The Angry Drunk

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has finally arrived, bring­ing with it some of the most sig­nif­i­cant changes in the Mac user inter­face since OS X debuted a decade ago. Predictably the response from a large seg­ment of the tech pun­di­toc­racy has been fear, loathing and nerd rage.

Ever since Steve Jobs gave a brief pre­view of Lion at a spe­cial event in October 2010 there have been pun­dits claim­ing that the new inter­face fea­tures rep­re­sented the “iOSi­fi­ca­tion” of the Mac. Harry Marks does a good job of address­ing that claim on his blog so I will refrain from get­ting into that debate here. I do, though, want to address a point that I feel is get­ting missed by those bemoan­ing the changes in Lion.

Continue read­ing An Abstract Argument

On Monday Seve Jobs and a host of Apple exec­u­tives deliv­ered the highly antic­i­pated keynote address to the 2011 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. There are plenty of recaps of the annunce­ments avail­able and I have no inter­est in run­ning though the bul­let points here. If, by some mir­a­cle you’re unaware of what was announced, this slideshow from Macworld should fill you in.

What I want to com­ment on specif­i­cally is the iCloud announce­ment. I believe that, despite the stu­pid name, iCloud will prove to be as ground­break­ing as any­thing else announced at the Keynote. I also sus­pect that iCloud will ulti­mately be one of the most impor­tant announce­ments that Apple has ever made.

Continue read­ing On Cloud Nine

I’m watch­ing the con­stant blather regard­ing Mac Defender and Mac mal­ware in gen­eral with an ever-rising sense of utter dis­gust. From John Gruber’s brief to the point of inscrutable Wolf!, to Ed Bott’s increas­ingly mas­tur­ba­tory series of posts the blog buzz is all about “mal­ware” and with a few excep­tions it’s all pretty much bull­shit. The prob­lem is that the entire con­ver­sa­tion around secure com­put­ing has been — again with some excep­tions — com­pletely poi­soned by years of worth­less crap from pun­dits, press and ven­dors alike.

Continue read­ing Fuck the Whole Lot of You