UPDATE: references to the former Bird Site of short-form social media have been adjusted to avoid providing free publicity to something that is undeserving of such promotion. This is no longer how I feel about this website, but my historical feelings are to be preserved below, with the relevant site’s name obviously altered!

I like the fact that since the very early days, The Bird Site had offered you the ability to make your account ‘protected’. What this means is that unlike the default setting, your tweets are not publicly visible. Only people who are following you can see them, and any new followers you get after you protect your account have to be approved by you.

It is a great way to use Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible if you don’t necessarily feel comfortable sharing a lot if you know you are sharing it with the world. That’s why I like it, anyway.

However, there are some sacrificies you have to make when having a protected account — and at times it is not awfully clear what these are. Here are a list of some of the protected account restrictions you might come across, but might not be aware of.

• If you send a tweet @ someone who is not following you, they cannot see that tweet. So if you do have a protected account and are trying to enter a competition with a business where their account is not following you, for example, or speak to anyone who is not already following you, that is why they aren’t responding to you!
• Other people cannot retweet you (using the ‘official’ retweet mechanism). It is possible for others to use other ‘quote’ style manual retweets, but not the native retweet functionality. Trying to retweet anyone who is protected will throw an error message.
• Your tweets are protected, but the list of those who you follow and the list of who follows you is still public. There is no way to make those lists private. This is something to bear in mind.
• Another privacy point to remember is that if your account is protected, but you are conversing with someone whose account is public, their side of the conversation will be public (unless you converse via Direct Message).
• It can be more difficult to meet new interesting people on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible if your account is protected. There are those on the service who won’t spend much time deciding whether to follow you if you are protected.

For some of these reasons, I now also have a public account, @PeterUpfold, which announces new blog posts here and also I use to make conversation with people who aren’t following my main, protected account, @strategyoracle.

This post is up-to-date as of 2010-12-11. Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible can, and does, change its features and functionality iteratively. If you’re looking at this post at a later date, some of these restrictions may have changed!

‘Megaphone’ image is soundsky, by seungmina on sxc.hu. Licensing information for that image.

I have just released a new version of DfontSplitter for Mac. It is a bugfix-only release, containing a single fix for an issue that affected some non-English versions of Mac OS X.

New Features and Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where DfontSplitter would report valid files as not being in the correct format on some non-English versions of Mac OS X. File type detection is now done through uniform type identifiers, avoiding this issue.

Known Issues

• Converting TTC files on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) does sometimes run into problems, where the TTC splitting script can’t open the TTC file. The reason for this is currently unclear.
• Moving TTF files that have been extracted from a .dfont over to Windows — please see this workaround.
• Some Font Suitcase files may not contain TTF data that can be extracted.

Users of DfontSplitter for Mac should update their copy of the application by launching it, and choosing DfontSplitter > Check for Updates from the menu bar. Alternatively, you can always download a fresh copy from the DfontSplitter project page.

Since Snow Leopard, each new release of Mail.app (recently updated with 10.6.5 and now 10.6.7) and the Message.framework it depends on changes a ‘plugin compatibility’ UUID and suddenly breaks any plugins or extensions you have enabled in Mail.app. The developers of each extension have to update each and every one manually, and can’t do so before the new software from Apple is released.

If you can’t (be bothered to) wait for the updates from your plugin developers to arrive, however, and are confident that the plugin will work with the new version, you can hack said plugins and force them to be re-enabled inside Mail.app using the following method. Here I’ll be working with GrowlMail 1.1.2, but this should work for most Mail.app plugins.

A word of warning — not only does this involve editing the plugin’s files, which if you get it wrong could break that plugin and force you to download and install it again, it is possible that your plugin really isn’t compatible with the new version of Mail, in which case it could cause more serious problems. Back stuff up before trying this — you should be doing so anyway.

» Read the rest of this post…

‘at risk’, by booleansplit / Robert S. Donovan on Flickr

Scott Charney of Microsoft’s ‘Trustworthy Computing’ effort wrote a blog post recently discussing the threats presented by botnets and other malware installed on users machines, where the user is unaware of or apathetic about the presence of that software.

Just as when an individual who is not vaccinated puts others’ health at risk, computers that are not protected or have been compromised with a bot put others at risk and pose a greater threat to society. In the physical world, international, national, and local health organizations identify, track and control the spread of disease which can include, where necessary, quarantining people to avoid the infection of others. Simply put, we need to improve and maintain the health of consumer devices connected to the Internet in order to avoid greater societal risk. To realize this vision, there are steps that can be taken by governments, the IT industry, Internet access providers, users and others to evaluate the health of consumer devices before granting them unfettered access to the Internet or other critical resources.

I have argued previously against the “there’s nothing important on my computer, so I don’t care” response that some have to the discovery of malware on their machines, and I certainly believe that it is an irresponsible attitude that contributes to these greater threats.

But I am concerned about some of the solutions which Scott proposes — particularly those that might seek to create legislation and obligations on individual computer users.

» Read the rest of this post…

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog 1 for iPhone (UK iTunes App Store link). Yep, that’s right — the original game from 1991 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

It’s a fun game, albeit one which I’m not really very good at, having only made it to Spring Yard Zone so far (even with the assistance of the Level Select ‘feature’).

One thing that struck me about this game, though, is the technical limitations of the original hardware this game was designed for. When you have a 7.61 MHz 68K processor, a total of 512 colours (only 64 of which can be on the same screen at the same time) and sound that has to be generated through a rather primitive Programmable Sound Generator chip, you have a lot of things to work around and a lot of restrictions to work within to create a fun, entertaining video game.

Despite all these technical limitations — in fact, even because of them, you end up with an artform that becomes uniquely beautiful, because it is so technically constrained. The fact that all the sound has to be generated by this one chip, all the colours used have to be painstakingly thought out ahead of time so that the palettes will work out and you have the colours you need, the fact that the whole game has to fit inside a few megabytes — it enforces simplicity.

It’s something that’s easy to forget about when we can carry around extraordinary processing power in our pockets and the computers we use at our desks have such technical capability.

Video game programming twenty years ago demanded a different mindset — efficiency, simplicity and a degree of pragmatism about making things fit around the limitations. This game for me sums up where the binary, definite nature of digital technology, with all of its 1990s limitations, can meet with the full expression of human creativity.

I went along to the Great Dorset Steam Fair yesterday, and put together a short video.

If you can’t see the embed, you can click here to watch it on YouTube.

• All the iOS devices — iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, are built around Cocoa Touch.
• Snow Leopard brought 64-bit support to the Mac mainstream for Cocoa applications. Carbon applications are clearly on the way out and have been since the release of Leopard in 2007.
• The third major release of iTunes since Leopard came out is still Carbon and still only 32-bit. (Perhaps an even greater irony is that there is a 64-bit Windows version of iTunes.)

Is this a bit of a nitpick? Probably. Does it really matter what the framework underneath iTunes is if it is being improved? Possibly not. Is iTunes a huge, vital part of Apple’s iPod/iPhone/iTunes Store infrastructure that they are naturally unwilling to make huge changes to? Absolutely.

But I really, really wanted iTunes 10 to be ‘iTunes X’ — not just another major release with some new features, but a drastic rewrite of the application (for the Mac anyway) in Cocoa. The app’s performance has been improved with recent versions, but iTunes is still the one application that ships with Macs that feels out of place — the interface is jarring and not fluid, the app frequently hangs for several seconds for no reason and there is ancient UI debris hanging around. (Those first two might be better with this release, I don’t know, but the Mac OS 9-style context menu cursor lives on.)

Ah well, maybe iTunes 11? 🙁

The upgrade from a first-generation iPod touch to an iPhone 4 is a significant one, in many ways. 🙂

If you haven’t seen the iPhone Retina Display, it genuinely is as good as the marketing suggests. No matter how close I hold the device to my eyes, I can’t make out individual pixels; the rendering of text is the best I have seen on any pixel display.

Other than the excellent additional hardware features of the iPhone, like the camera, GPS capabilities and of course, having internet access wherever I am, the other biggest upgrade is the sheer speed of the device compared to the first-gen hardware. The responsiveness of the UI on the iPhone 4 is as good as, if not better than, that of the iPad. Everything about the interface is fluid, responding immediately and directly to what you do. All the apps feel so much faster and it makes using the device a lot more natural when you aren’t waiting, even for a quarter of a second, for the next screen to load.

I’m very pleased with this as an upgrade to my mobile computing. 😀

Further to my post explaining why I don’t like centralised comments systems such as Disqus, this blog post by Jacob Barkdull echoes some of my opinions on the service — both from a technical point of view and from the ideological standpoint that for something as critical as comments, if it’s on your website, it should be under your control.

Disqus is one central controlling entity, if Disqus decides to do “maintenance” or they begin to have server problems, everyone using Disqus comments now has not only no way visitors may leave comments, but also no way to display previously posted comments. And if worst comes to worst and Disqus disappears (as is possible with companies) everyone is left without comments, unlike if the comments are controlled by each “webmaster”.

…

I find issue with the added near 4 second pause on every page just to display Disqus comments, Disqus handles this well, but not well enough in my opinion. Because when pages load with Disqus comments there appears a little “Loading…” message, that eventually gets replaced by the comments and the form to post comments, the problem with the way they do this is when you refresh the page it jolts, kicking the scroll down the length of the comments until Disqus has loaded where it then kicks the scroll back up the length of the comments.

Jony Ive on the iPad:

I don’t have to change myself to fit the product; it fits me… There’s no right or wrong way of holding it…

Steve Jobs, on the iPhone 4, following some complaints about the signal strength dropping when people hold the sides of the device:

Just avoiding holding it in that way…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really interested in the iPhone 4 and I think it looks like a great device.

I just couldn’t help noticing the irony in the disparity between those two statements.