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Olde English - The Applicant

I wish there was some way of posting this without the trashy SuperDeluxe ads at the end.

Regarding the new iMac...

People. It’s not ‘glossy’. It’s GLASS. They’ve been making monitors and TVs with glass screens for 60 years. This is not some new thing. Sheesh.

via some guys blog

via some guy’s blog

iLife '08

iPhoto is the only iLife app I really use regularly, and GarageBand occasionally, but it’s nice to have the others around just in case I can think of some reason to use them.

iPhoto’s new ‘events’ view took a little while to win me over, but now I’d never go back. It drastically improves upon, and completely replaces, the ‘rolls’ metaphor from earlier versions. If you’re upgrading, it pretty much just converts all of your rolls to events. You can combine or split them without much fuss, and they’re sorted by the date in the metadata rather than the date they were added to the library (yes!). I had to go to the help file to figure out that to combine events: you need to select them both then double-click one, and then you can drag photos from one to the other. The thumbnail view is really pretty and a nice way to browse, although I still don’t like this ‘hover mouse over to quickly cycle thumbnails’ thing (which I will call ‘hover scrub’ for short), and there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn it off. But that’s minor. Another little annoyance is that double-clicking a photo now ‘magnifies’ it to fill the window, but without any controls to move back or forward in the event, but this can be changed in Preferences. The most awkward thing about the whole events metaphor is that the alternate ‘albums’ metaphor even still exists, as there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it any more.

The iPhoto web gallery feature looks nice (despite the annoying ‘hover scrub’ being fully implemented in JavaScript O_o) but it in no way justifies the still-ridiculous $99/year you have to pay for .mac service in order to use it - especially when the PicasaWeb iPhoto plugin is free, and the PicasaWeb service is free and is almost as good (if not as flashy). ( edit : the plugin doesn’t work with iPhoto ‘08… I’m sure there’ll be a fix soon. In the meantime, drag photos from iPhoto to the standalone PicasaWeb Uploader app. Works the same, almost.)

iMovie is a completely new app going by the name of an older one. I never really put the effort into figuring out how to use the old one, but I only started fooling around with the new one for a few minutes, and before I knew it I had strewn together segments from all of the video clips I’d taken on my digital camera from my iPhoto library, with transitions and music and stuff. The ‘hover scrub’, unlike in iPhoto, really works beautifully here, with audio too. It really is amazingly easy to throw something together. My little Mac mini (Core Duo 1.6 GHz) struggled a bit occasionally, but performance was very good, if not perfect. Built-in YouTube support is great too, although it’d be nice if you didn’t still have to to wait aeons for YouTube to do that ‘processing’ step after you upload. (I don’t see why you can’t just upload in whatever format is natively used, since presumably what YouTube is doing is transcoding.)

GarageBand, iWeb, and iDVD didn’t seem to have changed much at first glance.

… the idea that we are just now entering some untracked new realm is worth its weight in LOL’d.

… the idea that we are just now entering some untracked new realm is worth its weight in LOL’d.

—Tycho Brahe, on Microsoft’s ‘recent’ reneging of certain promises regarding Xbox 360

hehehehehe

Hehehehehe.

Bundles, e-mail and you

Playing around with Pages, I noticed that its file format (.pages) is a Mac OS X bundle - that is, a folder with multiple files inside that is itself treated by the operating system as a single file rather than a folder. This is also how Mac OS X applications (.app) are.

Of course, this presents several interesting technical hurdles when dealing with other operating systems, much like the old Mac OS resource fork used to. For example, you can’t download a bundle through your web browser; the web server will treat it as a directory with multiple files, and there’s just no way to download an entire directory at once over HTTP. (This also has a sort of interesting inherent security benefit, as it’s just not possible to directly download a bare Mac OS X application. It has to be inside a single-file format like .zip or .dmg.)

Anyway, I was wondering how this would work with e-mail, so I opened up Apple Mail and tried to send myself a .pages bundle. Mail let me choose the file and attach it just as though it were any normal file, and when I got it back on the other end, Mail let me view it or download it just as though it were any normal file. Iiiiinteresting. But from what little I know about MIME (the magic that makes e-mail file attachments work), this should be impossible. So I had a look at the raw e-mail source:

--Apple-Mail-1--92203827Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64Content-Type: application/zip; x-mac-auto-archive=yes; name=untitled.pages.zipContent-Disposition: attachment; filename=untitled.pages.zip

Keep in mind that I never zipped the file, and I when I looked at it on the receiving end, it didn’t look like a zip file, and saved to my desktop as an uncompressed .pages bundle. It looks like that ‘x-mac-auto-archive’ bit is what makes it work. Of course, this would be ignored on other operating systems, and so the attachment would show up for them as a .zip file (with contents that are not likely to be useful to them).

I guess it’s one of those things that I shouldn’t be surprised Just Works™, but I still find it neat.

iWork '08 w/ Pages '08

iWork ‘08 w/ Pages ‘08

Finally, a horizontal formatting toolbar. Just what I needed. Pages would now be my favourite word processor if not for its annoying file-format behaviour.

It supports Microsoft Word (.doc) files, as well as new Word 2007 (.docx) files, although in my tests, opening a simple .docx file I created with NeoOffice would always crash Pages (not sure which program is at fault here, but I tend to think crashing is not ever an acceptable action). Pages will also refuse to let you edit a Word file in-place; you can open and edit them, but when you go to save, it insists on saving in Pages format. You’d have to go to the Export menu item, click Word, and overwrite the existing file each time you want to save, if you’re going to be sharing files with Word users. Even Microsoft isn’t this bad about forcing their formats on you.

Almost needless to say, neither Pages nor the rest of iWork supports OpenDocument in any way, which is inconvenient because almost all of my documents are already in that format, and I’d kind of rather they stay that way for maximum future-proofing.

Still, I like the interface a lot.

There’s a 30-day trial available, and after it expires, the programs still work in view-only mode.

New York Times discovers the identity of Fake Steve Jobs

New York Times discovers the identity of Fake Steve Jobs

Fake Steve, in character, is not happy about this; although, his alter-ego, Dan Lyons of Forbes, doesn’t seem to mind all that much.

Recently someone claiming to be Mr. Jobs’s daughter, Lisa, wrote to tell him, “You don’t sound at all like my father, but your blog is hilarious.”

That was pretty much my take on it, too. 

Like most things associated with Real Steve, what he really thinks about it is a mystery. I can only imagine he’s probably not happy about the rather negative portrayal of himself, but obviously he can’t say or do anything negative after it’s become such a cultural phenomenon, because it would be bad P.R.

As for Mr. Jobs himself — the real one — he did not seem all that interested when told the identity of his online doppelganger. He said in an instant message conversation that he had no interest in reading [Fake Steve Jobs’s upcoming in-character] novel.

I think the NY Times author just wanted to brag about being on an instant-messaging basis with Real Steve.

LEGO Indiana Jones

LEGO Indiana Jones

cf. LEGO Star Wars.