Newspapers' New Owners Turn Grim - by David Carr from The New York Times - "Critics of newspapers say that part of the problem is that the industry has lost its ability to surprise. Tell that to the guys who have just bought in.... These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves."

Moving from WordPress.com to Self-Hosted WordPress in Plain English - by Michael Martine from Remarkablogger - "Sooner or later, you find out that out of all five billion themes available, you don’t really like any of them, but you have little to no say (or skill) in customizing all but a very few of them. Sooner or later, you discover that all the cool functionality other blogs have from something called plugins is verboten to you on WordPress.com."

Mozilla CEO says Apple's Safari auto-update 'wrong' - by Martin LaMonica from CNET News.com - "A lot of people appear to be bent out of shape about Apple using its auto-update service to distribute the Safari Web browser on Windows. The CEO of Mozilla, which makes the rival Firefox browser, calls it bad business."

Twenty-two years ago, I bought the only computer I've ever loved. It was a whirlwind romance, and it began, as many affairs do, with a quick glance across a crowded room. A brand-new Macintosh Plus was sitting on a small desk in a computer shop called Computer Contact in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. It was a beautiful spring day in central Michigan, with the sun shining and the birds singing. Our eyes met and I casually strolled across the sales floor to introduce myself.

When I first met Mac, it had a golf game running on its nine-inch monochrome screen. This was remarkable because the only golf games I'd played on my Kaypro II computer worked like this:

You are 175 yards from the hole. What club do you want to use?
> 4i
The ball travels 163 yards. You are in the fairway.
You are 12 yards from the hole. What club do you want to use?

And so on. Almost as exciting as watching golf on television, actually. The game on the Macintosh wasn't text-based, though. It featured a real-looking golfer jauntily waiting to tee off. I'd never seen anything like this. I'd played video games in arcades, of course, and on my Atari 2600 at home, but this was nothing like the blocky sprites that passed for humans in many of those games. This was revolutionary.

Now I realize the original Mac came out two years earlier, and while I certainly remember the famous "1984" Super Bowl ad, it didn't actually show the computer. The ad's imagery and message were cool, but what could Apple be introducing that would justify that ad? With IBM PCs and Apple IIs as my only comparison, how different could this "Macintosh" possibly be? It didn't help that sales of the original Mac and its 512K successor weren't exactly stellar. So Macintosh had been under my radar... until I saw the golfer on my new love's monitor.

Looking closer, I saw the mouse. I'd never seen a computer mouse, but it seemed fairly natural to hold the soap bar shaped object and move it around a bit. Pointing at the menus across the top of the screen, I watched as each one "dropped down" to display several choices. I quit the golf game and began exploring the rest of what I soon learned was the Mac's "desktop."

I found MacWrite and MacPaint. The affair was all but consummated at that point. Remember block commands in WordStar? I still have painful memories about block commands. They resurface every time I go looking for a missing HTML end tag.

I wanted this computer. I needed this computer. I loved this computer.

The shop also had a 512K Mac nearby, and I was almost swayed by its lower price tag. The store owner assured me, though, that the Plus was the one I wanted because it had one megabyte of RAM: "enough to last me pretty much forever." I don't blame Bob for being wildly wrong with that prediction, after all, most PCs had only 64K of memory at that point.

$2600 later, the Plus came home with me, along with a $600 ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer. I've never enjoyed taking anything out of a box more. Now I had my own Macintosh that I could play with endlessly. Or at least when it wasn't loading and saving files onto its single 800K floppy drive.

A month later, having had enough of "floppy swapping," I bought my Mac's first peripheral: a second 800K floppy drive. That made life much easier, and made the next major event possible in our ongoing relationship: Mac and I went pro.

The manufacturing company my wife Doreen and I were working for needed a price list for a product line they were taking on from a sister company in Florida. The decision to move manufacturing to Michigan had been made on short notice, so they needed the materials right away. Doreen was in charge of the company's marketing materials, so she called the printing company Delfield worked with to find out how quickly they could turn the job around. They weren't able to promise anything faster than six weeks, due to the time requirements of traditional typesetting and design. Doreen asked me if I could put something together with the Macintosh. I said yes and started laying out the price list in MacDraw. A few days later, I took a floppy disk with the file on it to another computer store in Midland where they had an Apple LaserWriter - très exotique! The quality of the output was excellent, 300 dpi, and while the commercial printer's layout department had to cut in the logos and a few photos, the brochure was done only three weeks after the initial request. They also saved some money in having me do the work, so soon there were more layout projects coming my way.

I bought Aldus PageMaker 1.0 and Adobe Illustrator 88 and continued to improve my skills in the infant field of desktop publishing. When I was making more from my moonlighting than I was as a draftsman at Delfield, I quit and started my own freelance business, which I've now been doing for 20 years.

I couldn't have done it without my Mac Plus. Oh, I've owned plenty of other computers, including a Mac LC (my first color computer), a Mac Performa series, and several Windows-based computers. But my Mac Plus was the one that changed my life. It doesn't work very well any more - its monitor only displays the top half of the desktop - but I still have it, and one of these days I'll have to take some time to see if I can repair it. It's the least I can do for an old friend.

Any other early Mac owners? Let me know about your Mac love in the comments!

Has the emergence of the mobile web destroyed the market for native applications for mobile devices? Michael Mace, a former VP of Product Planning at Palm who's now a principal at Rubicon Consulting, says yes on his blog today. He notes that although the number of smartphones has increased, the "attractiveness" to potential developers has been decreasing. And now with the growth of the mobile web, those developers are likely to be working on applications that can be delivered over a fast mobile connection to a handheld or smartphone browser.

Michael notes:

"If you're a mobile developer, you should consider stopping native app development and shifting to a mobile-optimized website. That's what Elia [Freedman, CEO of Infinity Softworks] did, and he said it's amazing how much easier it is to get things done. Even mobile game developers, who you'd think would be the last to abandon native development, are looking at web distribution."

The advent of Adobe AIR, which I discussed earlier today, and other similar technologies from Google, Microsoft and others, would seem to hasten that trend. Apple is set to release development tools for the iPhone sometime soon, which could spur creation of native applications at least on that platform, but personally, the "feature" I was looking for recently when I upgraded my mobile phone was how reliable and faithful were the mobile versions of the Google applicatons, including Gmail and Google Calendar, that I use at home and work everyday. No more syncing; I want the same data wherever I go.

The second Tuesday of the month is here, and Microsoft's Lincoln's Birthday present is no less than eleven patches, six marked "critical" and five "important." One of the patches affects only Windows Vista users. The complete details of the eleven patches is available from the Microsoft TechNet site. Visit Windows Update to check whether your computer is patched, especially if you have Automatic Updates turned off. Remember to do this using Internet Explorer; Firefox or other browsers won't work with the Windows Update site.

The anticipated Service Pack 1 for Vista isn't available - officially - yet. It's expected in March. Reports from Windows news site WinBeta suggests that it's available now, but it's probably best to wait for the offical release date to avoid problems.

Apple also updated Mac OS X to version 10.5.2 yesterday. If you're using the third most popular operating system (after XP and the intrepid Vista users), you can find the updates here or by checking for software updates under the Apple menu.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser lost market share again in December to Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari browsers. IE held 75.8 percent of the browser market in December, down from 77.1 percent the previous month, according to data from Net Applications. Firefox increased its market share from 15.6 to 16.4 percent during the same period, while Safari went from 4.6 to 5.1 percent.

An interesting side note in Net Applications' data is the speed of adoption of new browser versions. Firefox 2 was officially released in late October, 2006, and just over a year later, nearly all Firefox users have upgraded to the newer version (96.5 percent use Firefox 2 versus 3.5 for Firefox 1.5). Internet Explorer 7 was released just ahead of Firefox 2, but it took until last month for the majority of IE users to have switched to version 7 (53.4 percent now use IE7, with most other IE users still on version 6, although some older versions are also still in use).

The New Tech Heroes have used the Firefox browser since its official introduction in November, 2004, and I continue to recommend it to our friends and clients for its security features and overall ease of use. Its growth in market share is largely due to its reputation as a more secure browser, as many of its innovative features are now part of Internet Explorer 7, including tabbed browsing.

Regardless of which browser you choose to use, it's vital to upgrade to the most recent version and, as with any software, make sure any security patches are downloaded and installed regularly. The browser has become the most common computer application, increasingly used to replace traditional desktop-based software, so its security is paramount to any home or small business computer.