The Right Tool For The Right Job

An old boss of mine took the time to drill into everyone’s head that he expected us to use the right tool for the job. He may have tools he preferred using, and he would often poke fun at tools he didn’t use, but he had respect for the tool that got a job done the most efficiently. I was thinking about this ethos when I logged into my Twitter account with the command line client, ttyttter. Don’t get me wrong, I love ttytter… but I’ve stopped using it.

Almost all of my twittering (which is mostly reading the people I follow, to be honest) is done on my iPhone. If I’m at work, and need a short break, I fire up the phone. Same when I’m at home, or on the bus, or whatever. Even when sitting in front of a computer that arguably more capable in every way, I still use my phone. It’s always handy, and most importantly, it remembers my place wherever I am. I don’t have to scroll back and try to figure out what I’ve just read, or get ahead of a joke or comment stream because I started at the wrong place. It’s nice to have it all on one device.

I’ve also found that this applies to Facebook. The only thing I use the full web app for anymore is blocking stupid applications, which is simply faster with a mouse. Other than that, Facebook for me is primarily a iPhone app.

What else do people find they prefer the phone version of?

iTunes Ping Improvements

To be entirely honest, I’m not sure we need another social network. I’m almost sure we don’t need another, but that didn’t stop Apple from trying to fill the gap where MySpace has arguably failed. MySpace, when it was new and shiny and people still used it, was a great resource for local bands to get fans and groupies. They could release music, tour photos, and whatnot, and a lot of people used it for that function. However, it’s really gone the way of Friendster, and has fallen into disrepair. Possibly it’s because most people who “designed” sites on MySpace enabled auto-playing of horrible music, and had flashing crap all over their pages that made me think I was about to have a tonic–clonic seizure.

Regardless, Apple has decided to have a go at the social networking thing, and as they have few hundred million iTunes users in the world, they do have a pretty good start. However, they have to convince people to use the service. So, I’ve got a few suggestions:

1. Allow users to like imported music – that is, music they have ripped from their collection. It’s incredibly irritating to try to setup the “music I like” icons if the album you want isn’t on the store yet.
2. Allow users to mark albums they have imported as purchased in the iTunes Music Store. This is a partial fix for the previous complaint: I don’t want iTunes to recommend something to me for purchase that I’ve already imported and setup with correct metadata.
3. Allow users to “follow” any artist on the store – even if the artist doesn’t have a profile setup yet. They Might Be Giants don’t have a profile as of yet, but I’d like to be able to say “hey, I like these guys enough to follow album releases and whatever.” Can’t do it until they set it up, which is really frustrating.
4. Allow a finer-grained control of who can see what – I don’t want to show everyone my musical purchases, but I’m ok showing them the bands I like. I’d really like to have the ability to create groups to put people in, and be able to adjust privacy settings for each group.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ve got more good ideas for Apple to ignore in here somewhere.

Magic Mouse Lag

I’ve been having intermittent lag issues with my Magic Mouse recently – which really irks me, as I love the mouse as a whole. Reading a little on the support sites suggested looking into your wireless network settings. Some people claim that forcing your wireless network access points to broadcast on channel 11 will solve bluetooth interference issues.

I’ve made the change, and so far, so good. Tracking speed is back up, and everything feels a little snappier. Which is what I want. So, if you’re having problems with any bluetooth device, and you can change your wireless network settings, try forcing channel 11. It may help you.

Spam Account Cleanup

Foolishly, I left the “allow anyone to register” option on for this blog after I got akismet’s WordPress plugin working. Which means that every few days, I’d get spammers signing up to see if I’d given users better access than people who were just posting. I had 147 accounts, of which 27 were legitimate. This post is to announce that we’re back down to those 27, and signing up for accounts has been disabled. If I’ve accidentally deleted you account, sorry, but I didn’t recognize your username or your email address, and I’m tired, so I’ve likely made at least one mistake.

If you really feel like you need one, let me know by email, and I’ll hook you up.

Mozilla Skywriter

Mozilla’s Bespin text editor has changed name – it’s now “Mozilla Skywriter”. I miss some of the imagery that Bespin evoked, but hey, that’s progress, and at some point the Lucasfilm lawyers would have taken them to court. One of the cool things I learned about today is the ability to use Skywriter as a bookmarklet and make any textarea HTML field turn itself into a Skywriter field. It doesn’t allow for word/line wrap natively (which makes writing prose harder), but that should be coming. It also supports native HTML markup and syntax coloring in these bookmarklet’ed areas, which is pretty cool for the kind of work I do. Once it supports Perl, I’m set.

On the downside, it removes the ability for the OSX-native spellchecker to dive in and check my spelling. I’ve come to rely on that service for a lot of what I do – I can just right-click the misspelled word and OSX suggests the correction for me. Maybe someone will extend Skywriter this way? I’d offer, but I don’t exactly have free time these days.