If Steve Jobs Were Alive He’d Want Us To Stop Saying “If Steve Jobs Were Alive”
This morning I read yet another piece about Apple that said “If Steve Jobs were alive…”. We’ve seen this time and again since Jobs died but even more now in the wake of the release of the latest iPhone. It seems like every time someone has a complaint or even a compliment about something Apple has done they invoke the name of Steve Jobs to support their position.
Here are some examples:
- Apple Maps would not have been released in it’s current state if Steve Jobs were alive.
- If Steve Jobs were alive he’d approve of the size and weight of the iPhone 5.
- If Steve Jobs were alive he’d fire Tim Cook.
- If Steve Jobs were alive today he’d never allow the iPad Mini to be produced.
The last example not withstanding (as of this writing we don’t yet know if the iPad Mini is fact or fiction) no one can say for sure what Steve Jobs would be up to if he were alive. What would he approve of? What would he disapprove of? What would he allow or not allow Apple to create? Produce? Sell? Who knows? Nobody.
So can we just stop saying this already?
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Goodbye, Twitter Tools
I had fallen behind in installing software updates on this blog since I hadn’t posted for a while. (Too many other things going on in my life that I had to deal with so the blog got put on the back burner.) So when I logged in today I wasn’t surprised to see that several plugins needed to be updated. One of them in particular really bothered me.
I have been using Twitter Tools to tweet my new posts for a long time. One of the features I liked in Twitter Tools was the additional plugins made for it. For example it had a YOURLs plugin that would use my YOURLs installation to supply short URLs for each tweet.
But the update I installed today changed everything. Not only does the YOURLs plugin no longer work but Twitter Tools requires another plugin, Social, to be installed to make the main plugin work. Though I didn’t like this requirement I installed it anyway so I could see how it worked. If things went fine I’d just remove the plugin.
Things didn’t go fine. For one thing there was a problem with Social. When I clicked the link to add my Twitter account it redirected me to a dead link on my own blog. I had to manually play with the URL to point to the proper page to allow Social to access Twitter. Then, once I’d set up the account, it didn’t tweet my next blog post.
The final piece to the puzzle was the 2,021 comment spams that came within an hour of setting things up. I will not say that Twitter Tools or Social are responsible but out of the 200 I’ve managed to moderate already all of them are associated with the tweets imported by Twitter Tools. It certainly seems suspicious.
Needless to say Twitter Tools and any related plugins are no longer welcome on any of my blogs. Time for me to investigate other solutions.
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More Bugs In Podcasts App For iOS
The Podcasts app for Apple’s iOS really stinks. Many of the bugs in the app are well known and documented on other websites and blogs but there’s one I came across today that I hadn’t seen anywhere else.
I was listening to a podcast on my way into work. When I got to the office I paused the podcast and removed the earbuds so I could put them away. A little while later I got a call. When I ended the call the podcast unpaused. Since the earbuds were no longer in the audio played over the speaker for all to hear. I’m not embarrassed about what I listen to but it was an office disruption that didn’t have to happen.
Another issue I ran into this morning was that the app is not deleting podcasts after they have been marked as read. I had to manually delete them in order to install app updates.
These are just a couple of the issues with this app. I’ve run into several others (but not today). I wish they’d iron them out and make the app a bit more polished because right now the user experience on it really stinks (which is contrary to Apple’s usual MO).
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A Writing Experiment
I’ve written before about my desire to write more often. Unfortunately despite my efforts I have still not been able to manage writing as often as I’d like. A new approach is definitely in order.
Starting tonight I’ll be working on an experiment. Every work night I’ll spend a half hour with a text editor attempting to write. I may not actually end up writing something and what I write I may not necesarily publish anywhere. But this is not about actually publishing. It’s about getting back into the act of writing.
With any luck this will help get my writing juices flowing. If so you’ll see the results here. If not you’ll probably also see the results here.
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MLB Standings Plugin Updated
When I first created the MLB Standings plugin I had assumed that most blogs to use it would be fan blogs of specific baseball teams. The plugin shows the standings of only one division because such sites will want to display the standings of the division that their team is part of. Another thing such blogs would probably like is the option to highlight their team in their division’s standings but I was in a rush to deliver version 1.0 and didn’t have the time to add that option on the initial release. I had resolved to add this feature in version 1.1 of the plugin but a funny thing happened on the way to 1.1.
While working on this one feature I actually ended up adding a whole lot more. Most of them are under the hood but some of them are visible. For example the menu to choose a team to highlight uses AJAX to only show the teams in the division selected in the Division menu. Implementing the Team menu in this way removes the possibility that a user may accidentally choose a team from a division that isn’t going to be displayed.
While discussing this with a couple of colleagues some under the hood ideas came out. For example using the WP_http protocol to download the XML file. Though this change is transparent to the user it removes the dependency on having cURL on the server end. Also switching to the WP Transients API instead of a custom function to determine when to update the XML. The third idea was to save the XML to the database instead of to a directory on the server. This eliminates the dependency on the server’s file system as well as making file permission issues a thing of the past.
All this and a rewritten settings page that uses the WordPress settings API better, a link to the settings on the Plugins page and some refactoring to eliminate unnecessary settings & variables and you can see why this is much more than a 1.1 version.
So I now present MLB Standings 2.0. Check out the MLB Standings page for more details and download links. This is an almost complete rewrite of the plugin so if you tried it before and it didn’t quite work for you please try it again.
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