it’s the little things that matter. Apple recipe is so simple: Just make things better. As much as you can. And don’t stop there. Jobs could say for years “Our products look from the back better than the other guys from the front”. Yet nobody really started to compete with Apple in the design league. Sony was good in the 80s and early ninetees. Right now there isn’t much industrial design that would be worth mentioning. Despite the fact that Apple makes a killing, vastly based on design. Go figure.
Category: Apple
Can we please make sure that the next President and Administration at least have some basic understanding of something like this?
Please imagine GW Bush looking at a website like the one above. How long could he look at it? How would he describe what he saw to somebody else?
This is the guy supposed to run stuff for 300 Million people in all the things where there needs to be somebody running things. Like war and peace and the financial future of the government.
It seems that America has issues with interlect and clarity, as some links might illustrate:
A democrat activist site has an analytical look a CNNs front page in 2000 and 2006.
The GOP is doing the old Terror trick. They were in power for five years after 9/11. Spent billions on war, yet were unable to get OBL. That’s why you NEED TO VOTE for THEM. Amazing that there seems to be an audience going for that.
Politics, always have been messy and partizan. Let’s switch to technology. There never have been any Mac Viruses. I know of a couple of hundret Apple users, or know the people that are responsible for them. The users are a very mixed crowd. Nobody had ever a Virus or malware issue. You get spam email on a Mac too, your google search results are at times full of spam, but that’s where the malware drama ends for you. It is as simple and as clear cut as that.
Still people write articles like this. There are no factual obvious blunders in this. Except that this blurry mixed bag of facts, statements and quotes seem to hover around this bogus theory of market share. This article exists so that people that benefit from it can point to it and say “Look, Mac’s have viruses too”.
If there is an obvious outbreak of stupidity it causes sometimes a clear response.
But generally it seems to cheap and easy to generate messages and ‘news’ that everybody does it. And most people have an agenda to push. The average american is surrounded by communication that is all meant to pull him in one direction or another. People simply give up on having an opinion that is based on facts. They just swim in a pile of soundbytes and pick whatever seems approiate in the current moment. That’s probably why politicians get away with all the crap that they are coming up with.
It was not always like that: In the age of reason there was an attempt to know things. There were discussions, and a quest to find the best solution based on as much objective findings as people would get a handle on. I am sure there were snake oil merchants back in the day as well. I want to believe though, that it was clear and simple that these people were peddling there goods and had no part on a serious discussions about serious matters. OK, maybe I have a slitghly idealized perspective on a world in that the American Constitution has been created.
Learning new stuff. Again. Will it ever end?
When trying to figure out why on earth there is no easy and obvious way to find out why a writeToFile has failed in Objective C the google gods had some mercy and sent me to this page that not furthers my question a single inch. Wil Shipley is the author of Delicious Library and what he had to write let me go further for 48 hours to look into this whole Cocoa thing. And that’s after spending three days to prepend 4 (!) 7 digit phone numbers with 310 since there are now overlay area codes. Cleaning up your address book with Objective C is a rather interesting excersive in patience.
“… to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. ”
Yeah, that’s gonna work, Steve! Probably works with him. Reality distortion field of a billionaire on a park bench.
iTunes 7. It’s blue. Again? Wasn’t it already? Album art is nice, yet also scary: I think you need an iTunes login to use this feature. So in theory Apple knows what Music you have. They say that they will not keep this data. It would be a big blow if they would. For everybody. I wonder if the RIAA sharks start to circle the infinite loop.
Apple could use this data. Big time. Imagine what kind of data mining they could do. Knowing about the Music collections of millions of people. Think Amazon’s ‘people that bough this also bought that’ feature on steroids.
Just let’s pretend that Apple sticks to their word. And let’s hope that as well.
Video playback is nicer now. It was actually a horrible hack: “Ze Frank” was mostly tugged away in the lower left corner of the interface.
opens terminal in directory of finder window
To open your current working directory from the terminal in the finder simply type:
open .
That is open “dot”, which you can replace with other valid file names. Works with other files as well. Pretty much does what would happen if you would click on the thing. In unix a . is the current directory
AppleScript I hate. The concept to have a scripting system to drive Applications is great. The implementation sucks ass. No, really, it’s worth this trip into the dumb language bin. AppleScript is a stupid hack. It’s syntax makes no sense for anybody. Only a couple (and I mean less than hundret) zealots that happen to get scared of any real language still use it. Worst of all: the makers of AppleScript are still with Apple and have given us “Automator”. Just add another layer of crap over another one. AppleScript thinks that people want ‘human readable code’. No they don’t. Specially if it makes no sense at all. End of rant.
It is also plain broken:
launchctl is the utility to start and stop processes for Apples launchd tool. For an application I am writing I would like to start / stop services, and launchctl does just that. I can create a .command file and that makes a shell script clickable. The only caveat is that terminal will launch and the window will not go away once the script is done. Not as neat as it should be. As an aside: stay away from the “Save Settings as Defaults” in Terminal.app. This will also save your current running application for instance as that. If you have a login to another machine, than all future Terminal windows will want to log in to that machine. The remedy is to trash the terminal.plist out of ~/Library/Prefecenses. And the ‘close winow when shell exits’ option does not work. Hence the detour to Applescript. But, that does not work either, since Applescript just beachballs if it launches a launchtl unload ... for instance.
Applescript is a freaking hack. It makes me sad and angry (ok, actually that would be an overstated, computers don't that do that anymore to me) since it's sitting in a place that an amazing application could occupy. Imagine any decent widespread syntax, an API library to all Applications and some GUI glue. That together with some way of version manage / download these 'system scripts' and you would have lots of people developing nice short cuts, meta apps or whatever you want to call it. It would be extending what Unix did 30 years ago for command line applications. Use Photoshop, mail and iDVD in one workflow for instance. Or google, iTunes and a printer in another. You see, it would be awesome. For everybody. But instead Sal and Co. give us what they can come up with. Which is frankly not much. Sigh.
using launchd under OS X 10.4. I see sometimes errors:
Workaround Bonjour: Unknown error: 0
They google as being harmless, and I have not seen bad things that I could relate to them.
he is willing to give a MacBook away
On September 9 we will know what it was about this “Mac’s can be hacked” meme that everybody duplicated but nobody did research.
Apple’s XCode comes free with your operating system. It allows you to compile code. But is it a decent Development API? I highly doubt so. I don’t spend 50 hours a week with it. I hope nobody has too. I wasted the last thirty minutes of my life trying to find a way to rename a project. Just giving it a new name. Not more not less. I truly sucks. This is probably not a bug, just some ridicolous user interface disaster. XCode. It truly sucks, and, isn’t that a coincidence, there is no real alternative to it.