Adobe has posted a free public beta version of Photshop CS6 to Adobe Labs. There are huge improvements to almost everything, but one feature in particular is worth the entire eventual upgrade price alone:
Layer search. Finally. This is going to make my life so much easier.
Alex MacCaw (a member of my new Svbtle writing network), has published a great article on the future of Rails:
So what’s the future for Rails? If you talk to the likes of 37Signals and GitHub, it’s pjax and server side rendering. This involves fetching a partial of HTML from the server with Ajax, updating the page and changing the URL with HTML5 pushState. The advantages of this approach are clear. It’s simple, fits in well with the existing methodology and doesn’t require using much JavaScript.
I think this makes sense for web sites, but not web applications.
I think it’s hard for us, as technology people who use the web every day, to understand how big of an effect the click-wait model has on our thinking as we explore and use stuff on the internet. The future is absolutely client side. When I click on something, the interface should react instantly. There is no reason to talk to...
OMGPOP has been acquired by Zynga. Peter Kafka at All Things D:
The price: $180 million, plus another $30 million or so in employee retention payments […]
Zynga will get a New York-based team of about 40 people, and a series of games that OMGPOP has produced over the past few years. But the obvious target here is Draw Something, a sort-of social Pictionary game played on iPhones and Android handsets.
Draw Something was first launched on OMGPOP’s website five years ago. It remained there, as a relatively obscure game, without much usage. Six weeks ago, it was ported to iOS. Today, the company is worth $180 million.
In 1997, when asked what he would do with Apple, Michael Dell famously exclaimed: “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Just fifteen years later, I am pleased to report that Apple is finally giving the money back to the shareholders.
Apple’s market cap on the day of Dell’s request was $2.733 billion. This morning, Apple announced a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share. Given 932 million shares, the total quarterly payment by Apple to investors will be $2.47 billion. About four months after the dividend takes effect, Apple will have given all of the money back to the shareholders.
Michael Dell should be satisfied.
Thanks to Evan Solomon for making this discovery.
When I was growing up, AIM was the main system I used for communication over the web. I used it every day. In fact, the first time I ever experienced mobile data was through AIM on a never released beta product called the AOL Mobile Communicator, a small black box that was manufactured by a little-known startup called Research in Motion. Though I only had it for six months, that little device changed my life; it was the first time I can remember using a product that gave me a glimpse of the future.
It’s strange that AOL was never able to find a happy place for AIM. As the most popular instant messaging system in the United States for many years, AIM was a massive enterprise. But it was never really a product; no matter how hard AOL tried, AIM has always seemed to gravitate toward being something that is extremely difficult to monetize: a protocol. AOL tried to make it a social network...
It has been popularly reported that Apple has more than $100 billion in cash. The amount is actually $138 billion, and the number doesn’t describe cash, but instead the value of assets. Apple actually only has about $10 billion in cash. The rest is expected to be placed, for varying lengths of time, in investments. To understand what this means, we need to define a couple of terms.
When a company makes an investment with its cash reserve, it usually buys what are called marketable securities. Marketable securities are usually broken up into three categories: cash equivalents, short term marketable securities, and long term marketable securities. (A security is a thing that represents ownership of something with value. A share of a company sold on the stock market is a security, and so is a bond. The fact that a security is “marketable” just means that it can be put onto a market, like...
Before Mountain Lion Developer Preview 2, Mac apps could access your contacts at any time, without asking for permission. You wouldn’t even know it was happening. This policy is the same as the one on iOS, which recently got a lot of attention. Today’s release of DP 2 removes that ability by default. When an app attempts to access contacts for the first time, the following dialog is displayed:
There is also a new area of System Preferences, under Privacy, for managing apps that have contacts access permissions:
This functionality is clearly in response to the iOS contacts issues of the past few months. It’s good to see Apple taking this seriously.
This acquisition does not make much sense to me. As a user of Tracker, I think this is terrible news. Congratulations to the founders of Pivotal, though.
While writing the documentation for The Markdown Mark, I created a very simple framework to help standardize the process of defining a brand. It’s fairly rudimentary, and it currently only focuses on defining the visual brand, but it integrates lessons I have learned in the past while working with companies that didn’t have clear brand documents.
From my description at the Github repository:
The Open Brand is a framework for clearly and properly defining a brand (currently, the visual brand). It aims to help open source projects, companies, and people develop brand definitions that can be used properly, developed quickly, and referenced consistently.
Because of its structure, the Open Brand can be used by stakeholders possessing any level of design experience.
Pixel-fitted PNGs You should always include pixel-fitted PNGs at every common or useful size to prevent...
Get this app. Worth every penny.
I’m working on a longer review that will come soon.