BOOL’s Sharp Corners

Mark Dalrymple:

If g_name is non-nil, it’s a true value, so this function will be returning a true value. It might not be YES, but truth is truth in C, isn’t it? If this function returned bool, it would return the correct value.

Unfortunately, with BOOL, it doesn’t. If the address happens to have a zero lower byte, this function will return zero due to the same slicing behavior.

Google Drive and Mac Metadata

I did some preliminary testing with version 1.0.2960.1377 of Google Drive. At first glance, it seems to be a lot like Dropbox except that it’s slow and doesn’t work very well. At launch, it fills the Console with errors like:

5/7/12 2:22:58.497 PM [0x0-0x70070].com.google.GoogleDrive: objc[1082]: Object 0x2f1a8d0 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking - break on objc_autoreleaseNoPool() to debug
5/7/12 2:22:58.497 PM [0x0-0x70070].com.google.GoogleDrive: objc[1082]: Object 0x2f10af0 of class NSPathStore2 autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking - break on objc_autoreleaseNoPool() to debug
5/7/12 2:22:58.497 PM [0x0-0x70070].com.google.GoogleDrive: objc[1082]: Object 0x2f0f5f0 of class __NSCFData autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking - break on objc_autoreleaseNoPool() to debug

This makes it appear as if the developers weren’t very experienced with Objective-C and also didn’t test it.

Uploading took around 20 minutes for a folder with under 100 files and 100K. (I never thought I’d write the phrase “slower than iDisk.”) It reported numerous “unknown” upload errors. They kept occurring when I clicked “Retry” but did not recur after restarting the Mac.

I waited 40 minutes for it to download 17 files totaling 60 KB, after which it seemed to have stopped making progress, and I gave up. Of the files that it completely downloaded, it did not transfer the following metadata: label, creation date, extended attributes, locked flag, invisible flag. Dropbox initially had problems with these as well, but as of version 1.0 it handles them properly. (The test file with the resource fork was one of the ones that didn’t download before I gave up.)

I assume that my experience is not typical, or I would have read about more people reporting problems. But from what I’ve seen, this is one Google product that should have stayed in beta.

Extended Attributes Google Drive Mac

Windows 8 DVD Playback

Ed Bott (via John Gruber):

Microsoft’s decision to remove support for playing DVD movies in Windows 8 has caused some confusion. If the VLC media player can provide DVD support for free, why can’t Microsoft? For starters, Microsoft isn’t French.