Degrees of “Free”

In this week’s episode of Build & Analyze, Marco Arment explains the challenges of competing with free. At some point over the last few years I’ve migrated away from free services for anything I consider essential. I’d like to say this was calculated but this shift took place at a subconsious level. This shift has two reasons:

  1. No Monetization = Temporary
    I don’t want to waste my time in something temporary. I’ve been burned too many times over the years investing my time and effort learning a free service or app that disappears with little or no warning. If something is good, I want it to stick around and I understand that requires money.

  2. Free is Not Free
    While some apps are free downloads, they are rarely “free”. I end up paying with intrusive ads or information about myself. I’d much rather pay a few dollars to begin with. In my book, that is much cheaper.

Applying this to Instapaper, not only did I pay for the app on my iPhone and iPad, I also am a subscriber and pay $1 per month for this ridiculously useful service that I use every day.

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Mac Floppy

Stephen Hackett turned me on to this fun website looking at the original Mac. I had to smile at the post with the original control panel. I can identify the very moment that my love of the Macintosh began. Having used a succession computers including the Radio Shack Color Computer, Atari 800, and then Apple II, I sat down at an original Mac and saw this control panel. The graphical user interface blew my mind. Also, I loved the whimsy of it. When I saw the tortoise and the hare in the control panel, I was hooked. I still am.

Hazel 3.0? Yes please.

One of my all-time favorite Mac utilities, Hazel just turned 3.0. I’ve been using the beta for several months and today I’m paying my $10 upgrade fee gladly. ($25 for a new license is also a steal.)

Paul, not surprisingly, did an amazing job with this update with useful new actions like import into Aperture and syncing. Yes, you can one-way sync a file or folder to another location with a Hazel action. (Think about that for a few moments.) The Rule preview feature gives a popover to display a file’s attributes with highlighted attributes for the matching rule. Perhaps my favorite improvement is nested rules letting you combine “and”, “or”, and “not” to automate in new and smarter ways.

The user interface also looks sharper and is more useful. Conditions and actions are now draggable/reorderable. Finally, he built everything around a new engine that makes it all even more efficient.

Here is a page showing off some of the changes. Also, if you are new to Hazel, go listen to the now dated MPU show about it. Perhaps we’ll need to do a new show.