Ged Carroll

Category: software | 軟件 | 소프트웨어 | ソフトウェア

Soon after I started writing this blog, web services came up as a serious challenger to software. The thing that swung the tide in software’s favour was the rise of the mobile app ecosystems.

Originally mobile apps solved a gnarly problem for smartphone companies. Web services took time to download and were awkward compared to native software.

Now we tend to have a hybrid model where the web holds authentication functionality and the underlying database for many applications to work. If you pick up a Nokia N900 today, while you can appreciate its beautiful design, the device is little more than a glowing brick. Such is the current symbiosis between between software apps and the web services that support them.

That symbiosis is very important, while on the one hand it makes my Yahoo! Finance and Accuweather apps very useful, it also presents security risks. Some of the trouble that dating app Grindr had with regards security was down to the programmers building on third party APIs and not understanding every part of the functionality.

This means that sometimes things that I have categorised as online services might fall into software and vice versa. In that respect what I put in this category takes on a largely arbitrary view of what is software.

The second thing about software is the individual choices as a decision making user, say a lot about us. I love to use Newsblur as an RSS reader as it fits my personal workflow. I know a lot of other people who prefer other readers that do largely the same job in a different way.

  • Mac software recommendations

    Why a list of Mac software recommendations and why me? I have been using Macs since my early cough, cough – ok let’s just say a long time. I bought my first Macs secondhand. The first one was a sit-up-and beg style Macintosh SE. This is in what nerds now call the Mac Classic style machine. This allowed me to proof club flyers on a computer rather than getting bromides made. The machine paid for itself in less than five months.

    Classic Mac Flickrdither

    I moved on to a PowerBook 165 running ClarisWorks and early Internet software.

    I managed to connect it to the net through my university and surf in 16 shades of grey. Some of the software I recommend has been maintained almost as long as I have been a Mac user which says something about the power of developer’s core ideas.

    At the time there wasn’t the Mac user community that there is now. But what users there were made up for their lack of numbers with fierce passion.

    When you bought a Mac you could tap into a real world community. My University user group met once a month and swapped software and tips.

    It was this rather than the iMac which made sure Apple had a user base by the time Steve Jobs returned. Mac related magazines filled in the knowledge gap and carefully curated demo software. It was through this experience that I learned about some of the apps here. I have stayed loyal to them over the decades and upgraded them as required.

    Nowadays there is a larger, but less passionate community. We tend to share web services rather than apps. We also tend to gather around the biggest rather than the best. I am a great believer in supporting independent development where the applications work better for me. This the lens that I view software through in making the recommendations below. Some of the recommendations come from people I trust like Mat Morrison. Where I have shared a piece of software I don’t use I’ve made this clear below.

    Despite the disappointing* product designs of the last two MacBook Pro revisions, I’ve been surprised as a few more friends move to the platform. They’ve sought advice myself and other friends. So I thought I’d consolidate the knowledge and put it out there.

    The process caused me to reflect on the software that I use and value. I like:

    • Products that work both online and offline, so Hemingway’s native app made it in rather than the Grammarly Chrome plug-in. Internet isn’t as ubiquitous as one would have you believe, God knows I love technology, but I am not blind to its faulty implementation
    • Products that seem to be mature and have gone through a couple of development cycles
    • Software has to fit me, rather than the other way around. I’ve built up behaviours over my time using computers and networks that seem to work for me. But we have different learning styles and habits, which was part of the reason why I’ve suggested choices that I don’t use but others like. Chances are one of them will work for you, but not all of them will
    • I prefer not to depend on web giants like Google, Facebook et al when it comes to software. Their ‘always in beta’ philosophy can make for inconsistent product experiences – look at how the Skype consumer platform UI and functionality has changed for the worse over time. ‘Always-in-beta’ also results in abrupt ‘sunsets’ – that’s tech speak for killed off. This happens for a few reasons. The bigger they get, the bigger a service has to be in order for it to be worthwhile supporting. Their product strategy is about you as a product rather than you as a user. This is true if its an application or an API. Their entry into a market can see them decimating small competition; once that has been completed if there isn’t megabucks they’ll leave just as fast. The RSS news service Google Reader is an exemplar for this process. I love new shiny things as much as the next nerd, but I also don’t want to invest too much into them if they can disappear just as quick

    Communications

    Communications used to be a simple process for me, as I used to run Adium.

    At one time Adium supported ICQ, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN. Adium still exists but many of the main instant messenger platforms don’t. These days things are a little more complicated for me.

    I run Apple’s Messages.app which allows me to use my iPhone’s SMS service and contact other Apple product users. It’s encrypted which is nice. It’s so simple, even my parents have managed to master it.

    I use Slack to keep in touch with a number of professional groups.
    My friends in China and Hong Kong use a mix of WhatsApp desktop app and WeChat’s desktop app.

    I don’t use it so much any more but LINE and Kakao Talk make a couple of good desktop apps too. The Economist and Wall Street Journal do good content on their LINE channels. Bloomberg and the UK agency Battenhall publish some good content on WhatsApp that are worth subscribing to.

    I use the consumer version of Skype to dial into conference call bridge numbers. I have used Skype for Business whist working at Unilever and Publicis – it wasn’t a positive experience.

    I know some friends that find Franz handy, it seems to support an eclectic collection of services; but not all the ones I need covered.

    Evernote alternatives

    Evernote wasn’t the innovator that many people think it is. DevonThink and Yojimbo have been longer in usage amongst a small but dedicated Mac user base.

    DevonThink – positions itself as document management. It also syncs across devices. It is an expansive and thorough piece of software, I’ve tried it. It’s great, but just wasn’t for me. Devon Technologies also have some interesting products that do web and system search. They have been handy for friends in recruitment headhunting research.

    Yojimbo – In my personal experience I found Yojimbo easier to use than DevonThink. Both are great tools, but its a question of what makes the most sense for you. I think you should try both and see which one works best for you.

    Graphics

    OmniGraffle – great for diagrams and flow charts. OMNI are long time Mac developers and always seem to get the most out of the machine.

    News

    I have been vocal in my love of Newsblur RSS reader on other occasions, so won’t go into how fantastic it is here. I use a native Mac app called ReadKit to interface with Newsblur, Pinboard and Buffer on my Mac. This was really handy when I was in China, as the internet operates differently there.

    ReadKit also has good integration with Buffer and Pinboard.in; services I use for social posting and bookmarking respectively. ReadKit isn’t perfect; in particular its persistent windows for posting to Buffer and Pinboard.in can annoy; but it works for me.

    Office software

    I use the default macOS applications Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts. app. They work flawlessly with iCloud to sync across iPhone, iPad and Macs. I have Google hosted, Microsoft Exchange and IMAP based accounts running on Mail.app side by side with no problems (so far).

    I use the home edition of Microsoft Office (for Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Going for the home edition is a fixed cost rather than an Office 365 subscription. I use Hemingway to handle the creative process of writing and provide some editorial input. If I am writing a presentation for myself then I will use Keynote instead of PowerPoint.

    I use OmniPlan as an equivalent to Microsoft Project.

    Music

    I still listen to ripped music on iTunes. Streaming services like Spotify often have a limited library of back catalogue music. Carefully curated playlists can see tracks disappear in an arbitrary manner when rights owners pull them from the streaming service. I listen to old DJ mixes, digitally bought music from BeatPort, iTunes and Bleep. I also rip CDs as often these are cheaper than their MP3 counterparts or haven’t made it into online music stores. iTunes also handles my podcasts and audio books. I have an iPod Classic that’s tricked-out with a 256GB SSD. I don’t run my phone’s battery down listening to music. I have been keeping track of my listening using last.fm’s app.

    Productivity

    BBEdit is a 25-year old piece of software for the Mac. It is a text editor but always comes in more handy than that descriptor implies. It’s one of them applications that I discovered on a Mac Format or MacWorld demo disk and then kept on using.

    I haven’t used it, but Duet looks like a handy way of bringing a secondary screen around with you, if you are working out of client offices.

    OmniFocus – list writing made better, but also handy for getting thoughts down on a presentation etc

    Parcel – comes in handy for keeping an eye on your package deliveries.

    PopChar X – I have been using PopChar since I was in college. I got it on a demo disc from MacFormat and immediately saw its benefit. Twenty years later I am still using the application.

    Screen grabs

    Papparazi is my go to screen grab tool, Skitch comes highly recommended from people I trust.

    Utilities

    Apple has got an annoying habit of taking ideas from great utilities and including them in future versions of macOS. This is great for users, but bad for Apple’s long-suffering developer community. It was independent developers who kept the faith during the dark times of the mid-1990s.

    coconutBattery – recommended by a friend who uses it for ensuring that apps aren’t drawing excessive power when you’re on a battery. Here’s looking at you Google Chrome!

    GraphicConvertor – yet another app that is over 20 years old and still supported. It manages to handle the most arcane graphics formats and allows you editing functions.

    Fetch and CyberDuck – Fetch and Transmit have been the go to Mac apps for FTP clients for a long time. Familiarity for me means that Fetch edges out Transmit. Both are great pieces of software that I am happy to recommend. It is also worthwhile considering CyberDuck which is open source. CyberDuck has also done work on supporting Amazon and Google storage which some of my friends find invaluable.

    Little Snitch – in the world of Mac users Little Snitch used to be famous for stopping Adobe software from phoning home. This was back before Creative Cloud when buying software was a major investment for agencies. So there was an interest in cracked user codes and careful monitoring of your network connection. Little Snitch is very useful these days as a really good firewall application.

    Stuffit Deluxe – yes you can do a lot in terminal but you’d be hard pushed to find a compression app that handles as many formats as Stuffit. I even opened up some 20 year old .sea archives from my time in college.

    TechTool – machine health monitoring that has been around since the dark days of the Mac. A great application to keep your Mac running the way you want it to.

    Terminal.app (default app) – macOS is built on a proper operating system NetBSD and the Mach micro-kernel. Terminal allows you to access the power of the operating system. But with great power comes great responsibility, I strongly recommend some additions for your bookshelf. O’Reilly Publishing has some great books that provide advice on how to use the terminal notably Learning Unix for OSX. David Pogue’s Missing Manual series for macOS are worthwhile as references as well.

  • Designing the Internet

    David D Clark was involved in the designing the internet as it moved into the commercial sphere. He rose to prominence in the 1980s through to the mid-1990s. In the talk at Google’s Mountain View campus he goes over much of the process. The things he says about network economics and security is particularly interesting.

    Outtakes

    In the 1970s it was about getting the protocols right, they needed to debug both the code and the specification that went alongside.

    1980s made hierarchies to make things scale as everything got bigger.

    1990s brought in the commercial internet, the specific goal of specifications was to shape industry structure. Protocol boundaries define industry structures.

    Quality of service development was compromised because it didn’t work economically for network providers. Specifically by concern about internet telephony. Standards adaptation was affected the internet service providers efforts to get value out of applications that run over the top (like Google).

    His discussions on designing the internet with politicians are particularly intriguing. There are still unanswered questions about societal and political accountability. There is a space for anonymous actions and an accountable internet would fall back to sovereign states including authoritarian regimes.

    Availability as well as integrity and cryptography (disclosure control) are important for security. The internet is insecure by design. Conscious decisions were taken to put risky actions into the internet. This gave us Flash, Acrobat and the Chrome browser.

    Embedding risky actions to provide attractive features for users, versus ensuring that these are only between people who you know. Trustworthiness is key.

    Protocol features affect industry power, adding more features may give power to the wrong people. The prime example of this is the work that the Chinese government have been doing with Huawei to try and define real ID, censorship and cyber sovereignty into next generation standards. More related content here.

  • Tencent annual staff meeting + more

    Notes From Tencent Annual Staff Meeting – China Channel – some interesting insights on how they are looking at the online world

    Key takeouts from the Tencent Annual Staff Meeting:

    • They made a big issue of treating customers honestly, which made me think that might not be in the culture up to now. There was also a call to focus on users rather than competitors
    • More on user focus – WeChat is a tool, not a platform. Only tools are the most friendly and meaningful to users. WeChat has been trying to do one thing, to treat every user as a friend
    • They wanted mini games become a platform for ordinary people to show their creativity. If this goal is not achieved, then they were happy if the mini games on the platform died
    • A recognition of the cognitive dissonance on social platforms where people show their best lives on Douyin and the unhealthy nature of it
    • Tencent launched the most stringent youth anti-addiction system in history. This is a long-term initiative that is very beneficial to the entire industry and a responsibility we must assume as an industry leader

    2018 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights – I wish that I’d this quality of data when I was cranking out press releases for Yahoo! Search. The review is as much about cultural change as it is about trends in smut. More on adult entertainment industry related content here.

    The Last Independent Mobile OS – Motherboard – interesting write-up on Sailfish and yet more reasons why you shouldn’t trust Google at all

    Pioneer’s woes echo those of earlier Japanese audio legends – Nikkei Asian Review – for someone like myself this is heartbreaking

    1967 Mustang meets Tesla: Aviar Motors all-electric muscle car – Electrek – this fits in with Aston Martin’s announcement last week about retro fitting vintage cars with electric automation

    Interesting video that’s as much an illustration of collective delusion that drives VC thinking in a very wasteful manner and where they are likely to be putting their focus moving forwards

    Nobel economist Paul Romer

  • SurfSafe + more things

    The SurfSafe Browser Extension Will Save You From Fake Photos | WIRED – Chrome only. I don’t know how effective it is. SurfSafe was developed alert people that their media diet is infected with misinformation, right when it happens. Something that Google and social platforms have struggled to do up to now. I would be very surprised if research into SurfSafe was not on the task lists of product managers throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.

    The New York Public Library is publishing books on Instagram. | FastCompany – reminds me of Brazilian bank Itaú and their use of Facebook canvas mobile content / ad format for children’s e-books. Its a beautiful idea and well worth looking at the project. I wonder if this is also aimed at young adults who probably don’t read as much as they should

    An Oral History of ‘GoldenEye 007’ on the N64 – MEL Magazine – probably the most iconic game for the Nintendo 64 platform. GoldenEye 007 managed to use the capability of the platform really well and was excellent at storytelling.

    Forrester: ‘WPP must dissolve its agency brands’ | The Drum – I agree that consolidation is required, but not convinced that Forrester have the blueprint. There is brand equity that equates to the agencies not the holding company. A classic example of this would be Ogilvy or J Walter Thompson. The effort would be better steered into how agencies can collaborate more easily and that is down to collaboration tools and a shared P&L – creating the right ingredients for collaboration. Up to now, WPP has tried to do this by dedicated businesses for clients like Red Fuse for Colgate-Palmolive. More related content here.

    I love the damned if you do it right, damned if you do it wrong introduction on this video

    One of the nicer campaigns that I have seen for consumer DNA testing services: FootballDNA

  • Zuckerberg to testify + more news

    UK parliament’s call for Zuckerberg to testify goes next level | TechCrunch – while taking action to get Zuckerberg to testify is a good thing. It is a pity that the UK didn’t show similar gumption when dealing with the Kraft Foods CEO with regards the Cadburys takeover. Would it be that hard for Zuckerberg to just avoid the UK all together?

    Xiaomi to sell smartphones in UK through Three | Technology | The Guardian – Huawei will be getting worried; especially as Xiaomi has a reputation for making high-specification innovative phones at a lower price point. Xiaomi has been providing good quality handsets for a while and this is the kind of springboard that they need into western markets

    ‘Forget the Facebook leak’: China is mining data directly from workers’ brains on an industrial scale | South China Morning Post – Workers outfitted in uniforms staff lines producing sophisticated equipment for telecommunication and other industrial sectors. But there’s one big difference – the workers wear caps to monitor their brainwaves, data that management then uses to adjust the pace of production and redesign workflows, according to the company. The company said it could increase the overall efficiency of the workers by manipulating the frequency and length of break times to reduce mental stress.

    WhatsApp Co-Founder Leaving Facebook’s Board Amid User Data Disputes – The New York Times – The announcement followed disagreements between Mr. Koum and Facebook’s leaders over the use of people’s data and the social network’s attempts to weaken encryption. Officially he just wants to relax and collect vintage Porsche 911’s with air-cooled engines. More related content here.

    McDonald’s admits app adoption rates are ‘pretty low’ but it will keep investing in mobile | The Drum – not terribly surprising when one thinks about macro trends in app usage and adoption

    How China Leapfrogged Ahead of the United States in the Fintech Race | PIIE – poor infrastructure, lack of access for MasterCard, Visa, Amex, Diners Club etc. Low value of Chinese note denominations

    Eavesdropping on the deep | MBARI – I found it very soothing to listen to with all the white noise

    NightWatch | Subscription – gutted that KGS no longer provide this newsletter it has been a great resource