Skype for iPad as Business App of the Year? Puhleeze.
The folks over at IT Pro had their IT Pro Awards 2011 recently. They awarded a few different honours. Some innovative, others pretty predictable. I struggle to care that Microsoft won "Vendor of the Year"? What does that even mean? And if it's a category that Microsoft won, who else even had a chance of winning it? Oracle? IBM? HP? And those are 4 of the biggest anyways, so it's not like this award will create some new recognition or awareness of a vendor.
The only thing I think awards are useful for is if you understand why they are awarded. What did candidate A have that candidate B did not? The IT Pro awards appear to be a simple popularity contest. That is, random web site visitors had a set of candidates to choose from, and they chose for whatever reason. If the candidates were judged on criteria (e.g., originality, fitness for purpose, reliability, value for money) I would love to see how the winners (and losers) scored. But these awards are meaningless. There's no judging. Just popularity of clicks.
iOS5 Security Restrictions
The restrictions feature of iOS 5 are pretty weak. Here's what's wrong and what someone needs to do to fix it.
Reader in Safari is quite cool
I noticed the RSS Reader feature on my iPad after I upgraded to iOS 5. When Im reading a web page, the word Reader shows up in the URL bar. When I tap it, the iPad looks a lot more like a kindle. The coloured backgrounds drop off, fonts are ignored, ads go away, and I get a basic black text on white background. Much more readable.
Obviously the RSS feed doesnt include YouTube videos, and a bunch of other parts of the page. But it also doesn't include the ads! Some sites don't have an RSS version, so you don't get it. But where they do have it, it's so much nicer.
Location Security in iOS 5
Like many people, I upgraded to iOS 5 on my iDevices very soon after it came out. I noticed that Location Services has a lot more options than previously. What is interesting is that they have made the icon for Location Services in the status bar off by default, and they buried the option to enable it. Once you enable it, you'll discover lots and lots of services looking at your current location. I find this a bit too much of an invasion of privacy. Here's how to tone it down some.
OMFG: Ports on MacOS Sucks
I wanted to do something pretty straightforward, theoretically. I wanted to install VLC from source on MacOS X. I use the MacPorts system for this. It's really similar to the FreeBSD ports system. What a nightmare.