After trying to use SkyDrive as an alternative to Dropbox for some of my Instagram recipes on IFTTT, I discovered that it cannot sync paths with more than 254 characters. From SkyDrive’s FAQ, under The path to a file is too long:

The entire path, including the file name, must contain fewer than 255 characters.

Receiving the error disables file sync and logs you out of SkyDrive. You’ll need to remove or rename the file that generated the error before logging in again.

After looking around why Dropbox doesn’t seem to have the same problem, it appears that this is a limitation of Windows. Dropbox will sync longer paths on a Mac but will not sync the same on a Windows machine.

A number of boxed software have started going to a subscription model. Not too recently, Microsoft released Office 365 Home Premium which is essentially Microsoft Office with subscription pricing. If you’re not averse to paying for software, I think it is a very good deal for families (or anyone) with multiple computers. You get to install Microsoft Office on 5 devices at SGD 12.99 per month (SGD 129.99 per year). You also get an extra 20GB of SkyDrive space (making it a total of 27GB), which is a good enough (and cheaper than Dropbox) solution if you want to have a backup of your documents and media files on the cloud.

More recently, Adobe announced that its future products will only be subscription based via Creative Cloud. If you’re not a current customer, the complete suite is priced at SGD 66.00 a month (with annual commitment). A single product is SGD 26.00 a month (with annual commitment). If you have at least a CS3 license, the complete suite goes down to SGD 39.00 a month and the single product to SGD 13.00 a month for the first year. It goes even lower to SGD 26.00 for the complete suite if you have a CS6 license. With this new pricing they’ve also opened up Creative Cloud for individuals to more countries including Singapore.

If you use any of the above products and always find the new versions more useful, the subscription model makes the cost more predictable and managable compared to a one-time purchase. Otherwise, I’m not sure if it makes sense.

All this talk about Google Reader shutting down made me think about all the services I use and pay for but have free tiers. I depend on them so much that I felt bad not being a paying customer. Also, because I want to be able to complain to someone when their service is down. Kinda hard to do that if you’re not giving them money.

• Dropbox for syncing
• iCloud for iOS sync and backups
• Google Apps for email

Of the above, I’m slightly worried about Google Apps because I’m not sure if they’re profitable enough for Google not to ever have to shut it down. I’m actually wondering if I should get Office 365 Small Business Premium (wow, that’s a mouthful) instead. It comes with Office for 5 computers and I hear they’re no longer the enemy.

While luck will always play some role in our success, you don’t find luck by sitting on your ass. Rather, you find it by getting up and experiencing life as much as you can until it can’t help but find you.

This resonated to me because when people tell me I’m a “genius”, they’re mostly referring to the knowledge I gained through a combination of experience and curiosity.

Please note that I’m upgrading from an iPhone 4.

• It’s really light, thin and fast.
• Camera is immediately usable on launch.
• There’s no noticeable lag when shooting multiple photos.
• Apps immediately respond to touches when I switch between them.
• LTE is really fast — photos upload instantly, video uploads no longer suffer timeout errors.
• The screen seems to be a lot brighter and the colors are more vivid.
• The extra space on the screen is very welcome.
• Apps that are not optimized for the new screen size don’t really feel out of place.
• Love the new earpods.

About a month ago, Flickr overhauled their iPhone app. They rethought the Flickr experience on the iPhone. Although they took a lot of cues from Instagram. The app is still as Flickr as it can be.

I love the new justified view when browsing photostreams. Everything’s just a lot faster and more fluid. They also improved the in-app camera by adding a built-in photo editor for making quick edits like orientation, cropping, red-eye correction, brightness/contract and even adding text. I’m still undecided on the filters since I haven’t used them extensively but I’m still glad they’re there.

Hopefully the new app helps me take and share more non-square pictures with my iPhone.

Craig Hockenberry writes a great behind the scenes look on what went into the making of Twitterrific 5. It was great to learn how each person in the team and their various interactions with each other contributed into making Twitterrific 5 such a beautiful piece of software.

Instagram just released an update that adds a great feature for people who don’t always use its built-in camera. Now, you can easily select from the Camera Roll by doing a long press on the camera button on the tab bar.

Other features that came with the update:

• Redesigned and streamlined camera
• A new filter named “Willow”
• Improved tilt-shift
• Photo thumbnails on the Following and News feeds
• More foursquare integration

So, JSCamp was fun. Hats off to Thomas and Sayanee for a well run conference. There were parts that could’ve been better, particularly when it came to the workshops. However, what made it great is that most of the talks were both entertaining and informative. And it’s commendable that they offered a lot of variety.

Speaking of the talks, my favorite has got to be “Markup and Style without HTML and CSS” by Jed Schmidt where he talks about why he created his little JavaScript library Domo. It was highly entertaining and thought provoking. As for it being useful, I’m still undecided. A close second would be Michal Budzynski’s interestingly named talk “Yo mama’s so ugly, she makes onions cry” about JavaScript face detection, its quirks and applications. And third would be Sangmin Shim’s “High Performance Mobile Web Game Development in HTML5,” where he goes through the pains of creating games for mobile browsers. Honorable mentions go to the talks by Alex MacCaw, Angus Croll, Divya Manian, Eric Bidelman and Irene Ros.

Other nice things were the WiFi, the food, the coffee and the AR drones. I didn’t get to go to the beach party since I had a previous appointment, but looking at the photos, it looks like it was fun.

I’d like to think JSCamp set a good benchmark for developer conferences in Asia. And I hope that its overall success will lead to having a conference in Singapore that’s more Cocoa focused like One More Thing in Australia.

I’ve been using Sublime Text 2 for the past few days and I’m slowly inching my way switching to it full-time from TextMate.

I was a bit overwhelmed initially since pressing ⌘ + , (Preferences) just presents me with an empty window called “Preferences.submlime-settings.” I also wasn’t particularly a fan of the Chrome-style tabs in text editors. But after figuring out how to create some build configs, installing the Soda Theme and a few more packages via Package Control, I can pretty much do almost everything I’d normally do on TextMate. Most of the stuff I feel may be missing are probably already there. I just need to learn how to activate them.

Two features really stood out for me. The first one is Syntax Specific Settings which lets me have different tab settings depending on the language I’m writing in. It also tries to guess if indentions are space or tab based. The other feature is the Build System. It helps a lot now that I’m writing more CoffeeScript than JavaScript and more SCSS than CSS.

I’m happy with the whole experience so far and it seems to keep getting better the more I figure out how easy it is to make it do what I want.