Related link: https://rollyo.com/index.html

I created a RollYo search log called “Dashboard Dev”. It’s pretty neat and does help a lot in focusing the searches towards dashboard development topics.

RollYo limits you to search entire domains, not individual directories/pages/sections of a domain, so it limits your ability to focus your search in huge multi-topic sites like Apple’s. Of course you can game the engine and include the word “Dashboard” in a search. That will make it will find links on Apple’s pages about Dashboard, but limits the results from the Javascript and HTML help sites that have information that Dashboard developers would be interested in, but don’t specifically reference Dashboard.

Of course Apple’s site (or MacDevCenter’s for that matter) only have a couple of pages on something like Dashboard, so you don’t necessarily have to search those pages, just know the links.

Maybe a mashup of del.icio.us and RollYo would solve the “problem”: del.icio.us for the hard links by tag and RollYo for the links within sites that have more and disperse information.

We have seen public remarks from Apple and the recording industry as talks get underway to determine the immediate future of the iTunes Music Store. Some of the comments have been just wrong, such as the quote misattributed to Warner Music’s Michael Nash recently at the CTIA show. The “Well, now we’ve got another MTV, in Apple. And we have to deal with it,” remark was really made by Kenneth Hertz, partner at Goldring Hertz and Lichtenstein LLP, a law firm representing major recording industry artists.

Like many following the negotiations, I’m a little uneasy about how things may shake out. But for now, I’m going to sit tight and see what Apple can do. If you have any insights about these talks, I’d like to hear them.

Following up on my article last week, Again with the emacs, and prompted by a commenter in that post, I downloaded Aquamacs, an ‘Emacs distribution with customizations and an enhanced Mac user experience’, according to the developer. The 33 MB dmg file gives you a 124 MB app bundle to drag to your hard drive. This already seems excessive for a text editor — but of course, Emacs Is Not Really A Text Editor.

(Author spends a few seconds trying to make something out of the EINRATE acronym.)

Here’s a developer screenshot of Aquamacs Emacs running on Tiger to get you acquainted.

Upon launching the app, it in turn launched Help Viewer to let me know what was new in this release. Coincidentally, Aquamacs 0.9.6 has just been released in the past couple of days. Closing Help, I switched over to the Aquamacs scratch window — like regular Emacs, a starting point.

The first thing I noticed was in the menubar — there are two sets of shortcuts available for frequently used commands, a Mac-friendly version and an Emacs-friendly version. Copy, for example, has Command-C and H-c. Or Close Current Buffer: Command-w and H-w. Not all commands are done this way, but seemingly most of the biggies are.

In the short Aquamacs session I had today, while not earth-shatteringly illuminating (no vi defections here), it made me feel a lot more comfy about the Emacs experience. If, like me, you are a combo Mac and Unix guy, though perhaps starting on the Mac side of things, Aquamacs might well be a good stepping stone into a powerful new editing experience. And there is a ton of power to be had.

However, the point of my trying out Aquamacs wasn’t so much attempting to find comfiness, nor really as a stepping stone. I decided to give it another try because I recalled a technological tenet of mine, that it is better to have many tools at your disposal than only one. Even if you are not highly proficient in all of them, knowing them all at least cursorily makes you a better programmer, administrator, or even user.

Much like the futility of the OS wars begins to grate on you after a while, the Editor Wars — while fun — do every programmer who ignores the other side a disservice.

And by the way, Emacs devotees will be happy to know I wrote everything after the first paragraph of this article in Aquamacs. :)

:wq

Whoops. Old habits die hard.

We had been hearing the rumors for some time that Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 would be Windows only. This week we learned those rumors were true.

I can’t speak for Adobe or anyone else, but my guess is that Apple’s homegrown products, such as iPhoto 5, don’t set very well with Adobe strategists — something like, “too many similar products in an already small market.” That thinking does resonate with the business side of my mind… to a degree.

But I’d like to point out a few things that favor releasing Elements 4 for the Mac. First, there really isn’t a product like it on the platform. iPhoto 5 is not Elements. They do different things. I recommend iPhoto 5 and an image editor. Elements has been a powerful, affordable option to fill that need.

Second, the Mac platform is a haven for digital photographers and visual artists. It’s an easy entry point that allows folks to stretch as far as they want. When you think about getting serious, you think about Photoshop CS2. Having a current version of Elements for the platform provides a natural upgrade path for these types of customers.

Finally, there’s an uneasy feeling in the Mac community that Adobe and Apple aren’t getting along as well as we’d like them too. No Elements 4 certainly doesn’t help with this uncertainty.

On the bright side, there’s a big opportunity here for someone to step in and provide us with a powerful image editor for less than $100. Or maybe it’s already here?

Your thoughts on any of this…

Apple’s decision to come clean with the iPod nano screen problem will be welcomed by a lot of people, not least Matthew Peterson, who started the online campaign highlighting the issue.

It was a nice change to see Phil Schiller publicly declaring that Apple was aware of a problem, and was immediately doing something about it. Did Peterson’s campaign change their hearts? Perhaps.

This is by no means the first time people have complained about Apple products. There’s been plenty of complaints about the iMac G5’s internals getting too hot and occasionally melting, but eventually Apple responded with a repair program. Then there was the battery recall for G4 iBook and Powerbook laptops earlier this year.

None of which will be much comfort for people who have had problems with dead pixels on their flat screen displays. Yes, this is an old one but it still gets my goat every time I think about it. Apple, along with every other computer manufacturer, points out that if they absorbed the cost of replacing every machine with dead pixels, those machines would retail at far higher prices in the first place. As a result, a certain number of dead pixels is considered “acceptable”.

In the UK, though, there’s a law that says that any product sold has to be “fit for purpose”, and that the company that sold you the computer, not the company that manufactured it, has initial responsibility for dealing with your complaint. Ian Betteridge wrote something very informative about this recently which explains the details.

I’d be interested to hear if any UK-based readers have managed to get a dead pixels problem resolved by the retailer under this consumer protection law.

Any more positive experiences?

While we all figure out how we’re going to carry around our nanos, here’s a high quality sleeve that’s affordable. The nano Wrapper is a “super slim, stay-on tube with access to iPod nano hold switch, dock connector and headphone jack, made from Wrappers’ exclusive treated faux suede fabric designed to add scratch protection without adding bulk. Lined in super soft cream, faux suede (the same fabric used to line Italian leather gloves).”

You can get one for £16.99 with free postage (that’s less than $10 for those of us in the States). Mine is ordered.

Wow, what a great turnout for this year’s Mac DevCenter Survey. Last time I looked, we had more than 1,300 respondents (once again the highest turnout among our site surveys).

As of today, I’ve closed the survey so the link to the Zoomerang site is no longer active. On Friday afternoon, I’ll publish the summary of results so you can see how your peers rated this site. I have to tell you, there were a few surprises.

I’ll have plenty more to say about that in the upcoming article. Until then, I want to thank you for taking the time to contribute your opinions.

I noticed what seemed like a minor screen marking the day after I bought my iPod nano. But, now I wonder if it is a screen issue or something else entirely (at least for my particular unit).
You can see the bottom right corner of my screen and part of the shell in the photo attached here.

I read Derrick Story’s
Mystifying nano Screen Issue blog as well as a bunch of articles like AppleInsider’s
Concerns mount over iPod nano LCD durability.
I chatted briefly with Derrick and decided to blog my observations (sample size = 1, so take it with a grain of salt).

I’m pretty careful with gadgets in general.
The iPod nano sits in a re-purposed soft-cover PDA case (I couldn’t find a hard cover one that suited the tiny iPod lying around my home).
My nano is mostly used sitting upright and relatively stable in a coffee cup holder in my car.
This is the same place my larger and heavier Pocket PC sat when it served as my primary MP3 car audio player.
Every now and then the nano gets placed in a shirt pocket or a conference badge holder.

So, I took a long and hard look at my nano and noted that the scratches have not affected the LCD display itself.
Then, I noticed that the surface blemishes actually extend to a good portion of the nano shell.
For my specific nano, I think the problem is not so much the screen but whatever coating covers the screen and shell.
I saw similar problems with a clear protective cover that HP used on its Jornada 420 several years ago.

I’m taking my nano on trip to Seattle this week.
Fingers crossed that it survives what should be an otherwise mild and uneventful set of flights.
It will be sitting in my shirt pocket or conference badge holder for the rest of the week.

More nano screen issue thoughts?

Just like everyone else in the Mac community, I’ve been following the discussion about the nano screen issues. There have been reports of two problems: 1) the screen seems to scratch easier than other iPods, and 2) it will actually crack under normal use.

I’m curious about these reports, especially those who say they’ve seen marred nanos displayed in Apple Stores (wow, talk about bad marketing if this is true!). You can review this discussion for yourself on flawedmusicplayer.com. These reports fly in the face of reviews by other sources such as ars technica that did all sorts of nasty things to their nanos and commented on their robustness — definitely no screen cracking from carrying it in a top shirt pocket.

My 4GB black nano has not suffered any marring or screen cracking either, even though I’ve been testing it constantly for my previous posts. In fact, my only complaint has been that my battery doesn’t last 14 hours.

So, what’s the deal here? I doubt that the unsatisfied nano owners are making up stories. Why would they? And I don’t think that I and other satisfied owners have been that careful handling our devices. It almost sounds like there are two types of nano screens out there… possibly from two different vendors supplying them to Apple?

If you’re a nano owner, I’d like to hear your screen experiences — good or bad. And if you have any insight as to how these things are produced, I’d love to hear from you.

Russell Beattie’s provocative Why I might switch back post has attracted a great deal of attention over the weekend, and it’s hardly surprising.

I think it’s fair to say that in the last few years, Macs running OS X have become widely used among a certain section of the weblogging and tech conference-going digerati; when one of the best known people in that group decided to suddenly stand up and say what they don’t like about the Mac, it was bound to get some people all wound up.

I’m not one of the OS X zealots who instantly assumes that all criticism of the system is wrong or unfair. Several of Beattie’s points hit home, fair and square (such as the sigh-inducing awfulness of the Finder, or general system slowness, or the high cost of .Mac).

That said, I can’t stop myself from answering back on just a handful of Russell’s comments, ones I either don’t understand, or simply can’t agree with.

Anyone who says that Macs are more stable than Windows are smoking dope. I have two brand new Macs and they regularly go wacky and need reboots.

This first comment is the most unexpected of all. Yes, Macs do crash sometimes and yes, sometimes they need to be rebooted. But I’d never say that any of my machines running OS X has needed regular or even frequent reboots. The last time I had a Windows machine, it needed daily reboots.

Like it or not, it’s a Windows world, and interop has to be a priority. If I take a few screen shots, paste them into a PowerPoint For Mac presentation and send them off, and no one can see them because the images have defaulted to some wacky Quicktime tiff? That’s bad.

These days, I’d say interoperability between Windows and OS X is pretty good. It’s rare that I receive a file that I can’t open, or convert to something more convenient. And the example problem is odd; last time I looked, system screenshots were saved as PDF or PNG. Wacky Quicktime tiffs as defaults? I’ve never encountered them.

The widescreen on the Powerbook is completely overrated. Web pages and documents are tall, not wide. Because the wide screen lowers the viewing center of the screen, I end up getting a crik in my neck looking “down” at the wide screen, rather than more straight ahead on PC based laptops.

This one had me scratching my head. How, exactly, are PC laptops easier to look at straight ahead? How does being “wide screen” lower the viewing center? To back up my point, I’ll mention that I recently got myself a Powerbook (widescreen) to replace my old iBook (most certainly not widescreen). I haven’t noticed my neck being cricked any more or less than usual.

What is the friggin’ deal with the .dmg files? The install process is so broken. Unzip .dmg.gz, mount .dmg, copy to Applications, unmount .dmg, delete .dmg, delete dmg.gz. Bleh.

Dragging one icon from one window to another is far easier than using most Windows installers, I’d say. Plus, most of those installers are no more tidy, often leaving behind the installer file itself and an icon for the newly installed app on the desktop.

Does anyone use Sherlock any more?

No.

Wait. You *do* use Sherlock?

The Mozilla Minimo browser for Windows CE (Windows Mobile Pocket PC) was released on Sept. 22. I took it for a quick (relatively speaking) test drive keeping in mind that the project is in a very early development stage.

Minimo 0.009 Released

One of the first issues that came up was that the release note clearly states that Minimo does not start on the Dell Axim X50v.
Guess which Pocket PC is the one I prefer to use every day?
I didn’t see the older HP iPAQ 2215 on the compatibility list (see link below) but decided to try Minimo on it (2215) anyway.

Minimo on Windows CE Matrix

The HP iPAQ 2215 was released in 2005 and runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003.
You can find my article about Windows Mobile 2003 running on the iPAQ at:

Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Software for Pocket PC 2003

Despite its relative age, the iPAQ 2215 is a relative speedy Pocket PC with a 400MHz PXA255 processor with 64MB RAM.
Minimo wanted 12.0902MB RAM for installation and I only had 6MB free system storage RAM.
So, I opted to install it on a SD flash memory card.
The installation went smoothly.
But, as the version number 0.009 indicates, it is very early in the development stage and should not be compared to production quality products.
So, I was not surprised by the spartan user interface.
I was a little surprised by how slowly it started up and ran.
However, it does work and I was able to to search using Google connected over a 802.11b WiFi network connection.

Tried Minomo on a new Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC like the Dell Axim X51v? Let us know if it works on it (or not).

A few weeks ago, we were visiting family for a weekend and my three-year-old son was introduced to the delights of the Paint program on Windows.

It’s almost become something that all modern children have to experience - their first encounter with real software, their first use of a mouse. My son took to it all very easily and was soon creating his own works of electronic scribble art, much to the delight of his grandparents.

Of course I knew what the next step would be. Next time he saw me working on my Mac, he asked me: “Daddy, can I do drawing?” He wanted to play with Paint again, but we don’t have a Windows machine for him to use.

So I quickly trawled around for some simple drawing and painting apps for Mac, and he and I have spent some happy hours since then trying them out.

The first one we tried was Palette, which had my son chewing his lip with concentration and shouting with delight when he’d found something new.

Tux Paint is very appealing, partly because it’s open source and partly because it is so well designed. Every aspect of the interface is visually appealing but easy for a child to comprehend. I particularly like the way drawings are saved and re-opened, using thumbnails. You never need to type a filename.

Another one we downloaded was μPaint, which is a nice drawing app but not suitable for children - well, not young children anyway. Teenagers, or perhaps younger ones with some experience with computers, will be able to dive right in.

What’s your favorite kids app?

I’ve been editing Chris Kohler’s Retro Gaming Hacks, and I’m really bitten by the bug. My GBA collection is overflowing with retrogaming titles, and my Mac and Linux computers are sharing desk space with my Atari 130XE. And now I’ve found another way to play these old-school games.

GameTap is Turner Broadcasting’s subscription-based gaming on demand service. The list of games is pretty impressive, but what really jumps out at me is the platforms represented: Dreamcast, Sega Master System, Intellivision, Genesis, Atari 2600, Arcade games, and more. It looks like they’ll have a decent selection of modern games, but retro games currently dominate the list.

Although it’s not officially launched, they are letting users trickle in. I signed up for early access at gametap.com (on the lower left of the page where they ask for your email address and birthdate) and got access within a day. Currently, the only platform supported is Windows, and the client is a 70MB download. Their sign-up process says “Apple Macintosh computers are not currently supported (but we’re working on it)”.

At first, I thought “iTunes for Retro Games”, but it’s really more like a Napster to Go, since you don’t get to keep the games you’ve downloaded. And from there, it’s all downhill with the music store metaphor, since you can’t download the games to a handheld device… but wouldn’t that be a killer feature for Turner Entertainment to add to GameTap?

Overall, I’m in love with GameTap. There are games in there (such as Zaxxon) that I haven’t seen in any other retro gaming collection. The user experience is great: the interface is intuitive, enticing, and encourages exploration. Video shorts are woven nicely into the experience, and appear shortly after a game begins loading. Yeah, I think it’s excessive that it takes 10 seconds for Adventure to initalize, but I imagine they want to give the video shorts a shot at getting your attention. And it worked: more than once, I kept watching the short even after my game had finished loading. And plus, as a Colecovision fanboy, I am already comfortable with the idea of a 10+ second delay that’s in there for no good reason at all.

When you load a game, you get a screenshot, summary of the game, and links to more information, including box art, game history, and more. The controls are usually some combination of arrow keys, and X, C, and V for action buttons.

I have two gripes. First, even though GameTap keeps games in a local cache, there’s no offline mode that I could find. They could take a cue from Steam and come up with a way to provide an offline mode. Second, as much as I like the user interface, it’s got one huge drawback: it’s full-screen, all the time. I’d much prefer something in the system tray so I can jump into a game quickly and out again when I’m done. When I need a two-minute shmup fix, I don’t want to spend three minutes logging in and loading the whole game system. That said, GameTap is the best-behaved full-screen program I’ve used in a long time. I can Alt-Tab back to Windows and leave it running in the background with no glitches.

Turner has launched a very reasonable ($15/month) legal emulation service. The selection of games is wide enough that I may hang onto it after the trial (1 free month, first 3 months at $10 a month). And while I was waiting for Space Invaders to download, it started up a strange video of a guy in an Atari shirt reading poetry in an arcade. It really doesn’t get any better than that :-)

What’s your high score?

I’m a big fan of the single entry approach to work. That’s why I embrace apps such as Address Book and iCal. For my digital images, iPhoto 5 is my database. Everything goes there first. I annotate the images in the comments field, and apply the working name in the title field.

Thanks to some excellent plug-ins, apps, and services, this is working great for me. I use Automator to prepare and upload pictures to my flickr page, .Mac for my album pages for clients, and BetterHTML Export for building custom album pages and authoring photo CDs.

I have a new favorite plug-in called Photon. This open source software is a plug-in for iPhoto that enables me to post a photo as a weblog entry to a Moveable Type site (also TypePad, Blojsom, and WordPress). It’s a free download.

Once you install Photon, you access it via Share > Export in iPhoto 5, then click on the Weblog tab. You have to configure the plug-in so it uploads the images to the proper location on your MT site. After doing so, you just click the Export button and the image goes straight from iPhoto to your site — resized and including title and caption. Photon also works with iPhoto 4.

Thanks to Photon, and software like it, I’m able to keep all of my photos, and comments about them, in one place (iPhoto), then serve them up just about anywhere I want.

Palm, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless have a
joint press conference scheduled for Monday, Sept. 26.
I’m guessing they are not announcing an iTunes phone :-). But, what I’d really like to know is whether Palm-focused sites will start to cover and support the 700w or focus purely on the Palm OS side which is now owned by Access.

Earlier this month, I
wrote about Japan’s Access buying PalmSource
(the software half of the original Palm) and, therefore, Palm OS.
Now, Palm (the hardware half of the original Palm) is having a joint press conference with Microsoft and Verizon Wireless to announce the much discuss Windows Mobile based Treo 700w (formerly referred to as the Treo 670).

I’m really curious to learn what the Palm-centric communities thoughts are regarding to their Palm reporting and user support going forward.
Do you plan to cover and support (via discussion boards and how-to articles) the 700w running Windows Mobile or focus on only on devices running Palm OS?

Do you run a Palm-centric web site? Let us know whether you plan to cover/support the Treo 700w community.

Related link: https://bevhoward.com/Rita/

My friend and fellow Mobile Devices MVP Bev Howard put together a low-bandwidth mobile device friendly web site that provides information about Hurricane Rita at:

https://bevhoward.com/Rita/

He describes the site as:
This page was created for use by mobile and other slow connection users to enable them to get critical information on Hurricane Rita without wasting time and bandwidth downloading unrelated information, junk, complexity, advertisements and other junk that seems always be present.

Bev provides a bunch of links to mobile device friendly information from sources such as NOAA and other reliable information sources.

Have other suggestions for mobile device-friendly low-bandwidth severe weather information sources? Let us know here.

I am a text editor window shopper extraordinaire. With as much time as I spend either hacking config files or writing text, having a good editor in my toolbelt is a must. I’ll download pretty much any new one that has any promise, just to give it a shot. Sometimes, against my better judgment.

Yesterday, I downloaded Carbon Emacs to give it a looksee. A 39.1 MB dmg file. I didn’t get around to checking it out until today, when I realized it expands to a 184.9 MB Emacs.app bundle. Got it copied to my Applications folder and started it up.

Once again, like every other time I think to try out Emacs, I hit random keys, perused the help file, realized I didn’t feel like going through the learning curve just to edit text, and gave up. This time, however, I stuck around long enough to play Tetris for a while. Did you know you can play Tetris in your text editor? You can if it’s Emacs. Check under the ‘Tools’ menu, at the bottom — you’ll find like 10 games to play.

So I trashed Emacs.app. Feeling better. What’s the old saying? ‘Emacs is a nice operating system. The only thing it lacks is a good editor.’ The ‘nice’ part is arguable, too. ;) However, this is no commentary on Carbon Emacs itself — it seems a well-enough-done port.

I’m rather astounded by the size of the app bundle, but there is a lot more going on inside than just a text editor. And that’s rather the problem.

So why do I do this to myself?

(By the way, this is strictly a commentary on what works for me — I’m not about to get embroiled in an editor war with somebody else’s heartfelt favoritism.)

Here’s a bit of nostalgia for you, by way of explanation. On my old Apple ][+ back in the day, there were a handful of programs I spent the vast majority of my time in, not counting my BASIC programming: Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, Decathlon, and a word processor — the name of which escapes me at the moment, but imagine a terminal window program, all keyboard-command driven (no mice, of course), with simple formatting tools. All geared toward one goal: writing text, saving it on floppy disks (that were floppy), and printing it on our dot-matrix. I wrote school papers, fiction, all kinds of stuff in that program. Loved it.

Were there challenges? Sure, of course. But here’s what it had that trumped everything else:

Green characters on a black background. And nothing else.

Bliss.

This love of austere simplicity in my editors has followed me over the decades since, and even if I got distracted for a while by Word back in the early 90s (the destructive path of one macro virus took care of that little anomaly), it has never truly disappeared. In fact, when I was first learning unix along with my first Internet exposure back in 1994, I began lusting after the terminal window.

And now, here I am, in the enviable position (particularly from the point of view of myself in the distant past) of running a crazily powerful multimedia-based, unix-like operating system that is virtually constantly on the net, but which also contains (behind all the glitz) those lovely green characters on a black background.

So that, in a round-about way, is why I occasionally start up Emacs, despite remaining true to vi. I guess I want to like the behemoth, because I have a soft spot in my heart for terminal-based editors. Plus I have a text editor addiction. But it is with all my best affection that I give Emacs a miss one more time.

:wq

Related link: https://wired-vig.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,35201,00.html?tw=wn_story_rela…

Although I do enjoy a good history lesson, I’m not usually the one to bring up old news. Just a while ago, however, I stumbled across an old Wired News article from all the way back in 2000 that I thought was just too good not to mention.

It’s a very short article that you can zip through in just a minute or so, but here are some interesting quotes from it when viewed in light of the upcoming Intel move:

Apple has no plans to change its fundamental business model and release MacOS X for Intel machines. “I’ve personally heard Steve say they would never do that…” (Never say never)

“There’s no chance of any of that appearing in x86…There’s just too much work to run on anything but PowerPC.” (Too much work?)

“…all of Apple’s software developers would have to rewrite their applications to run on a MacOS X/Intel machine.” (Really?)

Aside from the few chuckles I had when reading it because of the obvious irony, I have to wonder if perhaps universal binaries weren’t at least a twinkle in Steve’s eye back then.

What do you think — an ironic coincidence or steadfast planning?

Related link: https://maps.google.com

I think that we could all agree that Google Maps is one sweet application. Totally breaking the MapQuest norm, they threw in satellite/hybrid views, latitude/longitude navigation, cool AJAX-enabled scrolling, and an API (well, sort of) among other things. Who would have ever thought cartography could be so much fun?

Given that Google Maps isn’t just your typical mapping experience, I’ve been pondering the possibilities of how it could be used to enhance desktop applications. Two apps that have already been enhanced by Google Maps come to mind right away: Address Book and Dashboard. In my opinion, both of these are great places for lacing in Google Maps, but I have to think that the best is yet to come. After all, when something becomes as pervasive as quickly as Google Maps did, it’s just one of those commodities that people are going to start expecting to see everywhere — not just on the web.

Fortunately for OS X developers, integrating Google Maps into your apps is cake. In fact, I almost decided not to even mention it — but I couldn’t resist because I thought the broader context of it all deserved some discussion.

Using WebKit, you can create a browser by writing only one line of code. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s true. Instead of reinventing the wheel here, however, take a look at the Mac DevCenter BYOB tutorial. When you build your own browser, you could go ahead and load up Google Maps right away, but it won’t be a very friendly user experience. You’ll be told that your browser isn’t supported, and if you load the page anyway, you’ll get slammed with intermittent messages like this one time and time again. Eventually, you’ll risk losing your patience. Let’s not go there.

“But Safari uses WebKit and it works fine on Google Maps. Why doesn’t WebKit work when I try,” you ask. Well, here’s the thing: browsers send in a UserAgent string to each web server they talk to as part of the normal chatter that goes on. If you want to know what this string looks like, you can type this into your browser’s address bar to see for yourself:

javascript:document.writeln(navigator.userAgent)

If you don’t get a response, wrap it up in a simple HTML page and load it in the browser to get something back. It should look like this if you’re using Safari:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412.5

Your homebrewed browser, on the other hand, gives you something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.7 (KHTML, like Gecko)

You can see that Safari adds a little bit to the end, and Google Maps doesn’t appreciate our homebrewed browser’s non-compliance. Did you really think that Big Brother was the only one watching?!? Fortunately, we can care of things very easily, but we’ll have to tell a lie to do it. Here goes, (ok, so it’s more of a spoof than a lie.)


//in awakeFromNib:
[webWindow setCustomUserAgent:UserAgentString];

In the method call, webWindow is an outlet to your WebView in Interface Builder, and UserAgentString is an NSString containing a UserAgent value like the one from Safari that Google Maps supports.

From here, you could do a lot of neat things to integrate Google Maps into your application. Remember that your user interface doesn’t have to remotely resemble a web browser at all. Instead, you could load the content in the WebView using an interface of your own choosing or through some other automated process by manipulating the query string. For example, if you wanted to load a map of Springfield, VA, pass the WebView the value “https://maps.google.com/?q=springfield+va”. For more complex examples of URLs with custom query strings, click “Link to this page” in the sidebar of Google Maps.

Now, go give it a try.

What are some examples of how you would like to see Google Maps laced into desktop applications?

Apple is a very image-conscious company. It controls the output of information better than any other in its sector, indeed better than almost any other company of any kind. There are lots of secrets within Apple, and mostly they are kept pretty well.

All of which makes it interesting when the senior management allow the tiniest snippet of information to come out.

In this week’s “Meet the press” event in Paris, Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller talked about a range of subjects. I suspect they had a list of points they wanted to make, whether or not they were asked the right questions by the assembled journalists.

One comment by Steve Jobs caught my attention more than the others.

Jobs promised new technology on Intel Macs that will prevent the installation of OS X on non-Apple hardware. He’s very confident about this. Jobs wanted to remind us of this summer’s widespread reports of OS X installations on x86 machines, because he’s sure he has an answer to prevent that happening on a massive scale once the switch has begun.

Consider: because Apple is so secretive, it never tells us about new technologies in advance. Everything gets unveiled for the first time when Steve is on stage - that “Oh, one more thing” moment that gets the Mac conference goers so excited. But here’s Steve, in front of a bunch of journalists, telling us about something before it’s even available. This is unusual for him. That’s why I think it’s something he’s got a lot of confidence in.

Now we can spend hours discussing precisely what sort of piracy-protection Apple might want to employ (and the folks at Slashdot have been doing exactly that), but my favorite summing-up of the whole thing comes from a Metafilter thread from February this year, in which poster kindall said:

Apple copy-protects their operating system with a hardware dongle. This dongle is called a Macintosh.

Wise words. And yet … even hardware dongles have been cracked and sidestepped in the past. Precisely what Steve Jobs has placed his confidence in will be something for us to ponder and discuss interminably between now and next June, when the first Mactel machines are (still) on schedule to be unveiled.

I bought a “Copy Controlled” audio CD the other day, but it ripped fine on my Mac

This week, I have been mostly getting annoyed by email software. There’s a pattern to it. Mail does something annoying, like taking 20 seconds to delete a message, and in frustration I rush off and download some other client, install it, set it up, try it out, and soon discover it does something else equally, if not more annoying.

Things that annoy me about Mail:

• It takes forever to do stuff
• Some stuff it can’t do at all, like subscribe to folders on my IMAP server
• The activity window: it hogs huge screen space; it doesn’t always show what’s actually going on
• Phantom messages that just disappear
• Search suckage (so, searching “Entire contents” does not include the “From” header, I have to search them both separately. Not really “entire contents” is it?)

(That said, Mail integrates well with everything else in OS X; and Mail Act-On is the most useful plugin for anything in the whole world ever.)

Things that annoy me about Eudora:

• The. Toolbar. Must. Die.
• Anything configurable with x-eudora-settings is, by definition, overcomplicated
• It insists on using its own Out folder instead of the Sent messages folder I want it to use on the IMAP server
• No manner of clicking on links makes them open in the background. Eudora just can’t stop itself from bringing the browser to the front
• Lack of keyboard shortcuts; moving a message from the inbox to one folder on my IMAP server requires too many clicks

(That said, Eudora is faster than anything else around, and the searching is second to none.)

Things that annoy me about Thunderbird:

• Why do message windows have to display the next message when I’ve finished with the last one? When I’ve finished with a message, I just want the window to close
• Can’t get links to open in the background
• Why does it have to be so fiddly to make everything happen in plain text? I know people who prefer plain text email are getting thin on the ground these days, but don’t we at least deserve a simple “Send all mail as plain text” preference widget?

(That said, Thunderbird is faster and better behaved than Mail, and does pretty much everything I need. It’s only niggly details that stop me from using it.)

What software has annoyed you today?