Easy On Me

Domain name registration

Easy On Me — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:36:55 +0000

I will court controversy by saying that we like GoDaddy (affiliate link, or godaddy.com if you want to copy and paste without it) for domain name registration and use them for approximately 500 domain names. PRO: Your new domain names appear on the web within minutes. They have 24-hour phone service. They’re by far the best domain name registrar to use if you want to sell a domain name to someone else because so many people know how to use them and have accounts. CON: They favor phone support over web-based support so they can upsell services while they have you on the phone. They make it too difficult to buy a domain name with no other products.

Web hosts

Easy On Me — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:16:49 +0000

We use HostGator (affiliate link, or hostgator.com without the affiliate link) for dozens of sites. They’ve hit the sweet spot in web hosting, with fantastic 24-hour service, a massive feature set (namely unlimited domains and unlimited databases, which means you can set up as many WordPress sites as you want), and good performance–all for under $10/month. HOT TIP: Use coupon code HOSTGATOR to get your first month of HostGator for a penny.

Who Are the Other Dennis Ritchies?

Easy On Me — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 01:21:47 +0000

Dennis Ritchie, supremely literate codeveloper of the C programming language and its accompanying little book, “The C Programming” language, died as a titan in the programming world and as a footnote–if that–elsewhere. (My favorite tribute to him: This first-rate sonnet by Edmund Jorgenson. It’s as good as you’ll find in any poetry journal.)

Ritchie was titanically gifted. He had a deep understanding of how computers work and utterly changed the way generations of programmers worked. Before he and Brian Kernighan invented C, each computer had a completely different programming language. It was sort of like having to learn English to work in New Hampshire, French to work in Vermont, and Spanish to work in California.

C was designed to so that one could isolate most of the computer-specific parts into a subset of the program. It was also aesthetically pleasing, irresistibly so to forward-thinking programmers.

C was such a powerful influence that programmers demanded it even when manufacturers and companies like Microsoft (sorry, my cherished alma mater) actively fought against its use. While its use is waning in most programming jobs it is still very much alive, running in the operating system of virtually every desktop or laptop computer on Earth, and on billions of other devices that have computers embedded in them. Dennis Ritchie’s influence on humanity was infinitely greater than that of, say, Princess Diana, and maybe even of Michael Jackson.

In my opinion he should have been a Nobel or Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. This is a hard thing to explain to people who aren’t programmers, so I never expected anything like that to happen. Understandably, most mentions of his name outside of Reddit or Hacker News were polite but muted. Because his accomplishments were of such a technical nature one doesn’t expect him to be on the Medal of Freedom shortlist.

I am haunted now, wondering who the Dennis Ritchies of the rest of the world are. Maybe Paul Erdos in math? Surely one of them is Malcom McLean, who invented the shipping container. Another one would have to be Norman Borlaug, directly responsible for saving the lives of billions of people through improved farming techniques. Who are the living ones? Who’s the Dennis Ritchie of hip-hop, or country music, or materials science, or construction, or art? There’s so much I don’t know….

Starbucks Kick You Out? Good. You Need It.

Easy On Me — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:12:04 +0000

Recently an unconfirmed story has been going around that Starbucks is starting to eject people who hang around for hours, using it as an office and seldom making any purchases. (The blog post that triggered the story has, interestingly, vanished). I’ve contacted Starbucks and am awaiting a reply. Meanwhile, let’s pretend it’s true. Because if you’re one of those freeloaders, it may be the best improvement to your productivity since you gave up Facebook for a couple of hours just to see what it would be like.

No Pain Deadline, No Gain

It’s easy to forget that deadlines make us more productive. Study after study has shown that people tend to be more efficient when they’re given a deadline, even if it’s not strictly necessary. What are you doing for 3 hours in a Starbucks, anyway?

There’s almost no task you can be doing that requires 3 hours in a Starbucks. If you’re writing a long report, it would be much better to find a quieter location. But are you really writing big-ass reports all the time?

If, on the other hand, you’re dawdling your way through emails, tweets, and Facebook updates, ask yourself whether those are necessary to your job. If they are, I strongly suggest you give yourself a 45 minute window to get them done and blow out of there. Do them sequentially. Turn off your phone to get these tasks done without interruption.

Kick Yourself Out of Starbucks

Doing serious business development or just about any other kind of white-collar work that you think you need Starbucks for demands your full attention. It’s noisy in most Starbucks locations. Besides, they’re paying rent by the square foot. Do you honestly think they owe you an office?

What part of your job brings home the bacon? It’s probably things that you can do better someplace else. If it’s cold calls, then you’re bugging the other customers. If it’s calls to clients, then the background noise is annoying them. If it’s programming or web development, the distractions are probably harming, not helping, your billable efforts. If you’re interested in doing high quality work, consider doing an hour or so at Starbucks and have the courtesy to kick yourself out. Do the rest in your home office or library, or wherever you can focus like a laser.

Give yourself a deadline. Stop being a slacker. Watch your productivity skyrocket.

News of the World Shutting Down-We’re Here to Help

Easy On Me — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:04:08 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tom Campbell
EasyOnMe, Inc.
12819 SE 38th St. PMB 293
Bellevue, WA 98006
Office: (425) 223-3279
Fax: (623) 321-6087
eom@easyonme.com

News of the World Shutting Down: Scandal-Generating Robot Runs New Site With 100% Truth-Free Drop-In Replacement

After Illustrious 168-Hour Beta Test Period, BreakingNewsOfTheWorld.com Fills Shoes of Historic Publication: No Phones Tapped

Bellevue, WA, For Immediate Release - ”News of the World Shutting Down” headlines have dominated every media site on the planet for days, while a hardworking robot has quietly provided a free, scandal-generating replacement service at http://www.breakingnewsoftheworld.com. In its historic 168-hour run the new publication has already broken News of the World’s impressive one-day record for inaccurate stories–fulfilling its stated mission of providing 100% falsehoods round the clock, without a single wiretap law broken.

News of the World Closing Provides New Opportunities

Asks Breaking News of the World publisher Tom Campbell: “The News of the World phone hacking scandal hammered home an urgent journalistic question: in time of declining circulation, rocketing print costs, and burgeoning numbers of B- and C-level celebrities desperate for media coverage, how can a legitimate news operation survive?”

Breaking News of the World disregards the question altogether by promising to provide absolutely zero legitimate news, instead using trailing-edge software to scandalous stories on the fly with 100% inaccuracy. The kind of computing power required to create compelling fake journalism of this quality has only been available since the 1970s, and for obvious reasons has seldom been employed with such potency on the Web.

News of the World Shutting Down Results in Launch of New Publication

“It’s the Everlasting Gobstopper of yellow journalism”, points out ex-Microsoft manager Campbell. “Just click the Next and Previous Scandal buttons and you’ll get an endless flow of despicable rubbish, but at least it’s unique every time. I think.” The Breaking New of the World Site features:

* Targeted fake stories created for each individual reader, with no two experiences ever the same
* Instant headline and story generation
* Guaranteed useless stories about has-been actors, washed-up rockers, and aging football stars
* A minuscule, never-changing, utterly irrelevant rights-cleared selection of vaguely familiar-looking stock photographs

Robotic Staff of 1 Does Work of 200

Before the News of the World phone hacking scandal, that publication had already slimmed its once-bloated workforce down to a modest 200 after cost-cutting measures. At its inevitable closing Breaking News of the World will only need to make one staff member redundant, a robot named Rovatron. Rovatron still holds down a day job at online auction sniping firm http://www.esnipe.com [eSnipe, Inc.], but its enormous processing power is hardly taxed by its additional duties. “We wanted to help England in its darkest of hours,” said an eSnipe spokesman. “eSnipe are only too happy to export rubbish journalism creation technology at no cost to our friends across the pond.”

Rovatron’s defense department origins are belied by its artificially idiotic retrofit software. Able to generate over 190,002 fraudulent stories per second, it divvies them out to the http://www.breakingnewsoftheworld.com site with astounding speed. “Eat your heart out, Murdochs,” says publisher Campbell. “No one is happy about the News of the World shutting down,” he says with Murdoch-like empathy, “but truly loathsome journalism must now be created by upstarts, and we simply can’t outsource this kind of work to non English-speaking countries.”

# # #

Independence Day 2011

Easy On Me — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:46:26 +0000

Two hundred thirty-five years ago the greatest set of minds in history got together in a smoky, furnace-hot pub, dense with the funk of agitated people, fierce arguments between gentlemen who were not above solving a problem with sidearms, and the insurmountable question of slavery among a people declared to be free.

They were, of course, in mortal danger. The document being presented to them, a declaration of independence, was tantamount to kicking the king’s ass, then running like hell to get away. People like Ben Franklin and George Washington had until recently thought of themselves as loyal citizens of Britain. Now they were inviting the mightiest naval force in the West for duel (at least they had home advantage).

There was some possibility nothing would happen. Benign neglect is perhaps the most effective form of government and it worked out fine with us and the Brits, until they started charging for protections we received from them. But nobody knew if Cornwallis would charge in here immediately, wait for a war to be declared, or what.

Reading the notes of these meetings one realizes they were adamant that they get the whole thing right. Many of them were architects, which shows in the elegance of the system they created. Many were scientists, which shows in the way they applied experience and human nature to their founding document. Many more hated each other because, well, that’s what happens when you’re doing something this important and you don’t agree completely with your neighbor.

Their army would be led by a man whose military past to this point was mainly marked by inexperience and catching-up. There were mostly no uniforms. But the army would not yet be raised by July 4, 1776. What would be raised was a flag. and it was not that of Britain.

Happy Birthday, Americans. I am happy to be alive in a country still bristling with opportunity and still a shining a powerful light seen by the oppressed and the oppressors everywhere.

How To Write A How To

Easy On Me — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:54:01 +0000

This article tells you how to write a how to, a skill you can take with you in almost any field and convert into hard, cold cash while simultaneously advertising your skills for the next job you get, even if not’s not writing. I’ve made a lot of money teaching people how to do things for decades, and I never saw all the elements of writing a good how to in one place. Instead, I studied the most popular, effective, and successful examples and came up this with short set of principles. It’s been drawn from applied psychology, wildly popular products from companies like Apple and Microsoft, and low-key sales techniques.

Make A Promise. Deliver it. Explain What It Meant

There’s a reason your English teacher didn’t make money as a writer. She didn’t have to worry about wasting people’s precious lives. The saying goes that you should tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and tell them what you said. Bull. Here’s what you should really do.

Promise them you’ll improve their lives and how you’ll do it
Show them something step by step
Tell them what it meant

1. Promise them you’ll improve their lives,and how

A how to is a promise to solve a problem, often one that will be painful. So instead of telling people you’re going to explain how to install WordPress, you tell them you’re going to teach them how to fire their webmaster and instantly create a website they can maintain themselves.

Keep It As Short As You’d Want It To Be

Keep your how to as short as possible. Even if you’re paid to write by the word, don’t treat your job that way. People don’t have any time for anything anymore. Solve the problem as quickly as you can, without leaving anything out. Write short, punchy sentences without too many commas, colons, or semicolons. Avoid big words. Your English teacher liked them. Your readers just get agitated.

Use The Rule of 5. Or 7, Whatever

People can’t retain more than 3-5 items at a time. Write your sections in groups of 3 or 5-maybe 7 at most. Anything with sequences of more than 7 items to perform or to remember at once probably needs to be reorganized.

Start By Selling

Assume they don’t know how they got here. Somewhere in the first paragraph orient the user who was sent here by someone else by explaining what you’re going to teach them and why it’s a good thing. You may think that because they’re here, they have a good reason. You’re wrong.

They may have landed on a web page someone else recommended. They may have been handed a printed document by a boss and aren’t certain what to do. Make them feel good about reading what you’re going to write. That includes making them comfortable from the first paragraph, and they can’t be comfortable if they are constantly wondering why they’re here.

The best salespeople are famous not for shoving their product or service down their customers’ throats, but for explaining clearly what the problem is and how it can be solved with what they’re selling. And in today’s world, everyone is doing sales. You must be forever vigilant in branding yourself and your employer.

2. Show Them Something Step By Step

Before you start writing, jot down each step you must cover in a separate line or paragraph. Then go through the process yourself, and add anything you omitted. Start each section with a summary of what they’ll learn in that section and how it fits into the bigger picture. Break the how to part into separate steps.

Bullets In The Head. Ing.

Bullets are your friend. Headings are your friend. People don’t read these days. They scan. (By the way-the correct, original meaning of scan is the opposite of how it’s used. It used to mean an exhaustive, complete consumption of the material–just like a scanner. But that’s not how it’s used anymore, so I’m reluctantly going with the flow.)

Readers will unconsciously jump from headline to headline before they do any actual reading. Your writing teacher probably wanted you to write in a huge undifferentiated mass of text. That made Dickens rich–a hundred fifty years ago. Get with the program. Headings (a line of text set aside from the material using a different size, typeface, or type style) help the reader ignore what doesn’t matter and dive right in to what does.

Here’s how to use a heading. Anytime you have a sef-contained concept, it probably deserves a heading, plus anywhere form a sentence to a paragraph summing up that concept. Depending on the level of difficulty, you may also want to explain why knowing that concept will help the reader.

Most word processors or online document editors such as Google Docs have a control that lets you choose Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on. Use them whenever possible. They normally convert to special HTML instructions when published on the web. These instructions help search engines and your human readers decide what needs emphasis.

The rule for using bullets is simple and widely ignored. Use one per step or per important concept. So instead of saying this, which is actually three steps :

Put the grated carrots into a pot of boiling water

You’d break down the steps in the way people expect them to happen:

Start a pot of water boiling
Grate the carrots
Drop them into the boiling water

Like headings, bullets help cement concepts together in people’s minds. Even more important, when your reader refers back to what you wrote because they didn’t quite understand something, they can jump directly to the bullets and follow along. Not forcing them to read a lot just to find their place saves their psychic energy for completing their task.

3. Tell them what it meant

This is perhaps my only original contribution to the whole enterprise of writing. Your teacher was wrong about the summary. The summary shouldn’t tell your readers what you said. Duh, they just read it-they already know what you said! Instead, it should tell them what it meant and how their lives are better for knowing what you just taught them. It should therefore explain how you made good on your initial promise.

That’s hard. It’s easy to say “We’ve learned how to install WordPress on your website, write blog posts, and create pages.” Instead, it should say something like “It’s no longer possible for one person to create an maintain a complex website from scratch. WordPress does all the hard parts for you, and makes adding anything from a blog post to a whole new section no harder than a word processor. There’s plenty more to learn but this set of articles showed you everything you need to get a credible website built in under a day. Remember to update it frequently for security purposes, and see our next set of articles if you want to learn how to create an event calendar or back up so that you won’t lose critical data at the worst possible time.”

In an increasingly complex world, everything needs to be explained: manuals, sales material, websites establishing you as an authority. Words are more important than ever, and these same concepts can be applied to video learning too. The organization, promise, and fulfillment of the promise remain constant no matter what the medium.

Speaking of which: Summarize everything up front, break things up into little pieces, use short declarative sentences, and embrace the bullet. You can’t go wrong writing a how to if you follow those principles. Even better: everything you write is proof that you’re an expert in your field, and will show your next boss that your knowledge is so deep you can how to write a how to better than anyone else: what better reason to hire you?

How to Make an iPhone App: Learn Development for iPhone and iPad-free

Easy On Me — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:53:33 +0000

Development for iPhone has been a high priority around here, and while we are perfectly willing to pay for even an expensive course, we’ve learned that iPhone development is at an inflection point where a combination of free and inexpensive resources looks like the happy medium. By the way, if you’re hip, you now call it iOS development, a term that encompasses both iPad and iPhone. They share much the same frameworks but still require slightly different code.

Roughly speaking, what you must know to write a native iOS app is:

Objective-C, a quirky language that should have been superseded by now (weird object/class syntax, lack of garbage collection, lame string class, and other offenses)
Cocoa, an older software foundation used for Macintosh development
XCode, the all-encompassing name for a set of tools and newer iOS foundation code. The latter is written in Objective-C and is meant to simplify development

iPhone application tutorials: now is a good time to learn

It’s a lot. Traditionally, learning how to program in (vanilla) C on the Mac or on Windows has had a very steep learning curve even for the samples of apps. The learning curve is still steep; don’t fool yourself. However, now is a pretty good time to get started. Enough people have done iOS development that the literature has matured. And while there’s a ton to learn, for the same amount of study that went into a simple C learning you now get a much bigger set of features.

Objective C Course

Apple has an acceptable Objective C Course online at The Objective C Programming Language. Hot top: If you look carefully you can see a link to a PDF, currently at the upper right of the page. I never noticed it until someone pointed it out in a forum.

Free iPhone development

Everyone knows you’re supposed to get started at Apple’s iOS Developer Library, but that starting point is too general and leads to some slightly outdated documentation. It is superbly written and ultimately the best place to return when you have questions. They haven’t organized the way they should and you can waste time starting there. Instead, go to the iOS Development Quick Start to begin your iPhone development career. It has some good tutorials. But not as good as my new secret weapon.

iPhone Developer Free-In Your Underwear! College Professor Gives Away Awesome Online Course

While searching for books on Amazon, I followed a not-too-promising-looking link in the reviews. It was by my new hero, a college professor named David Fisher of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a place I never heard of. That’s okay; I’m a college dropout and I’m pretty sure David Fisher never heard of me! The link was to David Fisher’s absolutely free tutorial: iphone development on a silver platter, in video form, for nothing!

While Fisher modestly recommends Beginning iPhone 4 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK as the best iPhone course out there (affiliate link), you could not do too much better than to pair up his free video course with the Apple docs. Here’s why I love his course:

He knows his subject cold
He’s a real iPhone app developer
He gives additional exercises, beyond the book
It’s for the most recent version of the iPhone
The range of material he covers is at least much as most seminars costing thousands of dollars, and he’s the equal of any seminar-giver I’ve run across

This course, also available as an Apple podcast (see CSSE490 IOS Development Rose-Hulman Winter 2010-2011)

By the way, while you must have a Mac to do the development work (yes, I know it’s possible on a PC virtual machine), some people think you need to buy into the $99 developer program at Apple. This is not completely true. The $99 is required once your app is finished and you plan to release your app in the App Store (even if it’s going to be free). The free SDK has everything you need to get simple apps working. You do not, strictly speaking, even need an iPhone. You can use the iPhone simulator in the SDK. You need the $99 member if you need:

The ability to transfer your code to a real iPhone
Access to iPhone hardware features that don’t work on a simulator, such as camera, or position and motion sensors
To get into the App Store

iPhone SDK Development for under $0?

If your budget is tight, you can learn everything you need to become an iPhone programmer (other than hardware features) for absolutely nothing. You don’t even need an iPhone. The Apple free XCode download SDK and developer documentation can be had for nothing, and the killer David Fisher tutorial: iphone development is also zero cost. You have to register as a developer first, which includes creating an Apple ID (free).
If you want to pony up $25 for a book, you can’t do better than Beginning iPhone 4 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK covers basic Objective C and modern IOS development. If that’s just too much, get the Kindle version of Beginning iPhone 4 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK for $17.

Total expenditure for the full-boat package: $100 for an Apple developer’s license, and less than $25 for one of the best books out there. :There has never been a better time to start iPhone development.

The Hardy Boys and the Invisible City: Getting the “Green Bar” On Our Website

Easy On Me — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 05:15:29 +0000

When using Google Docs recently I noticed they had that cool highlighted web address with the lock icon, a feature called Extended Verification SSL that indicates you have encrypted communications with your browser (the https://, which we already had) and also that you’re the real deal, a company with a little heft to it. I’d seen it on PayPal but somehow took it even more seriously this time.

Here’s an example:

eSnipe finally gets the green bar!

Our website is highly dependent on PayPal and does many transactions every day. I suddenly realized that our users would probably feel better about plunking down their hard-earned cash if we added the EV SSL to our site. I figured the cool highlighted address gives customers an unconscious cue that the company isn’t fooling around with their money and data. Renewing an SSL certificate is a pain in the rear to begin with. I figured out now was the time to get the EV SSL feature since I had to duel with the red tape contingent anyway.

Getting an SSL certificate isn’t strictly a technical matter. You have to prove that:

You own your own domain name
Your servers have permanent address on the web (a “static IP”, not the less expensive dynamic IP that shouts out “rented server on the wrong side of the tracks” (or racks, or something))
Your company has a physical location, or at least an address where lawsuits can be served on you
Your company is listed with a major directory such as Dun & Bradstreet
Your company has an accepted legal structure such as an S-Corporation, C-Corporation, or LLC, and is up-to-date on its filings

This is all common sense stuff, and so very 20th century. Because the truth is, my company is totally distributed. I work wherever I have a laptop, the main ops guy/programmer works in another state, and support people live in yet other states (sort of; I recently realized that one support person who’s been with us for years lives just an hour away in my home state, but you get the point)( I’m not a details guy), and I’ve never even met one of my most expensive lawyers, who’s across the country.

The certification people don’t want to hear that, and for good reason. At its root the concept of the SSL is that customers want to know that third parties have verified that you’re not likely to run off with their money, and that if you do, you’ll have left some sort of paper trail. The EV SSL certification is expensive by small business standards, though well within the IT budget of a major corporation. This fee is, let’s be honest, in large part to keep the riff-raff out. If your company can’t afford a few thousand for the certification, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out diplomatically a few years ago, it’s not stable enough to merit the very appearance of substance it is meant to convey.

We had to do a little… adapting to satisfy the certification team. They needed to see email addresses using our company’s domain. I conduct the vast majority of official business using my personal email account. So I had to start checking the official company email address more. Because we hold no debt and are not a public company, we had let our Dun & Bradstreet listing lapse a decade ago. Therefore they needed to contact James, one of our lawyers, to ensure we existed, had indeed been incorporated since 2001, and can be served during the business day for lawsuits (thanks, James, but I hope I don’t ever need you for that one). They called and emailed several employees during the business day to make sure said employees were on the job. (They asked for an HR department but, ah, I’m the HR department.) DigiCert, the company that issued the EV SSL certificate, was polite but insistent. It’s a thorough process.

What city is my company in? In Seattle, where management lives, California, where operations does its magic, or Arizona, where support is? Our customers don’t much care. In practice eSnipe is 100% virtual. I honestly don’t know what state my Quickbook Online business records are kept in; they’re stored in the cloud (backed up on a local drive, duh), maybe at Intuit’s offices in Northern California, maybe not, I don’t know. Microsoft is technically a Delaware corporation; Microsoft Office is written mostly in Redmond but also in India. I doubt that matters to most Office users.

On the technical end of things, the operations staff had their hands full. Part of my application included asking them to generate a certificate request or “CSR”, which is a big huge number represented in encrypted form as shown below, sharply truncated.

-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIEXzCCA0cCAQAwfzELMAkGA … blah blah blah rZjVqR0VvD+DFv3RM6mCBy VvJn7a4WWmjBHkFTI3TRRsYn2 ncNGPLGLP9+7sosafQbZfCcS+Q== -----END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----
This number is created by taking identifying characteristics of the web server, the computer it’s running on, and a number of other factors that, while invisible to any of us viewing the CSR in its raw form, form a unique identifier. Among the data are our company’s name and city of origin, all baked into the CSR. This tripped me up last time we got the simpler, plain vanilla SSL certificate. I was living in Arizona, the company was based in Washington, the server that generated the CSR was in California, and I was thoroughly confused. Since I was in Arizona, that’s what went into the CSR, and the certificate was rejected. Someone at the certificate company looked us up in state records, found our Washington incorporation and busted us. That’s low tech, and it does the job just fine. I may have been in Phoenix, but my company was in Washington. They’re all about the due diligence, in case you wondered how seriously they take that green bar.

Does physical location matter in a global company, which we are, tiny though we may be? It still does. In this most modern of businesses, when it comes to handling your money, the universally accepted methods of determining who we are boil down to methods that would make perfect sense to the Hardy Boys.

P.S. They had to reissue the certificate this time, but for once it wasn’t me. After all that work someone on the other end spelled eSnipe’s state as Wahington, and I had to catch it. Puh-leeze, I’m supposed to be a high-level guy. Where are Frank and Joe when you need them?

Piracy, Quality, and the Free Software Conundrum

Easy On Me — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:43:39 +0000

In a recent post I mentioned Seashore for OSX, a free graphics editor based on the GIMP but with a sleek, modern user interface that’s much easier to pick up than the GIMP’s. Seashore is a fantastic piece of work. I actually like it better than Photoshop for some purposes. I will continue to pay for Adobe Photoshop for many reasons. Among the most basic are that people I hire use Photoshop and they always rely on new features, and that it’s simply an astoundingly capable piece of software, developed by a huge team of highly motivated, well-paid developers working at one of the best tech companies on the planet.

That said, I have zero loyalty to Adobe, because I have never got support for them on the very expensive products I’ve paid for. I have had to rely on spotty community support, and while I am grateful to that community I am angry that Adobe doesn’t follow up on what I believe to be well-documented, precisely written support requests. I also have four computers I work on regularly. Photoshop licensing allows me to work on two. Perfectly fair: it handles the common case of running software on both a laptop and a desktop, and I have no beef with that scheme. However, when one computer died and I reinstalled it on the new one I found out I was supposed to have deactivated Photoshop first. Well, thanks, Adobe, but you know… the computer committed suicide without informing me ahead of time.

That’s how I found Seashore. I just didn’t have time to go through the red tape Adobe required of me to use my own product, even though they don’t bother to help me when I have a problem with it. Obviously, free software like Seashore doesn’t require any licensing shenanigans and can handle the vast majority of my graphics needs. Since I use four computers I’ve been evaluating the purchase of a second license for Photoshop. Ah… no. I don’t like being punished for buying their software. Because of course if I stole a cracked copy off a torrent site I wouldn’t have any licensing issues. I’ll stick to being slightly inconvenienced with my current setup.

Make no mistake about it. I will continue to use Photoshop. But if a commercial competitor arises that lets me use the software on all my computers even at the same price as Photoshop, I’ll be over it like brown on rice. In fact I had that opportunity in the Mac world. For music composition I own Logic, Apple’s high-end product, but I stopped using it because of the complicated license key situation. I was able to get a “family license” of iLife, which includes the less powerful Garageband, for a couple of hundred dollars. Now I’m strictly a Garageband user. It’s goo enough, and doesn’t penalize me for being a paying customer.