Related link: https://www.netcaucus.org/events/2005/fec/

This afternoon on Capitol Hill, the Congressional Internet Caucus held a panel on McCain-Feingold & the Internet, and while the video is still coming (showing on C-SPAN as I type this late in the evening on the East Coast), you can download MP3 Audio of the discussion between Mike Cornfield of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Chairman Scott Thomas of the FEC and Mike Krempasky of Red State.

During Mr. Krempasky’s opening statement, he made an incredible point. In 1665, the Lord Mayor of London, on the rumor that cats and dogs were spreading bubonic plague, ordered the destruction of all dogs and cats in the city. Except, this had an horrific effect, removing all predators for the true vector for the disease: rats. The FEC is threatening to remove bloggers’ voices from the campaign field because of campaign finance problems, which is disingenuous, since Mr. Krempasky makes the point that bloggers are “a broad and deep cross section of America…the blogosphere is fiercely independent, it’s suspicious of authority, suspicious of money and frankly it’s more effective than any regulation could be at exposing these connections and fact checking the so called authorities who try to…throw their influence around.”

Mr. Morris of the CDT made an excellent follow up point, that the FEC is threatening to make laws that affect the internet today that will only hinder the internet five years from now. We’re still inventing at such a rapid pace that laws affecting specifics of the internet and its use for speech, political or otherwise will be ineffective in short order. This is becoming a common theme in government regulation of technology.

Before the Supreme Court this week is Grokster v. MGM whereby the entertainment industry is arguing that technology is harming them, even when the technology wasn’t created for that purpose in the first place. As we involve government in the innovation business, it seems to me that we are doing so to our own peril: regulations against the use of technology interferes with the inherent ingenuity of American businesses. No one knows where technologies like BitTorrent are going, and restricting and manhandling their usage will only make things more difficult for us to free them from the fetters of bad laws in five years.

When Apple began to respond to the recession of the early 2000s, they did so not through layoffs and staff cutbacks, they did so through innovation. Thusly was the iPod born, the new iMac (twice revised since then), the G5, the Cinema Displays and a whole host of additional software products based on media. Had the government limited what media could be produced on a computer in 2000, this would have limited an entire digital media revolution, and destroyed an incredible business concept. So too is political speech being threatened by poor understandings of the internet and technology. So too is file-sharing and digital rights policy by poor understandings of the internet technology.

The public comment period on the new Rule from the FEC begins on the day of release to the public Register, currently slated for next Friday, the 8th of April, and will last 60 days. If you blog, if you innovate, if you benefit from either of these things, and believe me, we all do, take the time to write to the FEC about your viewpoints and make yourself heard. It is, after all, our democracy, we ought to take part in it.

Regulation vs. Innovation, what’s your take?

The web development world is about to enjoy one of those chocolate-and-peanut-butter moments, the convergence of two individually flavorful technologies to form a scrumptious new taste sensation.

The chocolate in this equation is Ruby on Rails: a framework for building database-driven web applications. But far from being yet another web development framework, Rails is known for its small footprint, low barrier to entry, flexible-yet-powerful, “more joy and less code” approach to application building. Rails is primarily the work of David Heinemeier Hansson, the backbone of 37signals‘ fabulous Basecamp project management tool (more on this incredible pairing in a forthcoming post).

At Rails’ heart is Ruby, a lightweight object-oriented scripting language somewhere between the flexibility of Perl and the cleanliness of Python. The magic of Rails, however, is that you can accomplish a great deal without ever stepping in any code. Rails takes care of the first mile of any web application: the database crud–that’s “create, read, update, delete.” What is usually an hour or three of rote programming, Rails whittles down to just a single line of configuration.
And when you do reach the point where you’ve need of some code, there’s less of it to deal with. Less code means a lower bar for newcomers, a narrower gap between rapid prototype and deployed application, and fewer bugs to shake out.

But less code doesn’t necessarily mean more joy for the developer: there’s still configuration and setup to deal with. The heavyweight in the web application framework space is the Java-based Struts. Leaf through the first couple-three paragraphs of the Struts page and you’ll find a profound dearth of joy in the laundry list of acronyms and strangely dubbed packages. And you’ve not even laid eyes on the most painful part: the unceasing stream of XML configuration through which the hapless developer must wade before even getting anywhere near database configuration, let alone the application itself. Rails opts for convention over configuration: establish some sensible defaults, glean all you can from what you’re given (your database, for instance, already knows a lot about what your application’s data will look like), and give it a whirl. While you’re more than able to configure the life out of a Rails application, it’s not the suggested way of going about things.

While I’m in no way suggesting Rails is a panacea, it’s ability to appeal to those further down the power-law curve, on the cusp of that developer/designer divide, stands it in good stead. Indeed, we’ve been seeing interest in Ruby explode over the past few months: no doubt in large part due to the swift adoption (or at least tire-kicking) of Rails.

(Literally see a Rails application unfolding before your very eyes, then delve–if this is your thing–into the nitty gritties of “Rolling with Ruby on Rails”.)

The peanut-butter is a little something called Ajax, and it’s cropping up in your browser just about daily–often without your even taking notice of it (aside, perhaps, from a delighted “Hmm!” every so often). It’s the desktop application-like quality of the Gmail interface, the surprisingly slick interactivity of Google Maps that made you stop wondering why anyone bothered writing yet another online maps site, the subtle auto-fill of your city and state names as you typed your ZIP code into a web form.

Codified by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications”, Ajax stands for “Asynchronous Javascript + XML.” Essentially what Ajax does is move much of the smarts involving user-interaction from the web server to your web browser. This takes the form of an Ajax engine (a piece of Javascript code) embedded into a web page, downloaded to your browser, and springing into action upon arrival. Acting as an interaction broker, the engine takes care of all the whizbang interactivity you see (form input and validation, dragging-and-dropping, showing-and-hiding, etc.) while dealing with the web server (and it’s back-end database) as needed. This is in stark contrast to the typical dichotomy of treating the browser as a dumb beast capable only of layout and display and relying upon round-trips to the server for anything requiring any smarts. By backgrounding all of the back-and-forth with the web server, the stateless, staccato nature of typical web applications is kept to a minimum.

This makes for a richer application for the user, up-to-the-minute data streamed live from the back-end database server, and a lighter load in-between (data is shuttled back and forth as XML rather than being wrapped in the heavy clothing of HTML).

Now you’ve no doubt noticed some of this sort of interactivity on airline reservation, bookseller, and online banking sites. Much of that, however, was slight-of-hand rather than true Ajax at work. View the HTML source of many of those pages and you’ll find them choked with pre-loaded data made available to a tangle of single-purpose Javascript scripts. A lovely (though unfortunate) example can be seen in the International Herald Tribune’s typical article page; while seemingly Ajaxian, the full content of the article is already on-board, only hidden from view until you click the “> NEXT PAGE” button. While the effect is snazzy–for some limited definition thereof–that’s a lot of baggage for a page to be carrying about just in case it’s needed. Not to mention the amount of work it takes for the developer to keep all these loosely joined bits in some semblance of order. And, in the end, it doesn’t result in anything more than base-level interactivity of the sort you wouldn’t tolerate in any desktop application.

Ajax is about moving the intelligence to where it does the most good: presentation and interactivity in the browser, transaction management on the server, and data passing back and forth on the network.

Now bear in mind that Ajax isn’t something you download. It’s a collection of technologies and a way of harnessing them together in designing web applications. Implementations are springing up like tulips on the first warm day of Spring. And they vary widely in applicability, usability, completeness, and integration with web application development frameworks. And it’s in these details that the devil really lies (c.f. Yahooligan Jeremy Zawodny’s “Respect for Web Developers”).

The taste sensation of the Rails/Ajax sweetmeat lies in baking Ajax right into the framework. Through the object-oriented Javascript library Prototype and a set of helper tags, Rails is making Ajax part of the process of developing web applications rather than another layer to be grafted on in a completely different way (and historically by a different person or team). To quote
David Heinemeier Hansson, chief Ruby on Rails wrangler: “Instead of trying to soften the blow of doing client-side Javascript libraries as many others are doing, we’ve gone ahead and more or less removed the need for hand-written client-side javascript entirely.”

Ruby on Rails was off to a good start even before bringing Ajax on board; and it’s only gone from strength to strength since. There’s a danger, of course, that Rails could become a hodgepodge (cast your mind back to that Struts page). By baking in too much, it could move beyond the ken of the lightweight coders giving it lift. That said, given the sensibilities of those at the helm, I’m not terribly worried.

Business 2.0’s April “Hits & Misses” features a piece on a Santa Rosa, CA (down the road from O’Reilly World HQ) company that ZAPped Daimler where it hurts. After waving it’s sub-Mini two-seater Smart car in front of US customers at the Detroit Auto Show, Daimler thought it smarter (we’re talking bottom line, not “the greater, smarter good” here) to offer US buyers a paradoxically-dubbed Smart mini-SUV instead. ZAP routed around the roadblock between customer and auto-maker, landing a deal to offer US drivers the real article–and were overrun with orders. As of March 22nd, pre-orders have exceeded $200 Million.

When the words “iPod killer” first appeared, my first reaction was to blush slightly, cutely bat my eyelashes and think “How touching, these companies finally understood that Apple is on something”… Now, the exact same words tend to make me angry and puffy in a record-setting time — and that ain’t a pretty sight.

Why? Because it looks like the whole consumer electronics industry is now trying to “kill” the iPod instead of inventing something of their own. Do you launch a new MP3 player? Well, make that an iPod mini killer. Some kind of watered-down DVD player? OK, that’ll get rid of your iPod photo! And if your engineers are working on a vaguely rectangular device capable of emitting sounds, you gotta market it as the Shuffle exterminator…

My Economics 101 textbooks taught me that competition was the mother of innovation and the basis for a sound market. This, I am more or less ready to believe but we seem to have now left the competition zone to enter the obsession one, this dangerous area where, instead of wondering what customers need and how they could solve their problems, manufacturers focus on what the others already do — i.e. products that are already there, products from which only innovations and no breakthrough can come.

Thanks to the efforts of dozens of highly capable engineers worldwide, I can now go to my local Darty (the French equivalent of a “JCPenney meets Target meets CompUSA only less appealing” store) and pick about twenty gum-pack sized devices that do more or less the exact same thing — with some varying features here and there of course but nothing worth changing the sales pitch. Do I want to buy these? Not really… They are, after all, copies of a truly innovative product and who wants to buy a copy when they could have the added coolness of the original — even if it’s sans Ogg Vorbis support?

As great as it is, an iPod is an iPod and will always be. It is the best designed music player on the market, the most good looking, the most robust one but it is what it is and, in some time (maybe weeks maybe dozens of years), people will want to move on to something new — maybe something else from the iPod engineers, who I am sure have many tricks up their sleeve, maybe not. The iPod may be the absolute best (which I do believe) but consumers will get tired of it, much like they get tired of any product, from computers to electric cheese graters. So instead of attacking a superb device by adding features to a product that doesn’t really need any, what about trying to come up with something that will appeal to different people, solve new problems? That’s what Apple did when they designed many of their most successful products after all…

Until next time, dear Mac users, enjoy thinking different!

Since a lot of us spend a lot of our time using web browsers, it’s only natural that we like to keep a close eye on movements and developments in the field. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who keeps an eye out for new releases of browsers that have become old friends, or, less often, new browsers I’ve not had a chance to get to know yet.

One such browser popped up from nowhere yesterday, so I downloaded and had a play; my curiosity simply had to be satisfied. What could this newcomer, called Sunrise, offer that the established players hadn’t already thought of?

Well, quite a lot as it happens. Certainly a lot more than I’d expected.

Sunrise is by no means going to take over as my default browser, and the UI is very different to most Cocoa apps.

But Sunrise deserves your time simply because it offers a handful of new ideas, things I have never seen in any other browser.

Sunrise is based on Webkit, so renders pages just as Safari would

I love the idea of a toolbar button that instantly resizes the working window to 640×480 or 800×600; and an HTML source window that’s semi-transparent by default, so you can still see the rendered view in the background. (Sure, there are ways of getting the same result in other browsers, using extensions or third-party apps or scripts; it’s just nice to see the creator of Sunrise putting in the effort to make these features part of the default set-up.)

More unusually (because I can’t see how they’d help me with day-to-day browsing, but perhaps they’d be of use to others) are the keyboard shortcuts for moving a window around your display. Hit Command+Option+1 and the window hops up to top-left. Command+Option+4 and it goes to bottom-right.

Like I say, no practical use to me as they stand, but what a great concept. Wouldn’t it be nice for every app you use to have a series of user-controlled window positions, each of them invoked with a similar key combo? I tend to keep my browser window in the center of my screen, but having a swift way to shift it to the left, so I can refer to a text file underneath it, then shift it back again would be great.

There are other clever innovations in Sunrise, so if you have an interest in browsers and browser features, it’s worth downloading and playing with.

Its main offering, as I see it, is stimulation. Sunrise demonstrates that there’s so much more that browsers could offer us in terms of being simpler, quicker or easier to use. Those of us who spend a lot of time using them should encourage these new ideas and hope that they spread further among the browser development community.

What’s on your browser features wish list?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/airportexpress/

Easter Monday is a traditional Holiday time in France. It is the day of the year where any self-respecting citizen is expected to spend hours discussing the merits of chocolate eggs, walk a few steps in the Bois and, above all, relax.

This year, relaxing involved for me the purchasing of an AirPort Express Base station and the setup of an AirTunes-enabled network, complete with WPA over WDS — sounds, fancy, doesn’t it? ;^) (Simply put, it means decent security on a roaming network)

Indeed, since Apple announced the AirPort Express base station last summer, I had been dying to try out one. These brick-like access points are to wireless routers what the Mac mini is to computers: they’re small, irresistibly cute and hide, under their boyish good looks, an impressive set of tricks and powerful features.

Not having an AirPort Express base station to play with has long been cause for frustration. Indeed, their new hardware and added musical capabilities have raised much discussion in the Mac community since they first appeared — questions like “Can I use the Ethernet port as a WAN/LAN one?”, “Does the AirPort Express do NAT?” took a while to be answered and where at first the subject of much speculation.

Today, I am pleased to report that the AirPort Express base station not only lives up to its reputation but exceeds it. The new design has introduced a new attention to detail in the AirPort family that, while having always been powerful and easy to use, had shown signs of pastiness during the past months — the setup interfaces were getting a bit cluttered and the overall setup experience seemed to get increasingly confusing for new users without real benefits. The new AirPort Admin Utility is clearer than ever, finally comes with more meaningful error messages and some very neat features like station identifying and USB printer renaming that just make setting up a wireless router fun again — OK, I’ll settle for “easy” if you want.

Nice security touches like the ability to configure WPA over a roaming network or to entirely disable the APX’ wireless capabilities should you just want to use it as a print server and stereo connection will make it all the more welcome in corporate networks that might have restrictive policies in place concerning the use of access points. The AirPort engineers also did everything they humanely could to prevent users from keeping the factory default password and encouraging them to at least start securing their installation.

Is the AirPort Express perfect? No, certainly not, but it comes as close to perfect as an 802.11 access point can — and, along the road, it helped enhance its already awesome big brothers (sisters?). If you haven’t looked at AirPort in a while or haven’t thought much about this blinking flying saucer that’s performing quietly in your cupboard, please, upgrade your installation (Software Update might also give a quick boost to some other applications or peripherals you own), put on new contacts and have a look at what’s new!

Until next time, dear Mac users, enjoy thinking different!

Oh my, relationships are so hard. And we’re still not sure what’s going on with the Motorola iTunes mobile phone. But it sure makes good coffee reading. Here are some interesting spins on the subject:

The Seattle Times - Motorola mystery: Who muzzled iTunes phone?.

The Independent - Lend them your ears: iPod has all the best tunes, but mobiles are coming to bury it.

theunofficialbluethoothweblog - More On Song Downloads For Cellphones.

Seems to me that someone forgot to factor in the carriers into this equation.

Related link: https://www.lifehacker.com/software/life-hacks/index.php#easter-egg-hunt-037282

LifeHacker made me aware of some amusing Google search pages in L33t, Klingon and Sveedish Chef (bork bork bork). I’m not sure if these really count as Easter Eggs as they are all listed on the main Google language tools page. Other cute versions include Elmer Fudd and Pig Latin.

Google does have an actual “official” Easter Egg page that’s pretty cute.

And, of course, there’s the classic Google search for French Military Victories, but that’s a Googlebomb, not an Easter Egg

So what sort of Google Easter Eggs have you found?

We finally brought color to the Missing Manual series. It’s Apple’s fault really. Adding things like the Adjust panel for serious image editing, RAW file capability, and digital movie management gave us the perfect excuse to go deluxe with this one. And it hits the streets today.

To celebrate I’ll send you a signed bookplate so your collector’s edition will have a signature too. All you have to do is email me some kind of proof of purchase for iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, plus a mailing address, and I’ll send you a an official O’Reilly author signed bookplate.

If you want a sneak peek of some of the new goodies Apple has included in iPhoto 5, here are a few articles to whet your appetite:

• A RAW Look at iPhoto 5
• Output Like a Pro with iPhoto 5
• Movies Made Easy in iPhoto 5

And thanks for helping us celebrate out first color Missing Manual.

I found myself in a McDonald’s this morning with about an hour to kill. I ordered a coffee and a Big Breakfast, which isn’t all that big. This left me with 50 minutes remaining and a cup of medium-strength joe.

So like any good MacGeek, I opened up my PowerBook in search of wireless networks. Lo and behold, SBC FreedomLink appeared in my AirPort list of networks. “Great,” I thought, “yet another service to sign up for.”

I use T-Mobile at Starbucks and don’t really have any complaints other than the expense. In certain airports I’ve tapped into Wayport, and it’s just fine. But FreedomLink? What the heck is that?

The sign-up page had the usual pricing options, plus a fields for “user name” and “password.” Since I’m already an SBC DSL customer, I entered the info for my DSL account.

It worked!

I spent the next 50 minutes answering email and updating O’Reilly web sites. The coffee even began to taste good. The only thing is, I’m wondering if this is a value-added service for existing SBC customers, or if I’m going to get a $6 charge my next phone bill?

Now, only if the breakfasts were a little better at McDonalds…

Does anyone have the inside scoop on SBC’s FreedomLink service?

With my laptop now back in the shop again, I have returned to my pair of Mac minis. Not entirely pleased to suffer the bonds of VGA, I pursued a DVI KVM. The only one I could find was an OmniView KVM from Belkin. On the PC Connection website, it indicates that the OmniView is Mac compatible, as does follow-up research at the Belkin site. Excellent, I think I have found my beastie! I order it and await its arrival.

A few days later, I unpack the unit, unpack the separately ordered KVM cables, and hook it all up. The design of the KVM itself is a bit odd, it is not your typical rectangular box, but in the right sort of situation odd design can triumph over beige boxes. Included in the box was a transformer plug, complete with L shaped AC adaptor. There’s a slight problem in the design here, plugging in the L-shaped adaptor either blocks a USB port, or it blocks the Monitor DVI port. Suddenly, I’m wondering who made that design call. Attaching the Belkin-issue KVM Cables made a second design flaw fairly obvious: you have to nearly crimp the cables to get the sheath to stay on the back.

What really got my goat was what happened next. With everything in place, I was greeted with the sort of beeping a piece of life-support equipment might make if I’d suddenly had a heart-attack. A glance at the manual showed nothing, but a phone call to Belkin revealed the true nature of the problem: Belkin doesn’t recognize Apple’s USB Keyboard as a USB Keyboard. Unless you have a PC-compatible (whatever that means, I was under the impression that USB keyboards were USB keyboards…) keyboard, it won’t stop the beeping.

The tech-support representative wanted to walk me through the process of flashing the firmware on the device, except that to do this you need a PC with a Parallel Port. I would argue that this device is, in only the loosest of terms, Mac-compatible, for to do anything with it, you’d need PC accessories, which likely Mac users will not have. Saying that it will work with any DVI machine, while forcing you to use one set of accessories is barely compatibility, and Belkin ought to reconsider the language on their site.

Seen a good DVI switch? Had a similar experience? Let me know.

UPDATE: Well, after further review, it looks like Amazon.com has removed the pre-order feature for Tiger, as well as the link to the rebate info. Guess Apple didn’t want people jumping the gun, or thinking that Tiger would be out by May 31st. Either way, this post is moot.

As rumors of Mac OS X Tiger’s pending release date continue to fly around the Internet faster than pigs with wings, Amazon.com now offers a $35 rebate on pre-orders of Tiger made between now and May 31, 2005.

The special offer requires you to fill out and submit a form for the rebate, which means you’ll still have to pay for Tiger upfront ($129.99 US), but you’ll get some cash back later on.

Planning to upgrade to Tiger when it comes out? If so, what’s the one feature you’re most looking forward to?

Well, I’ve got my iPod shuffle now. Just a bog-standard 512MB model, “as cheap as chips” as they say over here in the UK (although, it should be pointed out, chips are no longer particularly cheap these days).

A funny thing happened when I first used it.

As I excitedly waited for it to fill with songs, watching the Autofill feature at work on my behalf (”Now we can choose what you listen to wholesale!”), my eyes involuntarily strayed to the titles of songs I knew.

“Oh good,” I noted, “The Great Dominions by Julian Cope is on there. And The Wrong Child by REM. Kandy Pop by Bis. Great.”

My eyes - and my brain - ignored the other stuff listed in iTunes; the songs I have no idea are buried away on my hard disk, until random play mode, or in this case, an iPod shuffle, brings them to light.

When it was charged and ready to use, I popped the earbuds in and switched on. The very first song played was a complete mystery to me. I had no idea of the artist or title. My eyes flicked down to the iPod to get the answer, and I had to laugh at my own silliness. So that’s why some people say they can’t live without a screen on their portable music player…

I’m not complaining, though.

When His Royal Jobsness unveiled the Mac mini, I had a little think and pronounced it the “just enough” Mac. The iPod shuffle is the “just enough” MP3 player - the kind of device perfectly suited to millions of ordinary folk who just want to listen to some music on the move.

These are not the same people who get geek pleasure from buying music electronically, who feel it is important to have 10,000 songs at their disposal at all times, or who feel the need to install Linux (or any other OS for that matter) on a cute device that fits in their pocket.

They’re people like my friend Celia, who I bumped into as I walked into town the other day. I uncorked the earbuds from my head to talk to her, and pulled the iPod shuffle from my coat pocket.

“Look at this, my new toy,” I said.

Celia is a busy mother with two young kids. She doesn’t have time to read weblogs or stay up-to-date with musical trends. She’d never even heard of the iPod shuffle.

“Wow,” she exclaimed. “I thought iPods were much bigger than that.”

“Most of them are,” I replied. “This is the new, cheap version.”

She asked how many songs it could store.

“About 120 or thereabouts.”

Celia’s eyes widened.

“Well that’s plenty! That’s about 10 albums! Wow. I’d love one of those.”

This is what the iPod shuffle is all about. Normal people, just listening to music. Not even their whole music collections; they don’t need to have their entire collection with them everywhere they go.

I don’t agree with Dan Hill when he calls the lack of built-in clock shortsighted on Apple’s part. Of course the company wants to keep costs down, but it also wants to produce a “just enough” music player for Celia and millions of people like her. People who don’t care that the Shuffle has no clock, about Audioscrobbler, or about their Recently Played playlist keeping track of what they listen to while iPodding.

All they want is the comforting sound of the music. Everything else is geekspeak to them; just noise.

Is the iPod shuffle all that it should be?

I’m at O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this week, where everyone’s talking about remixing. In between sessions, though, I’ve been sneaking out to the adjacent mall to pick up two of the Nintendo DS games as they released this week, Yoshi Touch and Go, and Retro Atari Classics.

Both games are fantastic, but the Atari game fits perfectly with the remix theme. With ten classics games faithfully reproduced and with redesigned input that takes advantage of the DS touch screen, it’s pretty great to begin with. But every game features a “Remix” button at the top of the launch screen. The remixed versions of the games feature the same gameplay, but with artwork reimagined by well-known artists, including Shepard Fairey, a remixer from way back. Best known for his Obey Giant campaign, Fairey rose to instant fame in Providence when he remixed Buddy Cianci’s election billboard by replacing Cianci’s face with Andre the Giant’s.

Anyone have a picture of that billboard?

Related link: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1775953,00.asp

Let me get the hard part out of the way. I am a lifelong Mac user. As long as there has been a Mac, I have been using one. Well, except for the time in college where I experimented with a mainframe, but, well, that was college, and we all know what college is like. I have been a Mac advocate since just about Day One.

What our dear friend at PC Mag has to say, however, is that people who support the Mac platform, and recommend it to friends and family, do so out of blind faith. However, our dear friend could not be more wrong. It’s not that the majority of people who have market-leader products have them because everyone else does, it’s because they want the product. If you buy a nice Merlot from Sterling Vineyards and have it with dinner and enjoy it, you might tell a wine loving friend about it. If you get a new cellphone and it works out well for you, you might tell a friend about it.

Product Evangelism is nothing new. It’s been happening since man was rubbing two sticks together for fire. “Hey Ug, you might want to try birch sticks, the bark is way more flammable than the poplar you’re using.” This is nothing new, yet, somehow, to someone like our dear friend, you might think that Mac users had invented it.

One thing that Apple products do is make people talk about them. The iPod made people talk about music players, about digital music rights, about portability and design. The iMac, when it was first created, made people rethink, and then ditch, the floppy disk. The iMac when it was revised into the lampshade model, made people rethink, and then ditch, the CRT. Now we have the ubiquitous iBooks and PowerBooks, and heaven help us, the white earbuds that can be seen just about everywhere from metropolitan mass transit to small town sidewalk.

It’s not about conformity; It’s about having the best available solution. And Apple seems to provide that better than most other companies that I can think of. Volkswagen owners may wax rhapsodic, and Leica users may say “not bloody likely,” when you ask them to part with their M3s, but more Mac users than not say “From my cold dead hands,” when you ask them to switch platforms.

Why? Why is that? What makes the Mac so great? It’s not that so many people have them, it’s not that they sparkle and shine in the light, it’s not that they spontaneously provide enlightenment, so what is it that makes Macs so cool? It’s in the design. Go and pick up a Revolution in the Valley, or saunter on over to folklore.org and read the incredible stories of how the original Macintosh was crafted. Much care and thought went into building that machine. These brilliant engineers built a computer they would want to use. And with the exception of a few models since the original, it has stayed that way at Apple. Building machines to exceedingly high design standards, full of features that individuals will find useful, will create for you a market of customers and users that will sing your praises. And that’s exactly what Apple has done. It should be no surprise that people might wish to share their success stories with their friends. Computers are no different than wine, automobiles, or other electronics in this regard.

Don’t mock what you don’t understand, Mr. Dvorak.

Apple fan? PC fan? What do I have right or wrong?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/macmini

When I came home from the office on Tuesday night and found myself with a dead Powerbook on my hands, panic initially gripped me, “My email! My music! My photos! Good God, my life is on this thing.” A glass or two of scotch later, I rememebered that Puck, my faithful Mac mini TV-top server was a full computer in its own right, and not just a conveniently-sized, and very network aware, storage device. I packed it up in my bag and headed for the office, undeterred.

Setting up the Mini at the office was just as expected, plug it in, power it up, get moving. The first thing I had to do was fill it full of all those applications I needed to make life a bit more tolerable. Office, Adium, SubEthaEdit, the office email client and a few other goodies that make my Mac Life a lot more manageable. Then it was time to stress test my little friend. Nine open applications later, Puck was still handling the load, incoming email, playing iTunes, instant messaging, word processing and some simple database work be damned. Not so bad for a computer with an desk footprint smaller than my Powerbook.

Almost a week later now, I have but one complaint, but I have a feeling that’s more to do with iPhoto rather than my mini: when iPhoto is open, it just doesn’t share nicely with others. iTunes bogs down during uploads, causing tracks to skip, but granted, this is with about half a dozen applications open.

All of this causes me to wonder, if given a faster HD, and a goodly sized chunk of RAM, how well could the mini run OS X Server? We shall find out, for that’s exactly what I intend to do next. Just as soon as Apple returns my Powerbook.

Is the mini your primary computer? What do you think of its abilities?

It began when I installed iWork (of which more anon).

My beloved old G3 iBook has a mere 20GB of hard disk space. I smile ruefully now, when I remember buying it and thinking “20GB? I’ll never fill that!”

But fill it I very nearly had, and iWork is a demanding piece of software. It wants a gig or so of my precious hard disk. What’s more, it’s not as flexible as I’d hoped. When it came to running the installer, I thought I’d try just installing Pages first, and leaving Keynote 2 for another day. But when I clicked on “Customize”, expecting the chance to pick and choose what software was installed, it turned out the choices were very limited. All the installations options were checked by default, and uneditable. When it comes to installing iWork, it’s all or nothing.

So I had a little think and decided the time had come for a hard disk clearout. What stuffs were hogging my hard disk, and which ones could I safely delete?

My first thought was my music collection. There must be gigabytes of rubbish in there that I never even listen to, I thought. But no - my iTunes library is only 707 songs, most of them much-beloved tunes that I really like to have around. Not much room for deleting stuff there.

What else was cluttering up my hard disk?

Aha! My spurious “~/downloads” directory, which turns out to be crammed full of out-of-date disk images of old software products which most of the time, I don’t use. Junk it; wow, two fresh, clean gigabytes to play with. What else can I get rid of?

I turn to my “~/_current” directory, which is where I keep all the bits and pieces and bits and bobs that would otherwise lurk on my desktop, if I were the sort of person to have a messy desktop.

What a treasure trove that turns out to be. Look, here’s a bunch of mp3 files I copied from a friend, intending to listen to. I drag a few of them into Audion, and satisfy myself that none of them are terribly necessary. Command+Backspace the lot of them, and another gig of space is freed up. I’m enjoying this. What else can I trash?

Command+Tab to the Finder; Command+N for a new window. Hmmm. For a long time now, I’ve had a “~/Applications” directory as well as the root-level “/Applications” directory. It’s time for a Grand Clean Out.

I churn through both directories with something approaching wild abandon. When was the last time I used $this_application? If I can’t remember when it was, it’s clearly no use to me. Command+Backspace. Command+Backspace. Command+Backspace.

What’s the point of two locations for applications anyway? I ask myself. Shazaam! With one drag-and-drop, I move everything to “/Applications”. I quit Quicksilver, restart it, wait for it to find all my apps in their new home.

I emerge after an hour or so of ruthless file management, and what have I got?

Back to the Finder, hit Command+N. Look at the bottom of the window.

“11 items. 5.5 GB available.”

Wow. All I’ve been doing is deleting stuff, but it feels like the most productive hour I’ve spent on computer maintenance for ages. Now feels like a good time to return to that iWork installer. Insert disk.

It’s a very satisfying feeling, isn’t it?

After a week of poking, probing, and picking, I’ve posted a review of the Casio EX-P505 digital camera, er, MPEG-4 camcorder, I mean, stereo capture unit, oh and umm, infrared picture maker. It takes snapshots too.

Casio threw down the gauntlet by stating that video functionality for the EX-P505 isn’t supported on the Mac. Instead they provide you with this cheesy software bundle for Windows. Well guess what, thanks to some nifty open source tools, you can encode Casio’s MPEG-4 for OS X, and it looks fabulous!

I cover how to do that, plus discuss infrared and regular picture taking stuff with this palm-sized powerhouse of a camera. Great fun indeed.

There’s something familiar about the winning designs in Apple’s Dashboard Widget Contest, announced last week.

Take a look at the soft curves and muted colors of Send SMS and WikityWidget; the interface is very shiny happy friendly. Very Aqua. Very lickable.

Remember the old days of OS X? When Steve Jobs described Aqua’s UI elements as “lickable”? Many of those aspects of OS X have gone now, or remain in a much muted form. Starting with Jaguar, the shinyness began to disappear, to be replaced by a flatter, more sombre look.

These winning Widgets look to me like a return to the lickable application of old. And I think Widgets is a perfect place for this sort of UI design. They can be as gaudy as their designers like; since they’re only on screen for a while, and won’t be the kind of app people spend hours-long periods of time in, it doesn’t matter so much. Keep the OS and the proper applications flatter and more sombre. When you’re spending a lot of time in an application, you don’t want it to turn your eyesight all jazzy.

I particularly like the look of WikityWidget, and it makes me wonder what kind of impact widgets might have on the wider Mac shareware marketplace. Might some application developers consider re-working their old .apps as widgets? Might there be free widget versions of paid-for applications?

What are the limitations of widgets? How far can Dashboard be pushed? At what point will we start seeing “widget bloat”, where a widget becomes so crammed with features that it becomes better suited to being an application?

Have you been playing with widgets? What do you think?

Every operating system has its quirks. OS 9 was marred by frequent crashes. A typical prevention regimen included running Norton Disc Doctor religiously (defragment, defragment, defragment). Other OS 9 fun included memorizing all your extensions and when you installed them. Looking back, Conflict Catcher, which would start up your Mac a bizzilion times with every conceivably combination of extensions turned on and off.

Thankfully we don’t have to worry about this in OS X. When you install an application you need not worry whether it will conflict with another application. This is welcome relief.

However, as I said every operating system has it’s quirks. And while OS X is a far superior operating system to OS 9 there are still troubleshooting issues that pop-up. These issues are inherently anti-user because they make no sense whatsoever. I appreciate that OS X is built on top of a rock-solid Unix foundation. But I don’t appreciate that I have to run fix disk permissions every couple of weeks or so. Why isn’t this function build into the operating system?

Permissions are one example, rebuilding the disk directory with third party tools in another. In 2005 you’d think we were beyond these issues. More than Dashboard users want a computer that does as much as possible to take care of itself. With Tiger, Apple should do everything it can to make the operating system more intelligent, and more able to take care of itself.

Do you think OS X should be self-repairing?

Related link: https://www.linkbackproject.org

Isn’t it great when you discover something unexpected hidden away in an application, something that delights you because it’s just what you needed, but you had no idea it was there?

Wouldn’t it be equally great to find a way of editing objects within documents, no matter what application those objects had been created within?

Linkback heralds the start of a fascinating project to turn that thought into reality. Backed by some of the best-known names in third party Mac development, it promises users the chance to paste a chart or diagram from one app into another, such as a word processor; then double-click the chart to edit it again in the app used to create it. Changes are automatically reflected in the pasted version. Neat, huh?

I’m excited by this because I’ve been using something similar in recent weeks. As part of my efforts to publish every day on a Moveable Type-powered blog, I’ve already described my use of MarsEdit as a blog editing tool. What I discovered shortly after posting about it before is that by hitting Command+J while drafting a new post, it opens in BBEdit. MarsEdit is nice but it’s a world away from the powerful text and HTML capabilities of BBEdit, which is also a much faster editing environment.

My routine changed after this discovery; now I could start a new post in MarsEdit, write it in full with BBEdit, and simply save to see the changes instantly available in MarsEdit again. Editing is super-fast and about as efficient as posting to a blogging app on a remote server is going to get. I love it.

The clearest explanation of Linkback’s inner workings uses the good old client/server model. In this case, individual applications are servers (providing data about objects) or clients (acting as recipients of those editable objects). When the user activates Linkback, they effectively trigger a series of negotiations between the two apps, sharing data via the built-in Cocoa pasteboard. It’s neat because it’s such a simple idea and uses the tools readily available, rather than trying to implement something new to do the same job.

And simplicity is one of primary motivating factors here. That’s the key. After all, the concept of sharing data between apps isn’t new; the idea of creating a Really Simple Framework to enable it is. According to the guys at Nisus, some developers might only need to add a few dozen lines of code to make their products Linkback-friendly.

What do you make of Linkback?

Related link: https://www.kernelthread.com/software/ams/

Grab your Powerbook and head on out to a local amusement park. Thanks to the Apple Motion Sensor (AMS) built in to the 2005+ line of Powerbooks, there’s all sorts of fun to be had with it in meatspace. A fabulous exploration of the AMS on kernelthread.com digs into the nitty gritty details of the underlying technology and provides some fascinating applications that play with the AMS. The Orientation Visualizer “displays a 3D image of a PowerBook 15 that appears to ‘hang’ in space. … The orientation of the on-screen image is a real-time approximation of the computer’s physical orientation.”

Related link: https://www.opensource.co.jp/forum/

Although I am not a close follower of Open Source conferences outside of the U.S., I believe this may be the first one in Japan that I have heard of sponsored by some well known Open Source Organizations including Open Source Japan, Zope, MySQL AB, and Zend. Here is some information I received that provides more details…

Open Source Realize Forum 2005

Latest technologies and case studies - Open Source changes IT

Overview

The conference will be held on March 15th in Kobe, Japan and March 18th in Tokyo, Japan.
Please visit the event site for more information.
https://www.opensource.co.jp/forum/ (Japanese language site)

Here’s a Google-translated-to-english link of the Japanese language conference page provided in the announcement above.

Google Translation of Open Source Realize Forum 2005 home page

If you have the opportunity to attend this event, please let us all know how the conference was!

Related link: https://www.theappleblog.com/2005/02/24/interview-with-chris-adamson-author-of-qu…

I recently did an interview with TheAppleBlog about QuickTime for Java: A Developer’s Notebook. It went well, and I thought they asked some good questions that gave me a chance to talk about interesting stuff. And now I’m looking back at the interview and asking myself…

…why am I not thanking the Developer’s Notebook series for helping me focus this book?

The thing is, this book represents the third time I tried to get a Java Media book off the ground. In fact, it was almost three years to the day between sending out my first proposals and seeing QTJ:ADN on bookshelves. And a lot of that is because what I was proposing probably wouldn’t have had a readership much larger than… um… me.

I initially tried to put together an omnibus Java Media book outline, the be-all, end-all, desk-cracker on the topic. This required a fair amount of self-delusion - I’d worked with Java Media Framework long enough to know that it didn’t internally support any media formats that anyone used (except MP3, which they later took out). Worse, in my desire to be complete, I proposed a chapter on JavaTV. It was already dead in 2002, but today? Take a look at the mailing list archives for javatv-interest. It has been years since a non-spam message was posted to the list, yet the list keeps running, and the home page maintains its quaint link to PersonalJava, on which JavaTV is based, even though that link takes you to an end-of-life announcement… OK enough details, leave it at this - it’s probably a good thing that this proposal went nowhere.

Funny thing, I also had QuickTime for Java in this first proposal, and thought I would have to defend the inclusion of a non-Sun API. Instead, the feedback I got was “QuickTime has credibility, but people don’t really understand it… why don’t you look into that?” So I did, and wrote some articles for ONJava (I site that I now edit, but I digress). And then I decided I was ready to pitch a QTJ book.

And wouldn’t you know it, I again proposed the be-all, end-all, desk-cracker format. But this time I got some good feedback, basically along the lines of “nobody wants the ultimate animal book on QuickTime for Java, but a small, focused book with practical and isolated examples might work.”

Lucky for me, this is exactly what the Developer’s Notebooks series is all about. True, I had to adjust my writing style - working with Brett means no more “we” and the attendant lecture-hall style of writing - but that’s a good thing. I think the format is more direct and more practical, and for some topics, particularly QTJ (which has some methods and constants that are literally meaningless in Java because they involve things that only C programmers would have to deal with), ignoring the edge stuff and just showing what you can do with it is a great approach.

So… sorry I forgot to mention that in the interview. The format really helped me find my legs, and I’m grateful for that.

Maybe it’s because I’m a graphic designer by training but I like things to be visually consistent.

One of the beautiful things about the original Mac operating system was it visual simplicity and consistency. A window in Macpaint had a similar look and feel (such a funny expression, look and feel!) to a window in the finder.

This consistency was, well, consistent throughout the entire classic operating system. OS X appears to have thrown all that out the window. Now we have some Apple applications with a metallic look and some without. Why does iPhoto get the metallic look and Mail doesn’t? Or, even more egregious, within the finder itself some windows are metallic and some aren’t. I’d like to see the dartboard at Apple where they figure this stuff out. Actually, I wouldn’t.

Consistency in a user interface is a good thing. At a certain point the UI should fade into the background. The early innovators on the Macintosh knew this, Windows copied it, and to see a somewhat scattered interface in OS X is disappointing to say the least. Yes, some of this visual vertigo has to do with the superfluous (albeit beautiful) over-the-top eye-candy in OS X. But a lot of it has to so with interface differences where they are not needed.

Let’s hope Tiger cleans up its act and bring the Mac back to the refined interface it was famous for.

Does this aspect of OS X bother you too?