Apple ← A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Giving up for now on Google Two Factor Auth 2

Nov

2013

I love the idea of two factor auth, and I think Google has generally done a good job on it, they have certainly tried to make it easy to use . But the collision of iOS/OSX and Google TFA is just killing me. The problem probably lies in the Apple products — when you configure ...

installed both ios7 and osx mavericks last night

Jun

2013

ios7 first impressions: the mail app i think i will like, seems a little easier to dispose of messages, and viewing messages is a lot cleaner i never used game center, mostly because i don’t care about the feature, but a little bit because it was so horribly ugly. nice to see that fixed sometimes ...

Today’s reasons why I want to throw Win8 in the trash

Apr

2013

Everyone has written about forcing the stupid touchscreen down our throats, that annoys the heck out of me too. But maybe I can get used to it. But moving beyond that, I just want to use a damn printer. There is nothing about printers on the home screen. When you type in “printers” it says ...

My Macbook Pro refused to boot this morning…

Jun

2012

…the harddisk was full and that caused all kinds of hell to break loose. But really it was a sign — “Macbook Pro with Retina Display”:http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/ — ordered. J is laughing at me — $200 for the extra 8G of ram, so $400 imputed price for 16G, and J just bought 16G for $80. I ...

When you are 10x behind in mobile apps, your tools probably ought to be 10x better

Apr

2012

As part of “my Windows Phone trial”:http://theludwigs.com/2012/04/switching-to-the-nokia-lumia-900-for-a-while/, I am going to dig into the developer tools. I’ve written a little throwaway iOS app, and i’ve written one with “Parse”:https://parse.com/ (super easy!). So I’d like to understand the experience of writing a Windows Phone app. “App Hub”:http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started seems to be the starting place. Like a lot ...

To heck with AppleTV, give me an Apple Microwave

Apr

2012

29 buttons on the front panel and almost none of them do what I want. The designers have optimized for packaged convenience foods and I never eat those, but cooking those is the default on the damn thing. All I want to do is defrost frozen foods and reheat leftovers. And 90% of the time ...

Friday afternoon musing about TV — VCOs, Airplay, Cameras

Mar

2012

Gearing up for lots of basketball watching over the next month, OSU is on tonight, Go Bucks, humiliate the Boilermakers. I know he is long retired but that combover that Gene Keady sported for years still annoys me and Purdue must pay for it. Anyway, random TV thoughts: * Why are there no virtual cable ...

Why do they call it AppleTV? Where’s the TV part?

Mar

2012

I mean, you can’t really watch TV on it. Live sports like NFL football or NCAA football or all the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament action? No. That’s at least 50% of the reason we have TV sets and cable service at our house. NHL doesn’t cut it. The most popular prime time shows like American ...

MSFT’s biggest miss — another facet of MSFT’s stagnation

Feb

2012

“Microsoft’s biggest miss”:http://minimalmac.com/post/17758177061/microsofts-biggest-miss is a nice discussion of another issue for the company, the slippage in relevance of Office. I can’t speak to the whole market, but my document composition has moved almost entirely to vehicles like Evernote, Dropbox-hosted apps, Google Docs, and draft emails because the absolute #1 feature I need is document availability ...

MSFT and the decline of the PC hardware ecosystem

Feb

2012

In the late 80s, IBM attempted to reassert control over the PC hardware platform with the introduction of the PS/2 and its proprietary “MicroChannel”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture architecture. The cloners fought back, customers voted with their feet, the PS/2 initiative failed, and the era of open PC hardware continued and flourished. This was hugely beneficial for MSFT as ...

An alternative view on Apple and TVs

Feb

2012

Lots of rumours this week about an upcoming Apple TV reintroduction. The partnering with major cable players makes sense to me, that is just the iPhone playbook all over again — pick off one carrier, create a great experience with them, help them gain share, and then the rest of the providers will crack. I’d ...

The day you stop learning is the day you start dying

Jan

2012

My grandfather once told me “The day you stop learning is the day you start dying.” I’ve had a lifelong commitment to education and I am still learning every day. There is so much going on in education, the choices are broader every day, with so many efforts to increase access and lower costs. Some ...

Kind of sad that Apple took “bounce” out of lion mail

Oct

2011

I’m not the only one — “Apple forum discussion on bounce”:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3201744?start=0&tstart=0. OK I realize it wasn’t actually that effective in stopping unwanted email, but I enjoyed using it as a kind of “f%^* you” message to certain senders. I got an emotional lift from hitting that button.

Photostream is cute, but what I really want is Aperture/iPhoto in the cloud

Oct

2011

So “I don’t really get iCloud storage yet”:http://theludwigs.com/2011/10/im-struggling-to-understand-why-i-would-ever-use-icloud-storage/, and “Photostream doesn’t really accomodate all my DSLR pictures well”:http://theludwigs.com/2011/10/icloud-photostream-and-dslrs-dont-seem-to-be-a-great-fit/. So rather than just whine about what I don’t have, what do I really want? First — I have a 203G (gigabyte) Aperture library today, that is where my primary photo storage is. Digging into this a ...

Love iOS5 keyboard shortcuts … But why aren’t they iCloud enabled?

Oct

2011

Settings…general…keyboard…shortcuts. Love these, will save me infinite amount of typing. Completing web forms, email, everywhere. But why oh why aren’t these iCloud enabled? I want the same exact shortcuts on my iPad, iPhone, and Mac. And I don’t want to have to re-enter them on each device. The lack of multiple device support is exactly ...

I’m struggling to understand why I would ever use iCloud storage.

Oct

2011

I’m struggling to understand why I would ever use iCloud storage. After a couple days of tinkering, I have two sets of data in iCloud — device backups, and Pages/Keynote docs. * I really don’t get the value of device backups. My apps are all recoverable from the iTunes store. I use primarily apps like ...

My overall reaction to iOS5? Confusion.

Oct

2011

OK like the rest of the working world I spent hours yesterday trying to upgrade my iPhone4 and iPad2 to iOS5. About a dozen retries for the phone, maybe half that for the iPad, and I finally got there. Not a great experience but no harm done, just a half day of my life wasted ...

Apple is the new Honda

Sep

2011

Nice writeup of “Apple’s manufacturing/supply advantage vs the PC OEMs”:http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/new_apple_advantage. Reminds me very much of the way Honda and Toyota crushed the American car manufacturers in the 70′s and 80′s — GM in particular had overly complex product lines, cars with a gajillion options. Honda came in with a simple model, no options, and great ...

Like many others, Steve Jobs has had a profound effect on my life

Aug

2011

By the time I was a junior at Ohio State, I knew that a) i was fascinated with personal computers, and that b) despite my electrical engineering education, I did not actually want to be an engineer. So I was wondering what to do post-college, and a very good friend of the family who was ...

Business Models and Evil

Aug

2011

Some interesting commentary on “Google’s business model by Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/08/23/swartz-google-evil — a total Apple fan, doesn’t view ads as inherently evil, but says you need to be very respectful of your users. And referring to “an original article by Aaron Swartz”:http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googevil who says you can’t make things worse for users just to make money. I don’t ...