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MacHeist Nanobundle 2

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Well, Macheist has come and gone again, and now I have a couple of gigabytes of new software (mostly Monkey Island) on my notebook’s hard drive. The usual rule with Macheist (and similar deals) is that you only buy it if there’s a product you’d cheerfully pay the fee for in the bundle, and on that basis this bundle was a great deal for me: I’m a sucker for Monkey Island (even though I never really cared for the threequel). I’m also glad to see Telltale Games shipping Mac products (I hope they port the Sam & Max titles: I will cheerfully pay retail for any Sam & Max title until I become jaded, but I’ll probably buy the Wii version otherwise…).

I did end up installing all of the other programs, although some got uninstalled pretty darn quickly.

MacJournal is a really huge program for keeping a journal. I have a cloud-based solution for doing this called Wordpress and — unlike MacJournal — it is accessible from anywhere (including my iPhone), it’s free (and open source), it lets me make some journal entries public while keeping others private, has a comment system, does version control, automatically backs up to the cloud, and doesn’t take up a metric buttload of hard disk space. (Uninstalled)

As a side note, MacJournal is a fine example of an attractive, functional, easy-to-use useless piece of software the like of which does not exist for Windows. If you found a niche product like this for Windows it would be a horrible piece of crap. MacJournal is quite lovely — it’s just not useful to me. All of the pieces of software in the Macheist bundle that I’ve installed and used have been very polished, stable products. It’s a testament to the quality of Apple’s indie software ecology, and I think it must be quite terrifying for Microsoft which cannot itself produce such polished products let alone attract third parties to do so.

Ripit is a program that does one thing (rip DVDs to hard disk) and does it very, very well. I have not quite reached the point of ripping my entire DVD library but when I do, I’ll be glad I got a license for this. (Installed but not used, yet.)

Clips is an intriguing little hack that monitors you clipboard and then automatically keeps the last N clipboards around for use at the touch of a key. I think this is a great idea and pretty well-implemented, but it just never occurs to me to use it. I’m running it though and maybe, one day, I’ll actually use it. It’s a lot like multiple-undo, I think — one day you’ll realize you (a) use it all the time and (b) get enormously annoyed by a program that doesn’t have it. (Installed, running, but not used yet.)

CoverScout is an intriguing iTunes add-on. I haven’t installed it yet but I have high hopes that it will actually help sort out my iTunes cover art situation (my wife and I ripped our entire CD collection two house moves ago, and many of the tracks have very odd cover art having been incorrectly identified by iTunes at some point. As I understand it, CoverScout’s sole purpose in life is to fix this kind of thing, so I’m hoping it’s good at it. (Not yet installed.)

Flow I’ve already discussed. I think I may be in love. At minimum, Flow makes Little Snapper irrelevant by doing what Little Snapper does for screenshots for — basically — everything. I still use Transmit without thinking, though. (Installed, used, kept.)

Rapidweaver is a program I’ve considered and rejected in the past. It’s a very similar program to Sandvox (which I also own and don’t use), perhaps a little better put together and with generally more attractive (and, as far as I can tell, flexible) themes. Unlike Sandvox, it seems to have built up a fairly solid third-party plugin ecology and might actually be a useful product for someone looking for a template-based web development tool. More attractive and flexible than Sandvox, produces much lighter weight pages than iWeb (although also much less flexible graphically). Rapidweaver has also been sitting at version 4.3.1 for a rather long time (it used to be one of those programs that would get revved every few weeks) — perhaps the developers are losing interest. (Installed, messed around with, probably will be uninstalled.)

Tweetie is one of those non-solutions to non-problems. Indeed, since it’s a desktop Twitter client it’s something of a meta-non-solution to a meta-non-problem. I installed it and played with it for a few minutes — the fact that it was not especially obvious how to make a new tweet was a very discouraging sign (I did figure it out…). But at least it’s small. (Installed, used, kept… for some reason. Oh, that’s right, it’s 2MB.)

The Macheist folks also snuck in three bonus programs for promoting them via Twitter (further alienating me from Twitter). One of the programs — Tracks (installed, used, kept) — is a very well thought out iTunes remote (in particular it offers Spotlight-like access to your iTunes library from a menubar widget) but the other two — Airburst Extreme (Uninstalled) and Burning Monkey Solitaire (Not downloaded) — are wastes of hard disk space as far as I’m concerned.

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Mailplane v. Gmail Notifier

Friday, March 5, 2010

I finally clicked one too many mailto: links that launched Mail.app (which I immediately quit from, having never — since I installed Snow Leopard on this laptop — reconfigured it so it will actually run) and decided to try out Mailplane.

Mailplane is a simple, clever, and well-executed idea. Build a simple webkit wrapper for gmail, and then use gmail’s keyboard shortcuts and API combined with Cocoa to deliver a proper Mac experience. Mailplane works (with a few minor glitches) as advertised, and has some brilliant convenience features, such as providing deep integration with iPhoto and drag-and-drop file attachments.

And, of course, it handles mailto: links.

The problem is that in the twenty-four hours I’ve been using it, my single greatest annoyance with it is that it’s not running in my web browser. Needing to alt-tab to another app to copy something from my email (or, now, Google Buzz) to a web page or vice versa, or middle-click a link in an email (or Buzz) to open the page in a new tab, is a royal pain in the ass — and it affects me every few minutes, versus the once-in-a-long-while that mailto: links annoy me, and the once or twice a day that file attachments annoy me.

So, far from being “The most productive way to use Gmail on your Mac”, I find Mailplane to be, essentially, a bad idea.

So I googled for “mailto links safari gmail” and quickly found Gmail Notifier for Mac. I assume the Windows version is similarly good. It’s free (vs. $25 for Mailplane), and essentially provides basic desktop integration of Gmail and Google calendar. I don’t use the latter, and I find being shown random ancient unread emails to be annoying, so I’ve turned off most of its functionality. But it does handle mailto: links.

Which brings me to my second pet peeve with Gmail, and something Mailplane addresses really well.

There’s a Firefox extension that provides drag and drop attachments for gmail, but it only works in some (older) versions of Firefox and I’ve pretty much sworn off Firefox, and totally sworn off crufty old Firefox. While lamenting the lack of such a goody for Safari, I came across this post (strangely enough, rated one out of five stars):

Safari allows you to drag and drop to any Choose File… button.

I checked this and yup, it works dandy. The only remaining issue is that Gmail doesn’t give you a target button by default, which costs a click. Oh well.

This is why I use a freaking Mac.

Incidentally, the main reason I don’t simply configure Mail.app to send mail via Gmail and be done with it is that I have this nasty habit of leaving crap in my Gmail inbox (over 3000 unread items, mostly borderline spam) and there seems no simple way to stop Mail.app from trying to download large portions of it. Of course I haven’t tried lately, so chances are if I did it would work perfectly and I wouldn’t have typed this pointless blog entry.

Post Script

Nope, Mail.app still sucks. Maybe iTunes and Mail.app will get married and move out.

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Good v. Evil

Thursday, March 4, 2010

It’s not like Apple is a patent-troll shell company that needs these suits for income. It’s not like the government is going to shut down everyone’s Android phone already in the market. It’s purely an anti-competitive suit. Which, for consumers, just limits innovation.

Business Insider, Apple’s wimpy patent suit is proof that it’s terrified of Google

I have news for you, Business Insider. Patents are anti-competitive. That’s why they exist.

There are several questions raised by Apple’s lawsuit against HTC. Is it right or wrong? Can Apple win? Why is Apple doing it?

I have no clue about the last two questions, but like everyone else, I have strong opinions on the first.

John Gruber thinks it’s all about Steve Jobs being emotional:

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

That’s not the language of a licensing dispute or the beginning of a polite negotiation. That’s the language of a man aggrieved.

I think he may be right, after all from an emotional standpoint it seems to me that Apple is, again, being ripped off by competitors. While what Apple’s imitators are doing seems wrong (and after all, the “emotions” we’re talking about come directly from our sense of “justice”) it seems to be perfectly legal, right? Well, surely if it seems wrong and it may in fact be illegal, doesn’t Apple have the right to try and find out?

Fortune (Steve Jobs: A Man Aggrieved) quotes Paul Graham as saying that Apple is in danger of becoming Evil:

“Apple is inching ever closer to evil,” writes Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, using the word in Google’s low-bar don’t-be-evil sense, “and I worry that there’s no one within the company who can stand up to Jobs and tell him so.”

Now, the funny thing here is that I don’t think Apple is anywhere near Evil in any Moral sense (and what other sense is there?), but it may be being Evil in using a broken patent system in an attempt to pursue its idea of natural justice. But how is that different from using the Tax Code to throw Al Capone in prison?

I’ll finish off with words from Wil Shipley (who himself has been victimized by Apple — note, I don’t think Paul Thurrott speaks for Delicious Monster):

If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it’s going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft. Enforcing patents isn’t a good long-term play: it’s the beginning of the end of the creative Apple we both love.

It’s a nice sentiment, but seems to be completely without factual basis. Did the brainiest people slowly leave Microsoft? If so, was it because Microsoft used its might to quash competition? It seems to me that Microsoft’s problem has never been a lack of brains, but a lack of taste. AT&T was, for many decades, a powerhouse of innovation, built and maintained by quashing rivals and enforcing patent laws. I seem to recall similar admonitions that Steve Jobs’s obsession with secrecy would damage Apple’s culture of creativity.

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MacHeist, Flow, etc.

Thursday, March 4, 2010
Flow in Action

Flow in Action

I’ve just paid for the latest MacHeist bundle. The funny thing is that the app I buy the bundle for is usually not the app I end up using. For example, the app I bought the last big bundle for was Espresso (the rival to Coda from the MacRabbit, developers of the excellent CSSEdit), but Espresso — while still promising — has proven very buggy (not to mention that it’s a royal pain in the ass to customize color settings, and the developer keeps changing the CSS tags so old color preferences become obsolete), and it still lags far behind Coda in most respects.

Aside: these days I live in Cornerstone and use a variety of text editors rather than Coda or Espresso.) In the end, my favorite app from that bundle turned out to be Acorn, which I had almost no interest in. I should add that Acorn also has problems — indeed, I think I email a new bug report or gripe to the developer every other day… Then, as I mentioned the other day, that bundle also includes The Hit List, which I’ve just started using (in fact it’s become one of the apps I “live” in), so that bundle has paid for itself several times over.

My reason for buying this bundle is really the Monkey Island game (which I probably won’t have time to play). But after downloading the bundle apps, the one that really impresses me is Flow. I remember a while back when Transmit first came out — Panic did a good job of publicity and so (noticing it had a nice icon) I decided to give it a shot, fully expecting to delete it immediately. After all, I already owned Anarchie (or whatever the frack it’s called these days) — The Best FTP Client In The World™ — right? And FTP isn’t exactly rocket science, what can this new app add? Well, turns out the answer was “not quite enough”. I played with Transmit long enough to decide it wasn’t quite up there, emailed some suggestions to their email address, and went back to “work” (those were the days!).

Of course, within minutes Cabel Sasser had responded to my emails (at what must have been a very odd hour), and within months Transmit had most of the new functionality I’d suggested along with a loyal user and evangelist (I think the big big that I wanted Transmit — and FTP clients in general — to do was transparently modify a test file on the server, get its modification timestamp, figure out what the time difference between Here and There is, and deal with file replacement accordingly. I once made this point at a Macromedia conference in Sydney which got a standing ovation from the audience and completely perplexed the (American) presenter. I don’t think anyone has actually done this yet, it’s very annoying. It was even more annoying back then as I lived in Australia and maintained websites on US-based servers, so timestamps were often very misleading.)

OK, what was I talking about? Oh, that’s right Flow.

Flow is a new(ish) FTP (SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, etc.) client for the Mac. Its design goal appears to be to make remote servers behave as much like your local hard disk as possible, with additional — very thoughtful — goodies such as letting you bookmark a folder on a server and set it up to automatically copy the URLs of uploaded items to the clipboard. So far, my only problem with Flow is the way it morphs the sidebar from a set of local bookmarks to a local file hierarchy. I’m not exactly sure how to do what Flow is doing better, but it seems like a bit of a kludge.

It also makes me wish that its developer(s) would simply build a complete Finder replacement, since they clearly “get it”.

I think I’ve found my new favorite FTP client. Sorry Panic. (Well, we’ll see how easily I can reprogram my muscles to stop typing “command spacebar T R A N enter”.)

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Director 11.5

Monday, March 1, 2010

I made most of my income as a Director coder for almost ten years (and used it as an animation program for a few years before that), so it’s sad to see how badly it’s been neglected. I just came across this “review” of Director 11.5 (which has been out for ages, a year I think) via MacSurfer.

I own licenses for most versions of Director from 4 thru 11 (and had licenses through my employers for versions 2, 3, and 3.5) but version 11 was so tragically bad that I completely lost interest. Here’s the kicker: Director 11.5 still hasn’t added support for AS3 Flash. I mean, seriously?!

I also see they’ve bolted PhysX on to the long-neglected 3d engine. Yeah, not having physics is the big problem with Director’s 3d engine. Thanks guys, how about — um — FBX support so we can import some actual content? It’s essentially a maintenance release with its most important “new feature” being “hey, it runs under Leopard”. (Heck, based on my experience with v11, “hey it runs” would almost be compelling.)

(Bear in mind that “DirectX 9″ support means it runs under DirectX 9″. It doesn’t actually use any DirectX 9 features.)

Oh yeah and multiple undo for text editors. Wow, think we might get multiple undo in the main UI in version 15?

Yeah, let’s rely on these guys for a vital piece of web infrastructure.

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