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As someone who check out¹ news from major tech blog regularly, the ability to filter and verify the validity of news is important. Blogging is easier with the access of information and the help of technology. One can write a summary of news from the press release or a thread in Reddit without confirming first.

Yesterday, we had a pile of false reporting from major tech blog. Most of them didn’t apologize for false reporting, or at least admitted that it was their fault.

I guess it’s a common occurrence in this field. Write a story, publish it, and correct it later if it’s proven wrong. Has the ease of blogging made writers to neglect the impact of misreporting?

Once a major tech blog publishes a story, especially the breaking one, their readers are going to share it to their social circle. It can be a tweet or just a casual conversation during lunch. The misinformed people will continue the cycle and spread the story, although not always, to their friends. As a result, we have a lot of misinformed people.

But wait. Didn’t they apologize and update the story to let their readers know there was a mistake? Yes, it’s still useless.

Unlike us who follow news regularly, some of those misinformed people don’t care which site they’re reading the news. They only care how popular the stories are. They see an interesting title and a link, click it, read the news, and leave the site. Do you think they’ll check the same story twice? Nope. I bet they won’t even know which site the story originated from.

See the problem? Information spreads. No amount of apologies can correct misinformed people. That’s why getting the story right in the first place is far more important than correcting it later.

To be fair, avoiding misreporting is impossible. Sometimes the problem lies with the sources, not the writers. This is where journalism plays its part.

There aren’t many effective ways to fix consequences caused by misreporting. The most common attempt is sharing the updated story through the social media. For a blog, writing a separated post to correct previously published post shows how much you care about your readers.

1. Do people read all those news? ↩

I’ve never customized the folder icons on Mac. There is a reason behind this decision. Most of the icon sets take away the natural beauty of OS X. They usually stand out by themselves, ignoring other UI elements, and turn the whole OS X into a bizarre state.

De Anza is the latest folder icons sets designed by Louie Mantia, a former Apple and Square designer. Consisting of 2 color schemes with many sharp details, it blends well with Finder and OS X Mountain Lion. I can say it’s the most beautiful¹ folder icon sets I’ve seen so far.

If you’ve never customized your OS X before, I’ll give a brief tutorial on this. There are many tools you can use to get this done, but I’ll share the one I use to change the system icons. If you’ve never heard or tried CandyBar before, then go ahead and download a copy of it first.

There are many ways to replace system folder icons without the help of CandyBar. Using CandyBar allows you to restore everything easily without having to creep out when the next OS update breaks your system.

CandyBar used to be a paid app to customize Dock and various of icons. But the new regulation in OS X Mountain Lion has caused the team to stop the development of CandyBar, leaving it for the folks at IconFactory. They’ve made it the latest version that supports OS X Mountain Lion for free. The drawback is you can no longer customize Dock and applications download from Mac App Store with CandyBar. Fortunately, it can still be used to customize system icons.

The process to customize system icons is pretty straightforward. Move the downloaded De Anza icon set into CandyBar. You should see them in the sidebar and the preview of each icon underneath. Scroll down and find the list of system folder icons. The next step is to drag and drop De Anza folder icon into the system folder icons according to their type. Replaced icons will show a dim blue light around the container. Apply the changes and relaunch Finder.

For Dropbox users, some folder icons can’t be replaced using traditional copy-paste method. You have to open the Dropbox package and replace the actual icons in there. There are about 4 icons you need to replace with different filenames. I’ve included the renamed icons for you to download. Get it here: De Anza for Dropbox.

1. I always try to be careful when coming up with a title. Using “The Most” in the title requires a tremendous amount of responsibility because nothing lasts forever. It puts my credibility on stake, but I find that is the only way to show you how much I love the new folder icons set by Mantia. ↩