dgallagher

iOS gives you the option to disable Background App Refresh either for all apps, or for individual apps: Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh

Affinity Designer is really great for vector graphics, and exporting to raster. Super fast. Super easy to learn.

Their developers are very active. They have a beta available to owners. I've encountered a few minor bugs in their App Store version, downloaded the beta, and noticed it was fixed.

I walked through Target's Open House in SF a few weeks ago; I'd recommend visiting if you're in the area. It's pretty slick product display space. Each "room" has a projector which gives an overview of four or five products in a room, and how they tie together in your life. One of the rooms had a Kinect mounted above next to the projector; not sure what it was being used for.

The main lobby has a couple long tables with all of the products on display which were demo'd in the rooms along with some interactive Surface-like table which detects if you get near it and moves floating sprites around. They had displays on the wall listing the most popular products, and a few sales people to answer questions. IIRC there were approx 40-50 products displayed. Kudos to Target for setting the space up.

Everything being sold felt they'd fit perfectly inside of a Brookstone, or Sharper Image when they still had retail stores. Most of them were "vitamin" products rather than "aspirin", which gives way to some of Allison Arieff's criticism in the article: "What the products on display have in common is that they don’t solve problems people actually have."

That's very fair to say. There were a few items which did solve real problems, like Nest which can help reduce heating costs, but most things sold didn't fit into that category. Many were "neat" things which you could entice someone with disposable income to splurge on.

I'd like to C++ support added to Swift, similar to Objective-C with Objective-C++. There are some C++ frameworks which are nice to use in Obj-C, like Box2D. Currently to get them to work with Swift, you have to write an Obj-C or C wrapper around a C++ framework, and then import that into Swift.

Does anyone have experience using Configuration Management software in a heterogeneous environment? For example, I've seen large environments running Windows 2008/2008R2/2012/2012R2, various flavors and versions of Linux including Ubuntu Server, CentOS, SUSE, etc... What's the pretty? What's the ugly?

I understand consolidation and standardization of operating systems is usually the best state to be in, but in a lot of larger companies running legacy software it's not economically feasible to do.

What if Apple introduced workstation-class ARM another way; made a really powerful iPad/iPhone which could sit in a dock with keyboard/mouse/monitor, and run both iOS and ARM OSX?

x86 computers could continue to exist for high-end users, but typical-users might be content with a hybrid tablet/computer. As ARM increased in power, x86 might dissapear entirely.

Your comments on Windows compatibility/virtualization are spot on. Cloud streaming, Citrix/XenApp, can help in some situations here. In a few years virtually all major apps will probably be cloud/browser based (Microsoft Office, Adobe Suite, streaming games/apps, etc). Windows on Mac might not be as important then. It's possible Microsoft might release ARM Windows too (besides RT). If ARM gets popular in the datacenter you may see Windows Server 2015 ARM Edition. They've done this in the past with Itanium.