Timothy Noah writes: To put it in terms that supporters of the three Bush tax cuts can understand: Poor planning for the postwar occupation of Iraq is costing you money at the gas pump.
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I just found this article on Ananova: We are not talking retarded people here, but a couple who were brought up in a religious environment who were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate. Basically, this German couple went to a fertility clinic where the doctors discovered that they simply hadn’t tried having sex. wow. that’s just kinda freaky.
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The Coding Monkeys (aka Martin, Martin, und Dominik) just released SubEthaEdit 2.0. SubEthaEdit is a snazzy text editor for Mac OS X that supports collaborative text editing over Apple’s zeroconfig networking protocol (Rendezvous).
2.0 seems like it has some very cool new features (like autocompletion). I’m going to have to snag a copy and kick the tires when I get home this evening.
Congrats guys!
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I just had the weirdest feeling. I saw a picture on Bruce Sterling’s weblog that looked eerily familiar to me. It took me a few minutes to figure out what it was, where I had seen it, when that was, and who I was with.
I am nowhere near where I thought things would go when I was last in front of that statue. It’s been only about seven months, but it feels like virtually everything in life changed for me between now and then.
I haven’t talked to the person I saw that with since early January, and I don’t really expect to talk with her ever again. It’s a pity that I don’t care that I’ll never talk with her again.
Life life life. Life has the strangest way of doing unexpected things to you.
Honeywell, Lori, Marta, Amy, Minneapolis, the Purple Onion.
Microsoft, Jamie, Seattle, El Diablo.
Sorry if this all seems oblique. I don’t feel like it’s appropriate for me to get into the gory details, but I still want a record of all of this for myself.
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John Zogby writes: “But as of today, this race is John Kerry’s to lose.” I don’t know if I agree with him, but I hope to god I’m wrong.
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I’ve been a fence-sitter for years. I started out with Mac OS 7.5 (really, System 7.5) back in the early 1990s on a Power Mac 6100. I was totally a Mac zealot: “PCs suck, blah blah blah.” At the age of 17 I started working for the Geek Squad, where I became a PC user by default. I was fixing Windows machines by and large, and then fixing the occasional Mac that came in. By this time, I had built myself a Windows machine, and started running Windows 98 full-time. By the time I started in college, I had abandoned Mac OS completely.
September 13 2000. Apple released Mac OS X Public Beta. After several false starts, the single most dull Macworld Expo speech ever, and the return of Steve Jobs Apple had finally flung itself into the future. I started reading more about OS X and got more and more excited. The University of Minnesota was a UNIX school, and I needed an easier way of writing my little C and C++ apps than I was afforded through an SSH terminal. I needed a friggin’ shell on my computer. So, I bought an iBook and spent the extra $30 for the Public Beta.
Holy cow, did it ever suck.
OS X Public Beta is quite possibly the single slowest operating system I have ever used in my entire life. It was slow, it was incomplete, it gave me the spinning pizza of death for minutes straight. And I kept using it anyway. This is, of course, because it was still the coolest piece of software I had ever seen in my entire life.
It took me a while to get the hang of the Cocoa API, but I eventually figured it out. The thing that has always killed me about Mac OS X and Cocoa, though, is the lack of third-party control libraries.
Windows Forms applications (Windows GUI apps written using the .Net Framework) are really easy to write too. In some respects, it’s easier to write a WinForms app. In others, Cocoa is easier. It just depends on what you’re trying to do.
One thing that is far easier to do with WinForms is locating and using free, third-party controls. You can find controls that give your application a Windows XP look and feel, an Office 2003 look and feel, and so forth.
At this point, there is no easy way to build an application that resembles the OS X Finder. Where’s the location switcher control from Apple? (the little thingy you click on on the left hand side of each Finder window in order to easily switch between different folders on disk) Where’s the switcher control from third parties? Hell, I can’t even spend money to get something like that. Where are all of the controls out there to help me emulate the appearance and behavior of iCal?
I can only assume that this has a lot to do with the sheer differences in the numbers of developers writing Cocoa apps (and third party controls) and writing .Net apps (and third party controls).
One of the best things that Apple could do right now, I think, is if more high-quality control samples were released. Cocoa developers really need more information on how Apple does things like make the little, funky modal dialogs in iCal that let you choose repeating calendar events. One of the best-attended sessions at WWDC last year was a talk on how Apple does certain little bits of UI mojo. They need to do more, and all year-round.
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Is this thing still working? Testing… Testing…
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Why on earth doesn’t Apple dedicate a person for a month to documenting the facilities built into XCode for creating new editor types? Jeez, this really irritates me to no end.
There is tons of documentation surrounding this for Visual Studio. Admittedly, it is challenging to learn how the entire VS integration process works, but you can do virtually anything once you figure it out.
All I really want is a graphical editor for my Movable Type blog templates. Is that really so much to ask?
Actually, if the documentation on all of the funky little macros used by MT internally was more readily findable for me, I could probably kludge together a program in a couple of hours to do this for myself.
I just don’t have the time right now, but I’d certainly pay $15 or $20 if someone developed this as shareware. Any takers out there?
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I’m still working on configuring the look and feel of my MT3 blog. This is phenomenally slow, tedious work. On the plus side of things, it seems to be progressing in the direction of overall goodness. I hate blogging about blogs, so hopefully this will be the last time I bring myself to do this.
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MT 2.6 blew up on me after I did something kind of dumb. Basically, it’s not that graceful at recovering from errors. This seemed like as good a time as any to upgrade to MT3, though, so here we are. Let’s hope we can avoid comment spam this time around. Back-posting of old posts to come.
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