Month: January 2014

30 years later

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”

It must have taken a few weeks after that famous January 24th before my dad came home from an Apple resellers meeting with a big white box with a colorful logo.

mac_picasso_logo

The first Macintosh of my life was installed in our living room, with a plaid to protect the polished mahogany table. The mouse. The graphic UI. MacPaint. It was love at first sight.

Since then I have used a Mac pretty much every day. I cannot think of any other piece of technology that I have used so much and for so long, and that has had so much influence on my life.

I have used a lot of Macs.

At the beginning it was the 128K. Then the 512K. Then it was the Plus. The first hard disks (what will we ever do with 10Mb of storage?). And the internal ones, which as soon as summer arrived started overheating.

The Macintosh II had colors, the SE/30 was quick, the IIfx was sooo powerful! I worked for years doing graphic animation on a IIfx.

When we started working together, the first Mac Monica and I bought was a Quadra 700. And a LaserWriter 12/640 which lasted for almost 20 years.

There were some dark times. System 7. The Power Macintosh 8500. Some friends moved to Windows. I stubbornly stuck with my Mac. I even bought a 20 anniversary Macintosh.

Then the light again (Jobs was back) with the colored iMacs, the translucent G3 desktop. And the beautiful G4 Cube.

And all the laptops. Starting with the fantastic PowerBook 100, which was simply amazingly small. And then the sophisticated, black and cool Lombard and Pismo. And the first G4 Titanium. Can you imagine? Titanium!

And then all the Aluminium MacBooks, and the incredible light Air, and… it’s today.

Thanks for the ride Apple. And what a ride!

Multi language stream using Facebook Lists

I have been playing with lists on Facebook lately. Initially I considered them reading lists (a way to aggregate stuff from a selected several sources in the same page), and they are, but you can use them also as distribution lists, and this is much more interesting. Thanks to lists I think I have solved one of my long-standing problems on Facebook: multiple languages.

Facebook - Create List

I don’t have a huge number of  friends on Facebook, I have tried to keep my social graph consistent, and while I cannot say I know personally every single contact I have, I can say in most cases I’m connected to people I know of. Overall I’m pretty happy with the content I find on my Facebook page, my real problem is posting: considering that about 20% of my connections are not Italian, which language should I use?

My solution so far had always been posting everything in English (wrongly assuming that all my Italian contacts can read some basic English). This approach kinda works as long as I’m posting original content, but it did prevent me from re-posting all the interesting stuff I found in my stream which is in Italian. And with 80% of my contacts being Italian it’s a lot of stuff.

So I finally decided to go through all my contacts and manually create a list of my Italian friends, so now I can easily post in Italian for my Italian friends and in English for everyone else.

The UI to do this could be much easier, and probably Facebook could be doing this automagically, but still, it’s a nice step forward.