SimpleText for Mac client
I have just posted a new version of the SimpleText for Mac client. It runs as a status menu item, and allows you to sync a directory of text files on your Mac to the SimpleText.ws web service. This version brings in a number of changes:
- Added User’s Guide
- Added AppleScript to sync and chnage user account.
- Changed No longer uses MacFuse, stores synced files on local filesystem.
- Changed Local filesystem layout supports multiple user accounts, so full resync no longer needed when changing accounts.
To get the new version run SimpleText for Mac’s build in software update, or download it directly from this link download link.
So I bought [a new iMac], but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings. I felt the way I’d feel buying something made in a country with a bad human rights record. That was new. In the past when I bought things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure. Oh boy! They make such great stuff. This time it felt like a Faustian bargain. They make such great stuff, but they’re such assholes. Do I really want to support this company?
— Paul Graham: Apple’s Mistake (via marco)
Notes From Roger Martin on Design Thinking
Notes [not complete quotes or anything] from Martin’s talk at Rotman’s:
[Spends the first 8 minutes thanking the people who helped him with the book.]
Competitive advantage is going to come from companies that can advance knowledge faster than their competitors.
From mysteries to heuristic algorithms; which means inventing the future
There’s analytical thinking, and then there’s intuitive thinking.
Companies will probably go bankrupt between their intuitive leaps. So they need both intuitive and analytical thinking capabilities.
The book is about how companies can mix the two types of thinking.
[He gives us a long introduction to Claudia Kotchka, former VP, Innovation, Design and Strategy, Procter & Gamble.]
[Dr Steven Scherer is introduced. Again, long.]
Martin: You pay attention to things other people didn’t. What did you see?
Claudia: Understood how designers think. New mantra of customer is boss. DT furthered empathy with consumers.
Roger: Steven’s accomplishments come from everything others have thrown away.
Steven: They kept throwing outlier data away. You need to ask the proper questions to come to a solution.
Roger: We can get into traps just by going by models. Go against convention.
Claudia: In order to succeed you need to be delusional. Being delusional, a rebel can be your motivation. Start proving success, bring people along to accept it and embrace it.
Steven: Intuition- the ability to view a problem from a dimensional framework and then attack it. Education and experience prepares you, but intuition takes you there.
…
There are systems designed to consistency or validity. Many systems are designed for consistency.
By studying outlier data, you must be studying data that means something.
We have to figure out a way to explain something.
The higher education system teaches you inductive and deductive logic, but not abductive logic.
…
Roger: What teaches you to go beyond the way you were taught?
Steven: Expose yourself to experiences. Environment. My dad threw blocks at me and said “build something”. Push observations and ideas into practical applications.
Have a system to help you identify what your strengths and skills are. Early. Undergrad educations should be kept very broad.
…
One of the biggest problems for organizations is that the reliability oriented people and the validity oriented people often don’t get along with each other.
…
Audience: How did you navigate through the system at P&G as a rebel?
Claudia: People see barriers thy don’t exist. Learn the language of the reliability folk.your goals are the same, how you get there might be different. Find different ways to make things happen.
Audience: What do you do about problems that go beyond your system (industry problems, government or environment)?
Claudia: Find common ground. Walmart and p&g are competitors, but they still work together.
Audience: What do you think about design as a group activity?
Claudia: At P&G they have designers and design thinking groups working together on the same problem and not trying to silo things. We want the design skills brought to the table in a design thinking process.
Audience: How does one persuade a group to take on design thinking in a high risk environment?
Martin: “Prove it” gives you toning and refining of existing ideas.
Panel: Start using design thinking in your current sphere of influence then move up from there. Nobody ever sees something “new” as low risk. Design thinking is being applied more in the service business more than anywhere else.
The Death of The Boring Blog Post? →
Let’s face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one…
Google Is Making Their Own Netbooks
In this video about how Chromium OS will boot quickly (at around 2:35), the speaker mentions “we’re also using solid state storage devices… not hard disk drives” and how that will let Google Chrome OS load much faster.
My question is how would Google know what sort of hard drives we’ll be using, unless they are making their own computers?
The speaker also mentions how our “netbooks will go to sleep… and wake up in under a second”. It looks like we’ll all be buying Google Chromium OS netbooks in a few months.
Update: Robert Scoble - “Ahh, now we learn what I meant by “locked down.” You will only be able to run Google’s Chrome OS on new machines made for it.” - http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/5865136064
YouTube Direct →
I like this a lot. It opened up my eyes to something as well.
New media wasn’t changing old media. As of now new media was there as something old media was trying to respond to. They tried to offer content for free in different ways, they tried to be more rich, they tried being more social. But they were trying to impose themselves on new media.
I think YouTube Direct reverses that and in a way unlike a lot of others, is a system to inject itself into old media, and have direct change on it.
I sort of picture old media being this person who is trying to protect themselves from a virus by injecting themselves with what they think is a vaccine, but it’s futile and they get more sick everyday. But eventually that fails, and the virus becomes strong enough that it takes over the person’s entire body. But they don’t feel sick anymore, they in fact feel stronger than ever. Because they acted resistively trying to protect themselves from the virus (even if that meant being exposed to a little bit of it) rather than embrase the virus and let it take over their bodies completely.
A new Retweet Button for Posterous?
Yes yes, this matters very little it’s just a retweet button (it does look nice though), but what I really wanted to point out was the new Flickr embed that Posterous now has.
Just by including a URL to a Flickr photo set or tag, you get an automatically generated gallery on your Posterous gallery. I wonder if the gallery continues to update as you add more images to your flickr account.
Taking something that has been around for a long time and adding some innovation to the mix to make it interesting and relevant in a new way. I like it!
http://blog.posterous.com/mini-feature-auto-embed-flickr-sets-and-tags
Believe nothing…
A nice quote from Buddha mounted on the wall at Buddha Pie pizzeria.
What you see from on top of the tallest tower in the world.
