holman runs the voodoo down

The Future of iTunes

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:01:56 -0800

The Future of iTunes

Switching around

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:45:00 -0800

Switching around:

Just as an FYI for those of you following me on Tumblr: Tumblr’s out, Jekyll’s in.

Main blog: http://zachholman.com

RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/holman

New blog will likely be more infrequent, longer posts. Possibility that I’ll keep my Tumblr account active and make it more, well, tumblish, so new posts might start popping on here a bit more regularly, too.

nice_find: it's sorta like getting TextMate 2, but more real!

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:02:29 -0800

nice_find: it's sorta like getting TextMate 2, but more real!:

TextMate’s find in project is terrible. More than I few times I’ve just printed out my codebase on paper and searched by hand just because it’s, you know, faster. My solution the last year or so was Ack in Project, which at least solved the beachball of death, but it wasn’t a great solution. Luckily, nice_find is. Blazing fast, native, and nice.

Gruber on The Tablet

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:20:32 -0800

Gruber on The Tablet:

Gruber pens the most exciting article I’ve read without actually including any hard facts.

The Mac is, and will remain, Apple’s answer to what you use to do everything.

The Tablet, I say, is going to be Apple’s new answer to what you use for personal portable general computing.

January is going to be awesome.

Up to Nothing

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:23:00 -0800

Up to Nothing:

You’ve built this guilt into your office. It’s why your screen is not facing folks who walk through your door. You’re worried: “They might see me doing nothing”.

You’re not up to nothing. You’re aimlessly mentally wandering — an act made famous by every bright idea ever had in the shower.

Wieden+Kennedy’s “Go Forth” campaign for...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:03:40 -0800

Wieden+Kennedy’s “Go Forth” campaign for Levi’s. The strongest advertising on television today. The words are from Walt Whitman himself, as he reads excepts from his poems over one hundred years ago.

The companion spot: “America”.

Positioning Apple

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:55:40 -0700

It’s easy to say that Apple has a great marketing department. It’s also boring. The interesting question is: why is Apple so good at marketing their products?

Managing Expectations

To put it plainly: Apple is great at managing expectations. I don’t really mean this in the traditional sense, that Apple first tries to scope down expectations and then releases an incrementally better version, blowing away expectations and having immediate success. Apple is more clever than this. What Apple does differently is that they mold expectations.

It’s not about under-promising and over-delivering. It’s about adjusting how consumers use your product in order to reach what is ultimately a great experience. This adjustment can be extremely non-intuitive. I’d argue that historically Apple has made moves in the very opposite direction than you’d expect in order to set up an easy layup months or years down the line.

This is all illustrated better with concrete examples.

iPod Nano’s new “camera”

The Apple rumor community had the new iPod Nano pegged for a camera for weeks. Toss in a tiny lens, hook up a small chip, and we’re done. It’s an interesting rumor, but contains no shockers. It’s straightforward enough that everyone thought they had it all figured out.

Steve comes out, mentions the Nano has a camera in it. Cool. The weird part is that it’s a camera that takes no pictures; only video. This is strange. The cynical amongst the internet (surprise! there’s a bunch of them) immediately jump on two related points: 1. The video quality sucks, and 2. You can’t take photos! Seriously! A Linux-based 200GB media center deluxe from 2007 with a massive zoom lens is half the price of the Nano! Apple’s screwing you, you suckers!

This is the interesting bit for me. The one fundamental constraint for any Apple-produced device is physical size and shape. More than anyone else, Apple will compromise on almost anything — Firewire 800, battery life, expandable batteries, PCI Express cards, the entire video card itself — with the exception of physical design. It’s worked for them. I think it’s clear that a number of consumers will pay extra for more durable aluminum casing, a slimmer profile, a more inviting grasp to it. Immediately, this fundamental constraint limits the camera. At a certain physical size, the physics don’t work for high quality pictures while retaining small dimensions.

Once the decision has been made to include a camera, the driving design of the product has limited your choices in how to implement it: not well. By constraining design, they just can’t implement a fantastic camera. Luckily, “not well” is relative. I’d wager that the chip Apple selected fits into the category of “takes mobile video decently, but the photos kind of blow a bit”.

Once that decision has been made, most companies would just toss the bucket at the consumer. It takes decent video, and, hey, you can take some kind of quality of photo, too. This is what makes Apple different. By removing photos from the equation completely, yes, Apple avoids shouts of “This picture looks like garbage!”, but more importantly it explicitly shapes the experience into one revolving around video.

It’s no longer another smartphone. Or a point and shoot. Or an SLR. Its purpose is strictly for fun, off-the-cuff video for those times you might have your Nano with you. By ripping stills out, it’s no longer just another de facto “Photographic Device”. It becomes less of an option to bring with you on your family vacation; it’s rather a subtle prod that maybe you should bring that SLR or point-and-shoot with you instead. Does this ruin the Nano as a broad, multi-purpose device? Yes. Absolutely. But again, it’s not a primary market for the Nano (yet). Having the ability to take stupid, silly little videos is a bit of an untapped market, really. I have a Kodak Zi6, which is nifty and is similar to the Flip, but I have to consciously bring that with me. People carry their iPods around every day; having a low quality video camera on the Nano is going to be extremely popular in high schools and universities across the country. By shifting — not undervaluing — how you’re expecting to use the Nano’s camera, Apple’s able to gently redirect it into another, more successful experience.

iPhone’s MMS (or lack thereof)

Pardon my French, but fuck AT&T. Unfortunately, I’m a developer by profession, so I can grasp how messed up AT&T made viewmymessage.com, which was the website you previously were redirected to if you received a multimedia message on your iPhone.

Upon receipt of the MMS, you’re directed to either viewmymessage.com/1, or viewmymessage.com/2. One of those appears to be a legacy site that’s still in use, and it matters which one you go to- the logins are not federated. Once there, you have to laboriously type (or copy and paste one chunk at a time) a username and a password (the password being memorable, whereas the username being randomly generated, of all things). Inside, you see a maliciously-cropped photo or clip or whatever your insensitive friend texted you.

It’s a terrible process.

From common sentiment, this is all AT&T’s fault. Their network can’t handle full-fledged iPhone MMS rollout, and they apparently can’t build web apps for shit. But that’s beyond the point; no one expected real competency from AT&T anyway. Again, what’s interesting is how Apple managed this.

From the very beginning, even before launch day, you had Steve up on stage going out of his way to say how cool it was to take a picture on your phone, drop it into the mail app and your recipient would then get pretty decent-quality photos. This was the case for two years. It wasn’t a matter of saying, “well, sending multimedia is tough right now, so don’t expect much, but hey, a few years down the line we’ll surprise you with KILLER MMS!” It’s a route they could have taken. From the get-go, Apple could have said, “hey, we’ve got a bunch of stuff on our plate; we’ll get to MMS eventually. In the meantime, I guess email could work.” Or even, “well, MMS is a little hard to figure out and/or not high on our own lists, so here’s a mediocre solution now that we might clean up in the future”. Instead, Apple tossed all of its weight behind email. Everyone has email, everyone is used to email. (I’m continually surprised by friends who both 1) don’t know what MMS is, and 2) don’t receive traditional MMS. A number of my friends who don’t receive traditional MMS get it forwarded to their email inboxes automatically anyway.)

viewmymessage.com, for better or worse, has adjusted my expectations of MMS. I hated that solution; I embraced email for sending multimedia. Even though I’m now happily situated with MMS finally, I still will tend to use email for multimedia. I suspect that’s good for a number of people: I have a stable, cross-device avenue to share media, and AT&T doesn’t have to carry another few kilobytes on their load-laden network.

Like the Nano, for some reason their development cycle was constrained or set up such that a particular feature would turn out subpar or limited in some fashion. By molding expectations, however, Apple is able to change the rules as they see fit. Again, this isn’t a surefire way to win support. Plenty of people (myself included) hated MMS, and I’m sure plenty of people don’t like that they can’t take Nano stills. But they’re taking things in a different direction in hopes of repositioning customer expectations.

The subtle prodding

At the expense of over-analyzing every decision, you can start seeing these progressions, these shifts over the course of many products at Apple. iTunes has had smart playlists for years. At first, I found them foreign. If you go way back to the Napster-era WinAmp days, you find everything riddled with static, manual playlists. It’s really a carry-over from CD mixes, where you want control in picking each and every song, because heaven forbid you’re stuck with a crappy song on your 16 song mix and you’re driving in the middle of nowhere and you have to listen to that song.

Smart playlists started making sense the more I grew my library. Top 100 songs listened to. Songs rated 4 stars or higher. Last 100 songs purchased. Things like that. I had started to adjust to letting my computer figure out my habits. I suspect this was something Apple must have noticed years back, but they didn’t have the technology to do much with it until recently. Then iTunes DJ and Genius Playlists came into the mix, which let you listen more on a global recommendation level. Most recently, Genius Mixes, which give you pretty targeted genre-based playlists. More and more I don’t use shuffle and I don’t use playlists; I just let Genius take over.

You can also see this with the evolution of geolocation. The iPhone first got broad wifi-based geopositioning. Then iPhone got quite accurate GPS. Then iPhoto got Places to organize your months of newly-geopositioned photos. Then Snow Leopard got OS-level CoreLocation. I rather doubt this is the last of the progression, either. It’s a logical hierarchy, but one that might have been a little confusing with the advent of iPhone wifi-detection, since outside of Flickr there just wasn’t many avenues to do anything with that data.

From a consumer standpoint, it’s comforting to suspect that there’s some grand plan behind everything, that each step Apple takes is a step towards a more integrated, neatly designed end game that will make my life terribly more organized and worthwhile a year down the line. I hold no illusions that this is always the case. I’m sure some brilliant Apple decisions have been complete seat-of-the-pants bullshitting that just happened to hit paydirt. But I also think that what sets Apple uniquely apart is that ability to take high level, end-to-end past-to-future views across entire product lines.

Because 11Mbps is better than 10Mbps

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:49:16 -0700

Why do cable companies bother advertise their connection speeds so heavily? Internet connectivity has lagged behind hardware specs by about 5-10 years, but they’ve followed the same path. In the 1990’s, a 486 blew away a 386. 512MB of RAM offered enormous advantages over 256MB. But today it just doesn’t matter. Apple, in particular, buries technical specs away, because the vast majority of people just don’t care if their Core 2 Duo is running at 3.06GHz or at 2.1GHz. Software and hardware have progressed to a point where incremental improvements are effectively negligible. It’s the experience that matters. It’s the design. It’s the freedom. It’s the productivity.

Today, connectivity is the same. The vast majority of people are fine with a basic cable internet package. Most YouTube videos — the fattest bandwidth hit for the average consumer — will buffer and start playing within seconds. The connection speed shouldn’t be a selling point. The selling point is how your experience is: are your customer service reps assholes? Or the design. Is billing and package management a complete nightmare? Or the freedom. Are you filtering and prioritizing your customer’s bandwidth? Or simple economics. Are you dicking everyone with fee after fee, even when someone upgrades their equipment to pay more money to you?

Yes, you techies out there streaming bittorrent over a tunneled Tor node to a DC++ server do want more bandwidth. But you’re also not going to buy a random, vanilla metal box from Dell. You’re in the minority. It just doesn’t matter anymore.

NetNewsWire? More like NetNewsOMGI'MGONNADIE

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:18:49 -0700

My favorite and most-used piece of Mac software, NetNewsWire, released a new version this week. NetNewsWire (whose parent company is NewsGator) is probably the finest RSS software on the planet, with best-of-class apps on each platform. As I alluded in a tweet, this both excites me terribly and implants the fear of change in me. It’s been a long time coming; the iPhone version has been rotting in AppStore approval hell for at least a month, and I’ve been holding off on new NNW for Mac betas until I could cross-sync over Google Reader onto my iPhone. I upgraded immediately.

It’s been a disappointment. I realize change is hard to deal with, so that was unsurprising, but as a technologist by profession I started wondering why I was having such a bad experience with it. What kind of lessons can we take from this? What has NewsGator done right, and what does the new version fall flat on?

Disclaimer

Love NewsGator, love their devs (led by fearless Brent Simmons), and still love NetNewsWire. I’m trying my best to make this a study in abstract rather than a direct assault on NNW itself.

Okay, let’s get cracking.

NNW iPhone v1: A Framework

NetNewsWire for iPhone had been effectively the same version for a little over two years, if memory serves me. It predates AppStore. Their first Cocoa app was nearly a 1:1 port of their initial web app, which itself came out early on the scene once Apple detailed more specific WebKit hooks to make Safari more app-like. It was almost frustratingly basic:

A flat list view split out by feed that let you drill further down into each feed’s new items. We’ve lived with this day in, day out, with little to no changes until this week. It wasn’t for lack of want; as my most-used app, yeah, I wouldn’t mind some new updates, a little extra pizazz. But what I’ve come to realize is that by going this route they’re able to leverage the notion popularized by 37signals: Half, Not Half-Assed. Part of the 37signals ethos is that you do the bare minimum to start with, partially because it’s easier and simpler to implement, but also because it appeals to a broader audience. By releasing a simple foundation, you encourage users to develop their own workarounds, their own methodologies while using your app.

This is important when building something like an RSS app. My methodology is flat: no folders, sparse usage of “clippings” or “starred” stories, and I read every story that crosses my inbox. My boss is the opposite: very hierarchical, broken into topical folders, less of an “inbox zero” methodology. It becomes difficult to build an app that satisfies both of us, unless you break down the problem into a simplistic, unambiguous presentation. Whereas NetNewsWire v1 was an open-ended framework that let you work as you’d please, NetNewsWire v2 has a different expectation of how you use it, and my existing patterns have broken because of it.

NNW iPhone v2

Let’s look at the home screen.

Since I enjoy reading everything in the pile, right off the bat I notice I have one new feed I’d like to read. Unfortunately, NNW has decided that I want to see them sorted alphabetically, so that one news item is now lost in the stack. I tap “Latest” in hopes to find that.

Well, it should be somewhere. Unfortunately, there’s no real good way to jump straight to whatever’s the newest unread item. That button somewhat exists, but only if I tap on an unrelated story and tap the “Next Unread” button (which doesn’t go in reverse and it doesn’t disappear if you’ve read everything). I also lose all the context of what feed I’m reading by getting everything collapsed in one giant stack. Part of the reason I can afford to read everything is that I don’t read them all… that is, if I’m reading the feed of a typical aggregator, I know I can just browse headlines, tap “mark all as read” since I assume the story will bubble up in other blogs if it’s newsworthy, and then move onto the next feed with unread stories. That entire process is unattainable now.

Again, it’s important not to lose sight of the main issue here. The little things can all be fixed, over time, through bug fixes, new feature additions, or new user preferences (all of which mean added development time and slower time-to-market). It’s that broad picture view that I’m having difficulty awarding NewsGator a win. They had a great, flexible platform that molded people’s expectations for years, and that’s a horrible thing to waste. It’s also very hard to attain. In a manner of speaking, it takes balls to singularly focus on one attainable goal and ship it. Even more importantly to maintain it.

The astute among you will, at some point, mention that another one of 37signal’s core values is to make opinionated software, and that NewsGator is now putting out good software that has a clear opinion attached to it. Generally, I agree. Opinionated software is a good thing. But the problem is if your opinion changes. Or, to be slightly more accurate, if you go from having no opinion to having an opinion. If 37signals suddenly decided that Campfire isn’t really great for the web, but that Campfire is an ethos that should live in the cloud through a combination of IM, IRC, and email, go right ahead- that’s a great opinion to have. It’s just a terrible opinion to have once you’ve set expectations to the contrary.

Whether NewsGator will adapt NetNewsWire to something I’m more comfortable with remains to be seen, just as whether I’ll grow more comfortable with the new NetNewsWire way of doing things remains to be seen. Like most things, it’ll probably meet somewhere in the middle and I’ll remain a giddy little fanboy. Take a look around, though. It’s got all the good stuff in it: design, UI, technology, and human expectations. Mix ‘em all up and it’s just another one of those stubborn little fun problems in our industry.

In what might be the finest Snow Leopard change, click-resizing...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:44:55 -0700

In what might be the finest Snow Leopard change, click-resizing a Finder window from the lower-right hand corner in Cover Flow mode will keep the Cover Flow section anchored and expand the bottom file listing space. Finder resizing in Leopard instead anchored the file listing and expanded the Cover Flow section up top. Needless to say, I very rarely thought to myself, “Well shucks, I wonder how big I can make these big-ass icons.”

Cue higher integrity of integrity's queue

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:20:41 -0700

We just jumped on the Integrity bandwagon at the office. It’s a cute little open source project that I’ve admired for quite some time but haven’t had the chance to play around with until now. So far so good; if you’re looking to move to continuous integration it’s definitely a viable option. (The other jive cat on the street, CI Joe — a @defunkt production — looks really interesting but is a little bleeding-edge right now.)

One of the issues we ran into fairly quickly was effectively a fat race condition. If I commit and push right now, and then a minute later I commit and push again, Integrity seems to run the first batch of tests and, once notified by GitHub about the second push, immediately run the second batch. Since we’re running this on a test database that gets destroyed and rebuilt, once the second batch runs it nukes the tests for the first run and then fails on its own.

The gist below is a quick solution to that. Once tests are run, it touches a file; when finished, it removes the file. If the file’s present, chill in a holding pattern until it’s gone.

The last bit, ci:throw_error, is to ensure that the temp file gets removed if an earlier command bails out. For example, a sample integrity build command:

rake ci:enqueue && rake spec && rake ci:dequeue

This works if your specs run clean, but if that fails it’ll exit before you can dequeue, which impacts any future pushes. Instead, use a command line:

(rake ci:enqueue && rake spec && rake ci:dequeue) || rake ci:throw_error

…which will still throw an error so Integrity marks it as a broken build, but it also ensures you clear that tempfile.

Making a better iTunes

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:05:26 -0700

After iTunes 9 was released, much of the criticism surrounding it was directed at the bloat of the software itself.

From a random digg comment:

Talk to me when iTunes isn’t an enormous, bloated, fatass of a program. Yeah iTunes is great for the casual music listener, and the iPod support is awesome, but there are a lot of areas to improve on. Here is my wishlist for Version 10:
- Shrink the memory footprint! iTunes should play music in the background and still allow me to do whatever else I’d like to do without killing performance.
- FLAC support.
- Fix the coverflow art issue with older nVidia cards.
- Add the option to tag files from the internet. MediaMonkey has a feature where you click an album and press ctrl + L. This opens a window where you can select to download cover art, artist tags, track tags, genre tags, year tags, etc.

It’s a pointed comment, but I think it fares pretty well for generalizing many of the “iTunes is bloatware” crowd. Right off the bat, however, there’s two conflicting thoughts: that iTunes is a “fatass of a program” and should slim down, and that iTunes should then add at least two new features that don’t have particular broad-market appeal. That’s the foundation of bloatware.

That nitpick aside, I think this brings up three interesting questions about iTunes itself: what is the meaning of iTunes, and what does that mean for its future?

The Meaning of iTunes

This is a particular point of contention that I feel most reactive criticism misses. They seem to take the “iTunes” name as the same as its historical origins: namely, that it is a place for your tunes. At this point, music has become subsidiary. When you think about it, that’s staggering. The cornerstone of Apple’s business this millennium has been the iPod, and, to a lesser extent, the iTunes Music Store. That its flagship product no longer caters to music is certainly surprising, and I think it’s a common point of frustration for people making these comments. But it’s no longer the reality: Apple has been increasingly pushing far more than music the last few years, and iTunes has adapted and changed with the iPod and the iTunes Store.

It’s nice to say that you want to go back to the glory days of Winamp in the 90’s, where all you have to worry about is some MP3s, a few playlists, and a play and pause button. Great. The problem is that consumers’ interests have changed. For the vast majority of people, that purist mentality would be disaster. Do you store your videos and movies in some unsearchable, unbrowseable Videos directory, like so many of us did years ago? How do you get those into your iPod? Drag and drop? A separate application? Does that mean you split it into iMusic, iMovies, iSync, iPodcasts, iApplications, iTVShows, and so on? The difference is that people have different expectations based on how they use their media. You can’t let them hide it all away in some folder they’ll never use; they want it all easily accessible in one package so they can shoot it to their iPods, their iPhones, their AppleTVs, and so on.

The meaning of iTunes is no longer just music. It requires the addition of different features, different focuses. That means the Winamp of the 90’s doesn’t cut it. Album art is now a focus. Genius playlists take some of the great ideas from Last.fm and Pandora and moves it to your personal machine. App management is now done in iTunes because it’s such a pain in the ass to do it on your phone. Things are changing, and iTunes has had to change with them every step of the way.

The Future of iTunes

I’ve been mulling this about in my head since a bit before iTunes 9. Where is this taking iTunes? On my Mac, iTunes is a glaring omission from Activity Monitor’s neat column of “Intel (64 bit)”. From all the rumors over the last few years, it sounds like having a decade-old Carbon-based iTunes has become a development nightmare. I’m sure there’s still predecessor SoundJam-era code standards and design buried in there. Any sort of instability, performance drains, or design inefficiencies are a huge pain in the ass when you’re the world’s most-deployed software outside of the OS.

I’d imagine The Big Rewrite is probably coming in the next year or two. QuickTime X is fundamentally a different project than QuickTime 7 (see Siracusa’s excellent Snow Leopard review on Ars for the intensive details of this changeover). QuickTime stretches back nearly two decades and has become a standard unto itself, so I think it’s fair to say that Apple has the balls to make heavy changes like that. One has to wonder what The Big Rewrite would entail for iTunes, though.

John Gruber went into some detail yesterday on what that rewrite might entail, specifically from the point of OS X development. I think what he’s saying makes sense, though I don’t think sprinkling WebKit is sufficient enough pixie dust for ease of cross-platform portability. I do think that WebKit would (and is, as of iTunes 9) helps out in the iTunes Store perspective, though. Pretty much all of the new iTunes Store is straight CSS3, HTML 5, and JavaScript, which you’re able to do when you’re sure that your entire audience is on the world’s most advanced browser. This means you can hire regular designers and front end developers to update your store rather than dive deeper into any proprietary XML or even make Objective C-level changes. It’s a win for Apple. And as long as we’re on the subject: my secret hope is that this opens the door for a more public and web-based iTunes store in the future. Whenever I click on one of those special open-in-iTunes links I cringe; it’d be slick if I could browse in my browser of choice and click-to-download-in-iTunes instead.

Then there’s the issue of the name itself: iTunes. It’s got great branding, but it doesn’t make sense considering it’s now two distinct (and huge) parts: your media, and your iPod. If there’s a company that would ever drop a brand like iTunes it’s Apple, but would it ever make sense. Would there ever be a case for an iSync (current app named that way aside)? I think the problem is that you do want to be as close as you can to your media itself, so spinning off syncing into another app might be confusing, but does this change if you sync your media over your network? Does this all change if you keep all of your data in the cloud and sync over the air? Does syncing itself become just another web app? When iPhones and Touches get in the neighborhood of 200GB, 300GB and more, does it really matter about selecting which calendar, which playlist, or which photos to sync when you could just toss it on your device with room to spare? These issues might not come into play for another 3-5 years, but I think it’s a model towards which we’ll be moving, and when we move there iTunes will have to adapt again.

There's No Such Thing as a Good Client

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:51:16 -0700

There's No Such Thing as a Good Client:

Things which make money for you not only give you money, they also give you time. But if you’re only getting income, and you’re not getting equity, your books only balance if you pretend the time budget isn’t there.

Another good read by Giles Bowkett. The core of its message is far broader than just consulting.

Little Snow Leopard Tidbits

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:25:06 -0700

- QuickTime, if maximized full-screen on a secondary display, stays full-screen even if you interact with other apps. This is excellent, and it’s one of those things I’ve always wanted but never knew it.

- As you move between Spaces, the small icon overlay that shows your position animates. In Leopard, it immediately flashes to the new position; in Snow Leopard, it quickly moves the white fill to the next space.

- Though more of an iTunes tidbit: you can consolidate everything into one Media folder now. Which, you know, considering you’re reading this you probably know that by now.

- Split windows in Terminal are pretty awesome. I haven’t settled on my regular usage of them yet, but I’m leaning towards some sort of setup with autotest or script/console readily accessible. It’s too bad these are attached to specific tabs, though; I’d rather which they worked like frames that were attached to windows, with each split having their own set of tabs.

- The Image Capture redesign, though a little confusing from a UI perspective, is totally worth it just for the fact that I’ll hopefully never have to install some 3rd party printer or scanner software sludge from HP or other vendor. The scanner at work showed up immediately on my network through Image Capture and worked without any setup whatsoever.

- I keep the lock icon on my menu bar: it’s set up through Keychain. It’s mostly designed to let you quickly lock or unlock Keychain to restrict access to password-protected areas if you’re stepping out temporarily, but I’ve always used it for a quick way to lock my screen. In Snow Leopard, this turns your screen off rather than the previous method of dumping you to your screen saver. I’m neutral about this change, as I enjoy my iPhoto-studded screensaver, but I love how it’s now a quick way to turn both of my displays off at night so the glow doesn’t keep me up longer as I try to sleep. (Though luckily I can sleep through anything, really; try it sometime. My neighbors do every morning.)

- I think it’s worth installing QuickTime 7 (the old “QuickTime Pro” from Leopard). I really dig QuickTime X, but it’s *really* barebones in terms of functionality: limited export options, and virtually no video control options. For example, I’ve used QuickTime Pro a number of times in the past to do a simple 90 degree rotation and re-save; it seems the supported fashion to do this now is to import into your iMovie library and really dig into it there. You’re better off digging out your Snow Leopard disk, looking in “Optional Installs” and installing the older version of QuickTime for these quick one-offs.

- If I recall correctly, right clicking and selecting “Change Desktop Background” wasn’t in previous versions. This is quite a bit more intuitive than Quicksilvering around my system preferences instead.

- There’s some additional hooks in Automator for defining and creating your own Services directly. I only made very limited usage of the Services menu in the past, and a lot of people are abuzz about the new Snow Leopard Services panel, but I’m still skeptical about whether I’ll actually use it. With a quick plug into Automator, though, it’ll make it a lot easier for me to define my own (or for others to create and share their own) if it makes sense in the future. It’s especially cool if I can fork almost all of the heavy lifting to a Ruby script using the built-in “Run Shell Script” in Automator as well.

Sebastiaan de With breaks down Snow Leopard’s UI changes...

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:24:58 -0700

Sebastiaan de With breaks down Snow Leopard’s UI changes pixel-by-pixel.

The wry self-referential man inside of me would also appreciate a similar, detailed, pixel-based analysis to Sebastiaan’s detailed, pixel-based analysis to Snow Leopard and other similar posts. It’s hard to find another blogger who puts so much thought into not just his blog design but the design of each individual post itself.

The iTunes organizational hierarchy has been slowly getting more...

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:28:58 -0700

The iTunes organizational hierarchy has been slowly getting more and more disorganized with each feature Apple adds. When you let iTunes manage your files, traditionally they toss everything in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music. That works great when everything in “iTunes Music” is, you know, music. Once they’ve tossed movies, podcasts, and a slew of other features in the mix, your directory hierarchy gets really nonsensical with everything in one big ol’ pile.

iTunes 9 finally moves away from this mentality, though the feature is hidden by default. iTunes now lets you organize everything into an upper level “iTunes Media” folder structure, which then breaks out neatly into logical groupings: movies, apps, shows, and so on. You can find this in File => Library => Organize Library. You’re welcome.

Moving your Rails stack to Snow Leopard

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:54:00 -0700

A few notes on upgrading to Snow Leopard for you attractive Rails developers out there:

MySQL

Your MySQL install will get nuked (configuration, binaries, and the database itself). Head to mysql.com and grab the new image (the installer for 10.5 worked for me) and install MySQL like usually. Once installed, you’ll need to reinstall your mysql gem. I needed to dust off my Snow Leopard disk (all one hour of dust) and install the Developer Tools again. Dive into your “Optional Installs” directory on the DVD and install Xcode.mpkg. Once installed, you can then get your mysql gem built for your particular architecture:

Using the 32bit MySQL install:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

That should build your gem and you should be able to proceed from there.

MacPorts

MacPorts, if you’re moving to a 64bit Snow Leopard install, will be completely bombed, leading to odd errors when you try to build C extensions for gems like nokogiri or RedCloth. You’ll have to uninstall all of your ports.

Unfortunately, the port command will also fail for you. To fix that, I needed to rebuild MacPorts from source, which kind of sucked. Once built, thought, you can do a sudo port -f uninstall installed and you’ll be back on track.

TextMate

TextMate has a few gotchas regarding the upgrade to Snow Leopard. I’ll push you over to the helpful wiki page on it, which lists some fixes for command+arrow, command+R, and some 32bit/64bit issues.

I’ll probably add more as I run into issues, but these are the main issues I’ve noticed since launch.

Getting Logitech Control Center to work on Snow Leopard

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:36:23 -0700

If you’re doing an upgrade to Snow Leopard, you might notice that, while Logitech Control Center might be installed still in your System Preferences, various shortcut buttons on your clever little Logitech mouse are completely not working. I enjoy having Spaces and Expose right on my mouse, and the fifteen minutes without those shortcuts readily available nearly put me in the psych ward. You know, more than usual.

Have no fear! A quick hackery is here! (At least until Logitech gets their crap in gear- you hear? This is no mere software engineer veneer to interfere with what we’d do best to steer clear; this is important shit.)

But I digress. Dive into your Applications folder and copy Expose.app and Spaces.app into your main Applications directory. (Make sure you copy rather than just drag and drop, otherwise Untold Foolery will probably happen.) I’m guessing Snow Leopard swapped the location of these apps and LCC has yet to be updated for that.

The quickest path to $50m in revenue? Build fun.

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:47:29 -0700

nabeel:

Turns out it takes an average of eight years to hit $50m in revenue, which is about the point when you can start thinking about things like going public.

Feeling impatient? Don’t start a networking company. Of course this is a limited study, but we are seeing another wave of entertainment-oriented companies repeating this pattern in Social Gaming currently. At least three social gaming companies I know of will be, or already have, hit $50m in revenue in their first three years of business.

Apple's iPhone tactics work

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:01:40 -0700

Lately there’s been a lot of comparisons between Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s Windows monopoly of the 1990’s (I’m looking at you, reddit and Hacker News). A lot of the anger is focused on Apple’s AppStore and iPhone lockdown tactics, which leads to warcries of “APPLE IS A MONOPOLY! APPLE IS EVIL!”.

Luckily, Apple’s not evil.

Let me qualify that: I view “evil” in this context as whether that company is leveraging existing assets to curtail the freedoms of the customer. In other words, the customer is forced into a position that they wouldn’t have otherwise taken.

This is an important concept. Whether my definition of “evil” is accurate or not is likely up for debate, but I tend to hold the position that one should stay out of someone’s way. If a consumer wants to jump off a bridge, let them; while the company might be classified as irresponsible, I don’t think it makes them “evil” to follow the wishes of their customers.

Microsoft got into trouble in the 1990’s for leveraging their existing asset — Windows — and using their monopolistic power in other avenues, like web browsers. This is evil. From a consumer’s perspective, there’s not an easy way to jump ship. The Mac of the 90’s wasn’t as viable a platform as it is now, and *nix had a long way to go before user friendliness. I don’t even view the Internet Explorer issue as that big of a deal; I think the OS should be able to make smart default choices for its users. Put it this way: if Microsoft utterly entwined Internet Explorer 8 with Windows 7 and wanted to push Firefox and other browsers aside, I’d have much less of an issue with them doing it now as opposed to ten years ago, if only for the notion that switching to another OS is so much more accessible now.

Zap forward to today. You have people like Calacanis hooting and hollering — in a surprisingly high-pitched squeal, I might add — about Apple’s AppStore approval process, the issue with iPhone lockdowns, and Apple as gateway between third-party developer and consumer.

I’ll get it out of the way: the AppStore approval process is a mess. Running arbitrary code on my iPhone would be cool, that I heartily agree with. But I don’t see this qualifying them as the “Microsoft of the 2000’s”. I view this as a bridge jumping problem: Apple has designed their product in a fashion of lockdown and hand-holding. It’s a very opinionated product. Apple isn’t forcing this on their userbase. If your users use your product, and, by all measures fanatically love it, this has to raise questions about whether your typical consumer even gives a rat’s ass about these issues. The fourth highest positive response for the iPhone in that survey is specifically third-party apps.

Even though the iPhone is doing gangbusters on customer satisfaction, there’s certainly a number of capable competitors coming along, most notably the Pre and Android. Compare this to Microsoft of the 90’s, when alternatives meant a huge switcher cost. Right now, it’s not an issue to switch phones; number portability was achieved on the telcos by law a few years back, and most contact data can be easily ported from your OS-based address books or through SIM cards.

Are there some issues Apple needs to address? Sure, and I think that’s what Schiller has been trying to do. But the reason iPhone users are flocking to the device and staying there isn’t because of Microsoft monopoly-era tactics; it’s because Apple has built a better device. And if they do decide that iPhone doesn’t seem to fit the bill, you aren’t prevented from rolling the dice and trying one of the competing devices (with varied success).