, or foot massage, or eating eggplant parmigiana — we want to have this child without medical intervention, if we can. That means we’re biding our time patiently, nervously, excitedly, and trying to act like everything’s normal. As normal as we can manage knowing the world is going to change at some random hour in the next week or so.

If you get a chance, leave some encouraging thoughts for Laura here.

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NetNewsWire’s Stinkin’ Synching

RSS readers used to be amazing, wondrous portals into a novel, rich trove of original content. When that was the case, when they were still new and our expectations for them were relatively low, the leading Mac OS X application for aggregating them was NetNewsWire and I used it loyally.

But as RSS evolved and the sheer volume of feeds I collected became more and more of a management challenge, I began to sour on NetNewsWire. It may have started strong, but its development momentum lazily petered out, its gaps in functionality growing more egregious every six months or so. Today I regard it as a not particularly good application at all, and it sits on my virtual junk heap of software that just couldn’t — or wouldn’t — evolve along with its users’ needs. Especially with recent revisions, wherein its developer has apparently focused on cosmetic changes to the program at the expense of true improvements, I regard it as a squandered, mishandled opportunity.

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