How to Be a Horrible Boss – Diego Baschs Blog.

Mac OS X Lion gave us the ability to take apps full-screen, moving clutter and distractions out of the way and making organizing your desktop easier. Native apps like iPhoto, Safari, Mail and iCal supported this new full-screen mode out of the box, and third-party apps followed suit, including some of my favourites like Evernote, Chrome and Reeder.

But for anyone using more than one screen, this new full-screen mode renders that second or third screen a little pointless. For example, here’s a dual-screen setup with iTunes on the primary monitor and a peek at the second monitor, which displays Apple’s now-signature cross-hatch wallpaper:

OS X Lion Full Screen Mode with Dual Monitors

That cross-hatch wallpaper area on the second monitor does not allow for a window or another full-screen app to be placed on it. It doesn’t even allow for widgets from the dashboard area. In other words, it’s useless.

I have heard the arguments from the other side on this one, stating that a solution is to simply close your laptop and use only the external monitor, or that placing two full-screen applications next to each other isn’t really in line with Apple’s intent when they rolled out this feature. The intent was to allow you to focus on one application, one task, one project at a time. Dual-monitor setups don’t fit into this philosophy because they’re made to multitask. I am of the opinion this dialogue could swiftly be snuffed out if Apple would provide an option to either allow or disallow applications to concurrently run in full-screen mode when more than one display is hooked up.

As it stands, it seems like a deliberately lazy part of an otherwise great operating system.

In a previous post, I talked about how OSX Lion has helped make sharing my office’s internet connection over wifi easier. When I have my Mac broadcasting the connection, I can help cut down on the costs of 3G data by using WiFi on my iPhone and iPad when I’m at work. But when it comes to using iMessage as a replacement for text messaging, this creates a problem.

You see, unbeknownst to me, my company’s network blocks the ports that iMessage uses to send and receive data, thereby disabling my ability to receive messages from anyone on iMessage. The fact that this happened without my knowledge was a big problem.

I planned on meeting a friend for lunch and she said she’d message me when she was finished her meeting. Almost half an hour went by with no messages and I thought her meeting was going long. When I left my desk to use the washroom, my iPhone went out of range of my Mac’s WiFi and switched back to 3G. Boom! I get three messages from my friend saying she’s finished her meeting, asking to meet her somewhere and then wondering where I went.

What are your experiences using iMessage over a company network or public WiFi? Have you had the same problem? Leave a comment.

Since I became an iPhone owner a couple years ago, I’ve always found that jailbreaking has opened the ubiquitous device up to some really cool features not otherwise available in Apple’s walled garden. But as of late, with iOS updates flying fast and new features cropping up, I have found reason after reason to return my phone to its vanilla glory. With the release of the most recent version of iOS (5.0.1), I decided to give an un-jailbroken iPhone a try.

Here’s a quick list of some of the reasons why jailbreaking might be a thing of the past for me.

• Personal Hotspot – prior to the wireless carriers agreeing to free their data connections from the bounds of mobile devices and allow them to be tethered to laptops, desktops and anything else that will accept a bluetooth/wifi/USB internet connection, the only way to share my iPhone’s 3G connectivity was to jailbreak and run the fantastic MyWi application. But now with Personal Hotspot, there’s just no need to jailbreak in order to share a data connection. The only limitation to this is that on my 3GS, sharing over wifi isn’t supported with Personal Hotspot, but that’s only really a concern when I’m sharing a connection with my iPad, which so far has been a rare occurrence.
• iBooks - it just straight up doesn’t work on a jailbroken iOS 5 device. There are fixes/workarounds, but I’d rather not have to spend a bunch of time messing around in Terminal / iFile to make a 1st-party app work. Boourns to that.
• App Updates - this is a touchy subject, because one of the things you can do with a jailbroken iPhone/iPad is use cracked applications. Sites like apptrackr state that they are “for application trials, and nothing else”, but in the same breath they admit that the majority of their users come to the site to pirate. Full disclosure, I’ve done my fair share of “application trials”, but after a while of using the app, I either lost interest and deleted it, or found it useful enough to warrant the average $0.99 – $2.99 price tag. The main thing that pushed me toward legitimate app purchases – it simplified the updating process – with cracked apps, there are no update notifications, and the latest versions of apps might take weeks to show up in a cracked format. When I moved to iOS5, this became a major headache. Legitimately purchased apps are the way to go, hands down. I believe Apple’s system of selling Apps through the App Store defeats piracy the same way iTunes has done a lot to combat music piracy – something Steve Jobs mentioned when the iTunes store first launched.
• Performance - while jailbreaking your device doesn’t necessarily slow it down, as soon as you install any application that requires Mobile Substrate, (like my favourite jailbreak app, BiteSMS) you can be certain of a drop in performance, especially when it comes to opening or switching applications. This is especially noticeable on my aging iPhone 3GS. I’ve seen a marked speed improvement this week since upgrading to iOS 5.0.1 and staying away from jailbreaking.
• OTA Software Updates - I don’t know if this is a byproduct of jailbreaking or not, but the OTA update for 5.0.1 failed on my iPhone and iPad, both of which were jailbroken at the time. I’m hoping the next round of updates go smoothly on my vanilla iOS devices.

One marked improvement I’ve seen on my iPhone 3GS since upgrading to iOS 5 is that it has improved the speed of installing multiple apps or app updates from the iTunes App Store. In iOS 4 or earlier, each app would download and install one at a time, making installing updates for many apps a sometimes slow process.

In iOS 5, however, apps will download and install simultaneously, speeding up the process of installing many apps or updates. More specifically, what happens now is that once an app is finished downloading and begins installing, iOS immediately begins downloading the next app in line. This process of installing and downloading in tandem noticeably speeds up the process, which is good for those of us who are constantly updating the many apps installed on our iOS devices.

Kevin Rose posted on his Google+ page October 15, 2011 that he envisions iOS to include push updates for apps in the future. He doesn’t have any inside information on whether or not this will actually come to fruition, but I’m certainly with him as far as the idea is concerned. Everyone with more than just the stock iOS apps will agree that it’s a pain to have to manually poll the App Store to see if there are updates for your apps.

To take it one step further, I imagine App Store updates could happen automatically on all your devices, just like photos show up in your photo stream now. The apps are already stored on Apple’s servers, so it would just be a matter of including an option to turn on automatic updates. With all the money Apple’s been spending on servers for iCloud, I’m pretty sure they could handle the extra bandwidth of sending out push notifications.

The Globe and Mail published an article stating several reasons why, given the recent death of its co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, the future of Apple is in decline and that it would be a good idea to sell your stock in the company, should you own any.

What bothers me about this advice is there’s no mention or consideration of Jony Ive. Ive is widely considered to be Jobs’ protege and while they worked together at Apple they were close friends and many have noted their similar work styles, eye for design and that they were in many other ways kindred spirits. Everyone who’s been saying that the spirit of Apple will live on with Jobs’ products and innovations must also agree that it will also continue to innovate and succeed because of Ive’s designs and his close ties to Jobs’ philosophy. Tim Cook may be the head of the company now, but Ive is most definitely the heart. In my mind, that’s a combination worth investing in.

It’s been a wild year and I’m delighted to say that my little man Adam turned 1 on October 22. His birthday party is on Saturday but he’s got a bunch of toys already from us and his grandparents – including this sweet wooden block toy.

Big thanks to everyone who attended Adam’s first birthday party. He had no idea why there were so many people in his normally quiet house but it was a blast all the same. And TOYS! OMG toys. Can’t believe Christmas is just around the corner. This kid is going to be swimming in neon plastic.

In other news, he decided to start walking the day of his birthday. I managed to capture it on video, albeit not wonderful quality. See embed below and forgive me for the incredibly effeminate ”yay” at video’s end.

Everyone and their dog has weighed in on the death of Steve Jobs. Will that stop me from throwing my hat into the proverbial ring? Hell no. I’ll try to keep it brief, though.

As a teenager in the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an ardent PC guy, while my best friend at the time was hardcore Mac. I never understood his fascination with this little niche market of computers that didn’t have a lot of games software and didn’t seem to be all that different from windows machines, save for the lack of a command prompt (I was ignorant of the terminal at that point).

Fast forward twelve years or so, and you’d see me purchasing my first Mac – a mid-2009 MacBook Pro, second hand (from a guy who works for Microsoft, no less). This came after two years in college, where most of the labs, recording studios and video edit suites ran Macs. The power and simplicity drew me in and when it was time for a new laptop there was only one clear choice.

Since then, the elements of my Apple ecosystem have grown significantly.

And I can say with certainty that every one of these things is the best product in each category that I’ve owned.

So long, Steve, and thanks for all the fish great technology.

Remember Victor Petit’s totally awesome QR code resume? The one that made you feel pretty insignificant, regardless of your perfect typesetting and leather-bound portfolio? Yeah, he did a pretty clever thing. I wonder if it got him a job.

Well, I guess someone took notice of his clever idea, because now ad agencies are scamming being inspired by it and applying it to ads at your local restaurant’s urinals. Case in point, this ad for Sheps Hair Transplant Clinic:

Insert penis joke here! (click to enlarge)

and here’s the video that QR code on the pretty lady’s mouth links to:

I have to say, as long as the folks at Sheps are ignorant of the idea that sparked the campaign, it’s a pretty good use of QR codes, video and smartphones. Then again, I may be the only guy so far who has actually stood in the bathroom for two minutes after I peed, holding my phone up to an ad at a urinal just to see what it says.

The folks at Honest Agency get an A for cleverness but a D for location selection. An execution like this would probably have worked better on a bus bench or shelter – basically anywhere there aren’t a bunch of other guys doing their business, wondering what that dude is doing lingering around with his phone out.

I’ve been using OS X Lion since the day it was released. I’ve found most of the changes between 10.6 and the new OS to be improvements, but there’s one area where Lion really falls flat, and that’s Safari.

None of the functionality inside Safari has drastically changed, and there are certainly some welcome additions – tap to zoom, the reading list and full-screen mode. Those niceties aside, I have had some major problems with Safari since upgrading to Lion.

I recently read about known problems with memory leaks in Lion Safari which likely accounts for the problems I’ve been seeing: I keep Safari open for a while and it gets insanely sluggish loading pages and scrolling through content. When I get fed up and quit Safari, it hangs and I’m pushed to Force Quit Safari. It’s such a bummer because in Snow Leopard, Safari was my #1 browser choice, after doing some pretty lengthy testing against Chrome and Firefox.

So while I wait for Apple to push out a fix to Safari’s issues, I’m back to using Chrome as my default browser. What’s your default right now? Are you having trouble with the new Safari? Leave me a comment.