honganhkhoa

My wedding on November 19th, 2011, with Linh, my best friend and my love of the life.

No longer single now :)

Inspiring story behind a new product.

(via daringfireball)

I am surprised how much this news affects me. For me, he is a teacher that has made me into who I am today. His death reminds me one of his greatest teachings:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

He never did.

John Gruber:

Attack from a position of strength. Build on your previous successes. That’s what Apple does. That’s what Amazon is doing here. The other guys — the Samsungs, HTCs, Motorolas, RIMs — can’t match Apple’s hardware design, don’t even try to match Apple in terms of original and differentiated software, and struggle to match Apple’s prices because they don’t have the economy of scale advantages Apple does. Those guys can’t match Amazon either, because they have no content to sell. Amazon can give away the razor because they’re already in the business of selling blades. The other guys don’t even have blades to sell.

About the 4th Street Apple Store (N. Calif.):

What looks like a simple retail storefront is actually a carefully designed, measured and constructed assemblage of glass, cement, metal and stone whose edges correspond. […] When all the painstaking design and construction work is finished, passersby and store visitors “see” the effect, but probably don’t realize why the store is so attractive.

(via daringfireball)

futurejournalismproject:

Quoting Steve Jobs. We Will Miss You. Be Well.

Quotes gathered via the Wall Street Journal and Wired.

Select thumbnails to view.

Background on Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple CEO.

(Source: futurejournalismproject, via mutteringsontech)

Peter Bright:

Ultrabooks are ultralight PCs, like the MacBook Air, no more than 0.8” thick, like the MacBook Air, with Intel processors, like the MacBook Air, metal cases for superior heat dissipation, like the MacBook Air, SSD storage, like the MacBook Air, long battery life and even longer standby time, like the MacBook Air, and affordable, like the MacBook Air. Oh, and they should boot in 7 seconds or less (which at a pinch, the MacBook Air can probably pull off, too). Is the MacBook Air actually an Ultrabook? Intel told us that that’s up to Apple—the MacBook Air is an Ultrabook in all but name.

Intel, keen to stimulate demand for PCs (rather than for ARM-powered tablets) is clearly so annoyed by the inability for PC OEMs to meet this specification that it recently announced the creation of a $300m “Ultrabook Fund” to invest in companies that are working to build this kind of hardware. That’s a damning indictment of the PC industry.

I am using a 2010 low-end 11.6” MacBook Air. Except the screen size and disk space, it is superior to almost every Windows laptop I have ever used. It is powerful enough for a developer like me (the current 2011 version will do much better), beautifully designed and priced at $999. It’s easy to understand why the PC guys are having to play catch-up with Apple in this game.

Consider Lenovo. Lenovo offers a range of different Wi-Fi adaptors in many of its systems. Instead of designing several different motherboards, each with a different integrated adaptor, it puts the adaptors themselves onto daughtercards and plugs them into a socket on the motherboard. The upside is that Lenovo can offer a lot of diversity, and the daughter cards can be standard Mini-PCIe components that anyone can use. The downside is that Lenovo has boards that are less integrated—hence larger—with more components and more complex manufacturing. Lenovo also has to buy smaller numbers of more adaptors than it would if it just picked one version and standardized. It also means that people buying Lenovo systems have to make dumb choices on the website.

This kind of approach doesn’t work for Ultrabook machines.

Machines meeting the MacBook Air’s specification can be built cheaply enough; Apple’s managing it, and Intel’s price estimates probably aren’t too far off. But they require a different approach to PC building. For example, Apple’s laptops use custom-sized lithium polymer batteries. These allow Apple to make the battery exactly fit the space available, maximizing battery life and minimizing space, but there’s a downside of sorts: Apple can’t use standard battery modules. Similarly, the MacBook Air uses a highly integrated motherboard, with almost all functionality built-in. This makes the board smaller and cheaper to produce, but it means Apple doesn’t offer a wide range of processors, GPUs, WiFi adaptors, etc.

When founders come in to pitch our firm—one as the CEO and the other as President—the conversation often goes like this:

“Who is running the company?”
“We are,” they both say.
“Who makes the final decision?”
“We do.”
“How long do you expect to run that way?”
“Forever.”
“So you’ve decided to make it more difficult for every employee to get work done so that you don’t have to decide who is in charge, is that right?”

via rands.

Solarized

The first time I saw the Solarized theme was in the OmniOutliner iPad app. The colors are stunning with great readability and easy on the eyes.

I have just applied this theme for my iPad app, Writie. Unsurprisingly, the Instapaper bookmarks look so fantastic. With this, Writie might become my preferred way to read Instapaper on the iPad.

My new app

My new app, Writie, is launched today. It reflects my ideas about a better writing environment. In the first version, the core feature that I have focused on was the integration with Instapaper.

There are some minor bugs in this version, which I will address in the next update. Also, I have a lot of ideas for it that I would like to try out.

I have not feel excited like this for some time. This is certainly a good start.