Category: Commentary

Mark Pilgrim sounds off about full screen “writing-focussed” text editors:

Reading the change logs of these programs is like traveling back in time. Way back. Latest changes in JDarkRoom 8: Undo / Redo. Seriously. Version 8, and they now support undo. No offense, but what the fuck?

He makes a good point. Does the world need yet another Text Editor?

Probably not.

But WriteRoom did the write thing and popularised full screen writers recently. The other apps (Darkroom, jDarkroom, whatever) are just trying to emulate this success on other platforms.

Who’s to say the “next great thing” for Text Editors has been done yet? I like the idea of WriteRoom but I’m now ooking for a different development platform – a cross between a good text editor, with IM support, collaborative editing and version control all built in. Sort of like iChat mixed with subEthaEdit. And if it can do a CoreAnimation fade of my background so I can see what’s going on while working, then all the better.

I would have to say that I don’t agree with Mark on this one. Yes, its a fad but it’s one that was probably needed.

He was one of the people at the front of the banner charge against Mac OS X and Apple a few months ago which ended up looking a bit like when the International Pippin Society rioted outside Apple HQ.

Steve Jobs:There’s three guys having some sort of fit in the parking lot. Can we call security? Or film them for the next iPod advert?

Bambi:Cameras on the way…

Go figure. I don’t know why he’s bothered, none of these apps run on Ubuntu anyway.

I’ve been using Dashcode beta recently for mocking up some interfaces for Desktop apps. Does this make me a bad person?

I thought it might but as time has gone on I’ve become more and more convinced that it might be the best way to go. I find the basic UI elements in Cocoa to be pretty tired and frankly, the fact that a lot of the UI elements I want to use don’t seem to be available in Interface Builder is just frustrating. This Bezel UI type stuff as used by Aperture, Motion and the other Pro apps and as coming to Leopard in Quick Look.

So, next best thing, DashCode.

This recent post on Violent Acres reminds me of conversations over the last two years with a good friend, ex-co-worker and Mac convert. At the time we were both single and discussing men and women and the whole problem with “nice guys” and how it affected us.

Being a nice guy sucks. You’re told how great you are. You’re told you’re “the type of guy that girls should be looking for”.

Bollocks to that. Girls don’t want nice guys, they never did. They want outlaw bikers (Link NSFW and more than a bit rude).

I remember a lot of “mean girls” from my school days. I don’t hold a grudge of course, to them or the bullies. I mean, we were kids. I was a geek…or a dork…or a nerd…or something. But I’m going to make sure that my daughter and son are aware of the social hierarchy there.

The Lone Sysadmin rounds on Vista and everything he doesn’t like about it.

There is a resounding cry from a lot of educated IT folk about the “increased security” in Vista.

This was an opportunity for Microsoft to do the right thing and they missed it with their “all or nothing” attitude.

Sounds about right.

Who’s waiting for Vista SP1?

Rich Segal posts:

A Microsoft guy walks into a booth and says “So, what do you do?” The friendly people in the booth explain the technology, customer base, happy people, cool stuff, etc. All normal, all happy happy.

Microsoft Guy: “Oh. Well, I’ve been in our research department and they do what you do, so, well, bad for you.”

The booth CEO says, in effect, I don’t think so, we have 9 patents, millions of users, and do this that nobody that we know of does.

Microsoft Guy: “Well, research has stuff that we can use and it probably is good enough.”

This isn’t about BAD MICROSOFT

This has two points:

• Good Enough. Windows is Good Enough.
• (the) big challenge is to make sure your prevent one (or ten) arrogant people from destroying the hard work of 1000s of others.

Building a product, you’re up against good enough which is why there are a thousand word processors available for Windows, but most people use Word. You’re up against that. There will always be someone making a less smart, less sexy product cheaper than your product.

Also, be confident without being arrogant. If you shit on someone, they’ll know in future that you’re a git and will treat you like one.

Two months ago I complained about the situation at Muckamore Abbey Hospital where children and adults rights are being abused. Individuals held under the pretense of “delayed discharge”.

Last night on Newsline there was a report and it was covered by the Stephen Nolan show at 9:00 am this morning on Radio Ulster. There’s also two pages on the BBC News web site Action plan for ‘crisis’ hospital and Patients trapped by cash shortfall. It was covered again on the news at 6:30 pm on BBC Northern Ireland. I will have video and audio segments hosted in a few hours.

According to Nolan this morning, this is breaking news.

Stephen Nolan’s show was emailed about my blog entry in mid November. Two months ago. It’s taken him two months to actually do something about it and, frankly, if it hadn’t been for Newsline, it would still have been swept under the carpet. I have been forwarded the acknowledgements from Nolan’s handlers.

The sad thing is that this addresses the “delayed discharge” (including some there who should have been out more than 14 years ago) and does nothing to address actual abuses as reported by the parents of the individual in my original post.

I suppose something is better than nothing.

As one parent on the Stephen Nolan show said: “We’re living in limbo”. She’s followed by an ex-inmate from the hospital who left the hospital three years ago after being inside for 4 months who talks about the place in glowing terms.

You were in there for 4 months, mate.
You got out.
Do you see the difference?

Over at Creating Passionate Users they’re talking about what makes us smile and the example given is the Mens room sign at Honolulu Airport.

To be honest, this is what I love about Apple. It’s the little things. It’s the alphabet-pop-ups that appear when scrolling through my music on my iPod. It’s the application of real world physics to the scrolling on the new iPhone. The damn thing bounces when you hit the end of the list! It’s the use of the ambient light sensor on a MacBook Pro to not only dim the screen to save power but also light some LEDs so the keys on my keyboard show up. I can type at night without a night light! Fabulous! It’s the same principle that made Disco create such a furor of style over function. It wasn’t that it could burn disks. No-one cares. We can all do that. It was that it gives off smoke, INTERACTIVE smoke, while burning. This distracts you from the wait while it burns. It’s like putting mirrors beside elevators – we’re so fascinated with our own loveliness that we forget how long it takes for the oppressive little metal box to arrive. And again, mirrors inside elevators so we can try to block out the odour of the guy who just got in. Disco went further. They uses the sudden motion sensor in the Apple laptops to sense when you were jiggling your machine around and popped up a warning as wobbling the drive could cause a coaster instead of a functional CD. These things required thought. And delight on the part of the development team which they were able to impart to the user.

Whether or not you hated the fuss about Disco is immaterial. If you blogged about the features, you raved. If you blogged about the problem you have with style over function, you just drew more eyeballs to their site. It’s bold, it makes you smile and everyone I’ve spoken to downloaded it, just to see. Last time I checked, the smoke didn’t work with Intel GMA950 graphics or NVIDIA graphics cards. When was the last time you kinda wanted to upgrade your graphics card so you could see something like smoke rising from an application? Nuts.

Inspiring this kind of delight doesn’t require big budgets from a marketing department. In fact, your marketing department probably will never think of something like this. Marketeers never do.

Another thing that made me smile today was this little excerpt from Healthbolt:

What happens right now if you drink a Coke

In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.

20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)

40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.

I’ve not missed drinking Fat Coke since I switched to Diet in the new year. How smug do I feel?

Driving through my hometown I noticed that one of the traditional record shops that had been the mainstay of my record-buying life in my angst-ridden late teens and early twenties had closed down and was now one of these modern-day pawnshops (like Cash Converters, these eBay shops or whatever). As an aside, when you have more than two of these kind of shops in a small town, you know the economy is going downhill.

The model of the record store has been in danger for a while, but not from online juggernauts like the iTunes music store or Real’s Rhapsody service. The real danger has been from online CD fulfillment stores like PLAY or Amazon. These stores give me what I want, with the album art, to my door, mostly free of stupid copy protection and Sony rootkits. I rip a CD in a couple of minutes and enjoy. There is no step 2.

This record store, the last record store in the CITY, closed down in part because they clung to the old way of doing things. Their prices were usually £2 more than buying from Amazon, even with shipping taken into account. That with the surly, spotty self-righteous music bigoted staff and the limited stock that a high street store could offer, meant they were doomed the day the Internet was invented. Why didn’t they pursue the iPod and other music players? They have a high street location so they were ripe for getting the footfall needed to be a specialist music store – they could have been offering rip and load services for iPod users, they could have been a place to come and try out the BOSE Sounddock and compare it to the Apple iPod HiFi. There was so much opportunity considering their location and their brand. All wasted.

I think the same will begin to happen to the video store if they’re not careful. With the advent of films on demand over broadband, downloading films from iTMS and the ease of use and pricing of DVDs out of Tesco (3 quid for Watership Down, 3 quid for 28 Days Later) then it’s hard to see where they are going to make their next buck. As if in anticipation of my condemnation of their business model, the local video rental place about half a mile from my Mums has closed down.

My reckoning is that they’ll have to change or die.

Dave says:

I am writing this on a Mac, because it’s much better than Windows. Apple didn’t need any patents to get me to buy their system. I don’t even like the company, I think they’re brats, small thinkers. Even though I don’t have to, every year I spend thousands of dollars on their products. That says all I need to know about what kinds of locks you need on users. The only lock you need is to create a better product. The rest of it is nonsense.

It doesn’t matter about your personal ethics on software patents. These days if you want to keep any sort of competitive edge, you have to patent. The reasoning is twofold.

• It prevents others from directly copying your technology and just copying your great ideas. They have the opportunity to license them. This is the way patents work
• If you don’t patent it, some other bugger will. This leaves you in a shit position.

I don’t like software patents but frankly there’s too any arseholes out there nowadays that they cannot be ignored.

Dave’s not done yet though.

In order to make a point about journalist and blogger ethics in what they will accept in order to get a scoop he mentions this little gem:

I’ve heard from people who were at the Jobs presentation this week that there was a wire connecting his cell phone to something. I can’t tell you myself, because I am not allowed to attend Apple press events. If I were there, I would tell you.”

That COULDN’T possible be the video out cable that Jobs mentioned during the presentation which put the output from his phone onto the projection system? No it has to be something more nefarious.

This kind of deception is the rule, not the exception, in Silicon Valley.

Hey Dave, what lies did you tell? If it’s the rule then you must be part of it?

This kind of deception is the rule in business.

When you’re running a startup, someone may ask that dreaded question: How’s business?

Now…you could tell the truth about how everyone got paid but you for the last three months or how you’re now cold calling old enemies in order to get a fighting chance or mybe how you’ve made a shady deal with some City businessman for a quarter of your liver…but instead you say….

Great. Run off our feet. Have had to turn away business.

There’s good reasons for these lies, of course.

• It’s a temporary lie. Business will either pick up or you’ll go bust
• If you tell the “truth”, it might get out. Creditors will cut your credit and debtors will hold off paying because if they hold off long enough, then they won’t have to pay at all

That’s business.

In nearly four years of trading in my first company, I can count the number of ethical businessmen I have met on my fingers. And none of them are church men.

Mark Pilgrim sounds off about the iPhone software ecosystem:

All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.

The funny thing is that no-one was bleating like this when the iPod was released. This highlights to me a lot of confusion on the part of the general populace of technology pundits.

Apple ≠ Mac

It’s like when a local ignoramus asks me whether I’d like to work for “MAC”.

The Macintosh (or Mac) is a product. Apple is a company. It’s only a result of Apple’s stagnancy in the mid 90s that “Apple Mac” has become a phrase in itself. At one time, Apple made the Apple II, the Mac. Later they made Newtons, Pippins, Quicktake Cameras, LaserWriter printers, AppleScan scanners. In the mid-90s Apple dropped everyhing but the Mac and that left them with one revenue stream. And when it failed, Apple nearly failed.

If anything, the iPod and now the iPhone represent a return to Apple’s core business. Apple as a company should have multiple products. They’ve done excellent work re-trenching the Mac. Then they used the ‘faithful’ Mac market as a huge focus group for the iPod knowing that a lot of them would buy simply because of the Apple logo. The fact that MP3 players that worked with the Mac were all shit just ensured success in that micro-niche.

Pilgrim believes that because the iPhone exists that Mac developers, who only exist at Apple’s behest, will have a harder time of things.

Uh, okay…

Apple is stating that the iPhone, just like the iPod, is a closed platform. They only want applications that don’t look shit to exist on this device. This restriction didn’t stop some enterprising developers from getting Linux and third party applications working on iPod so it’ll not stop enterprising hackers from doing the same on iPhone.

Pilgrim’s general dissatisfaction with the Mac for his needs is well documented and entirely his opinion (even if you think he’s being a shithead about it). I think he’s a little upset that he’s not leading a charge against the establishment with hundreds of hairy geeks supporting him. It’s the same emotion that has your local PC geek telling you why you were stupid for buying a “MAC” and that you should just buy a PC. He’s insecure and needs the group to justify his position, to bolster his ego.

I don’t give a shit about what computer you buy. I just don’t want you to try and force me to use a computer system I’m not interested in.

I’m interested in the iPhone. I want one. Not only because it’s the closest thing to the “Ghost” I was talking about last week but also because it’s the son of Newton. It just looks like it feeds off the UI principles that Newton pioneered.

I just gotta wait.