greenthinks

Khoi Vinh, of NYTimes.com, writes the absolute best article on the new Apple-made cell phone that everyone and their grandmother seems to think is being announced/released at MacWorld Expo on Tuesday.

Vinh talks about how he has been planning on replacing his Palm Treo 650 with whatever Apple decides to release in the mobile phone arena:

In fact, when I think of that passel of features in terms of what a design tyrant like Jobs might release, it seems somewhat unlikely. Very unlikely. I mean, think about it: does it seem remotely possible that Steve Jobs would release a phone that’s a browser, an application platform, a camera, a PDA, an email client and an iPod? Would you bet money that he would? That kind of modal schizophrenia seems like it would be a clear affront to his sensibilities, and none of this even addresses whether the phone will sport a keyboard. I’d be happy if I’m wrong, but can we really expect a phone with a keyboard from the Barnum-like genius who gave us an iPod without a screen?

It’s a great piece – go read it.

So I’m trying out the new Google Calendar, which does work yet in Safari (Apple, get going on those Web 2.0 improvements!). I’m running it in Firefox and hitting up against a pretty irritating Firefox behavior: When you hold down the mouse button in Firefox for macs (like if you are dragging to create an event or dragging an event around), it pops up the right click menu.

Now, that does make some sense, because Macs don’t by default have a right click button and some people would not otherwise know how to access the right click menus, but there should certainly be a way to turn it off.

Does anyone know how to turn it off?

Update: I figured this one out myself, thank you very much…

The answer? A setting you can reach in Firefox by using the “about:config” function (for all your newbies, that’s type about:config in the Address Box and hit Return/Enter). If you search for “dom”, you will see an entry called “dom.disable_open_click_delay” with a default integer value of, I think, 1000. I changed it to 5000 and now have no problems dragging all sorts of stuff around in Google Calendar. Wonderful!

Another Update: So it appears that I was entirely wrong. The previously mentioned entry in the Firefox config has no effect on the issue I was dealing with. The reason Google Calendar started working was because Google modified their site’s code. Ah well, still looking for a solution for this behavior on Firefox for Mac.

Final Final Update: I just tried this again (holding down the mouse button over a web page in Firefox on Mac) and found that the functionality has either been disabled or completely removed in Firefox 2.0 RC1. Wonderful! Case closed.

So I was going to comment on the lack of Applescriptability in iTunes for Windows (not that I would expect it to be included since its underlying structure, the System Events system, is a pretty low level part of the Mac OS). This was in response to some blogger’s list of 5 improvements he’d like to see in the next version of iTunes. He was clearly talking about the Windows version, because multiple items on his list have been solved for me for a long time with scripts (he also said he was running it on Windows). Unfortunately, try as I might, I cannot for the life of me locate said article.

Oh well, I just wanted to recognize the fact that the grass is still a little greener for us Mac users here in terms of iTunes functionality.

First things first. I will, for the time being, no longer be linking. At least not often. Why? Because my own issues about blog post quality have been getting in the way of my ever blogging. Case in point, this will be my first post in over a month. I know how important linking is (though it has gotten less important with Google), so I will try to resume doing it at some later point.

Now, on to more substantive matters. There are some major areas in Apple’s OS X OS that need improvement. While Tiger (10.4) was a terrific release, it has only marginally improved through the subsequent point releases (now at the Universal 10.4.4).

Let’s get it started:

1. Safari – Chief amongst the stagnant and dire bunch is Apple’s browser. While rumors have been brewing about a myriad of new features coming in the fruit company’s upcoming Leopard release (10.5), new features are NOT what Safari needs the most. The biggest problems with Safari still lie with the rendering engine itself. Comments from Dave Hyatt and the rest of the WebCore/WebKit team on their blog make it sound like they are convinced the engine is done and are now just tidying up and getting ready for the next gen content rendering stuff. The engine is NOT DONE. Most of us who follow at least some blogs have seen puzzled posts like one from James Rocchi (then the film critic for Netflix) that he could not figure out how to post to his weblog from a film festival’s press center, because they were using macs. Are macs really that different? Do they have keyboards that look different or require fundamentally different skills to use? No. The problem was simply that the WYSIWYG functionality in Movable Type does not work in Safari – the default browser on the Mac. Robert Scoble had the same problem with Wordpress at an Apple Store. So did his son Patrick, though he was using Blogger. In all these cases (and many more), these PC users got very bad impressions of the so-called “ease of use” of the Mac, when it required that they know and remember the HTML link tag to link on their blog posts. This is the sort of problem that should be first on Apple’s list of things to fix in Safari.Why am I so riled about this? Because there is no good explanation. If they’ve already solved this problem and are simply waiting to give us the new rendering engine in Leopard, then that in and of itself is unacceptable and unprecedented. New features? Fine to use to sell a new release. Bug fixes and rendering engine improvements? Bordering on exploitative when used to sell their new release. And in fact, Apple has shown this to be their view as well. When WebCore/Webkit underwent a serious overhaul, they released the upgraded engine inside basically the same Safari as version 1.3 for current users, and that same engine, albeit with many new features in Tiger as Safari 2.0. So it would not seem that they are merely waiting for the next release to bless us faithful customers with these fixes. Which means they are simply not fixing them.There are many other issues with Safari rendering I could talk about. Apple needs to continue to work with banks and e-commerce sites to make sure that they do not lock out Safari users. There is nothing more confusing to my mom than thinking that Safari is the web, until she reaches The Gap and finds that it will not work on her nice white Mac computer. Us techies may be able to abstract the application and its particular compatibility issues away from the computer itself, but normal users don’t. If they cannot reach a website or interact with it succesfully on a Mac using Safari, then they will blame the Mac – not the application.


2. iCal – This one is not nearly as dire as the other, but is still pretty important. Calendering is an area where not much innovation is taking place and where so much innovation needs to happen. Jon Udell talked about this recently on his blog, though he was certainly not the first and will definitely not be the last to have this problem. While at least Microsoft believes they have solved the calendering space for corporations, noone has even really tried to deal with group calendering on the consumer level. That is except Apple. If you’re entire family is on Macs, you can each use iCal and subscribe to each other’s calenders, and things will basically work fine. There is not such a great web story, but then again, Apple has never really gotten the web, so that’s no surprise. What I have been hoping for (and am seeing glimmers of in the Hula project) is an Open Source web calendering initiative that would use any of the standards used by iCal for syncing to interoperate with desktop clients. This would give us the best of both the web and the desktop and once someone wrote a killer Windows client that could handle this (MS has a new Windows Calender in Vista that may play this role) things could really be peachy.So what am I asking Apple to do? Most of what I wrote above does not rely on anything that they may do or not do. Well, I would like them to push forward. While the rest of the pack are simply trying to replicate basic calendering functionality on the web, Apple should be doing what they are really good at – moving the pale a football field further. I’m not a researcher, nor am I a software dev, but I am certain that there are many ways that we can improve upon the basic calender functionality that is contained in every calendering application. I’ve seen no indication that anyone else is working on this – so I really hope Apple is.


3. iChat – Here is where I want Apple to do a bit of following, in contrast to my last point. Microsoft has already started showing off the next generations of MSN Windows Live Messenger. The piece that Apple should have gotten first, and that Microsoft seems to be jumping right into, is the collaboration over IM application. Microsoft is tackling this on two levels: on the consumer level with Windows Live Messenger and on the corporate level with Office Communicator. The fact is that Apple needs to give us a way to better collaborate over iChat with our documents and browsing.

There’s probably some more, but this has gone on long enough, so I’ll cut it off here. I’m staying realistic but here’s hoping Apple will deliver.

Dave Winer is now using LemkeSoft’s GraphicConverter on his mac instead of Adobe ImageReady, which he had been using on Windows:

Anita Wilhelm, illustrating the spirit of TagCamp in Palo Alto on October 29. Notable because it’s the first graphic I produced on the Mac. Took about an hour, but I figured out how to use Graphic Converter Pro, which is pretty nice, but not quite as easy as ImageReady. The good news is now I should be able to do new little graphics in the margin. Ever since switching to the Mac, I’ve just been snarfing old ones from the archives.

Why not use ImageReady on the Mac, Dave?

This is the stupid message I get from Microsoft Word today, while working on my latest paper. But wait, I thought there is no Hebrew support in Microsoft Word on my mac? That’s right! So it is NOT that the Hebrew proofing tools (dictionary and other info that Word uses for each language) are not installed, it’s rather that they’re not available. Microsoft, if you’re going to make business decisions to exclude a capability from your program, have the decency not to complain that that capability isn’t installed, as though it is somehow my fault!?

Every power user or techie (or nerd or geek) has their pet utilities, without which a computer just does not feel like “home.” For me, the most important of these has, for the past few years, been Objective Development’s LaunchBar.

I’ve tried Quicksilver, that up and coming free youngster, but it just was too much of a mess for this OCD detail nut. LaunchBar knows what it is meant to do, and it does it beautifully. More recently, as LaunchBar seemed to be in a state of languor, and as Apple introduced Spotlight in Tiger, I have tried to do away with my LaunchBar habit.

Today I go to Objective’s site, just for the hell of it, and lo and behold, a new beta version! And they haven’t been sitting around doing nothing, either. 4.1 boasts full spotlight integration, further integration with Address Book and iTunes, support for Automator workflows, and a bunch more features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

I’m impressed.