The Perfect Abbey Road

The Perfect Abbey Road

 

 

ONE THING THAT Steve Jobs understood that music industry executives didn't is that we love our music. In initiating digital downloads from iTunes he allowed us to create and burn our own playlists and our own versions of classic albums.

This is something I've been doing myself for many years. You see, on almost every album there are either a few fillers -- songs included to pad out the album -- or just songs that we personally don't like. Then there are also the songs not included but we wish they had been. On the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's, for example, there is the one I don't like, Paul's 'When I'm Sixty-Four' (what John Lennon caustically referred to as 'one of Paul's granny songs') and the one I like but think doesn't belong there, George's 'Within You, Without You'. On the other hand, there are the two songs that even George Martin wishes had been included but weren't: 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane'. Whenever I listen to the album these days, those two left-offs replace the two I don't want there.

I have done this kind of thing with many albums: Eagles' Hotel California and The Long Run, Bowie's Heroes/Helden, The Who's Sell Out, and so on.

Likewise, I have my own classic Abbey Road: I've replaced the Paul granny song that the other Beatles hated, 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' (Lennon even refused to play on it), with the raw-but-powerful version of John's "Don't Let Me Down" that was released on "Let It Be (Naked)". The rest of the album remains unchanged. It is, for me in this personalised version, not only the perfect Abbey Road, but also the perfect rock album.

c Kenneth Rowley 2015

Mac-like

Mac-like 

 Everybody knows that Apple is the Rolls-Royce of computing. When I encountered my first Mac, back in early 1985, every computer I had ever used before became a second-class citizen. And even when Apple's fortunes hit rock bottom in the dark nineties (do you remember a pic of a Windows install disc with the legend, "One OS to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them"?) the Mac refused to die. Why? I've always believed it was a combination of three things: 

a Mac always worked straight out of the box; 
a Mac always expressed the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) that stood behind it; 
and, if you had the courage and a little bit of skill, a Mac could always be tweaked. 

My favourite Mac OS was OS 7; my favourite Mac program was the experimental but amazing Cyberdog (an Internet suite built to demonstrate the concept and power of OpenDoc). Cyberdog was a joint project of Apple and IBM and it was killed off c.1997 by Microsoft pressure; Windows 8 reminds me of it everytime I see a new WinBox. Anyway, now it's 2014 and I still have my Macs. But I now also have linux. My first linux love was Bianca (2.2) and I still use Mint (Quiana 17 is on a partition of this machine). But now linux also has its own OS 7. It's name is elementary OS.

Why Windows is in trouble...

Many commentators think Windows is in trouble because Windows 8 is proving so unpopular that some companies are making money by uninstalling 8 and replacing it with 7. Others point to the fact that Microsoft's Secure Boot option (sic) is really a way to try and stop users dual-booting their machines by installing linux, for example, on a new partition. Still others claim that desktop machines are already obsolete and Windows has very little mobile presence.

But the real reason that Windows is in trouble is that OS X and Android are close cousins.

Consider, for example, a mobile programmer. Let's say he writes his new app in python, a flexible language for such apps. He writes it first for iPhone and iPad; which means it will run on a UNIX core. If he then wants to release an Android version, it's not that difficult (I'm not saying it's easy) because Android is a LINUX flavour, and linux derives from unix. But if somebody then asks him for a Windows version...

This is the main reason why Apple and Google are the two giants fighting for mobile dominance at the moment.

Apple struggled prior to OS X, but the switch to a UNIX core helped reverse its fortunes. And Windows 8 boxes-- such as the Lenovo Thinkpads--are ideal platforms for running linux.

aDeskbar!

my desktop with aDeskbar on the right

I should have posted this earlier, but... well, anyway. aDeskbar is a perfect solution for those of us who are really Mac users but have migrated to linux for whatever reason (I use linux at work mostly). As you can see from the screenshot it can sit anywhere you want it to, it can autohide, and it works seamlessly and trouble-free with the lightweight distros out there (in this case, Peppermint-ice). If you are interested, read the original post on OMGubuntu and download the deb file by following the links. I'm finding aDeskbar a valuable utility at the moment. Enjoy. The link:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/adeskbar-dock-panel-replacement-for-ubuntu/

{Google} WAVE R.I.P

So, WAVE is officially dead. Well, I'm neither surprised nor particularly disappointed. It was a good idea, but it didn't work well on mobiles-- and that, I think, is the kiss of death for such technology these days. Actually, a lot of these 'new' technologies remind me of the greatest and most innovative program ever released: Apple's Cyberdog, which was so advanced in its ambition and design that nobody has even yet quite caught up. Unfortunately it was part of Apple's and IBM's OpenDoc initiative which was (for reasons explained elsewhere) killed off by megadeath Microsoft back in c1996.

Flock is the new Dog

Back in the mid-1990s, Apple and IBM joined hands for an exciting new concept called OpenDoc. The idea was to focus on a task rather than on the applications etc needed to complete the task. It was a heady, radical, holistic kind of idea that brought integration centre-stage to the world of computing. Microsoft killed off OpenDoc by leaning heavily on both IBM and Apple, but not before Apple had shown what the concept could do by building an all-in-one Internet Suite called CyberDog. CyberDog was light-years ahead of anything else around at that time and in many ways we still haven't equalled it but Flock is coming close and is quickly reminding me of those exciting days. The way that Flock is personal and the ways in which so many things are integrated under the same hood was exactly the CyberDog way of doing things.  And that explains partly why I love Flock so much and how this one product has got me genuinely excited about the Web again.

Blogged with the Flock Browser