Dell sells some pretty nice monitors. Just picked up a nice UltraSharp 27-inch display. Great color accuracy and good build quality. The old 20″ Apple Cinema Display (with the old ADC connector) is now retired after close to 10 years of use. It might get used as a 2nd monitor, but there’s not enough desk now at this point. And some people will ask “Why not a 4K monitor?”. Two reasons. Expensive, and I don’t “need” 4K for anything right now or in the near future. It’s kind of a technology looking for a problem to solve – for me at any rate. So no 4k.
Tag: Technology
Still loving Pods Framework
Still loving Pods Framework. The plugin just so powerful and flexible. I’m still amazed at just what’s possible.
I just finished building out a WordPress site with CPTs (Custom Post Types) and custom Taxonomys to handle creating and displaying project information. Pods Framework really made it easy.
Thoughts on the Mac App store…
So I recently made some purchases through Apple’s Mac App store. Overall I think it’s a good system, particularly for those developers without strong marketing and distribution channels. The net benefit for the world is positive, although I wouldn’t want app stores like this to be the only way of buying and distributing software.
Here’s a quick list of pros and cons, followed up with my “huh…this could change everything” realization.
Pros:
– Purchases are amazingly easy and generally painless.
– instant gratification (click, purchase, download, and go)
– easy to keep apps up to date
– curated experience means good exposure to new/useful apps while (so far) keeping malware out
– App Stores – not just the Mac App store – provide economic impetus to develop for the Apple ecosystem, meaning more cool apps for Mac OS/iOS
Mixed:
– walled garden – it’s nice and pretty, but sometimes you want to break out…
Cons:
– the store is difficult to search
– for a “curated” experience, the store still has a lot of “this passed review?” kind of apps
– broadband is a necessity, particularly for larger apps
And now for the “this can change everything” realization. So most software licenses basically tie the software to a machine, device, and sometimes even by CPU. Under the App Store, once you purchase software, it is licensed to your App store user account. This means you buy software once and can use it anywhere (after logging into the App store and installing the app under your App store user account). It’s basically a floating license (I’m looking at you, Luxology Modo). This makes perfect sense to me – the machine doesn’t matter – it’s not licensing the software. The user though…they matter a lot, they’re the ones licensing the software. I eagerly await for this licensing model to become the norm because it has the potential to change everything.