If it’s not hard, it’s software
First we hear about Flickr’s downfall, now Winamp. It’s amazing to hear how this big companies bought and killed an acquisition by refusing to let them thrive.
In both cases corporate culture ironically killed everything they were trying to acquire. In both cases, they could have been huge, had they been agile enough to stay on the bleeding edge.
Today I had a large MP4 I wanted to break up into smaller chuncks because the disk was FAT32. Ends up you don’t need to re-encode. You can use ffmpeg and do something like this:
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00 -t 01:30:00 -i input.mp4 -acodec copy -vcodec copy output1.mp4
That will copy the first 90 minutes to output1.mp4. Adjust the timecodes and output file to write another chunk to a different file. There may be a way to do it by filesize, but I didn’t figure out how. As always use a recent version of ffmpeg if you can.
That handy tip saves a ton of CPU time.
Apparently Windows 8 Internet Explorer 10 will ship with Flash. Rather than put a nail in the coffin they are putting the corpse on the hood and driving around the neighborhood.
Flash is today what ActiveX was about 10 years ago. A proprietary insecure nuisance.
It’s worth noting even Adobe is doing some interesting HTML5 stuff these days. Adobe isn’t totally ignoring the future. Playing with Adobe Edge is somewhat high on my todo list.
I got to walk down to the Hudson this morning and watch Shuttle Enterprise arrive in NYC. It was an amazing site to behold. It was cold, and the pier was pretty busy, but I think everyone had a great time regardless.
Some interesting graphs on iOS 5.1 upgrade stats. iOS 5.0.1 and 5.1 are notable because they are the first upgrades to be delivered OTA. Unless this data is a unique segment and not representative of the larger ecosystem (I don’t think that’s the case), this is pretty impressive.
This is why the upgrade process is so important to client side applications, especially when you manage a platform. After installation keeping a user running the latest and greatest is critical. It impacts your entire ecosystem, which in Apple’s case includes the web, iOS developers, tech support, and yes even wireless partners.
Google’s biggest mistake was leaving hardware vendors and wireless providers in charge of managing upgrades. They are carrying a lot of baggage from old Android devices that Apple doesn’t. This is only going to be more amplified in the next 12-24 months as Apple users stay more current and Android continues to fragment.
An old but interesting interview with X-Plane creator Austin Meyer on Direct3D vs. OpenGL:
…I bet on OpenGL, and used that. As a result, here we are, 15 years later, and the people that use Direct3D can support Windows only. But, with OpenGL, I support Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm OS, Google Android OS, and oh yes: iPhone and iPodOS which are also OpenGL. So having X-Plane in OpenGL let me move over to iPod and iPhone very quickly. The port was done in 2 weeks, to be very exact. And you saw that i have moved 500,000 units on the iPhone and iPod since. I get $7 from each of those sales, and have moved 500,000 units in the last year and a half, so get out your calculator, do some math, and see if i made the right choice to bet against Microsoft 15 years ago.
Always bet on standards. Nobody remains on top forever. When you bet on proprietary tech because it’s in the lead, you’re betting that your demise will happen prior to the leader falling. Never bet against yourself.
I was curious about Microsoft Flight, since it was released today. It’s not really a simulator like Microsoft Fight Simulator was. It’s really just an arcade style game but of higher production quality. The graphics are not bad, it runs smoothly, however there’s not much to keep you playing with it. 30 minutes in and already bored. I personally don’t find it entertaining or challenging.
X-Plane 10 on the other hand is mindbogglingly complicated and I suspect I will never even get “OK” at it, much less good.
It’s a shame Microsoft didn’t just spin off or sell the MSFS product to someone. I bet it could have done fine on it’s own. It seemed to have a pretty dedicated community around it.
I hate having to use registration codes when installing software, but have accepted it as the way things work.
Today however I got to enter one that’s 80 characters long. That’s right, 80.
Nothing says “we hate our customers” more than making them enter 80 random characters into a text field before they can install the product they purchased.
Like many in my trade, I keep a Twitter client open all day. 140 characters works very well between compile times, reloads, uploads. I still use RSS extensively, but Twitter fills the gaps nicely as my brain is always looking for information to absorb (feel free to follow if you don’t).
To this day it amazes me that I can’t find a perfect Twitter client. Tweetie back in its day was pretty damn close, but since it was bought by Twitter, it went downhill to the point of being unusable on the iPhone. Amazingly priced at “free” it’s not worth the price. These days TweetBot is as close to perfect as I can find on the iPhone and I’d recommend it to anyone who is frustrated with Twitter for iPhone.
Largely due to neglect the Mac client is still usable to me, however it’s hardly awesome. Why doesn’t “command /” reliably bring the window to focus? Why can’t I set my preferred url shortener? The developer console has lots of weird select and focus issues. I could go on…
From where I sit, these are the most annoying things Twitter still hasn’t figured out:
So what am I ignoring in terms of annoying Twitter client things?
For all of us who spent so much time restarting computers to diagnose them over the years, this page will bring back some of the “glory days”. Relive the restarts of all the popular OS’s and versions.