Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

I’m at Moscone West now, cooling my heels with everyone else as we wait for the keynote. There’s a very large number of people here—representing some decidedly unexpected companies (NASA, Disney, and Lockheed Martin in addition to the more obvious ones like Microsoft and Macromedia). I always find it kind of amusing to watch the discreet glancing people do at each other’s chests during trade shows like this as they attempt to find out who they’re looking at!

So far I’ve been able to get away with having my camera, but unfortunately I forgot my PC card compact flash adapter, so I’ll have to post my pictures later.

I’ll keep posting as long as my AirPort connectivity holds out (it’s been a bit dodgy so far, unfortunately).

I just opened Safari’s Rendezvous menu while connected to the hotel network, and guess what I saw?

It’s great to be among my own kind (and even greater to find out that the great Scottish poet Robert Burns is a Mac user!).

Just in case anyone is wondering what I’ll be doing at Worldwide Developers Conference next week, I’ve posted my anticipated schedule to the web. I may change my mind, of course, and there are still some slots where I haven’t decided which session to attend, but this will probably be how my week will be spent. I feel like I’m back in college planning my quarter (yes, my alma mater is one of the few still using the quarter system!).

I will definitely have a digital camera and my PowerBook with me at all times, and I plan to blog the hell out of this thing, so stay tuned!

(Update: As the WWDC FAQ points out, cameras are strictly verboten, and I will be subject to a strict non-disclosure agreement, so my plans to “blog the hell” out of the conference might be—ahem—scaled back a bit. Rest assured, though: anything I can say, I will say!)

At work, we use Microsoft Exchange and Outlook for email. While I certainly have never been much of a Microsoft fan, I must say I reserve a particular hatred for this dynamic duo. Why? Until recently I’ve never been able to put my finger on it exactly, but I think I finally managed to crystallize my distaste yesterday. I was watching my sysadmin buddy troubleshoot a bizarre problem that rendered Outlook clients unable to send and receive through the Exchange server until after a reboot, when it hit me: Outlook takes something that is dead simple (email) and turns it into something inordinately complicated!

In my opinion, products like Outlook and Exchange exemplify how terribly wrong Microsoft’s heavyweight approach to everything is. I remember Jason Kottke saying something a few months ago that really sums up my feelings perfectly:

In developer land, having been recently reintroduced to the ins and out of Microsoft development, I’m reminded how differently Unix developers and Microsoft developers approach software development. If Unix development philosophy is small pieces loosely joined, Microsoft’s philosophy is big chunks tightly coupled.

As it happens, I am reading Lawrence Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas right now, and I think his examination of the Internet’s “end to end” design (which dictates that the network itself should be “dumb” and that all the real intelligence should be concentrated at its endpoints) is very instructive when thinking about the flaws in Microsoft’s usual approach. In my opinion, if it had been up to Microsoft to design the Internet, we would not have the simple, enormously flexible “innovation commons” that Lessig describes, but rather a complex, chronically fussy “smart network” with severely limited potential.

Complexity may be a boon to software marketers looking to hype new features and “professionals” who get a thrill out of adding new certification acronyms to their email signature, but it’s bad for almost everyone else. Until Microsoft learns to appreciate the zen beauty of a minimalistic solution, I forecast that they will continue to suck in a big way as an enterprise platform.

Tim Shey has written a truly excellent response to Sahar Akhtar’s criticism of the iTunes Music Store (and, by proxy, the very concept of music downloads) in Salon. I particularly enjoyed Tim’s essay because it makes an argument that has always been very near and dear to my heart: namely, that the current, radio-centered, album-oriented approach to music promotion and distribution is not the only (or even the best) system possible. As Tim says:

Akhtar argues that sales of LPs are currently driven by a hit commercial single with radio airplay, which artists are encouraged to make to appeal to a large audience and which are usually “catchy and forgettable,” and that artists take their true flights of fancy on other LP tracks. This seems to me a gross oversimplification of the way musicians create music, and a potentially insulting one to both artists and the people who listen to them.

I couldn’t agree more. In my opinion, anyone who argues, as Akhtar does, that “the musical creativity and risk-taking associated with the album format will decline” as download services begin to dominate, has obviously never owned a copy of the Beatles’ Past Masters collection—two discs of songs originally released exclusively as singles. Included are “Day Tripper,” “We Can Work It Out,” “Paperback Writer,” “Rain” and “I Feel Fine”. These are some of the best (and, often, the most innovative) songs in the Beatles catalog, and none of them ever appeared on a proper album!

The next time someone tries to convince me that the album format has been a force for quality in pop music, I will point to the latest Billboard charts and remind them of Phil Spector’s famous definition of the word “album”: “two hit singles and eight pieces of shit!”

Last Thursday, Robb Beal and his cohorts at UserCreations announced the release of Spring 1.3. Spring, you may recall, was one of the winners of O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Innovators Contest (which I referenced in one of my earliest posts).

The way I would explain Spring (which may not be exactly the way Robb would explain it, but it’s the way I tend to think about it) is this: its a platform for turning “objects” on the web into objects on your desktop. The way this transformation is implemented is really quite ingenious—rather than having to type some sort of onerous URL into Spring (as I expected), the user is able to simply drag an image representing the Spring object (say, a CD or a book) from a web page onto a Spring canvas. This may not seem like a big deal to a non-programmer, but to me it’s damn slick—an extremely clever bit of coding that makes for a remarkably seamless user experience!

From the canvas, the user is then able to perform any number of predefined actions on the object, or make the object interact with other objects intuitively (he could, for example, recommend a book to a friend by dragging an arrow between the book object and a friend object). In short, Spring is an attempt to emphasize the visual, gestural aspects of the GUI—you might think of it as Clutter on steroids.

If, like me, you’ve been thinking about giving Spring a go, but need that extra little “push over the cliff” (as Nigel Tufnel would say), you should definitely take note of the bundle offer that Robb and CocoaTech’s Steve Gehrman have going, which includes both Spring and Gehrman’s wicked awesome Path Finder for the low, low price of $42! Given the amount of complaining about the Finder we all do these days, I’d think we’d all be jumping at this opportunity!

Finally, if none of that convinces you, there is one more reason to check out Spring: since Robb has given me the honor of being an “object” on one of Spring’s default canvases (right under Mena Trott, no less!), you can all finally see what I look like (which I’m sure has been on everybody’s minds for absolutely months now :-).

MacCentral editor Jim Dalyrmple used his weblog today to opine that Microsoft’s decision to abandon Internet Explorer for the Mac is a bad thing. I agree with him that the news is bad to the extent that it might make the Mac platform seem less viable to people, but I definitely have to disagree with one of his core assertions:

Some Web sites are written for Internet Explorer—as development of IE continues on Windows more and more Web sites will be unavailable to Mac users. Can Safari keep up with the development of IE so Mac users can continue to access everything on the Internet? Not a chance.

My “day job” is with a company that has a behemoth custom web application written in ASP with a SQL Server backend (I didn’t write it—outside consultants did—and I’m currently trying to convert it to Java). It is most definitely designed specifically for IE—that is, it makes use of non-standard, IE specific functionality—and it doesn’t even come close to working on the Mac!

In my opinion, IE for the Mac has always been a bastard child—a token effort. Not to denigrate the work of its developers, but I personally never really believed that Microsoft was seriously committed to cross-platform equivalence. Unlike, say, Mozilla, Mac IE never used the same rendering engine as the Windows version, and never supported the same feature set. It was a different browser entirely, and often not a very good one.

That said, I’m not going to join the group shouting “good riddance” either. Like Dalyrmple, I don’t think the abandonment of a major Mac application is anything to celebrate. Rather, I wish MS would have kept IE around and focused on making it equivalent with the Windows version. Then I think IE would truly have had an important role on the Mac platform!

Now that they’re abandoning it, though, I wonder if the MacBU would consider open-sourcing Mac IE? That would be very cool, if only for the educational opportunities it would provide. And who knows—maybe a community of independent developers could pick up where MS left off!

David Stewart, resident of one of my favorite cities, posted some thoughts on an interesting dilemma currently faced by the European Union:

The problem is that at the moment the Europe of the Fifteen has 11 official languages which means there are 110 different language combinations that have to be supported. When the union expands in 2004 a further ten languages will be added raising the number of combinations to 420. The commission translation budget is already €700m per year.

This leaves the administration in Brussels with an unenviable decision: how to cut costs? Whether they choose to drop some languages or pick one (read: English) as a common standard, people are going to be upset. Dave, sci-fi fan that he is, suggests an alternative that wouldn’t offend anyone (or, rather, would probably offend everyone equally)—Klingon—while my scholarly brother Ben proposes Latin as a more traditional alternative. Hey, if it was good enough for Charlemagne…

(Update: As Dave points out in the comments, I should have attributed the above quote to Seán Mac Carthaigh. The original article, from Ireland’s Sunday Business Post, is available here.)

Some nice “indie” software I’ve purchased recently:

• CSSEdit (US $14.99)

  I am a huge fan of cute little applications that do one thing and do it well, so CSSEdit was an instant hit with me. Of course, it also helps that I hate editing CSS and have never really liked using the facilities other applications (BBEdit, Dreamweaver, etc.) have for generating it.

  CSSEdit’s interface is attractive, very logically organized, and full of thoughtful features that could only have come from a developer accustomed to the drudgery of web design (the “Extract CSS from URL” command and various file and clipboard export options are prime examples). In my opinion, the behemoth web design apps could all learn a thing or five from this little upstart!

  (Update: I forgot to tip my hat to MacCentral editor Jim Dalrymple, who turned me on to this app via a post on his new weblog. Thanks Jim!).

• VoodooPad (US $10.00)

  Like a lot of people, I like the concept of Wikis (the informality, the automatic linking, the easy collaboration) but hate the web form interface and strange “WikiWord” (smashed together) link names used to edit them. Fortunately, Gus Mueller has given us VoodooPad, an application that provides most of the benefits of Wiki on the desktop (and doesn’t require WikiWords to generate links).

  There has been some recent talk in the mainstream press about the possibility of Wikis catching on in business environments, and I really think that if such a thing is possible, it will be applications like VoodooPad that will pave the way. The only thing that VoodooPad is lacking, when compared to a standard Wiki, is the ease of collaboration, but Gus is working on that.

  VoodooPad also happens to be the first application I know of that takes advantage of the Note Reader functionality in iPod firmware 2.0, which is also pretty cool.

  (Update: I just found out that Kevin Wojniak has incorporated support for Note Reader into the new version of his app, Pod2Go! Pod2Go already parses RSS—now, if Kevin could take things just one step further and allow for arbitrary RSS subscriptions, I’d say he has a killer app on his hands!).

• Suite Modeler (US $25.00)

  As I said before, I’ve been trying add AppleScript support to PodWorks but finding the process aggravating due to the weak documentation and strong potential for XML-editing errors. Fortunately, my recent call for help on cocoa-dev was answered by Don Briggs, whose Suite Modeler application can be a lot of help both in generating new AppleScript suites and (more importantly for me) diagnosing problems with existing ones.

  In my opinion, Suite Modeler fills a glaring gap in Apple’s Developer Tools. My only request is that I would like to be able to simply drag a header file (perhaps with special comment tags, à la XDoclet) to Suite Modeler and have it automatically generate a script suite. Then Don would truly have created the Interface Builder of the AppleScript world!

I hate to bring my Senior Prank page up again, but I recently started noticing a lot of referrers from a site called sniggle.net: The Culture Jammer’s Encyclopedia in my site’s logs, and I couldn’t resist mentioning that my class’s humble prank has evidently rated a mention alongside such classic countercultural gems as “Arm the Homeless,” the Black Panther Coloring Book, and the Barbie Liberation Organization. All I have to say is, if Noam Chomsky calls, tell him to talk to my agent…