Mark Roseman's Blog

I am Cocoa's bitch.

While I'm glad that some people have a more positive relationship with their Mac programming toolbox, I can't say I often feel the same way, especially coming back to it after a couple weeks off.

A whole lot of "why the hell don't you know what I think", "go over here and get that, and then here and get that, and then do this over here... no not there, here...", and some "you never listen to me" and "what are you, stupid?" thrown in for good measure. Demanding, rigid, humorless, by-the-book, condescending, controlling. Sometimes you just can't win.

How Dumb is your UI?

I always enjoy Rands' posts, and this one about cloud UI choices is worth the read. His description of Dropbox is right on target, and showcases the real smarts behind a "dumb" service. Dumb here really means RMMADWIM ("read my mind and do what I mean"). Also nice that he calls out Brent as a great example of sweating out the details in NetNewsWire.

New Community Space for Guelph.

Received an email just now about 10 Carden, a new community hub, shared space, meeting and collaboration joint, co-working, business and arts and social change hang out. It's located in beautiful downtown Guelph, just across from the new city hall, and from the descriptions it sounds like it will be a very made-for-Guelph solution that borrows and adapts the most relevant ideas from similar spaces in other locales. Excellent!

Map of Online Collaboration Tools

Via Robin Good, this collaboration tools map is a public, editable mind map of mostly affordable collaboration tools, organized into a variety of different categories. Useful!

Aspire Preview Launched!

There's now a public preview of my new Aspire "life-goals and long term planning" software for Mac OS X Leopard available at unifiq.com.

And as always, right on time (i.e. almost exactly two months after the original guess for when the 1.0 would ship). :-)

Working from home.

Via Small Business Labs, a summary of a survey of Cleveland area home based businesses.

• 70% of the respondents had been working for home for over 5 years


• 41% said they started their business because they stopped enjoying working for someone else


• Only 21% said they started their business because they lost their job.


• Only 12% said being a home business hurt their ability to attract customers

Tanking economy ---> health and happiness!

Interesting Macleans article entitled Living on less. It talks about the current economic meltdown bringing on a (forced) change to many peoples' over-reaching and excessive lifestyles. Which for some people and their expectations, I can definitely see being a very good thing.

Rabid Partisanship.

Adam Radwanski had a good article in today's Globe and Mail about the extreme partisanship that we've so nicely adopted in Canadian politics in recent years. Even had a scan of the comments and they weren't so bad for a change.

This past election was a disappointment on so many levels, though the results were pretty much as I'd expected, so no great shock. I think that's all I'll have to say on this for a while...

And let's hear it for the internet which continues to pit Canadian against Canadian from coast to coast. Yes, it's sure helped keep those lines of "communication" open.

Government for the people? Ha!

I had a chance to read William Marsden's Stupid to the Last Drop (subtitle "How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesn't Seem to Care)"). As you'd imagine from the title, it's a polemic directed at the oil industry and particularly the "support" it receives from the Alberta government.

The general message is not new or shocking (well, except to the people who've been trained to react to any possible criticism of the oil industry with "damn you Eastern bastards, it's our oil and you can't tell us what to do! We remember the NEP!"). The less known details of particular policies or events though can be truly horrifying, and bundling them together just magnifies that.

Of course, it's not like we're short of other examples of governments acting on behalf of industry groups instead of the people it's supposed to represent. And the people cheering that the government is doing a fantastic job. Will omit practically obligatory reference to current federal election campaign.

Call for beta testers.

I'm starting to seed a beta of the 'goals' application - which has been named Aspire - to a few people. If you'd like to help out, please see this beta information page.