Tech Pragmatist

The very fact that these guys are seriously considering putting a startup incubator on a boat off-shore to side-step visa requirements tells you that there is something wrong with the immigration situation in the US. The UK recently introduced the Entrepreneurs Visa which, arguably, is beginning to work, but London is in a pretty unique situation since anybody who is a citizen of any state in the European Union is entitled to come and set up a new company – something that doesn’t really compare in the US.

Feel free to watch Fred’s excellent interview with Carlotta Perez, but what really struck me was his respect for Daniel’s tweet (with which I completely agree - attribution matters):

Cool to see @fredwilson interviewing Carlota Perez. Like finding out Yoda trained Obi-wan. Lineage of thought matters.

Michael Mace on the Kindle and iOS ecosystems

… the Kindle line is a Volkspad, priced to be the tablet thing that everyone eventually gets for basic content access.

While you are reading up on the topic, it is also worth checking out Mr Gruber’s take on Amazon’s New Kindles:

It’s all about the content, though. That’s the difference that other tablet makers missed.

…

The e-ink Kindles are to the Kindle Fire what the music-playing iPods were to the iPhone, and what the iPhone was to the iPad — traction in the mass market based on trust and loyalty.

I didn’t write it and I couldn’t have said it better.

I like my Applescripts and I like Alfred. Being able to run one from the other is great.

What I was quite particular about though was that unless your scripts were somewhere in your home folder (technically as long as they weren’t inside a “System” folder) then they would be found. However if like me you put your Applescripts where Apple tell you they should be, in ~/Library/Scripts then by default Alfred won’t find them. The other reason for putting scripts there is that a bunch of other applications expect them to be there too.

Alfred’s PowerPack rescued me by making plugins available, so I was able to build a plugin that let’s you run your scripts from the proper folder. It is also really easy to install - download the extension that I built, double click it to install it, then when you next launch Alfred you can use the keyword of script and all your scripts will be found.

Here is a screenshot to show the plugin in action:

There is no way that you can say that this report is impartial, unbiased or representative of the whole market, but even based on this questionable data, there are two things that stand out in particular:

• The prognosis for the Android tablet market isn’t good (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun)
• The finance market seems to have to got back up off its knees, usually a pre-cursor to growth in the rest of the market

(for the curious, I use Good on both my iPhone and my iPad, v4 and v1 respectively. Good isn’t blackberry, but it is respectable and steadily improving)

This is quite amazing, lifting the lid on the way money is spent on software in the US military.

(disclosure: I work for Palantir in the UK)

I have recently been playing with Alfred and especially the Powerpack options that allow you to do some of the most awesome shell hacking with a GUI that I have ever seen.

However, after playing with it for a bit I started wishing that I could quicklook items as I navigated through them in Alfred, so I asked their support for guidance and quick as a flash I got the following answer from Anna:

Quicklook support is not directly in Alfred. With the latest 0.9 release, however, provided you can find a Terminal command that would let you quicklook a file, you could then set it as an additional action in the action list.

So I was slightly disappointed but not deterred – this is after all an App that is so young, the developer has only just gone full time on it (congrats!). I have come to a simulation of what I originally wanted to do and it is close enough to my original idea to be worth sharing – so here is my howto for it.

Few companies manage to find a people solution for a technology problem, but I particularly this example as they did something that breaks the mould, yet in hindsight looks obvious.