Local Insanity

I’ve used NewsFire for all my RSS needs for a while now. I don’t really like the fact that I had to pay for it, but I understand that there’s very little incentive for a developer to do a good job (or do anything) when he is not compensated for his work. So I paid for a license. Why? Because it looks great and is drop-dead simple to use (space bar and enter key are almost all you need), and none of the free alternatives worked as well, as much as I might have liked them to.

A feature that was added recently is the ability to watch video podcasts from within the app. So what? I don’t watch any - oh wait, I do watch Ze Frank. Hey that’s pretty cool! I can make it bigger without the silly cmd+opt+8 trick, and the space bar works.

If you’ve been itching to drop NetNewsWire Lite and go for a better app, this weekend people who buy NewsFire will get Inquisitor for free. And those who blog about the promo will get Inquisitor free too .

My new MacBook finally arrived yesterday! I got it mostly set up in a short amount of time and am now testing it to see what it does well, what it does not so well. Here are my initial impressions:

The Good

• It’s a Mac. Need I say more?
• It’s fast - at 2GHz core duo, it’s a huge improvement over my 1GHz G4
• Built-in iSight, Mag-safe power, magnetic latch, bright screen
• Running WishRadar tests takes under a minute!

The Bad

• The keys can be difficult to press, particularly the arrow keys
• The bezel on the screen is a bit big for my tastes - doesn’t really match OS X
• Plastic makes it feel a little cheaper than my old TiBook

In all, it’s a solid machine, and the screen size doesn’t seem to bother me. Hopefully I’ll solve or forget about its problems as time goes on and I realize how much a faster machine will help me code.

As I sit on my mom’s new sectional and look around her house, I start to wonder how I’m going to get home since I forgot my wallet…

Windows Vista is coming soon and with it a reevaluation of my choice to switch to the Mac. I very much doubt I’d choose to switch back, given the phenomenal power and beauty of OS X. Yet here are the things that, nearly three years later, still irk me:

WMV

Roughly 15% of the video content on the web that I encounter is in WMV format, usually v9 or greater. This presents a challenge that I haven’t quite conquered. Had the percentage been closer to 50%, I’d probably have figured out a way to play these files. Which I actually just did - Flip4Mac plays at least one file that I tried to play before. Problem solved.

Internet Explorer

This isn’t a Mac problem per se, but the effect is the same. Many website operators still think that they can just ignore that part of the population that doesn’t have IE5.5+. They can choose to do so, and I can choose not to use their website even when I have access to IE.

I mainly experience this problem through others, like my mom. She works for Kaiser, and Kaiser’s intranet assumes you are using IE for certain things like accessing Lotus Notes. Creating (or supporting) a monoculture like IE on Wintel is just begging for difficult and expensive IT maintenance.

Perhaps they’ve run the numbers and determined that they’d have greater support costs trying to support other browsers (i.e. Firefox) than a reduction of the usual IE/Windows problems would cover. If that’s the case, so be it. That’s just not a company that I’d want to work at.

Incidentally, my company, j2 Global, does a good job of allowing a heterogeneous set of browsers and OSes to be used in-house. Kudos.

Games

I don’t frequently play games, and the ones I did before (Diablo II, StarCraft) actually do run on a Mac. My current game is Counter-Strike, which I’ve picked up again after a long break. I’ll probably stop playing it once I get a social life, but until then it’s fun sometimes. It only runs on Windows, so I have to devote part of my PC to Windows.

Attitude

Why the choice of OS should be such a hot-button issue I don’t know. You are not your OS, and an attack on it is not an attack on you. I have to remind myself of this sometimes whenever someone starts saying bad things about Macs. Usually the speaker is part of the anti-Mac bandwagon whose ideas are not based on fact but on hearsay, but not always - its the latter type that I try to listen to and respond in kind. With the former sometimes they are unwilling to listen to reason and prefer their version of reality where Macs suck just because, but many aren’t so far gone and will listen when I put the facts to them in a non-threatening way.

Needless to say, this position of having to justify my decision over and over gets tiresome. The desire to take the blue pill and go back to sleep sometimes floats by my peripheral vision, but it’s easy enough to avoid.

Windows

Turning my attention to Windows now, I think it’d be interesting to take note of the things Microsoft would have to include (or exclude) in Vista to make me switch back, or at least to actually want to use Windows for anything other than gaming.

A decent shell

CMD just doesn’t cut it. It’s not so much the shell itself as the lack of utilities for it to make it a useful place to do something. Where are grep, sed, awk, less, ssh, gcc, wc, etc? I could use cygwin, but that would only have some pull if the other issues I have with Windows were fixed. In this respect, MSH looks somewhat interesting.

A better file system

NTFS is fine, a big improvement on FAT and FAT32. However I want the UNIXy goodness of symbolic links, arbitrary mount points, or good substitutes for these. Screw Windows’ drive letter convention! I’m pleased that Vista will at least be minimizing the focus on drive letters.

A better alt+tab

Command+tab in OS X allows me to use the arrow keys and the mouse once it’s up. Windows could take a cue from this. Exposé is another feature that Windows could use to manage its many windows.

A better task bar

Mac OS X has the dock which, while being basically a launcher, also shows me which programs are running, lets me open a file with a specific app, and more. That said, I don’t really use the dock. I use QuickSilver, and there is no good substitute on Windows (AppRocket doesn’t cut it).

Better integration of common services

Mac OS X has global spell-checking and an easily accessible Address Book API. These two are worth quite a lot to me. Mail, Adium, and many other apps use the Address Book to find contacts. The experience is just nicer.

Bundles

Mac OS X has a concept of bundles, or packages. It basically is stopping to ask the question of why file name extensions should only apply to files and not folders. This allows awesome things like single-file application installs and the ability to just try out an app without copying it to /Applications.

Windows has either installers or zip packages that need to be copied somewhere (e.g. Program Files, a kind of absurd name). Installers usually just get in the way, and don’t actually let you configure anything for most smaller apps.

Having this ability in Windows would be really cool.

Technorati Tags: apple, microsoft

I’m sending in my PowerBook to Apple for what may be it’s last time. I wanted them to get it right, so I included a letter:

Apple:

It’s been 36 months since I bought my PowerBook, and I’ve been very happy with it overall. The design of the machine is sexy (though not as sexy as the new aluminum ones), it’s light, it’s portable, and it’s reasonably fast. The software performs equally well, and I’ve grown to love Mac OS X. I’m always pleased that newer versions of the OS actually run faster than the previous ones - something unheard of in the Windows world.

However, I am not so pleased with the fact that I’ve had to send the machine in so many times, and that each repair takes far longer than I think it ought to. The SuperDrive on this machine has been replaced twice, and the current drive still has trouble writing to DVDs that the older ones didn’t blink twice at. The hard drive failed once, and it took several weeks to repair. The logic board and other parts were replaced because they cause bizarre video problems on waking from sleep and on intense usage.

During the setup for the last repair, I was asked if I would like to have any problems with the casing (paint, bulges, etc) fixed. I was elated, since my TiBook has fallen victim (albeit not as bad as some) to the problem of paint bubbling and peeling at the corners and on the hinge, respectively. I was under the impression, both from sources online and from talking to this customer service representative, that this was covered because it was recognized as a manufacturing defect. When I got the machine back the problems remained. No one had even touched the paint.

This was highly annoying to me, not so much because I don’t like how my machine looks (it is still sexier than most PCs), but because your company made a commitment to a customer and then silently disregarded it. I don’t believe it was intentional, but my machine still has paint defects and a semi-defective SuperDrive.

My ideal outcome of this situation would be for you to ship one of the new Intel PowerBooks that are rumored to appear in January, or even a 15″ AlBook G4. But as I like to live in the real world, I doubt that will happen, so here’s second place: touch up all the peeling/bubbling paint, repair the bulge in the casing on the left side near the front (if you were looking straight at the machine’s headphone jack, just look a bit to the right), and do whatever testing you can on the SuperDrive and the rest of the machine. If you really feel there is nothing wrong with the SuperDrive, send it back as is. If there is a problem, please address it.

I’ve convinced a number of friends and family to buy Apple computers based on their wonderful appearance, solid operating system, ease of use, and great customer support. I hope the outcome of this repair will make me believe that last one again and, when the time comes, convince me that I’m right in buying another new Apple computer for my next machine.

Thank you,

Brian Donovan

Technorati Tags: apple, letter, powerbook, repair

This is a post where I try out ecto, a desktop blog manager for Mac OS X. So let’s see, what can it do…

There’s an iTunes button: Such Great Heights from the album “Give Up” by The Postal Service

That’s neat. There’s an Amazon button:

“Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)” (Neal Stephenson)

That’s what I’m reading right now. Unlike iTunes, I had to tell it what I’m reading.

Hmm… we’ve also got an iPhoto button, but it doesn’t seem to help me put the image on my page - too bad.

The other thing I wanted to address in this post is that I found the FSM, and it is good. I appreciate parody in the face of complete and utter breakdown of reason.

Technorati Tags: ecto, fsm, blog

My PowerBook repair has been dragging on for a while now. It took about a month to get Apple to register my AppleCare properly with my PB. Now I’ve sent it in and I’m just waiting… and waiting… and waiting since October 3rd. At almost two weeks, I hope they do what they did with djbsquared of #adium’s PB: they replaced it after three weeks of “Hold - Awaiting Part”. If they replace my TiBook with a nice, shiny, new AlBook, I’ll be quite excited. That will make me and Apple about even with the amount of extra trouble they’ve caused me. For my own reference, the dispatch number is D5396382, serial number QT3160W5N4M.

I’m currently typing this on Grandpa Black’s new PowerBook. It’s a 15″ and it looks quite nice. Just like Sarah’s. So what’s been happening since I last wrote:

• I quit the South Beach Diet, Sarah followed nearly immediately (Mimi’s Cafe did her in)
• The job search is still just a search, though I’ve got a response from a staffing firm in Glendale, so maybe I’ll check that out while I’m in the area
• Porting Ruby to JavaScript is not that fun because of all the language and library features that JavaScript lacks

While people have been able to run certain versions of linux on their Macs for some time, for the great majority of users having a Mac meant you ran OS X, and vice versa. With the announcement of Apple switching to Intel processors, will this equivalence remain? I’m curious as to whether one couldn’t just get the x86 version of OS X to run on any ol’ (powerful enough) PC. What could Apple do to prevent this? Will running Windows on a Mac be possible w/o emulation?

On that note, emulation will be much faster since the emulator should not have to emulate the processor. Virtual PC is the main emulator for OS X, and it is now owned by Microsoft. Does MS like this move? Are they happy? Will Apple set itself up as a direct competitor to Microsoft? From the rumors I’ve heard over the years, Apple’s hardware line is too profitable for them not to have. If that is true, it would answer my earlier question about OS X on your Dell machine.

This comes at a time when I’m considering my career options. I’ve thought about getting into Mac development, and the prospect still interests me, but suddenly buying a G5 doesn’t. I want to wait for a new, Intel one. G6? Who knows what they’ll call the machine? PowerMac P4? They’ll probably continue with the GX naming, as the G3 was a Motorolla chip, not IBM (right?). But it was still PowerPC, so… I don’t know the history of it that well. At any rate, I think Apple has covered its bases on this one, and I think the transition will go smoothly. I still think OS X is the best platform around, and I’ll continue to use it, but some of my fire has gone out of it. My PowerBook is now in middle age (25 months), and there is no replacement in sight. Not until next year anyway. That’s okay, but it just feels more shaky than it did a few days ago. All of a sudden PowerMac G5s are not an option for me. Oh well. It’ll be an interesting next few years.

Bring back my PowerBook! My hard drive has died, and it makes me sad. My PowerBook is in for repair - I don’t know when I’ll get it back. For the moment I’m stuck with an Ubuntu Linux box, which is not so bad but it’s ugly and it doesn’t have Quicksilver, TextMate, Growl, Adium, or iTunes. It does have the power of *nix though, which makes me somewhat happy because I can still test cool things like Ruby on Rails. Too bad my web hosting provider doesn’t support Rails. Oh well.

No that’s not an accidental ‘S’ on the end. Read more at DrunkenBlog.