Converting xml to xml is a whole lot easier than xml to pdf...:)
Exactly the point - wouldn't it be nice to have an open-source tool that could do it for you?
This way you could convert Keynote presentations to PDF, without needing to have a functional copy of Keynote around.
Yup, that would be great. But also note that things could get
very interesting if you could work the other way, too. Editing
in stuff in Keynote is not bad at all (it's a Cocoa app so all of the emacs-style editing keys work!), but there
are days when you want to create stuff like this programatically, or manually via something like the pretty hand AxPoint input
format. And then you export to keynote to get those entertaining revolving cube transitions.:-)
The idea is NOT to add tabs inside a window. But to place a new window at the exact same place as your previous window and let any obscured windows pop up a tab.
I appreciate the effort and thought you have put into this idea, but I see at least two problems with it:
Windows are identified by their title bar text which can be very long; horizontal tabs always face a challenge with this.
I don't really see how you can easily deal with (say) 20 open windows effectively with this idea. Again, I think
the insight I have on tabs is that you're primarily trying
to gain the functionality of the "window list" given in the Window menu while solving its issues and allowing keyboard navigation.
Power-users can cycle the windows in a tab-like fashion using the [option] key.
I am not sure how this is any improvement over cycling through windows using cmd-~. Am I missing something?
My examples were just to show that tabs aren't new, and the various implementations (good or bad) only show we're bound to see them continue.
That's specious reasoning at best. One example of a bad user interface-- two if you count Mozilla/Opera/Chimera tab-based MDI-- does not a trend make.
I think a better way to argue about this is to
decide what problem it is that needs to be solved, figure out to what extent current tabbed browsing solutions do
or do not solve them, and then do the *right* thing.:-)
Personally (and surprisingly to me) I find that I miss tabs
less in Safari than I would have expected. It turns out
that *one* problem that tabs solve in Mozilla is the problem that raising and repainting browser windows takes just enough time to be irritating. Safari gets around this by being much faster.
That said, speed alone does not solve every problem. A general problem with any application that includes multiple windows is simply managing all of the windows,
making it clear which is which, and allowing you to navigate between them conveniently. Here, the biggest
problems with just using multiple windows are that when
you have a non-trivial number open, they overlap so you
can't immediately see all of the relevant content to raise
the one you want (or even all of the titlebars). Further,
while there are "nice" ways to cycle through multiple windows (cmd-~, best read here as "I command you to twiddle":-)), you can get to scenes like that in Toy Story II where our porcine hero must go "around the horn" on the remote to locate the right channel (here window).
Now, there is a method to do this already in the interface,
namely the list of open windows in the pull-down "Window" menu. This solution has its own set of problems. The "Window" menu now exposes a much wider pull-down menu surface, but it will never be wide
enough to show the full title. (This is a major problem
with the Mozilla tabbed browsing interface, made worse by the fact that the list is presented horizontally rather than vertically.) Another problem with the Window menu solution is that, especially for fast typists, pull-down menus are too slow.
Ironically, Apple sort of/kind of recognized some of these
issues more completely when it came to the (surprisingly similar) issue of bookmarks. So I now have a dozen or so
bookmarks on my "bookmark bar", and they are arranged horizontally and scroll off the screen. Not great. But then there's "Bookmark View" (option-cmd-B) which provides
me with the obvious solution: a scrollable list of essentially full-width bookmark entries! And even some
keyboard navigation! But then it craps out: you can use
the arrow keys to highlight a bookmark entry, but then there is no way to go to that bookmark
without using a mouse. The obvious answer would be "hit return", but somebody at Apple has apparently assumed that what I would usually want to do in that case is *edit* the bookmark name rather than *use* the bookmark itself. Bleah. Keyboard navigation
for "bookmark view" really needs to be fixed. Then it will be heaven on earth.
And when "Bookmark Heaven" has been achieved, all that Apple has to do is give us "Windowlist Heaven" arranged
along exactly the same principles. Hit (say) option-cmd-W and go to "Open Window View". Navigate to your open window, and you're there. This simultaneously solves
the visibility problem, the "title space" problem, and the "fast navigation" problem.
The only problem it does not solve that Tabs could solve is the "Hierarchical Organization" problem. When I am
running BLAST searches on ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, ideally I want all of that stuff separated from my more "usual" browsing. With tabs, I just have a "Blast Window" filled with tabs related to that stuff, and a "Regular window" filled with tabs related to the usual stuff. The window
list solution alone does not solve this one. What could help is what amounts to making the list of windows hierarchical (I guess like bookmark folders).
In short, we need a (potentially hierarchical) "Window list"
view that allows robust keyboard navigation. Everybody
can benefit, nobody needs to use, and the interface is
within UI guidelines and common sense.
I'm now wondering how long it will be before we see HTML that opens a new tab
Oh, sure, let's go right back to the bad old days of browser-specific HTML. "I'm sorry, but you must use a browser with a shitty multiple-document interface implementation in order to view this site." That'd be great...;-)
Ooh--I know; we could call it "frames". Wait a minute; that's taken. Uh...let's call it "framelets" and make it twice as confusing as frames, and provide a <noframelets> tag that allows us to handle people with pathetically out-of-date browsers.:-) (Man, that *was* a pretty scary idea...)
Many bugs were fixed, and CSS improved *a lot*
on
Safari Beta Updated
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yes, you can run the w3c.org CSS1 tests now. But more importantly from my perspective (:-)) is that Eric Meyer's
css / edge stuff now almost completely works.
The only abject failure there is the second "ragged float" demo, and even that one is pretty close.
As far as styling XML goes, your XML apparently does have to have the DOCTYPE stuff set up correctly. This means you get no joy with the stuff on the w3c Styling XML site; safari won't display the xml files there at all.
Oh yeah: it's a bit faster...not that you're likely to notice.
Yes, this is off-topic, but my story submission of the new
Safari Beta was summarily rejected:
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
2003-02-12 20:42:59 New Safari Beta (version 60) is now out (articles,apple) (rejected)
Whatever...in any case, you do want to go out and grab
the new Beta. Fixes almost all of the bugs I reported (mostly CSS and DOM, also some random crashes), allows
you to use self-signed certificates, and adds XML support (!).
Uhh... it's right there on the front page. Look on the bottom. "iMac from $799. Great value on a classic design."
Interesting; it is on the front page of the Apple store page,
but if you click the iMac pictures on the main Apple page, you really don't get anywhere near this model. Guess which one I did...
the big gripe about the $7XX iMac was that the retailer margin just wasn't big enough for anybody to bother keeping them in stock.
I didn't know anybody bothered buying Macs through the non-Apple retail channel any more. Apple Stores are all over the place, and the Apple Store on the web is everywhere!
Uh...there are Apple stores "all over the place" IF you are talking
about a selection of some of the very largest metro areas. Prominent metros that do not have Apple stores within dozens or hundreds of miles include:
Seattle
Portland
Kansas City
Pittsburgh
New Orleans
Nashville
Salt Lake City
Birmingham
...and all of the second-tier markets. I expect these top 8
and others will get "filled in" as time goes on, but right now
probably the biggest local Apple presence most of these places
have are college bookstores, which are (wait for it) where most of your $7XX iMacs are likely to get sold, if any do. Here in Columbia, MO (an oasis of civilization in the middle of nowhere), I think the majority of all Macs sold are through the college bookstore route.
The Apple Store on the web is always there, of course, but you're not going to find the $7XX iMac there, either, unless you can pull an educational ID out and look in the right place.
Personally I'd like to see Apple put G3 processors in the refined 12" PowerBook enclosure-- trading aluminum for polycarbonate-- and continue the iBook line. The iBook is a great idea: a small, rugged laptop geared for consumers and students. I'd hate to see it go away.
I know what you mean here, but I think we're beginning to
see less than a lot of room for an iBook line more than one model "deep". I think the $999 iBook right now is the
lowest price you're likely to see for any Apple-made notebook.
Maybe they could use the new enclosure (with anodized colors?), and put in a G3 and a less studly video chipset, but
then I don't know if there would be enough "obvious" differentiation between the iBook and the PowerBook. It is,
alas, a marketing question more than a technical one.
But the current iBook enclosure could be improved a bit, with the addition of things like the slot-loading CDROM and the new hinge.
New hinge is key; I know the failure rate on the tray-loading
CD-ROMs is non-trivial, but are the slot-loading models more
reliable overall?
Ideally, I'd like to see an iBook with about a 500 MHz IBM G3 processor and accelerated graphics-- a slower CPU plus hardware accelerated graphics adds up to a quite acceptable user experience with 10.2 and Quartz Extreme-- for about $799. But I don't know if there's enough market for a machine like that. I would hope that there is, but who knows.
I think there's a market for this, but Apple would probably have to do these themselves and/or through college bookstores only, since the big gripe about the $7XX iMac was that the retailer margin just wasn't big enough for anybody to bother keeping them in stock. In other words, if I'm selling 200 of these at
the beginning of the semester, it might be worthwhile, but
it might not be worth holding onto inventory or putting it on display given that I have better margins on (say) the 12 inch
PowerBook. To my mind, that one *does* scream "iBook II" since it lacks the DVI connector of the rest of the PowerBooks.
The 15inch TiBook's dont scrape the screen, it only looks like it... you just need to clean the screen with a light solvent and it comes clean:)
That's probably true for the 15" TiBook, but I, alas, was talking
about the 12" iBook (ice white models). It's true that most of the look is grime, but it's not all grime.:-(
A 12" PowerBook with an 867 MHz G4, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, and a SuperDrive goes for $1999. To get the equivalent of the display on the 17" iMac, you have to move up to the 17" PowerBook, which goes for $3299 (1 GHz CPU, 1 MB L3 cache, 512MB RAM, 60 GB HD, SuperDrive).
That's, alas, pretty close to being true. Unfortunately, the 12" Powerbook lacks the DVI output that even the 15" Powerbook
has, so you can't do the cute "$1800 Powerbook plus a 17" LCD trick". Otherwise, I bet that everybody would do this.:-)
Now how about some hot new G4 iBooks for $999? Otherwise I will be forced to buy a 12-inch powerbook
Dude, the 12" PowerBook is the G4 iBook. Asking for it for $999 amounts to nothing more than whining, and will gain you no sympathy here.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple actually phased out
the iBook name except for the $999 model. The PowerBook
model has more cachet, and the new 12" Powerbook has some
serious overlap with the more expensive models in the iBook line. I just saw the 12" Powerbook yesterday, and some of its best features aren't obvious until you play with one:
The keyboard is much better than the iBook's (although the keys are a tad slick.
The hinge is much better than the iBook's.
The keyboard caps will never scrape the LCD screen.
It is a slot-loading machine
And it's smaller and faster and just a very nice machine. At my
place of business, departments can buy the 12" Powerbook for
$1499, and I could get it for $1699. The only drawback I could see is that you really can't use one of the nice new LCD panels with it since it doesn't do DVI much less the hyperspecial Apple digital LCD connector thingie.
Re:Pith is cute, but lacks keyboard control...
on
Tabs for Safari
·
· Score: 1
The Pith window never receives keypresses, and doesn't usually become the active application. I opted to do that rather than have it absorb them because after clicking the pith window I kept trying to use the Safari command keys and Pith would just beep and look at me like I was stupid.
Yeah, after I posted I realized that this was probably the issue. This is not an easy problem to solve, I'm afraid. The only way I can see for this to work is if Safari (or any Cocoa app) could be convinced to send apple events to Pith (or any other application that could use them). In other words, if cntrl-pagedown wasn't handled by Safari, but meant "next tab" to Pith, then Safari would pass the event on, and Pith could take a swing at it.
Alas, I don't think that could ever work. The only other idea would be that if Pith could (optionally) take keypresses, "select" the right tab, do its thing, and tell Safari to focus itself again. So you'd have to do something like cmd-~ to raise Pith, then get to your tab (e.g., cntrl-pageDown/Up to cycle through) and have Pith pass control back to Safari.
Oh well; it's already *pretty* useful, so I'm not complaining.:-)
Uh... no. There is talk about the PowerPC 970, but it's at least 6 months away from being available for testing, much less for production.
You're right in that I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this chip, but I think you're being a bit pessimistic about the timing
of its arrival. This page on the PowerPC 970 is decently informative and recent. It suggests sampling will start ti happen in the second quarter of 2003, and volume production will begin in the second half of 2003. Has the schedule already slipped this far? My impression was that IBM doesn't like to let
these things slide.
There's no doubt that 2003 could be a pretty tricky year for Apple, but I think I like their roadmap leading to January 2004 *much* better than any other hardware vendor out there. Right now, Apple is basically in a position where they will make a little bit of money, and when their high-end hardware is actually
really fast again...I don't think their sales are likely to go down.
Pith is cute, but lacks keyboard control...
on
Tabs for Safari
·
· Score: 1
OK, so the good news is that this is a nice litttle utility that
keeps track of all my open windows. In spirit, it is actually
*very* similar to a tab-replacement suggestion I made. Now, one thing I still really miss is a way to keyboard navigate through the pith list. If this really is just a clever AppleScript hack, then you'd think there would be a way to get keyboard input to work, at least when Pith is the active application.
As a side note, now that I've been using Safari for several weeks, I find that I'm not having a lot of "no tabs" withdrawal symptoms, but I am having "type ahead in browser window" withdrawl. Every time I have to use the mouse when surfing at a place like Yahoo, a little piece of me is sad...
I remember my first modem: 1200 baud. I recall being able to read BBS messages faster than the modem could transmit. Uphill... Both ways... and WE LIKED IT!
Fiddle-de-fee! You young whippersnappers always had it the easy way. In my day we had none of your fancy pants
1200 baud modems. Nosiree, we had punchcards and mechanical teletypes. Phone lines, bah! It is a very little known fact, but David Rhodes first sent his solicitation letters via carrier pigeon! A very dirty business, that. But we LIKED it!
Next week, if you're good, I'll tell you how we used to fashion inodes of out chert. Now, run along now...
Oh, wow. So the one thing I hadn't realized until reading this article was that a lot of the so-called gene patents
were just based on (very possibly dodgy) Expressed Sequence Tag data. Somehow, that seems so...wrong.
Can anybody out there with experience in this field comment on how trashy you could get in these patent applications?
I really don't think either would happen. First, why would MS be worried about looking like a monopoly? I'm not sure what could be done to them now - but certainly nothing will happen as long as Bush is in the whitehouse.
Actually, the declaration of MS as a monopoly really does
limit what they can get away with, because they are vulnerable to suits from third parties as well.
MS has settled some of those quietly, I believe. Now the problem here is that the legally recognized monopoly at this point is *not* on office suites, but on PC-compatible operating systems. Getting the monopoly ruling of suites would certainly be doable,
but I don't know that withdrawing from a market where
you are legally recognized to have a monopoly could possibly be ruled as abusing the monopoly.
Only a product running on windows could appear to beat out office.
Maybe, but you have to remember that Powerbooks in particular are not unknown in even fairly strongly Windows shops, so if a Mac office suite could read and write whatever a Windows PC throws at it, but has some clear advantages, it would at least cause a fair amount of whining to happen.
The one weakness that RELAX NG has versus W3C XML Schema is a lack of general cardinality constraints. In XSD you can use 'minOccurs' and 'maxOccurs' to, e.g. require seven to twenty occurrences of a given element. In RELAX NG, you must either list the pattern seven times explicitly, or settle for an approximation like .
Thanks for the note; that really is a weird omission. In practice, I don't see that this would be a huge problem,
but it's always interesting to see the warts. I used to
think that the W3C would be unstoppable when it came to
setting standards like this, but with the recent controversies surrounding XHTML 2.0 and XSchema (among others) I sense that this might change.
I am currently working on a series of articles on RELAX NG. In most ways, I think RELAX NG really is the best of all worlds. It is more powerful than W3C XML Schemas, while being a natural extension of the semantics of DTDs. Moreover, if you choose to use the compact syntax (non-XML), you get something very easy to read and edit by hand.
I am old, and I am wary of the ways of hype. But after
reading this and other comments on this thread, I had
a look at the RELAX NG tutorial. All I can say is: wow. Given that this stuff is
already known to be formally correct, I am finding it very hard to believe that the W3C should not just punt on XML Schema and just adopt RELAX NG instead. It seems to have
every advantage: You can understand it, it is powerful,
James Clark endorses it, the tutorial is helpful...what's not
to like?
OK, so I just checked out the "Prima" fonts on which these
Vera fonts will be based (and you can do with a testdrive
of the Prima fonts at Bitstream.
Not surprisingly, the kerning is much better. A bit surprisingly, the kerning of pairs involving "e" in Prima Serif is still not what you might expect. Tastes vary, but a "Ve"
pair (as in Vera, the font name) should be fairly tight, and
the serifs are such that "er" needs to be tighter as well.
As displayed on the Bitstream page, Prima Serif (=Vera Serif) is indeed a pretty tight font (with an x-height such that it even looks a bit condensed) so you notice these things.
That said, I think I do want to be a lone with Vera Mono Sans and her slinky oblique and bold sisters.:-)
Hmm. Not that I don't appreciate Bitstream's gift, but ugh, the kerning on those looks terrible--especially the serif font.
Yes, but you should take heart that this is just what
the first guy who just punched text into AbiWord on his notebook got. We will see better.
I mean, right now you'd have to think that there are hints not being used here, or being used in a particularly sucky^H^H^Hboptimal fashion. So the "ts" problem you note is much worse in Vera Serif 16 than in the 24.
What gives me great hope is the look of the Vera Mono Sans font. Now, there's a font, people. Before you pick apart the licensing or whine about not
getting Centaur or what not, have a look at this.
I, I, might even have to end my love affair with Lucida Sans Typewriter (sniff).
OK, so I haven't seen it anywhere yet, but a logical guess
as to the set of *10* fonts we are likely to see would be:
Bitstream Vera Sans
Bitstream Vera Sans Italic
Bitstream Vera Sans Bold
Bitstream Vera Sans Bold Italic
Bitstream Vera Serif
Bitstream Vera Serif Italic
Bitstream Vera Serif Bold
Bitstream Vera Serif Bold Italic
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Bold
That said, the notion of a "Bitstream Vera" font is rather
obscure on the net according to google. There *is*
a set of multilingual fonts that go under the "Vera Humana" name; maybe Bitstream bought or adapted these? So where are the font experts when you need them?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that would be great. But also note that things could get very interesting if you could work the other way, too. Editing in stuff in Keynote is not bad at all (it's a Cocoa app so all of the emacs-style editing keys work!), but there are days when you want to create stuff like this programatically, or manually via something like the pretty hand AxPoint input format. And then you export to keynote to get those entertaining revolving cube transitions. :-)
OK, I'll bite: where is the complete changelong? :-)
I appreciate the effort and thought you have put into this idea, but I see at least two problems with it:
I am not sure how this is any improvement over cycling through windows using cmd-~. Am I missing something?
I think a better way to argue about this is to decide what problem it is that needs to be solved, figure out to what extent current tabbed browsing solutions do or do not solve them, and then do the *right* thing. :-)
Personally (and surprisingly to me) I find that I miss tabs less in Safari than I would have expected. It turns out that *one* problem that tabs solve in Mozilla is the problem that raising and repainting browser windows takes just enough time to be irritating. Safari gets around this by being much faster.
That said, speed alone does not solve every problem. A general problem with any application that includes multiple windows is simply managing all of the windows, making it clear which is which, and allowing you to navigate between them conveniently. Here, the biggest problems with just using multiple windows are that when you have a non-trivial number open, they overlap so you can't immediately see all of the relevant content to raise the one you want (or even all of the titlebars). Further, while there are "nice" ways to cycle through multiple windows (cmd-~, best read here as "I command you to twiddle" :-)), you can get to scenes like that in Toy Story II where our porcine hero must go "around the horn" on the remote to locate the right channel (here window).
Now, there is a method to do this already in the interface, namely the list of open windows in the pull-down "Window" menu. This solution has its own set of problems. The "Window" menu now exposes a much wider pull-down menu surface, but it will never be wide enough to show the full title. (This is a major problem with the Mozilla tabbed browsing interface, made worse by the fact that the list is presented horizontally rather than vertically.) Another problem with the Window menu solution is that, especially for fast typists, pull-down menus are too slow.
Ironically, Apple sort of/kind of recognized some of these issues more completely when it came to the (surprisingly similar) issue of bookmarks. So I now have a dozen or so bookmarks on my "bookmark bar", and they are arranged horizontally and scroll off the screen. Not great. But then there's "Bookmark View" (option-cmd-B) which provides me with the obvious solution: a scrollable list of essentially full-width bookmark entries! And even some keyboard navigation! But then it craps out: you can use the arrow keys to highlight a bookmark entry, but then there is no way to go to that bookmark without using a mouse. The obvious answer would be "hit return", but somebody at Apple has apparently assumed that what I would usually want to do in that case is *edit* the bookmark name rather than *use* the bookmark itself. Bleah. Keyboard navigation for "bookmark view" really needs to be fixed. Then it will be heaven on earth.
And when "Bookmark Heaven" has been achieved, all that Apple has to do is give us "Windowlist Heaven" arranged along exactly the same principles. Hit (say) option-cmd-W and go to "Open Window View". Navigate to your open window, and you're there. This simultaneously solves the visibility problem, the "title space" problem, and the "fast navigation" problem.
The only problem it does not solve that Tabs could solve is the "Hierarchical Organization" problem. When I am running BLAST searches on ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, ideally I want all of that stuff separated from my more "usual" browsing. With tabs, I just have a "Blast Window" filled with tabs related to that stuff, and a "Regular window" filled with tabs related to the usual stuff. The window list solution alone does not solve this one. What could help is what amounts to making the list of windows hierarchical (I guess like bookmark folders).
In short, we need a (potentially hierarchical) "Window list" view that allows robust keyboard navigation. Everybody can benefit, nobody needs to use, and the interface is within UI guidelines and common sense.
Ooh--I know; we could call it "frames". Wait a minute; that's taken. Uh...let's call it "framelets" and make it twice as confusing as frames, and provide a <noframelets> tag that allows us to handle people with pathetically out-of-date browsers. :-) (Man, that *was* a pretty scary idea...)
As far as styling XML goes, your XML apparently does have to have the DOCTYPE stuff set up correctly. This means you get no joy with the stuff on the w3c Styling XML site; safari won't display the xml files there at all.
Oh yeah: it's a bit faster...not that you're likely to notice.
Whatever...in any case, you do want to go out and grab the new Beta. Fixes almost all of the bugs I reported (mostly CSS and DOM, also some random crashes), allows you to use self-signed certificates, and adds XML support (!).
Interesting; it is on the front page of the Apple store page, but if you click the iMac pictures on the main Apple page, you really don't get anywhere near this model. Guess which one I did...
Duly noted; that's what I get for blindly cutting and pasting. :-)
Uh...there are Apple stores "all over the place" IF you are talking about a selection of some of the very largest metro areas. Prominent metros that do not have Apple stores within dozens or hundreds of miles include:
The Apple Store on the web is always there, of course, but you're not going to find the $7XX iMac there, either, unless you can pull an educational ID out and look in the right place.
Man, that *is* a great episode, but where I lost bladder control was during the song, which I really think is the very best one:
I know what you mean here, but I think we're beginning to see less than a lot of room for an iBook line more than one model "deep". I think the $999 iBook right now is the lowest price you're likely to see for any Apple-made notebook. Maybe they could use the new enclosure (with anodized colors?), and put in a G3 and a less studly video chipset, but then I don't know if there would be enough "obvious" differentiation between the iBook and the PowerBook. It is, alas, a marketing question more than a technical one.
New hinge is key; I know the failure rate on the tray-loading CD-ROMs is non-trivial, but are the slot-loading models more reliable overall?
I think there's a market for this, but Apple would probably have to do these themselves and/or through college bookstores only, since the big gripe about the $7XX iMac was that the retailer margin just wasn't big enough for anybody to bother keeping them in stock. In other words, if I'm selling 200 of these at the beginning of the semester, it might be worthwhile, but it might not be worth holding onto inventory or putting it on display given that I have better margins on (say) the 12 inch PowerBook. To my mind, that one *does* scream "iBook II" since it lacks the DVI connector of the rest of the PowerBooks.
That's probably true for the 15" TiBook, but I, alas, was talking about the 12" iBook (ice white models). It's true that most of the look is grime, but it's not all grime. :-(
That's, alas, pretty close to being true. Unfortunately, the 12" Powerbook lacks the DVI output that even the 15" Powerbook has, so you can't do the cute "$1800 Powerbook plus a 17" LCD trick". Otherwise, I bet that everybody would do this. :-)
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple actually phased out the iBook name except for the $999 model. The PowerBook model has more cachet, and the new 12" Powerbook has some serious overlap with the more expensive models in the iBook line. I just saw the 12" Powerbook yesterday, and some of its best features aren't obvious until you play with one:
And it's smaller and faster and just a very nice machine. At my place of business, departments can buy the 12" Powerbook for $1499, and I could get it for $1699. The only drawback I could see is that you really can't use one of the nice new LCD panels with it since it doesn't do DVI much less the hyperspecial Apple digital LCD connector thingie.
Yeah, after I posted I realized that this was probably the issue. This is not an easy problem to solve, I'm afraid. The only way I can see for this to work is if Safari (or any Cocoa app) could be convinced to send apple events to Pith (or any other application that could use them). In other words, if cntrl-pagedown wasn't handled by Safari, but meant "next tab" to Pith, then Safari would pass the event on, and Pith could take a swing at it.
Alas, I don't think that could ever work. The only other idea would be that if Pith could (optionally) take keypresses, "select" the right tab, do its thing, and tell Safari to focus itself again. So you'd have to do something like cmd-~ to raise Pith, then get to your tab (e.g., cntrl-pageDown/Up to cycle through) and have Pith pass control back to Safari.
Oh well; it's already *pretty* useful, so I'm not complaining. :-)
You're right in that I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this chip, but I think you're being a bit pessimistic about the timing of its arrival. This page on the PowerPC 970 is decently informative and recent. It suggests sampling will start ti happen in the second quarter of 2003, and volume production will begin in the second half of 2003. Has the schedule already slipped this far? My impression was that IBM doesn't like to let these things slide.
There's no doubt that 2003 could be a pretty tricky year for Apple, but I think I like their roadmap leading to January 2004 *much* better than any other hardware vendor out there. Right now, Apple is basically in a position where they will make a little bit of money, and when their high-end hardware is actually really fast again...I don't think their sales are likely to go down.
As a side note, now that I've been using Safari for several weeks, I find that I'm not having a lot of "no tabs" withdrawal symptoms, but I am having "type ahead in browser window" withdrawl. Every time I have to use the mouse when surfing at a place like Yahoo, a little piece of me is sad...
Fiddle-de-fee! You young whippersnappers always had it the easy way. In my day we had none of your fancy pants 1200 baud modems. Nosiree, we had punchcards and mechanical teletypes. Phone lines, bah! It is a very little known fact, but David Rhodes first sent his solicitation letters via carrier pigeon! A very dirty business, that. But we LIKED it!
Next week, if you're good, I'll tell you how we used to fashion inodes of out chert. Now, run along now...
Oh, wow. So the one thing I hadn't realized until reading this article was that a lot of the so-called gene patents were just based on (very possibly dodgy) Expressed Sequence Tag data. Somehow, that seems so...wrong. Can anybody out there with experience in this field comment on how trashy you could get in these patent applications?
Actually, the declaration of MS as a monopoly really does limit what they can get away with, because they are vulnerable to suits from third parties as well. MS has settled some of those quietly, I believe. Now the problem here is that the legally recognized monopoly at this point is *not* on office suites, but on PC-compatible operating systems. Getting the monopoly ruling of suites would certainly be doable, but I don't know that withdrawing from a market where you are legally recognized to have a monopoly could possibly be ruled as abusing the monopoly.
Maybe, but you have to remember that Powerbooks in particular are not unknown in even fairly strongly Windows shops, so if a Mac office suite could read and write whatever a Windows PC throws at it, but has some clear advantages, it would at least cause a fair amount of whining to happen.
Thanks for the note; that really is a weird omission. In practice, I don't see that this would be a huge problem, but it's always interesting to see the warts. I used to think that the W3C would be unstoppable when it came to setting standards like this, but with the recent controversies surrounding XHTML 2.0 and XSchema (among others) I sense that this might change.
I am old, and I am wary of the ways of hype. But after reading this and other comments on this thread, I had a look at the RELAX NG tutorial. All I can say is: wow. Given that this stuff is already known to be formally correct, I am finding it very hard to believe that the W3C should not just punt on XML Schema and just adopt RELAX NG instead. It seems to have every advantage: You can understand it, it is powerful, James Clark endorses it, the tutorial is helpful...what's not to like?
Not surprisingly, the kerning is much better. A bit surprisingly, the kerning of pairs involving "e" in Prima Serif is still not what you might expect. Tastes vary, but a "Ve" pair (as in Vera, the font name) should be fairly tight, and the serifs are such that "er" needs to be tighter as well. As displayed on the Bitstream page, Prima Serif (=Vera Serif) is indeed a pretty tight font (with an x-height such that it even looks a bit condensed) so you notice these things.
That said, I think I do want to be a lone with Vera Mono Sans and her slinky oblique and bold sisters. :-)
Yes, but you should take heart that this is just what the first guy who just punched text into AbiWord on his notebook got. We will see better.
I mean, right now you'd have to think that there are hints not being used here, or being used in a particularly sucky^H^H^Hboptimal fashion. So the "ts" problem you note is much worse in Vera Serif 16 than in the 24.
What gives me great hope is the look of the Vera Mono Sans font. Now, there's a font, people. Before you pick apart the licensing or whine about not getting Centaur or what not, have a look at this. I, I, might even have to end my love affair with Lucida Sans Typewriter (sniff).
That said, the notion of a "Bitstream Vera" font is rather obscure on the net according to google. There *is* a set of multilingual fonts that go under the "Vera Humana" name; maybe Bitstream bought or adapted these? So where are the font experts when you need them? :-)