Category: technology

This is an interesting idea.

I’ve been a big fan of Quicksilver for a long time, and recently I have found myself more and more going to the Search feature of the MacOS Help menu as a shortcut to other menu options. It perfectly makes sense to me. [via Brent Simmons]

[HUD] It’s a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”. This concept of “intent-driven interface” has been a primary theme of our work in the Unity shell, with dash search as a first class experience pioneered in Unity. Now we are bringing the same vision to the application, in a way which is completely compatible with existing applications and menus.

For the last couple of months I have kept Safari, which is my main browser, logged off Facebook. When I want to check what’s going on there (there’s many people I care for on Facebook, mostly family), I switch to Chrome. This is actually not very different from switching to the Facebook app when I’m on my iPhone or iPad. The reason I do this is to prevent Facebook from tracking my web surfing (would be nice if they would expose who they think I am as Google does).

In this set up what I find annoying are web applications that rely exclusively on Facebook for some features. For example, I would like to look into Wavii but they only support Facebook log-in (it’s a beta). Or in the case of Pinterest, the only way to find friends is, again, connecting my Facebook account.

To use these other apps I just switch to Chrome and do whatever I need with them, it’s not very different from switching from a browser window to another, I have plenty of RAM and I always run several browser anyway. But the curious result is that Chrome is becoming the ghetto of FB-only apps.

Wonder where this will end…

All other days I know everything.

I have been thinking about how I use/see different social networking tools these days.

I’m sharing here some observations.

Facebook

I have never been a huge fan of Facebook, but I do find it useful to keep up with a lot of relatives I would not hear from otherwise. I almost never post anything to Facebook (my tweets and Flickr photos are automatically pushed). From time to time I re-share something I like. I’m also managing a few pages, but that’s another story. I have 454 friends on Facebook, the vast majority is people I actually know somehow. I use a secondary browser or iPhone/iPad apps for Facebook, as I find slightly annoying being tracked around the web.

Google+

I liked Google+ a lot in the first weeks. That’s probably because there was very little people there, and conversations seemed to be meaningful. Then Robert Scoble published a circle which included my account, and suddenly I had more than 5000 followers. I like the concept of circles, and I liked the idea of keeping a circle of “Italians” to post stuff in Italian (it’s incredible how bad all social networks are when you speak more than one language and you have friends who only speak one of them), but with the large number of followers I gave up keeping my circles sorted. Today I have 6710 followers and 205 people in my circles: I add those I find interesting. I still check Google Plus a few times a day (using my regular browser… I just can’t live without letting Google know everything I do).

Twitter

I’m not very good with Twitter. I find it hard to post meaningful stuff in 140 characters. I follow 439 accounts (people, companies, queens, squirrels, etc). Have 1815 followers. Sometimes I retweet something, I use it to push links (this post is a good candidate), but I don’t check Twitter that often. I have a list named “friends” I try to follow a bit more, but they keep hiding the lists feature in every UI change and I guess I will give up on them soon.

LinkedIn

For a very long time I was super-serious about not accepting connections from people I didn’t actually know. Lately I have been a little less strict about the rule (I do accept connections from people I find interesting, even if I don’t know them). I still turn down Indian businessmen and Venezuelan PR agencies, and I’m always slightly amazed by the fact that people I know do connect with them. I don’t see what’s the point.  I have more than 500 connections on LinkedIn. From time to time it has been useful to find some information about people I knew, but it really never worked when trying to make contact with others.

Path

Like many others, recently I have been playing with Path. I like to think of it as the network of people I like. It’s too soon to say if it will last, but it’s promising and I like the design of the app. If you wake up and your dsl line is down, friends will think that you sleep for days.

Foursquare

After some pretty intense activity in the past, I’m not checking it anymore. Never accepted contacts from people I didn’t know relatively well (knowing where I am is kinda private).

Others

I also have Plancast, Friendfeed, Quora, Dopplr, Digg, Slideshare in my “social-networking-open-all-with-one-click” bookmark, but I can’t really say I find any use in my accounts on those networks.

 How about social networks and you?

Brent Simmons on comments:

I see my blog that way: it’s one place on the web, the place where I write. It’s one leaf on a tree. It doesn’t have to contain everything. These days there are so many ways and places to comment — so many other tools — that including comments here would be Emacs-like.

Just installed a fresh copy of WordPress, found a clean and simple template, wondering if this time I’m going to keep blogging for real.

 

Steve Jobs has had a huge impact on the whole world by influencing the life on millions. These are some of the moments I remember.

My parents’ company was an early Apple dealer, the first Apple ][ entered our home in 1979. I immediately started playing with it. I remember playing Breakout with paddles.

One or two years later (I must have been 10), my dad taught me some Basic programming. I remember writing a simple program which played a 4 frames animation of a stick-man playing basketball.

In the early 1984 the first Macintosh arrived. We unboxed it in our living room. And there was MacPaint. Life has never been the same: I didn’t need to write code anymore!

Not much later, a Mac in my bedroom was connected to an early modem. An acoustic coupler. I called a friend on the other side of Gorizia and we chatted in a terminal window.

In 1989 I incorporated my company: a tiny advertising and design agency. All because I loved using those tools.

It was going to MacWorld in San Francisco with my dad, in the late ’80, that I first met Dave Winer and Marc Canter who would later have huge influence on my work.

In those same years I met my wife when I was hired to teach her how to use Quark Xpress.

It was a time when Apple was almost a faith. There were constant endless discussions with everybody about why the Mac was better.

And then for some time the Mac was not cool. Many moved to Windows. Quite stubbornly I didn’t. (Steve was not at Apple at the time).

Actually we also had a NeXT Color Station in our office. We mostly used it to render 3D animations with RenderMan, back when Pixar was in the software business.

In order to put the NeXT on the same network with our Mac Quadra, I had to first figure out TCP/IP networking.

Then Steve got back to Apple, and Thinking Different started to be cool again.

I picked up the guitar again after many years and started studying music thanks to Garage Band.

There has been a Mac next to me for most of my life.

Thanks Steve.