One of the most common complaints I hear from those migrating from that other operating system to OS X is the lack of decent alt-tab functionality.

That’s not to say that OS X doesn’t have an alt-tab — it does. And alt-tab-alikes abound. LiteSwitchX does a nice job of fixing OS X’s default inability to alt-tab back and forth between the two most recently foregrounded applications.

But in fact, it’s not the alt-tab, per se, that’s at issue. It’s the Mac concept of windows belonging to applications rather than existing semi-autonomously that causes unrest. While hopping from Mail.app to IE to BBEdit is a snap, it’s simply impossible to alternate between, say, Google and Slashdot residing in their own IE windows or Document1 and Document2 in Word. Some applications do provide their own local keyboard shortcut — Command-~ in both IE and Mail.app — but this is a rarity and varies from application to application. Other applications assign windows to Command-# keys, but who the heck can bear all that in mind while actually trying to get some work done.

My kingdom (or an honourable mention) for an alt-tab as nature intended it.

What alt-tab-alike do you use?

Related link: https://www.furrygoat.com/Programming/PocketFeed/index.aspx

Pocket Feed is great! All I have to do is fire it up, point it at my Radio subscriptions, and have it download the headlines. With Pocket Feed, an 802.11b CF card, and my Pocket PC, I can roam around the house and yard while reading my favorite weblogs.

A while ago, I posted here that I was in search of the perfect search engine. Today, I have a functioning search engine in place at the jschool and all is well.

My initial plan had been to use mnogo, but the $800 fee for implementing mnogo on Windows (free on other platforms), nixed those plans (I’d love to run the site off an X-Serve, but it’s not in the cards for now). In the end, I turned to the open source search engine Swish-e. One of the things that drew me to Swish-e was the wide availability of interfaces for it - Swish-e is bundled with a perl CGI, but there are also interfaces written in PHP, C++, Java, and other languages.

Getting the indexer to run the way we wanted it to proved to be fairly easy. I was able to tell it to exclude certain directories, skip common stopwords or words that appear on more than n % of pages, etc, and to schedule nightly index creation.

I had initally intended to write my own PHP interface to Swish-e indexes. I quickly learned that, while simple search interfaces are simple to write, advanced interfaces, which include booleans, phrase highlighting, intelligent ranking and sorting, limiting, stopwords, and stemming, are a whole ‘nuther matter. Simple scripts quickly grow green mould. I went back to the bundled perl interface, which works great out of the box. Cutomizing its behavior and appearance wasn’t 100% trivial, but neither was it un-doable (perl is not my first language).

My only complaints with Swish-e as it stands today are:

1) While it will index and search meta tags such as keywords and descriptions, there is currently no easy way to get these to rank higher in results (to crank up the document “weight”) without modifying the source code of the indexer itself. This feature is slated to be tweak-able in the conf file in a future version.

2) There is no built-in logging facility. If you want to see what people are searching on, you’ll need to modify the scripts either to stuff vars into your apache logs or to generate an external log, which you’ll then need to parse with other tools.

Other than that, I’m totally happy with it. I’m auto-indexing 3,000 pages every night, and built a PHP tool to initiate a manual index when needed (to make a new document appear in search results immediately).

My boss even found what could be considered a bug in swish.cgi — his comments on some anomalous sorting behavior may result in future improvements — which would constitute his first official contribution to an open source development project.

In any case, the lesson here is that simple search is easy, while really good search is correspondingly hard. Hats off to everyone who has put their energy and time into making Swish-e what it is today so that people like me can come along and have a high-quality web application to plug in quickly and freely. Your efforts do not go unnoticed (and that goes for open source developers everywhere).

Those of us who’ve had beta Jaguar for the last few months know what a tremendous job Apple has done with the latest incarnation of its Unix-based OS. So much so that most developers I talk to are willing to pony up the $129 asking price for the upgrade.

This is remarkable in light of the fact that developers don’t like to pay for anything that is downloadable or comes on a CD. But quite honestly, Jaguar (code name for Mac OS X 10.2) is that good.

Thanks to a deal between Amazon.com and Apple, all of us can get Jaguar for $79. All you have to do is order from Amazon by Sept. 3, 2002, download the $50 rebate coupon, and have it postmarked no later than Oct. 3. It will take a few weeks to get your $50, but that’s a nice chunk of change to show up in your mailbox.

And by the time you get your check, you will be so hooked on 10.2 that you might decide to take that rebate and get yourself a Bluetooth module or some other goodie to extend the pleasure of Mac computing.

Of course beer and pizza are nice choices too …

You’ve no doubt seen Apple’s fabulous Switch campaign commercials,
most notably the wildly popular Ellen Feiss and uber geek and BoingBoinger, Mark Frauenfelder.

But what of the others? The geeky ones. The scripters. The sysadmins in their server cages.
The command-line jockeys. Those through whom the source flows openly.

Now, from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, come their stories…

Chris DiBona chucks Emacs for Vi
David Ascher tries his hand at macho Perl code,
Ken Williams runs cooler in boxers,
Nat Torkington deserts the camel for the sleek world of Python,
and
Sarah Burcham switches to Windows XP,

All movies are in Quicktime, optimized for Web-streaming.
They were filmed on a Sony Handycam DCR-TRV130 NTSC over the period of about an hour.
Editing, stitching, spindling, and fiddling done entirely in iMovie (more on that later)
on an Apple iBook running Mac OS X v10.1.5.
They’re mirrored for your pleasure over at Perl.org.

Karma points to
Nat Torkington for the banjo bits and handycam loaner,
Chris DiBona for some fleshing out of the idea,
acme for answers,
and
Supersnail, Julian Axolotl for use of his studio.

Related link: https://use.perl.org/~gnat/journal/6427

Nat Torkington, Open Source Convention Program Planner extraordinaire, turned folks loose on conference schedule data: “I’ve extracted the OSCON schedule as a ton of HTML that will make your browser choke, a ton of XML, and tab-separated values for Excelophiles.” Some results include:

• SVG
• A Palm “schedule themer”
• An all-in-one, compact HTML representation for the entire conference and one page each per track.

Good stuff! Doing these kinds of schedule grids can be a lot more complex than looks (which is one reason why we haven’t come up with the perfect system on our own conferences site!)

Do you have more examples?

Related link: https://www.karelia.com/watson/watsonFAQ.html

Want to see what’s coming from Apple in Sherlock 3? Check out the Watson application from Karelia. It’s no coincidence. Apple loved Watson. They included a demo of it in the “Phil and Avi” show at MacWorld SF in January and gave it the Apple Design Award for the most innovative Mac OS X product in May at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

At last week’s MacWorld Expo keynote, Steve Jobs showed off the cool features of Sherlock. The movie tool includes the ability to check out the movies playing in your neighborhood, view the previews, and even purchase tickets at participating theatres… just like Watson. After remaining quiet, Karelia has finally posted an entry on their FAQ page to set the record straight about Watson and Sherlock. Among other things, the page notes that Karelia was not compensated by Apple.

Come on Apple — do the right thing. We can’t keep rooting for you as the good guy if you are going to engage in business practices like this.

What should Apple do?

It’s that time of year again. Time for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego. Even though this is only the second year for the convention to be hosted in the Sheraton Harbon Island, San Diego now means Open Source to me. The moment I walked out of the airport terminal and felt the perfect weather wash over me, I knew that I was here for a week full of heavy tech discussions mixed in with trips for Mexican food and the beach.

The feeling was reinfornced when, waiting for the shuttle bus to the hotel, a fellow geek walked up and said "Going to the conference?"

"Sure am. Shuttle bus is on its way." I replied.

"Thought so." he said.

To which I sat and thought: " Hey! I’m not a geek. I’m not wearing a conference t-shirt and I hate pocket protectors and what not. I’m even wearing the coolest sunglasses I can find! What’s giving it away?&quot Then I realized that Jason, my traveling companion, and I both had laptop bags. And, really, why else would you have a laptop in San Diego?

When we got on the shuttle, it became crystal clear the geeks were descending. There were several folks in Perl shirts and everyone had laptop bags. It’s already shaping up to be a good time.

Amid all the ruckus (both good and bad) from MacWorld NY this year, I find myself happy that iTunes 3 cleans up my one big complaint–the gap between tracks that makes itself heard on mix discs and classical music. There were a couple of possible fixes that Apple could have taken for this problem. The one they chose to implement was the ability to combine CD tracks into one MP3 when ripping.

I’m glad to say that this works easily and as promised. No more gaps (or skipping, as they say). Combine this with a fix that appeared for the iPod long track battery drain problem that showed up a while ago, and I now have a happy pair of ears.

As far as the other new features in iTunes–namely SmartLists, play counts, and Audible.com support–I’ve heard some people ask "What good are they?" However, I like them. I never could get around to sorting my music into playlists and putting some programmatic smarts into playlist creation sure does help. And I’m just now venturing off into exploring what can be done with Audible.com files. Several friends have been enjoying listening to books on tape (and CD) lately, so now I’m giving it a try to see if I like it as much as they do.

One last major improvement: The visualizer now runs at frightengly fast speed if you let it–at least on my GeForce 3 equipped PowerMac. I had to enable frame-rate limiting to 30 frames per second. 50-60 frames per second is just too fast. Not that I’m complaining of course. And I haven’t tried it on my now old school TiBook with its puny ATI Rage video chipset as it’s been tied up for other purposes.

Of course, iTunes isn’t done yet. I’m looking forward to seeing Apple integrate support for the the new MPEG-4 AAC format. I’d also like to see support for Ogg-Vobis–though I’m not holding my breath. Bottom line: iTunes 3 is a solid update that addresses the last major problems with the product. It’s all frosting on the cake from here.

What do you like or dislike about iTunes 3? Are you using SmartLists and the like?

After two full days of Macworld NY, the highs and lows are separating like cream from milk.

My list of highs is actually longer than I had anticipated. The new 17″ iMac is a gem and a great value at $2,000. iTunes 3 shows that Apple is committed to making their already great iApps even better. iSync is downright exciting and may prove to be the missing link that helps us connect all of our digital goodies.

The Expo floor has been booming for two days. At times it’s hard to get around. Activity at the O’Reilly booth has been nonstop from the opening bell to the closing. Our Mac titles are selling better than ever, and I think the word is out that O’Reilly is committed to providing quality books for Mac users. We introduced iPhoto: The Missing Manual at Macworld, and it’s been well received.

New Yorkers are great people, and I’ve very much enjoyed talking to attendees on the Expo floor, during my iPhoto session, and in the O’Reilly booth. Outside the convention center, I’m staying in Times Square where it’s always electric.

Late night Times Square (Broadway) shot from the 20th floor of the Marriott Hotel. After 1 am is about the only time you can casually stroll the sidewalks.

On Wednesday night I went over to the Village to see Mike Daisey’s one man show, 21 Dog Years — Doing Time @ Amazon.com and had dinner with him and friends afterward. He really knows his Mac stuff and had some terrific ideas for improving the .mac package.

The last highlight I want to mention is Apple’s new store in Soho. They renovated an old post office and transformed it into a beautiful setting to shop for and buy computers. I don’t think Apple is getting enough credit for their commitment to providing a wonderful customer experience in their retail stores. The new addition in Soho just might be the best yet.

As for the lows, I have to say that the launch of .mac could be more graceful for existing iTools users. My preference would be to let us keep our existing services for free, then migrate to the $49 premium service when we’re ready to take advantage of the new features. Forcing existing customers into “an all or nothing” choice seems like bad business to me.

Apple, it’s not too late to rethink this approach.

Other lows include the traditional Mac vendors who chose not to attend the show. The vendors on the Expo floor are doing a great job. I tip my cap to them. As for the other guys who didn’t show, but who still want our money for their products, I give a big thumbs down. I’ve spent my dough on the folks who are here.

Even though New York is in my highlights category, I’m including it in my lows too. It’s not easy getting from any hotel to Javits Center, all the really good food seems to be way over in the Village ($7 - $10 cab fare), the traffic sucks, and it is really humid.

In a way, seems like New York and Apple have a lot in common right now. They each have noteworthy pluses and minuses. Both are exciting and tough. And I really never know what’s going to happen next.

I’m glad I’m here in the middle of it.

Of course, Apple would release a new, larger-capacity iPod just two weeks after I decided to go for it. No regrets though - the iPod is easily one of the most worthwhile gadget purchases I’ve made in a number of years - it certainly gets more actual use than any phone or PDA would.

Capacity is only part of the deal - just as interesting are the facts that the iPod can now work with Windows (MusicMatch Jukebox is about as close as Windows users come to the database-like functionality of iTunes), and will be able to sync calendars. Also interesting is that it now comes with smaller headphones - the previously shipped earbuds were so large they hurt my ears, forcing me to spend additional money elsewhere for wearable phones. The new phones have an in-cord remote, too.

Even though I now have an “old” iPod, I still benefit from a bunch of enhnancements in iTunes 3, like the fact that it now offers Smart Playlists. This means playlists under OS X are now every bit as intelligent as the ones we were able to create in BeOS using nothing but attributes in the Be File System - playlists that are spontaneously generated from live and arbitrarily complex genre and/or era queries, for example. The presence of this feature is so BeOS-like that it almost makes me feel like Apple read my OS X-BeOS migration pieces and is in the process of answering my prayers one at at time. Unfortunately, I don’t see anything on the Jaguar pages about meta-data in the filesystem.

Not so welcome is the ridiculous pricing scheme attached to the previously free Mac.com services. $100/year for a WebDAV folder, access to cute digital postcards, and an IMAP account? Apple, listen up: You’re a cool company, but people aren’t so blindly devoted to you - or stupid - that they’re going to be gouged like that. Don’t forget the promotional value you get by having all those mac.com email addresses out there. Don’t forget that anyone buying connectivity gets free web space automatically. Don’t forget we can send digital postcards for free from bluemountain and other services. And don’t forget all the iTools logos you stuck on your product boxes, and the iDisk item in the Finder menu, all implying that iTools was part of the purchase price of this “premium brand” product.

Throw in the lack of any upgrade pricing for Jaguar and the whole arrangement smells bad to me. Apparently I’m not the only one - to see Apple’s stock price tumble like it is right after a MacWorld is not a good sign (yes, I know the whole market is doing ugly things, but still…)

Do you think the lack of any upgrade pricing for Jaguar is reasonable?

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

Apple has released version 3 of iTunes, their awesome, free digital music jukebox application.

Among the nifty new features are “Smart Playlists,” playlists that automatically and dynamically update their songs based on user-defined rules.

iTunes 3 also sports a new song rating feature that you can use to rate songs and if desired, add them to a smart playlist.

Since playlists are the method of transferring songs to the iPod, Smart Playlists will make updating the iPod more dynamic and automatic. New songs by an artist or genre specified in a smart playlist will automatically be added to that list and thus to the iPod.

Other neat features are: “Sound Check,” which will automatically adjust output volume to maintain consistent levels; support for content from Audible.com; support for new .mp3 tags that keep track of playback dates and counts; improved control over music file and folder naming and storage; and a purty new purple dock icon.

What’s your favorite new feature in iTunes 3?

The last thing I wanted to do was connect my PowerBook G4 to a jerry-rigged power supply. Yet, there I stood with plug in hand thinking, “My god, not only am I going to fry my Mac, I could short out the entire floor of the Marriott in Times Square.” But what choice did I have?

I’m in New York City for Macworld. I have a ton of work to do. Aside from my regular publishing duties, I’m preparing iPhoto demos for the O’Reilly booth plus another demo for an iPhoto session with Rick Smolan. Everything starts on Wednesday. So Tuesday night was my last chance to pull things together.

That’s when the power supply for my TiBook failed. It’s not Apple’s fault; it’s mine. I have this bad habit of grabbing my notebook and dashing off with the power cord still connected. Every time I swear I’ll never do it again.

Well, my bad habit caught up with me. Tonight, after I had run the battery down to 10 percent, I plugged in the power supply and … nothing happened. No juice. Nada. Zippo.

Madly I tried jiggling things and sampling different outlets — still nothing. I called around Times Square for a replacement, but the only computer stores open that late had nothing that would work. I had to do something. There was no way I could wait until the Macworld expo floor opened on Wednesday at 10:30 am to get a new power supply.

Power Supply on the Mend. I chose to use my last two adhesive bandages on the power supply wires (white circled area) instead of my bleeding knuckles. It was a good call.

In desperation, I did the unthinkable. Like an old country doctor, I poured myself a stiff drink, grabbed a Swiss army knife, and prepared for surgery.

It was ugly. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to pry open an Apple power supply, but it’s not easy. After 30 minutes of dogged persistence and two knuckle cuts later, I pried the sucker open.

Now what? Everything looked OK. I wiggled and jiggled wires in search of the problem. Then I found it. The inner sleeved wired (leading into the power supply) had a dark spot where it had worked loose and shorted. With great care I separated the wires, pulled back their coverings and attempted to reattach their nerve endings. I knew that if just one thread of the black sleeved bunch touched any part of the white sleeved group, me and my PowerBook were dead.

Then it was time to close. Since I didn’t have any electrical tape, I used adhesive bandages to wrap everything up.

At last, the moment of truth. I plugged the power supply into the electrical outlet and held my breath. Everything was OK. Gently I pushed the plug into my PowerBook begging the gods to spare my machine. Lo and behold, the orange ring light powered up, and I was in business.

Now I know I voided every warranty on the planet and risked life and limb of my TiBook, but I was desperate. No way was I going to face hundreds of people at Macworld totally unprepared — at least not without a fight.

So, the moral of the story? First, don’t yank on your power supply. It will pick the worse possible time to retaliate. Second, always carry a Swiss army knife and a first aid kit.

The life you save may be your Mac’s.

This week, Sybase announced the beta availability of Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) for Mac OS X. My experience with Sybase on Mac OS X goes back to proto-Mac OS X, when I picked up a two floppy set of Sybase version 4.something for my NeXTStation. That was kind of cool, running a solid data server that fit on two floppies.

A Watershed Event

So, what’s the significance of the Sybase announcement? Some are saying that this is the first major enterprise-class database to come to Mac OS X, and with all due respect, this is debatable. Apple has been shipping the enterprise-class MySQL with their enterprise-class Mac OS X Server, and other enterprise-class databases, such as PostgreSQL and OpenBase, are available for Mac OS X. It’s all in what you define as enterprise-class. (And we could argue about that for weeks!)

But still, the release of Sybase ASE is a watershed event, because it’s a certain kind of major enterprise database we’re talking about here, one of the old guard databases like DB2 and Oracle. They’ve been around a long time and have a solid, long-standing reputation. They inspire a confidence that generates a lot of buzz in the industry press.

What’s happening now is a lot like what happened with Linux: when these databases became available for Linux, something folks had been saying all along was validated: Linux is ready for the enterprise. It doesn’t matter whether one single company builds a system with Linux and one of these major enterprise databases; their availability was a stamp of approval.

As with the database rush to Linux, Sybase is again leading the way. On Linux, it started with their quiet release of CT-Lib, which enterprising freaks used to connect even to Microsoft SQL Server. A short while later, the Sybase server appeared for Linux, along with Oracle, DB2, and others.

So Sybase is once again sticking its neck out, to its own benefit and that of other big database vendors. It won’t be long before we see Oracle for Mac OS X (actually, they’ve already committed). So this is big news. But is it fun?

First Look

I headed over to https://www.sybase.com/mac and grabbed the trial version of the ASE beta. It comes as a disk image containing an installer, some release notes, and ODBC libraries. The installer is a typical Mac OS X package installer, and did not require a reboot on my system. It installed everything into /Applications/Sybase, and took up about 550 megabytes of disk space. At the end of the installation, the Sybase server is launched (process name: dataserver), and is ready to accept logins from either the isql command-line utility (/Applications/Sybase/OCS-12_5/bin/isql) or jisql, the Java-based GUI query tool (/Applications/Sybase/jISQL.app. Figure 1 shows the jisql login window.

Figure 1. Logging into jisql as the database administrator

Safe Shutdowns

Mac OS X 10.1 does not support shutdown scripts, so you should shut down Sybase before you power down or reboot your computer. To do this, log into jisql as the superuser (Username: sa, blank password), and type the command shutdown into the Input Window, and click Go, as shown in Figure 2. (You could also use isql for this)

To start the server again, run these commands as a user with administrative privileges:

% cd /Applications/Sybase/ASE-12_5/install
% sudo startserver -f RUN_SYBASE

Figure 2. Shutting down the Sybase data server

Interacting With the Server

As shown in Figure 2, you can use the jisql application to send commands to the database server. If you’re a command-line junkie, you can also use the isql query tool. But, you’ll need to set up your environment first by sourcing SYBASE.csh:

% source /Applications/Sybase/SYBASE.csh

Once you’ve done this, you can log in to isql using the sa username and blank password. After you’ve logged in, you can issue queries against the database. In the following listing, I’m inspecting all the users in the database server’s sysusers table (note that each command should be followed by the go directive):

% isql -Usa -P""
1> select name from sysusers
2> go
 name
 ------------------------------
 dbo
 dtm_tm_role
 guest
 ha_role
 navigator_role
 oper_role
 probe
 public
 replication_role
 sa_role
 sso_role
 sybase_ts_role                 
(12 rows affected)

A Sample Database

Poking around system tables can be pretty boring. Sybase includes a sample database of authors and publications. To use this database, log in and issue the use pubs2 command. (This is the Sybase analogue of cd.) Once you’re in the pubs2 database, you can use SQL statements to work with the various tables:

% isql -Usa -P""
1> use pubs2
2> go
1> select au_fname, au_lname from authors
2> GO
 au_fname             au_lname
 -------------------- ----------------------------------------
 Abraham              Bennet
 Reginald             Blotchet-Halls
 Cheryl               Carson
 Michel               DeFrance
 Ann                  Dull
 Marjorie             Green
 Morningstar          Greene
 Burt                 Gringlesby
 Sheryl               Hunter
 Livia                Karsen
 Chastity             Locksley
 Stearns              MacFeather
 Heather              McBadden
 Michael              O'Leary
 Sylvia               Panteley
 Albert               Ringer
 Anne                 Ringer
 Meander              Smith
 Dick                 Straight
 Dirk                 Stringer
 Johnson              White
 Akiko                Yokomoto
 Innes                del Castillo                             
(23 rows affected)

Superuser

So far, you’ve been using the superuser without a password. This is a bad idea, even if it is the default; it’s like having a blank root password. You should change the password as soon as possible with the sp_password stored procedure. The following isql session sets sa’s password to secret:

% isql -Usa -P""
1> sp_password NULL, secret
2> GO
Password correctly set.
(return status = 0)

Just as you don’t do everyday tasks on your Unix machine using the root account, you shouldn’t use the sa account for database development. Use the create database statement to create a separate database for your development, add a new user with sp_addlogin, and make that user the owner of the new database with sp_changedbowner. That way, you have the Sybase equivalent of a home directory to mess around in:

% isql -Usa -Psecret
1> create database dev_database on default=4
2> go
CREATE DATABASE: allocating 1024 logical pages (4.0 megabytes) on disk
'master'.
1> sp_addlogin bjepson, open_sesame, dev_database
2> go
Password correctly set.
Account unlocked.
New login created.
(return status = 0)
1> use dev_database
2> go
1> sp_changedbowner bjepson
2> go
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact a user with
System Administrator (SA) role.
Database owner changed.
(return status = 0)

Now I’ve got a user called bjepson, who is the owner of the four megabyte dev_database database. I can log in with the command isql -Ubjepson -Popen_sesame. You can do the same with your own installation, and start playing around!

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

Wonders never cease! The Liberty Alliance Project has released its 1.0 Specification for a simplified sign-on and federated networking identity system.

As the Liberty Alliance’s first step in enabling an open federated network identity solution, Liberty version 1.0 specifications focus on interoperability between systems to enable opt-in account linking and simplified sign-on functionality. This allows users to decide whether to link accounts with various identity providers and makes it easier for both consumers and businesses to take advantage of the growing Web services space.

New Scientist talks with Timo Skytta, Nokia representative in the alliance. Peter Drayton offers some initial observations.

Apple’s getting much better about updating Mac OS X in response to security concerns. Recently they upgraded OpenSSH and Apache in quick reponse to announced vulnerabilities–and they did it about as quickly as humanly possible considering the testing that anything that goes out via Software Update must go through. This is essential to Apple’s continued success in wooing the Unix market and a major improvement from last year when Apple was sometimes percieved to be a bit slow with critical fixes.

In another move that shows that Apple is continuing to figure out that they now have a whole lotta Unix weenies using their OS, the latest version of Software Update adds a bonus feature in addition to its stated purpose of securing the update process. This new feature is a command line interface to the software update utility. Yes, you too can now remotely log into your Mac OS X client machine and update it.

Try it out (you may have to launch a new Terminal window after upgrading–or use rehash):

[titanium:~] duncan% softwareupdate
Software Update Tool
Copyright 2002 Apple Computer, Inc.

Your software is up to date.

Even better, there’s a man page to go along with it:

[titanium:~] duncan% man softwareupdate
man: Formatting manual page…
SOFTWAREUPDATE(8) System Manager’s Manual SOFTWAREUPDATE(8)

SYNOPSIS…

Spiffy I say. Very spiffy. I know it’s a small thing, but it shows that the clue centered in Cupertino is strengthening.

What do you think?

MacCentral points to a “scathing” article in the Wall-eyed Street Journal where MacBU’s head and Corel’s EVP of marketing are complaining that Apple hasn’t done enough to promote Mac OS X, and thus their wares. Poor, poor, Microsoft and Corel. Shame on you!

When I first saw this article, I had to restrain myself from laughing too hard. Here’s the lead-in from MacCentral:

“As Macworld Conference & Expo draws near in New York City this week, the Wall Street Journal has published a scathing article about the state of Mac OS X adoption and how it has affected some Mac software publishers — chief among them Microsoft Corp., whose Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) head said that the company may re-evaluate its relationship with Apple unless Apple makes a stronger effort to market the operating system.”

Okay, now try to forget about the bad writing in that last sentence. The “operating system” in question is Apple’s Mac OS X. Great. Now that we have that cleared up, let’s look at this for a minute.

What a load o’ crap! Typical WSJ bullshit and MS posturing, if you ask me (which nobody did, but that’s okay). Of course, the timing of this couldn’t have been any better. Gee, what conference is this week? Hmmm…could it be Macworld New York?

The head of Microsoft’s MacBU is complaining that Apple hasn’t promoted Mac OS X enough, saying it’s hurting sales of Office v.X. Corel’s executive vice president of marketing is complaining because people aren’t buying their wares, either.

Wah! Microsoft’s profits are down.

Um, hello?! Saying that Apple isn’t promoting Mac OS X is kind of like saying the sky isn’t blue, or the world is flat, or that Cheetos are bad for you. Have either of these people been to Apple’s web site lately? Have they seen all them Switcher ads on television? Have you, uh, picked up and read a magazine in the last, oh, year or so? Seen any Mac OS X ads in them magazines?! (I know I have, does the /dev/null ad ring a bell?)

Will someone please send out the clue police?

Come on, let’s get down to the real issue here. Microsoft doesn’t like the fact that Apple’s encouraging people to Switch (the correct term) to Mac OS X. “Real people” in television commercials are putting themselves out there, saying “I was a Windows [user/admin/whatever], and I’ve switched to Mac OS X, and you know what? It’s better.” You can’t get any clearer than that, can you?

The fact of the matter is that Apple must’ve joined the NRA, or something. They’ve squarely targeted their advertising (see that, “ad-ver-tie-zing”?) at Windows users by putting ex-Windows users out there to say: “Hey, come on over, life is great with Mac OS X.” Windows users are finally catching on to everything that us Mac-folk have been saying all these years, and Microsoft doesn’t like it. Wah!

I’d rekon, too, that in this economy, people aren’t willing to shell out ~$400 for Office v.X, especially when it’s received such bad reviews from people who actually use it. It’s bloated. Slow. And yes, the Service update helped, but it’s still over-priced and grossly overweight.

And really, I can’t see why Corel is complaining. They’ve done a really good job at turning people away from their products, long before Mac OS X came out, so why not jump on the bandwagon? (For those of you who’ve been Mac users for any length of time…remember what happened when Corel bought WordPerfect from Novell back in the mid-90’s? Well I do. Need I say more.)

As fellow editor, Derrick Story, pointed out in an email exchange we had over this:

“…just ain’t many people to buy over-priced bloated software. Especially when AppleWorks can open .doc and .xls files and let you make changes … For free!

“I think this is more of a reaction to the Switch campaign and QuickTime’s emergence …”

Poor Microsoft. Poor Corel.

Apple’s not promoting Mac OS X? Bah!

Okay, enough of my ranting. Let’s hear what you have to say about all this…

Related link: https://radio.weblogs.com/0105852/2002/07/13.html#a692

Sam Gentile finally reveals the details of his recent VSIP work. This effort has the development of Groove tools and applications in some cases down “to less than 4 minutes end to end and the touch of a few buttons!”

At first I was a little irritated to read that Adobe, Macromedia, Bare Bones, Symantec, and others had decided to sit this one out at Macworld NYC. Then I thought about it for a minute.

Here we have this great new platform on the best hardware ever with a very promising conference in New York City to show it off. What a perfect time for new companies to make their move. Make no doubt: Macworld NYC is going to be booming. I can’t wait to get in the middle of it and see what the new guys are offering for my PowerBook. After all, I still have a gig or two free for new goodies.

So yeah, at first I was miffed. Call me fickle, but I’m over it, way over it, and can’t wait to meet the next generation.

What’s your take on the changing Mac landscape, and what do you think we’ll see in New York?

Was recently looking at Tim Berners-Lee’s homepage and found myself nodding in agreement with seemingly simple things he was saying about what’s acceptable to mail to a stranger, and what is not. For example, he says it is acceptable to mail him documents, but not programs. Then he notes that MS Office documents sometimes contain programs. Bingo.

Interestingly, he apparently finds HTML e-mail acceptable, whereas I have been waging a lonely battle against it for a long time.

He also notes that when you send him Office documents and expect them to be read, you are in essence asking him to install proprietary software on whatever machine/OS he may be running at the time — those of us who made it through the BeOS years know what an issue this is/was/can be. Yes, BeOS had an application capable of reading Word docs (a great one, in fact), but that’s not the point. I should be able to devise my own OS in my basement and still be able to communicate with others via standard document formats.

It is unfair and wrong to assume that someone is running Windows, or has Office installed. Draw your own analogies to the assumption of many that an atheist should be unbothered by being required to pledge allegiance “under God.”

O’Reilly blogger Rob Flickenger recently posted IE(eeeee), on his frustration at the hands of the IE 5.2 installer. I agreed with Rob in some respects. For example, there’s no reason a Mac installer should be closing down apps, unless it’s an OS upgrade. Other than that, I didn’t mind the IE 5.2 installer, and found the upgrade worth the minor hassle.

But Rob’s post did get me thinking about a related issue: The fact that application installers for OS X have such different usage philosophies.

On the one hand, we have these wonderfully easy to use .dmg installers, which reduce installation time to near-zero (you don’t even have to drag the included app to any specific location first - you’re free to run it right from the disk image for testing first). Personally, I think .dmg installers are the slickest development since the invention of the Mochi bon-bon.

On the other hand, Apple is looking for acceptance in the organization, and that means working the way sysadmins like things to work. And most sysadmins run a tight ship, with strict rules about users installing their own apps (i.e. they can’t). Installers that require admin passwords help sysadmins maintain a controlled environment.

On the other other hand, the .dmg installation method is not going to allow the user to install anything outside of user space. The user is still constrained to a sandbox of sorts.

What I’m getting at here is that Apple, by finally achieving the “impossible” and creating a user-friendly Unix, finds themselves trying to serve two masters — the traditional “computer for the rest of us” ease-of-use user, and ye olde bearded-weenie Unix security guru. In the process of trying to serve two masters, these kinds of ambiguities are bound to arise. The realm of application installers is a good example of that schizophrenia.

So the question becomes, is there a “canonical,” Apple-recommended way for an installer to behave? Or does Apple’s responsibility end with the creation of a secure, user-friendly platform, such that anything possible to occur within that platform can co-exist?

For those of you who are sysadmins in large organizations, what kinds of app-install controls would you like to impose on users that you currently don’t have with OS X?

Related link: https://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1040-941394.html

Mac OS X 10.2 (code-named “Jaguar”), originally slated for release by the end of summer, will more than likely be hitting the streets in August. The NYT has a short -list of new features; for more detail, take a gander at Apple’s “A look inside Jaguar”.

Testers say recent Jaguar test versions, or beta builds, deliver on many of the promises Apple CEO Steve Jobs made when he previewed the OS in May. Most refinements to the Aqua user interface have come in the last few beta builds, another indication Jaguar is nearly ready.

Boy, is it going to be fab MacWorld Expo in NY in a couple of weeks.