History's Take on Steve?

Since Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple last week, the tech press has gone completely wild with retrospectives. Being the Apple fanboy that I am, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading, watching and listening to all the media had to say. From favorite Steve quotes and reporters’ personal anecdotes to complete synopses of his life and career, the tech world was literally abuzz covering what was arguably the biggest technology story of the year. Frankly, the tone ranged from playful to funereal and everything in between. Amongst all this noise I came to the the realization that the real story here has hardly been touched: How will history judge Steve Jobs?

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Books to Consume All Your Free Time

Daniel Suarez has written a couple of novels that should be on every geek's reading list. I've listened to Leo LaPorte go on and on about these titles for months, but I was afraid to buy them in fear of shirking my other duties to read them.  My fears were well-founded.

If you're a techie, Daemon and Freedom™ contain the ingredients necessary to push all your geek buttons. Daemon begins as a millionaire computer genius/game developer Matthew Sobel dies of cancer leaving an AI version of himself running loose on the internet to carry out his vision of socioeconomic re-engineering of the world's power structure. While the tech is a bit futuristic, the setting is present day and very believeable. If you've ever played a first-person shooter, you'll be instantly familiar with the described "darknet" where followers of the deceased Sobel rebuild their crumbling world. Suarez does an excellent job developing the characters while not overdoing the touchy-feely stuff and I found myself very interested in the human side of the story. But let there be no doubt, these books are high-tech action thrillers and the reader is not left wanting death and destruction.

I bought Daemon on a Friday.  By Sunday, I was back on the Whispernet purchasing its sequel, Freedom™. After Daemon I wanted more and Freedom™ delivered IN SPADES! Rumor has it, Suarez is working to complete the trilogy. I'll be first in line.

Turn Off Natural Scrolling in Lion

Undo "natural" scrollingThe more I use OS X Lion, the better I like it.  The only feature I've had trouble with is the new scrolling behavior. I gave it a week to "sink in", but I just couldn't get used to it.  If you're having the same problem there's a simple method for turning it off.  Simply open System Preferences and select "Trackpad".  When visible, select "Scroll & Zoom" from the top toggle buttons.  Uncheck the top checkbox (as shown) and scrolling will return to the way it's been for the past twenty years or so.  I don't know what Apple is up to with this change. Maybe they're training us for some future super duper changes they have in store. I'll worry about it then. For now, I'm back to scrolling things the way I'm used to.

An In-depth Analysis of iOS 5

Due to my non-disclosure agreement with Apple, I cannot divulge much about the latest iOS version.

So...

Over the Air Updates: GOOD!

OS X Lion System Information Gets Revamped

Clicking "About This Mac" from the Apple menu for the first time in Lion left me pleasantly surprised. The System Information app has undergone a complete transformation in 10.7. The first thing I noticed after clicking "More Info..." was the new Overview window and how much more information it provides. Lion's version adds a picture of your Mac, the model name and release date, the type of graphics adapter (complete with the amount of VRAM) and the Mac's serial number. Also, the build number of your OS X version has been added. These were all available before, just not in the Overview window. Like before, there's a button to launch the System Information app and one to check with the mothership to see if any updates are available, but now there's a "Windows-like" menu at the top left. It navigates to windows for checking your displays and examining your memory configurations along with one that presents a storage overview of all your mounted volumes with iTunes-like, horizontally stacked, multi-colored bars. It breaks down disk usage by the types of files consuming the space. Usage is broken down by audio, movies, photos, apps, backups and "other". It also includes a button for launching Disk Utility. This window is the one that set off my cool alarms. Sure, it's not going to drill down to obscurity like DaisyDisk does, but it will tell you plenty about your disk usage, especially when you just want to see what's soaking up the sectors on a portable hard disk or thumb drive.  Besides, it just looks so damned COOL.