Cpgeek.org

This is in response to http://www.macworld.com/article/146038/2010/01/ipad_future_shock.html

it's basically just growing pains. evolutionary computational ergonomics demands that new user interfaces be designed that simplify, obfuscate, or remove the lines between using a general purpose computer, using an appliance that does 1 task very well, and simply interacting with objects we're familiar with in our environment. it's a big step. it's basically the difference between a blinking cursor in Apple BASIC and an interactive AI voice interface as you see on the 24th century star trek shows.

the way apple is currently accomplishing this is to implement Jef Raskin's idea (awesome guy to know about) of having completely minimalistic but ergonomic full-screen interfaces for each thing you want to do making said interface tailored for that task and no other, and having some ergonomic way to switch between tasks. that's pretty much the basic idea behind the iphone os.

I still don't understand why people are choosing NOW to talk about all this stuff instead of at the introduction of the iphone some 3 years ago. All the iPad is, is a really big, moderately more powerful ipod touch with better battery life. it's not really a game-changer, it's the same technology, just a bit bigger and slightly more evolved.

I wanted to talk about an AWESOME SITE I heard about on TekZilla (a cool IPTV show having to do with everything tech). It's called AlternativeTo and it’s primary purpose is to find good, viable, alternatives to popular applications, both free and non-free across multiple operating systems.

MacHeist. MacHeist is a great site that my good friend Mark Z told me about. MacHeist has a few pieces generally-lesser-known-but-high-quality software that are really cool. they have a new bundle every so often, and they basically give this normally-for-pay software away in hopes of getting the word out and increasing sales to the original software manufacturers. Right now the bundle consists of:

Well my most non-attentive non-readers, the server outage which occurred over the past 2 days which nobody probably noticed was due to our main server being completely hosed. There was an electrical problem that knocked out the memory slots on the main machine that controlled the cpgeek.org network.