Since you keep hitting me with these spammy popups no matter how many times I click on “Do not show again”, you leave me no choice but to switch to VirtualBox (much better software in any case, and less Windows integration means less chances a virus breaking out of the virtualized Windows ghetto.
Oh, and installing MacFuse without asking permission (unlike VMware Fusion): not cool.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
In a triumph of hope over experience, I recently “upgraded” from Adobe CS3 Design Standard to CS5 Design Standard. I hardly ever use Photoshop any more since I started using Aperture and Lightroom (originally a Macromedia product, no matter what the lame “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom” face-saving branding may try to claim), the main driver for the purchase was actually InDesign CS5 and its ePub functions.
Of course, this is Adobe. Previous versions gratuitously included crud like a full Opera install (an older version, insecure, naturally) just to display a splash screen, or a full MySQL install to power Acrobat search. I never install Acrobat, of course, since that bloated and bug-ridden piece of garbage managed to steal the crown for most insecure software from Internet Explorer, no small feat.
Adobe does not want to confuse users with streamlined and efficient software, so they decided to include the mostly useless Growl on-screen notification program to nag you into registering. Increasing bloat and attack surface for malware is not a good idea, nor is interrupting creative people’s flow with interruptions. Of course, helping clients Get Things Done is a low priority at Adobe, as evidenced by their product choices.
You have to pity the Growl developers, whose reputation will suffer from guilt by association. I dislike interruptions and do not find it useful, but many people do and rave about it. They installed it by choice, not as a sneaky drive-by install for slimy marketing purposes.
Some more annoyances in CS5:
In other words, unlike Lightroom, CS5 is designed to be endured, not to delight.
Delicious Library is one of the slickest apps on the Mac, and won countless design accolades. Essentially, it is a database for your books, CDs and DVDs (version 2 added gadgets), and it looks glorious on a large monitor like mine. It seems like a novelty for collector-fondlers, and I myself unfairly dismissed it as a toy in 2008, but behind its playful user interface lies a remarkably powerful organizational tool, and the new 2.5 version has made major improvements in stability and performance after 2 years of relative neglect.
My wife and I are both avid readers—one of our common dreams is to someday have a home with a dedicated room for a library. We are squarely in the demographic for the Bookshelf porn website. Here is a montage of mine alone, not including the books I reluctantly had to consign to storage, or those in my parents’ basement back in France:
With well over 900 books, I needed a system to manage. At some point I discovered Delicious Library has a writeable location field in its database for every item, and you can create virtual shelves to organize your books. I literally have one DL shelf for each shelf in my bookshelves, one for each box in storage, and one for all the books I keep at work. This way, I can browse shelf by shelf or box by box, or conversely look up the location of a book I need.
You may think recording the location of each book would be a mind-numbing task, but Delicious Library makes it effortless. It can read ISBN bar codes using the iSight camera included in most Macs, but a better option is to use the Microvision RoV Bluetooth barcode scanner they sell and support. It is quite expensive at well over $200, specially compared to the inexpensive Symbol CS1504, but the convenience makes it well worth the price if you have a serious library to wrangle.
If you select a shelf on the left sidebar, then scan a barcode, the book is automatically added to the selected shelf. I filed a feature request with them in 2008 for precisely this, and I do not know when they added it, but it makes a world of difference. The scanner has a memory, so you can zip into an adjoining room, scan all the barcodes on a shelf, zip back and let the scanner pour the shelf’s inventory into DL. It even reads out the titles as they are added. Repeat the process and quite quickly you can compile an inventory of your entire library.
The search function in DL is somewhat primitive, but Smart bookshelves (similar to iTunes’ Smart playlists) help. I have Smart Bookshelves for:
Delicious Library tries hard to use cutting-edge functionality in OS X, which is why version 2 only supported Snow Leopard and later. It has a top-notch AppleScript implementation. I am no AppleScript guru, but I relatively easily wrote my own scripts to:
Thanks to the user interface, browsing books on the Mac is almost as fun as doing so on the bookshelves, and infinitely faster. Of course, this is true of most book catalog programs, including many fine free options available for Windows and Mac, but most others do it with less aplomb.
One of the greatest features in the Webkit-based browsers (Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome) is WebSQLdatabase, the ability for a web site to store information in a SQLite database on your browser accessible via JavaScript. This allows web developers to build database-enabled applications that run entirely in the browser, without requiring a server. This is very useful for mobile devices, which in the US enjoy flaky network connectivity at best. One very handsome example is the iPad-optimized Every Time Zone webapp.
SQLite is probably the most important open-source project you have never heard of. It is a simple, streamlined and efficient embedded database. Firefox stores its bookmarks in it. Google distributes its database of phishing sites in that format. Sun’s industrial-strength Solaris operating system stores the list of services it runs on boot in it—if it were to fail, a server would be crippled so that is a pretty strong vote of confidence. Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture use it to store their database, as do most Mac applications that use the CoreData framework, and many iPhone apps. In other words, it is robust and proven mission-critical software that is widely yet invisibly deployed.
WebSQLdatabase basically makes the power of SQLite available to web developers trying to build apps that work offline, specially on mobile devices. No good deed goes unpunished, and the Mozilla foundation teamed up with unlikely bedfellow Microsoft to torpedo formal adoption of WebSQLdatabase as a web standard, on spurious grounds, and pushed an alternate standard called IndexedDB instead. To quote the Chromium team:
Q: Why this over WebSQLDatabase?
A: Microsoft and Mozilla have made it very clear they will not implement SQL in the browser. If you want to argue this is silly, talk to them, not me.
IndexedDB is several steps backwards. Instead of using powerful, expressive and mature SQL technology, it uses a verbose JavaScript B-tree API that is a throwback to the 1960s bad old days of hierarchical databases and ISAM, requires a lot more work from the developer, for no good reason. To add injury to insult, Firefox 4’s implementation of IndexedDB is actually built on top of SQLite. The end result will be that web developers will need to build a SQL emulation library on top of IndexedDB to restore the SQLite functionality deliberately crippled by IndexedDB. If there is one constant in software engineering, it is that multiple layers add brittleness and impair performance.
Of course, both Mozilla and Microsoft are irrelevant on mobiles, where WebKit has essentially won the day, so why should this matter? Microsoft has always been a hindrance to the development of the web, since they have to protect the Windows API from competition by increasingly capable webapps, but I cannot understand Mozilla’s attitude, except possibly knee-jerk not-invented-here syndrome and petulance at being upstaged by WebKit. WebSQLdatabase is not perfect—to reach its full potential, it needs and automatic replication and sync facility between the local database and the website’s own database, but it is light years ahead of IndexedDB in terms of power and productivity.
I am so irritated by Mozilla’s attitude that after 10 years of using Mozilla-based browsers, I switched today from Firefox to Chrome as my primary browser. Migrating was surprisingly easy. Key functionality like bookmark keywords, AdBlock, FlashBlock, a developer console, and the ability to whitelist domains for cookies, all have equivalents on Chrome. The main regressions are bookmark tags, and Chrome’s sync options are not yet equivalent to Weave‘s. At some point I will need to roll my own password syncing facility (Chrome stores its passwords in the OS X keychain, which is also used by Safari and Camino).
The hard drive in my October 2006 vintage 80GB iPod 5.5G died a few weeks ago. I wasn’t keen on upgrading to the iPod Classic as:
I use my iPod mostly in my car. The classic hard drive iPods have one key capability iPhones and iPod Touches lack—the ability to shuffle by album, which is essential when you listen mostly to classical music and where an opus maps to an album.
While investigating repair options, I found out Toshiba now makes a two-platter 240GB (224 GiB) hard drive. The iPod Classic won’t recognize the second platter (a third strike against it) but the 5.5G will. I sent mine to RapidRepair for repair/upgrade and received it back yesterday. The flip side of such an enormous drive is that the sync takes forever: I started it around 10PM yesterday and it is till running, over 9 hours later. They handled the repair very professionally, there are no marks on the casing, and I now have a fully functional 224GB iPod for less than the price of buying a new 160GB iPod Classic. The only feature it is missing is the ability to play 24-bit/96kHz ALAC files like those I made out FLACs purchased from Linn or the B&W Society of Sound.
I can’t understand why Apple does not make this new high-capacity drive available in iPods or the MacBook Air.