A video by Niklas Roy.

This is good, really good. Snarky and cynical, too, but that only makes it better.

Thanks to Jens Arne Männig for the link.

Listening to the current episode of Angry Mac Bastards this morning reminded me that I wanted to write a couple of sentences related this great article by Philip Elmer-Dewitt, in which he calls bullshit on some ”analysis“ done by Trip Chowdry.

Chowdry's—and feel free to replace him with any other so-called analyst—claim is that Apple's doomed because they've destroyed shareholder value as the stock fell from ~ $700 to ~ $400 (and we all know how that happened).

I'm going to share a piece of wisdom here:

It's not shareholder value that counts, it's stakeholder value that counts.
More specifically the value a company creates for its present and potential customers.

Because that's what brings in the money. And Apple's good at that.

Ever since the announcement of Google Reader's shutdown I started to notice something around the web, a trend of sorts.

Amid the discussions about successors to Google Reader and frankly idiotic proclamations about the demise of RSS, I saw that RSS buttons were given a more prominent placement on sites again. Often I was greeted by a popover or sidebar badge that not only explained how to get notified about new content through Twitter or email newsletters, but also told me that there's a working RSS feed if I want to subscribe. Sometimes I was told plainly that just because Google Reader was going the way of the dodo, RSS wasn't about to stop working, usually followed by links to articles explaining how to add RSS feeds to popular browsers or email applications. (I noticed similar messages and announcements on a smaller scale when FeedBurner started acting up a few months ago, and many sites started to jump ship.)

Marco Arment wrote a good—albeit a bit over the top—article about what RSS has to offer in a world where companies like Google, Facebook and increasingly Twitter are trying to lock users into their version of the web; an open, decentralised solution for spreading information that isn't owned or controlled by one person or company.

It seems as if Google's axing of Google Reader reminded website owners and users of this fact, and that's a good thing.

First off: I'm happy for the team behind Tumblr and I believe that it'll benefit the platform in the long run.

A little backstory for those who are interested in it:

When I first got serious about maintaining a personal site, I took a look at all the alternatives out there and decided to sign up with Tumblr. Previously I had used a site made with iWeb; it was nice, but not being able to add posts on my iOS devices got on my nerves quickly.

Tumblr was my home on the web for a long time, but at some point the limitations imposed on users became too much for me and I starting looking for alternatives. My search lead me to Squarespace, right when they transitioned from version 5 of their CMS to version 6.

At the time it was a good choice, because Squarespace offered;

1. more customisation options than Tumblr,
2. the promise of good iOS applications,
3. and a clear company-customer relationship.

Unfortunately Squarespace v6 has steadily gotten worse since I signed up. While I'm still their customer on paper, the changes that are made behind the scenes that directly impact the functionality and look of my site, without me having a say in them, speak a different language.

On this front, the only advantage I have over Tumblr is the lack of ads in my CMS (Squarepace's excellent support and dedication to uptime notwithstanding). Tumblr's iOS app is the best on the market right now, while Squarespace's app is slow, buggy, doesn't work well with v6, and often breaks things on the site when used.

And last but not least there's the fact that the only export format Squarespace offers today is Wordpress XML. The one thing I cannot stand when using paid services, are companies trying to lock me into their platform with my own content, when I'm already paying them.

At this point I'm on the verge of moving my site to a static site generation engine that's self-hosted on some dedicated server (most likely Pelican). It would be a lot of work, but it would also mean that I'd have complete control over the site and wouldn't have to deal with crappy CMSs (one can add posts by uploading Markdown-formatted text files), making the site leaner as an added bonus.

Tumblr's acquisition has me perking up my ears. I might be willing/able to cancel my plans of going full-on neckbeard with my site (see above) and go back to Tumblr, if two things happen:

1. Tumblr@Yahoo! introduced a true paid option that not only removes ads, but also makes it clear to them and to myself that I'm their customer, not advertisers or other third parties.
2. They reintroduce (in the paid plan if they want) simple options to import to, and export from Tumblr.

I just want an easy way to write articles and post funny pictures, knowing that I own my content and can take it anywhere I want, if I want to.

Just found this on Matthew Baron's blog.
I've always loved the simplicity of the Game of Thrones theme song and this performance underlines that fact.

(Oh and that Asian kid totally looks like the asian version of Joffrey with glasses on.)

Ich schreibe derzeit diverse wissenschaftliche Arbeiten und stoße dabei von Zeit zu Zeit zwangsläufig an die Grenzen meiner Formulierungsfähigkeiten. Da ich beim Frühstück kein Synonynmwörterbuch lese, sondern Artikel auf meinen Lieblingswebseiten, ist es praktisch einen guten Thesaurus zur Hand zu haben.

Wolfgang Reszels OpenThesaurus-Plugin für das OS X Lexikon sind hier ungeheuer nützlich, denn obwohl die Datenbasis schon etwas älter ist, ist es sehr praktisch die Inhalte von OpenThesaurus.de offline verfügbar zu haben. Wenn man aber belastbare Definitionen benötigt—und hier ist der Duden immer noch die Autorität—dann landet man früher oder später auf Duden Online. Die Firma Duden bietet zwar die meisten ihrer Nachschlagewerke als Software zum Download an, jedoch funktionieren diese ebenso gut wie quadratische Reifen am Auto.

Um mir die mühselige Aufgabe zu ersparen jedes mal auf duden.de das gesuchte Wort einzutippen, habe ich mit ein wenig Hilfe durch diesen Artikel einen Dienst für OS X gebastelt.

Die unten verlinkte Datei wird einfach im Ordner "*Benutzername*LibraryServices" abgelegt. Damit ist der Dienst systemweit verfügbar.
Genutzt wird der Dienst, indem man ein Wort markiert und dann im Kontextmenü (rechte Maustaste oder CTRL-Taste + linke Maustaste) unter Dienste selbigen auswählt.
Alternativ kann man auch den Menüpunkt "Dienste" im Menü mit dem Programmnamen nutzen oder ein Tastaturkürzel nutzen.

Anmerkungen:

1. Den Ordner "Library" kann man unter OS X Mountain Lion aufrufen indem man im Finder auf das Menü "Gehe zu" klickt und mit gedrückter ALT-Taste den entsprechenden Eintrag im Menü sichtbar macht.
2. Ein Tastaturkürzel kann man in den Systemeinstellungen unter "Tastatur » Tastaturkurzbefehle » Dienste” definieren. Mein Vorschlag ist "CTRL+ALT+CMD+D", da diese Kombination meines Wissens nach von keinem anderen Standardprogramm verwendet wird.

Bonus:
Wer häufiger englische Wörter nachschlagen darf und hier eine gute Quelle sucht, ist mit dem Longman English Dictionary Online gut bedient. Ein OS X Dienst, der genauso funktioniert wie der oben beschriebene kann hier heruntergeladen werden.

I stumbled across this introductory video for Facebook's news feed redesign on Fast Co.Design and something rubbed me the wrong way about it. Check it out for yourself.

Sure it's nicely done and it succinctly showcases the new design and how it'll benefit users, but something is missing. One quick glance at my own newsfeed reminded me what it was: the ads. The news feed in the video and in all of the promo materials I could find (doing a quick search online) had no advertisements in them. This is the first sentence you hear in the video:

So when we talk to people about how we can make their news feed better, one of the things that we heard over and over again was “My news feed is cluttered.“ […]

Yes, it is cluttered; with ads. This is the part that has been conveniently left out. A quick check of my own news feed revealed that four out of twenty entries were straightforward ads. I'm not even counting the ‘person xyz likes this company’ entries or sponsored posts.

I'm not complaining that there are ads on Facebook, after all Facebook is no charity and it's offering a service used by millions for the price of having our data sold to third parties so they can attempt to show us tailored ads.
What leaves a bitter aftertaste in my mouth is the way Facebook is sugarcoating these changes by omitting one of the most essential parts of the user experience. In the end ‘uncluttering’ the user's news feed from potentially irrelevant entries by your friends, will also mean that Facebook is going to have an easier time delivering ads in that same news feed that we users will have a harder time ignoring (or telling apart from actual entries by our friends).

The news feed redesign has received well-deserved praise from smart people and I have to concur, it looks great and might solve a couple of basic problems the current iteration suffers from, but not showing one of the main aspects of the Facebook experience is disingenuous to say the least.

Researchers have recently found out that human hearing beats the Fourier Uncertainty Principle, proving that the way music is compressed today leaves very much to be desired. Apparently the human ear has the ability hear the bits of sound the developers of compression codecs like mp3 had thought were safe to eliminate in order to save space.

If you're interested in good sound quality and the way you store the music that is precious to you, you should read the article linked below and understand that mp3 or any kind of lossy compression is not the way to go.

This is what game studios like EA would love to see: consumers valuing virtual things in virtual games the same way they value their real life equivalents, making us pay through the nose to ‘enjoy’ the games the produce.

I'm not buying it, literally.
I'm not saying that freemium games have no place in this world—there are after all games that make excellent use of this concept—but it should never be a sleazy method of gaming customers for their money just so they can play.
If you don't think that's what EA's doing with Real Racing 3, check out TouchArcade's review of the game.

I'd have gladly paid $ 20,– for this game, but the way it looks now, I won't be playing it at all. Oh and you should check out Tycho Brahe's commentary to the above comic.

iTunes 11 is not a good piece of software. In many places it has made organising your music/media collection a pain for anyone who owns more than a couple hundred of songs. Apple has been rightly criticised for improving an already mediocre product for the worse.

iTunes's purpose is to serve mainly as a gateway for the user's content, in this case letting you import CDs to put them on your iDevice(s) — and if you really like Apple, you can then push your ripped CDs to iTunes Match so they can live happily on a fluffy cloud with all the music you've bought from Apple directly.

With that in mind, here's something Apple did well in iTunes 11:
The user interface and workflow for importing CDs has actually been improved.
Apple has made it very easy to edit information for the entire CD as well as download and upload (!) CD information to Gracenote's CD-database.

But the biggest boon is the application asking how to encode the CD each time the 'Import CD' button is pressed. In previous versions you had to open the application preferences each time before importing a CD if you wanted to use a different encoder.

If you have a lot of CDs to import, being able to quickly choose whether to import a CD using the Apple Lossless encoder (for complex music, such as orchestral recordings) or the AAC encoder (for less complex music like pop) can be very helpful.