Category Archives: Apple

Apple, Mac, iPhone, and the ecosystem.

Zoto

Apple, Design, Linux, Open Source, WordPress

Zoto looks pretty neat. I signed up earlier and also set up an account for my Mom. But why isn’t WordPress a “supported blog”? Only a 136 users so far as I write this. Go sign up and try it out. They’ve done some interesting things with the interface and they have an open source photo client available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. I couldn’t get the Linux client working on my Mom’s computer, had no trouble at home on Gentoo though. I think it was an old version of Python.

I uploaded a few not-yet-on-the-photolog photos to my Zoto page to get the party started. (The fact that some of those are from Christmas and New Year’s means I really need to catch up.)

Apple’s Challenge

Apple, Linux, Open Source, Software

If I was Apple I wouldn’t be worried at all about Windows, I would be worried about the next generation of Linux desktop software. The main reason I’m considering a G5 for my next desktop purchase is that I want a powerful machine that Just Works when I plug stuff in and can still run all the open source tools like Subversion, rysync, PHP, MySQL, etc etc that I rely on. It’s also interesting that all the software I regard these days as truly essential isn’t desktop software, it’s server software. I can survive switching text editors or graphics programs or even operating systems, but if I had to use ASP and SQL Server instead of Perl/PHP/Python and MySQL I’m not sure what I would do. I can function without these things on my desktop, but having to access them remotely (if it’s pretty transparent) prohibits some pretty cool stuff and diminishes my productivity.

Windows and OS X are tools I use to get things done. Linux desktop software (X, KDE, Gnome, etc) is a hobby. If I could focus on getting work done instead of getting my wireless card to work I could consider as a serious and cheaper alternative to a OS X desktop. (No matter what I want one of those new Cinema displays though.)

To preemptively clarify, my comments do not at all apply to Linux in the server space, where it by far the most mature and capable platform out there and I would hardly consider anything else.

A Foot of Mac

Apple, Software

I broke down:

Three retail boxes, one for Keynote software, one for a 12 inch Powerbook, one for an iPod

Now I’m just walking around with a big goofy grin on my face. First thoughts:

  • I cannot tab in forms like I used to
  • Enter lets you change the filename instead of drilling down
  • The aliasing of the fonts looks funny at first but you get used to it
  • It’s faster than my Vaio
  • Things are very intuitive (e.g., setting up my bluetooth mouse)
  • iSync rocks
  • Setting up my phone as a GPRS modem was not intuitive.
  • I want something like Putty
  • 256MB of memory is not enough
  • I’m getting used the quirks pretty quickly
  • I keep hitting the trackpad when I’m typing and erasing stuff

It’s not a total switch, I still have Windows XP on a laptop and a desktop that I use daily, and my Gentoo desktop has been running very well. This is just getting my feet wet on a new platform, and greatly expanding my testing enviroment. A big part of my motivation was that a grossly disproportionate part of my audience (about one in six) is on OS X, a platform that I previously had no easy way to test on.

I would love to hear software recommendations and general tips and tricks. One thing I really miss is I used to have shortcut keys that would launch putty SSH sessions to different servers and use key authentication so I didn’t have to type anything, about 5 of them, and not having that is actually slowing me down a lot.

Mac IE 5 Support Worth It?

Apple, Music, Web Standards, WordPress

In Joining the Dark Side -OR- Is Mac IE 5 Support Worth $1,500, Scott responds to Tantek’s calling out of the new Feedster’s lack of support for Mac IE. Personally I’m sympathetic to Feedster’s case because I’ve had to spend hours talking to someone with a Mac trying to debug Mac IE issues with this site and wordpress.org and ended up having to change my favorite list menu technique from using floats to display: inline, which meant changing all the other menu styles to compensate. It was a pain.

I know that when I’m tweaking and checking things in different browsers, the number of my audience who uses that browser isn’t always the most important thing. In the previous case the only Mac IE I had heard anything from since both of the sites started was Tantek, and that was important enough to spend a couple hours of my time on. Imagine if you’re doing a job and the client’s boss uses Netscape 4, (god help you and) suddenly that browser becomes much more important in your testing, and you should triple your rate.

However, is this something the Web Standards Project should be interested in the same way we have been All Music or Odeon? I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but in my opinion it’s not the same at all. Feedster’s pages are a few trivial mistakes away from valid XHTML 1.1 and valid CSS, which is no easy task. (MIME issues aside.) Of course they should fix those mistakes, but it is a matter of a few minutes rather than 1-1.5 days. They aren’t writing to one browser or propietary technologies, they’re writing to modern standards and excluding browsers that have serious flaws in that area. Is that so different from the browser upgrade campaign?

From a user experience point of view, excluding Mac IE users might be a good idea as well. If Feedster allowed Mac IE users to visit and they saw a messed up layout (or no layout at all), as Tantek has suggested, then their perception of the Feedster brand, reliability, and image would be negative. I bet Keith would have some great thoughts on this. If they’re given a message that the site doesn’t support Mac IE, (honestly) they’ve probably seen this before and will just switch to another browser for that site. In my experience Mac users tend to be total browser flirts, and have every browser you’ve ever heard of installed. I would rather they open up my site in Safari or Firefox.

If Tantek was here I imagine he would counter that those browser options are really only valid for users on OS X, and that ignores hundreds of iMacs and such in libraries and such. Of course the question that a site owner needs to ask himself then is that in terms of costs and benefits, does that half of a single percent audience in libraries on older computers overlap with the audience you’re targetting with your site? If I was doing an ecommerce selling something like BMW accessories, I wouldn’t even give it a second thought. This isn’t about the many innovations that Mac IE introduced or its excellent standards support for its time, the issue is where Mac IE stands today.

On the bright side, Feedster has characterized this as a business cost/benefit decision and said if anyone sends them Mac IE CSS they’ll use it, which seems like a good concession. Of course I think Feedster should support Mac IE, and a day and a half to add support seems a little high, but if they choose not to I can understand.

New Feedster

Apple

The new Feedster is out and seems to be a world better in terms of speed and reliability. The new system is certainly influenced by Technorati (or is it vice versa? I don’t know.) in everything from “claiming” blogs down to the waiting image. They’ve got some neat services. You can read Scott’s entry on the launch, complete with a picture of a cat. Looks good, but that is the most horrid permalink I have ever seen on a blog. Is that s9y default? Update: And thank goodness they took the beta label off! I hope this is a trend. Update 2: It doesn’t play with IE 5 Mac though.

I Now Have… Pants

Apple, Music, Travel

The weekend was a ton of fun, starting off with me barely recovered but going to Rene’s birthday party (which has pics up now), next day getting a Tungsten T and meeting some H-Town people (Kathy and Christine summarize nicely), and then taking an unexpected road trip on Sunday to Navasota and meeting my sister. You see, when I left Austin after SxSW I was in a little bit of a hurry and I ended up leaving 3 pairs of pants, 2 belts, and 3 shirts. I just flat out forgot them. Picked those up and had lunch with my sister and her roommate. Charleen has a thousand stories. We visited a graveyard with an ancestor buried there and it was an interesting experience all around.

Today was a beautiful, beautiful day. Many ups and downs, but the highlight was that the new lenses for my glasses came in. My prescription has changed quite a bit, and I’ve been seeing the world in sort of a haze for I guess a year now. As I waited for them to put the new lenses in I walked from store to store, browsing at Radio Shack, listening to some music, eating a slice of apple pie, and when I got my glasses back I put them on and gasped. There couldn’t be a better time of the year for this to happen. As I walked outside I felt the sun kiss my skin and the trees are beautiful and OH MY GOD look at the amazing leaves I can see each one. Everything is so incredibly crisp I just want to grab it and make sure it’s all real.

X-Files Mark

Apple, Travel

Out of the blue, my Mom asked me what was that strange mark on my neck, and I had no clue. A quick trip to the mirror revealed what looks like a large bite right on my adam’s apple, which is quite conspicious. Mom examined it, and said it looked like a spider bite or something similar. Great. Is this sweet revenge on the part of spiders? When did this spider bite me? Why didn’t I notice? Will it make me buff? So many unanswered questions.