March 9, 2012
Today I noticed what is apparently a bug in Lion. PDFs open in Preview in Continuous Scroll mode by default, but I prefer to use Single Page mode. Since it was getting a bit tedious switching to that mode every time using the menu item, I created custom shortcuts for the View modes: Continuous Scroll (⌃⌘1), Single Page (⌃⌘2) and Two Pages (⌃⌘3).
To my surprise, Preview didn’t seem to recognize these custom shortcuts. The menu items didn’t show them and pressing them didn’t do anything. After a bit of googling I came across this thread on Apple Discussions. Apparently, this bug affects all sandboxed apps, like Preview and TextEdit, possibly others. Defining the custom shortcuts for All Applications seems to work, but that’s prone to create conflicts with existing shortcuts.
This is yet another example of how Lion, so far, has been a step back in terms of reliability, stability and polish. With every new major OS X release I’ve come to expect that some of the new features will be a bit buggy. This usually gets ironed out by 10.x.2 or 10.x.3 so all you really have to do is skip the .0 and .1 releases. But having basic functionality that has been working for years break with a new OS release and still be broken in 10.x.3 is simply unacceptable and worrying.
March 7, 2012
Get A Free iPad 3
I’m just kidding, of course. No free iPad 3 to be had here. I just wanted to see how much traffic this highly SEO’d post title might get me. Maybe I’ll slap some Adsense on here later.
Now be a good fanboy (or -girl) and go buy the new iPad, just like everybody else.
Update: The Onion had a similar idea.
via DF
March 6, 2012
Samsung Galaxy Note on track to sell 10 million units this year ◆
As many critics, I was sceptical when the Galaxy Note was introduced. Too big for a phone, too small for a tablet. But the Note seems to be selling well, even the German Amazon product page has over 250 mostly 5-star reviews.
Goes to show that just because it’s not an iPhone or iPad, there can still be a sizeable number of people who are going to like it.
March 5, 2012
Mal’s pistol now available, shipping end of March
Image © Quantum Mechanics, Inc.
So, as you can clearly see, ordering the screen-accurate Mal’s pistol was more or less inevitable. It’ll be interesting to see if it passes customs without problems or if I’ll be woken up by the German equivalent of a SWAT team at 6:00 in the morning. Times like these, everything is possible.
March 4, 2012
Frequent, Intense Mature and Suggestive Themes ◆
Excellent suggestion from Marco Arment on how Apple could improve how they handle apps that let the user access the “unfiltered internet”.
March 3, 2012
Drop that pen and put your hands above your head! ◆
Some great advice for tech bloggers for “slow news days”.
March 2, 2012
Making a living as an app developer ◆
The economics detailed in this article are quite sobering. But I think the post’s overall premise of developing just one app and completely relying on that for your income isn’t realistic. Ideally, you need to have more than one app and, if the model works for your app(s), use in-app purchases for additional income.
via Macgasm
I’m as much of a fan of instant gratification as the next person. Buying things is so easy these days, it’s almost too easy. Just a couple of clicks or taps, and your ebook, app or game instantly downloads to your computer or device or your package gets sent to you within 1-2 days.
As fun as it is, this way of buying things has a serious downside: Over the years I’ve bought a lot of things I don’t really need. At the time each and every product seemed like exactly the thing I needed and I was 100% sure it would improve my life in some way. But since purchasing most products is just a click away™, I hardly ever spent much time thinking about if I really, truly needed the product. Instead of weighing the pros and cons of a purchase, I just clicked “Buy” and was done.
There’s a saying that self-awareness is the first step to self-improvement. I realized that I had developed a habit of impulse buying, and I wanted to regain at least some control over what and how much I buy. Here’s how I tricked myself into not buying things the moment I feel the urge to do so.
Whenever I come across something that I want, instead of clicking the Buy or Add to Cart button, I add a bookmark to the product page to Yojimbo and tag it with shopping. I use the Bookmark in Yojimbo bookmarklet which pops up a window where I can enter tags for the bookmark. In addition to the shopping tag I usually add some more tags to make it easier to find the item again later. Once I’ve bookmarked the product in Yojimbo, I can safely forget about it, knowing it’s safely stored in Yojimbo and I can return to it anytime I want.
What this little trick has achieved is fairly amazing. I buy a lot less stuff. Right now I have 280 items in Yojimbo tagged shopping and the oldest one is from October 2009. If I had bought all that stuff instead of bookmarking it, I would have spent a ton of money and later realized that I didn’t really need many (or even most) of those items.
