Linked List: January 11, 2014

Saturday, 11 January 2014

Harvest 

My thanks to Harvest for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Harvest lets you track billable hours from anywhere, effortlessly, via web, Mac, or iPhone. Tracked hours appear in visual time reports designed to finish projects on time and within budget. When projects are completed, you can even use Harvest to send detailed, professional invoices. In short, Harvest is a complete time-tracking and invoicing service designed for and by creative professionals.

Best of all: you can get started today with a free 30-day trial.

Goodbye, Cameras 

Craig Mod, writing for The New Yorker:

This past October, just before the leaves changed, I went on a six-day hike through the mountains of Wakayama, in central Japan, tracing the path of an ancient imperial pilgrimage called the Kumano Kodo. I took along a powerful camera, believing, as I always have, that it would be an indispensable creative tool. But I returned with the unshakeable feeling that I’m done with cameras, and that most of us are, if we weren’t already.

The non-networked, non-app-enabled camera’s days are numbered.

Do not miss Mod’s extensively illustrated companion piece on his own site, “Photography, Hello”.

Paul Thurrott on the Future of Windows 

Paul Thurrott:

Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public, and the latest release, Windows 8.1, which is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the original release, is in use on less than 25 million PCs at the moment. That’s a disaster, and Threshold needs to strike a better balance between meeting the needs of over a billion traditional PC users while enticing users to adopt this new Windows on new types of personal computing devices. In short, it needs to be everything that Windows 8 is not. […]

In some ways, the most interesting thing about Threshold is how it recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista. It’s an acknowledgment that what came before didn’t work, and didn’t resonate with customers. And though Microsoft will always be able to claim that Windows 9 wouldn’t have been possible without the important foundational work they had done first with Windows 8 — just as was the case with Windows 7 and Windows Vista — there’s no way to sugarcoat this. Windows 8 has set back Microsoft, and Windows, by years, and possibly for good.