amdavidson

The iPad's Automatic Transmission

posted on 2010-01-30 - amd.im/YesO

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That's where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn't need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

That's not to say there aren't trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they're more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it'll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.

via daringfireball.net

This seems exactly right to me.

Squaw Day

posted on 2010-01-30 - amd.im/ONdT

Snowy but nice day at Squaw Valley.

The Apple iPad

posted on 2010-01-27 - amd.im/2AOD

Well, the secret is out!

I’ve had to keep my mouth shut for well over a year, but the product is finally announced. It’s been an exciting road, lot of travel-time, a lot of long hours (and more still to come). Let me know what you guys think.

Booted!

posted on 2010-01-23 - amd.im/orT3

SweetCron is Dead or Why Lifestreaming isn't for me

posted on 2010-01-21 - amd.im/BB1C

For some time, I have had a sweetcron install setup as a lifestream at amdavidson.me. It has worked out alright, for the most part, but I think it’s time to put it out to pasture.

At first glance, lifestreaming seemed like a neat idea. One place to aggregate all of the content that I generate around the web. A “one stop shop” to see everything that I had been up to. It worked out exactly as it was intended. SweetCron faithfully sat in the background, pulling in RSS feeds from around the web and publishing them to my site.

Unfortunately, SweetCron is no longer actively developed. Yong Fook, who created the software, has open sourced it but there seems to be no real movement towards continuing it’s growth. He posted his reasons for this on his blog.

He makes a few very valid points in that post. The one that is most interesting to me is the impersonal nature of the lifestream. I think that really nails one of the aspects of the lifestream that never satisfied me. I don’t much interaction on any of my sites just a few views and even fewer comments. But the SweetCron site took it to another level, it removed my interaction from the site. There was (probably literally) no one involved.

The SweetCron site is still up and will be for now, but I won’t pay much attention to it. Instead I’ve been toying with a tumblelog for storing the things I find interesting around the web. For content that I create: check back here.

nook

posted on 2010-01-19 - amd.im/Jdk5

I got my Barnes & Noble nook in the mail last night (finally…). Here are my first impressions.

Pros:

• Ergonomics are much better than my Sony Reader.
• Page turn speeds not nearly as bad as early reviews said (running v1.1.1 software).
• Sony Reader ebooks were easy to side-load

Cons:

• User interface is clumsy and awkward.
• Heavier in the hand than expected (but not overly heavy).

Moving Day (Part 2)

posted on 2010-01-19 - amd.im/X7au

This site is no longer the home of AMDavidson.com…

I am keeping it around for now, and may continue to use it as a tumblelog, but in all likelihood the site will remain dormant.

For the latest content, head directly to amdavidson.com. If you want to know my reasons for switching a second time in less than a week take a look here.

Rob Glaser on the iPod in 2003

posted on 2010-01-15 - amd.im/4SGh

It's absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market.

Rob Glaser, CEO RealNetworks (via Daring Fireball)

Official Google Blog A new approach to China

posted on 2010-01-13 - amd.im/KTGo

Google reconsidered their stance on China's Great Firewall and decided to un-censor their search results.

I applaud Google on doing the right thing here, even if it does end up meaning losing a valuable marketplace.

However, this means there's going to be yet another thing I need VPN access for when in China.

Moving Day

posted on 2010-01-12 - amd.im/WMYz

It’s moving day. Not in the literal sense, perhaps, but today my blog has moved over to Tumblr.

I’ve had my run at coding my own blog software, but it just became too cumbersome and limiting. There are so many features on other platforms that I could just never match up to.

So off to Tumblr I go. I now have access to a pretty solid iPhone posting app, a bookmarklet that will allow me to post things I found around the web, and solid theming that allowed me to copy the theme from amdavidson.me to Tumblr with no trouble at all.

The only thing that I lost in the process was the 10 or so comments that people had left on my posts over the years. I don’t think there’s a way that I can inject them into Disqus, but if I find a good way I will.

Feel free to check out the old content (it’s all there), and hopefully check back for new content more regularly now that I have much better facilities for posting varied content types.