Tumblr and Tumblelogs

There’s a new Web 2.0 kid on the block known as Tumblr that is a free tool for creating tumblelogs. What is a tumblelog?

Tumblelogs are blogs with less fuss and more stuff. Tumblr is your friendly and free tool for creating tumblelogs.

Think of a tumblelog like Daring Fireball’s Linked List. Its a place for quick posts that in and of themselves do not warrant an entire blog entry. The sorts of things you post to your tumblelog might also have been gathered together in a single summary post for the day or week. Unlike Twitter which I still don’t see the use of, Tumblr makes it easy to share little tidbits of information with people without derailing the flow of your main blog. They provide quick ways to post text, photos, quotes, links, conversations, and videos.

Now I just wonder how long it will take before someone creates a desktop client for the Mac like Iconfactory did with Twitterrific for Twitter.

Update: I’ve created my own tumblelog on Tumblr.

Bill Gates – Blatant Liar

Here’s page two of some excerpts of an interview that Steven Levy of NEWSWEEK did with Bill Gates of Microsoft. Clearly Bill is a bit annoyed by the I’m a Mac commercials. I find it particularly interesting that Bill responds to criticism about upgrading a PC being equivalent to surgery with:

And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

And then goes on to blatantly lie about vulnerabilities in Mac OS X in response to a question about why the features of Vista seem suspiciously similar to those in Mac OS X Tiger, which has been out nearly two years now:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

Perhaps he was referring to the Month of Apple Bugs which as far as I can tell was much more of a publicity stunt than a serious list of vulnerabilities against the OS. It appears from a quick perusal of their site that many of the bugs aren’t even in the OS, but in applications, some of them not even Apple’s. As far as I’ve heard there hasn’t even been one exploit where your machine can be taken over, totally or otherwise. But there certainly are not such exploits released daily. I expect the MoAB people took quite a long time to compile their list in order to know they would have a month’s worth of bugs.

Unfortunately, and I’m sure Bill knows this, all it takes to start a myth is a well publicized lie. I don’t know if Steven Levy pressed him on this because MSNBC only saw fit to publish excerpts of the interview. What a shock.

UPDATE: Michael has a similar view of this interview in his blog entry Is Bill Gates on Crack?

Macworld ‘07 Keynote Reactions

I must say I’m a bit shocked. Not shocked by Apple TV or even the iPhone really. Shocked that Steve only unveiled Apple TV and the iPhone, the latter not even being available for another 6 months. Don’t get me wrong, I think they are both cool and will talk about them a bit but I am surprised we didn’t see new versions of iLife and iWork. Granted nothing about a year-based naming scheme requires that new versions be released every year, just look at Microsoft, but I really thought Apple would continue with Macworld timeframe updates. Anyway, lets look at what they did announce.

Developer – the dirty word

It occurred to me today that there are different understandings of the word developer with regard to software development. It is an overloaded word and I think it may be a source of confusion.

Macworld ‘07 Predictions

Macworld is just over a month away and it seems a good time to comment on what I think we’ll see this year.

iWork ‘07 Given the naming scheme Apple has chosen we are all but guaranteed for a new release of iWork. Keynote is fairly mature at this point but I think we can expect new templates and possibly new builds. Pages should also receive some new templates and hopefully some fixes for things like object selection. There may be some additional features for each but I think we’ll see a spreadsheet app added to the bundle and integration with both Keynote and Pages will be the major changes to those apps. Will we also see a database front-end of some sort? It would be nice, and AppleWorks has one.

iLife ‘07 Again the naming scheme gives it away. I hope we’ll see some major improvements to iWeb but that may depend on how much demand Apple sees for the app. Garageband seems to be Steve’s baby so I won’t be surprised by improvements there. iMovie and iDVD seem fairly mature but possibly there will be something new to add. I expect iPhoto to get some additional editing capability. Most if not all of the apps will get some integration with iTV.