Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold?
on
Acme for Windows
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· Score: 1
Textmate for Mac OS X has a folding feature which works in many situations. Very extensible and hackable, and has a small and active developer community around it.
No affiliation beyond satisfied customer and occasional bundle contributor.
All you people thinking about Improv, forget it. Look at Pages. It's essentially Keynote with the word processing amped up. Don't get me wrong... I use it and like it very much (except for the obnoxious inability to copy a picture into a table cell at original size). But it's not a revolution in page layout. It's just a fairly well-designed app which handles graphics very very well.
I would think Numbers would be like Keynote's numerical table features amped up. That would mean a solid spreadsheet with the usual functions with very easy charts and graphs (like in Keynote). In reality, that's probably what would really benefit people. People don't need a revolution in object-oriented spreadsheeting... they do need a spreadsheet that makes it easy to tell what's being added to what, and which gives you easy ways to visualize your data.
Probably for the same bureaucratic reason Californians write all their tax checks to Donald Westly(?). [Man, if that guy ever cashed all those checks and split town, he could go buy Fiji.]
Everything attached to the UC system goes to the "U.C. Regents". Tuition, IP rights, parking tickets, they even get first dibs on your spouse on wedding night. Sad, really.
I hit it, and it skips to the next commercial. It takes me about.5 sec to realize it's another commercial. I hit it again, skip to next commercial. Repeat until I get to the show part.
It's sort of manual, but it's also nice to feel like you are eradicating each individual commercial.
Now your 'jump to index button' (the right arrow pointing at a pipe ->|) will jump 30 seconds if you are in play mode. You can change the 3 and 0 to suit your needs. The 'jump to index' still works as it used to if you are in rewind or fastforward mode.
The key purchase: Jobs and Unix
on
NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That's what it boils down to. You can argue technically whether BeOS could have worked (too risky, I think), or Solaris could have flown (too dependant on a rival, I think).
Bottom line: Going NeXT saved Apple by getting Steve Jobs back and getting OS X based on Unix BSD. Steve Jobs might be a crazy man, a meglomaniac, whatever, but he has vision and taste and the drive to force others to follow his vision. The interregnum of Sculley et al was consumed with internal fighting and a zillion product teams smashing each other.
Also, the move to NeXT helped Apple acquire OS rock-solid stability and the Alpha Geek population, as O'Reilly puts it. So now, even though market share is sitting around 5%, OS X is still guaranteed lots of cool stuff.
And finally Tiger is going to start pulling in some of those BeOS metadata ideas...
You're not a troll, but I do disagree with you.
1. The iPod didn't sell because of innovative features. It sold because of innovative interface and style (and herd-like fashion momentum). When it came out/. was crapping itself to talk about how stupid the device was because of... low features! Some things never change.
2. Jobs has said many people play music hundreds of times, and only few people play movies repeatedly. The fact that one guy did a 'cause it was there' kind of movie hack on the iPod does not make a market. Maybe as digital video gets easier (got to love those flash-card mini-camcorders, too bad about the shooting quality), the market will grow.
3. It costs money to squeeze features on. It's already expensive as it is.
4. If Apple 'missed' the opportunities, then who is taking advantage of it? Is anyone making money off of a portable mini movie player? I'm not convinced a market exists.
My own consumer opinion is I'm not going to get a photo iPod, but I can see the market, especially for the output-to-TV features.
OOo has its problems. But of all the non-MS office packs I've used, and I've tried practically all of them, it is the only one that is even remotely adequate for compatibility. And this is the number one sticking point for office suites.
NeoOffice/J is acceptable looking and acceptably fast. Load time is slow, but I only load it once per boot. The only other program I'm pulling for is Nisus Writer, which used to be the best, and now is in a lamentable state. If they can get their act together (tables) and get better MS compatibility, they have a shot.
I guess I'm also hoping Apple is secretly developing a killer office suite.:)
All my two-window needs are met by either command-tilde...
THANK YOU... I never knew this shortcut, so I assumed it wasn't possible.
You're welcome!:)
I also personally much prefer keyboard shortcuts. Apple is improving in this area, but it's still not where it should be. Panther has the first usable keyboard navigation for Open/Save dialogs.
I think a bunch of shortcuts are listed in Finder Help. But some of us old converts have been trained by awful Apple Help performance not to ever ever hit the help button. I mean, WinXP Help is usually useless, but it's responsive!:)
As for Expose, I find it more usable when I bind mouse buttons to it. I'd use middle-button if I had one, but instead I bind the left-right click chord to the Expose key. It's cool! Now I just have to remember to use it...
Drawers can be bad. E.g. iCal drawers are very annoying, since most people want to keep their week/month calendars zoomed fullscreen, and then the drawers fly open and squash the view.
But when I browse, I essentially never need the window zoomed horizontally.
So, if I need to use two windows at once, I need to put them next to each other (or change their size, which is too time-consuming).
I'm curious when you find you need two side-by-side; I'm trying to think of a situation and I'm failing... All my two-window needs are met by either command-tilde to flip back and forth or Expose.
And all the Omni PR people have had to say about that is: 'a lot of our users don't experience crashes'. So wow - that's how you deal with crashes at Omni Group support?
If you have a crash, a Crashcatcher app opens and mails a crash log to Omni. What more do you expect, a handwritten certificate of apology? (This happens for registered versions... your unregistered mileage may vary.)
No thanks. I got Safari if I want, and Safari is an honest effort, and Safari is not playing leap frog or riding on the tails of anyone else's efforts. Omni should first attempt to get their own browser out the door without crashing all over the place; when they've demonstrated they too can write solid code, then they can do what they want.
Are you serious? Safari is 'riding on the tails' of the entire KHTML team and indirectly the efforts of many other open source developers. This is how it should be.
And we shouldn't forget. Omniweb was there first. Back when OS X was just out, there was only the hideous hideous IE5 (tragic since IE5/OS9 was the best browser of its time) and a nightmarish Netscape. OW was gorgeous and fast and showed everyone what a browser really should be like. Yeah, it had occasional crashes, but it was the best of the bunch. Except for the sick task of reverse-engineering all of IE's bugs. Leading to...
Creating a souped-up version of Safari might give them back a market niche, but it's not honest the way they're going at it, IMHO. Show you can write a browser first - then worry about the doodads.
That's right, why use a standards-compliant free Apple standard Toolkit, when you can completely reinvent the wheel for no good reason other than to impress about ten people in the world who probably won't even register your product and will complain about how your URL field isn't adjusted right in your demo movie. While their at it, they should have written their own compilers, the cheating bastards.
This isn't macho CS major dueling here. This is about creating useful software. Most of us are delighted they are using Webkit for rendering and thinking about other interface issues instead of wasting their time on rendering (which incidentally was killing their development efforts).
If you don't like it, don't use, or don't try it. But please don't try to say it's somehow dishonest or wimpy to use system toolkits.
I agree with everyone about how annoying the slide-out window is. We need either (1) an option to make it a popup window again, or (2) for the calendar to auto-shrink if the drawer pops off the screen side.
It's keeping me from switching from Palm Desktop, which I'd dearly love to do. (That old rebranded Claris Organizer is still a solid old bugger of a program.)
Also, I can't figure out how to color-code my Palm categories. Palm Desktop, for instance, lets you specify all Travel events as Blue and Work meetings as Green, etc. As far as I can tell, the Palm can only sync to one calendar, which means one color. Am I the only one who uses this color coding?
I've looked around and can't find any vendors of 1GB DIMMs for the old PB G4 15". Any thoughts on where to get them? Are you sure they will really work with the older slots?
Okay, answering my own question, Sun talks about Mad Hatter and it seems to be merely a Java front-end to StarOffice and misc other Office type programs.
AP talks about another Sun thing, code Mad Hatter or "Sun Java Desktop". What's the relationship between StarOffice and this Mad Hatter deal? Why would they work on two parallel projects like this? Presumably MH builds on the translation libraries from OpenOffice?
Inquiring minds want to know...
I could have games up and running in a minute or less (~15 seconds in some cases), where my Commodore owning friends would wait 5 minutes or more for their tape drives to load anything, and even the ones who had disk drives waited 2-3.
Very true. But it's not fair comparing to a C64 and their 1200 baud storage systems.
Booting the Dos 3.3 startup disk usually took a while, I think because it loaded integer basic, which was a dog.
Also, DOS 3.3 was inefficient with its buffering; remember all those fast DOSes that came out, like DiversiDOS, etc. Now those really flew.
ah yes, thinking back to the days when you were proud to save a few cycles or bytes... [old man]back in our day, we had to stick big phone handsets into 300 baud modem... and we were grateful!! rassafrissen...[/old man]
I've typed on everything from a 2Mhz Z80 system to a 2.8Ghz system. Can you guess how different my typing speed was? Can you guess which one booted faster?
Hee hee! Actually, I'd guess it was about a tie on the boot-up race. Booting an Apple ][ with vanilla DOS 3.3 off a floppy took a while. On the other hand, you could hear every track seek, so you had audio progress feedback...
Now once ProDOS came out and I installed it on a gargantuan 80MB SCSI HD, man startup flew!
In addition to the other comments, practically everything we have of Kafka's writing was published after his death contrary to his express wishes. And I happen to like seeing the bootlegs and weird dregs of musicians. You know it's not meant for broad consumption, and that's okay.
I'm not sure that I can consider the MacOSX port of OpenOffice as "usable" until it has the capacity to -print-
Then rejoice, for OOO under X11 can indeed print. I think there may be some inkjets that have driver issues (Epson?) but I've used it to print very nicely to two Postscript laser printers (HP4000, Brother HL1470N) and even to PDF.
If you're complaining about the NeoOffice "Flaming Yeti" build, then yes. This is an in-progress Cocoa port. The X11 build has been the focus so far. Now they should make faster progress on the Cocoa one.
But the main juice of OOO is working all right: MS translation. I've found Word 5 documents arrive DOA, but Word >97 docs read in okay. There are formatting glitches here and there, though. Your mileage may vary.
If you just want a kick-butt Cocoa wordprocessor, maybe consider Nisus Express or Mariner Write. They both try to do Word decoding, but in my experience the translation is inferior to OOO.
ps. The OOO work would go faster if Apple pulled a Safari and built a monster WP on top of the OOO translation libraries, and contributed fixes back. He said wishfully.
Updated. Re:Beware if you use PithHelmet
on
Safari 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
PithHelmet rocks. Note on web site that there is a new version for Safari 1.0. To install the bundle, look where you installed the SIMBL folder (for me, ~/Library/InputManagers) before and replace the PithHelmet bundle by hand with the new updated one. Works fine so far.
I'm using a beta of OOO (not the latest). Apple X11 lets you take X11 clipboards and paste to the Mac side. OOO had a bug that limited the clipboard to 255 chars, but I think they are working on that. There is another little issue with creeping windows in Apple X11, but overall I'm quite pleased with it. It's the only program I've ever used that comes close to decoding the (criminally obfuscated) MS Office formats. I think the interface is really clunky, but not more so than the Office that they are cloning.
I feel certain the program you mention was Karateka, I mean, how many games had the flipped over version thing.
Hee hee! Karateka was a classic. That blasted bird.
Actually, both Karateka and Prince of Persia were written by Jordan Mechner, so it must have been a weird quirk of his. It was definitely Prince of Persia, because when he played in mirror mode, we always called it "Bruce of Bepzig" (approximately "Prince of Persia" in backwards funky font).
I actually bought PoP, weirdly enough.:)
It's a great game to play in emulation still.
The existence of emulators was what convinced me to trash my//e, but again I regret it now as having the actual hardware really would be different for a child learning. Not to mention my hundreds of now-unreadable 800k 3.5" disks in ProDOS format.
Yeah, 1 MHz, but an efficient megahertz. It felt as fast as a 8 MHz 8088 PC.
Remember when the 8MHz Zip Chip and 10 MHz Rocket Chip came out? Man, that computer FLEW. My senior year in college, my roommate used to play Prince of Persia at top (10x) speed. Then for a further challenge he'd flip it on this weird mirror mode we found and play (and win) with the monitor upside down. Brilliant, but weird.
I threw out my souped-up Apple IIe three years ago before moving cross-country and I've had pangs of regret ever since. How are my kids going to learn computers and programming? Not on Win 2010 with C++; I'd rather give them an Apple II, a machine you can understand completely from hardware to ROM to RAM.
Eyes glazed with nostalgia, Eric
PS. Don't even get me started on The Beagle Brothers....
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No affiliation beyond satisfied customer and occasional bundle contributor.
I would think Numbers would be like Keynote's numerical table features amped up. That would mean a solid spreadsheet with the usual functions with very easy charts and graphs (like in Keynote). In reality, that's probably what would really benefit people. People don't need a revolution in object-oriented spreadsheeting... they do need a spreadsheet that makes it easy to tell what's being added to what, and which gives you easy ways to visualize your data.
Maybe that would be a revolution, actually...
Probably for the same bureaucratic reason Californians write all their tax checks to Donald Westly(?). [Man, if that guy ever cashed all those checks and split town, he could go buy Fiji.] Everything attached to the UC system goes to the "U.C. Regents". Tuition, IP rights, parking tickets, they even get first dibs on your spouse on wedding night. Sad, really.
It's sort of manual, but it's also nice to feel like you are eradicating each individual commercial.
Now your 'jump to index button' (the right arrow pointing at a pipe ->|) will jump 30 seconds if you are in play mode. You can change the 3 and 0 to suit your needs. The 'jump to index' still works as it used to if you are in rewind or fastforward mode.
Bottom line: Going NeXT saved Apple by getting Steve Jobs back and getting OS X based on Unix BSD. Steve Jobs might be a crazy man, a meglomaniac, whatever, but he has vision and taste and the drive to force others to follow his vision. The interregnum of Sculley et al was consumed with internal fighting and a zillion product teams smashing each other.
Also, the move to NeXT helped Apple acquire OS rock-solid stability and the Alpha Geek population, as O'Reilly puts it. So now, even though market share is sitting around 5%, OS X is still guaranteed lots of cool stuff.
And finally Tiger is going to start pulling in some of those BeOS metadata ideas...
You're not a troll, but I do disagree with you. 1. The iPod didn't sell because of innovative features. It sold because of innovative interface and style (and herd-like fashion momentum). When it came out /. was crapping itself to talk about how stupid the device was because of... low features! Some things never change.
2. Jobs has said many people play music hundreds of times, and only few people play movies repeatedly. The fact that one guy did a 'cause it was there' kind of movie hack on the iPod does not make a market. Maybe as digital video gets easier (got to love those flash-card mini-camcorders, too bad about the shooting quality), the market will grow.
3. It costs money to squeeze features on. It's already expensive as it is.
4. If Apple 'missed' the opportunities, then who is taking advantage of it? Is anyone making money off of a portable mini movie player? I'm not convinced a market exists.
My own consumer opinion is I'm not going to get a photo iPod, but I can see the market, especially for the output-to-TV features.
I use Dr. Bronner's Liquid Soap, you insensitive clod!
NeoOffice/J is acceptable looking and acceptably fast. Load time is slow, but I only load it once per boot. The only other program I'm pulling for is Nisus Writer, which used to be the best, and now is in a lamentable state. If they can get their act together (tables) and get better MS compatibility, they have a shot.
I guess I'm also hoping Apple is secretly developing a killer office suite. :)
I also personally much prefer keyboard shortcuts. Apple is improving in this area, but it's still not where it should be. Panther has the first usable keyboard navigation for Open/Save dialogs. I think a bunch of shortcuts are listed in Finder Help. But some of us old converts have been trained by awful Apple Help performance not to ever ever hit the help button. I mean, WinXP Help is usually useless, but it's responsive! :)
As for Expose, I find it more usable when I bind mouse buttons to it. I'd use middle-button if I had one, but instead I bind the left-right click chord to the Expose key. It's cool! Now I just have to remember to use it...
But when I browse, I essentially never need the window zoomed horizontally.
I'm curious when you find you need two side-by-side; I'm trying to think of a situation and I'm failing... All my two-window needs are met by either command-tilde to flip back and forth or Expose.And we shouldn't forget. Omniweb was there first. Back when OS X was just out, there was only the hideous hideous IE5 (tragic since IE5/OS9 was the best browser of its time) and a nightmarish Netscape. OW was gorgeous and fast and showed everyone what a browser really should be like. Yeah, it had occasional crashes, but it was the best of the bunch. Except for the sick task of reverse-engineering all of IE's bugs. Leading to...
That's right, why use a standards-compliant free Apple standard Toolkit, when you can completely reinvent the wheel for no good reason other than to impress about ten people in the world who probably won't even register your product and will complain about how your URL field isn't adjusted right in your demo movie. While their at it, they should have written their own compilers, the cheating bastards.This isn't macho CS major dueling here. This is about creating useful software. Most of us are delighted they are using Webkit for rendering and thinking about other interface issues instead of wasting their time on rendering (which incidentally was killing their development efforts).
If you don't like it, don't use, or don't try it. But please don't try to say it's somehow dishonest or wimpy to use system toolkits.
It's keeping me from switching from Palm Desktop, which I'd dearly love to do. (That old rebranded Claris Organizer is still a solid old bugger of a program.)
Also, I can't figure out how to color-code my Palm categories. Palm Desktop, for instance, lets you specify all Travel events as Blue and Work meetings as Green, etc. As far as I can tell, the Palm can only sync to one calendar, which means one color. Am I the only one who uses this color coding?
I've looked around and can't find any vendors of 1GB DIMMs for the old PB G4 15". Any thoughts on where to get them? Are you sure they will really work with the older slots?
I thought it was going to be something cooler like the Java port of OpenOffice.
AP talks about another Sun thing, code Mad Hatter or "Sun Java Desktop". What's the relationship between StarOffice and this Mad Hatter deal? Why would they work on two parallel projects like this? Presumably MH builds on the translation libraries from OpenOffice? Inquiring minds want to know...
Very true. But it's not fair comparing to a C64 and their 1200 baud storage systems.
Booting the Dos 3.3 startup disk usually took a while, I think because it loaded integer basic, which was a dog.
Also, DOS 3.3 was inefficient with its buffering; remember all those fast DOSes that came out, like DiversiDOS, etc. Now those really flew.
ah yes, thinking back to the days when you were proud to save a few cycles or bytes... [old man]back in our day, we had to stick big phone handsets into 300 baud modem... and we were grateful!! rassafrissen...[/old man]
Hee hee! Actually, I'd guess it was about a tie on the boot-up race. Booting an Apple ][ with vanilla DOS 3.3 off a floppy took a while. On the other hand, you could hear every track seek, so you had audio progress feedback...
Now once ProDOS came out and I installed it on a gargantuan 80MB SCSI HD, man startup flew!
In addition to the other comments, practically everything we have of Kafka's writing was published after his death contrary to his express wishes. And I happen to like seeing the bootlegs and weird dregs of musicians. You know it's not meant for broad consumption, and that's okay.
Then rejoice, for OOO under X11 can indeed print. I think there may be some inkjets that have driver issues (Epson?) but I've used it to print very nicely to two Postscript laser printers (HP4000, Brother HL1470N) and even to PDF.
If you're complaining about the NeoOffice "Flaming Yeti" build, then yes. This is an in-progress Cocoa port. The X11 build has been the focus so far. Now they should make faster progress on the Cocoa one.
But the main juice of OOO is working all right: MS translation. I've found Word 5 documents arrive DOA, but Word >97 docs read in okay. There are formatting glitches here and there, though. Your mileage may vary.
If you just want a kick-butt Cocoa wordprocessor, maybe consider Nisus Express or Mariner Write. They both try to do Word decoding, but in my experience the translation is inferior to OOO.
ps. The OOO work would go faster if Apple pulled a Safari and built a monster WP on top of the OOO translation libraries, and contributed fixes back. He said wishfully.
PithHelmet rocks. Note on web site that there is a new version for Safari 1.0. To install the bundle, look where you installed the SIMBL folder (for me, ~/Library/InputManagers) before and replace the PithHelmet bundle by hand with the new updated one. Works fine so far.
I'm using a beta of OOO (not the latest). Apple X11 lets you take X11 clipboards and paste to the Mac side. OOO had a bug that limited the clipboard to 255 chars, but I think they are working on that. There is another little issue with creeping windows in Apple X11, but overall I'm quite pleased with it. It's the only program I've ever used that comes close to decoding the (criminally obfuscated) MS Office formats. I think the interface is really clunky, but not more so than the Office that they are cloning.
Hee hee! Karateka was a classic. That blasted bird.
Actually, both Karateka and Prince of Persia were written by Jordan Mechner, so it must have been a weird quirk of his. It was definitely Prince of Persia, because when he played in mirror mode, we always called it "Bruce of Bepzig" (approximately "Prince of Persia" in backwards funky font).
I actually bought PoP, weirdly enough. :)
It's a great game to play in emulation still.
The existence of emulators was what convinced me to trash my //e, but again I regret it now as having the actual hardware really would be different for a child learning. Not to mention my hundreds of now-unreadable 800k 3.5" disks in ProDOS format.
- Eric
Remember when the 8MHz Zip Chip and 10 MHz Rocket Chip came out? Man, that computer FLEW. My senior year in college, my roommate used to play Prince of Persia at top (10x) speed. Then for a further challenge he'd flip it on this weird mirror mode we found and play (and win) with the monitor upside down. Brilliant, but weird.
I threw out my souped-up Apple IIe three years ago before moving cross-country and I've had pangs of regret ever since. How are my kids going to learn computers and programming? Not on Win 2010 with C++; I'd rather give them an Apple II, a machine you can understand completely from hardware to ROM to RAM.
Eyes glazed with nostalgia, Eric
PS. Don't even get me started on The Beagle Brothers....