It's Christmas in January. That's right, it's Macworld Expo and Steve's keynote is in eight hours!

Of course, they're not webcasting it this time (well, they're timeshifting the webcast 9 hours) so I'll have to rely on the rumor sites for the play-by-play, but it's always a cool day to be a Mac enthusiast.

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Kuro5hin has a great article detailing excerpts of comments from the recently-leaked Windows source code.

What they don't mention in the article is that it's unclear what stage of development the code was in, so just because there are comments detailing how evil hacks are doesn't mean that those hacks weren't fixed before a product release.

Still, it's a nice little window into the humanity of Windows engineers.

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I try not to post what everyone else posts, but when there's such a confluence of memes, it's hard to resist.

According to Edward Tufte, PowerPoint is evil. It helps speakers present and audiences tune out (in PowerPoint form). PowerPoint is responsible for the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, and its principles can be seen in the destruction of the Challenger as well (in powerpoint format, ironically). In short, PowerPoint makes you dumb.

What if Lincoln had access to PowerPoint at Gettysburg? (by Peter Norvig who, in addition to co-authoring my undergrad artificial intelligence textbook, is also a fellow Googler)

David Byrne, however, has found a saving grace in demonstrating that PowerPoint can be an artistic medium. If anyone has a link to the actual content, I'd love to see it.

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Sometimes you have to willfully resist anthropomorphizing technology. I wanted to see if Men Without Hats's new album (their first new work in a decade) was on the iTunes Music Store, or any of their old stuff, for that matter.

Turns out the iTMS not only doesn't know any of their songs, but it even insults them!

(click to enlarge)

As a graphic designer, I loved having a utility that would give me a magnifying glass and tell me the exact color of a given pixel, in RGB or hex. It was oh so very useful, but now I want more.

What I dream of, as do so many people who have to make pixel-perfect HTML, whether they know it or not, is a PixelSpy that tells me not just the color, but the rationale behind a pixel. I want to point at a pixel on a web page and tell me, layer by layer, what objects are there, with easy shortcuts to the cascaded style info for that object, with the ability to click on any one of those properties, like font size, color, or what have you, and show me the tree of cascading factors that made it end up at that value.

I want to be able to click on a 1-pixel border that shouldn't be there and instantly know what piece of code makes the browser think it should be there.

It would save hours. Like now.

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Sam, I read your open memo at the Proteron site today, and it left me with questions.

I've been an avid Mac user since I got my 128K Mac in 1984. As a former helpline staffer at the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, writer for MacWEEK Magazine, marketing assistant for Dantz Development, and software developer for Casady & Greene, I completely understand the plight of "the little guy", but in this particular example I feel that your venom is unwarranted.

Your open memo is based on the claim, reiterated on the LiteSwitch X home page, that "LiteSwitch X was the original application switcher for the Mac OS". This is both 'disappointing' and 'dishonest'. The first application switcher for the Mac OS was "Switcher" written by Andy Hertzfeld (with special thanks given to John Markoff and Bud Tribble) while under the employ of Apple Computer in 1985. Apple pioneered the technology you're claiming they pilfered, and they did it when the Mac OS was barely one year old. Over the intervening 18 years countless "little guys," Proteron among them, have come out with application switchers building on Apple's foundation. Surprisingly, very few gave any credit to Andy, John, Bud or Apple for the original innovation.

While I agree that Sherlock likely crossed the line in replicating Watson functionality, I don't feel the same sympathy for Proteron. On the aforementioned LiteSwitchX page you scream in 48-point letters (using Apple's corporate font, no less), "Dear Apple: You forgot some important features" in OS X 10.2. Beneath this accusation you simultaneously berate Apple for remembering them in OS X 10.3. I'd suggest not using the 'gloat' and 'sympathy' cards at the same time. They tend to cancel each other out.

LiteSwitch X is a very elegant product, but it has clearly borrowed more core functionality from those applications that came before it than it adds to the table. As long as LiteSwitch doesn't violate patents and look-and-feel copyrights that's fine, but it's poor form to cry foul when someone does the same to you. If, on the other hand, you feel that Apple has impinged on your intellectual property rights then I would suggest pursuing legal action against them. Writing an 'open memo to Steve' that you know will go unanswered seems to me to be little more than a 'mouse who roared' ploy for attention.

I noticed that you've recently released LiteSwitch X 2.1 with support for Panther. I wish you the utmost success with it.

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Today Casady & Greene closed its doors forever.

Ten years ago, when I started programming for the Apple Newton PDA (can you believe that it was introduced ten years ago?) I looked for a publisher to partner with and, after several months, I found Casady & Greene. They published 'Reflex', my Newton productivity toolkit, and would have published 'Nexus', an amazing addition to the NewtonOS, if Apple hadn't closed the Newton down.

The folks at C&G are an amazing bunch. I'm really sorry to see that they've fallen on hard times. Still, hopefully the individuals that made the company what it was will go on to their own new adventures and find new joys.

Thank you, Casady & Greene!

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The damned spammers have a new trick up their sleeve that's been foiling my mail client's smart spam filtering. They insert comment tags <!-- like this --> throughout their email, between words every few letters, so neither my email client's Bayesian logic nor my own explicit filter for 'viagra' will flag it as spam. I've literally been getting about 40 of these emails sidestepping my email program every day for the last couple weeks. Here's an example.

The two simplest solutions seem to be Apple's updating of mail to filter out comment tags in the html portions of email before running its spam filtering, or switching to an email client like Mailsmith that will let me write my own complex rules using regular expressions and perl, so I could make filters like "If the email has more than 4 comment tags" or "If, when all comment tags are removed, one of these keywords exists."

Option three is just filter out every piece of email that has a comment tag in the first place, only a lot of legitimate email has these tags (for no reason but to help the lazy programmer who didn't bother taking it out, even though no reader should ever see it).

Apple? Are you working on this problem?

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There's been a lot of speculation about Mac OS X 10.3, 'Panther' that Steve jobs will be demoing on Monday at the WWDC keynote speech. even though the update isn't due to come out until September, it's being unveiled to get developers on the bandwagon to support 10.3 features on launch day.

One of the features with the biggest potential for impact is 'multiple GUI logins' which basically means that more than one user can be logged in at once. The conventional wisdom has been that this would let Bob stay logged in while Jane logs in to work on her paper as Bob is temporarily away, so each user doesn't have to shut down everything they're doing just so someone else can access their files and use the computer. I think this could be a lot bigger, though.

Ever since the iMac came out with two headphone jacks on the front of the computer, it's been clear that Apple realized that educational computers are shared computers. The ability to log in to a computer has been tremendously important in educational environments, because students can take their workspaces with them.

but what I haven't seen mentioned is the possibility for simultaneously shared computers. Pop in a second video card, plug in another keyboard and a second mouse, and suddenly you have the usefulness of two computers where before you had one. And when you only need one, you have one computer with two screens!

True, there's the obvious argument that this could cost Apple sales, but I really wonder how many two-mac homes there are right now. It seems to me that the ability to buy one computer that the kids and parents could use at the same time would be a strong reason to buy Mac over PC, and when you only have a 3% market share, coming out with a feature that could lure a fraction of the remaining 97% is worth losing a fraction of the 3%.

Now that assignments are required to be typewritten at earlier and earlier ages, two or more kids having to share one computer at home is turning into a big problem. Wouldn't it be nice if the mantras on the value of sharing weren't halted by the digital divide?

And wouldn't it be nice if Apple came out with a 2lb thin client wireless tablet so you could use your computer anywhere around the house, even as your wife does the same?

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The common clipboard is arguably one of the most important concepts to give rise to the non-modal computer (that can run several applications at once). Copy in one app, paste in another. It's great, and it's essential.

Oddly, it looks like Apple's trying to replicate this design pattern in the 'search' widget that has become common in the iApps (iTunes, Mail, Safari, etc.).

Experiment: Open Safari, navigate to a page, and use command-f to find a phrase in that page. Now switch to OS X's Mail program and enter a phrase into Mail's 'search' box, then go back to your Safari window and hit command-g ("Find Again"). Amazingly, Safari thinks that you don't actually want to 'find again' but you want to find an instance of the word you just 'searched' for in Mail!

I can see the designer's argument for why this could be a good idea: The most recently entered item into a lexical-specification widget must be the mote that the user is concentrating on at that moment, so naturally we're helping them if we assume that they want to find that same phrase in a web page.

There are two problems with this, in my opinion, neither of which are devastating alone, but combine badly.

First: It acts as if 'search' and 'find' are the same thing when they're not. To 'search' on the web, in a list of emails, or in an iTunes playlist actually means to filter based on a substring match. 'Find' on the other hand means to bring to the forefront the specific substring in the context of the data source currently being looked at, be it an individual email, word document, or web page.

Within the context of a specific application, bridging these together doesn't present a problem. It's usually a two-stage approach: First you search for relevant items, then you find within each item for the relevant data. Google uses this approach with the automatic highlighting of search criteria when displaying cached copies of pages returned from a search. Safari does it too, taking the text entered into the 'google search' field and placing it into the 'find' dialog, whether it's visible or not (and, perhaps arrogantly, whether you had previously been 'finding' for something else).

Within an application, soft-integrating search and find (or perhaps more appropriately, "filter and highlight") can be helpful, though it can still create unexpected results.

The second problem is the fact that different applications usually represent different cognitive tasks in the user's mind, so a search for one criteria in one application is irrelevant to the finding task in another application. Even worse, it can be a direct inhibitor, for example a few minutes ago when I was 'finding' IP numbers listed in a web page, then manually looking up the name next to the IP, filtering that name in Mail, then going back to find the next instance of the IP, only to find that Safari took me to the next instance of the person's name. This kind of self-perpetuating failure means I have to manually type or re-paste the 'find' criteria each time.

I don't know if this is an intentional design decision on Apple's part or an accidental sharing of the namespace for a widget class, though the former seems more likely, since shared namespaces across applications in a unix environment seems pretty darned unlikely considering find and search aren't OS X 'services'. Either way, I'll have to take a look later and see if the behavior exists in iTunes and other apps that use the find/search widget.

Oh, and on a different Safari-bug note, it appears that if you hit the 'find previous' button in the find dialog box, it does exactly the same thing as 'find next'. I guess that's why it's beta. :-)

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I was going to write this specifically about iTunes, but I think it applies to most mp3 players. If any mp3 players have this functionality, I'd love to hear about it, regardless of platform.

A predefined playlist is just that, a queue of songs whose composition and order has been set up manually. Set on random shuffle, the order is mixed, but the contents of the list remains the same. That's all fine, but it's not how Iusually work.

A lot of the time I use music as my background, but to let it fade in to the background, I need one of a smaller subset of songs, almost like you need certain conditions to fall asleep, but once there can tolerate a lot more.

What I want is to be able to insert two songs or five into the playlist queue, even if it's on random. I want to be able to say "play this song now, then that one, then go on to your normally scheduled randomness."

I can do this already with a single song by finding the song, playing it, then unfiltering so that everything is visible, but first, that limits me to a one song push to the queue, and second, that song has to be in the same playlist that it will be going back to after that song.

I want a 'current song queue' box where I can drag a few songs in, order them around, and then at the end of my little list, drag in a playlist's icon, so as to say "and when you're done, keep playing from this playlist.'

With this system, more advanced functionality could be to specify "Play three songs from ths playlist, then 2 from that, then al of this playlist on random shuffle, before emptying out into a random play of the entire library." All this would be possible with a little interface work.

What would be even better would be a system that gets rid of playlists altogether but relys on markov chaining to create song queues that meld well fro one song to the next, gravitating towards one or another style of song. This is similar to something my group created in our 'home MP3 player' assignment this semester, but I'll talk more about that once I put the work we did online.

In other news my graduation present is coming few weeks early. Let's just say I need to find some more mp3s to fill the rest of the 30 gigs. ;-) (Thanks Dad!)

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Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked chess player, speaks out on why Deep Junior, the computer program he played to a 3-3 tie a few weeks ago, is a superior accomplishment to IBM's Deep Blue, the computer that beat him six years ago.

In his editorial piece, Kasparov puts forth a compelling vision on the juxtaposition of science and cognition, and touches on the 'why' of the Turing test, instead of just the 'what'.

I just wish the article was expanded to a book. Fascinating stuff.

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Irate Scottsman has an interesting entry on inconsistencies in UI controls amongst Apple's own iApplications.

Personally, ever since Apple started with the iApps, I've been questioning the conflict of interest between Apple's setting UI guidelines, and then breaking them in their own applications in order to make those applications feel more appealing than third-party options.

The 'chrome' UI window theme used by iTunes, iPhoto, Safari and others is the clearest example of this. It lends the applications a sense of utility and refinement above that of applications that actually follow Apple's published UI guidelines.

It goes further than that though. Back when we were implementing webcams into the mac version of Yahoo Messenger, and I was creating the interface for the webcam broadcaster, I sought to follow the play/pause/ffw designs that Apple had established. Seeing the similarity in the webcam broadcaster's utility with that of quicktime, it made sense to leverage off the media controls OS X users were already familiar with.

Quicktime Controls

I got in touch with the UI evangelist at Apple and asked where I could get the approved 'bead' graphics for the play/pause/stop buttons, and I was told that not only were those graphics unavailable for third-party use, but that they are specific to Apple, and that other applications with interfaces requiring play, pause and stop buttons should not seek to emulate these controls.

What? Beaded buttons are one of the primary differentiating visual characteristics of OS X, and Apple goes through great pains to make sure they're used pervasively in third-party applications. Yet somehow media buttons fall outside the fold.

My first thought was that Apple's software revenue is tightly focused on digital media applications, but if that were the case, I would think that they'd put more effort in keeping their interface controls consistent across their own cutting-edge apps. Instead, each iApp tweaks the standard, either slightly, by beveling it down into a chrome window (iTunes), swapping the order of the 'rewind' and 'full rewinid' controls (iMovie 2), or eventually abandoning the bead style completely, as iMovie 3 has done:

iTunes Controls

iMovie 2 Controls

iMovie 3 Controls

Sadly, it seems that Apple's UI guidelines are created by waterfall design. They create cool new applications, then update the guidelines to accommodate. Thus, the application designer with the keys to the Apple UI palace can innovate all they want, then declare it the standard upon release. Third-party apps rush to follow suit, but by the time they do they seem outdated and boring, and Apple's taken the next step.

It reminds me of the Microsoft light bulb joke: "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "None: They just adopt darkness as the new standard, then charge customers for the right to unscrew their own light bulbs for compliance."

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Talkin' with Benjy about debugging PHP scripts that write custom headers:

Benjy: okay, this is a freaky bug. gah
Kevin: Yich. Headers weren't meant for mortal men like us.
Benjy: yeah - headers feel like I'm getting "low level"
Benjy: also, headers are REALLLY FUCKING HARD to debug
Kevin: Totally. Apache and PHP try to handle it all for you..
Kevin: Maybe you need a nph-type file.. Ugh.
Kevin: Nevermind..
Benjy: nph?
Kevin: 'non-parsed-headers'
Benjy: I don't even want to know
Kevin: Time was that you could prepend 'nph' to a cgi's name, like nphslideshow.cgi' and apache would know not to handle headers for you.
Kevin: Dark ages, man...
Kevin: That's back when, if you wanted an animated graphic, you could make an nph cgi that would write the image, then write another image, and another, to the same image spot.
Kevin: "Server-push" at it's most bare.
Benjy: dude, that's... ew
Kevin: It was sooo messy.
Kevin: But then, it only had to work on Netscape 2...
Kevin: I suddenly feel so old...

Good times, good times...

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So it's week two and the semester's already at full tilt. I pulled my first all-nighter of the semester Sunday night, and have been packed with work all week, and all the week to come.

It feels SO GOOD.

I learned a new word yesterday: eustress. I haven't found it in an online dictionary yet, but I'm going to check out the Oxford. Eustress is an opposite of 'distress.' In effect, eustress is 'good stress.' To me it feels like 'frenzy' but then I'm a sicko who likes frenzy. Anyhow, that's what I've been swimming in, and I like it.

Every single one of my classes is awesome. My teachers are fantastic, in contrast to a mix of brilliance and disappointment last semester. I'll write up my course listing in the next couple days, and will dive into detail on each of my classes later on, with syllibi and possibly even photos and video.

Right now, I just finished a simple maze program, representing my first foray into visual basic. It's a simple maze game for my Programming Usable Interfaces class. We were told to code something, anything, in Visual Basic. Don't even try to map the maze; it randomizes each time you turn. It's nothing special, but it's great to have the freedom of sitting down in a computer lab for a few hours, letting my imagination being my guide. Oh, and I wouldn't have called it 'impress.exe' except that was the sole constraint of the assignment.

For a (very, very slightly) more down-to-Earth example of what I've been doing the last few days, our first project in Game Design was to create a new game based off of hopscotch. The assignment was in three parts:

1. Brainstorm at least 50 ideas for hopscotch.
2. Pick three or more ideas, and write a paragraph or two exploring them.
3. Pick one, create a rule set, playtest it, document your findings, iterate the ruleset, playtest again, and document your findings.

I love this place. Wait'll you hear about our project for this week. I'll write that as soon as I finish my reading for tonight's classes.

I'll need your help. Get ready for some great nostalgia.

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Today's moment of zen, 2 minutes old, was watching a businessman playing with one of the new 12" titanium powerbooks, as he checked his stocks, made a trade, and confided to me that he made enough in the market today to pay for the powerbook he was clearly lusting after.

Yes, I'm at Macworld Expo this afternoon. Very, very cool toys, and I'm glad to say that if I had to decide today, I'd still get the giga15tibook.

Okay, enough sitting on the floor of the Apple booth. Back to the jungle I go! Today's quest: great sound editing software. Reason and ProTools are high on my list.

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Hey y'all! Continuing in the three-year-old thread of writing bots for AOL Instant Messenger, I've written an applescript interface between AIM and iTunes.

While offices can use it to let anyone at any desk control the office iTunes jukebox, and stores can use it to control their music from computers in the front of the store, I wrote it so I could control my stereo from my couch, using my hiptop's AIM client.

Anyhow, it's getting pretty polished and I'd like to know if any folks out there use AIM and use iTunes, and would be interested in doing a little usability testing and QA on it before I release the first full version next week.

Interested, or know someone who is? Drop me a line!

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I'm always collecting things in my head to blog, and once in a while two seem to match up in an odd way, forcing them to the front of the queue. Today's tidbits are about minimal languages, Toki Pona and K, minimal verbal and programming languages, respectively.

My friend, Pigdog's Mr. Bad, recently introduced me to the wonderful language of Toki Pona. Unlike Esperanto (another of Seņor Bad's hobbies), Toki Pona is a constructed language that favors simplicity over clarity, and touts itself as "the language of good. The simple way of life."

The Toki Pona language consists of 119 words. By virtue of Toki Pona's extremely small vocabulary, and order-independent syntax, the language is good at talking about feelings and simple relationships, but not about the finer points of politics or silicon-on-insulator microchip fabrication techniques. Tokiponists believe this is exactly as it should be.

It only takes about a day of effort to learn, though the trouble comes when you have nobody to speak with but yourself. Mr. Bad himself admits that he has onl had Toki Pona conversations in email and instant message conversations which, sadly, rips away the simplicity latent on the very phonemes and the way the mouth moves to pronounce them.

Perhaps Toki Pona will become my Chinese as it's used in Firefly, the underlanguage for muttering under my breath. Then again, what place does a happy language have as a muttering language. Well, it could be an interesting experiment anyhow.

...

On the other side of the minimalist coin is a programming language I only found out about this morning called K. There's an excellent K introduction and primer on (appropriately enough) Kuro5hin.org.

I haven't played with K, but it seems to be for lists what perl is for well, big files. And, um I thought Lisp was the language for lists... But this looks pretty cool anyhow. The interesting part is the syntax of K, a language where operators are called verbs, objects are nouns, and linguistic analogistic structures like adverbs take the place of more traditional looping structures.

Sadly, they don't have a version for the Mac yet, just windows, Solaris, and Linux, but a port can't be far behind.

At any rate, if you're a programmer, the primer is a good read, if it serves no other purpose than to be a reminder that just because so many of the coding languages we use have such a similar structure (Is concatenation done with '+', '.', or '&' in [language I'm coding in today]?) that doesn't mean that entirely other syntaxes exist and can prove valuable tools for specific problems.

the part that's amusing to me is that both of the above examples seek to distill existing languages down to core elements, but for entirely different reasons. Toki Pona strives to shape emotion by carving away parts of a language that breed stress, while K tries to distill languages down to core atomic components so that more complex questions can be answered with less chaff.

Either way, an interesting look at how narrowing a vocabulary can change the message conveyed.

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I'm watching a seminar being given by the head of Microsoft's game development, drawing similarities and differences between games and productivity software, and I gleaned teh following realization:

When people beat a game and it was enjoyable, they strive for the next version of that game. People don't sit waiting for the next version of Windows, either because it's not enjoyable, or because they haven't beaten the current version yet (if you view the struggle to create a usable, workable system as a game in and of iteslf).

People lust for OS X 10.2 because 10.1 was enjoyable, and people beat it. It's stable, it does what it's supposed to, and ironically enough, people aren't satisfied with that, because they like the twin challenges of new functionality and troubleshooting.

Well, the geeks, anyhow.

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So the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger for Windows went into public beta today, containing a lot of the work that I did in the months prior to leaving the company.

A lot of things didn't make this version, (which means that 6.0 is going to be really, really cool whenever it gets made) but 5.5 has several nice new features, such as Super Webcam (with a 15 frame-per-second 'Turbo Mode,' advancing the current 0.75fps mode), more (and improved) smileys, and a new IMVironment selector, in addition to smaller enhancements in usability and look and feel.

The faster webcam deal is really pretty cool (if you're on a DSL or faster connection), as it really runs the webcam into a meaningful expressive tool...

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Okay, so since the ad had taken on a life of its own, sparking conversations all over the place, I feel the need to write just a bit more about what bothers me, and what doesn't, about Apple's recent tactics.

First and foremost, I'm not particularly bothered that Apple has decided to charge for iTools. I'm sad for the necessity, but that's the way the web is going, and though there's still the ambiguity about whether iTools was a feature of 10.1 and 9.0, or if only the hooks into it were features, that's another battle, and a point that Apple should explicitly address in one form or another, especially as they're on the cusp of releasing a new version of the OS, and many users may be asking themselves which of the 150 new features will Apple start charging for next year?

No, the problem I have with Apple is that even though Apple SVP Phil Shiller admits that the average conversion rate to paid services is 10 percent, though they hope to beat that, Apple is shutting out the 90% of Mac users and Apple loyalists who choose not to pay for the premium services.

Let me be explicit here: I'm not saying that this 90% (which, by the way, consists of 1.9 million Mac users; a fair chunk of their 5% market share, and a number significantly greater than the entire user base using OS X) deserves free iTools functionality in perpetuity. I'm not even saying, despite the fact that Yahoo and hotmail have free email offerings, that Apple should have a free, limited level of service. I am saying that there are two levels of consumer standards that Apple should meet: The first is an obligation to existing users, and the second is a more intelligent, palatable product structure.

Apple needs to make money off iTools/.mac. That's their prerogative. By offering a reasonable suite of products at what can be argued as a reasonable price for those products, Apple has created what is to many, a viable subscription package, and perhaps even a good deal. For users who wish to retain the services that they had been getting for free, along with the new services, that's great. For those who choose not to pay for the service and move on to other providers for their needs, Apple has an ethical obligation to do at least a bare minimum to help those Mac users out.

Apple has claimed that they need to make .mac profitable. Fine. They claimed that iTools was not a sustainable model. I believe that too. The problem is that Apple has made a deliberate decision to not allow forwarding addresses or change-of-address bounces on expired mac.com accounts, and that is Apple turning its back on those Mac customers who are loyal enough to use a Mac, but not loyal enough to buy all the bells and whistles Apple has to offer.

This is, quite plainly, dirty pool.

It creates pissed off users who have committed only two sins: believing that a mac.com email address offered as free from Apple would either stay free or close down gracefully, and choosing not to buy a subscription bundle that costs 10 times more than the functionality they desire.

What's the right thing to do? It's simple. Mail forwarding isn't the answer. It doesn't educate the sender about the new address, and requires Apple to expend server resources for an unspecified period of time. Unless the user proactively informs every person who sends them mail via mac.com, Apple will face the same problem months or years down the road.

When Apple shuts off the free mac.com email addresses, anyone sending to such an address will get an 'undeliverable mail' message when the email hits Apple's mail servers. This 'server tax' will happen no matter how Apple treats their expired mac.com accounts. Allowing mac.com users to specify a 'change of address,' and modifying the Apple mail servers to bounce, not an 'undeliverable mail' gobbledygook server error message, but instead a 'This user is no longer at mac.com. You can reach them at . Please update your address book.' requires only one hit to a database to lookup the new address. This flow educates the sender, doesn't require the former mac.com user to know the email address of everyone who might email them, and gives Apple users the freedom to choose the package that's right for them, instead of locking iTools users into Apple's product because of their email equity held hostage.

This is the right thing for Apple to do, and to do otherwise is to admit that Apple is in such dire financial straits that a 10% conversion to .mac is more important than the goodwill of the remaining 90% who, let's not forget, will be deciding whether they want to pay $130 for Jaguar in the next few months.

So, that's the bare minimum. Now let's look at the product offering itself:

In their own breakdown of costs, justifying their claim that $99 a year is a good deal for the bundle's contents, they say that the email access alone is worth '$40+ per year,' citing Yahoo and Hotmail as similarly-prices services.

First off, Yahoo and Hotmail have free email addresses. It's true that it would cost about $40 to match .mac's offering feature for feature, but if you didn't need POP access, or were happy with a 6 megabyte mailbox, you could pay half that or less.

Apple offers additional email addresses 'a la carte' for $10 a year if you're already a .mac subscriber, so clearly Apple's costs for these additional 5 meg accounts is less than $10 a year, yet this option isn't offered to the average user.

The 'value' of getting what Apple purports to be $250 worth of software and services for $100 a year is clouded by the fact that most of the items are products the average user wouldn't otherwise buy, such as virex (when was the last time you saw a virus for OS X?) or the backup tool. Moreover, several of the items listed are software products not subscriptions. Bought separately, a consumer wold only have to pay for them once, not year after year. there's absolutely no guarantee that these products will be revised every year, or even at all. If you stay a .mac subscriber for three years, suddenly the software freebies aren't so cheap.

The point is that Apple is trying to sell users things they don't need or want, simultaneously holding hostage the very few services that users do require, and using the filler services as a justification for the high annual rate. This is the worst kid of manipulation.

Apple has some of the best interaction designers and product marketers in the business, so one has to ask: how did this happen? Well, I'll tell you...

Exactly one month before Apple's most recent quarterly earnings announcement, they lowered their forecast on that quarter's earnings. This is something that companies do when they see that industry analysts are predicting earnings higher than what the company sees as likely internally. It's designed to prevent a huge selloff of stock after a negative surprise earnings release. Apple wasn't going to make the numbers they predicted last quarter, and they wanted to give investors a heads up.

Fast-forward to the eve of the Keynote speech: Apple released their earnings numbers after the bell on Tuesday evening, roughly matching their lowered expectations. The next morning Apple's CEO would be giving a pivotal keynote speech in front of 50,000 people in the financial capital of the world, withing earshot and webcast of the very analysts and investors who, after reading Apple's financial, are waiting to hear what he has to say before making the decision to upgrade or downgrade Apple's stock.

Clearly, the New York keynote was being delivered to the financial community. What better way to cater to that community than to announce new sustainable revenue streams? Recent moves in the subscription realm by competitors such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real, justified subscriptions for services as a viable tactic, and one that is recognized by Wall Street.

Speaking to a packed auditorium gone suddenly terse and quiet, Jobs was trying to save his company's market capitalization. It must have killed him to have to make that speech to that audience. Still, the groundwork for this decision was laid down weeks if not months earlier.

I've heard from inside Apple that this was a 'Steve-down' decision. having participated in literally a dozen meetings at Yahoo, discussing the premium services offerings, prices, add-ons, etc., for Geocities and Mail packages, I can tell you that (at least at Yahoo) those decisions weren't made lightly, and the balance between profit and customer satisfaction was a delicate one, honed during meeting after meeting, assisted by surveys and market research.

My assumption is that this same kind of thoughtful research went on at Apple too, with carefully planned tiers of service for .mac (which, I'm guessing, was still going to be called 'iTools' before the change). Then one day the need for new apparent revenue streams is realized by Apple's top executives. Despite the fact that by Schiller's own estimates, .mac will generate only $22-44 million a year, equating to 0.4-0.8% of Apple's annual revenues, iTools was targeted as a financial golden goose to be sacrificed on Wall Street's already bloodied altar.

The rest is history.

So, how did the big master plan work out? Conversion to .mac accounts is too slow to gauge, largely in part to Apple's decision to start the annual clock on the day the user pays, incenting users to wait until September 30th before buying in to .mac. As for the stock price: It lost 18% of its value the day after Apple lowered its quarterly forecast. The following morning Merrill Lynch and AG Edwards downgraded Apple stock to Neutral and Hold levels. These downgrades were the likely catalysts for the .mac pricing plan. Apple stock lost another 17% in the two days following the earnings announcement and the keynote speech. On the morning of the 17th, Salomon Smith Barney downgraded Apple stock from Buy to Neutral.

All told, in the last two months, Apple stock has dropped 46%, from its 52-week high to its 52-week low. Since the keynote, Apple stock has dropped 18%.

Clearly .mac wasn't the only Wall Street appetizer at the keynote. The decision to release a Windows iPod was one held in reserve for a case of dire need, and the pricing structure for Jaguar was similarly changed in recent months. If Jaguar had always been intended to be a full-priced upgrade, it would have been labeled 10.5, not 10.2. In fact, the decision to keep the Jaguar codename is built on the necessity of differentiating 10.2 from 10.1. The 'leopard print' X logo followed from the same rationale.

Now, as so many of the 'anti-whiners' have whined, Apple has a mission to make money, and of course that's true. As Apple devotees we all have some bitter pills to swallow in the coming quarters until the economy the tech sector turn around. Nevertheless, if the past couple of week have shown us (and hopefully Apple) anything, it's that Apple needs to create the illusion, if not the reality, that we the loyal Apple customers are in this with Apple together. Heavy-handed pricing and upgrade policies (I won't even get in to the QT 5 Pro -> QT 6 Pro debacle), aren't the way to retain the market share that Apple still has.

The lure of a better product is what made most of us buy our first mac. The allure of a better company is what causes us to evangelize, put Apple logos on our cars, even brand ourselves with mac.com email addresses.

In short: We are the cult of Apple. Please don't make us drink the kool-aid.

Comments? (56)

For those who really want that 7-hour advance notice, here's what's going down tomorrow:

• iPod for Windows: Certain
• OS X 10.2: Certain release date, probably early August. $19.95 upgrade price.
• 17" LCD iMac: Most likely an announcement and a late Aug/Early Sept. release
• 20gig iPod: Same release date as the 17" iMac, but possibly not announced at MWNY.
• iPad: Patience... Wait for MWSF.
• Also... 'Switch' kudos, 3rd-party kudos (Halo?), QT 6 overview, small tweaks, LCD price drops...

Here's hoping for surprises!

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Here's my semi-annual prediction list for Macworld Expo. Have at you!

• Two-button mouse - Apple designed two-button optical mouse standard on new macs. Possibly a new design that makes the left button larger than the right, so that 'center clickers' still get their expected behavior.

  why? Apple itself has been pushing contextual menus for several years. Now most applications for Mac OS X support control-click functionality and most users use it every day. Since most Mac users use Windows or Unix computers at least occasionally, they are familiar with two-button mice. As stubborn as Apple has been on this issue, there is less and less reason to shun a two-button mouse simply because it came from the Wintel side. Probability: could be

• Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard - Using the recently developed and tested Bluetooth drivers for OS X, and a possible motherboard-level bluetooth chip and antenna, bluetooth keyboard and mouse could be a new standard to go along with Apple's move towards incremental mobility enhancements like the current space-efficient keyboard and LCD displays.

  why? Apple has taken steps on their site to position Bluetooth as an embraced technology. While unsuitable for high-speed applications like iPods, video editing, or displays, bluetooth would help apple's mission of the wireless computer. With an LCD monitor. the only cable might now be the thick AVI cable from the G4 tower to the display. Batteries could be an issue, and a small powered docking tray for mouse and keyboard might be a solution. Probability: Someone? Yes. Apple? Maybe... Bluetooth solutions at Expo are virtually certain. With Apple's pushing of the thumb-sized USB Bluetooth Nubbin, other vendors are likely to reveal solutions even if Apple isn't ready to yet. Think Wacom...

• 20 gig iPod - iPods will now come in three sizes: 5, 10, and 20 gig. Prices for the 5 and 10 gig iPods will drop by $50 to $349 and $449 respectively, while the 20 gig will sell for $549.

  why? Toshiba, the only supplier of the 1.8" hard drives Apple uses for the iPods, came out with a 20 gig drive last January. While it has identical power consumption as the 10 gig, it has an extra platter, making it 8mm high instead of the 5 and 10 gig's 5mm. Along with price point marketing issues, this is why the 20 gig didn't come out earlier. The 10 gig was basically a part replacement, with some possible software mods. The technical requirements for the 10 gig are virtually the same as the 5 gig. The 20 gig will either need a case that is 1-3mm thicker, or Apple will need to rearrange the iPod's interior. Initially, the iPod was created with stock parts from several vendors, with no custom ASICs, lowering startup costs and time to market. Now that the iPod is established, the engineering and testing effort for an ASIC may be justified, and such a chip would clear us space inside the iPod; more than enough for the 20 gig drive. Probability: It will happen at some point. call it 50/50 for an announcement or release next week.

• iPod for Windows - At one point envisioned as a separate hardware product, an iPod for the Windows market would now have identical hardware as a Mac iPod, and would probably be sold in the same box, with a multi-platform install CD and manual. No iTunes for Windows, but a slick utility solely to create playlists and import music onto the iPod, without any playing ability on the Windows side.

  why? As often as Apple has failed in the consumer electronics arena (AppleCD, Newton, Pippin, QuickTake, etc.), they have a huge hit with the iPod, despite the product's mac-only limitation. Without this limitation, the iPod is the best of breed for the portable MP3 market. Balanced between having a product which has brought more people to the Mac platform, and one with a respectable market penetration and profit center of its own, the logical compromise is to provide enough Windows functionality to open up the potential iPod audience to those with any computer, while still providing a premium experience to those with Macs. If done correctly, Apple could create a Windows experience which would inform them of the added capability available to Mac users, helping with Apple's current job 1: Switch. Probability: Virtually certain.

• 17" LCD iMac - In addition to the successful 15" iMac, a 17" 1280x1024 screen would bring in a lot of people currently being driven to large, noisy G4 towers with empty slots, just to get a decent-sized screen.

  why? Good question. Though the iMac enclosure is smaller and less expensive than the G4 tower, such a machine could easily cannibalize the G4 tower market. Prices for the 17" iMac would have to be high enough to retain the profit margin of the G4. Personally, such a machine would be my ideal, as it would be for a lot of people. I'd love to see this happen, but I'd worry about it sharing the same fate as the G4 Cube: A very appealing machine, but with a cannibalization tariff so high as to make a machine perceived as overpriced, however cool it may be. Probability: 60%. I'd have said 40%, if not for all the buzzing over at apple, yanking press credentials of the rumor sites.

• OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) - not a release, but a full walkthrough and a release date around August 10th.

  why? Beta testing went really well, and Apple would love to get some all-important Operating System buzz in the media in time to have an impact on the educational buying season, Apple's second largest after the holiday season. Probability: Certain.

• Switch Hoopla - Look for at least one, and possibly all, of the stars of the Switch commercials to be presented on stage, along with a couple new ones.

  why? Jobs loves to show off his media campaigns, and he hasn't had a chance to talk about this one in front of a big audience. It's a gimmie. Probability: 80%.

• Superdrives Everywhere - Look for Superdrives to be standard on all G4 tower machines and G4 Powerbooks. Also expect Superdrives on all but the entry-level LCD iMac and iBook, which will keep their CD-RW and CD-ROM respectively. The eMac and CRT iMac will remain the same.

  why? Superdrives are coming down in price, and it's a point of difference between Apple and the Windows world. It positions Apple to take better advantage of the shift from VCRs to DVD and, considering Apple's refusal to let users upgrade just their optical drive to an iDVD-compatible superdrive, it's a carefully planned solution to promote people to buy new machines, while handing their old machines down to people aching for iPods, etc. ;-) This idea is further supported by Sony's recent release of a DVD-RAM/CD-RW equipped notebook computer (Sony is Apple's primary optical drive supplier), and the fact that last week's Apple Employee Promo featured eight current Mac models, only one of which contained a Superdrive. It looks like they're clearing inventory. Probability: 70%

• Price drop on 22" and 23" Cinema Displays - Look for the 22" to drop to $1799 and the 23" to $2599.

  why? If a 17" iMac is released, the step up to the G4 tower can't be as steep. Customers looking for more than an iMac will feel that they need a bigger screen, and $2500 for a display is a huge obstacle. At $1799, it starts becoming a realistic, though extravagant, option. Current promos give a $500 rebate when you buy a G4 tower and a 22" display, so a price drop from a current $1999 to a perpetual $1799 isn't unrealistic. Of course the 23" would have to come down too, though the $2599 figure is a little more arbitrary, and would fluctuate based on Apple market research that I don't have access to. Probability: 80%.

• iPad - the super-cool pen and tablet-based Mac.

  why? Inkwell, along with the fact that several other hardware and OS manufacturers are heading down this path, makes this a clear stop on the Apple path. Probability: Zero at this Expo. January's another story though...

Well there you go! That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll see what happens on Wednesday the 17th!

Comments? (102)

Girls, use it to help plan activities, clothes, and 'important dates.' Guys, use it to know when to treat your girl extra-nice.

Witness the System Tray PMS Alert Indicator for Windows

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Good: OS X has built-in spellchecking in applications that choose to support it.

Bad: Thousands of common words are missing from the dictionary, especially place-names.

Worse: It completely ignores all words that are three characters or less, so forget about OS X helping you when you mistype 'teh' or 'iz' or say "ack! t his is soo wrong!"

Sometimes an ounce of cure generates a false sense of security that can end up doing more harm than good. When you don't see any more red squiggles and you assume everything's spelled right, it might just be that the OS isn't looking close enough.

Addition: Are there spelling bees in Spanish-speaking countries? Spanish words are pronounced strictly by their spelling (or more likely, vice-versa). Is the spelling bee a happy by-product of a disjointed, inconstant language? It'd be a shame if other countries never got to experience the joys of spelling bee championships.

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A lot of people call weblogging software "Content Management Systems." I think this fits only in the loosest sense, as most weblogging packages are really 'Content Delivery Systems' with a little CMS thrown in.

Real content management is the domain of tools which, contrary to their mandate, are so difficult to insert into the regular process flow of data creation, modification, and deployment, that it's not used anywhere near as often as it should be, and is usually used only where it has to be, say where programmers are all working concurrently on a codebase. That's where concurrent versioning comes in.

To handle simultaneous access, file locking, merging, source branching, and all that, your options are few. You can buy, deploy, learn and mandate the use of an expensive package like Interwoven or Perforce, use something slightly less expensive but with a host of other workflow problems like Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, or you can do what millions of geeks do and learn to use CVS, or Concurrent Versioning system, an open-source implementation atop RCS, another open-source tool.

The beauty of personal content management is really seen when you use it for more than just code. It will save every version of a file, so when you want to go back and get that paragraph you edited out of your great american novel five weeks ago, it's there for you. If you think your site redesign was a mistake, a year after you launched it, you can rol back the templates to the way they all were at any specific date.

CVS isn't trivial to learn, especially if you're setting up and running your own CVS server, but kudos to Apple for publishing a how-to article Mac OS X: Version Control with CVS.

I encourage the mac and the (far more common) PC user to check out the article. You can get CVS for virtually any platform, and its benefits aren't tied to the OS.

It's early, I'm running a bit late, and I just woke up 20 minutes ago, so I'm not running at full-proselytizing speed, but CVS is really cool, is something that by all rights should be built-in to the fabric of any modern OS (especially when hard drives cost $250 for 120 gigs), and can totally save your ass. Now that I've turned aside from proprietary data formats like Microsoft Word (my last year in college I wrote everything in HTML with a simple stylesheet. It's really nice to be able to read, edit, and publish anywhere, especially when you don't need Word's featurebloat for a simple paper), CVS becomes even more useful, as the diff and merge functionality is easily comprehended, and only actual changes are saved, instead of resaving a whole file because you changed 'teh' to 'the.'

Okay, shower time, then takin' the train to work. Happy Friday!

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Okay, follow me on this one, this is great:

One of the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, passed into law in 1998 as house resolution 2281) is that not only is it illegal to circumvent content-protection schemes (for music, CDs, DVDs, anything) but it's also illegal to distribute such circumventions, even if the circumvention mechanism in question can be used for legal purposes, such as making a personal backup of a piece of software or encoding a CD to mp3 to listen on your portable player.

The most famous test case for this was regarding DeCSS, a small software app that allowed people to copy and decrypt DVD movies. Within weeks of the software coming out, the developer was sued, and sites hosting the software were ordered to remove or face prosecution.

The most notable site refusing to remove the program was the hacker site 2600. 2600 was sued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) where the judge found in favor of the plaintiff, and 2600 lost [pdf]. To be clear, they were breaking the law because they were, through dissemination of information, enabling people to circumvent a content-protection scheme.

In a similar case, a Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov, was detained while attending a trade show in the United States because of his participation in creating a program that circumvented Adobe's content copy-protection scheme.

After Adobe customers staged significant protests at Adobe's San Jose headquarters, Adobe asked that the charges against Sklyarov be dropped. Since it was a criminal matter, not a civil matter, Federal prosecutors had the option to continue with the charges against Sklyarov if they so chose. As of May 8th, a federal judge has declared that the law is constitutional, and that Sklyarov and his company must still stand trial to determine if they violated it.

...

A few months ago, Sony started manufacturing audio discs with a copy-protection scheme which inhibited their being ripped into MP3s by making them incompatible with the Audio CD and Hybrid CD formats in such a way that most audio CD players could read them, but CD-ROM drives could not. (Pioneer, the developer of the CD format, claims that Sony can't call them 'Audio CDs' because they don't conform to the standard for that designation.)

The protection system works by making a 'hybrid CD' that looks like it contains both an audio session (with the music tracks) and a data session. While an audio CD player ignores the data portion entirely, a CD-ROM drive will check the data session on mounting the disc, to determine what it should do with that data. On Sony's disc, they place corrupt header data on that session, so that the CD-ROM drive rejects the disc, audio tracks and all, and refuses to mount it.

Some smart folks figured out that this was how Sony managed their trick, and they scribbled over the data session portion of the disc with a black marker. The data portion is visible as the matte ring around the edge of the CD, while the audio tracks make up the matte circle from the inner edge to nearly the outer edge of the CD.

Covering the data track prevents it from being read in the first place, and thus the CD-ROM drive sees a simple audio CD, and operates normally.

Okay, well and good. Except that by the letter of the DMCA, this is a circumvention mechanism and it is therefore illegal to make this modification to the media you purchased. Further, disseminating instructions on how to circumvent the copy-protection mechanism is also a criminal violation of the DMCA.

So yesterday CNN publishes a story about the circumvention technique, spelling out in the introductory paragraph exactly how to defeat Sony's copy protection mechanism.

According to the DCMA, ratified by Congress and upheld by the federal courts, CNN appears to be in violation of the law, and should face criminal prosecution (as should I for this very post).

It's irrelevant that Sony might not want to press charges against CNN. The federal government's refusal to grant Adobe's request to drop the charges against Sklyarov demonstrates that, as a criminal matter, the decision on whether to prosecute doesn't lie solely with the alleged victim.

The trouble is that the only person who is helped by this prosecution is the consumer. The entertainment industry would rather not have this trial come to court for fear it would expose the DMCA's protections as going beyond reason and restricting a free press. CNN would rather not get prosecuted. Actually, I hope I'm wrong and CNN would welcome the constitutional challenge, but with so many media outlets being owned by entertainment corporations in favor of the DMCA, it's questionable how likely CNN, or other sizable media outlets would be to test this case. A smaller outlet probably wouldn't want to risk the legal consequences of losing.

It's important to realize that bringing CNN to court over its story sounds stupid and childish, and it absolutely is. sadly, it's what the DMCA demands, and I dearly, dearly hope that it happens to show that the copy-protection-protection laws in the DMCA go far beyond what is reasonable for the protections they seek to provide, and that this case may be the method for stopping the next Sklyarov, or any person simply wanting an mp3 of the album for which they've purchased an individual license.

I'm sending out a few emails tonight. Further news will follow if any of the people in positions to do something about this get back to me...

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For all you OS X users out there: When you have magnification turned on in the dock and you mouse over the dock items, do you perceive the items as getting closer to you while the others stay father away, or that they get bigger, while the others stay small?

Just curious.

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In an effort to increase customer awareness and popularity, five of Macromedia's "community managers" have started their own weblogs, to discuss Macromedia technologies and interact with consumers.

"Giving the community managers a platform on which they can use their own voice, that was our idea," Hale said. "Our format (on Macromedia.com) just wouldn't be as quick as a blog is. We do have a community section in there, but a blog is five sentences and 10 links. And that gets to the heart of why people trust blogs -- they like the format."

Hale added: "Would it have been a true blog if we put it on Macromedia.com? Not really."

Indeed, it was important to Macromedia that its blogs seemed true, that readers perceived them as the thoughts of very helpful community managers instead of corporate shills. If the effort felt disingenuous, like the company was merely jumping on the blogwagon, it could have backfired.

"I'd hate for you to think this is some kind of marketing agenda," Hale said. "If there is an agenda, our agenda is related to getting good information in people's hands."

The problem is that taking it off of Macromedia.com just blurs the line between it being a corporate comunications outlet and a true personal expressive publication. Are these people running the blogs as part of their jobs? Does Macromedia pay for their hosting? Are they anywhere near as likely to get fired for things they might say on their blog?

It's an interesting line to draw, or in this case, to blur. I'd wished for a Yahoo-oriented blog, but the torrents of customer-care type mail I'd get would be overwhelming, and I don't think Yahoo would go for an unofficial blog like that.

Still, I hope for the best for Macromedia and these blogs, and I hope they keep it honest. While Adobe might be pissed at Macromedia for infringing on their patent, I'm pissed at Macromedia for their push for a flash-based web. Here are leaders in the web technology field, pushing a position I can't believe that they truly believe in, because its success would mean profit for the company, at the expense of established online staandards and creating more consistancy usability problems than you can shake a fist at...

I find it ironic that blogging is one of the areas that Flash itself is particularly ill-suited for, and though Macromedia owns ColdFusion, they're using Blogger and Userland for the weblogs. Nevertheless, this might end up being a good thing. Back in the Newton days, the Newton developer community was helped immesurably by Apple's Newton Developer Technical Support staffers spending most of their day on the Newton Development newsgroup. They gave an amazing look behind the scenes, and more importantly, you could tell that the communication was two way. Several ideas that first came to light in the newsgroup's threads resurfaced again in subsequent versions of the OS.

What I'm trying to say is that not everyone can have the organically grown relationship that TiVo does with their customers, and we'll just have to see how mature Macromedia and their blogging cadre are about honesy vs marketing on the weblogs, basically, whether they use their blogs for good or evil.

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So Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference got underway this morning, and Steve outlined the forthcoming OS 10.2 called 'Jaguar.' This pisses me off incredibly, and makes me euphoric with joy.

First, the shit (the bad kind): Apple's including iChat, an Instant Message client that will work with AOL Instant Messenger's network. This pisses me off because as the interaction designer for Yahoo's Messenger for Mac, I think that picking one chat network and 'blessing' it with an Apple client is as bad a move as binding Internet Explorer into the Windows OS. I'm also pissed off because they didn't choose Yahoo to do it with. Fuck'em. We'll show them.

Second, the shit (the good kind): One technology being introduced in Jaguar is Inkwell, OS X's implementation of handwriting recognition. They've taken the Rosetta handwriting engine from Newton 2.0 and ported it to OS X, likely improving it along the way.

They mention that you'll need a digitizing tablet to use Inkwell, and there is flat out no way that they went through the engineering effort of porting Rosetta just to support text entry for people with Wacom tablets.

As far as I'm concerned (and I'm not usually so vehement about rumored products) I am absolutely certain that this means the iPad (all) is on its way, possibly in October, but more probably in January.

By releasing Inkwell into the OS months earlier, Apple is softening the ground and testing the waters for user acceptance of this handwriting recognition engine, and handwriting recognition in general. Once Inkwell has positive (or at least non-negative) buzz, the time is right to launch iPad, the killer hardware.

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The more I use OS X as my regular operating system, the more Win2K starts to feel like KDE and Gnome when I turn to it...

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I got four odd emails today, from different, fake-looking addresses (one was a spoofed email bounce from my own domain). Each of the emails had an executable file (don't touch it! It's evil! (I assume. I, being safe, use a mac for reading email, so I'm immune to the torrents of email virii that go around)) and a small image.

These were the two images included in the emails. No words, just these:

Have you seen us?

I haven't heard anything about the virus, and I have no idea what it does or how widespread it is. I'm curious if any of you have seen either of these images in recent emails though...

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I'm happy to announce that Wednesday night witnessed the release of Yahoo! Messenger for OS X! This is the first software release since I started designing for Messenger back in mid-January. This version brings the Mac client closer to the Windows version, with support for typing notification, the extended set of smileys, idle-time notification, and of course, Mac OS X. Yay!

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Microsoft and Unisys are planning a massive ad campaign designed to 'save people from the evils of UNIX.' Among the reasons Unix is a bad idea, and will box you in, according to the ads:

• Unix systems are inflexible
• Unix requires you to pay for expensive experts
• Unix makes you struggle with a server environment that's more complex than ever

Okay, now anyone who's ever used a Windows server environment and a Unix environment is probably thinking 'but no, those are the things wrong with Windows, not Unix!'

In short retort:

• Unix flavors run my TiVo, my Powerbook, Google.com, and this web site. That's pretty flexible to me. NT Webservers in places I've worked have to be completely rebuilt on a regular schedule to address 'creep' problems that will otherwise bring the machine to a crawl, if not a blue screen of death.
• Unix requires you to know what you're doing, or to use tools created by other people. You can always hire an expert, but you're more likely to find a good one for less money than someone who's still trying to pay off their credit cards from the 6 months or more they took off work to get their Microsoft Certification credential. An MCSD credential means you can make bank consulting, and naturally Microsoft pushes employers to use only Microsoft Certified Engineers, so Microsoft's accusing Unix of requiring expensive professionals is a bit of hypocrisy.
• Finally, the Windows server environment is quite complex, nowhere near as modular as Unix systems, and gets more complex with each version. Also, since it's a single-vendor solution, if you don't like the way a product's development is headed, it's tough luck, or you can change systems entirely. Unix has flavors, and as they evolve, you can easily port from one to another that better suits your needs (from Solaris to Linux, for example).

It's all about the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and Microsoft's firm belief that the decision makers in a company are the ones in air so rarified as to know little enough about technology to be brought in to Microsoft's folds by this bunch of crap.

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(i am not a press release... i am not a press release)

Okay, so it may not be as innovative as MapBlast's LineDrive maps, but Yahoo's new mapping software is a big improvement over the MapQuest (*cough*AOL*cough*) system it replaces. For one thing, the maps are antialiased, so they don't look like crap when you print them, and they have street names you can actually read.

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I'm all for ubiquitous computeing, but some web innovations should never make the transition into the 'real world.'

Topping that list is Am I Hot Or Not: Palm Pilot Party Edition, where you and your palm-packing party-pals can rate each other anonymously and you can find out if you're hotter than the party average.

I have to think that the fatal flaw here is that the hottest person at the party is likely the one not frantically beaming their rating of every other person at the party in n*n-n many combinations.

I want the lite version: Am I a geek or not?

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One of the speakers I heard at the Council on Foundations was Mr. Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. One of the stories he told ended with a musician's realization of the 'Beyond the Fuck It' principle, aka BTFI.

The general principle is that when you get to the 'fuck it all' stage of despair, you can come through the other end with an attitude of 'well now that I've said fuck it I can do things my way and I don't care what happens.'

Anyhow, one of the things that's been on my list for a long time is to get Fury.com into a CVS code revisioning system so I can have a real development deployment and a real production deployment and I just need to republish to update production Fury to the last stable version. the sad truth is that this hasn't happened, and so I only make changes to Fury piece by safe piece.

Until I get to BTFI, that is. When that happens you can keep viewing the site and see it work, fail, look really strange, go haywire, until my changes are incorporated and working on the live site. One thing for certain: It makes me sure to complete a feature change before I tire of it, because I'm not going to go to sleep with the site broken.

Anyhow, I'm just about there, which is a good thing for progress, but a bad thing for someone who would like to think of himself as a pragmatic programmer.

Does knowing the 'right way' and not doing it the 'right way' make me a little better than someone who's stupid through ignorance?

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Went to IKEA tonight, and I took a bunch of pics for fun and research to take back home.

Now I'm home and thought it'd be the perfect time to try out iPhoto's automatic Photo Album maker.

See for yourself.

More important, I bought lamps, which means I now have light, which is a Very Good Thing.

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The term 'Geek' has become so broad in the last few years, encompassing those who use the web a lot socially and for content, like webloggers, on one end, and those who are die-hard coders, and can handle operands with greater ease than adverbs.

I smiled when I saw the result of one person who intersects these two worlds: Weblog Major Mode for Blogging in Emacs.

I'm sure the seven of us will be so happy with this tool.

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So hey, how about those Apple announcements yesterday?

Of course I feel a little let down. I mean sure, the iMac design is really cool and yes, if I didn't have a desktop I was really happy with I'd buy one, but frankly it didn't live up to the hype.

"To boldly go where no PC has gone before" - Where? The nightstand?

"Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond." - The only thing the rumor sites agreed on over the last few months was that there would definitely be a flat-panel iMac, with a radical industrial design.

Okay, that said, the new iMac is very cool. I didn't expect them to move to the G4, and I certainly didn't expect them to include a Superdrive in the top model. Actually, no matter which feature was decided first, it likely drove the other one, since a G4 is required to do the MPEG-2 encoding in iDVD, and what good is a Superdrive without iDVD? Similarly, it seems silly to include a G4 processor and not offer as an option the only hardware option that requires one.

I wonder about the hinge arm. I'd have to see one, but I know that every desk lamp I've ever had with a spring-arm like that has broken or grown feeble. Of course, I have to tell myself it just looks like a desk lamp. One thing is clear though, this is a consumer and business computer, not a computer for the educational market. Apple is clearly using the iBook as their educational vehicle now. There's no way a school would buy this computer. I mean, you think *I'm* hard on my spring-arm lamps...

I'm also fine with the prices. Actually, the timing is perfect. My uncle got an iPod for Christmas and my dad and I spent several hours encoding a bunch of his CDs and uploading them because my uncle doesn't have a Mac. He's been anti-Apple for the last 18 years, ever since he bought 10 Apple Lisas for his office at $10,000 a pop, then Apple came out with the Mac for a quarter the price and abandoned the Lisa. He loves his iPod though. He loves his iPod so much that he's buying a Mac to use with it! I told him to hold off until after the keynote, and now he's going to get the model with the Superdrive. I might just win him back into the Apple camp yet.

Other thoughts on the Apple presentation:

• The 14.1" iBook - Barely a blip in Steve's presentation, this is clearly a concession to market needs, as opposed to Steve's vision. I get the impression Steve doesn't like this machine, even if it's what people want. Anyhow, they didn't mention that the extra 2 inches of screen space come at the cost of a significantly larger iBook (over an inch wider and nearly an inch deeper; only the thickness stays the same), and an extra pound of weight.
• The switch to OS X as default - It had to happen sooner or later. Just because most people I know are waiting for Photoshop to make the switch before they do is no reason to assume that new Mac buyers feel the same way. The OS is really stable, there's a lot of software for it, including the 'digital hub' suite, and considering the learning curve going from OS 9 to OS X, it makes a lot more sense than teaching new users OS 9, then telling them to toss that out the window and move ti OS X six months from now. When you think about it, those users who would want to use OS 9 are those who already know it. Presumably these are the same people with the savvy to know how to switch the default OS in the Startup Disk control panel anyhow. And then, of course, there's the fact that iPhoto is an OS X only application...
• iPhoto - Second to an iPad, this is the thing I've been waiting for from Apple more than anything else. It's great. I take pictures almost every day. I keep my Powershot s100 with me pret