Tag: Software

I found this cool application yesterday. My wife asked me to locate the manual for some baby thing we have (it seems that we’ve collected a lot of stuff for our 5 week old and each thing comes with a manual to lose) and said that she had emailed it to me. I fired up DocumentWallet and looked for it. I’ve been placing all the manuals I get (most are available online) into a baby category in DocumentWallet so I don’t have to search for things again.

OK, maybe DocumentWallet isn’t new and I didn’t discover it (yes, I wrote it), but this is sure a cool use for the app. With a smart category for everything that contains baby, I can find manuals quickly and easily. Why didn’t I come up with this sooner?

Over on VersionTracker, someone posted a comment about ReceiptWallet saying that Quicken for Windows allows users to scan in receipts and attach them to the register. This is great, except that it is Windows! Most Mac users don’t want to use Windows and that’s why they use a Mac. Will this feature ever come to Quicken for the Mac? At this point I think it is highly unlikely. Quicken is a very old code base and needs to be made a universal binary to move forward; it is going to take a lot of work to do this and if Intuit was smart, they wouldn’t touch scanning on the Mac due to the poor TWAIN drivers that companies like HP and EPSON put out.

Like many people, I’m quite disappointed that Apple has delayed the release of Leopard until October. Many of the features that Apple is touting look really cool, and I want to use them! While major OS updates take time to get them right and we all want to see a stable release, it would seem that a company as large as Apple could get the resources to do such an upgrade in the time they promised. Apple’s “excuse” is that they’re working on the iPhone and resources have been shifted to it over Leopard.

I see a number of problems with the delay. First off, putting the iPhone over the core Mac OS X shows a disturbing shift towards a consumer electronics company that started with the iPod. There is a lot of money to be made in cellphones, but it is a cutthroat business. Second, Apple should be able to hire adequate resources to do two major products at once. Apple is quite picky about their hiring of engineers and for the most part requires engineers to be a) employees and b) must be onsite in Cupertino. Many of the most highly qualified Mac OS X developers don’t want to relocate to Cupertino (have you seen the housing prices lately or looked at the traffic?) and want to remain contractors for flexibility. In addition, Apple has very draconian policies about doing outside projects while being employees. While this may not be legal in California as long as projects are done on their own time and using their own resources, very few, if any, Apple employees that I know of are afraid to doing projects such as shareware with stymies outside of the box thinking.

Another problem is outside of Apple’s control is that many people that apply for jobs say they know Cocoa, but in reality there are a limited numbers of developers/engineers that have commercial Cocoa experience. Many people say they have Cocoa experience, but that is based on a few small shareware applications. I’ve been developing using Cocoa for about 4 years now full time and I’d like to think that I’m highly qualified. Granted it is a chicken and an egg situation that people can’t get Cocoa experience without a job doing Cocoa and can’t get a Cocoa job without known Cocoa, but if Apple put aside being employees and the location, I’m sure that, for the right amount of money, Apple could find qualified developers/engineers.

I hope that the Leopard delay products a solid OS release, but based on the large number of features that Apple has indicated will be in Leopard and the features that Apple hasn’t revealed, I’m not very hopefully that 10.5.0 will be stable. It took up until Mac OS X 10.4.9 to make 10.4 very stable.

Good luck, Apple!

I’m not sure what Apple has been thinking in its recent updates to iTunes in terms of user interface. The changes have taken the product many, many steps back in terms of usability. Just the other day I installed a new DVD drive in my dad’s iMac and when we were testing it, I went into iTunes to burn a full DVD to see what happened. I created a new playlist with 3.75 GB of music, changed the iTunes preferences to burn a data CD/DVD and clicked burn. A few minutes later, I tested the DVD in my machine and found that it only had 551 of the 1054 items in the playlist. My dad mentioned I needed to check all the items in the playlist to burn them; I did this and got the full DVD. No where in the interface does it say that only the checked items will get burned; the burn button tooltip says something like “Burn Playlist to CD/DVD”; it doesn’t say “Burn only the checked items in the selected playlist”. That was my first problem.

The second was that I saw the browser window on my dad’s machine and wanted to see it on mine to play with. After a few minutes I found “Show Browser”, but I then only had 2 columns and my dad had 3. We searched under the View menu, control clicked, and everything else we could think of to get the column turned on. We stumbled upon the item in Preferences to “Show genre when browsing”.

While I’m beating up iTunes, let me continue. In the General Preferences section there is an item labeled Shared Name. When isn’t this under the Sharing section? Moving on. In the source list, you can’t click on Library, Store, or Playlists. Apple has mixed controls in this list to make things confusing. I also discovered that if you try to delete an item in a smart playlist, it won’t delete which is understandable, but in iPhoto if you delete an item from a Smart Album, it is removed from your library. Ever hear of consistency?

Let’s not forget that none of the controls are standard controls from the wacky toolbars to the odd color of the toolbar. How about the eye button in the lower right? The tooltip says “View library by artist, album, and genre.” I’m not quite sure how an eye fits that? Let’s look at the view icons in the upper right. The first two change just the bottom half of the window if the browser is shown while the third one changes the top and bottom. Does that make sense?

I think Apple just keeps cramming stuff into iTunes without paying much attention to usability. I’m sure people will disagree with me.

For the most part, Mac OS X has been solid and reliable. However, there are times when I have to restart. Recently my machine wouldn’t always wake from sleep requiring me to power cycle it; I don’t shutdown my machine all that often, but opt to sleep it so it wakes faster. I saw this a lot under 10.4.8 and it also seemed to occur when I unplugged my machine from my external monitor, keyboard, etc. With 10.4.9, I’m quite happy to say that I haven’t seen any of that. Some apps have crashed, but I haven’t had to restart my machine.

Way to go, Apple! Hopefully this will keep up with Leopard, but there are supposed to be lots of changes, that we might be starting over with stability.

For the last few days, I’ve been playing with Camino as my default web browser. For my new help system, it has some components that rely on Firefox (for editing knowledgebase articles), so I wanted to give Firefox a try. Unfortunately Firefox doesn’t look like a Mac application. Camino is supposed to be a Mac-ified version of Firefox, so I decided to give it a try. While it’s better than Firefox in terms of being a Mac application, it still has some weird behaviors. It appears to be faster than Safari and seems to be functioning well. I imported my bookmarks and since I’m using 1Passwd for storing passwords to websites, the transition was easy. One bug that is kind of annoying is there are 2 checkboxes for Passwords; “Allow saving in the Keychain” and “Auto fill passwords in web forms”. Unfortunately they don’t work properly. With 1Password, I fill in my passwords with it so I turned off Auto fill passwords in Safari and now Camino. In Safari, the HTTP Authentication passwords still got filled in, but web forms didn’t get filled in. Camino, however, requires that “Auto fill passwords in web forms” be turned on to fill in web forms as well as HTTP Authentication passwords.

I should probably just download the source and fix it, but the last time I touched anything related to Mozilla, it made my head spin and I found some source I had written when I was at Qualcomm that was used without retaining the copyright message (the original source I wrote is still available).

The jury is still out on if I’ll keep using Camino, but the speed and better support for editing in Cerberus and my blog (both use TinyMCE). We’ll see.