MacNerdism

Even more than with the Web2.0 thingamingy, today the question of Venture Capital arises. The freshly released iPhone SDK. A ‘not too bad’ platform for developers: 70% goes to the developer, 30% to Apple and the developer can set the price¹.

Some more details for the developer, or actually just one: you get paid monthly.
Yes, Apple pays you monthly for the sales you made.

Let’s rehash: the SDK releases in June. You have more than three months from now one to build your application on the free SDK. Think it’s going to be an amazing application? Spend the $99 it will cost you to obtain a digital certificate allowing you to get your application in the AppStore.

June, 30th 2008 your application hits the AppStore, together with the iPhone 2.0 firmware. Within 15 days your remote FTP client was downloaded 4800 times. The application is sold for $10, for every sale $7² goes in to your pocket.

4800 times $7.
How much of venture capital do you need?

Imagine you built a Transmit-alike FTP client for the iPhone.

How much of VC do you need?

Of course, that would be too simple. Your plan actually is to create a mobile platform, more even, interaction between the Excel spreadsheets you run at the company you work for³ and the mobile spreadsheet platform you are going to build for the iPhone. Get the big plans out. And the big guns. YOu need money, of course you do!

You already get your monthly wage from said company you plan to optimize their valuable company time. Doesn’t sound to me as if they will complain, better even… If your operation is successful, they’ve paid you several months your wage and then can sell their awesome platform in the AppStore.
Of course, you would never consider this an option, because the risk to lose your job in that time is too high. You need VC. And how could you obtain VC?

iFund.

First you work weeks long on your plan, your presentation. A presentation CPBK will invest in, that same presentation your multinational employer might not support. In the best case you might obtain some millions of VC, turning you into the peon of another company. Losing 4 years, or more, of rank.

What if your plan fails?

How much of VC do you need?

1. This means that every platform will costs around 140% of the value it really is worth. [↩]
2. Yes, I do know you have to pay taxes on this [↩]
3. A major credit card company. [↩]

Among both men and women there seems to be a rather high admiration for the Queen of Burlesque, Dita von Teese, but one has to admit that she might not be the most appropriate background for screenshots published on a blog.

There are several small, but great applications to hide all the screens except the active one if you want to take screenshots. My favorite one so far is the freeware application Isolator. Isolator does one thing and does it well: when activated over the keyboard shortcut [Command]+[Shift]+[I] or from the menu bar, Isolator hides all the non active windows and overlays the desktop with a solid color. Contrary to the other freeware app BackDrop, Isolator doesn’t offer the option to use an image for the overlay.

Which seems a little superfluous anyway because I might as well hide all the other windows with [Option]+[Command]+[H] or from the menu bar and admire my own Dita background¹.

1. I know, I know… this only hides the other applications. [↩]

In the smallest chance you’re like me, you like keeping your dock tidy and not cluttered. If you’re not like me, probably you don’t care because you’re a Quicksilver nerd.

Mac OS X.5 has the annoying habit to keep the printer pane after a task in the dock. This situation becomes even uglier when you use several (network) printers over a session.
Luckily Leopard has the option to auto quit after a task is finished.

Control click the printer icon in the dock and select Auto Quit as shown in the screenshot at the right.

This is no recursive behavior and needs to be repeated for every printer.

Together with Spaces, QuickLook probably is one of the most used new features in all-day usage of Mac OS X.5. One keystroke and you have a beautiful preview of the file, without having to use the graphically awesome, but very resource (and memory hungry) Coverflow.
Just hit the spacebar and there you go.

Sadly, in its standard form QuickLook is rather limited and offers no support for folders, archives and many more. But with a few QuickLook plugins you can easily extend QL.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember, yesterday, when I said that even Microsoft could hardly set the same update pace as Apple lately did, with 4 updates in less than 2 months?

I lied. Kinda.

Actually, it’s FIVE updates in 2 months. Mac OS X 10.5.2 is expected to pop out of the software manufactory in Cupertino, around MacWorld next year.

Now let’s look at this with a Redmond mind set. Does this really mean only 2 updates for Mac OS X 10.5 or shall we convert this to a more MS appropriate type of updates? Redmond usually releases tons of updates, one for each specific change in the system. Offially Microsoft sticks to monthly (second Tuesday of the month) updates, unless critical security holes need to be fixed urgently.
When trying to be nice, the Mac OS X 10.5.1 update covered fixes to 10 different programs. For Redmonders this would have meant 10 different updates¹. Apple release all updates as one… and then fanboys grab the opportunity to say Windows needs more updates.

Yeah, right.

Hopefully, with 10.5.2, Leopard will become at least as stable as my old, proven Vista install is.

1. Seen the changes, rather 12 to 13 actually [↩]