Archive for September 13, 2005

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Define: Enterprise

Jason Fried:

We hear about “Enterprise Software” all the time. Or, this is a product for “The Enterprise.” Let’s see what you think it means. In this context, explain “Enterprise” in 10 words or less.

PATH_MAX Blackholing

Jonathan Rentzsch:

Well, you don’t have to use the tofu file system APIs. You can use Carbon’s granite FSRef-based APIs, which offers high-fidelity file system entity routines. They’re not path-based, and thus don’t suffer from the inherent flaws of path strings.

But! Hilarity ensues when you mix the competent FSRef APIs and the tofu path APIs: it’s possible to “blackhole” a file.

The iTunes 5 Source List

Pierre Igot has some interesting observations about iTunes’ source list compared to Mail’s and the Finder’s:

What if you want to create a new folder the root level? Well, same as in Mail: You first need to make sure that nothing is selected… Hold on a second! In Mail, in order to deselect what’s currently selected in the mailbox drawer, you can click on the empty area at the bottom of the list. Not so in iTunes! In iTunes, you cannot have nothing selected in the source list! So what do you have to do if you want to create a new folder at the root level of the source list? Well, you have to select an existing source at the root level of the source list first—but not a folder! (Otherwise, iTunes will create the new folder inside that existing folder.)

State

John Siracusa (on his new blog):

State retention sounds like a Nerd Feature, but surprisingly few people, nerds or otherwise, seem to request it. It’s also a pain for developers to implement, blah blah, read all about it. But once someone experiences it, it’s hard go back. What’s rare is the unprompted desire for state retention, not the love of the actual feature in practice.