Hard drive failure

One of the worst things that could happen to a computer happened today to me. The hard drive on my PowerBook failed. It started making funny noises yesterday and then today it stopped spinning. Given that I'm a bit paranoid about backups, I said to myself, "this isn't a problem as my backup is 2 hours old." Then my elated thought turned to disappointment when I realized that my 2 hour old backup is sitting in the bank vault where I had just been a few hours earlier to store my backup. The good news is that my 9 day old backup boots my PowerBook thanks to SuperDuper!. So on Monday morning I'll drive over to The Chip Merchant, plunk down $150 + tax for a new 80 GB hard drive, then goto the bank which doesn't open until 9 am. Then I have the fun task of disassembling my PowerBook and putting the new hard drive in.

To add to my backup strategy, I'm going to get additional TrayDocks and have 2 backups at home so that this doesn't happen again.

Stuffit Archives and .hqx encoded files

Stuffit products have been on my Macs for years and have done a wonderful job of compressing and decompressing. Stuffit Expander shipped with all versions of the Mac up until OS X Tiger. Now that zip is built into the OS and even has extensions for keeping the Mac resource fork (newer applications don't use the resource fork anymore), I haven't been able to come up with a reason to keep Stuffit Expander around except to deal with files I download that are still in .sit and .hqx formats. I find that some companies are still putting files on their websites with these extensions; if the app doesn't have a resource fork, zip it. If it does or you want to customize the look, use a disc image (.dmg) and let a user download that. I think by now users are used to using disc images. Also, the disc image doesn't need to be zipped or .bin put on the end; just make sure your web server serves up the .dmg file as application/octet-stream.

Passing off Windows software as Mac software

It amazes me that companies recompile their code to work on the Mac (either using cross platform GUI libraries or trying to make a Mac interface without basically ever using a Mac) and expect Mac users to not be offended when no real effort is put into making the app look like it belongs on a Mac. In one app I ran today they even used a screenshot of a Windows dialog in the dialog! As a die hard Mac user, I avoid software that is done this way as much as possible as it doesn't instill confidence in me if they can't provide a Mac user experience which really wouldn't take all that much time. This is similar to my complaint about Palm applications in an article I wrote called "Common User Interface Mistakes. Some Real World Examples" published for the PalmSource Developer Conference, May 2003. In that article, I used screenshots to point out errors in user interface according to the Palm OS guidelines. One line that I really like from the article is:

If a developer didn't care enough to spend an extra hour fixing the user interface and making it adhere to guidelines, did he or she cut corners when developing the application? This isn't to say that an application with a good user interface operates better than one with a poor user interface or that a good application can't have a poor user interface, but it may be indicative of the quality of the application.

HTML Email

Yesterday I received a message from the Palm developer program; it looked liked there was nothing in the message, so I poked around and found that it was an HTML formatted email. I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to HTML email in that I completely oppose it. I go to great lengths to only display plain text email in Mail.app. I think my aversion to HTML email goes back to when I worked on Eudora with Steve Dorner. Steve opposed many things and he didn't believe that HTML belonged in email which makes a lot of sense to me. One of my arguments against it has always been that I don't want the sender of a message to force how the message should be viewed on me, in particular, the text color, text font, and text size. This argument doesn't hold much water if you think about it; every website I visit forces me (more or less) to view it how the author intended. However, in most cases, people don't go overboard in websites to display stuff in 20 point bold, red type, like I've seen in email. Why people do this, I have no idea.

I'm sticking to viewing plain text email.