Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
At Paula’s birthday last night, two-year-old Emerson was showing me his new selection of toy tools (can’t wait till Miles is old enough to dig on a toy electric jigsaw – toys today are awesome) and we were exploring the capabilities of the pliers. After I took his socks off with them I asked if I could pull out his new teeth with the pliers. He squealed with delight and said over and over again “Take my teef out with pliers!”
Rectangular text selections in BBEdit 7.0! (Make sure you’re not in soft-wrap mode, then Opt-drag your selection). This is one of those features you don’t use often, but when you do it’s a life-saver. I used to make frequent use of rectangular selections in Pe for BeOS (now Pepper) and had requested this on the BBEdit mailing list – apparently I wasn’t the only one. Awesome.
Today attended more of the Pro Conference sessions:
Internet Security for the Rest of Us : Pretty breezing overview of firewalls (both router and local), virii, flying under the radar, common weak points in OSes, and so on. Actually hoped for more specifics, but got a lot out of this. Choice quote: “FTP is the single biggest security hole in any OS, any implementation, 2nd only to IIS as breach culprit.” That got a nice laugh, followed by a collective gulp.
QuickTime Compression Secrets : You know all those awesome movie trailers at quicktime.apple.com that always look so stellar that you wonder why your own QT stuff never looks half as good? It’s all encoded by one guy, whose job it is to encourage broader QuickTime adoption by making the content look dreamy. He ran this session, and dropped a bunch of hard-won Sorenson and Cleaner tips and arcana on us.
Advanced File Sharing with OS X Server via AFP, Samba, NFS : I don’t have an OS X Server machine, but am saving up info for the day I do. Pretty intense session. Apparently there are now organizations so impressed with XServe and OS X Server that they are buying these rigs just to serve otherwise 100% Windows clients. Ye olde user-friendly Unix. Does that rock or what? For the 2nd time today, got to hear networking gurus implore audiences not to run FTP services of any kind.
In 1930 your risk of developing melanoma was 1:1500 people. Today it is 1:75, due in large part to decreasing protection from our chemically shrunken ozone layer. Skin cancer rates are increasing by about 3% per year.
Received my free copy of Keynote on the way out of the keynote yesterday, with two hours before my presentation. Considered delivering my pres in Keynote rather than in PowerPoint. Installed it on the jschool TiBook I was carrying and imported my PowerPoint presentation. Import went great, and applied a theme that had the whole thing looking ten times better than PowerPoint at its finest (which, some would argue, is not saying much). Out of curiosity, checked the filesizes – the Keynote version was more than 10x larger than the PowerPoint original! This is because Keynote uses an XML data store, rather than binary blobs. That, in turn, means that any app can read and write the Keynote file format, which is fantastic for interoperability. But XML is not known for compactness (see my iTunes gripe).
Stopped by the gaming section at MacWorld today and stumbled on an Unreal Tournament tournament. Out of curiosity, decided to stay and watch for a while. If you’re not familiar with this game, it’s all about shooting anything that moves with high-powered weapons, except that you’re not killing mere computer-generated characters — you shoot at the other people in the room with you, who are playing over the network. I was speechless. All I can say is that anyone who wonders why we have Columbine-style disasters today has their head in the sand. Base and degrading violence aside, the motion was so herky jerky and clumsy it seemed like game technology has barely improved in the ten or so years since I last played (Descent?). Very disorienting and un-fun looking. Hard to figure out what the appeal is, or how something like that can be called a “game.”
Attended a session on WebDAV today, which I’ve thought of implementing to allow students remote access to their files. The session itself wasn’t awesome (the speaker from Thursby was dry as a bone) but I did learn that there’s little advantage to deploying WebDAV unless you have a specific need to provide collaborative behaviors in the filesystem. NFS and SMB are just as universally supported across operating systems, and client implementations are more mature. On the other hand, if you do WebDAV now you’re ready for whatever collaborative things your peeps come up with in the future. It was interesting to see what Adobe has done – all of their new generation apps have a “Workgroup” menu item with special options built in to connect to and work with WebDAV volumes shared by groups. Very forward-thinking.
Next attended a seminar on NetBoot and got more than I bargained for. Wanted to learn the fundamentals of disk imaging and restoration, either locally from FireWire drives or over the network, but they assumed an audience with 10 years experience using rsync, revrdist, ASR, and friends – it was the most technical Mac conference I’ve been to. The author of Carbon Copy Cloner was on the panel – fascinating guy, and so committed. Good timing – I’m about to image and restore all the Greenhouse Macs, and this was a perfect intro.
More than 90% of people who attend trade shows just wander the booths, never go to the seminars, but there are so many smart people running the sessions. If you can pull the bread together, it’s usually worth it.
Does the fact that all these iApps are free mean that I have no right to point out their flaws? Aren’t I being ungrateful, looking a gift horse in the mouth? How can I complain about free products? I’m at liberty to go pay for a competing product, right?
Umm, right. Except for one thing. Like I pointed out in Tales of a BeOS Refugee last December and as Andy Inhatko says in this month’s MacWorld, there is no competition possible in the fields occupied by the iApps. Or precious little anyway. What incentive does a software vendor have to create a kick-ass audio database for OS X when Apple already hit that one right out of the park?
None. It’s exactly the same as the situation under Windows. Who can make a living developing Office software, or a mail client, or a browser for Windows? Microsoft has completely sewn-up and extinguished those markets. As good as the iApps are, Apple has to realize that they’re doing the exact same thing – cutting off limbs all around them.
That said, there are older image database apps out there, like iView MediaPro (the “i” does not imply Apple kinship) which I may try out soon.
ORA blog: iPhoto, iTunes Falling Down on Library Size
I’m not steamed because there are bugs. I’m steamed because Apple announced a whole raft of iLife features today — great features, no doubt — but made no mention of addressing the one thing that thwarts the very people who take the digital hub sales pitch seriously – media library sizes greater than “just beginning.”
Update: I’ve been MacSlashed!
It’s funny – an Apple-branded web browser is the last thing I thought I wanted out of Expo, but I’m already head over heels for Safari. Earlier this morning I was wondering why they would have chosen the lesser-known KHTML rendering engine over Gecko, but after feeling its speed and reading that the codebase is less than 1/10th the size of Gecko’s, I get it.
Safari’s bookmarks implementation is a thing of beauty. I’ve wondered since the mid-90s why no one ever seemed to get bookmark management right, but think Apple has finally cracked the egg. The one aspect of bookmark management I miss from BeOS is the ability to add keywords to bookmarks and then find similar bookmarks via live keyword queries. But if you make sure you give good descriptive titles to your bookmarks, the existing Find function works just fine.
They copied all the hotkeys over from Explorer, so everything works as expected. Even the almighty Cmd-click to open a link in a new window.
I’m always surprised to see how many people gripe about the brushed aluminum look. Personally, I’m sick to death of looking at white stripes and would be happy if every app on my system went brushed aluminum. However, it does seem like Apple has violated their own guideline to use brushed aluminum for apps that replace real-world devices. What device does the browser replace?