Thoughts

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22
Aug 10

Sharpie Liquid Pencil

First, a confession: I’m a pen nerd.

I recently read about Sharpie’s new Liquid Pencil, and was excited about it. A pencil with no leads to break? An erasable writing instrument that becomes permanent after a day or so? It seemed like the perfect pocket pen (er, pencil). Sign me up!

Just over a week ago I saw a two-pack at Officemax and bought it. I’ve been carrying one in place of my usual Pilot G-2, as an experiment.

Sadly, I must report that I’m not impressed. Maybe Sharpie will perfect the technology over time, but this initial version is a dud.

Here’s a sample page using several pens and pencils I have around on my desk.

Contrary to the claims on Sharpie’s blog, the Liquid Pencil writes anything but smoothly. It lays down the graphite unevenly; it’s choppy and inconsistent. It also feels kind of rough on the paper, at least compared to the pens I normally use.

Even the super-cheap Bic Round Stic wrote more smoothly and consistently.

Now let’s talk about erasing. Or rather, not erasing.

The Techniclick using regular graphite erases fairly well. You can sort of see what was written, if you squint at it. The Liquid Pencil, on the other hand, leaves a lot behind. I wrote “Something I regret writing” and then erased. I probably should have added “with” to the end of that sentence.

The pencil-to-ink conversion is also a bit overstated. I have seen claims ranging from one to three days. Okay, I’m willing to accept that there’s a variable or two here: paper type, humidity, etc. But after a week, I’m still able to half-erase what I wrote. Not very “permanent” even compared to a dime-a-dozen ink pen.

Verdict: I’m switching back to the Pilot G-2.

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20
Aug 10

Ye old Facebook

If you use Facebook, you’ve undoubtedly seen this at least once.

I hate the new Facebook! Join my petition group! Let’s bring back the old Facebook!

It happens any time Facebook changes anything significant. People are enraged for a while. After a few weeks, it peters out and things go back to normal. Until the next change, at least. Rinse, repeat.

Think about this. What are they really saying?

I have learned how this site works. You changed it, so now I have to learn it all over again. I’m pissed off.

This isn’t what people think they’re saying. People don’t like to think of themselves as incapable or inflexible, so they resist the idea that it’s not the new design they dislike, but that a change has occurred at all. Yet time after time (after a short adaptation period), users figure out where things are, and the gripes recede.

Fast forward to the next change. Even though people had bemoaned the previous version, they now eagerly jump to its defense, apparently having even more hatred for the newest design. There’s a certain sort of amnesia at work.

“The old Facebook was so much better” so many times now, the original Facebook must have been Jesus. -@Remiel

Sites like Facebook face the constant problem of keeping users coming back, and adding new features is a big part of that task. They also need to keep their interface both useful and desirable to average people. This butts up against a huge problem: most people don’t have much flexibility in their habits when it comes to using computers. They don’t understand the fundamentals building blocks of interfaces, the way technical people do; they learn by rote. Any time something changes, confusion and resentment result.

I wonder what these people would think if Facebook really did stop developing the site. No new features, no evolution. Would they start complaining that they want to do x or y, creating petitions asking Facebook to enable new features?

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21
Jun 10

Superhero quandaries

Some things that bother me about our favorite caped crusaders:

Spider-Man swings all around the city on thick, sticky ropes of web. Who cleans it up? How many people arrive to work in the morning, only to find their windows covered with it?

Batman uses a lot of high-tech top-secret tools. He has a handheld gun that can fire a rope into a beam and lift him to the rafters of a warehouse, or the top of a skyscraper. He has batarangs that he throws all over the place, and never seems to retrieve. Is there a black market in found bat-items?

Superman, Spider-Man and other superheroes wear their costume under their street clothes, and at a moment’s notice they slip into a phone booth or a dark alley and transform in order to save the day. Don’t Peter Parker and Clark Kent carry a wallet with a driver’s license, credit cards and the like? Yet they have not been identified based on the contents of the pockets of their frequently abandoned clothes. How often do they have to buy new clothes?

How does Superman keep his hair so perfectly styled when he flies “faster than a speeding bullet”?

If Iceman is made of ice, how exactly does he move his limbs?

What is Destro’s head supposed to be made out of? If it’s metal, how does he make facial expressions and move his lips?

What are the odds that G.I. Joe and Cobra each recruited no more than and no less than one ninja? And that those two ninja happen to have a history?

Will the new line of Batman films ever introduce Robin? Let me go on record as saying I hope not.

What do you suppose Steve Jobs’ secret identity is?

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17
Jun 10

No comment

Joe Wilcox challenged John Gruber to allow comments on Daring Fireball. Gruber explained why comments aren’t enabled. Wilcox responded by turning off comments on his site for two weeks (an experiment).

I recently disabled comments on this site. It’s not widely read, and what readers I have don’t often comment. The level of attempted spam finally decided it. Readers can still remark using my contact form. The ones who know me personally know how to find me using Twitter, Facebook, or email.

But the truth is that spam isn’t the only reason I turned off comments; that was just the catalyst.

Of the many blogs I read, two do not have commenting systems: Daring Fireball and Marco.org. I have a certain sense of relief when I read those sites, and it feels like a different level of quality. Is it entirely due to the content, or is part of it that the cacophony of the unwashed masses isn’t waiting below to spoil the experience?

These two blogs are not like most blogs I read. They are platforms, or to borrow Gruber’s term, soapboxes. Somehow it feels better to read them.

My theory is that when you write for a site with a commenting system, everything you write is tainted by the expectation that there will be a response, and that the response will be attached. Like letting random strangers add footnotes to your thoughts. As I write these words, I feel a certain level of freedom, not caring what anybody might say or think about it. Sure, people can email me. There’s a slight possibility that someone will write a response on another site. But what I write here will stand as published, its message not driven in other directions by outside forces.

Blogs are often hailed as a participatory medium, where readers and authors can engage in a conversation. On a carefully managed site, I suppose that might be possible. But anyone who has managed a blog in recent history can tell you that a non-curated site will quickly become a link farm, peppered with flamewars. On popular sites, especially those with a technical or political bent, comment threads devolve rapidly.

Don’t even get me started on the “First!” idiots.

What is a comment, really? In rare cases, perhaps a thoughtful contribution to the initial statement or question. More commonly, it’s ego-stroking; people pick up their megaphone and shout into the darkness, simply because they can.

Sorry, but I’ll skip it. When I wear my writer’s hat, I’ll say what I want to say, and none of you out there get to slap a post-it note on the side with your brilliant observations. If you want a voice, get your own soapbox.

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25
Apr 10

Porcelain engineering

Tonight I had dinner at a downtown restaurant called The Greenhouse Tavern. They use locally-sourced ingredients, organic foods, and are into recycling and so on. I can get behind all of that.

But here’s what struck me most: their bathroom. Yes, yes, I know, I’m hopeless. Bear with me.

First, the toilet. As described to the user via a small plaque on the wall, there are two buttons on top. You push the button corresponding to your (ahem) deposit. The toilet will use more or less water to flush depending on your choice. Or, if you don’t want to touch anything, it will attempt to divine which way to go based on how long you took. Here is a toilet that thinks.

Did I mention there’s a solar panel on top? There’s another on top of the sink faucet. I can’t imagine they see much sunlight.

Speaking of light, it’s controlled by a motion sensor, so you can’t forget to turn it off when you leave.

The hand dryer has a spout at the bottom, on which is a sticker reading, “Feel the Power.” I smirked and thought “What idiot decided to put that stupid sticker there?” And then, I put my hands beneath it and felt the power. This machine must have put out three times the air velocity of your typical hand dryer. It was a wall-mounted jet engine.

Bravo, Chef Sawyer. Your staff are great; your food is fantastic; your bathroom, sir, is well-engineered.

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12
Apr 10

Dear bloggers who returned their iPads

Over the last few days, I’ve read a number of articles and blog posts in which the author details how they bought a shiny new iPad, but later returned it.

A couple of them boiled down to: it just didn’t do what I needed. Alright, I have no problem with that. Doesn’t work for you, don’t keep it. Far be it from me to tell you how to spend your hard-earned dollars.

But over half of them complained about the closed, controlled nature of the device and the App Store model, and cited that as one of the reasons they didn’t keep the iPad.

And to you, dear sirs and madams, I can only say:

You are a sanctimonious asshole.

You heard me. What, do you think I don’t know that you have been well aware for years now how the App Store works? Did you think the iPad was magically going to be different from the iPhone in that respect? Am I supposed to believe that you are clueless about this issue, when you mentioned right in your post that you also own an iPhone?

I’m sure you had some other reason for returning the iPad, and that reason may well be one I have no argument with. But to complain about the software model, which you were fully informed about well before you bought an iPad?

That takes some gall.

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6
Apr 10

Response to “iBooks and private APIs”

I can understand Marco’s frustration with Apple’s use of private APIs. But I think he may be wrong to characterize Apple’s iBooks as a “slap in the face” to third party developers.

iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.

I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my customers will expect them, making my app inferior to Apple’s in key areas.

It’s also a slap in the face that Apple is listing iBooks in the App Store, since they employ technical measures to ensure that every other App Store app doesn’t call any undocumented or private APIs. This app wouldn’t pass the App Store submission process, yet developers need to compete with it for App Store attention. One of the great potential failures of an app-review system is inconsistent or unfair enforcement of the rules.

Why are some APIs private or undocumented? Because they are not ready to be made public. If Apple isn’t sure it can support an API into the future, they aren’t going to make it public. Maybe they’ll make it public someday; maybe they won’t. But as soon as they make it public, they officially support it and therefore can’t change it easily (at least, not the external interface or the way it functions as exposed to the outside).

Example: Developers were originally not permitted to use UIGetScreenImage(), but Apple decided to make it public (sort of).

Imagine the uproar if they made a not-yet-ready API public, it became popular, and then they rearranged it completely, breaking a bunch of apps. Nobody wants that, least of all third party developers.

It only makes sense that Apple would have private APIs in their own apps. What better place to take a test drive and kick the tires?

I feel for Marco, and I’d love to see some of these features make it into Instapaper. But Apple didn’t create the most popular mobile platform in the world by cutting corners and bending their own rules about quality.

(By the way, you should try Instapaper. It’s completely changed how I use the web.)

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6
Apr 10

Mac geeks: help with this problem?

My wife’s MacBook has developed a weird problem in iPhoto.

She has been trying to drag photos out to a desktop folder, so she can upload them to a printing service. She’s found several photos that she can’t drag out. Most seem to work fine, but these won’t permit the file to be dragged.

Normally when you drag a photo out you get the green “plus sign” overlay icon, meaning a copy will be made. On these photos, she gets the “no smoking” slash-circle symbol.

Other symptoms:

  • Right-click and “Show File” brings up a Finder window that shows the root disks of the machine. Normally you would get the folder where the photo lives, with the photo selected.

  • If you double-click the photo to bring up the large view, you get a big pixellated question mark. Normally you’d get the large version of the photo.

It’s as if the photo’s entry is still in the database/index, but the actual photo file has gone missing.

I’ve tried a systemwide Repair Permissions in Disk Utility. I also started iPhoto up while holding cmd + opt, and selected several options:

  • Rebuild the photos’ small thumbnails
  • Recover orphaned photos in the iPhoto Library folder
  • Examine and repair iPhoto Library file permissions
  • Rebuild the iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup
  • Reclaim unused disk space from databases

(In other words, the only option I did not try was “Rebuild all of the photos’ thumbnails.)

I’ve tried going into Time Machine, searching back to the oldest occurrence of the image I could find, and restoring it.

So far, nothing’s worked. I’m starting to fear filesystem corruption.

Anybody with any ideas, please let me know. If you already know my email address or have me on Facebook, feel free to contact me there. If you have neither, you can drop me a line using my contact form.

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3
Apr 10

Mislabeling Apple

iPad Launch Day is upon us, and with it comes another wave of articles and opinions. This week I’ve read several times about the coming death of the tinkerer class. Old-school hackers bemoaning the closed nature of the iPad/iPhone ecosystem, theorizing that if iPad were the state of the art when they came of age, they would never have become programmers. They dangle this theory like a specter: a future is coming when young people won’t have the opportunity to tinker, to become entranced by technology, or to ultimately grow up and become as awesome as they are.

These people are utterly missing the point.

Human beings are, by our nature, tinkerers. Nothing is going to stop that. We started out in caves and straw huts, and a mere few thousand years later, we have walked on the moon and created objects that would have had us burned as witches two hundred years ago. The iPad is not going to kill that spirit.

What these people are completely ignoring is what Apple is. I know the common wisdom: Apple is a hardware company. They make software, but only to sell hardware. In a sense that’s true. But that’s not really what Apple is, at least not anymore.

Apple is an experience company.

Apple isn’t selling a pound and a half of silicon, aluminum and glass. They’re not selling you a machine. What Apple sells is an end-to-end experience, one that they want to work perfectly. That takes quality control.

By “quality control” I mean the App Store approval process. I’ve read many arguments against it. It goes against free software principles. It is the Disneyfication of software. It allows Apple to exercise great power over developers.

Sure, the App Store has some downsides, in the eyes of a certain class of user. But for the other 99.9% of the world, it has one huge, huge upside. You aren’t going to get malware from the App Store. You aren’t going to get porn in the App Store. And, within reason, you won’t get horribly buggy crap from the App Store.

You can trust the App Store.

That’s huge. We are told constantly that it’s not safe out there; you can’t open an attachment in an email; you have to constantly update your system with patches. In the traditional computer world, you can’t trust anything. Any program you find on the Internet could have a malicious purpose; you just don’t know.

That concern goes away on an iPhone or iPad.

And that’s a great experience.

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31
Mar 10

Mac OS X must-haves

Jon recently got a Mac laptop at work, and asked me for recommendations, apps that are “must haves.” I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while anyway, because I’m asked this question a few times a year.

My top picks

LaunchBar

LaunchBar is the ultimate Batman utility belt for your Mac. It’s difficult to concisely describe what it does, but I’ll try: you hit a key combo to bring up a small bar at the top of your screen, and with a few keystrokes you can find and run applications, locate and open files, contacts, or bookmarks, execute dozens (hundreds?) of commands doing all sorts of things, search Google and other services, control iTunes, and even do math. You can even add your own commands.

The only way to really understand why LaunchBar is great is to try it. There’s a free 30-day trial download; after that you have to buy a license. I’ve seen people balk at the price for what they consider a “basic” utility. I use LaunchBar easily fifty times a day, so I consider the price a bargain.

LaunchBar is powerful and full of surprises and functionality. I may write more about it another time.

If you’ve heard of Quicksilver, let me put it this way: LaunchBar is like Quicksilver, but without all the slowness, bugs, and developer abandonment.

1Password

1Password is a versatile vault for all kinds of information. Passwords, credit card info, random notes, software licenses, anything you want. It ties into most browsers and lets you auto-fill logins on sites. It also has an easy-to-use random password creator built in.

Here’s how I use 1Password when I set up a new account on a site.

  1. I use 1Password’s random password generator to create a randomized, long password. I usually use about 20-24 characters, but you can go up to 50.

  2. I log into the site with my newly minted password. 1Password will automatically detect the login and ask if I want to save it. I say yes.

  3. The next time I need to log into the site, I just hit a key combo, and I’m automatically logged in.

Do you see the real advantage? It’s not just that I have the convenience of having something type my password for me. It’s that I can use a different and completely random password for every site I use, and I never have to remember any of them. All I need to know is the one password (get it?) to unlock my 1Password database.

If someone managed to crack my Facebook password, the damage would be limited to Facebook. They wouldn’t automatically have access to my Twitter account, my email, or (God forbid) be able to log into my bank account. I use Dropbox (see below) to sync my 1Password database between my desktop and my laptop, so I always have up-to-date data, whichever machine I am using.

1Password optionally syncs data to an iPhone app (via wifi), so you can have your data on-the-go.

Evernote

Evernote is a place to put anything you might want to remember and find later on. I use Evernote for all kinds of things. It has completely replaced all of the sticky notes, scraps of paper, random emails to myself, etc., which I used to use to stash bits of data that I didn’t want to lose. Now I just stuff it into Evernote, forget about it, and if I ever need it again, it’s right there.

Evernote can read images and extract words. You can take a picture of a sheet of paper, upload it to Evernote, and search for words in the picture to find it later. They even do handwriting recognition.

Another big plus to Evernote is that you can tag something with a URL. This is great for bookmarking articles. I used to use Delicious for these bookmarks, but I found that I would often go back to the site and the URL no longer worked. In the case of certain publications, the content would expire from the site (I’m looking at you, newspaper industry). The advantage with Evernote is that I can create a note containing the page’s contents, tag it with the URL, and if the link is broken when I go back, so what? I still have the contents of the page.

There are a number of Evernote clients available (Windows, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.), as well as access via their web site, so there are many ways to access your Evernote data.

Evernote is free, and you can upgrade to a Premium account if you want a larger monthly upload allowance.

Dropbox

In a word, Dropbox is magic. You have a folder, you drop in files, and they magically appear on any machine where you use Dropbox. I’ve seen other services try to do this (Apple’s iDisk, WebDAV in general…) but Dropbox is the first one I’ve used where it “just works” every time, and it’s fast.

I use Dropbox when I want to edit a file on multiple computers. I also use it to sync my 1Password database between machines. Because the 1Password data is encrypted with AES-128, it’s no problem to leave it out in the cloud.

Bonus: Dropbox is free if you don’t need more than 2GB.

TextMate

TextMate: easily the best text editor I have ever used. As I’ve said before, TextMate has all the extensibility of Emacs, but with none of the Lisp or Richard Stallman.

TextMate is one of those applications that is deceptively simple. At launch, you see nothing but a blank text window. Hidden beneath that simple face is a powerhouse.

I use TextMate for writing, coding, designing, and prototyping. The ability to invent new commands by writing small scripts is very powerful. Unlike some editors, you aren’t limited to a language that was chosen for you. You can use any common interpreted language. I’ve written TextMate commands in Bash, Perl, Ruby, and even PHP. (Though I regret the latter.)

TextMate isn’t cheap for “just a text editor,” but if you spend a significant amount of your time editing text, and especially if you write code more than occasionally, it’s well worth the price. I wrote this post in TextMate using Markdown.

Adium

Adium is a powerful instant messaging client with support for nearly every protocol that exists. I use it for AIM and Jabber, but it also supports ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, Novell Groupwise, Facebook, and a bunch more. In other words, if you’re on a bunch of networks and you don’t want to run a bunch of apps to use them all, Adium is for you.

ClickToFlash

I use ClickToFlash to block Flash content in Safari. Because I hate Flash.

ClickToFlash couldn’t be easier. Wherever Flash would be, you see a gray box that says “Flash” in the middle. If you want to load that object, click. You can also load everything on a page at once, or you can whitelist a domain (e.g. youtube.com) so it always loads Flash without a click. It only works with Safari.

Skitch

Skitch has a simple purpose: let you take a snapshot of something on your screen, and upload it to the web, quickly and easily. I use this at least a few times per week.

By default, Skitch uploads your snapshots to skitch.com. If you prefer, you can configure Skitch to upload elsewhere, like Flickr, or a WebDAV, FTP, or SFTP server. I have Skitch save files to my web site using SFTP.

SSHKeychain

If you use SSH, SSHKeychain is invaluable. As a systems engineer, I use SSH dozens of times every day.

SSHKeychain is an SSH agent, which means it can memorize keys and passphrases for you (to avoid constantly typing them in), and it can forward that authentication data through to other servers (in case you have to jump through one server to get to another, but need to use the same key on both). It can also handle some common tasks like creating SSH tunnels.

Yes, I know, Terminal has an ssh-agent built in, but each window gets its own. So you are constantly typing in your passphrase. It’s annoying, especially if you open several windows in a series.

Second stringers (good to have around)

Firefox

I hardly ever use Firefox, but I keep it around because occasionally I run across a site that is broken in Safari. Usually these sites work in Firefox (but not always – yes, there are still IE-only sites out there).

Flip4Mac WMV Player

Flip4Mac plays Windows Media formats in Quicktime (including in webpage-embedded views).

Perian

Perian is another Quicktime add-on. It understands a bunch of video formats, including DiVX.

ExpanDrive

ExpanDrive allows you to mount remote servers as local volumes. If you have a server that you can access via SSH, you can mount filesystems on that server on your Mac, using SSH (SFTP). It also supports FTP and Amazon S3. This is a great way to edit remote files with your favorite Mac text editor (like TextMate).

ExpanDrive is currently US$39.95.

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