Macintosh

Asswipe of the year

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The Mac world has its share of douchebags, mostly journalists like Rob Enderle who still take pleasure in predicting Apple’s demise. One waste of protoplasm eclipses all of them, and he’s one of us: the dickwad at Rixstep. I’ve avoided reading his site until recently and I regret reading it.

The guy is upset because Mac OS X isn’t a “pure” port of NextStep, so he rants against every piece of Mac software.

Last week he posted a scathing “review” of MarsEdit that made Andy Ihnatko’s review look like a lovefest. His review doesn’t even mention using the software – he complains about the presence of a .Trashes directory on the DMG image and TIFF images in the application that waste a whopping 752K of disk space!

He blames every software mishap (such as QuickBook’s desktop overwriting bug) on Apple’s incompetence, in one of his typical rants:

Steve Jobs came back to Cupertino triumphant. Not only did he get to finally run his own company but he came with the world’s most fantastic system in his suitcase. A system the Grade A Idiots already ensconced in Cupertino have done their best to destroy.

Not that they mean to destroy it of course: they’re trying to make it better. But somewhere between their staggering incompetence and their unparalleled arrogance these graybeards manage to screw up in astronomical proportions time and again.

The QuickBooks disaster is not the first and won’t be the last. The ‘massive data loss’ fiasco before it wasn’t the first either. This has been going on for years – ever since OPENSTEP wasn’t allowed out the door in early 1997 and the Grade A Idiots decided to hold it back for five years and ‘improve’ it.

Now they have their improvements and the whole world is laughing at them.

This was the holiday market – and their sales are going to be a disaster. This was their walkover – and they blew it. Miserably. Worse than any other company has ever done.

There’s never been an IT company with such an inaccessible head start stumble and fall so bad and totally ruin their chances. The worst of it is a great many people may return to Microsoft – and that’s a another disaster of astronomical proportions.

Yesterday he topped himself by ripping off content directly from Stepwise and misquoting it to support his gripe about Apple’s “bait & switch”.

Scott Anguish removed his content in protest:

Although it makes me sick to have to do so, I have temporarily pulled the main page of Stepwise off-line. The rest will likely go this weekend.

The “Rixstep” site has stolen a large chunk of my WWDC 1999 coverage and republished it without permission. [url deleted]

Frankly, I can’t take the stress of fighting this with “Rixstep”, it makes me ill just thinking about it.

Let me just state…

I did not write this for him.

I did not write this for him to steal and misrepresent.

I do not agree that we were ‘lead down the garden path’, nor that there was a bait and switch.

My copyright has been violated by his reproduction. But given the track record, I see no way to stop him from doing this. He’s published incorrect information about me before.

I only hope that the long-time readers of Stepwise will recognize that this is not my feelings on the matter, and that my co-workers also understand this.

More blog coverage at bynkii.com.

NetNewsWire is still the best news reader

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I decided to give Google Reader another chance and try the new features like friends, but after less than a day I went back to NetNewsWire.

I find that I can get through the news a lot faster in NetNewsWire. One big reason is that I have full control over when it gets updated. I have one group, Favorites, that gets updated every hour. The rest of the feeds I only update manually. I put feeds that I need to keep up with constantly, such as software updates and warnings from FeedBurner in the favorites group so I get notified right away.

Google Reader, on the other hand, refreshes continuously. I often find new items before I finish reading the last update.

One of Google Reader’s most popular features (and Scoble’s favorite) is shared items. I can do the same with NetNewsWire by adding an item to my clippings, which are automatically shared here.

Old domains never die

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About a year ago, two kids named Brandon and Erik had a podcast called Mr. Mac Geek, which was usually fairly interesting. As often happens, they became involved with other products and stopped updating their podcast.

I never bothered unsubscribing and it recently came back to life. However, it now appears to be owned by someone else and is full of poorly written misinformation and FUD, such as claims that Macs are plagued by spyware.

Please Don't Steal My Focus

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Coding Horror:

Has this ever happened to you? You’re merrily typing away in some application, minding your own business, when– suddenly– a dialog pops up and steals the focus from you.

This is the single most annoying – and potentially disastrous – thing any application can do.

Spaces is one of the worst offenders. Not only will it switch windows when an alert comes up, but it will completely switch spaces and pull the current application out from under you. I really want to like spaces, but it keeps annoying me by switching on its own when a window in another space demands attention.

New Widget Page

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I’ve uploaded a few feed widgets I created for my various sites. All of them are now available on my Widget page. The widgets are for this site’s feed, MacMegasite, my rarely updated WorldBeatPlanet podcast, and my shared clippings from NetNewsWire.

Spaces annoyance

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There have been a lot of complaints and criticism about Spaces in Leopard, particularly with how it switches spaces when you switch applications.

That behavior doesn’t really bother me, since a user action (clicking an application in the dock) initiates the space switch. When you click an application in the dock, that application should become visible. If it requires switching spaces to show that application, it’s only logical that it should switch to the appropriate space.

However, it should NEVER switch spaces on its own without any user action causing the switch. This is exactly what happens when an application in another space puts up an alert or displays a sheet. It also happens when you’re running Windows under either VMware or Parallels and some application (such as Outlook) displays a notification – in that case it’s especially annoying.

Instead of switching spaces, it could simply display some kind of notification in that application’s dock icon, either bouncing it or adding a badge (such as a yellow triangle with a ‘!’).

In fact as I was typing this blog entry (using MarsEdit in space 1), I received an email in Outlook, running in space 2, which switched me into that space, right in the middle of typing.

Home Server Changes

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I retired my Linux server and moved my Mac Mini, which was formerly connected to my TV as a DVR, into my office as my new server.

Since I’m using a Buffalo TeraStation as my file server, the only thing I was using the Linux box for was printer sharing & web testing. The Airport Extreme base station isn’t an acceptable file server for Time Machine backups.

The Mac Mini does support time machine backups & printer sharing, as well as sharing iPhoto & iTunes libraries. Since I have a cable TV outlet in my office, I can still use it as a DVR and watch my recordings wirelessly using EyeTV’s new sharing feature.

I can run Linux just as well under VMWare for web testing & software development.

Over the weekend I’ll replace the Airport Extreme base station with an 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and my old Linksys WRT54G.

Another Leopard feature: paths.d

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If you use the terminal and use MySQL or open source packagers such as MacPorts or Fink, you’ve probably had to edit your shell startup script to set the command search path so you can access the new commands.

Leopard makes it much easier – simply place a file in /etc/paths.d listing the additional paths you’d like added to your command search path. For example, if you use MySQL, you should create /etc/paths.d/mysql containing the following:

/usr/local/mysql/bin

No more editing .profile or .bashrc, and it’s available to all user accounts automatically.

Thanks to SysArchitects for bringing this to my attention.

AppleScript from the command line

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Here’s a Leopard feature I had overlooked until now. Shell scripts can now be written in AppleScript. Simply put the following line at the start of your script and save it as plain text:


#!/usr/bin/osascript

Previously, the AppleScript interpreter would choke on that line, so you had to do some ugly workarounds for it.

I haven’t had a chance to post too much for the last few days since I’ve been pretty busy with work. I just found out I’ll be going to Vancouver at the end of this month. I’ll try to post more about it later, and some more Leopard notes.

Time Machine tip

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Although Time Machine only backs up changed items in its hourly backups, since it backs up the entire drive, it also includes cache files which change frequently.

If you use VMware or Parallels, your virtual disk images are several gigabytes and will change continuously as long as the VM is running. That can take up a lot of space in your Time Machine backups and can take a long time to back up. To avoid that, exclude your VM folder in Time Machine options. You should still back up your VMs manually, though.