I guess from my point of view as a coder, determining the visible text strings of an entire PDF vectored image might be more complicated that looking up the meta-data for an image, MP3, or whatever, which presumably is nicely organized in either a static header or as a series of tag/data elements. (This assumes a reasonably competent and known format. I know from experience that early MP3s could be a little iffy.) PDFs can be extremely complicated and indexing them without crashing is probably quite a job.
In truth, I would guess Word documents are orders of magnitude harder to parse than your typical, standards conforming PNG file due to the Word document format's near legendary lack of elegance and opacity. I've read that some versions of Word basically just dumped raw memory structures to disk and called it a format.
Well that can't be it because Tiger will do things like look in PDFs for keywords. In Steve's standard demo, he starts typing and if you type "Vegas", you might get a PDF map of Nevada (if you had such a file on your hard drive) even if Vegas wasn't in the PDF file's name. So I don't know how Microsoft's service is farther reaching.
As a Mac coder, I'd really like to see all these supposed Objective C jobs. The vast majority of Objective C jobs I've seen advertised have been at Apple itself, which isn't very helpful if you don't or can't live in Cupertino, Pittsburgh or Vancouver, Washington.
If anything, employers seem convinced you can save money by writing cross-platform C++ and using the Qt framework, at least it's what I've been doing the last couple years.
Personally, I'd love to write in Objective C using the Cocoa framework; it's the funnest, most productive framework I've seen. If only someone in the greater Boston area was hiring.
I've owned 2 iBooks, and think them a great value, but I carry a Powerbook G4 12" now, and the model announced today will be my next primary machine. Why?
The anodized aluminum shell is much harder to scratch. My white iBook was hideously scratched; my Powerbook barely at all.
DVI out.
Spanning video out versus mirroring. Although you can probably hack an iBook's firmware to allow spanning.
The Keyboard. A Powerbook's keyboard is firm and durable. An iBook's keyboard is squishy and cheap.
Opening it up. Opening a Powerbook is not fun, but it's mainly a matter of unscrewing screws. An iBook is held together with easily broken and hard to release snaps. I upgraded my hard drive Saturday to a 100GB Momentus, and it was only mildly stressful.
The clincher. A DVD burning Superdrive as an option. I've put together several DVDs on my 12", and this is the main reason I went with the Powerbook.
Again. I think the iBook is a great little box; but if you have the means, I highly recommend the Powerbook 12".
I believe you are forgetting that Confucian thought has always been a philosophy of the ruling elite. Other philosophies: Taoism and Buddhism have more universal appeal and are more compatible with western ideals of individuality. Buddhists are so individualistic they reject even the obligations of their own family.
To buy into the idea that Confucianism maps one to one with traditional Chinese culture or philosophy is to ignore the vast majority of Chinese people.
It's possible Apple has the idea of using Airport Express to provide this kind of audio support. It's certainly capable of doing so, although Apple will have to expand which applications support AirTunes style streaming.
Buy a Mac Mini, then if you need WiFi and fancy audio support, Apple would be happy to take your $129. Again, allowing you to add features available in costlier Macs one part at a time, and ensuring that eventually it would be a better deal to buy an iMac.
Sorry for not being clear, but I simply mean that for me $199 is a fair chunk of change; something I have to think twice, thrice... before parting with. On the other hand $73 for the 5 polished applications of iLife, or even $129 for Mac OS itself is dirt cheap in terms of functionality per dollar, and are amounts I can part with without reflection. I wasn't implying iLife or iWork are a substitute for a decent text editor, which they are not, just that the perceived value of BBEdit is, for me, significantly lower then its retail price.
I don't begrudge Rich his success at selling in volume at such a high price, but I would not pay that much for any text editor. I bought my original, inexpensive, copy in 1994 and have upgraded thrice since, when I felt the added value was worth the price.
Having said that, BBEdit is an excellent product and I miss it greatly when I'm running Linux or using the XCode editor.
BBEdit is not cheap. It's $199.00 from the barebones.com company store. It's a fine text editor and I use it nearly every day, but when you compare its cost to iLife or iWork it is not cheap for what you get.
If you are buying a new USB keyboard, you should look into 3rd party Mac keyboards. While the Apple keyboard is quite nice, there are others; I have a Matias Tactile Pro on my desktop G5 at work which I like. It has a good feel, and should survive millions of presses.
Here's a recent discussion about 3rd party keyboards: http://www.lowendmac.com/misc/05/0110.html
And it is true, keyboards are non-powered hubs and you can only rely on them for low-powered devices. For instance, half of USB thumb drives will work from a keyboard (more or less). I doubt if the iPod Shuffle will work very well out of a keyboard; probably won't charge, and won't get USB 2.0 speed transfers.
1) He doesn't seem aware that Mac OS X is a Unix derivative (more so than Linux). He firsts fails to include it in his list of popular commercial variants of Unix, and then he says that Linux will shortly be the only prominent Unix variant. I think most people think Mac OS X will be around longer than shortly, and it is the most widely used commercial Unix variant.
2) He keeps calling it Macintosh, which is the general name for the hardware. The operating system is called Mac OS X.
Trolltech did not solve the lack of introspection and static compilation. They mitigated some small aspect of it, and in the process added a whole new layer of complexity via the qmake step.
And what is this "friend's friend" stuff? I had lunch with a guy on the engineering team trying to add dynamic class extension every workday for 3 months. It was not some urban legend. It was an engineering team trying to deliver small web based updates to an application with new methods added to C++ classes without having to deliver one big statically linked binary (compounded with ActiveX mumbo jumbo.) In the end, the solution added too much development complexity to be worthwhile.
And what's this whining stuff? I'm saying other tools are better at application development then C++; I'm giving the example of Objective-C as a better choice, and I gave you a handful of reasons why. You on the other have done nothing but give me the fallacy of appealing to authority. You have not given me one reason why C++ is superior to Objective-C in application development. It's as if you have no idea about the feature set of Objective-C, and yet are arguing against it.
I have been employed nearly constantly writing commercial applications in C++ for nearly 10 years. If there is a language which would be considered _MY_LANGUAGE_ it would be C++, and I will tell you again, it is an awful kludge of a language which relies entirely on its first mover advantage to keep it alive.
I see the unfortunate results of C++ every day of my life. I once whipped up a useable "prototype" in 3 weeks of Objective-C programming which 4 months of Qt/C++ coding couldn't match in terms of stability, speed, and appearance. I would have much preferred factoring the application has having a Cocoa front end on the Mac, and a Qt front end on the PC; the productivity enhancements of Cocoa are so great that we would have ended up saving time in QA and ended up with a true native Mac appearance. But the client was adamant about maximizing shared code. A decision, by the way, which because of the tight schedule nearly killed the company.
I was at another (well known) company where a team of engineers spent 4 months basically trying to add something better approximating instrospection and getting around C++'s reliance on static class declarations through the use of the PIMPLE pattern. This effort failed.
I am not a moron. I write in C++ because that is what I am hired to do, because people have a lot of legacy code to integrate. I'm sure most C++ coders are in similar situations. We muddle through.
I don't think that's very much of a good thing. C++ is a horrible kludge of a language, and Qt tries to salvage it with it's signals/slots preprocessing and other hacks. Everyplace I've ever worked in C++, people spent a huge amount of time implementing clever hacks to add features to C++ which other languages have for free. They had legacy code (MFC) or skills and were willing to spend upwards of a third of the development time grafting things into C++ rather than switch. We should be grateful that Trolltech has spent the time so we don't have to.
However, if you want to see what a clean language can do for a framework, look at how sweet Objective-C and Cocoa go together. Message passing right in the language, a clean memory management model, proper abstract interfaces, dynamic runtime module loading... It's just so beautiful.
I've been employed writing Qt apps for the last two years, and it's OK, but do my freeware projects in Cocoa and there is just no comparison in terms of rapidity of development and features you get for free.
Of course Cocoa is a Mac thing, but presumably Objective-C is a gcc language and therefore available for anybody to write a framework around. (I haven't looked at cross-platform Cocoa clones.) If you were writing Qt today, Objective-C would have to get some consideration.
Actually, I'm a suburban libertarian, and have given up actually reading the NY Times's editorial section as it is so utterly predictable, and intellectually dishonest. My favorite papers are the WSJ (to which I subscribe online) and the Washington Post. I was just trying to list where I perceived the paper's themselves positioning themselves, and being objective about it.
Let's look at the newspapers which are making a go of it with nationwide printings: USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and the NY Times.
USA Today - Marketed at travelers who might be interested in a snippet of hometown news. The McDonalds of newspapers.
The Wall Street Journal - Business oriented coverage with a solid conservative editorial page. The newspaper for Republican men.
The New York Times - Amazingly diverse coverage and in depth coverage, with excellent coverage of the Arts and a predictably liberal editorial page. The newspaper for literate urbanites.
The LA Time could have looked for another niche, but they basically are a poor clone of the New York Times. I used to read it quite often when I worked in LA and there is nothing about it that would recommend it over the other Times. Their whole market would be lonesome Southern Californians wanting to keep up with the music scene in Santa Monica.
It'd be nice if another newspaper could challenge the WSJ or the NYT for nationwide coverage. The Chicago Tribune and Washington Post have the potential to do so; I think the Post has the best liberal editorial page in the country, and the Trib is just a solid paper, but there is only so many people in the market for national papers.
I can't imagine how "slightly faster for casual browsing" justifies using Explorer. If anything, to maximize security, one should never use Explorer for casual browsing, and only use it to run Windows Update and perhaps other sites mandatory to doing one's job which use ActiveX controls. Otherwise use Firefox.
And for even better security, get a computer pre-installed with Safari.
Yes. I do it while traveling with my PowerBook. It doesn't require any additional software and just properly configuring the phone, which appears as a modem to the Network control panel. Be sure to enable the modem menu so you can connect/disconnect manually.
I believe the original poster was referring to the fact that the majority of Saddam's favored thugs were from the Sunni variety of Islam, giving members of the majority Shia sect very little power.
While consistency of interface is important, and it is something Apple slips up on, what you are generally talking about is not skinning. The quicktime player is not typically using a "skin." Some software engineer (this is a guess) spent a lot of laying out an interface, hard coding behaviors into C++, making sure everything scaled well as windows are resized and generally making sure that the one and only interface looked good and was responsive.
Aqua does not look like something a skinner would do, as it is seamless and beautiful, something that is very hard to do with the bitmaps typically used in skins (as of the year 2000, last time I had to deal with this, perhaps vectored graphics are available today) and really shows the power of designing an interface in C++ or Objective-C with a full range of OpenGL calls at your disposal. Look at the pulsing of a Aqua progress bar, the poof of an icon being removed from a dock, the transparent overlay of the volume control, the shiny middle of a metal window. All very hard to do with a skinning interface.
I do crossplatform development these days using Trolltech Qt. You can make interfaces which will look like Aqua windows on the Mac, but not quite. If you look closely you can see they are pathetic simulations of the real thing, filled with lifeless bitmaps where lively, hand coded OpenGL controls and beautiful translucent layers should be found. Or you can turn on some other theme, and not even try to simulate such high art.
It is true that you can open most Cocoa app's package, load a nib file into Interface Builder, hit a checkbox and poof you have a metal interface, although probably a not well layed out one. Well, this is more of a theme than a skin, as it isn't a generic invitation to add/remove arbitrary elements or make all the windows toroidal.
It is also true that you can play skinned movies from within the Quicktime Player. I had cause to create several of these using LiveStage Pro for a short contract last year, and it's nice to be able to do so, but it is not a general purpose substitute for the base movie player interface.
I was sort of going from a holistic point of view about the article in that he spent several paragraphs talking about what was great about Audion and it was all about the skins, he seemed to have little regard for the actual audio generating code, which he describes as being nothing special, and makes no mention I can recall of the database engine. I'm sure it was better than that, but it wasn't what he himself emphasized about what was great about his own product.
Also, I read the sentence you clipped the first time (a couple parsing attempts actually) , and I read it the exact opposite of how you are interpreting it.
"..., but now without some casualties." Since he says to replace the word "casualties" with "overall improvements", the sentence would read "..., but not without some overall improvements." You seem to be interpreting the statement as a negative assessment of the events of 2001 in terms of product development, while I think he's saying that 2001 resulted in both products being improved, but without Audion becoming better than SoundJam.
Of course, I could be misinterpreting things, it was an odd sentence.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess from my point of view as a coder, determining the visible text strings of an entire PDF vectored image might be more complicated that looking up the meta-data for an image, MP3, or whatever, which presumably is nicely organized in either a static header or as a series of tag/data elements. (This assumes a reasonably competent and known format. I know from experience that early MP3s could be a little iffy.) PDFs can be extremely complicated and indexing them without crashing is probably quite a job.
In truth, I would guess Word documents are orders of magnitude harder to parse than your typical, standards conforming PNG file due to the Word document format's near legendary lack of elegance and opacity. I've read that some versions of Word basically just dumped raw memory structures to disk and called it a format.
Well that can't be it because Tiger will do things like look in PDFs for keywords. In Steve's standard demo, he starts typing and if you type "Vegas", you might get a PDF map of Nevada (if you had such a file on your hard drive) even if Vegas wasn't in the PDF file's name. So I don't know how Microsoft's service is farther reaching.
As a Mac coder, I'd really like to see all these supposed Objective C jobs. The vast majority of Objective C jobs I've seen advertised have been at Apple itself, which isn't very helpful if you don't or can't live in Cupertino, Pittsburgh or Vancouver, Washington.
If anything, employers seem convinced you can save money by writing cross-platform C++ and using the Qt framework, at least it's what I've been doing the last couple years.
Personally, I'd love to write in Objective C using the Cocoa framework; it's the funnest, most productive framework I've seen. If only someone in the greater Boston area was hiring.
The list only contains items with either moving parts, or electronics. Ginsu knives have neither.
If you want to spend money promoting someone else's commercial property, how about spending it on something worthy of love.
If you look at the header of the model table you will see one listed as:
12-inch Combo Drive 1.5GHz
and the other listed as:
12-inch SuperDrive 1.5GHz
So the major difference is the more expensive one can burn DVDs. Plus it comes with a slightly larger hard drive.
- The anodized aluminum shell is much harder to scratch. My white iBook was hideously scratched; my Powerbook barely at all.
- DVI out.
- Spanning video out versus mirroring. Although you can probably hack an iBook's firmware to allow spanning.
- The Keyboard. A Powerbook's keyboard is firm and durable. An iBook's keyboard is squishy and cheap.
- Opening it up. Opening a Powerbook is not fun, but it's mainly a matter of unscrewing screws. An iBook is held together with easily broken and hard to release snaps. I upgraded my hard drive Saturday to a 100GB Momentus, and it was only mildly stressful.
- The clincher. A DVD burning Superdrive as an option. I've put together several DVDs on my 12", and this is the main reason I went with the Powerbook.
Again. I think the iBook is a great little box; but if you have the means, I highly recommend the Powerbook 12".I believe you are forgetting that Confucian thought has always been a philosophy of the ruling elite. Other philosophies: Taoism and Buddhism have more universal appeal and are more compatible with western ideals of individuality. Buddhists are so individualistic they reject even the obligations of their own family.
To buy into the idea that Confucianism maps one to one with traditional Chinese culture or philosophy is to ignore the vast majority of Chinese people.
It's possible Apple has the idea of using Airport Express to provide this kind of audio support. It's certainly capable of doing so, although Apple will have to expand which applications support AirTunes style streaming.
Buy a Mac Mini, then if you need WiFi and fancy audio support, Apple would be happy to take your $129. Again, allowing you to add features available in costlier Macs one part at a time, and ensuring that eventually it would be a better deal to buy an iMac.
Sorry for not being clear, but I simply mean that for me $199 is a fair chunk of change; something I have to think twice, thrice... before parting with. On the other hand $73 for the 5 polished applications of iLife, or even $129 for Mac OS itself is dirt cheap in terms of functionality per dollar, and are amounts I can part with without reflection. I wasn't implying iLife or iWork are a substitute for a decent text editor, which they are not, just that the perceived value of BBEdit is, for me, significantly lower then its retail price.
I don't begrudge Rich his success at selling in volume at such a high price, but I would not pay that much for any text editor. I bought my original, inexpensive, copy in 1994 and have upgraded thrice since, when I felt the added value was worth the price.
Having said that, BBEdit is an excellent product and I miss it greatly when I'm running Linux or using the XCode editor.
BBEdit is not cheap. It's $199.00 from the barebones.com company store. It's a fine text editor and I use it nearly every day, but when you compare its cost to iLife or iWork it is not cheap for what you get.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/fantastic_four/
Sorry. Now in proper URL form.
And it still does not look good.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/fantastic_four/ Does not look good...
If you are buying a new USB keyboard, you should look into 3rd party Mac keyboards. While the Apple keyboard is quite nice, there are others; I have a Matias Tactile Pro on my desktop G5 at work which I like. It has a good feel, and should survive millions of presses.
Here's a recent discussion about 3rd party keyboards: http://www.lowendmac.com/misc/05/0110.html
And it is true, keyboards are non-powered hubs and you can only rely on them for low-powered devices. For instance, half of USB thumb drives will work from a keyboard (more or less). I doubt if the iPod Shuffle will work very well out of a keyboard; probably won't charge, and won't get USB 2.0 speed transfers.
1) He doesn't seem aware that Mac OS X is a Unix derivative (more so than Linux). He firsts fails to include it in his list of popular commercial variants of Unix, and then he says that Linux will shortly be the only prominent Unix variant. I think most people think Mac OS X will be around longer than shortly, and it is the most widely used commercial Unix variant.
2) He keeps calling it Macintosh, which is the general name for the hardware. The operating system is called Mac OS X.
Other than that, an interesting enough article.
Trolltech did not solve the lack of introspection and static compilation. They mitigated some small aspect of it, and in the process added a whole new layer of complexity via the qmake step.
And what is this "friend's friend" stuff? I had lunch with a guy on the engineering team trying to add dynamic class extension every workday for 3 months. It was not some urban legend. It was an engineering team trying to deliver small web based updates to an application with new methods added to C++ classes without having to deliver one big statically linked binary (compounded with ActiveX mumbo jumbo.) In the end, the solution added too much development complexity to be worthwhile.
And what's this whining stuff? I'm saying other tools are better at application development then C++; I'm giving the example of Objective-C as a better choice, and I gave you a handful of reasons why. You on the other have done nothing but give me the fallacy of appealing to authority. You have not given me one reason why C++ is superior to Objective-C in application development. It's as if you have no idea about the feature set of Objective-C, and yet are arguing against it.
I have been employed nearly constantly writing commercial applications in C++ for nearly 10 years. If there is a language which would be considered _MY_LANGUAGE_ it would be C++, and I will tell you again, it is an awful kludge of a language which relies entirely on its first mover advantage to keep it alive.
I see the unfortunate results of C++ every day of my life. I once whipped up a useable "prototype" in 3 weeks of Objective-C programming which 4 months of Qt/C++ coding couldn't match in terms of stability, speed, and appearance. I would have much preferred factoring the application has having a Cocoa front end on the Mac, and a Qt front end on the PC; the productivity enhancements of Cocoa are so great that we would have ended up saving time in QA and ended up with a true native Mac appearance. But the client was adamant about maximizing shared code. A decision, by the way, which because of the tight schedule nearly killed the company.
I was at another (well known) company where a team of engineers spent 4 months basically trying to add something better approximating instrospection and getting around C++'s reliance on static class declarations through the use of the PIMPLE pattern. This effort failed.
I am not a moron. I write in C++ because that is what I am hired to do, because people have a lot of legacy code to integrate. I'm sure most C++ coders are in similar situations. We muddle through.
I don't think that's very much of a good thing. C++ is a horrible kludge of a language, and Qt tries to salvage it with it's signals/slots preprocessing and other hacks. Everyplace I've ever worked in C++, people spent a huge amount of time implementing clever hacks to add features to C++ which other languages have for free. They had legacy code (MFC) or skills and were willing to spend upwards of a third of the development time grafting things into C++ rather than switch. We should be grateful that Trolltech has spent the time so we don't have to.
However, if you want to see what a clean language can do for a framework, look at how sweet Objective-C and Cocoa go together. Message passing right in the language, a clean memory management model, proper abstract interfaces, dynamic runtime module loading... It's just so beautiful.
I've been employed writing Qt apps for the last two years, and it's OK, but do my freeware projects in Cocoa and there is just no comparison in terms of rapidity of development and features you get for free.
Of course Cocoa is a Mac thing, but presumably Objective-C is a gcc language and therefore available for anybody to write a framework around. (I haven't looked at cross-platform Cocoa clones.) If you were writing Qt today, Objective-C would have to get some consideration.
Actually, I'm a suburban libertarian, and have given up actually reading the NY Times's editorial section as it is so utterly predictable, and intellectually dishonest. My favorite papers are the WSJ (to which I subscribe online) and the Washington Post. I was just trying to list where I perceived the paper's themselves positioning themselves, and being objective about it.
Let's look at the newspapers which are making a go of it with nationwide printings: USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and the NY Times.
USA Today - Marketed at travelers who might be interested in a snippet of hometown news. The McDonalds of newspapers.
The Wall Street Journal - Business oriented coverage with a solid conservative editorial page. The newspaper for Republican men.
The New York Times - Amazingly diverse coverage and in depth coverage, with excellent coverage of the Arts and a predictably liberal editorial page. The newspaper for literate urbanites.
The LA Time could have looked for another niche, but they basically are a poor clone of the New York Times. I used to read it quite often when I worked in LA and there is nothing about it that would recommend it over the other Times. Their whole market would be lonesome Southern Californians wanting to keep up with the music scene in Santa Monica.
It'd be nice if another newspaper could challenge the WSJ or the NYT for nationwide coverage. The Chicago Tribune and Washington Post have the potential to do so; I think the Post has the best liberal editorial page in the country, and the Trib is just a solid paper, but there is only so many people in the market for national papers.
I can't imagine how "slightly faster for casual browsing" justifies using Explorer. If anything, to maximize security, one should never use Explorer for casual browsing, and only use it to run Windows Update and perhaps other sites mandatory to doing one's job which use ActiveX controls. Otherwise use Firefox.
And for even better security, get a computer pre-installed with Safari.
Yes. I do it while traveling with my PowerBook. It doesn't require any additional software and just properly configuring the phone, which appears as a modem to the Network control panel. Be sure to enable the modem menu so you can connect/disconnect manually.
I believe the original poster was referring to the fact that the majority of Saddam's favored thugs were from the Sunni variety of Islam, giving members of the majority Shia sect very little power.
While consistency of interface is important, and it is something Apple slips up on, what you are generally talking about is not skinning. The quicktime player is not typically using a "skin." Some software engineer (this is a guess) spent a lot of laying out an interface, hard coding behaviors into C++, making sure everything scaled well as windows are resized and generally making sure that the one and only interface looked good and was responsive.
Aqua does not look like something a skinner would do, as it is seamless and beautiful, something that is very hard to do with the bitmaps typically used in skins (as of the year 2000, last time I had to deal with this, perhaps vectored graphics are available today) and really shows the power of designing an interface in C++ or Objective-C with a full range of OpenGL calls at your disposal. Look at the pulsing of a Aqua progress bar, the poof of an icon being removed from a dock, the transparent overlay of the volume control, the shiny middle of a metal window. All very hard to do with a skinning interface.
I do crossplatform development these days using Trolltech Qt. You can make interfaces which will look like Aqua windows on the Mac, but not quite. If you look closely you can see they are pathetic simulations of the real thing, filled with lifeless bitmaps where lively, hand coded OpenGL controls and beautiful translucent layers should be found. Or you can turn on some other theme, and not even try to simulate such high art.
It is true that you can open most Cocoa app's package, load a nib file into Interface Builder, hit a checkbox and poof you have a metal interface, although probably a not well layed out one. Well, this is more of a theme than a skin, as it isn't a generic invitation to add/remove arbitrary elements or make all the windows toroidal.
It is also true that you can play skinned movies from within the Quicktime Player. I had cause to create several of these using LiveStage Pro for a short contract last year, and it's nice to be able to do so, but it is not a general purpose substitute for the base movie player interface.
I was sort of going from a holistic point of view about the article in that he spent several paragraphs talking about what was great about Audion and it was all about the skins, he seemed to have little regard for the actual audio generating code, which he describes as being nothing special, and makes no mention I can recall of the database engine. I'm sure it was better than that, but it wasn't what he himself emphasized about what was great about his own product.
Also, I read the sentence you clipped the first time (a couple parsing attempts actually) , and I read it the exact opposite of how you are interpreting it. "..., but now without some casualties." Since he says to replace the word "casualties" with "overall improvements", the sentence would read "..., but not without some overall improvements." You seem to be interpreting the statement as a negative assessment of the events of 2001 in terms of product development, while I think he's saying that 2001 resulted in both products being improved, but without Audion becoming better than SoundJam.
Of course, I could be misinterpreting things, it was an odd sentence.