mangochutney

the understatement: Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support

[Schandroidfreude]

Oh my! How bad iOS users have it in their closed environment. So so bad.[/Schandroidfreude]

(via Instapaper)

Richard Stallman is pretty much insane

This might be beating a dead horse, but it’s just too much fun. Ignoring the good the man did and the things he gave us, I’m going to go on the record here by saying that he’s a crazy, asocial and self-centered arse.

Read the story over at macgasm and if you have the time and need a good chuckle, read the entire document by Stallman, it’s hilarious.

(via Instapaper)

David Chartier on Shit work and technocentrism

chartier:

Zach Holman:

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.

I disagree with almost everything in this piece. It’s based entirely on one core assumption that is wrong in so many ways, I told Siri to set a timer for how long I can take to respond to this.

Holman hates managing Twitter lists, Google+ circles, email folders, and task priorities, and leans on a couple anecdotes and process-alergic indie contractor Merlin Mann to argue that no one actually gets any value out of doing these things. That’s fine for the people who don’t really get these things, or those who don’t work in an environment where they are ever necessary. But a lot of people do get value from these processes in a variety of ways, from simple entertainment, to maintaining privacy while sharing online (which Holman shrugs off), to staying on top of crazy work schedules and informed on current events. Aside from the inevitable edge case examples, developers aren’t spending all this time on features no one asked for.

One of Holman’s punching bags is Twitter lists. He doesn’t like them, doesn’t see the point, and doesn’t know anyone who thinks otherwise. I love and increasingly use Twitter lists, and I personally know a bunch of people who do as well. Stepping beyond my single anecdote, though, you don’t have to spend much time to find plenty of others who do as well. I also found great Twitter clients that do good things with lists and make them easy to use, and isn’t that half the challenge almost any work imaginable? If your tools suck, doing the work will likely suck.

I don’t need to trudge through every one of Holman’s “shit work” examples for you to get the picture. Just because you or like Merlin Mann doesn’t get or like a process doesn’t mean there’s no value in it, or that it’s “shit work.” Plus, leaning on a couple anecdotes to judge the big picture is just plain lazy. Writing these processes off because you don’t get them or don’t work in an environment where they can be useful is arrogant and ethnocentric.

I read the post by Mr. Holman and I came to a similar conclusion. If Mr. Holman doesn’t like those tools, fine, but writing them off because of it, is self-centered punditry that we can do without.
It’s black-and-white thinking of the highest (lowest?) order: “If a tools isn’t perfect from the get-go, the way I want it, it is shit altogether and nobody should even try to make it useful for them!”

To be clear: I don’t cherish the fact that I sometimes have to sit down and sort people into Twitter or Facebook lists. But the 15 minutes I spend doing this increase the value of both tools immensly for me. Same goes for RSS feeds; fairly regularly I weed through them, checking which ones are still worth reading and which aren’t.

Here are two examples:

• Twitter lists: While I don’t follow many people, I have a few key lists set-up. One of those is a list of friends and people whose opinion I value. Using this list in Tweetbot, I can quickly catch-up on recent happenings and discussions when I don’t want to go through 10 hours of my timeline.
  Mr. Holman might object by saying that this isn’t the way to use Twitter. Who in their right mind will spend time reading tweets so far back? Well, I sometimes do.
• Facebook’s new subscription feature: This is one of the most welcome additions to the service for me so far, because it allows me to select whose updates appear in my timeline. There’s a number of people I am friends with on Facebook, that I simply keep there to have a means of getting into contact without giving them my email address, but I don’t need to see every update of.

Jim Dalrymple's review of the new iPhone 4S

Great and to-the-point review of the new iPhone 4S, showcasing nicely how the improvements over the iPhone 4 will affect everyday usage.

If you only read one review of the device, make it this one.

David Chartier: Apple's fall from grace - BGR

chartier:

Zach Epstein:

But an interesting takeaway from yesterday’s announcement may simply be that Apple has fallen from grace in some respects. Apple is fallible, even if the 4S ends up being a success. A company that could do no wrong in recent history just, well, did wrong in the eyes of pundits who had previously viewed every Apple product announcement as a gift from the heavens.

Oh no, not the poor, never-wrong-in-a-million-years pundits! Say it ain’t so, BGR.

Related: can anyone offer a rational explanation as to why BGR is worth reading? Its rumors are consistently wrong and, in the last year or two, it’s stooped to publishing baseless pre-event bullshit for pageviews.

I think Apple doesn’t give a shit what most of the pundits think and why should they. The disconnect between what pundits value and what consumers value is growing bigger and bigger and thus the irrelevance of pundits who equate their own needs with those of the average consumer.

These people will undoubtedly slam a feature like ‘Find my Friends’ because they don’t understand it or have no real use for it, and because of that it has to be worthless to everybody else. John Welch nicely paraphrased it in this tweet.

As to BGR: It, Gizmodo, Engadget and the likes mostly exist so the kind of person I was talking about in the first paragraph can still feel relevant.

The Topolsky Spin — The Angry Drunk

Another handy law to invoke when discussing tech news and articles written by New Media Douchebags and wannabe pundits.

The other one, of course, is Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.