Changes

Structural Change

I’ve made some changes to the site. MacSparky.com is now reduced to two-columns. This allows me to make the article column wider, and use bigger pictures/screenshots. I like the cleaner look better. Let me know what you think.

Advertising Changes

Once the current Adsense run hits the payment threshold, Adsense will be going away, permanently. I’ve never liked the look of Adsense on MacSparky and I’ve decided getting rid of it is more important than the occasional check. I’ve also fixed a spot on the site for a single advertiser. If you are interested in sponsoring the site, drop me a note.

MindNode Pro Updates

A nice update to a quality application.

New features include:
* Visually Appealing Mind Maps
* Full Keyboard Support
* Images nodes
* Visual File Links
* Easily reconnect nodes by using drag and drop

Home Screens – Patrick Rhone

Today’s home screen post features Patrick Rhone, a very nice fellow and the curator of Minimal Mac, one of my very favorite Mac sites. Patrick is on twitter and you can learn more about his projects here.

Patrick summarizes the minimal Mac brilliantly.

I believe the most minimal computer is the one that is optimized for you. How you work. The menubar items you need. The dock items you need. The applications you need. The system you need. The peripherals you need. The tools you need to get the job done.

Patrick is the first guest to share his iPad home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

The one that is not quite released yet ;-).

What is your favorite app?

Too hard to choose between Instapaper and Simplenote.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Ego. I like to pretend that I don’t care about my numbers and that I have it mainly because it is the easiest way to log into multiple Tumblr accounts. But I really do check the numbers and care about them too.

How many screens have you filled?

Only two filled. Three icons on the third one. That said, most everything outside of the home screen are either things I am waiting for iPad versions of or apps for my two year old daughter and my wife. I rarely use anything not on the home screen.

What is the app you are still missing?

A decent Tumblr client. An iPad version of Reeder (which is so good that I’m using the iPad version on my iPad).

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

I use both pretty much most of the day. Combined, they make up about 80% of my overall computer usage.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

My fingers.

If you were Steve Jobs, what would you add to the iPhone/iPad?

They are both pretty perfect for my needs. Can’t think of anything I would improve. Perhaps a return of the aluminum back to the iPhone but that is an aesthetic thing.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Yes. You don’t need as much as you think you do.

Thanks Patrick!

Dropping Facebook

I announced (ironically on Twitter) over the weekend that I killed my Facebook account. I’ve had several e-mails from readers asking me to explain my decision. For me it was not a difficult one. I have never been an active Facebook member. While I have connected with several old friends using Facebook, they were not particularly close friends and none of these contacts have resulted in actually meeting a human being or rebuilding some lost close friendship.

My first annoyance with Facebook is the signal-to-noise ratio. It sucks. While I occasionally discovered what happened to so-and-so, more often I was asked to join in Mafia Wars, Farmville, and other time sinks. I felt like it was tedious to go into Facebook and have to make decisions about agreeing to be friends with people I’ve never met and probably never will. At this level it is mere annoyance. What ultimately led me to cancel my account was my privacy concerns.

There are several people exploring Facebook’s privacy policy, or lack thereof. There were two posts in particular that raised my eyebrows by people I respect, Patrick Rhone and Christopher Breen. Looking into this I discovered that despite their words, Facebook does not respect my privacy. In hindsight, I’m not sure how a company that makes its money by sharing people’s personal information can respect my privacy.

At the end of the day, limited usefulness combined with lost privacy made this a simple equation for me and an easy decision. If an old friend want to find me, it is not that difficult. I’m not advocating that everybody abandon Facebook. I just hope that everybody makes their own intelligent decision and doesn’t blindly surrender their own privacy.