developer's blog

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view. -Obi-Wan Kenobi

Recently I received a letter from Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, telling my why he raised prices on my service and why he was making changes that would make Netflix less convenient for me to use.

UPDATE: Of course Netflix back pedaled on this whole thing. They had to do this considering the huge backlash from thousands of people and bloggers. But as of this update I still think that Reed doesn’t understand his business that well, and I’d be happy to try out the first competitor that comes along that does what Netflix can do. Certainly the streaming has been full of buffer under-runs of late and all the DVDs on my queue are marked as “Long Wait”. This is not a good user experience. It is just the only thing reasonably close to what people want.

FURTHER UPDATE: While I complain that Reed doesn’t understand his customer or business model I have to admit the guy is thinking straight when it comes to networking and net neutrality. He understands who the bad guys are. See All Things D.

I took some time to look at the videos of Metro/Windows 8 and also download the Developer Preview. Plenty of information is already available at the MSDN website. Probably the best of the presentations is the one given by Jensen Harris - 8 traits of great Metro style apps. Taking these 8 great traits point by point I’d like to give you my impressions as a long time iOS and Mac developer.

I’ve seen a few articles about upgrading to Lion but most leave out the most important steps. Two steps that you should really do before any software update. In fact even when or if you need to update to the latest Snow Leopard (10.6.8) you should do these first.

Recently I read one of these predictive articles that industry pundits love to make. Usually they are the kind of article you can reread in five years and have a good laugh. The headline read iPad casts shadow on MacBook and of course I got sucked into reading it. The article took the point of view of walking into an Apple Store, talking to some of the employees, and getting the impression that the MacBook Air, and in fact maybe the whole MacBook line was doomed.

Just read this and thought it worthy of a link:

Matt Gemmel talks about application design on the iPad. http://mattgemmell.com/2010/03/05/ipad-application-design

Read more for my comments:

How many rings does it take to get to the juicy voicemail prompt on my iPhone?

Finally found out how to set the delay before calls go to voicemail. AT&T Customer Service had no idea when I called a few weeks back but a random guy with the handle dmapr - a Cell guru - on their web based support forum knew the answer.