5teev

It's sometimes worthwhile to use boring, "wrong" default form elements, like when the browser will automatically translate their text labels into the user's preferred (i.e., non-English) language.

And Apple extensively emphasizes this point: there is no substitute for testing on an actual device with your target OS installed.

I too stayed with Speakeasy for years solely because of their high quality tech support. Since switching to Comcast, all of my tech support have been pretty much like the AT&T transcript in the linked article.

"Good customer support" is a matter of perspective. As customers, we prefer highly qualified responders who understand and solve our problems. Most businesses prefer to pay as little as possible to people who are just good enough to keep you from canceling your service.

At the scale of AT&T's business, if they can keep you just this side of canceling, they will consider their customer support "good."

I absent-mindedly put a drop of cream in some green tea once, and found it an interesting variation and not bad at all!

It's worth pointing out that their website is very well done, especially the reordering process. Once you establish some favorites, it's a breeze to access previous orders and replenish the cupboard.

It was an arbitrary choice for an example. Obviously one would choose a key not being used for anything else. (This choice can also vary from session to session, depending on the task at hand.)

One thing I do all the time is making macros on the fly for repetitive edits with :map. E.g., switch the current and next line

:map * ddp

Then type * in command mode to execute the steps.

And if you mangle your file beyond hope with out of control macros, there's always u to undo and :q! to quit without saving.

Not all applications embed a UIWebView, and many that do also offer opening in Safari as an option. There are also between-app communications like Twitter's "Save Draft to Birdhouse..." or sending addresses to the Maps application. Not as flexible as the workflows you describe in Android, to be sure, but in that data is being passed between its apps, I believe it was overly broad to describe iOS as focusing only on "bite-sized" and "self-contained" apps.

I don't mean hardcore, nuts and bolts stuff, just that they're more involved with managing how the operating system behaves. And I'm not saying this, I was inferring from Gruber, who notes how many task managers, etc., are the most popular apps.

> Gruber's assertion that it's intrinsically better doesn't have a lot of weight to it.

I didn't read it as his specifying one that's intrinsically better than the other, but as which platform will succeed in the long run because it has more compelling software, i.e., Rage HD will sell more iOS devices than task managers will sell Android.

I don't understand how Android allows you to pass data between applications while iOS does not. I'm under the impression that I can use copy/paste and custom protocols to pass information between applications on my iPhone. Am I missing something?

If there's any cultural divide Gruber alludes to, it's that iPhone users tend not to know a whole lot about how the phone works deep inside, and whether by necessity or curiosity, Android users do.

In spite of all the cool features, this update suffers from the same issue that drove me away the last time I tried Textmate: single-character undo. I can understand why this would appeal to some users, but most other text editors undo in bigger chunks, something I've come to expect and prefer.

My original feeling about Textmate overall remains about the same. It probably appeals to recent OSX converts--it's a giant step forward from any Windows-based text editor I can think of--but lacks a certain "Mac-ness" long-time OSX users expect.

Thus Textmate risks falling into a no-man's land: users less set in their ways in the Mac world may settle for the relatively clunky IDE text editors; stubborn old-timers will prefer the more familiar feeling BBEdit.

As for the paucity of updates, let's cut Allan some slack. After some 20 years, BBEdit is only at version 9.6 and vim is only at version 7.3. Quality takes time.

I know geeks who use IRC and Usenet way more than the average person. So I'll probably be re-explaining this stuff to my brother-in-law all over again in a couple of years.

Here it's just a lazy way for clueless HR people to say "highly/broadly skilled." It indicates as little thought as someone who says, "You rock!" when you performed some technical task they don't understand, whether it took ten hours or ten minutes.

Someday we may well ask, "What was it, once, to rock?"

For basic "looks the same" stuff this is probably true. The difficulty comes from clients who devise features that only work well on newer browsers, then insist on keeping the same functionality rather than "degrade gracefully" on IE6.

> Programming will be easy when problem solving is easy.

An especially hard part is identifying where the problems actually lie. The average person "solves" a problem by addressing only the best case scenario and lacks the pessimism and pervading sense of doom that enables programmers to figure out in advance, and account for, all the ways in which every little thing will go wrong.

> So should you give money to bums on the street? > In short, my answer is: NO.

Ignoring the tacky epithet "bums on the street" I disagree with this conclusion. Giving someone money demonstrates respect for them as a fellow human being: "I trust you to use this as you see fit."

How would you feel if instead of getting paid for your work, you were told where to live, what and how much to eat, and so on? And now you want a beer? Sorry!

Nev wonders why Black Mike isn't more grateful for his gifts. Maybe instead of deciding for him, "Here's what you can do, and here's the tools to do it," he could give him the money and take him on a shopping spree, advising but not dictating.

"Don't BE evil" isn't the same as "Don't DO evil."

There's a lot of truth to this, but you'll soon be shouted down by the very people you describe. Successful people--however they got there--only like to attribute it to their own very hard work.

I would remind people that PG's credibility as a successful "big thinker" is largely based on the cash he made winning the dot-com lottery by selling his first company to people who, as he says, had little idea of, and less interest in, what they were buying.

I saw a guy solving a cube with only one hand, thus freeing the other hand to do the same thing, more or less.

Eliminating civil rights isn't the goal; like much of the evil in the world, it will be a side-effect of people who thought they were doing the right thing.

Does this mean if I'm an undesirable customer, they'll stop showing me ads altogether?

Object while you can, before it's mandatory to surrender all civil rights in order to fly.

Yeah, no disrespect to Graham, but oatmeal-against-the-wall....