These situations can leave us feeling lost in unfamiliar places. Often, there is no black and white, no right or wrong, no definitive answer, and we are left to make decisions with no understanding of their eventual outcome.

I've felt this place before, and I have known its solus tedium.

However, every once in a while, we find that glimmer of hope, that beacon of faith that tells that what we're doing is ok, lets us know that we're taking the correct path.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something —your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever—because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

These words were spoken by someone I greatly, greatly admire. Since my first hearing them years ago, they have echoed through me. They have aided me in forming a model of the universe that I am comfortable with. They have helped me develop friendships, aided me in making life's decisions and have pushed me to follow my heart.

There's a comforting feeling when you know that someone else can perceive things as you do, that your understanding of life isn't deliriously different from everyone else's.

On Wednesday, that person passed away, yet those words will continue to be at the centre of my mind. They will give me confidence to travel my way in life, and they will let me know that everything will be ok.

The orator had amazing vision, taste and understanding. There are many things that I will never understand, many things that I may question. We were never alike and I doubt we ever will be, but those words give me a cornerstone. They give me a bedrock for me to lay my own philosophy, and because of that, I am deeply grateful that they were said when they were.

And with that, I must say: Steve, thank you so very dearly, and goodbye; i will miss you.

Apple often demonstrates that the best way to watch movies on an iPad 2 is with the Smart Cover rolled up, to act as a base to a leaning iPad. However, if you do this, you'll quickly learn that the sound quality can often be a little lacking in this position. The reason for this is simple, the sound is directed away from you. A simple solution for this is to place your hand and cup the speaker. Suddenly, your iPad's volume will seem to have increased. 

So what makes a Smart Cover so smart? That you don't have to use it like this. 

Recently, i've been folding the cover behind the iPad. This does something simple: it reflects the sound back in your direction. This is wholly more comfortable than holding your hand to cup the speaker and takes little effort to hold.

Of course, this isn't the first time that Apple have used a reflective sound system. The iMac G5 of 2004, had it also. This was announced at Macworld Expo Paris in August where Phil Schiller stated:

You probably noticed "I didn't see the speakers there—there were no speaker grills". We've designed the speakers so they're mounted in the bottom and reflect off the desktop and bounce right back to you.

 He demonstrated this with a slide:

Every iMac and Apple Cinema Display has used this since. I'm not entirely sure this was purposeful for the iPad Smart Cover, but it makes me exceedingly happy.

In November, Facebook introduced its new messaging platform which was supposed to do away with the complication of communicating across different media. While many couldn't understand how this might be useful, it has occurred to me that Twitter has been doing this since its dawn.

Let me explain:
I have a Twitter account. Assuming that i follow you, you can send me 140 characters as an email, a text message, or through the method i normally choose to access Twitter; more recently this may even be a push notification through my mobile device. When you send this message to me, do you know where it is going? Do you know how it may be received? In the case of me switching my text notifications from a UK mobile number to a US one, would you even know which country you were sending the message to?

This offers a method allowing someone to send you a short text-based message that you can receive how you wish.

Back at university, we learnt about transparency pertaining to networked file systems. I specifically remember a single slide that detailed the different types of transparency that most networked file systems tried to offer. These transparencies are abstractions from the underlying file systems themselves. They are: access transparency, location transparency, migration transparency and scalability.

• Access transparency suggests that when using a networked file system, you should access the filesystem through an identical manner to how you'd normally access your local disk.
• Location transparency offers the concept of being unable to tell where a file is stored.
• Migration transparency proposes that no matter where a file is actually stored (and even if it is moved), you should always be able to access it through a single filename.
• Scalability states that the file system should seem boundless.

The questions that i asked earlier should suddenly seem extremely relevant. Twitter seems to possess the same transparencies as an ideal networked file system:

• Access transparency is held such that you can send a text-based message via an SMS message or another interface (a Twitter client)1.
• Location transparency is offered since you can not tell where a user is based on their username.
• Migration transparency is supported since messaging the same username will always result in the same account receiving the message no matter where they are or how they choose to access it.
• Scalability is a more murky translation in this regard. However, you can potentially send a single user as many messages as you wish2.

That Twitter adheres to these theoretical concepts suggests to me that it is much more than a simple web site, or fruitless social network. Twitter offers an abstracted communications medium, whereby people can communicate without knowing how someone receives their message, or where that someone is.

At Twitter, we strive to instantly connect people to what's most meaningful to them. For some people that involves freely texting "d x5315 What's happening?" to a short code (40404: US; 86444: UK), for some that involves going on to Twitter.com and tweeting "@x5315 you're awesome" and for some that involves opening an iPhone app and loading my Twitter profile. Either way, this is going through a system that allows you to care less about the way you send your message and more about the connection you make.

1. Assuming that a Twitter client is written for how you would like to send a message.
2. Assuming you stick within the API limits.

I got a T-Mobile plan, and they nicely cut the SIM card up for me so that it would fit into the iPhone 4. Once my phone was activated, i managed to get rid of the voicemail notification.

I couldn't get FaceTime to work on T-Mobile.

One night while i was talking to a friend, he told me to try turning FaceTime on again. Previously this had not worked, so i wasn't very hopeful. However, this time it worked. I didn't understand why, but i made and received several calls with FaceTime working perfectly.

Tonight, i popped my old O2 SIM card into my iPhone to check on my messages. After i put my T-Mobile SIM back in my phone the FaceTime buttons were gone.

Here's the list of actions i took, and i now have working FaceTime on my iPhone 4:

1. Turn phone off and on—can't hurt right?
2. Ensure that you have WiFi, and the FaceTime switch is turned off.
3. Go into General, then Network. (My settings are Enable 3G: Off, Cellular Data: On, and Data Roaming: Off)
4. Go into Cellular Data Network.
5. For the Cellular Data APN enter epc.tmobile.com.
6. For the MMS APN enter epc.tmobile.com.
7. For the MMSC enter https://mms.msg.eng.t-mobile.com/mms/wapenc.
8. For the MMS Proxy enter 216.155.165.50:8080.
9. For the MMS Max Message Size enter 1048576.
10. For the MMS UA Prof URL enter http://www.apple.com/mms/usprof.rdf.
11. Go back to the first pane in the Settings application.
12. Restart phone.
13. Go back into the Settings application, go into Phone.
14. Switch the FaceTime switch to On.

After this, it should say "Waiting for activation" below. About thirty seconds to a minute later, mine changed to "Your phone number will be shared with people you call with FaceTime.", which i believe means that it is working. I tested via FaceTime on my Mac, and that was fine.

This seems to have worked for me twice. I can't guarantee it'll work for everybody.

To verify, here is a picture of my Settings application once this has worked:

One other issue I was having was that I kept my music on external hard drives. This meant that if I travelled with my MacBook Pro, I would be left with the musical offerings of my iPhone and Spotify—both of which can be extremely lacking. My current SSD wasn't large enough to store my music library on, and therefore I couldn't carry it with me.

This got me thinking: What would two SSDs be like in RAID? Would this mean I'd be able to carry my music with me as well as have an altogether faster machine?

The first issue was that I needed a second SSD. I had an 80 GB Intel X-25M G1, and so focused on a second Intel SSD. For this, I settled on an 80 GB Intel X-25M G2 which is very similar to the prior generation.

The second problem was that I'd need to put this SSD in my MacBook Pro. Luckily, there have been several people who have done this before, and a friend suggested the iFixit.com Optical Bay SATA Hard Drive Enclosure.

I ordered both and fitted them myself. Setting up the RAID was easy using Disk Utility from a bootable pen drive. After using Time Machine to restore my entire previous system onto the RAID, it booted fine.

A thing to note is that Mac OS X can boot from RAID (I wasn't worried, honest).

So how was the performance?

The boot time seems very similar to previously. This could be due to the need to load the RAID information first, or could even be due to the fact I've now got VMWare Fusion installed. VMWare Fusion loves loading at startup: if you care to look at your Console after booting, you'll find many lovely notes from it. 

Read and write performance doesn't seem to have changed much, while copying large files does seem a little faster. I decided that a totally scientific and infallible experiment should be done using XBench. The results are shown below, as you can see the overall improvements are minor.

However, I do now have 160 GB worth of storage in my MacBook Pro which means I can carry my music around with me. 

Overall, while this may not make sense logically (or financially), it makes me really happy.

In the next series of updates, more settings have been removed. However, this time we're going to show you numbers to at least give a good idea as to why these specific settings had been removed. These results are based off random sampling and the sample size is 6 figures.

Animation

The animation setting has been completely removed. The setting had turned into a boolean field (containing only two options) and we found that very few people actually used the non-default setting, as shown below.

You may notice that the setting pertaining to the showing of retweets is also a boolean field, and you may ask "Why has that not been removed?". The usage of the retweet setting is very similar to that of the animation setting as seen below. However, we believe that this is a piece of core functionality and therefore should remain.

Speed

In the following chart, smaller numbers refer to a faster speed. We've decided to remove the 3000 option, and have renamed the other options to Default, Fast, and Faster. 3000 refers to a tweet being shown every 3 seconds, therefore it may be more beneficial to use the hover-pause system,

Text Size 

Text size is a setting that requires a lot of testing, due to the layout change when it is reset. Therefore, removing any of the following settings would give us less work to do.

Therefore, we've decided to remove the Small setting, which is only used in 1% of cases. The new settings are Default, Large, Larger, and Largest. 

Fall Size

The fall size setting has been cut down to the following three options: Default, Large, and Larger. If you look at this chart, you'll see the use of different sizes as they're currently distributed:

As you can see, the majority of use is in the default value of 20. The second largest distribution is for 200 and the third seems to be a tie between 50 and 100. The new settings are 20, 75, and 200. While the usage of 75 isn't that high, we believe that 75 offers something to both the users using 50 and users using 100. 

In conclusion, it's plain to see that many of the options we provide aren't greatly used and hence are expendable. This allows us to concentrate on new features without being bogged down in tests and support.

Just a bonus - this is the distribution of languages as used in our sample.

A friend was trying to highlight some text within OpenOffice Impress but in the Mac version of this software it would appear that this feature has been removed. The slides were originally created in Google Docs and featured the highlighted text. Exporting the slides as a PDF lead to complications with typefaces and exporting as a PowerPoint file meant that highlighted text was no longer highlighted. 

So we tried Keynote. 

In Keynote, you are incapable of highlighting text, the text Inspector shows this:

However, I was sure that this functionality was available in Pages. I opened Pages and wrote some dummy text, selected it and opened the Inspector. This extra functionality was available:

 So the feature exists in Pages but not Keynote. If you then copy the highlighted text into Keynote it remains highlighted, with no way to change the highlight.

It would seem that people don't need to highlight text in presentations.

However, there is one problem with watching this on the web. Flash.

 This constant use of processor can often lead to the temperature of your Mac quickly increasing, as you might expect from Flash. 

There is a simple solution: using the iPhone simulator that comes as part of the iPhone SDK. 

By opening the SDK and going to http://live.twit.tv in Safari, you can load the video stream that's usually only available to iPhones and iPod Touches.

The iPhone stream is an mp4-encoded stream, which means it can be decoded on the graphics card. This means that you get really low CPU usage.

The only downside I've been able to find is that the stream can sometimes be a few minutes behind, which isn't critical.

They're used in many applications such as:

Linkinus
Finder

One important thing to note is that when the toolbar is hidden, the source list should look the same. For example, the top of the source list looks the same in both Finder and Linkinus.

The application developers seem to have missed that here:

Source

While some choice is good, in this case the designer may be going too far:

10.5 px:
11 px:
11.5 px:
12 px:

Source