A Mac OS X Lion Feature that developers will appreciate.

This is a follow up post to my 1 day review of Mac OS X Lion.  After using it for a couple more days it still is a very positive experience.  I did find an interesting feature that I believe calls for another blog entry.

When you shut down your machine OS X Lion asks you if you’d like to re-open all the windows.  That is very handy because often I am using the same several apps all the time Chrome, Mail, iCal, Word and maybe an IDE.

Yesterday I was using terminal windows for my development and wanted to reboot my machine.  To my surprise when I rebooted the machine my Terminal windows opened and I had the history of my shell commands and outputs still in the buffer.

Even though I don’t reboot my mac often it was useful to regain the context of what I was doing.  This is another example of small but useful improvement done in the latest version of OS X.

1 Day OS X Lion Test: Three Favorite Things and One Small Problem.

Today I downloaded OSX Lion from the Mac OS App Store. The entire installation went flawlessly: the system upgraded and booted up as expected. I wanted to share the things I noticed as a person who does business communication and software development. For those of you who do not want to read the entire post I have to say that there are good reasons to upgrade, but you have to watch out for a couple of quirks.

Number one most favorite upgrade is the Mail App. It got a complete makeover. Conversation threading really works now. It’s a pleasure to use.

Mac OS X Lion Mail App

The app also seems to be a little faster to start up and that’s always a good thing.

My second most favorite improvement is the way multiple desktops work. Sliding desktops side to side feels more intuitive. The dashboard as a desktop of its own seemed like a brilliant idea as well. I seldom remembered to use my dashboard before but now I pop into it frequently.

Another productivity tool that I very much appreciate is iCal. I connect to multiple calendars and iCal is one of my most used applications. I have it linked to Meetup.com, Microsoft Exchange, Google Calendar and Facebook. In the new iCal I found a nice surprise a port of iPad Day view:

Mac OS X Lion iCal - Day View

It shows the full day agenda and also gives you a way to scroll through the appointment timeline on the left hand side.

All my applications that were installed on the Snow Leopard continued to work with the exception of NetBeans. NetBeans silently stopped launching. I had to go look at the logs to find out that Java runtime has been uninstalled. Issuing java from the shell prompt started an installation and addressed the problem, but I guarantee that if I wasn’t in the tech field I’d never figure this out. Once I have got the Java runtime everything worked as expected.

In Summary I believe Lion is a worthy upgrade. None of the features were particularly breakthrough but Apple showed continuous innovation and polish in a lot of places where it mattered.

Why work at Microsoft

I spent a total of 5 years at Microsoft.  2 years as a contractor and 3 years as a full time Engineering Lead.  My time at Microsoft had its ups and downs but overall it was a very valuable experience.  I am tough on Microsoft, but that’s primarily because I think they can do a lot better.  I want to devote a few paragraphs to why one would actually work at Microsoft, because even with all its flaws Microsoft can contribute a lot to someone’s growth.

First thing to remember – Microsoft is a very engineering driven company.  It is the best place to learn how to be a great developer, tester or program manager.  Most of the groups at Microsoft know exactly how those roles play together and how to train and execute in those disciplines.  Microsoft has had some issues delivering breakthrough products lately, but it’s rarely an engineering issue.  Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Xbox, Office, Windows Servers and Visual Studio are stable, extensible, responsive and are a pleasure to use.  In the interest of full disclosure I do use an iPhone and a Macbook Pro, but it’s mostly a hardware issue.

When you join Microsoft as an engineer they will train you how to write secure code, how to test it, how to grow in your role and invest in yourself.

Being at Microsoft as an engineering manager or a lead is also a great experience.  Microsoft will invest into training you how to hire and terminate, how to deal with various personalities and how to drive your team to excel.

The time I did spend at Microsoft I shipped products, did bug triage and gained intuition about how to manage a release.

There are plenty of reasons not to be at Microsoft and that’s why I left 5  years ago to join DocuSign, however that’s a whole different blog post.  I do consider my time on the Windows Team as a Masters in Software Engineering (as opposed to Masters in Computer Science).  The curriculum consists of taking classes, doing a lot of homework, working hard, coming into the lab on the weekends, and passing your finals by shipping software.

Google Plus could be the first PRM (Personal Relationship Manager)

My toolkit

Last night I was at a great API meetup put together by Shanley (@shanley) from ApiGee.  There were a few interesting presenters including SalesForce.com and Context.IO.  Thinking about CRM, extracting useful content out of e-mail and playing with Google Plus gave me an idea:

One thing that I love in the corporate world that is not yet in my consumer arsenal is a relationship manager.  By that I mean the organized view of: e-mails, phone calls, meetups, personal meetings, group affiliations, shared documents and shared pictures all in one view.

I really don’t need a relationship manager for people I stay in close contact with.  I know exactly what my relationship with my mom is about and I know what’s going on with my close friends.  However there is a distant fringe of people that I come in contact with every once in a while.  It would be great to have a view of our history together.  Under that category I would put: ex co-workers, tax accountants, dentists, doctors, car repair people, some of my college buddies and technical affiliates.

There are only a few companies out there that can actually gather that information and organize it.  I believe Google is in the position to do it well.  In fact creating the PRM would elevate the value of using Google voice, sharing Google docs, joining Google groups and, of course, using Google Plus. 

Google Plus exposes the Achilles Heel of Facebook

Last week I’ve got an invite to Google plus last week (thanks @iein) and had a chance to play around with it.  We have gone through many waves of social networks. Friendster, Orkut, MySpace and every new social graph addressed a major annoyance of the previous one.

I used Friendster and Orkut for a bit, but both of those didn’t catch people’s attention enough to keep them sharing information every day. MySpace saw real mass adoption but it completely failed with its design. I remember being frustrated with people’s pages, the auto playing videos, bulletins that were over run by club promoters and the rest of cheap design. Then came Facebook and it addressed some of the things that MySpace refused to fix.

For me Facebook was a big winner because you had to prove your affiliation to a certain college. You also didn’t have crazy designs on people pages. You didn’t have limitations on pictures and you had the news feed. MySpace reacted to those features way too late and it was probably afraid that it was going to lose some of its users if it became more strict and less customizable.

Now we are seeing people’s frustration with Facebook. The number one frustration is privacy. If you let people into your network they are free to see everything. If you don’t then they feel like you don’t want to associate with them.

People have gone around this issue by creating several profiles. Some just stopped sharing personal information altogether. Facebook has continuously erred on the side of overexposure of your data. Overexposure of your personal life is what kept people who are in your circle coming back therefor Facebook had no reason to fix it.

Google Plus holds a promise to fix the oversharing mess. Alexia’s Tsotsis’ article describes the difference between Facebook social networking and real world social networking. Facebook better react quickly or soon I will only share my personal info only on the network that promises to keep it to my inner circle of trust. 

Philosophical Questions as of July 2011

After reading Gurdjieff by John Shirley I have constructed the word cloud of the highlights and keywords.  The results were a little surprising but they gave me an insight into the philosophical questions I am currently pursuing.

I have excluded things like "our, their, the" here and here is the top of the report

Total words: 1022
Unique words: 628
Score: 61.4%
Words and frequencies:
love  10  1%
life  8  0.8%
real  8  0.8%
consciousness  6  0.6%
machines  6  0.6%
personality  6  0.6%

Going back to the highlights that match to these keywords the topic philosophical topics for me right now are:
- Understanding of Love
- Meaning of life
- The best way to experience reality and be conscious through the journey
- How do external influences make humans into machines
- How do I know who I am - what is essence and what is personality I have developed.

I did not anticipate this order but it does seem that these topics are both interesting and engaging.