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How PowerPoint was created
In 1987, a company called Forethought, founded by two ex-Apple marketing managers, rolled out PowerPoint and business meetings have never been the same since. Over at IEEE Spectrum, David C. Brock...
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Bad design: This is the menu where a wrong click triggered the Hawaii missile...
Honolulu Civil Beat tweeted this image of the menu page where an Emergency Management Agency employee accidentally clicked the wrong item and triggered a public emergency missile alert. According to...
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Remove the DRM from iTunes movies with TunesKit
More and more people watch movies and TV shows at home, exclusively through the use of streaming services like Hulu or Netflix, but I'm not one of them. I'm not against streaming: the problem is that...
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Programmer demonstrates his "perfect" Minesweeper AI
Code Bullet claims in this demo video, "I was able to create what I believe to be a perfect minesweeper player." As he's quick to point out, a "perfect" AI still relies on luck, because even a perfect...
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Photoshop was first sold as Barneyscan XP
Adobe's Photoshop, the all-conquering image manipulation software that now anchors the subscription-based Creative Suite, was originally written in Pascal and distributed under the name "Barneyscan XP"...
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Browsh: a modern text-only web browser
Browsh is a modern text-only browser which "renders anything that a modern browser can; HTML5, CSS3, JS, video and even WebGL."
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3D printed guns just cleared a major legal hurdle
Last week, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson won a major ruling in his quest to distribute gun-printing software. The video above from February outlines the background of the case. Via Reason:...
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WordTsar: WordStar updated "for the 21st Century"
In an age before Microsoft Word, even before Corel WordPerfect, WordStar ruled the DOS word processing world. Beloved to this day for its simplicity, power and wealth of keystroke commands, some...
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Microsoft gives classic Skype a stay of execution after user complaints
For years, I maintained a Skype number that'd forward to whatever phone number I happened to be using at the time. It was the only way to make myself reachable on the phone, despite my switching to a...
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TripMode 2 helps me keep my tethered data usage under control
Unless I'm in a cafe, hotel or staying at someone's home I connect to the internet over a tethered connection to my smartphone. I've got an unlimited data plan–but only the first five gigabytes of...
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Windows 95 turned into a native app
Windows 95, that most beautiful of operating systems, has been turned into an application. It's available to download for MacOS, Linux and, indeed, modern editions of Windows. Tom Warren writes: Slack...
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Learn about adjustment layers and layer masks in Photoshop
I've been using Photoshop for years, but I don't know what I'm doing. When I get stuck, I often turn to the YouTube channel Phlearn to learn how to do something. In this easy-to-understand 10-minute...
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Big list of open-source MacOS apps
Serhii Londar (Patreon) maintains a list of open-source applications available for MacOS. Unlike some similar guides, it's exhaustive rather than curated, and easy to reference in a single,...
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What the hell are Git and GitHub?
Have you ever read about an interesting app, only to click the link and find yourself on a GitHub page? If you're a coder, then you will be happy about it, but if you're like me, you will scratch your...
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Adobe: to read the Terms of Use, you must agree to the Terms of Use (Update:...
I tried to start Adobe Acrobat today, part of the Creative Cloud suite, and it wouldn't start unless I agreed to new Terms of Use. But to read the Terms of Use, I had to agree to the Terms of Use...
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Two free or cheap alternatives to Adobe Illustrator
If you're a professional illustrator, podcaster, or filmmaker, a $53 a month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud is a fair price to pay. But if you're just interested in having a good vector graphics...
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These ten software innovations transformed scientific research
When I was a mechanical engineer in 1990, I faced a stubborn problem with the design of a disk drive baseplate (an aluminum base that the disk motor and actuator motor were mounted on). When the...
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Collapse OS, an operating system for after the apocalypse
Collapse OS is an operating system that no-one should ever have to use. It's designed to be useful after worldwide catastrophe destroys human civilization: able to run on junk and easy to work with,...
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My favorite little-known Mac apps
[The following is from my newsletter, The Magnet. You can subscribe here.] Last year I started using a Windows PC after being a long-time Mac user. Originally, I planned to stop using my Mac, but a...
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A refined 90s-style operating system you can actually use
SerenityOS (github) is "a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core", wedding the simplicity and style of Windows 9x with all the features (and security) you'd expect from a...
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