Mr. Rogers Saved the VCR
Aside from being a decent and compassionate human being, Fred Rogers was also a champion of fair use.
Friday, February 28, 2003
Finder File/Folder Overwrite Bug
I agree with Bill Bumgarner that this is not a bug in the OS X Finder. The old behavior always annoyed me. However, I think the warning message should be more specific and say that you are replacing a folder. As to case-insensitive, case-preserving file systems…I like them.
Bochs
A commentor on Erik Barzeski’s blog says of Bochs:
It’s amazing slow, much slower than Virtual PC but it works.
Newton Rendezvous
Newton users never cease to amaze. Maybe their favorite product is only mostly dead. HyperCard? That’s all dead.
NEWMAC Basketball
(This has nothing to do with Macintoshes.)
This evening, my sister will play in the Engineers’ first NEWMAC semifinals. Apparently there will even be a webcast.
Ericsson Clicker
Sony Ericsson Clicker is a revolutionary application, allowing you to remotely control a wide range of applications with your Sony Ericsson phone.
(via Daniel Chvatik)
Drawers
Mike Zornek has posted some thoughts on drawers in Mail.app. I don’t like them because they mess up keyboard navigation.
Longhorn
What Allchin seems to be saying is that for every single file on your computer, it will get stored in a fashion where meta data about the content is extracted AUTOMATICALLY and then stored for queries. And this extraction will be extensive down to the level of object recognition within images. If this is true then it is indeed interesting and perhaps Allchin was justified in his comment. But can Microsoft really do this?
A New Kind of Science?
Classy links to a review of A New Kind of Science, which says:
Serious science should be predictive, not just descriptive. To qualify as science that applies to the real world, I would have expected to see some kind of claim in the book which could be verified against the behavior of the real world. Note that I’m not expecting him to have actually performed the verification yet (the book has only just come out, after all), but that there should be some indication of a path that would lead to verifiable, falsifiable predictions.
I’m withholding judgement until I read more of the book, but I definitely agree with the complaint about using Mathematica notation instead of math.
Thoughts on Iraq
Here are some interesting links I found on both “sides” of the debate:
Quote of the Day
This will not stand, ya know, this will not stand, man.
—The Dude, The Big Lebowski
Thursday, February 27, 2003
Stitching Together PDFs
The command above will basically create one outputfile called outputpdf.pdf that consists of pdf1.pdf and pdf2.pdf. You can replace pdf1.pdf with *.pdf and it will grab all the pdf files and output one pdf.
NSUserKeyEquivalents
James Houston shows how to make the keyboard shortcuts in Cocoa applications more consistent.
BBEdit Elements
I like TextWrangler. It’s much more capable than BBEdit Lite, so it’s plenty of text editor for a lot of people. BBEdit Lite was too good to give away. $50 for TextWrangler seems fair all around, although I think Bare Bones should have included AppleScript support instead of C programming features. My guess is that programmers will want the extra features that are available in BBEdit, anyway.
There’s been some grousing on the message boards to the effect that free tools duplicate many of TextWrangler’s features. These people might also enjoy the free tool that duplicates many of Photoshop’s features.
Quote of the Day
Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
—Douglas Adams
Monday, February 24, 2003
Google Does Reverse Phone Numbers
Ned Batchelder just discovered this, and it was news to me, too. It’s even faster than using Watson.
Install Like It’s 1991
I thought this was pretty cool, too. The first time I saw it, over 10 years ago.
Not only that, but the old way (using creator codes) could take advantage of the file system’s catalog to do the search really fast.
Metal Tab Browsing
If this is true then I think I’m going to puke. Not only does this indicate even more custom controls (see all the recent coverage of inconsistent UI), but… Ugh. I’d rather not have tabbed browsing at all than have even more bad UI shoved on us.
I had hoped that the Safari team would come up with something better than tabs. As much as they fill a need for some people, I think there’s got to be a better way to provide the functionality. And a new custom control for metal tabs? Hideous.
Sunday, February 23, 2003
Script Menu
Erik Barzeski shows how to make a script menu that includes the scripts for the frontmost application inline instead of just having them in a submenu. It’s not OSA Menu, but it’s getting there. (How about holding down Option to edit the script or assigning keyboard shortcuts to scripts?)
Unfortunately, Script Menu uses the annoying “disabled menu item as a label” trick that’s also seen in the Apple menu, iTunes, Mail, and Safari.
Friday, February 21, 2003
Is Shareware Dead?
At present, I call my software shareware. By that I mean that it’s free to try and isn’t crippled, although it will nag you. Users get support directly from me, and I’m responsive to their suggestions. I encourage people to share the software (but not their serial numbers) with their friends, and it’s available on various compilation CDs and at Info-Mac. But I guess I agree that the term “shareware” has become meaningless because everyone has a different idea of what it means. We stopped saying in ATPM reviews whether a piece of software claimed to be shareware. It wasn’t a distinction worth making. After all, BBEdit now has a shareware-style trial, and it’s backed by a responsive company, but it isn’t shareware, is it? Instead, we list the price and briefly state whether you can try before buying and how the trial is limited (if at all). I should probably start doing this for my software. The question that remains is what to select in VersionTracker’s License popup.
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Spring
I’ve created Spring objects for DropDMG and SpamSieve:
Just open Spring and drag them into one of its windows. Thanks to Robb Beal for compositing the Spring badge onto the icons.
S. Williams for Blount?
That said, there has been trade talk surrounding a deal for Denver (and former Boston) center Mark Blount. League sources said yesterday that the Celtics have talked with the Nuggets about a deal that would send Shammond Williams and a second-round pick to Denver in exchange for Blount.
No. Please. We don’t need the “Shaq of the Shaw’s” back in green. Even if he can put up better numbers than Baker.
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Licensing Fun
I find it really strange that Mozilla’s tri-license has created this situation. On the one hand, it encourages people to build applications using Mozilla code under the GPL, LGPL, or MPL, but at the same time it makes it impossible for anyone to really give the code back to Mozilla itself if that code doesn’t use the MPL.
iChat iRritations
Matt Gemmell dissects iChat. Wow, I don’t know how he finds the time to write all this stuff down. My main iChat irritation is that it saves transcripts in a proprietary format so they can’t be searched.
PDF Workflow
Bill Bumgarner shows a simple use of 10.2.4’s new PDF Workflow feature: making it easy to save PDF files to specific locations.
Microsoft to Buy Connectix
Yikes, is this for real?
Update: Apparently so, because now MacMinute has picked up the story. As Chris says, this will probably end up much worse than Microsoft is spinning it. What they’ve said so far is less encouraging than the initial word about the Bungie acquisition, and we know how that turned out.
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Apple Events
Developer usability aside, Apple Events and AppleScript are two of the more profoundly useful technologies Apple’s ever disgorged, and it drives me nuts to see Mac apps that neglect them. With a taste of what they went through, I have a deeper appreciation of developers who do the work to get it right.
Perversion Tracker
James McNally pointed me to Perversion Tracker, whose latest review is as hilarious as it is accurate.
BBEdit 7.0.2
Leave it to Bare Bones Software to put a tiny little feature like, oh, support for zillions of text encodings, in a 0.0.1 update. “Open from FTP Server” also falls into this category.
There Was a Fire
Anyway, I also remembered a humor piece I wrote 5 years ago for MacKiDo. There are some dated references, so I think it’s time to update it.
Sunday, February 16, 2003
Inconsistencies and iApps
John Gruber synthesizes the recent discussion on Apple’s (lack of) interface consistency. I can now scratch that off my to-blog list, since he’s said most of what I was going to say, better than I would have said it. I like Apple’s new rounded text field because, when used consistently, it hints that it’s for live filtering. (I first saw this use of a text field in Emailer, though iTunes gets the credit for popularizing it.) Apple has already recognized that it’s generally useful and included it in Jaguar. Unfortunately, the white-on-gray X that takes you out of search mode is not part of the standard control, so each program has to roll its own.
Gruber doesn’t quite come out and say it, but consistency and innovation are not at odds. If you need a new control, you should innovate and make one, and it should not be consistent with the standard controls. Controls with different behaviors should look different. But most of the time you don’t need a new control, and you shouldn’t make something that’s superficially different and try to tell me it’s an innovation.
Erik Barzeski’s Ken Burns post is also on target. I was going to wait and link to it when I discussed iMovie 3 and iPhoto 2, but that might not be for a while. In the meantime, here are some of the links I was going to discuss:
NetNewsWire Again
Rands explains why blogs and NetNewsWire have changed the way I find information. Yes, my vision was limited.
NetNewsWire has painlessly scaled to handle hundreds of weblogs for me. This means I’m scanning the fact/fiction/opinion of hundreds of people every minute of every day. I challenged anyone who is currently bookmarked or tabbed based to efficiently read hundreds of weblogs in the time it takes to drink your coffee. If your answer is, “I don’t care about hundreds of weblogs”, I would suggest you are a state of technical denial where your tool (i.e.: a browser) has limited your vision.
Saturday, February 15, 2003
AirPort Status Not Available
Like Lee says, John Gruber’s AirPort story probably shouldn’t have been funny, but it was. He also includes a link to Screenplays for You.
But then suddenly, for no good reason, the iMac could no longer connect to the base station via AirPort. This is not a range problem, or at least it shouldn’t be: the base station is only eight fucking inches from the iMac. And then it would get a signal, an incredibly strong AirPort signal — but without a connection to the Internet. The Status, it claimed, was Not Available.
I’ve had a similar problem with regular AirPort, only it never fixed itself completely. I have to keep resetting the Base Station now and then.
MxJ Issue Status
GCSF now has a page that shows when the latest issues of MWJ and MDJ were distributed, as well as the front pages of those issues. Subscribers can see what the issue plans are, and non-subscribers can see what they’re missing from the best source of Macintosh news and analysis.
Friday, February 14, 2003
Google’s Privacy Problems
Google needs to stop sending the cookie and promise to only store aggregate data, with no connection between users and search terms. This issue was publically raised almost a year ago; that Google still hasn't dealt with it is inexcusable.
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
NSSchizophrenicControls
I went into frenzied command-shift-4 mode (that’s screenshot-taking mode, by the way), and recorded for posterity some examples of Apple’s utterly schizophrenic UI design.
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
NetNewsWire 1.0
The “pro” version of NetNewsWire is out. Although I was initially skeptical, NetNewsWire Lite really grew on me. Now it’s probably my favorite new program since Watson.
SpamSieve 1.3
SpamSieve 1.3 is out. The new version is better at identifying spam messages, and it integrates with the system Address Book to help prevent false positives. The statistics code is completely rewritten to use a database rather than lots of Cocoa objects, and as a result memory use and launch and quit times are down. The corpus window also received a lot of engineering time to get good editing performance with tens to hundreds of thousands of rows in the table.
Thanks to the creators of PCRE and SQLite, the beta testers, and everyone who’s registered SpamSieve!
