Yesterday Apple announced two-factor authentication for iCloud accounts. I immediately enabled mine and it was no trouble at all. Apple still is really good at taking complex technologies and making them simple to understand and implement.

The idea behind two-step authentication is that you need two things to reset your password or get access to your account from a new device. In this case, you would need your iCloud password and a secret code sent to your iPhone or iPad or a double-secret code they send you that you are hopefully locking away in your 1Password database.

In my initial draft of this post, I recommended that you wait a week or two before enabling this so we could make sure all the kinks were worked out. But after having done it personally, I think this is good to go. Enable it on your account and make sure to sent this along to your non-geek friends and family members. If you need any help, MacStories did a nice walk-through. Apple also has a FAQ.

John Siracusa looks closely at the the dependencies between Google, Samsung, and Apple. This post includes everything I love about John’s writing (including an obscure link to a Gone with the Wind clip).

At one point, John explains Google’s overall success with Android:

“Google’s present position looks weak, but it has two big trump cards. First, Google has proven to be one of the few companies capable of creating, popularizing, and supporting a platform. Despite all the skinning and branding by handset makers, Google is still the driving force behind Android. This power can only be negated by another company that’s willing and able to match Google’s Android efforts on all fronts: OS development, app store, developer tools, evangelism, the works. That’s a tall order.”

I still don’t get how Android really helps Google. I’m sure there is some revenue and they want a foothold as a “player” in the mobile future, but I have to wonder how much they spend on Android vs. how much they make on the back end? While giving away search was a smart, I don’t think that business model works for a lot of Google’s other services, as we’ve recently seen with Reader. I especially don’t think this works for building an operating system. It seems to me Google is eventually going to have to either start charging license fees to manufacturers or stop giving Android away entirely and distribute it on their own Motorola designed hardware.

John’s second point about Google, their dominance in online services, is an excellent one. Apple is clearly behind in online services. They simply can’t deliver the bandwidth that Google does. Don’t believe me? Compare the speed of Siri vs. Google’s voice search on your iPhone. I think one of Apple’s greatest vulnerabilities is its inability to deliver online services at the same level as Google. Apple is getting better at this but they need to start closing the gap a lot faster.

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I’ve received several emails asking me about my love of Ethan Schoonover’s Solarized color scheme. Solarized is a set of colors Ethan selected for use in a text editor or app development platform.. Computer programmers spend a lot of time gazing at computer screens and Ethan thought it would be a good idea to package up a pleasant and complimentary set of colors for the purpose. While I don’t spend much time programing computers, I sure spend a lot of time looking at screens and I’ve been using the Solarized colors set for years. I’ve got no training on picking colors and I’m happy to take advantage of Ethan’s generosity here.

The download file has the colors in several formats including Adobe Photoshop, Xcode, BBEdit, and even Vim. (Yes, Vim. I really like the way it works with the Apple Color picker. Here’s how you install it.

First download the file from Ethan’s site.

When you open the file, you’ll see there are a lot of places to install Solarized.

I opened up the Apple color picker folder. Inside there is a script to launch the color picker. Fire it up.

Click on the palette and then open. Then select the ‘Solarized.clr’ file and you’re in business.

I recently posted my trick for using TextExpander to add permalinks to link posts. James Smith figured out some clever code injection to make this automatic. The only down side is that it goes on every post, not just selected link posts (like this one). I’m not sure I want a permalink on every post so I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.

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