As we lead-up to Christmas (and other holidays that I don’t personally celebrate), I thought I’d put together a list of a few of my favorite things — Mac apps top be specific. These are some of my favorite music and video apps. iTunes, iTunes Match, Last.fm, Spotify & Tracks I’ve been using iTunes to manage my music since iTunes 4.1 came out for Windows in 2003. Prior to that, I had a folder of music organized alphabetically and used Winamp for playback.

As we lead-up to Christmas (and other holidays that I don’t personally celebrate), I thought I’d put together a list of a few of my favorite things — Mac apps top be specific. These are some of my favorite day-to-day apps. Safari My favorite web browser on the Mac platform. It’s fast, has minimal UI chrome, and has precisely the extensions I need. I used to bounce around between Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but over the past year, I haven’t felt the pain of anything missing from my browser experience.

A recent editorial on Business Insider layer out a number of reasons why the author, Ed Conway, was “leaving Apple”. This is my response. Self-Indulgent Weiner In his editorial, Ed Conway wrote: Dear Tim, There’s no easy way to put this so I’ll just come right out with it. I’m leaving you. It’s been great (mostly) but it’s over. I figured the least I could do is to explain my decision in full – I like to think it might help protect you from nasty break-ups like this in the future.

For some time now, I’ve been a fan of the App Judgment podcast, which discusses new apps, devices and grades them on-air. Lately, however, I’ve noticed some saddeningly ill-informed “reporting” when it comes to Apple, iOS 6 and the new iPhone 5. Bias is bias First of all, everybody is free to have their own opinions. If these guys prefer Android-based OSs and non-Apple hardware, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you’re in the business of reporting information, however, make sure you have your facts straight and aren’t misleading anybody by leaving out relevant information.

In his piece entitled iPhone 5, John Gruber made a statement that really stuck out to me: […] but there is no benchmark, no tech spec, to measure nice. But you can feel it. And that is what resonates with millions of people around the world. As soon as I read this, I was struck by how true this statement is for companies like Intel, Google and Amazon that claim to be “metrics-driven”. The unfortunate side-effect is that they focus so much on metrics that they end up being driven only by metrics — which ultimately results in consistently sub-par experiences.

What does Ryan do when the same recruiter keeps pinging him over and over despite all efforts to get removed from a recruiter’s mailing list? Find out in this week’s episode of Clueless Recruiters! (Cue theme music!) Explanation There are few things that technical people are more annoyed by than technical recruiters. A very large segment of the technical recruiting industry has made a bad name for the rest of their industry by relentlessly spamming technical professionals after having not done their homework.

What do Lawyers, Evil Dictators and this week’s Clueless Recruiter have in common? A complete lack of human decency. All in this week’s episode of Clueless Recruiters! (Cue theme music!) Explanation There are few things that technical people are more annoyed by than technical recruiters. A very large segment of the technical recruiting industry has made a bad name for the rest of their industry by relentlessly spamming technical professionals after having not done their homework. These people hock job openings the same way that sleazy salesmen hock used cars.

The iPhone 5 was announced just moments ago, along with updates to iPod touch, iPod nano and iTunes. How close were my recent guesses? Naming I was way off. I did not think that they would call it “iPhone 5”, but here we are. They did the complete opposite of what I’d anticipated. Louie Mantia had the following to say about the name: God dammit Apple. “5”? Really? YOU HAD ONE JOB!! Let’s see how The Infamous They did with their predictions.

Many people have questioned what the next iPhone — widely expected to be released in under a month’s time — will be called? Let’s look at our options. iPhone 5 or iPhone 6 “iPhone 5” is the name that people have most commonly assigned to the upcoming iPhone, but there are a number of problems with that guess. The first of which is that it’s not the fifth iPhone — it’s the sixth. We’ve had (in order): The original iPhone The iPhone 3G The iPhone 3GS The iPhone 4 And the iPhone 4S.