Damn You, WHICH Auto-Correct?

If you've had a smartphone for any length of time, you're no doubt intimately familiar with the concept behind the site Damn You, Auto Correct! even if you've not yet visited it. (But you should.) :-)

Perhaps more subtle than the humorous mismatches between intent and attempted repair is the philosophy behind various implementations of auto-correct. I've recently been using a Samsung Galaxy Note exclusively after having had various iPhones for several years, and for all the similarities between the two, one thing is glaringly different: the way auto-correct works.

At first I was just drying out from the familiarity Flavr-Aid, thinking that the iOS spell-checker was simply better. And then I started to notice that the Android spell-checker followed a predictable pattern. The iOS spell-checker, as on iPhones and my current iPad 2, follows another. If you aren't aware of that, you'll be very frustrated when moving from one to another.

The iOS spell-checker, when it can't match your registered key-taps to a complete word in its dictionary, assumes that you've fat-fingered a misspelling, and so the (one and only by default) suggestion it offers is based on that assumption. There are linguistic principles that determine how it makes that decision. While those have been understood for some time, it's been only relatively recently that a real-time-capable implementation has been both (relatively) affordable and easily portable. Auto-correct on the iPhone has been steadily improving, likely due both to improved algorithms and more powerful processing capabilities. OK, fine; that's what people who've only used iOS lately expect; it works reasonably well as expected, what could possibly be different?

Android hasn't always had the top-tier processing capability or memory of an iPhone 4 or 5 to throw at anything, let alone spell-checking. (Recent high-end phones are extremely competitive, but that's a whole other post.) If they can't or shouldn't throw enough resources at spell-check to actually correct in real time, then what can be done?

Take the other fork in the road, of course. Don't assume auto-correct to be spell-checking; instead, use it to reduce the number of key-taps needed to type longer words, à la TextExpander. Of necessity, this will involve a fair amount of "real" spell-checking. Android's spell-checker seems to assume that any typos are typos in the first few letters of a longer word. Further, it seems to assume that the first letter typed in a new word is always correct, and rarely if ever shows alternate words with a different first letter. (Android, unlike iOS, shows a list of candidate words, allowing the user to select among them with a single tap — further speeding rapid [if initially correct] typing.)

Which is "better" depends on your preferences and the accuracy of your typing on the device you are using. With my Lincoln Log-like fingers, I could maintain an effective 2-3 wpm rate on an iPhone 4; nearly double that on an iPad. After my iPhone 4 was stolen (apparently for parts as it was never again turned on), I bought the cheapest 3G hotspot-capable phone I could find at Lucky Plaza, which turned out to be a grey-market HTC Explorer. That was easily one of the two most painful experiences I have ever had in over 15 years of using mobile phones. A very, very kind and loving soul loaned me a Samsung Galaxy Note running Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich"). Comparing the Explorer to the Note was slightly more comical (and less fair) than putting a 1976 Chevy Chevette onto a track next to a Bugatti Veyron and seeing who can finish 20 laps before the other. (If the Bugatti gives the Chevette a 15-lap head start, my money's still on the Bugatti. I've owned a Chevette.)

I now find that I type comparably fast on the (~5.3-inch) Galaxy Note as on the 10-inch iPad. I'll be returning the borrowed Note soon (geologically speaking, at least); I'm just waiting to be able to have a good demo of an iPhone 5 to compare, and see which I really prefer. The new iPhone is going to have to be at least as good as the fans and reviews say it is; this Galaxy Note is sweet…

Getting Your Stuff Done, or Stuff Done To You

This is the response I wanted to leave to "MrChimei" on the spot-on YouTube video, "Steve Jobs Vs. Steve Ballmer". Since YouTube has such a tiny (but understandable) limit on comment size, a proper response would not fit. Therefore...

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Let me put it this way. It doesn't matter whether you're speaking out of limited experience, or limited cognition, or what; your flippant attitude will not survive first contact with reality (to paraphrase von Moltke).

I'm a Windows developer who's been developing for Windows since Windows 1.0 was in early developer beta, on up to Windows 8. I had nearly ten years professional development experience on five platforms before I ever touched Windows. I had three stints at Microsoft back when that was cool, and sold most of my stock when it was still worth something.

I've also supported users of Windows and various operating systems, from groups of 3-5 small businesspeople on up to being comfortably high in the operational support pecking order in a Fortune 100 company. I've seen what helps and doesn't help intelligent non-geeks get their work done.

Both in that position, and in my own current work, I've observed and experienced order-of-magnitude-or-better differences in productivity, usability, reliability, supportability… all in Apple's favour. I've worked with and for people who became statistics junkies out of an emotional imperative to "prove" Windows better, in any way, than other systems. The next such individual I meet who succeeds, out of a sample of over 20 to date, will be the very first.

In 25 years, I have never experienced a Windows desktop machine that stayed up and fully functional for more than approximately 72 hours, *including* at Redmond, prior to a lightly-loaded Windows 7 system.

In the last 6 years of using Macs and clones half-time or better, I have never experienced a Mac that failed to stay up and working for less than a week. In the last five years, my notes show, I've had two occasions where a hard reset to the Mac I'm typing this on was necessary; both turned out to be hardware faults. Prior to Windows 7, any Windows PC that did not need to be hard-rebooted twice in a given fortnight was a rarity. Windows 7 stretched that out to 6 weeks, making it by far the most stable operating system Microsoft have shipped since Windows NT 3.51. (Which I will happily rave about at length to any who remember it.)

For many years, I too was a Windows bigot. The fact that Unix, then OS/2, then Mac OS had numerous benefits not available in Windows was completely beneath my attention threshold. The idea that (on average over a ten-year period) some 30% of my time seated at a Windows PC was devoted to something other than demonstrably useful or interesting activity was something that I, like the millions of others bombarded by Ziff-Davis and other Microsoft propaganda organs, took as the natural order of things.

Then I noticed that Mac users were having more fun. "Fine," I thought, "a toy should bring amusement above all." Then I noticed that they were getting more and better work done. "Well," I said to myself, "they're paying enough extra for it; they should get some return on their investment. I'm doing well enough as is."

And then, within the space of less than a year, all five of my Windows systems were damaged through outside attack. "Why," I asked. "I've kept my antivirus current. I've installed anti-spyware and a personal firewall in addition to the (consumer-grade) router and firewall connecting me to the Internet. I don't browse pr0n or known-dodgy sites. I apply all security patches as soon as they're released. Why am I going to lose this development contract for lack of usable systems?"

I discovered a nasty little secret: it's technically impossible to fully protect a Windows PC from attacks, using tools that a reasonably-bright eight-year-old can master in a Saturday afternoon. People responsible for keeping Windows PCs have known this for over a decade; it's why the more clueful ones talk about risk mitigation than prevention, with multi-layered recovery plans in place and tested rather than leaving all to chance. For as long as DSL and cable Internet connections have been available, it's taken less time to break into a new, "virgin" Windows PC than to fully patch and protect it against all currently-likely threats.

People used to think that using cocaine or smoking tobacco was healthy for you, too.

What I appreciate most about the Mac is that, no matter what, I can sit down in front of one and in a minute or less, be doing useful, interesting work. I don't have the instability of Windows. I don't have the sense that I'm using something that was designed for a completely different environment, as Windows too closely resembles the pre-network (let alone pre-Internet) use of isolated personal computers. Above all, I appreciate the consistency and usability that let me almost forget about the tools I'm using to work with my data, or with data out in the world somewhere, than on what I'm trying to accomplish.

One system treats its users as customers, whose time, efficiency and comfort are important and who know they have choices if they become dissatisfied. The other platform treats its users as inmates, who aren't going to leave no matter what... and if that's true, then quality sensibly takes a back seat to profitability.

Which would you recommend to your best friend? Or even to a respected enemy?

YAHA! (Yet Another 'Hey, Apple…') Hey, SingTel, you, too.

Hey, Apple…

I like what works, and what helps me work better/faster/more enjoyably; the more of these boxes that get ticked, the better. After all, that's why I'm sitting in front of two iMacs with a MacBook Pro and iPad close to hand.

However…

The new iMacs are a wonder. A 27" display, 2560 x 1440 resolution; absolutely gorgeous. I can have two full-page views plus a Terminal open on the same screen. Two steps forward for usability.

Now for one step back. The mouse cursor appears to be the same size as on my 15" MacBook Pro, even though I'm now looking at nearly three times as many pixels and, more importantly, screen area. How about taking a page from somebody else's playbook (for a change) and have some key sequence that would do a "radar-style" visual locator for the mouse cursor?

The Middle, or The Muddle, or Both

Seriously, I'm in love all over again with this new system. And if I weren't in one of the last Soviet-class customer-last economies, I'd be able to make even better use of the new tool.

With new hardware and software come new opportunities for learning. Anyone who's ever learned or discovered or done something new, or even new to him- or herself, has experimented; has pushed boundaries. Sometimes, they push back the first few times. "You'll know the pioneers because they're the ones with all the arrows in their backs" might be an Americanism, but its meaning is perfectly clear to anyone who's ever challenged Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns"; it's the things you don't know that you don't know that offer the greatest opportunities for learning — if you survive them.

Apple have always had a symbiotic relationship with leading-edge technical norms. The latest example, in OS X Lion, is that for the very first time since Macs have shipped back in 1984, no operating-system media (floppies, CDs, DVDs) come with the system. If you want to nuke from orbit and start over fresh, you use something called Lion Recovery. It's a sweet, eminently sensible idea: most Mac customers have access to fast enough Internet connections that downloading most of what you need to reinstall is less of a hassle than rooting around trying to find some discs that you just know you put in a drawer. Somewhere. Maybe it was in your home office. Maybe in the away office. Maybe they're in one of those bulging boxes marked "Computer Stuff" up in the attic. It could easily take you longer to find physical media than to download four gig or so of bits on a reasonably-modern, properly-managed and -provisioned connection.

Hey, SingTel…

And then there's Singapore.

Advertising here is (in)famous for always having the language "Terms and Conditions Apply", which in practice seems to mean "We don't have to do a single thing we said we would once you give us the money if we can think of a reason not to, or if we do deign to provide the promised product or service, we expressly reserve the right to make the experience as unpleasant as our most innovative Government Scholars™ can conjure up".

Case in point: said Lion Recovery. The way it appears to work is that when your Mac phones home to Cupertino, it then fires up a for-purpose Web server that listens on the usual ports for authenticated incoming connections (from Apple). Cupertino or its CDN upload the data to your Mac, which uses it to reinitialise your installed system. This only works, of course, if your Mac is connected to a network that allows you to do such things, without being blocked by either policy or incompetence. Ah, those terms and conditions.

The Singaporean Interwebs are full of woe documenting Apple customers' fate as victims of SingTel policy and/or incompetence, with Lion Recovery being the latest poster child for the meme. SingTel and StarHub, two of the three major telecoms companies here (and the two popularly thought of as more closely tied to the PAP Government) have intermittent-or-worse problems, while the third (M1) is apparently less hassle. People speak of tethering their Macs to their M1 phones and spending over five hours (in at least one case) successfully performing Lion Recovery. This would be greatly preferable to not being able to recover at all. Unfortunately, the M1 signal in the HDB tenement-with-pretension that I'm living in is too weak and unreliable to support that.

So I'm back to waiting, impatiently, for SingTel to get their cranial appendage out of whatever orifice it's presently stuck in, and work with Apple on fixing the problem. Apparently Apple have run against the proverbial brick wall on multiple occasions to try to help solve a problem over which they have zero control.

Hey, SingTel…

The Formerly Magical Trackpad

My Apple Magic Trackpad died tonight, aged less than six months, after a week-long illness. Numerous battery transplants, resets and reboots were unable to revive the patient. In lieu of flowers, donations to its replacement are now being gratefully accepted.

Whiskey. Tango. Fox?

Hardware — any hardware, but especially Apple kit — isn't supposed to die after mere months of daily use. I expect better from systems, and especially from Apple. Were I anywhere else on the planet besides Second World Singapore, I would have a reasonable degree of confidence that those expectations would be fulfilled. PAPaganda notwithstanding, this is the Potemkin city where having the highest-paid politicians on the planet doesn't mean that products or services (beyond political control-related security "services") are up to the same levels as would be expected in, say, Tanzania.

So I'm back to using the mouse that I'd been using for nearly two years before buying the Trackpad. With the wheel and five buttons (that I know of), it's certainly adequate for most ordinary-user or Web-developer tasks in Snow Leopard.

But trackpads are The Future™, a reality emphasised by the new OS X 10.7 "Lion" release, and by what's rumoured for Windows 8. While mice are comfortable and familiar to essentially everyone who's used a Mac in the last 27 years, or Windows PC in the last 15 or so, there are actions and gestures that the trackpad is simply a more natural fit for, and to which a trackpad user's "muscle memory" rapidly adapts. Going back to the mouse feels both familiar and foreign, not unlike attempting to ride a bicycle for the first time in thirty years (another recent experience).

So, I'll probably buy a replacement trackpad fairly soon. That is, if I can stay online long enough to get useful work done; we've had intermittent failures in the DSL service here of late. (Or am I allowed to say "intermittent successful access"? This is Second World Singapore, a family-run company town that dislikes any attention paid to the clay feet of its mighty statuary (and I'm not dissing the Merlion here).

Sigh.

The App Store: I Get It, but...hmmmmm...

Apple's "post-PC," "new media" iDevices are selling quite nicely, thank you. Millions of people have become enthusiastic, loyal, even evangelistic customers without ever clicking a mouse on an Apple desktop or laptop computer. Given that Apple's profit from a laptop or desktop computer is several times what it is for an iDevice, it's almost imperative for them to find ways to make the Mac desktop/laptop user experience support the traits that have been most successful on iDevices. This includes, especially, the App Store.

Fans of the App Store, either on the iDevices or the Mac, point to the fact that you can have several different devices (iPad/iPhone, iMac/MacBook) using the same Apple ID, and thus can install "content" that you "purchase" on several devices; all you need to do is register them under the same ID.

But the Mac, historically, has had a rather different model. You would (and still can, fortunately; at least for now) either purchase a disk with software on it, or download a "disk image;" a file which appeared to Mac OS to be a disk. As soon as you did that, a window would open with the program icon in it and an icon for your Applications folder, and you'd drag the icon over onto the folder. The software would be copied to your hard disk, and you'd be able to then run it like any other program. Want to uninstall the program? Drag its icon to the trash.

Another benefit of that latter model is that you have actual media — either physical or virtual — which you can use to reinstall the program on your computer or, license permitting, on other computers you personally or corporately own. You're very aware during the "normal" installation process that you're working with some sort of artefact which contains the program you're installing. That artefact either is or tries reasonably successful to simulate a physical object.

We've built up certain expectations about physical objects. They exist; though they can be destroyed, they don't generally disappear without direct action by you or another person. With very few exceptions, they can be used more than once. These and other expected traits give the object some value — economic, sentimental or otherwise.

The App Store for the Mac does away with the artefact; it replaces it with an abstraction that's not "real" in any sense you can point to afterwards. To a degree that some find disturbing, it turns the product with which you previously dealt into a service. That service can become unavailable for any number of reasons, not all of which are necessarily a result of your actions or intent.

Put another way, it turns the old "software as a product" notion, and in particular the notion of free software, on their heads. Most free software licenses (try to) make clear that the user is In Charge of his or her own system, including use of the software being licensed. The copyright holder retains certain rights, but yields the remainder to the user under conditions designed to make sure that the software remains "free" in the sense that it was originally licensed. The user may examine the software, redistribute it as he got it, (under most FSF-approved licenses) can create modified or derivative works so long as they are licensed compatibly to the original, and so on. Above all else, the user has the unquestioned right to make as many backup copies of the software as desired in case the original installation becomes unavailable (hard disk crash, extreme weather event, etc.) The user has rights, and has the means to safeguard those rights by virtue of the fact that he has a physical copy of the software in its original, usable form.

The App Store says "Mr User, you don't have to worry your pretty little head with any of that. You just point-and-click your way through the store, and when you check out, the software will be installed automatically on your system." That's great — so far as it goes. But there's no option, at least none that I have yet found, to retain a copy of the disk-image file(s) for the software you just licensed. If your drive goes south for the winter and doesn't come back, you "just" replace the drive, reinstall Mac OS X and install all your apps from the App Store.

That's fine for small programs, especially if you have a high-speed Internet connection using a properly managed ISP. But, unlike the App Store for iDevices, several programs licensed through the App Store for the Mac are in the hundreds-of-megabytes-to-gigabytes range. Try downloading Xcode 4 on a 128K ISDN line. And iLife. And iWork. And... you see the problem. Wouldn't it be much better if you at least had the option to manage all that locally, yourself, the way it's traditionally been for the Mac? And that doesn't even take into account Apple's well-documented "control-freakery," where software available one day — or even already installed on your system — may not be available the next. Even if we give Apple the benefit of all doubt, ascribing to them motives as pure as the driven snow, there's still a real problem here.

The iTunes Music Store has now moved away from "protected" DRM-encumbered music, because customers made it clear that they wouldn't stand for the inconvenience and loss of control over product that they had paid for. I can back up my iTunes library however I wish, and be reasonably confident that should anything happen to my Mac, I'll be able to restore the library on my new replacement Mac without downloading it all again from the ITMS.

Why can't I have that same confidence with the software products I license through the App Store? Apple aren't the only ones who think they should have a fair amount of control over "their" "stuff."

Comments?

My reaction to the new, pico-sized iPod Nano

This is the content of a comment I originally posted on ZDNet, in the Talkback section for the article New iPod Nano rumored to shrink further, by Jason D. O'Grady.

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Cupertino, CA (1 April 2012) (UPI) Apple Inc (s AAPL) today introduced the new iPod Implant, which is to replace both the existing Nano and Shuffle models.

At the launch event at the now-traditional Yerba Buena Center, retiring Chairman Emeritus Steven P. Jobs announced that the new device would be available immediately. Roughly the size and shape of two typical breath mints, the newest iPod model is designed to be implanted next to the user's cochleas where, using very low-powered vibrations, it plays stereophonic music which the user hears in "perfectly detailed clarity," according to Mr. Jobs.

Apple announced a partnership with The Curanderismo Group, a nationwide chain of medical practitioners who have been designated as "preferred installers" of the new device. At the event, Dr. Yuri Gallyutsinogenov, President of the Group, explained, "Installing the iPod Implant is a simple surgical procedure, which nearly all our practitioner members are now trained in. For the low, low price of $199, a customer can buy the new device and have it implanted on the same day by our specialists."

Mr. Jobs was quick to clarify that the price quoted by Dr. Gallyutsinogenov was just for the installation procedure. The iPod Implant, available with storage capacities of 8, 16 and 32 gigabytes (GB), is priced from $199 to $399 for the device itself.

Proof Against Most Idiots

Fair warning: Geekish laudatory rant ahead. Still with me? Good!

I suppose it says something less than complimentary about our Craft that, when things actually work in a sensible fashion, recovering from Stupid User Actions™, it's surprising enough to be noteworthy. But I seriously doubt that I'm the only one who's noticed this.

Case in point: yesterday, I started downloading the Debian Linux testing-version DVDs. Yes, plural; there are 8 of them., as the standard software repository comes along with the test build. Anyway...

As most of us do, I was multitasking pretty heavily last night; when I knocked off, I just put my iMac to sleep as usual. It was long after I had gone to bed that I remembered, "hey, wasn't I downloading a passel of Linux DVDs when I slept the system?"

Expecting to have several "interesting" error messages displayed when I woke the system up (if in fact the file system hadn't been somehow damaged... yes, I was used by Windows for far too long), I powered up the system and was about to log in when BAM!... 15 minutes of phone calls. Thoroughly distracted afterwards, I log in, check my email, read a couple of new bug reports for a project I'm working on, and then remember "hey! everything's working!"

I switch to the Terminal window for the download (which was using GNU wget 1.12 if you care), to be greeted by the following display (excerpting):

--2010-08-15 19:45:15--  http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso
Resolving cdimage.debian.org (cdimage.debian.org)... 130.239.18.163, 130.239.18.173
Connecting to cdimage.debian.org (cdimage.debian.org)|130.239.18.163|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://caesar.acc.umu.se/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso [following]
--2010-08-15 19:45:20--  http://caesar.acc.umu.se/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso
Resolving caesar.acc.umu.se (caesar.acc.umu.se)... 2001:6b0:e:2018::142, 130.239.18.142
Connecting to caesar.acc.umu.se (caesar.acc.umu.se)|2001:6b0:e:2018::142|:80... failed: No route to host.
Connecting to caesar.acc.umu.se (caesar.acc.umu.se)|130.239.18.142|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 4696719360 (4.4G) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: “debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso”

89% [===============================================================================================>           ] 4,214,102,016 --.-K/s   in 13h 40m 

2010-08-16 09:26:01 (83.6 KB/s) - Read error at byte 4214102016/4696719360 (Operation timed out). Retrying.

--2010-08-16 09:26:04--  (try: 2)  http://caesar.acc.umu.se/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso
Connecting to caesar.acc.umu.se (caesar.acc.umu.se)|130.239.18.142|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 206 Partial Content
Length: 4696719360 (4.4G), 482617344 (460M) remaining [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: “debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso”

100%[++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++==========>] 4,696,719,360 1.26M/s   in 6m 26s  

2010-08-16 09:32:50 (1.19 MB/s) - “debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso” saved [4696719360/4696719360]

Note the report of a read error at 09:26:04 on 2010-08-16. The software was complaining that it had to recover from a timeout. Yes, I'm sure ten hours or so significantly exceeds whatever timeout value had been coded into wget... but it never missed a beat (or a byte; the SHA1 checksum matched afterwards).

I'm including the obligatory "don't try this at home, kids!" warning... but, if you aren't sitting in front of Windows, isn't it nice to know you can?

Again, Standards Matter

People who I've worked with, or worked for, or read my writing here and elsewhere, have probably figured out that I'm a huge fan of standards just about everywhere they make sense: data formats, user interfaces, and so on. After all, why should we have to relearn how to drive a car simply because we buy a new Ford in place of a Toyota that the Government doesn't want us driving anymore? (You see very few old — or even fully-paid-for — cars in Singapore.) The steering wheel, pedals, and other controls are in a familiar layout; any slight differences are quickly adapted to.

Not so with the Western world's most widely-sold word processing software (for instance); when Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows shipped with a different, unique ('innovative', whether or not you find it debatable, is beside the current point) interface. Bloggers bloviated, many users were deeply confused, and corporate help-desk calls (and support/training costs) spiked. People running Windows PCs were very rarely neutral about the change.

A year later, Microsoft shipped Word 2008 for the Mac. Although there were some interface changes, the points of loudest discussion in the Word:Mac user community seemed to be

• the omission of Visual Basic for Applications as an attempted cross-platform macro language; and
• the new semi-proprietary document format, which allowed flawless interchange with Windows users (VBA notwithstanding).

Interface changes, per se, didn't spark nearly as much angst as had the Windows version of the year before. While a certain amount of this should no doubt be attributed to Microsoft's experience with the earlier release, the main reason was both different and obvious.

When developing Mac applications, it's much easier and better to follow the Apple Human Interface Guidelines than to "roll your own" interface. Developers, including Microsoft, are well aware of the ways in which the Mac development tools make your life easier if you structure and style your app to meet the Guidelines (and user expectations), as opposed to how much scutwork needs to be reinvented from scratch to do things differently. Users benefit even more, as the amount of learning needed to use a new app, or a new version of an existing app, are much less than is the average under Windows or Linux. And, unlike far too many Windows programs, Mac programs are usually highly discoverable; the user may not know how to accomplish a desired action, but there is one (and preferably only one) obvious path to follow, and mis-steps are generally not heavily penalised.

Right, "everybody" knows this, so why did I spend five paragraphs restating the reasonably obvious? Because the real intent of this post is to draw your attention to a phenomenon which is a necessary outcome of that standardisation and discovery: it is much easier to switch from one Mac app that performs a given task to another than it is on Windows. Most Mac users periodically switch between different applications for a given purpose, even keeping two or three installed on their systems. When you ask them why, they don't (generally) point to bugs or deficiencies in one product over another; they merely switch between them as their use cases change. For example, though I have both Microsoft Office and Apple iWork on this Mac, I will often create or open smaller Word documents in a simpler application such as AbiWord instead. It doesn't have all the features of Word or Pages, but it has the basics, and it loads more quickly and uses fewer resources than its two "big brothers."

The average Mac user is also generally more willing to try new applications, and generally owns more applications, than is the average for Windows. Since she is confident in her ability to pick up and use a new program, generally without resorting to a manual or even online help, there is a much more open discussion between users and developers, since both have seen a good bit of "the competition" and know what they like and don't like.

More rarely than is the case elsewhere, but not rarely enough, this easy migration from one app to another is due to real or perceived defects in a previously-used program. This happened to me recently; the program I had been using for a few months as my main Twitter client was not showing me all the tweets of people I was following in the "mainline" stream that I would see when I looked at each person's stream individually. Once you start following more than about two or three people, the mainline becomes absolutely indispensable; you simply don't want to have to take the time to look at each stream in isolation. So, I moved to another client, Nambu (now in "private beta" for a new release; version 1.2.1 can be found via web search).

Two immediate observations: I already know how to use this, even though Nambu has a far more dense presentation than my earlier client. And, because of that "dense presentation", it now takes me about a fifth as much time to get through my morning and afternoon Twitter catchups as it did previously. (Multi-column view is the killer feature, guys; there's only one little thing I'd like to see different...)

Again, why make noise about this? Simple: I've been a Windows user (usee?) and developer quite literally as long as there's been a "Windows"; I ran across my 1.0-beta developer kit floppies (5-1/4", of course) a couple of weeks ago (thinking about having them bronzed...or mounted on a dartboard. Maybe both.) But the nasty truth is, I very rarely change applications that perform a given task in Windows. The pain level and the (hopefully temporary) hit on my productivity aren't worth it until the pain becomes absolutely excruciating. I don't have that problem with the Mac, at all. I can try out new applications at will, even daily-workflow applications, secure in the knowledge that

• I already know how to use this, at least well enough to get started, and
• I can go back — or on to another candidate — any time I want to.

There's a word for the feeling that having that kind of freedom, that control over your computing experience gives you:

Empowerment.

Companies Lose their Minds, Then their Partners, Then their Customers, Then...

Following is a comment which I posted to Jason Kincaid's article on TechCrunch, "Why Apple's New Ban Against Sexy Apps is Scary". I don't know why Apple seem to be deliberately shooting themselves in so many ways on the iPhone recently; I am sure that they are leaving golden opportunities for Palm, Android and anybody else who isn't Apple or Microsoft.

Even if you're not developing for the iPhone or even for the Mac, this whole drift should concern you — because its most likely effect is going to be that you have fewer choices in what should be a rapidly-expanding marketplace.

Thanks for reading.

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Exactly; they're pulling a Singapore here. They're saying "we're better than anybody else" because they've got this App Store with hundreds of thousands of titles, and hundreds of useful apps. Then they turn around and say "we're the only game in town; we're not going to let you sell your apps to customers any way except through us — and oh, yeah, we can be completely arbitrary and capricious before, during and after the fact."

Let me be clear: up until very recently, I've been an unalloyed Apple fan; the only sensible response to 25+ years of Windows development and user support and 10 years hitting similar but different walls in Linux. I'm typing this on one of the two Macs sitting on my desk. I've got logs and statistics that prove I'm far more productive on my worst Mac days than I ever was on my best Windows days. And I've had several Switcher clients over the past few years who say the same thing.

I can write and sell any app I want on the Mac; Apple even give me all the (quite good) tools I need right in the box. I can use any app I want to on my Mac; the average quality level is so far above Windows and Linux apps it's not even funny. In neither of those do I need the permission of Apple or anyone else outside the parties to the transaction involved. Apple do have good support for publicising Mac apps; browse http://www.apple.com/downloads/ to see a (far earlier) way they've done it right. But developers don't have to use their advertising platform.

With the iPhone, and soon the iPad, they're doing things in a very untraditionally-Apple way: they're going far out of their way to alienate and harm developers. You know, those people who create the things that make people want to use the iPhone in the first place. And a lot of us are either leaving the platform or never getting into iPhone development in the first place.

And that can't be healthy for the long-term success of the Apple mobile platform (iPhone/iPad/iWhatComesNext). As a user, as a developer, as a shareholder, that disturbs me, as I believe it should disturb anyone who cares about this industry.

Piling On: More Kibitzing about the iPad

What do I think about the new iPad? Glad you asked. What's that? You didn't, really – or not many of you did. But that's OK, really; at least two other writers argue that we're going from an era of "nearly universal literacy" to "nearly universal authorship", so here's my two rupiah worth.

John Gruber, the blogger behind Daring Fireball, is a justly respected voice on a variety of topics, notably all things Apple. Two of his posts on the iPad, The iPad Big Picture and Various and Assorted Thoughts... are a good starting point if you've somehow just managed to crawl out of a bubble that protected you from hearing anything about it for the past, oh, six months or so, or more crucially the last three days. I also enjoyed reading Stephen Fry's thoughts on the device.

But one bit I would recommend above all to anybody who is thinking about "what does this iPad thing/phenomenon really mean?", or anyone who just cares about free expression, open societies, and all the other progress that humanity has made these past few centuries, should seriously ponder Alex Payne's thoughts On the iPad. Al3x makes some very good, if deeply disturbing, points.

As many people have pointed out, the iPad differs in one critical respect from every personal computing device as computing device that Apple have ever built, from the Apple I on up to the iMac that I am typing this on. The iPad is a device, first, foremost and specifically, for the consumption of digital "content". As James Kendrick says, Apple just want us to push the 'Buy' button, in an endless, mindless Pavlovian dystopia.

"Hang on," you say, "it can't really be as bad as all that. You're just pushing histrionics!" I truly hope so. But consider: Apple has sold every Mac, as well as all their earlier models, on the basis of a small group of generally positive, empowering ideas:

• "It just works better."
• "The power to be your best."
• And, of course, "Think different".

One of the (many) things that make the Mac special is the fact that every single Mac sold comes with a copy of the full development toolset for Mac OS X, right in the box. Anybody who wants to invest the time and effort can become a Mac developer. (The money involved, of course, is in buying a Mac in the first place, but you were going to do that anyway, right?) You. The smart-aleck kid down the street. Your Aunt Tillie. Anyone. That has been one of the core strengths of the Apple Mac platform and product; the ability for anyone, without genuflecting before any sort of gatekeeper, to write anything they can conceive of, using some pretty great tools. And thousands, dozens of thousands have. You don't need to be a big corporation. You don't even need to ask Apple's permission, or use Apple's site to market your creation. All you need is an idea, some persistence, and the willingness to learn.

Apple made a radically different statement with the iPhone. If you want to write a "real" app for the iPhone, you need to submit your bits to the App Store, a process that is the seeming antithesis of open, collaborative or fair. As a practical matter, you need to join the iPhone Developer Program, and pay a fee. Doing so will subject you to various license agreements, limitations of what can be developed, and so on.

Apple justified this by saying "hey, the iPhone is a phone, an appliance. We have to keep some control over things, to make sure that our (non-technical) customers have the best possible experience — and incidentally to ensure that we continue to honor agreements we've made with carriers like AT&T." And the developer community grumbled and moaned, but large numbers went along. And the App Store, by almost any measure, is a raging success in the aggregate — even though most individual developers aren't making much at all.

Now comes the iPad, which has been widely, often dismissively, described as a "super-sized iPod Touch." Which, in several senses, it is. But whereas the "iTouch" is an accessory in one's life, being a combination PDA, music player, and (ostensibly) simple application platform, the iPad promises to be all that and more. Specifically, it's being pitched as this "magical" piece of technology which you'll "always" have at hand. Why? Well, you can listen to music on it, or watch videos, or run the same apps you ran on your iTouch or iPhone along with a new generation of "super-sized" apps. Oh, and Apple did announce that their office-software packages would be available on the iPad — so you can use it for "work stuff."

What about the kind of creative outlets that have been highlighted at each Mac introduction since the 1980s? Well, um, good luck with that. Because, even though this is a "real" computer, it's "really not"; it's an up-sized iPod Touch, which is (officially, mostly) a passive device.

The iPad is being pitched as a "magical", but inherently passive, device that consumers will use to buy (or, usually, rent) "content". There'll be "social media" like Facebook, Twitter and so on; the iPhone already supports those. Anything that can be done entirely over the Web, without the use of plugins like Java or Flash (like blogger.com, is kosher, too. But anything truly creative, "revolutionary", "game-changing", is going to have to survive the App Store gauntlet — which means that it's going to have to be consistent with Apple's view of how the iPad "should" be used. As a passive device which consumers use to buy access to content.

Think "57 Channels and Nothing On," a million times over. Perfect for the top-down, don't-make-me-think society. (I'm sure it will be very popular here in Singapore, for precisely that reason.)

Apple, you can do better. We know, because you've mostly done much better before, and encouraged us, developers and users, to do great things with what you've built for us. The iPad isn't so much a step in the wrong direction, it's a leap of faith worthy of Wile E. Coyote — but we know how far off the edge of the cliff we've gone. And the only way to go from here, is down.

What's wrong with this picture?

Apple chose the only name that ever made sense for their new change-the-world device: the iPad.

So what's not to like about it? Well, that depends on who you are and what you really wanted this to be. No surprise there.

My biggest problem with it was summed up well by James Kendrick in his post, Thoughts on the iPad — Just Push the Buy Button, says Apple: it really is primarily about media consumption - i.e., paying big corporations for temporary, passive access to data. Something to switch your creative intellect off, not on.

And those of us who are often called the "Apple faithful" were hoping, praying if you will, for something so much more. Which in fact this could still be. But for the first time in Apple history, a product with serious computing power is being positioned in the marketplace such that creative, collaborative expression by individuals is almost a subversive act.

We've fallen a long, long way from "Think Different". And it's now much, much harder to argue that Apple is as much a computer company dedicated to creativity and the pursuit of excellence, than to argue that Apple has become "just another" corporate big-media company, helping to turn the Internet from what was once called "the greatest opportunity for expressive, collaborative democratic action in human history" into just another television set. Active creation becomes passive "consumption." All hail the primacy of content, and don't even think about upsetting the applecart. That would be Thinking (too) Differently.

The Audacity of Hype

This is the content of a comment which I posted to a TechCrunch article on The World Doesn't Need Someone Telling Us What We Don't Need In Tech. For what it's worth, I hope the iSlate/iPad/iTablet/iWhatever is real this time; if we have another Charlie Brown, Lucy and the Football moment, I think the market will see this as one of Apple's rare blown opportunities - to the tune of maybe $50 off the share price.

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

---

I also disagree with the "comfort zone" limitation idea; cf. Shaw and the Unreasonable Man. Apple's successes have all been revolutionary innovations; the few times that a "me too" product has come out of Cupertino (Apple III, Lisa), it's sunk at high warp speeds.

If the iPad is even halfway affordable (by Apple standards, anyway), they'll sell like iPods on steroids; I'd certainly buy one. Even having a big, beautiful iMac and a trusty MacBook Pro, I can see several useful areas for an iPad. More-convenient-than-laptop media browsing and ebook reading is the one everybody latches on to. But I could take an iPad onto the train every morning and get stuff done - standing on a lurching train filled with people from cultures that don't know how to move in crowds efficiently. I could take it into meeting-room meetings and hallway meetings more easily and effectively than a full-clamshell laptop. And it would probably be easier to gather a couple of people and run through a quick presentation with an iPad than a laptop, too. (Think "elevator pitch.")

Sure, it would fill a niche and scratch a few itches that I already know about. But for it to be truly revolutionary, it will need to find uses that I/we can't really predict yet, because we've never really had something capable of filling them - we've just sort of worked around limitations we weren't really aware of. (See 'iPhone' for previous example.) I've got more faith in Apple to pull something that revolutionary out of their hats than I do in any other tech company today — or in the 30 years I've been in this industry.

We ain't seen nothin' yet.

When Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Don't Trip

I've been doing a lot of software installation lately, on Mac OS X and various BSDs and Linuxes. Doing so reminds me of one of the major banes of my life when developing for Windows. If you're a Windows usee, you're acutely familiar with the concept.

DLL Hell.

On Windows, as you install a dozen apps, each of them will try to install their own versions of many system-wide (or vendor-wide) libraries. The poster child for these is msvcrt.dll, the Microsoft C Runtime Library, upon which virtually everything in or running under Windows depends in some fashion. Many unhappy man-millenia have been spent by admins and PC owners the world over trying to resolve compatibility issues, usually introduced when a newly-installed app overwrites a more recent version with the earlier version that app shipped with. Other things — including other libraries the app may depend on or even Windows itself — may break since features and bug fixes they rely on (present in later versions of the library) are suddenly gone.

Why think about this, when I'm as likely to write (or even use) any Windows software in the next month as I am to win the local lottery without buying a ticket?

Because, one of the things I added to my new MacBook Pro was the MacPorts software, which is a Mac analogue to the BSD ports collection. The Linux equivalent to this is (more or less) your package manager, whether it be aptitude or yum or portage or whatever. Windows has no equivalent concept; every app you install is its own universe, or thinks it is (with the "benefits" noted earlier), and no central one-stop "update everything" capability.

Modern operating systems may not have DLL hell, but they do tend to have numerous different versions of different libraries and support frameworks installed. Since those can be accessed by apps as either "give me the most recent version" or "give me version x.y.z", no equivalent to DLL hell takes place. But it does tend to eat up disk space. And it makes it harder to mentally keep track of what's installed; installing the MacPorts edition of Bluefish, an HTML editor, installs some eighty other "ports" — direct or indirect dependencies of Bluefish (which itself is primarily a Linux app). Some of these dependencies are last-month recent updates; a few are several years old. But MacPorts determines which packages are needed by Bluefish (and its dependencies, and...) and installs the latest version (by default) of those dependencies, or the specific version asked for. Thus, several files with the same basic name, but different version numbers encoded into the filename, can coexist peacefully in virtually any modern OS.

Recent Microsoft system software, particularly the "managed" software using the .NET Framework, avoids most of the cavalier instances of DLL hell, but introduces other quirks and brittleness in compensation.

But I'm still a bit unnerved by a software package — any package mdash; that has 80+ designated dependencies. I'm certainly thankful that I don't have to manage that dependency matrix myself.

If modern software development is "standing on the shoulders of giants", to appropriate a Newton paraphrase, then careless dependency introduction would be the functional equivalent of drunken tap-dancing: almost impossible not to trip.

Two steps forward, three steps back

Alternate title: ARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!

Both of you Gentle Readers may have noticed that I've been away from the blog for a while, and that a few posts that were previously published have gone missing. I've been busy fighting some other fires for a while, and my current network access has lacked the stability and efficiency that local propaganda would have you expect.

This evening (Wednesday 18th) I came across a piece of nifty-looking software, MacJournal by Mariner Software. It looks great — software that would let me compose/revise blog posts offline, in a native Mac app with nice organizational features and so on, at an attractive price, and with a 15-day evaluation period thrown in, just so you can try before you buy.

"Cool," I thought; "I'll be able to multitask on my shiny new MBP that's coming Any Day Now™."

Downloading and installing the eval copy went just as you'd expect; drag an icon into a folder, wait for the "Copying" progress dialog to go away, and it's done. Standard Mac user experience; nothing to see here, folks — unless you were expecting a Windows-style "Twenty Questions" installation.

I decided to do a really simple, trivial first exercise: select the five posts I'd written so far in a tutorial series; add the keyword ("label" in Blogger.com parlance) tutorial to them; save them back to Blogger. No animals were harmed in the performance of this experiment, and very explicitly, no content was directly, intentionally edited. (Note the qualifiers; they're important.)

(insert "train wreck" sound effects here.)

The first two parts were (relatively) unmolested; they didn't have any code blocks in them. The latter three did, however, and those were completely deformed. Numerous span elements were added, particularly around links (MacJournal seems to think links shouldn't be underlined, ever). Other formatting was changed; in particular, code tags were replaced by spans that set the font size to 13 points.

WTF?

It's going to take me a bit of noodling around in the software to figure out how to change the defaults to something that makes sense (at least for me), and until then, I'm back to editing in the browser. If the evaluation period expires before I'm happy with the configuration, then I'll comply with the license and blow it off my system. I'd really rather not do that; the feature list looks good, the interface is clean, and best of all, I don't have this Could not contact blogger.com line underneath my editing area as I type.

I understand that MacJournal, like most apps, has default ways of laying things out and working with things. I'm well aware of the difference between an "import" and a "copy" of something. But... I believe very strongly that the first rule of software, as medicine, should be "First, do no harm" — and that includes "don't mess with my formatting without even putting up a confirmation dialog asking my permission!" I really don't think that's too much to ask, or too hard to implement — and doing so would a) make a much more positive initial user experience by b) showing that you've thought things through well enough that c) your still-potential user isn't looking at an hour or two of careful, detailed work just to get back to where he was before he touched your product &emdash; or, rather, it touched his work.

Like most Mac users, I've gotten spoiled by how well most software on this platform is thought through to the tiniest details. Like most, I get annoyed when I have to deal with Windows or Linux apps that simply aren't thought through at all, apparently. (Spend a week with Microsoft Office or, even better, Apple iWork on the Mac; I dare you to go back to Office on Windows and be happy with it.) To run into a Mac app that fails such a simple use case so spectacularly (granted, in its default configuration) simply beggars explanation.

The Debate between Adequacy and Excellence

I was clicking through my various feeds hooked into NetNewsWire, in this case The Apple Core column on ZDNet, when I came across this item, where the writer nicely summed up the perfectly understandable strategy Microsoft have always chosen and compared that with Apple and the Mac. Go read the original article (on Better Living without MS Office and then read the comment.

As I've commented on numerous times in this blog and elsewhere (notably here), I'm both very partial to open standards (meaning open data formats, but usually expressed in open source implementations) and to the Apple Mac. As I've said before, and as the experience of many, many users I've supported on all three platforms bears out, the Mac lets you get more done, with less effort and irritation along the way, than either Windows or Linux as both are presently constructed.

But the first two paragraphs of this guy's comment (and I'm sorry that the antispam measures on ZDNet apparently don't permit me to credit the author properly) made me sit up and take notice, because they are a great summation of how I currently feel about the competing systems:

The Macs vs. PC debate has been going on for about 25 years or so, but the underlying debate is much older. What we are really discussing is the difference between adequacy and excellence. While I doubt I would want to be friends with Frank Lloyd Wright or Steve Jobs, both represent the exciting belief in what is possible. While Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer rake in billions, their relative impact on the world of ideas is miniscule.

Bill Gates understands that business managers are on the whole are a practical, albeit uninspired and short-sighted bunch. By positioning Microsoft early on to ride into the enterprise with the implicit endorsement of one of the biggest, longest-lived, and influential suppliers of business equipment, Gates was able to secure Microsoft's future. Microsoft's goal has never seemed to me to be to change the world, only to provide a service that adequately meets business needs. Microsoft has also shown from early on a keen awareness that once you get people to use your product, your primary goal is not to innovate to keep your customers, but, rather to make leaving seem painful and even scary. Many companies do this, but Microsoft has refined this practice into an art.

He then expands on this theme for four more paragraphs, closing with

Practically speaking Microsoft is here to stay. But I am glad that Apple is still around to keep the computer from becoming dreary, to inspire people to take creative risks, to express themselves, and to embrace the idea that every day objects, even appliances like the computer, can be more than just the sum of their functions.

Aux barricades! it may or may not be, depending on your existing preferences and prejudices. But it does nicely sum up, more effectively and efficiently than I have been able to of late, the reasons why Apple is important as a force in the technology business. Not that Microsoft is under imminent threat of losing their lifeblood to Apple; their different ways of looking at the world and at the marketplace work against that more effectively than any regulator could. But the idea that excellence is and should be a goal in and of itself, that humanity has a moral obligation to "continually [reach] well past our grasp", should stir passion in anyone with a functioning imagination. Sure, Microsoft have a commanding lead in businesses, especially larger ones — though Apple's value proposition has become much better there in the last ten years or so; it's hard to fight the installed base, especially with an entrenched herd mentality among managers. But, we would argue, that does not argue that Apple have failed, any more than the small number of buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his direct professional disciples argue for his irrelevance in architecture. If nobody pushes the envelope, if nobody makes a habit of reaching beyond his grasp, how will the human condition ever improve? For as Shaw wrote,

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.

And that has been one of my favourite quotes for many years now.

Expanding the Omniverse

Anybody who's worked with me in about the last 25 years knows that I've been preaching the idea that software craftfolk should never stop learning. Further, I've always believed that learning new languages or tools is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this, keeping the mind supple and open to new ways of doing things. And by and large, I've kept this up, learning enough of a new or long-neglected language to at least be able to read and patch code every two or three months. (You do the math.)

One of the languages that I learned rather early on in its lifecycle is Ruby. (Wikipedia has a rather good article summarizing the history, if you're unfamiliar with it.) Early 1.0-1.4 or thereabouts releases were interesting — they showed the power and promise of the concepts that Ruby is built on, without the bloated inscrutability of, say, perl. As so often has happened, I'd learned just enough to be dangerous, and then got sucked back into the charnel house that is Microsoft Windows development. By the time I had the time and inclination to start messing with Ruby again, an unfortunate thing happened.

Ruby on Rails.

Not that Rails isn't a great tool for building 37signals-type Websites; it clearly is. But it became a victim of its own hype and started being used for everything imaginable — famously including Twitter (a hype explosion in its own right.) Rails was enough to push me — and apparently a good number of other folks — away from Ruby and onto other languages, notably Python. And so I spent the bulk of the next couple of years in PHP, Python, C++, Objective-C, D (another bit of unsung genius), and managed to keep busy.

We developers have a well-known cliché for what drives us to do new things or participate in development projects; "scratching an itch". To scratch an itch in this context is to solve a problem that we ourselves are facing, or to do something that otherwise interests us. What got me motivated to get back up to speed in Ruby wasn't the Rails hype, or even seeing all the nice APIs that Twitter and Repertoire had made available. My problem was a bit simpler and more immediate.

Apple's Mail app started crashing under the load I was giving it. For about a year, I'd had a mail store that averaged about 2 GB and I was getting on the order of 600 to 800 emails a day. I don't mean to be critical of the app; it just wasn't designed to do what I was asking it to, certainly not when sharing 2 GB of RAM with the rest of the system. By the time I migrated away from Mail, I had over 400 filtering rules defined, to slice and dice incoming emails into appropriate folders where I could deal with them as I chose.

In late May, 2009, I up and migrated my email from Apple Mail to Microsoft Entourage. For those of you whose only exposure to Microsoft email software has been Exchange or Lookout! ("Outlook") Express, you're in for a pleasant shock. Entourage runs quite happily in the system as it is (even if I can't run certain other apps at the same time without upgrading RAM), and doesn't give me the maddening ten-minute freezes that were common with Apple Mail as it tried to figure out what to do next. Importing my existing mail store was a breeze. The filtering rules even came along for the ride, and Microsoft's rules editor is a real treat. There was, however, one small problem.

Somehow, the ordering of rules had become scrambled during the import, and after a few weeks of hand-editing to fix the biggest problems, I started looking for a program that would let me import, export, reorder and bulk-edit Entourage's rules. So far, I haven't been able to find one. (If anybody knows of anything useful, please add a comment or email me.) OK, I thought, no problem; nearly everything on the Mac is scriptable. I should just need to learn how to access Entourage's rule set from AppleScript or something similar, then I can write the tool I want. Not trivial, but certainly something that seemed conceptually quite practical.

So I started learning AppleScript, and casting about for tools and sample code that talked to Entourage from AppleScript. While searching, I ran across Matt Neuberg's site. Dr. Neuberg wrote the definitive guide on AppleScript — and then found something that worked better for him: rb-appscript. He's written an online book about it (eventually to be published on dead trees). At this point, I said "ok, let's get started with Ruby again and see what we can do."

If anybody has any pointers or suggestions, please comment. Thanks for reading.

"You can have my...when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands"

One of the, shall we say, unusual things about being in this line of work is that you develop stronger-than-is-healthy bonds to particular bits and pieces of technology, both hardware and software. For example, I think that anybody who's worked on a Mac as their main system for a year or so would take a catastrophic productivity hit if they were required to work in a Windows-only environment. Further, I assert, based on experience and observation, that this hit would actually increase in severity commensurate with previous Windows experience, as the nature of the problems and hassles encountered on a continuous basis would be that much more familiar.

But, believe it or not, this isn't a hit piece on Windows. If anything, Mac OS X takes the brunt here, in more or less a continuation of a previous post.

Don't get me wrong. The Mac itself is still one of the very few things I'd plug into that quote in the title. But the differences between it and the BSD Unix heritage it's based on, at an architecture-implementation level, sometimes drive me up the wall; it's as though I'm caught in the old Saturday Night Live "It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!" skit.

Case in point: the Web developer's Swiss Army Ginsu Knife, PHP. On Unix and Linux systems, it's very straightforward to build a scripting engine that contains just the features and extensions needed, with security and debugging features added in to taste. The last few releases have even made that process humanly feasible for Windows usees. On Mac OS X, however, it's a different story entirely. (Item: As of Friday 11 July, the search "mac php configuration" returned some 5.22 million hits. Applying Sturgeon's Second Law to this leaves us with at least half a million pleas for and/or offers of help.)

The practical result is that, on Mac OS X, one uses one of the various prebuilt binaries for PHP (from Apple, MacPorts, MAMP or similar — or goes without. If you're interested enough in PHP to want it to work on a Mac, you probably have some urgent deadline breathing down your neck; you don't have time to figure out how/why there are unique runes and incantations involved in making it work. This is the dark flip side of "almost everything Just Works"; the things that don't Just Work tend to average the entire experience out.

So, what's the most efficient solution for the reasonably serious Mac-loving Web developer? Simple: max out the memory in your Mac (and I do mean "as much as Steve&Co let you put in and not one byte less, blastit!"). Then, add one of the software tools that's going to be on that Mac somebody pries out of my "cold, dead hands"; VMWare Fusion. Once you have Fusion installed, grab an ISO image of your BSD version or Linux distro of choice, install it, and use that for your PHP and other web-dev activities.

Better still, you can still use your fave Mac editor, browser and so on during development in the VM; you'll want to set up ssh on your VM, and then use sshfs to mount your Linux/BSD filesystem as a disk volume in your Mac. From that point — a file is a file is a file; you're just taking advantage of the *ix VM's tools. This is how I do my PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 testing now.

And, after going through all this extra effort, you may well pray that the new version of Mac OS X enables a better native solution. I know I do.

Nothing is perfect in this world, and all technologies have speed bumps in some fashion. The good bad thing about OS X is that there aren't nearly as many as in some other systems I could name — but when you hit the ones that are there, you hit them hard.

---

EDITED 2010/11/03: At the time this was originally written, there was a prerelease bit of software that lots of people, including the vendor and the opportunistic authors and publisher of at least one programming book, thought was going to eventually become PHP version 6. Not quite; one of the long-promised features for PHP 6 went down a rabbit hole and ultimately killed the whole thing. Most of the usable "PHP 6" features were incorporated into version 5.3.2.

The Best Tool for the Job

One of the nice things about growing up around (almost exclusively) men who were master mechanics, carpenters or other such highly skilled tradesmen was that I developed an appreciation both for "the best tool for the job at hand" and "making do with what's available" — and whichever of these applied, accomplishing the task at hand to the best of anyone's ability.

As I've progressed through my software and Web career, I've become highly opinionated about the tools I use, just like any other experienced software craftsperson I've ever known. You and I might use different tools to accomplish what functionally is the same task, but so long as we each have practical, experiential bases for those preferences, we should just go ahead and get what needs doing done. (There's an argument in there for open standards as a requisite for that to happen, but that's another post.)

Too many people who should know better have religious-level devotion to or hostility towards certain companies and/or products. Yes, that includes me; I know I've said some pretty inflammatory things, usually when I felt someone was expressing a religious belief masked as a technical opinion. No doubt they've felt the same about me and any others who were incautious enough to oppose their evangelism (or reactionism, depending on the circumstances). In general, it should be pretty evident to everyone with a personal or professional involvement in IT or personal electronics that trends are driven as much by "what I say three times is true!" as what actually can be shown to be true. That's how mediocre-at-best products become "industry Leaders"; inertia and close-mindedness set in, reinforced by a well-funded, continuous and strident marketing/branding campaign.

I was having a discussion about this online recently, with a former associate who's long had me pegged as an ABMer ("Anything but Microsoft"). I can understand how he formed that opinion; I've long complained about the (innumerable) defects in the "market-leading" operating system, and about how slowly progress has been made in cleaning up the most egregious faults (such as security). But I've also worked at Microsoft in Redmond — three different times — and I've always been impressed by the number of truly gifted people working there. They've had their triumphs and tragedies (anyone used Microsoft Bob lately?). They've had to deal with widely differing process and management effectiveness as they transfer between or liaise with different groups. They've ignored a lot of what has been done outside the company, but they've also created some amazing things inside; too many of which unfortunately never make it into public products.

And the quality of their work product varies as much as any of the factors that go into it. Cases in point: compare, say, Windows Vista with Windows Mobile or the XBox; compare Microsoft Outlook (forever known as "Lookout!" to security/admin people) with Entourage; compare Word for Windows to Word for the Mac — what I understand is a completely different code base (and visibly so) that "just happens" to be able to flawlessly read and write documents shared with Word for Windows.

I also reread a blog post I wrote last December where I detailed the issues I was starting to have with Apple's own Mail app for the Mac. I have a mail store that's hovered somewhere above 2 GB for the last year. I receive 100-200 legitimate emails per day (and up to 700 spams). I presently have over 230 filtering rules defined for how to handle all that mail. Those rules have been built up over the last five years or so — first using Mozilla Thunderbird, then Apple's Mail.app, and now a new system; a progression that also speaks eloquently about the value of open standards. I have never, to my knowledge, lost a saved message whilst transferring from one package to its successor. The few hiccups each transition has had with filtering rules have all been relatively easy to find and fix, with the newest app making that process breathtakingly simple.

The new mail app? As you've no doubt guessed, Microsoft Entourage. It, like every other Mac app I've ever used, Just Works as expected (at least until you get out to the far, bleeding edges). If Microsoft made Windows and Office for Windows as well as they make Entourage (and the rest of their Office:Mac products), they really wouldn't have to worry about competition — and they'd richly deserve that. The market-friendly price for their Mac product (where their major, worthy competitor sells for US$79) is just icing on the cake.

I don't hate Microsoft. I just wish they would stick to what they do as well or better than anyone else, and leave the crappy products that can never be anything but hypersonic train wrecks — like Windows and Internet Exploder. I wish that ever more fervently every time I'm asked to help some hapless Windows usee fix "why my computer doesn't work". That would also make Microsoft's long-suffering stockholders — including current employees, former employees and myself, among others — feel a lot better.

Another item from the "That's obvious - in hindsight" dept.

Since upgrading to Safari 4 (why haven't you yet?), I ran into a problem with the single add-in that I've bothered keeping in Safari — Pith Helmet. If you're familiar with AdBlock Plus on Firefix, you've got the basic idea; an add-in to your browser(s) of choice that lets you block advertising, annoying Flash, or pretty much anything else you can identify by file name (e.g., "*.swf*) or by URL (e.g., "http://www.doubleclick.net"), and "magically" removes it from the final content displayed by your browser. This feature has gotten so popular that several browsers are building in more-or-less-competent versions of it by default.

Getting back to the problem... PithHelmet, the Safari ad blocker, was incompatible with Safari 4 because the framework it depended on, called SIMBL, has not had an update since October 2006 — which, as far as Safari or WebKit, equates to "forever". So I do a Google search for "greasekit safari 4", and then start whittling down the results (English language only, please, and only within the last year). Eventually, I ran across a forum post (which I have since lost) saying basically "Yes, PH crashes Safari 4 but has anybody else tried out Fanboy's AdBlock CSS sheet?"

Which, if you know anything about Web development, should have sent the palm of your hand rocketing toward your forehead in a major "D'oh! moment. Of course! Why didn't I (or we all) think of that about 6 or 8 years back?

For those of you who aren't as knowledgeable about the detailed workings of your browser, let me explain. Every Web browser, probably since at least Netscape 1.0, has included support for "user style sheets"; where individual users (or organisations of such users) can choose to instruct their browsers to display certain specific content differently than it was originally specified. For this to work, the user in question (or someone s/he depends on) have to be very literate in HTML and particularly CSS, the languages of Web pages. To do simple blocking, like 'block all SWF files", isn't hard with modern browsers, but the Web developers themselves can make life significantly easier by following modern "best practices". The "practices" particularly relevant here are "add 'id' attributes to all structural and semantic elements." (hmm; what's the difference between that and "all elements"? Another blog post...) If the developer does that, including for the body tag, then it's very easy for even a neophyte user to start filtering just what's wanted.... and learn something about how Web pages work into the bargain.

Thanks for reading — and commenting.

Mac OS X is BSD Unix. Except when it's Different.

One of the things that a BSD Unix admin learns to rely on is the "ports" collection, a cornucopia of packages that can be installed and managed by the particular BSD system's built-in package manager: pkgsrc for NetBSD, pkg_add for FreeBSD, and so on. In nearly all BSD systems, the port/package manager is part of the basic system (akin to APT under Debian Linux).

Mac OS X is BSD Unix "under the hood," specifically Darwin and, indirectly, FreeBSD.

This provides the Mac user who has significant BSD experience with a nice, comfy security blanket. This blanket has a few stray threads, however. One of these is the package-management system and ports.

Software is customarily installed on Mac OS X systems from disk images, or .dmg files. When opened, these files are mounted into the OS X filesystem and appear as volumes, equivalent to "real" disks. The window that the Finder opens for that volume customarily contains an icon for the application to be installed and a shortcut to the Applications folder. Installation usually consists of merely dragging the application icon onto the shortcut (or into any other desired folder). Under the hood, things are slightly more complex, but two points should be borne in mind.

First, there is no true Grand Unified Software Manager in Mac OS that is comparable to APT under Debian Linux, or even the "Add or Remove Programs" item in Microsoft Windows' Control Panel. Uninstalling a program ordinarily consists of dragging the program icon to the Trash or running a program-specific uninstaller (usually found on the installation disk image).

Second, while there is a "ports" implementation for Mac OS X (MacPorts), it isn't a truly native part of the operating system. More seriously, the versions of software ports which are maintained in its ports list are not always the most recent version available from their respective maintainer. Installing an application via MacPorts, installing a newer version through the customary method, and attempting to use MacPorts to maintain the conflated software can quite easily introduce confusing disparities into the system, with potentially destabilizing effect.

Go back and read that last paragraph again, especially the final sentence. Mac OS X, meet BSD Unix. Touch gloves, return to your corners, and wait for the bell.

Most users will never run into any problems, simply because most Mac users make little or no use of MacPorts (or any other command-line-oriented system management tool). MacPorts users are (almost by definition) likely to be experienced Unix admins who pine for the centralized simplicity of their workhorse software-management system. Informal research suggests that many, if not most, MacPorts users are active developers of Unix and/or Mac software. In other words, we're all expected to be grown-ups capable of managing our own systems, trading away the soft, easy-to-use graphical installation for a wider variety of nuts-and-bolts-level packages.

So why is any of this a problem for me? Why am I consuming your precious time (and mine) blathering on about details which most interested people already know, and most who don't, probably aren't? As a bit of a public mea culpa and a warning to others to pay attention when mixing installation models.

I had previously installed version 8.2 of the PostgreSQL database server on my Mac via MacPorts. Returning to it later, I realized that the installation had not completely succeeded: the server was not automatically starting when I booted the system, and the Postres tools were not in my PATH. After a bit of Googling, I came across a few links recommending the PostgreSQL 8.3.6 disk images on the KyngChaos Wiki. The server failed to start as expected.

Remembering that I had previously installed 8.2 the "ports" way, I first uninstalled the newly-installed and -broken 8.3.6. I then ran port uninstall postgresql82 && port clean postgresql82 in an apparently successful attempt to clean up the preexisting mess, after which the KyngChaos disk images installed correctly and (thus far) work properly.

This once again points out the usefulness of keeping a personal system-management Wiki as a catchall for information like this — both to help diagnose future problems, and (especially) to avoid them altogether. These can be dirt simple; I use Dokuwiki, and have for over a year now. Forewarned (especially by yourself) is forearmed, after all.

Just thought I'd get this off my chest.