Tuesday, April 29, 2003
- Robb Beal:
- “Apple users? Huh? You mean Mac users.” Bingo.
- “A revolutionary system would be decentralized (i.e., Web-like) and artist-centered (i.e., artists would have ultimate control). Apple’s system is neither.” But didn’t Apple have to work with the big companies because they own the rights?
- “What an embarrassment…that we continue to see stories written that idolize a single person rather than…the diversity of contributions being made. Does anyone find the idol stories interesting, or believable?” I agree with the first part, and perhaps the stories are exaggerated, but could Gil Amelio have pulled this off?
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Bill Bumgarner: “In other words, as my purchased music library grows, backing it up becomes quite the serious inconvenience.” And, apparently, iTunes’s backup feature doesn’t help you segment the library.
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Steven Frank: “The major negative is of course the Digital Rights Management.”
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Nat Irons: “I distinctly remember what happened to my music purchasing patterns the year I was using Napster most heavily. I’d buy ten albums a month without even thinking about it.”
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Chuq Von Rospach: “A lot of the anti-piracy seems to me like the attempt to move speed limits to 55: too many Americans simply didn’t agree and didn't buy into it. so you can either try to put a policeman on every highway, or you can raise the speed limit.”
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Dan Wood: “If Apple wanted to do something and revolutionary, they could have done something much more extraordinary that would have not only included the big names, but also allowed the ‘little guys’ to make their music available over iTunes.” I think getting the big players on board is a necessary first step to getting the concept accepted. It reminds me of Don Norman’s story about how Edison’s phonograph lost. And Rhapsody. The current system is a big enough step forward for 1.0.
This Web page lets you compile Java code when you don’t have the JDK installed (via Lambda).
Ken Arnold:
If we accept that programmers are humans, one primary and interesting consequence is that human factors issues can be properly applied towards the tools they use.…I am speaking about the more basic tools programmers use every minute they do their work: programming languages and APIs.
Consider garbage collection. One can argue up and down about the overhead, etc., but consider this: Two of the best selling C++ books are Scott Meyer’s Effective C++ and More Effective C++. The single largest category of the 85 tips—about one quarter of them—is dealing with potential memory leaks.…This is fundamentally a human factors problem: You can tell people how to avoid the whirling knives of the abattoir, or you can close the abattoir door.
(via Ned Batchelder)
Tony Arnold has updated iTableView.
Dennis G. Jerz:
On the web, a blurb is a line or short paragraph (20–50 words) that evaluates (or at least summarizes) what the reader will find at the other end of a link. A good blurb should inform, not tease. Usability testing will help you determine the best way to lay out your blurbs, but this document will help you write the content.
Dan Frakes has written an article that every Mac developer should read. My favorite piece of advice: put the full name of the product and the version number in the name of the disk image.
Classes are what make objects possible, and without objects, object-oriented programming would not make sense.
—Special Edition Using Java, quoted by Douglas Dunn on the now-defunct javarules.com
Monday, April 28, 2003
I really want to hear the details of the DRM. How is the iPod special wrt authorization? What happens if I burn a CD and then rip it?
I’m not sure yet how much I’ll use this service. Unlike Jobs, I like albums, and the prices seem geared towards singles. Right now, I see it as mostly useful for previewing and accessing previously unreleased material. I didn’t see the original version of “Slow Motion,” though.
There’s a flow to a good album. The songs support each other. That’s the way I like to make music.
—Trent Reznor
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Tim Bray has written an introduction to Unicode. From my quick skimming, his writing seems exceptionally clear.
Here’s a transcript of Kapor and Hertzfeld’s talk at O’Reilly. Chandler is written in Python, which Hertzfeld says is three times faster to program in than Java, which is three times faster than C. Chandler uses wxWindows for its platform-agnostic interface framework. The Mac version uses native widgets, but the program as a whole doesn’t feel at all native to me. I do like the way you can click on an address component (such as a phone number) to edit it. There’s no annoying editing mode, like in Apple’s Address Book. Hertzfeld apparently likes browsers: every view in Chandler has a URL, and one of the “key concepts is that you can have multiple Views onto each data set.” Kapor says: “We’re not successful if we make commercial development impossible.”
Lambda: “Our conclusion is simple, and contradicts our initial intuition: compiled implementations should use eval/apply.”
Two links I want to remember are Google Zeitgeist and where to find those tiny badges.
Rooneg notes that the The Unix-Haters Handbook (circa 1994) is now available online, hosted by Microsoft. It has a forward by Donald Norman and an anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie.
Here are some notes with comments from Kay and L. Peter Deutsch.
Here’s some discussion of the Rube Goldberg Honda Ad. I’d just assumed it was CGI…but Eric says it’s not.
A skeptic checks all the drawers.
—Dilbert
Friday, April 25, 2003
Eric Blair links to this New.com story. I didn’t expect this, and it’s great news.
Just as I was pining for the menu bar, Stone Design released FontSight, which brings back the Font menu. It doesn’t work in Carbon applications, but most Carbon applications have Font menus, anyway. Hopefully it will evolve into a MenuFontsX. MenuFonts showed previews of fonts in different sizes, and you could type the first few letters of a font’s name to jump to it in the menu.
Nicholas Riley:
EquationService, if you haven’t seen it, is a handy free application which produces PDF images with PDFLATEX or CONTEXT that can be dragged and dropped into Keynote or almost any other Mac OS X application. The main advantage over using TeXshop or similar is that you can typeset a single equation to get a small PDF image containing only that equation, rather than an entire page. The interface sucks, however, and I sent the author some changes which I hope he incorporates.
Dan Wood:
I hope people like the new SiteSearch tool. When people talk to me about Sherlock 3, what is undershadowed by The Controversy is the fact that there were hundreds of plugins out there for searching sites, which people liked, that don’t work in Jaguar! A lot of Sherlock’s original purpose of “meta-searching” is no longer pertinent, thanks to Google, but the ability to search a targeted site conveniently was abandoned when Apple changed gears. Yet those plugins are still available out there in Web-land, and many of them actually still work…not in Sherlock 3, though…just in Watson, and, I think, Interarchy.
Nisus has released a beta version of their Cocoa rewrite of Nisus Writer. As much as I’m glad that Nisus Writer is still under development, I can’t get that excited about the product because it hasn’t yet caught up to Nisus Writer 4. As with OmniGraffle, the interface is palette-heavy, although the palettes are in a drawer. When did the menu bar go out of fashion? Palettes should be for frequently used settings where I need direct feedback. I don’t need a palette for setting the number of columns in the document; I’ll do that once!
Eric Blair writes about the <q> tag in Safari.
John Gruber analyzes the Dan Gillmor article that’s been getting entirely too much coverage. I’m sick of Carbon vs. Cocoa and which group contributed what to melange that is Mac OS X. Gruber’s best point is that much of the great Mac software has historically been written by small developers. The only (non-Apple) applications from big companies in my Dock right now are Internet Explorer and Photoshop Elements. In a few minutes I’ll be starting up FrameMaker. I doubt this ratio has changed much for me over the years.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
—Donald Knuth
Thursday, April 24, 2003
This morning I released DropDMG 2.1. It adds BBEdit-inspired recent and favorite folders, support for Internet-enabled images, compatibility with Apple’s JDK 1.4.1, and lots of other refinements. I’m especially proud of the new sheet-based interface for overriding the preferences.
Erik Barzeski has some good criticism of OmniGraffle 3 and its icons. The new palettes look cool, and I was never really a fan of the old Interface Builder–style ones. But I think I want something more context-sensitive.
Slava Karpenko:
It is understandable that carrying an advanced featureset and lots of media manipulations can’t be all that speedy, but we’re talking about the interface responsiveness here. I am, trying to assemble my first home-made movie in iMovie, using a semi-modern Mac (dual-Ghz), don’t like clicking into a movie fragment and waiting for half a second for the system to understand I clicked in and update the UI. I don’t like browsing through the iPhoto library with an ocassional coffee breaks every time i click on an up arrow because my library contains about 600 photos.
Phil Greenspun:
The video also made one wonder for whom public television programs are made. Despite having two hours the show did not attempt to explain even the simplest physics or engineering behind radio or any of the inventions that were the subject of the disputes chronicled. The biographical and historical information was narrated so slowly that it could have been sped up 3X without approaching the speed of dialog on the Simpsons, which most people seem to have no trouble following.
Buzz Andersen:
All gripes aside, however, Eclipse on OS X is the same great development environment that I’ve come to love on Windows, and that alone is cause for celebration. I would kill to have Eclipse’s sophisticated code completion features in Project Builder (since I’ve been using Eclipse at work, my once frequent visits to the Java API docs have all but ceased).
I don’t think that would be enough to get me to write code in Project Builder, but if Apple implemented more of Eclipse’s feature I might consider switching. Although the situation is much better than on OS 9, it still seems like the Mac is behind in developer tools. Using a minority language like Objective-C doesn’t help, of course.
Erik Barzeski doesn’t like the Apple Store’s new look, and I’ve got to agree. It’s too cluttered. By the way, did you know that Apple still sells HyperCard? I recently bought a FireWire hard drive from Dell. Their store is worse, of course—especially the search feature. But I paid $60 + shipping less than if I had bought at a Mac store. (The price has since gone up to the Mac-store level.)
A witty saying proves nothing.
—Voltaire
Friday, April 18, 2003
Steven Frank:
Are web-based forums (especially phpBB and friends) really hard to use, or am I just not understanding something fundamental?
I thought I was the only one!
Scientific American:
Georgetown University law professor John R. Thomas sees the case as a demonstration of how the patent system is being commandeered by private individuals who then go on to make their own laws, free from the traditional safeguards that prevent the government from abusing its power. This trend emerges from the willingness of the U.S. patent office to approve what Thomas calls “postindustrial” patents that cover everything from methods of doing business to human behaviors.
Shira Springer’s article in the Globe today is a horrid piece of puff journalism. The Celtics have many offensive players, but their offense is awful. Rather than getting “the most” out of the Celtics, Jim O’Brien has them playing well below their talent level. Many of the players whose “expertise” he solicits have never played under a real NBA coach. O’Brien would probably be an OK coach for a veteran team, but these Celtics need a different sort of coach—someone like Larry Brown.
We’re going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
—Jason Kidd, upon being drafted by the Dallas Mavericks
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
How is a right-handed person supposed to use the keyboard to switch tabs in Safari? Using multiple windows and Command-` seems so much easier.
Bill Bumgarner:
While the elimination of the FireWire port from the PS2 does not necessarily mean the end of such a vision, it is certainly likely.
Tim Bray: “Semantics don’t come from schemas.”
