Fully Customizable Edit In Place jQuery Plugin
Jeditable is an in-place editor plugin for jQuery. With few lines of JavaScript code it allows you to click and edit the content of different html elements. User clicks text on web page. Block of text becomes a form.
July 10, 1856 was the birthday of one of the great scientists of the Victorian epoch, Nikola Tesla (d. 1943)…
He is best known for many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems with which he helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.
Photo: Tesla reading by the light created by his coils - NOTE: apparently a composite photo!!
Source: i12bent
Apple’s X Factor with Final Cut Pro X
The Final Cut Pro X uproar reveals one key to Apple’s succes that they’ve applied for years.
It started with Mac OS, then iMovie X and now Final Cut Pro X. Each time they’ve refined the process, calculated the blowback and confused competitors.
Dramatic product resets are a strategic tactic - take an existing product, strip it bare, ship a new bare bones feature set with an obvious core benefit, like 64-bit or native Cocoa, weather the criticism and let the market tell them whats needed next.
Apple famously doesn’t use focus groups - but they DO listen to customers regarding shipping products. As Gruber and others have mentioned, Apple watches every review and listens to feedback. They filter, prioritize and plan updates to rapidly close major gaps for dissatisfied customers.
The final key being, close gaps that pay dividends in a much larger market usually and ignore legacy features that have little value to the larger audience.
Most competitors would delay shipping until every feature for every market niches was ready. Most wouldn’t have the balls to attempt resets like Apple does. If they did, they would delay shipping for months or years until a “finished” product was ready.
This process is Apple’s X Factor. Its why unlike competitors, Apple thoroughly dominates the niches they pursue.
iMac To Wirelessly Charge iPods, iPhones, and iPads? - SlashGear
Apple’s patent application describes the system as “Wireless power utilization in a local computing environment.” It is based on the “mid range wireless power transfer physics” and makes use of wireless near field magnetic resonance (NFMR) power transmission to power devices up to 1 meter distant.
Very cool!
Paul Thurrott’s gambit - Apple’s Evolution vs. Microsoft’s Revolution
Paul Thurrott recently talked about why he is unimpressed with Apple’s latest iOSand Lion announcements. Hardly surprising considering his known disdain for most things born in Cupertino. John Guber explained why Thurrott is right and is missing the point.
Having been a developer using OS X since the developer previews of 10.0, when it was just Next/OpenStep with a Finder-like GUI veneer, Paul sounds like a party crasher, bitching about how the music and food sucks, unlike his buddies last party, which was OFF the HOOK and CRAZY.
Paul wishes for a crazy Apple. An Apple that completely overhauls the OS with each release, throwing caution to the wind.
Given his experience with Microsoft’s OS strategy I assume he hoping Apple suffers the same fate as Microsoft, whose decade long failure of an OS strategy allowed Apple and to a lesser extent Google/Linux to make huge gains.
Just compare the release cycles for both companies to see why Microsoft failed so badly where Apple succeeded.
- Windows XP - October 2001
- Windows XP Media Center - October 2002
- Windows Server 2003 - October 2002
- Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 - 30 September 2003
- Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 -12 October 2004
- Windows XP Professional x64 Edition - 25 April 2005
- Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs - 8 July 2006
- Windows Vista for Business use - 30 November 2006
- Windows Vista for Home use - 30 January 2007
- Windows Home Server - 7 November 2007
- Windows Server 2008 - 27 February 2008
- Windows 7 - 22 October 2009
- Windows Server 2008 R2 - 22 October 2009
- Windows Home Server 2011 - 6 April 2011
Compare that mess to Apple’s strategy - remember each release included both the desktop and server versions.
- Mac OS X v10.0 “Cheetah” - March 24, 2001
- Mac OS X v10.1 “Puma” - September 25, 2001 (6 months)
- Mac OS X v10.2 “Jaguar” - August 24, 2002 (11 months)
- Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther” - October 24, 2003 (13 months)
- Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” - April 29, 2005 (18 months)
- Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” - October 26, 2007 (30 months)
- Mac OS X v10.6 “Snow Leopard” - August 28, 2009 (22 months)
- Mac OS X v10.7 “Lion” - Summer 2011
Looking back on the Windows XP juggernaut Microsoft unleashed. Imagine where they would be if they had a focused iterative release cycle like Apple.
Microsoft’s revolutionary path, like most revolutions, failed more often than it succeeded. Media Center only caught on with die hards. Server aficionados still love 2003. XP users are still leary of upgrading after the Vista disaster. It took 8 years for Microsoft to produce a worthy successor to Windows XP with Windows 7. Which I love and think is the best version of Windows ever produced.
Apple by contrast followed the evolutionary path, building momentum and carving out permanent market share gains while Microsoft flailed for a decade.
As I type this, on a Lion install, I can say without doubt that Lion is the largest gamble Apple’s taken since the port from PPC to Intel.
Pundits like Paul should beware of brushing aside Apple’s evolutionary march. It destroyed the status quo in mobile and has been doing the same on the desktop for the last few years.
Paul I hope you enjoy the next Microsoft revolution. I hear developers really love the new direction they are taking with Windows 8.
iPhone’s Achilles heel
I’ve owned every version of iPhone. Was in line on launch day, during a hot North Carolina summer day.
The iPhone is one of the greatest phones every designed, minor flaws and all.
My iPhone lays deactivated and turned off tonight.
Why?
Despite the new hotness of Verizon, carrier lock-in forced me to leave. After years of pitiful AT&T service, I tried Verizon, the supposed savior of the iPhone and after a few months found it to be worse than AT&T.
Sure, I could make and receive calls, but only outside my home. Data speed here in Emeryville and around the Bay Area ranges from ok to useless.
Verizon proposed I pay an additional $249 for a booster in my home. If I lived in a huge building or in a canyon I would understand. But I live in Emeryville, center the Bay Area, completely flat with nothing obstructing my signal.
This brings me to the iPhone’s Achilles heal - its the carrier.
The carrier will always taint the perfect product experience Apple strives for.
The iPhone loses its luster when its on a crappy network.
While people bitched about dropped calls on AT&T, the dominant use of the iPhone is data - something Verizon sucks at.
In contrast, my T-Mobile Nexus S gets great signal and the data speed stomps Verizon and AT&T in my city. The problem, you can’t use an existing iPhone on the T-Mobile network or buy one for it.
Apple has a few options to improve this situation.
First, become a carrier. Either launch a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) or leverage their massive market cap to acquire a carrier.
I don’t thin Apple will acquire a carrier, they would spend too much time and money revamping the acquired company to operator at Apple speed. But they might pull off something like Virgin did with Virgin Mobile.
Second, ship a quad band, dual GSM/CDMA phone. This would allow customers to take their iPhone to any carrier in their area that provides good service.
The latter option is the obvious choice, Apple is an engineering company foremost. They could design such a phone and being unencumbered with exclusivity to any carriers, they could go rogue with an unlocked phone.
That said, Apple has always tried to be a one stop shop for a consumer’s computing needs.
If they launched an MVNO, using their famous negotiating skills to drive low rates, they could provide everything out of the box with Apple’s famous customer experience.
Apple’s next evolution should remove the requirement that “their” customers deal with another company in order to use “their” products.
It would change the game at a time when Google, HTC, Samsung and Motorola are just getting into the one Apple started.
Short logic: Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal
Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account.
At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to…
Source: shortlogic
Cleverness kills products.
The following dialog must make sense to the developers, decision maker and security nerds at Mozilla.
It will baffle normal users of their product. But, its sure clever!
Cloud music + Airfoil rocks!
Tiring of syncing, copying, backing up my large music collection I’m pushing it to Amazon’s Cloud Drive and using the Cloud Player to listen to it.
One component of iTunes that I can not live without is streaming music to numerous speakers around the house.
No worries - Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil to the rescue. With this slick application you can hijack audio from any application on your Mac.
Shiny bobbles. Productivity fallacies. Ship it.
My personality lends itself to constant experimentation and willingness to reevaluate my work methodology.
Sheer laziness often leads me to solutions that are simple, stable and sustainable — code, deploy and forget is what I strive for.
Google Reeder and Twitter are my biggest distractions. Reading posts from one of many developers I admire, touting technology XYZ being the end all be all, leads to countless hours of investigation and experimentation.
I’ve been building web services since the days of filemaker and applescript, yes you could build services on those back in the mid 90s. AppleScript, Perl, PHP, Java and Ruby have all be a part of my arsenal over the years.
Lately Node.js is luring me away from my usual tools, but late the other night as I tried to port an existing service to it and during the process I realized while cool, it was detracting from my productivity.
To sum up this hair brain thought, be very careful about investing time in new technology. You must balance the need to ship with the desire to innovate or grow your technical knowledge.
