tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-305406642024-03-07T17:58:04.886-05:00$HOME, Library, Preferences etcAn intermittent blog about technology at work and at homeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-38687906567860686502009-01-10T23:55:00.002-05:002009-01-11T00:05:34.673-05:00Alien User Interface Hell<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/SWl87ZdajwI/AAAAAAAAAOY/YFF-tQ1joOI/Alien%20-%20UI%20-%201.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 163px; height: 122px;" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/SWl87ZdajwI/AAAAAAAAAOY/YFF-tQ1joOI/Alien%20-%20UI%20-%201.png" border="0" alt="" /></a>I tend to like a movie to be playing while I'm working, preferably one I know well so I can ignore it. Today <em>Alien</em> was up on Netflix Instant. While going to make more tea I noticed the early scene where the <em>Nostromo</em>'s captain goes into the command area to commune with Mother. What the hell were the designers thinking when concocting the fake system user interface that is depicted in that scene?<br /><br />There's a <a href="http://idisk.mac.com/simon.pride/Public/Pictures/Blogging/LiveJournal/Alien_-_UI_-_1-20090110-235443.png">million tiny status lights</a>, all white, set into a white background. None of them has a readable label. The whole surface of the pod is encrusted with incomprehensible but significant miniature beacons. It's been frequently pointed out that some errors on our limited space missions so far have been tied back to ambiguous or confusing information displays in spacecraft cockpits. What evolutions did Ridley Scott expect to have happened in a few decades that would allow a standard human pilot to instantly discriminate one white light from ten thousand others and act on its information?<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/SWl87ydzJTI/AAAAAAAAAOg/MwLv3bo1_H8/Alien%20-%20UI%20-2-1.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 163px; height: 122px;" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/SWl87ydzJTI/AAAAAAAAAOg/MwLv3bo1_H8/Alien%20-%20UI%20-2-1.png" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Then there's the higher-resolution interface, which turns out to be a <a href="http://idisk.mac.com/simon.pride/Public/Pictures/Blogging/LiveJournal/Alien_-_UI_-2-20090110-235416.png">1970s 9" version of a Tektronix terminal</a>. The human input device also looks like an IBM keyboard with the top plate taken off.<br /><br />A movie made in the early 80s looks forward to the mistakes of the 60s and the limiations of the 70s. Really, what was the art director being paid for?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-27360707772587043062008-11-21T12:08:00.006-05:002008-11-21T22:19:48.746-05:00Calendar confusion<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/SSdoACc_kvI/AAAAAAAAALk/uh1N8W4Obhw/s1600-h/calconf-1.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 231px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/SSdoACc_kvI/AAAAAAAAALk/uh1N8W4Obhw/s320/calconf-1.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5271296238728221426" /></a><p>I finally got around to <a href="http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html">posting this as an error</a> in iTunes:</p><hr /><p>When calendars are synced between iCal and iPhone via iTunes, iTunes assigns arbitrary colors to the calendars on iPhone. These colors cannot be changed, and do not match the colors chosen in iCal. On occasion, iTunes will assign two calendars the same arbitrarily-chosen color, making them functionally indistinguishable on iPhone.</p><p>This is terrible user interface design because users become accustomed to the 'meaning' of the color of the calendar and use it in recognition of the calendar layout. The mental 'wrench' involved in translating color recognition between two instances of the same calendar data imposes a unnecessary cognitive load on the user.</p><h3>Solution</h3><ol><li> Allow the user to set the color of iPhone calendars.</li><br /><li>If the intention is not to allow the user control of the calendar color, for simplicity of implementation on iPhone, then the logical solution is to use the same color as specified in iCal.</li><br /><li>If the synchronization API does not expose this value, then the algorithm for assigning colors should take care not to assign the same color to two or more calendars. Colors should be assigned in a predictable way (e.g. red for first calendar in iCal, Green for second, etc), so that the user has at least the chance of making a one-time change to their iCal calendars' colors in order to make them the same in both applications.</li></ol><p>I <a href="rdar://problem/63944690">filed this as a bug</a> on Radar, and also in the new OpenRadar (<a href="http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=883">here</a>). Apple probably won't take any notice but one has to point this stuff out. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-17336681726821538462008-08-11T21:37:00.005-04:002017-10-13T15:04:48.922-04:00Folk Ergonomics: or, it all Fitts<br />
When I was a poor civil servant (<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">plus ça change</span></span>) and part-time graduate student I longed to own a Mac. I’d read everything available about them, and nothing I read did anything to dissuade me. What I wanted, as well as the crisp, typographic display and the integration between the applications, was the windowing system. I already knew, somehow, that a Proper Computer™ would be able to show more than one program on the screen at once and let you move between them. Lacking the funds to buy the current model Apple was offering, a Mac SE, I made do with an Atari ST 520 STFM. This was a strange machine with a dual personality:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>a games machine with aspirations to being a workstation, and which used the non-broken version of Digital Research’s GEM windowing environment. This system had been shamelessly copied from the Mac interface, so much so that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_lawsuits#GEM_.22look_and_feel.22_suit">Apple sued Digital Research</a> and got an injunction that prevented later versions of GEM (used on DOS machines, notably those from Amstrad) from using overlapping windows, drive icons on the desktop or other elements of Mac window manager furniture. Apple didn’t cite Atari in its suit, so on the ST machines GEM still kept its original, highly Mac-like functionality. It didn’t multi-task, but even so one program could show more than one window at once. On the desktop, it had multiple resizable and overlapping windows onto the file system, just like the Mac. It had WYSIWYG screen display and printing, a menu bar across the top of the screen, a crisp monochrome display, and was so much like a cut-price Mac that it was sometimes called - after Jack Tramiel, the Atari founder - the Jackintosh.<br />
Later, when I was working in a large accounting firm I was issued a Compaq Deskpro 386 and acquired a copy of Windows/386. This had the ability to run several Windows applications at once (even though they were painfully ugly and crude by later standards) and to multitask DOS applications, all in separate windows which could overlap each other and be moved around and resized any way you wanted. Then came Windows 3.0, and all the versions after. When I worked at the University of Cambridge I spent lots of time using UNIX computers, using X Windows and a variety of desktop managers - twm, the basic one, Motif, the Windows-like one, and my then favorite, fvwm, which allowed you to use multiple Motif desktops on the same screen, and flick between them with a simple keyboard command. Along the way I picked up some more powerful Macs at home too, which ran System 6 and System 7, which almost allowed proper multi-tasking of applications and their windows.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
All this time screens were getting bigger and higher in resolution, meaning the area available to run lots of programs at once was increasing. And there was a natural hierarchy of attention which translated reasonably well into the vertical stacking order and screen space alloted to programs and their windows. The main thing you were working on was at the top and had the largest window, such as a text editor or word processor or spreadsheet; then behind that and off to one side would be your mail application so you could see new mail arrive and scan its sender and subject without pulling its window to the front, and decide if you needed to read it right now or carry on working. Over on one side in a tiny window would be a chat program, either instant messaging or an IRC client, sized so you could keep an eye on the conversation without having to focus exclusively on it. A couple of terminal windows for fiddling with stuff on remote servers, a call tracking system way in the background or even relegated to another virtual screen, and the odd utility all were shuffled in a loose stack, arranged so each got the screen space and attention it merited and no more.<br />
This is the way I have worked for well over a decade, maybe more, and so did all my peers. It just seemed obvious, intuitive and natural. But when it comes to the mass use of GUIs, we’re the minority.<br />
When users began to get Windows on the desktop, the screens were pretty low resolution - 640 pixels across by 480 high. There wasn’t really room to get more than one application’s window on the screen at once. Even the next generation of screens that had 800 pixels by 600 were only good for showing more of your word processing document or your spreadsheet. So it was only natural that most users reacted to multi-tasking, windowing operating systems by using them as full-screen task switchers like the short-lived DOS application managers like TopView and DesqView that preceded Windows.<br />
Since TFT display technology became affordable, with transistor-based panels replacing cathode ray tubes on the desktop, users’ screens have followed the trend (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law">described by Gordon Moore</a>, co-founder of Intel) of geometrically increasing transistor density for least cost. This means that a single-task user such as a word processing worker now commands a screen of maybe 1600 by 1200 pixels, which is overkill even if you turn on all of Microsoft Word’s toolbars, palettes and floating interface gadgets. To me, it’s absolutely crazy to use all that area - two megapixels - to display just one application’s window. <span class="s1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">But that’s exactly what most users do</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">.</span><br />
That’s not to say that most users just use one application, zoomed out to full screen size. They use many applications, but each one’s window is maximized. Typically they user the Windows Taskbar to track the open windows, and switch between them by pressing<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>each window’s Taskbar button with the mouse. This produces absurd situations, for example: a user composing a short e-mail in Outlook or similar program finds the whole text of their message becomes one very long line going from one side of the enormous message window to another. That’s not a comfortable way to write, especially if you review it before you send it, and if the recipient is reading mail full-screen too it’s equally difficult to read. I’ve seen so many people, smart people, do this that it can’t<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>be wholly due to lack of training, or incuriosity about the possibilities of the user interface. There must be a benefit, but for the longest time I had no idea what it might be. Then the other day it came to me in a 4 AM epiphany (I live high up on the Upper Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is very noisy indeed. Being woken up at 4AM is normal). In order to explain what I realized, I have to talk about a bit of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) science.<br />
With command-line driven systems, ergonomics is all about making the commands memorable, short and consistent in their syntax and behavior. With GUI systems, it’s about making elements of the interface obvious, easily located and putting them in the best place for users to find and use them. A very important model for studying this field is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_Law">Fitts’s law</a>, which predicts the time needed to move to a target area on the screen as a function of the distance to the target and the target’s size. The actual formula for the law is up at the top of this article. The bottom line for our purposes today is that if you make targets wider, people find them easier to hit. A corollary of Fitts’s Law Is that things you want to click on should be sized proportionately with their importance or frequency of use.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
This doesn’t, at first glance, seem to have any relevance to the reason Windows users maximize their windows. There is one benefit to maximizing the window that doesn’t have any connection to Fitts’s Law, but is connected with how we learn to do things. Tasks involving hand-eye coordination are easier to learn if the target is in the same place every single time. Recall that every window on the Windows desktop has its own menu bar, at the top of each window. In the “Power User” Windows desktop approach, with its overlapping, variously sized windows, the user has to accurately hit the menu item they want in each individual window. Power Users don’t tend to find this difficult because a) over many years of using GUIs they’ve become horribly adept at accurately slinging the mouse anywhere at all on the screen with pinpoint precision, and b) they make enormous use of keyboard shortcuts instead of menus to accomplish the same tasks a casual user handles with the mouse. However, casual users tend to be mouse-centric, either because they were only trained to use the mouse and menus, or because that’s the primary way to explore the system (experience of earlier computer systems has scared them off experimentally pressing keys to learn what happens). Let a casual user use your Power User Windows or Motif desktop and they’ll uncomfortably hunt around the menus, missing the one they want, until you let them click the Maximize button. As soon as they do this, the ubiquitous File and Edit menus, where 80% of the work gets done in most users’ computing lives, jump to the same location they have in every single window. Now the user can nail them with ease and fluency.<br />
The relevance of Fitts’s Law to maximized windows is this. I said above that things should be wide in proportion to how much they get used. On a Power User desktop, the menus are always pretty narrow and hard for a non-expert to hit reliably. Maximizing the window doesn’t make the actual physical size of the menus any greater. However, the edges of the screen are treated specially by most GUIs. Assuming you only have one screen, if you flick the mouse up so the mouse pointer goes to the top of the screen, and keep shoving the mouse upwards even though the pointer is already at the top, the pointer stays where it is. This makes the menu bar <span class="s1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">semi-infinitely wide</span></span>. You can dispense with fine motor control and slow precise movements when you’re aiming for the top of the screen. You want to save this file quickly? You can whack the mouse up to the File menu, pull it down and hit Save. The speed at which you can quickly acquire the File menu makes a great difference to the perceived ease of use.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
This is exactly why the Macintosh user interface has always had only one menu bar, no matter how many applications may be running. The early Mac OS designers realized consistency of positioning and hospitality to overshooting the mouse were going to be crucial in a usable GUI interface. One of the better-known interface engineers who worked at Apple for a long time, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, has <a href="http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html">written extensively</a> about the use of Fitts’s Law in the design of the Mac UI. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
What’s quite wonderful is that I don’t think users are <span class="s1">consciously</span> choosing to maximize the windows in order to give themselves this consistency and hospitality. It’s something they’ve done intuitively, the spatial and visual parts of their brain prodding the consciousness into giving the poor overworked centers of proprioception and coordination a break. Windows users are unconsciously adding back to Windows one of the important elements of the Mac UI that Microsoft failed to copy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-35740020353019757822008-04-13T00:08:00.002-04:002008-04-13T00:10:56.374-04:00Simon's Dictionary: Integer Handicap<span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Integer Handicap</strong></span><br />[compound noun]<br />The period of reduced efficiency while you adjust to the fact that the software vendor has relocated vital application functionality to strange and different parts of the user interface in the next version, seemingly for the hell of it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-56557063863344589962008-04-07T21:43:00.001-04:002008-04-13T00:10:37.210-04:00Two lovely things<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://idisk.mac.com/simon.pride/Public/Pictures/Skitch/Dock-20080412-211421.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px;" src="http://idisk.mac.com/simon.pride/Public/Pictures/Skitch/Dock-20080412-211421.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />First, <a href="http://worrydream.com/bartwidget/">this widget</a> for planning <a href="http://www.bart.gov/index.asp">BART</a> trips. It's a glorious piece of information design. Then the essay on the thinking behind it, <a href="http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/">Magic Ink</a>. It's like <a href="http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/">Edward Tufte</a> started writing code for the Mac.<br /><br /><!-- technorati tags start --><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Macintosh" rel="tag">Macintosh</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Information Design" rel="tag">Information Design</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Tufte" rel="tag">Tufte</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-91251272301449963992008-01-20T21:36:00.001-05:002008-01-20T21:50:04.306-05:00Live Fast, Crash Hard<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://idisk.mac.com/simon.pride/Public/Pictures/Skitch/screen-sharing-no-entry-20080120-214545.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px;" src="http://idisk.mac.com/simon.pride/Public/Pictures/Skitch/screen-sharing-no-entry-20080120-214545.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Over the last few months, <a href="http://macsandipodsandshiny.blogspot.com/">my friends</a> and I are starting to find there's something very wrong in the state of Mac remote clients. I don't have a huge number of computers, but I have enough to make the use of <a href="http://www.realvnc.com/">VNC</a> (the free screen-sharing system originally developed by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Research_Laboratory">Olivetti Labs</a> at Cambridge) necessary. I used to have a mix of Macs and Windows systems, so some years ago I settled on VNC as the lowest common denominator method of connecting to one machine from another. VNC server runs as a native service on Windows, and there are mainstream clients which work well. On the Mac, it used to be that the canonical server was OSXvnc, now incorporated into Redstone's <a href="http://www.redstonesoftware.com/products/vine/server/vineosx/index.html">vine server</a>. For a VNC viewer I used <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/">Chicken of the VNC</a>. Chicken has a reputation for being very slow but very stable and my experience certainly bore this out.<br /><br />Then came OS X 10.4 (Tiger) which exposed the <a href="http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/">Apple Remote Desktop</a> (ARD) screen sharing service in the Sharing preference pane. ARD uses another version of the VNC code-base. I happily used this on the server end while continuing to use Chicken as a client. A while ago I started using <a href="http://www.jinx.de/JollysFastVNC.html">Jolly's Fast VNC </a>because it promised faster, snappier response from the far end. The promises were true, but I began to find that after a few minutes of using the Jolly Screen Client, the session would freeze. Restarting the client made no difference, nor did:<br /><ul><br /><li>Stopping and starting the Apple Remote Desktop client on the server</li><li>Disabling and re-enabling the ethernet interface on the server</li><li>Unplugging and replugging the Cat5 cable on the server</li></ul><br /><p>Not only did it kill the workings of remote desktop access, it killed every ethernet service on the server too. It wasn't talking to the VNC client, but neither was it talking to any other IP host - by name or by IP address. Nor could I renew the server's DHCP-granted IP address, a process that uses broadcast IP datagrams. I couldn't even see the server's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address">MAC address</a> in a client's ARP table, showing that the whole ethernet infrastructure was dead in the water. The only thing that brought my Trappist server back to life was a complete restart. I never go to the bottom of the problem so I just gave up on Jolly's and went back to Chicken and the problems went away. Then came Leopard.</p><p>You probably know that Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" has a slick, Apple-written Screen Sharing app. When I upgraded most of my machines to Leopard, I got rid of my third party VNC solutions. I was happy for a good long time controlling my Mac Mini (our media machine) from my MacBook Pro, both running Leopard. Connection times were fast and performance was snappy. Then the same lockups started. I'd be using Screen Sharing over Bonjour (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroconf">mDNS</a>) to control iTunes and the screen would lock up, and network traffic on the Mini would fall to zero in both directions. As when I was using Jolly's a complete reboot of the server system was the only thing that cured the problem.</p><p>I can't find any reliable information on whether the Apple client uses the same codebase as the Jolly's client, but it's very odd that both clients offer identically brisk performance and have identically disastrous effects on the server machine. I hope the upcoming <a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/12/19/mac_os_x_10_5_2_to_deliver_sprawling_list_of_fixes_for_leopard.html">OS X 10.5.2 update</a> brings a fix to this issue along with the many others it offers.<br /><!-- technorati tags start --></p><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Jolly's%20Fast%20VNC" rel="tag">Jolly's Fast VNC</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/VNC" rel="tag">VNC</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Apple" rel="tag">Apple</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Macintosh" rel="tag">Macintosh</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Networking" rel="tag">Networking</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Remote%20Access" rel="tag">Remote Access</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Olivetti" rel="tag">Olivetti</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Apple%20Remote%20Desktop" rel="tag">Apple Remote Desktop</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/AT&T" rel="tag">AT&T</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-62717339000555016602007-12-07T19:11:00.001-05:002007-12-07T19:11:01.727-05:00Exclusive: Apple's new lightweight aluminium notebookI was at Apple today and was given one of their new lightweight aluminum mini-notebooks. Surprisingly it has a small fixed amount of storage and uses a pen input device. I have put photos on my Flickr page<br /><br /><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/simonpride/2094465442/">Here</a><br /><br /><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/simonpride/2093691437/in/photostream/">Here</a><br /><br /><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/simonpride/2093691203/in/photostream/">Here</a><br /><br />Enjoy!<br /><br /><!-- technorati tags start --><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Apple" rel="tag">Apple</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Notebook" rel="tag">Notebook</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Aluminium" rel="tag">Aluminium</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Shiny" rel="tag">Shiny</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-20626158579765949482007-10-20T18:08:00.000-04:002007-10-21T10:44:42.261-04:00In the land of grey and pink<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/RxtloEkbTaI/AAAAAAAAAFs/OlC9ckbuA4k/s1600-h/fbpinkDSC_9416.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/RxtloEkbTaI/AAAAAAAAAFs/OlC9ckbuA4k/s200/fbpinkDSC_9416.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5123800740159770018" /></a><p>I’m pretty happy with my current-model MacBook Pro 15”. I got the Santa Rosa based 2.2 GHz model via a very good education price deal (I work in a university), and it’s a great all round machine. Because I take <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/simonpride/">lots of photographs</a>, I have calibrated the MacBook Pro’s display as well as my 23” Cinema Display so that I get true colors when preparing photos for web or print. I used the <a href="http://www.colorvision.com/product-mc-s2e.php">Spyder2 Express</a> from datacolor, which is a great little gadget. The idea is very simple: you use the supplied colorimeter to look at your monitor while an application displays swatches of known colors. The colorimeter reports the actual color appearing on the monitor, and the controlling application creates a table that records the difference between the RGB values in the swatches and the ones recorded by the colorimeter. This is known as a device color profile and the Mac can use its generic factory-shipped ones, or the more accurate ones you create for your own displays with the Spyder2 or similar devices, to calibrate your screens. Once you’ve done this calibration, you can be confident that the colors displayed on your monitor are as close as is technically possible to the colors the original creator of the image or graphic design intended.</p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/Rxtk30kbTZI/AAAAAAAAAFk/TxscF6gfhWU/s1600-h/cover_5529101222005.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/Rxtk30kbTZI/AAAAAAAAAFk/TxscF6gfhWU/s200/cover_5529101222005.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5123799911231081874" /></a><p>So I ran the calibration process and used the new profile. It looked richer and crisper, and prints I made using <a href="http://www.adoramapix.com/">Adorama</a> and Apple’s <a href="http://www.apple.com/aperture/print/">printing service accessed via Aperture</a> were true to the colors on my screen. Photographically, everything was perfect. However when using <a href="http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/">NetNewsWire</a>, or looking at certain sites such as <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, I noticed that a range of greys would actually be displayed as pink (see first image). I re-ran the calibration process a few times but still got the same result. I wasn’t happy with this - it was annoying me, and I spend enough time looking at this screen for it to matter.</p><br /><p>I searched a load of Mac sites using <a href="http://www.google.com/mac">Google’s Mac-specific search</a>, and didn’t find anything helpful. I then turned to <a href="http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa">Apple’s Discussions Forum</a> for the MacBook Pro and found a couple of articles which narrowed the problem domain to people exactly in my situation: they’d got a new MacBook Pro with the LED backlight and calibrated it with a Spyder2 or similar device. It seemed that the problem was that the current Spyder2 software, version 2.3, was hard-coded to use a white point of D65 (equivalent to the color of light emitted by something heated to 6300° Kelvin, and for years regarded as the <a href="http://www.cie.co.at/index_ie.html">best technical definition</a> of the actual color of daylight). From information in the discussions it was clear that version 2.2 of the software still had the white point hard-coded to whatever the display’s hardware regarded as white (Native white point) and this was preferable in this particular case to what Version 2.3 used to create the profile. Luckily Datacolor makes version 2.2 available on its web site, so I went there and fetched the older version. I chose to put the old version of the software in a folder called Applications in my home directory, instead of the main Applications directory.<sup id='fnref1'>[1]</sup></p><p>I ran the old version of the app, and let it do its thing. When I looked at the display as managed by the new profile, it looked fine - the pinks had gone (see figure 2). Then I turned the Cinema Display back on, which had been off because, as my friend David says of a similar screen, you could light a cigarette using its output and a cheap lens at 50 feet. In fact it’s so bright that as the sole light source in our living room it will let you expose a decent shot of the room at f/22, ISO 400, in only two seconds. Spillage from this monster would have biased the calibration process. Cross checking with the Cinema - which was my reference screen - showed that while the greys were now pleasingly neutral, the whites on the MacBook Pro were now a faint but nauseous green. I tried to stick with this state of affairs for a day or so, but as I switched my attention between the Cinema and the MacBook Pro displays, it was even more jarring than the pinkish greys, and I changed the profile back to the original one.</p><br /><p>I was stymied. The old version rendered the greys correctly, but produced unacceptable whites. The new version had crisp clean whites but pinkish greys. The Apple standard profile was too pale and too blue. Running manual calibration on the Apple profile but setting the gamma to 2.2 instead of the historic default of 1.8 helped with the paleness but didn’t help with the pinks. The male line of my family is genetically blessed in taking lush, healthy heads of hair to the grave, but I was at risk of being the first of our line to die bald as a result of my frustration. The only solution seemed to be to get hold of either upgraded software for the Spyder2 or get a better system such as the <a href="http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?ca=2&pid=108">Eye One Display 2</a>. </p><br /><p>The answer came, as it often does, serendipitously. I was reading Macworld.com and came across Dan Frakes’s <a href="http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macgems/2007/10/morebrightness/index.php">review of various brightness controller apps</a> for recent Mac models. I had not really felt the need for extra control of brightness of the displays I use - I thought I was managing quite well with the native keyboard-based controls for the MacBook Pro and the Cinema Display’s Star Trek-like touch controls on its right-hand side. Nevertheless something impelled me to try <a href="http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/shades">Shades</a>. I installed it, and then pulled its onscreen brightness slider down a little to dim the display slightly. The effect on colors was dramatic - the pinkish greys became the most neutral of shades possible. I nudged the brightness back up and the pink flush returned. I used the hardware control to dim the display and instead of the neutral greys I expected, I saw darker pinkish greys. Clearly Shades is doing something different to what the hardware backlight control is doing. I don’t yet have an explanation but I’m heartily glad that I have a solution. </p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/RxtiXkkbTYI/AAAAAAAAAFc/lZQXMVXuVpw/s1600-h/fbgreyDSC_9417.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/RxtiXkkbTYI/AAAAAAAAAFc/lZQXMVXuVpw/s200/fbgreyDSC_9417.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5123797158157045122" /></a><p>The lesson here is: never stop reading, never stop experimenting. You can even make an analogy with biodiversity: we never know what we might need until we need it, and at present we’re eliminating our options as to sources of rare and interesting molecules every time we let a Western feedstuffs company wipe out a tract of forest or jungle. We’ll pay for that, and maybe sooner than we think. In the Mac world, it’s the small developers like <a href="http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk">Charcoal Design</a> who are accidentally solving problems they probably don’t even know exist. It’s in every Mac user’s interest to cherish and support them.</p><br /><hr><br /><p><br /><ol><br /><li id="#fnref1"> One great thing about Macs is that applications are just files (they’re actually folders (directories) pretending to be files, but usually that doesn’t matter) and you can put them anywhere and call them anything you like. This is another great feature of Mac OS X - you can put any app in this folder and it works just as if it were living in the main Applications folder, but it can’t affect any other user on your computer. It’s very useful for trying out new versions of programs (or in my case, older ones).</li><br /><a href="#fnref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> <br /></ol></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-14598501084442660282007-08-13T22:09:00.001-04:002007-08-13T22:16:22.211-04:00Another Numbers feature<font size="+3">↑→↓←</font><br /><br />Frequent spreadsheeters are used to constructing formulae by pointing with the arrow keys. It's part of the spreadsheet conditioned reflex set to whack equals, arrow left, hit star, point left left, whack enter, to construct a typical "cost times quantity" cell formula. This has been braided into the finger muscles and the spinal cord of spreadsheet workers since <a href="http://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htm">VisiCalc</a>, through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3">Lotus</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCalc">SuperCalc</a>, <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214250">Multiplan</a> and Excel. Numbers retains the equals operator to introduce a formula (much more intuitive than Lotus's plus sign and less confusing than SuperCalc's complete lack of formula signifier) but forces you to mouse around the relevant cells to assemble your formula. It's a bit of a drag, honestly. I hope this becomes something the end user can change.<br /><!-- technorati tags start --><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Apple" rel="tag">Apple</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Numbers" rel="tag">Numbers</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Spreadsheet" rel="tag">Spreadsheet</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-90302593080229256392007-08-10T22:12:00.000-04:002007-08-11T15:20:38.284-04:00Excel ↔ Numbers roundtrippingI’ve just checked a couple of things about round-tripping spreadsheet documents between Excel and <a href="http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/">Numbers</a>. Firstly, Numbers adds a ‘cover sheet’ showing the Numbers table name and which exported Excel worksheet it relates to (see figure). This isn’t a showstopper but it could confuse people with whom you’re exchanging documents. <strong>Update</strong>: Another blogger user has <a href="http://qdolan.blogspot.com/2007/08/exporting-to-excel-from-iwork-numbers.html">discovered the preference</a> to turn this behavior off.<div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/Rr0g_ab1A0I/AAAAAAAAACU/ZYbcl4ZPrt8/s1600-h/ExcelNumbers.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/Rr0g_ab1A0I/AAAAAAAAACU/ZYbcl4ZPrt8/s200/ExcelNumbers.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097266627053159234" /></a></div><div><p>Secondly, Excel VBA macros are not preserved by a round trip from Excel into Numbers and back to Excel again. The entire VBA OLE stream within the file is just removed in any Excel file exported from Numbers. This is something to be aware of when collaborating with Office users who make any use of Excel macros.</p><p>That prompts the question “how can you have a serious spreadsheet that doesn’t have a macro language?” but honestly, I’m very far from convinced we really need one. I’ve seen countless examples of Excel sheets with macros that could be very easily replaced by a couple of ranges using some of the many hundreds of powerful Excel worksheet formulæ, if only the sheet’s constructor knew them. In part I blame Microsoft’s switch to online documentation for this ignorance of the true power of the app. I learned Excel by taking the thick, brown-and-white (Mac) or blue-and-white (Windows) perfect-bound Function Reference book home and reading it from cover to cover, so I got a complete picture of what sorts of functions were available and how to use them. It’s so much harder to get a good overview of the capabilities of the application by browsing the unattractive online help and reference. Excel’s calculation engine is optimized for ripping through huge arrays of formulæ like a shark is for swimming and catching prey. It does incredibly fast matrix operations. Asking it to sit around and wait while some large interpreted, procedural script runs is giving it an enormous handicap, and in most cases a totally unnecessary one.</p><p>Anyway, it barely matters now, as - like I’ve <a href="http://simonpride.blogspot.com/2006/08/microsoft-welches-on-vba-on-os-x-intel.html">made much of</a> here <a href="http://simonpride.blogspot.com/2006/08/vba-on-mac-update-more-words-same.html">before</a> - Microsoft can’t devote the necessary resources to bringing the VBA engine to Intel Macs. You can still write scripts in AppleScript that access and animate the Office VBA object model, but their code statements are horribly verbose and hard to parse compared to their (scarcely elegant) VBA equivalents. If you’re interested, April 2007’s <a href="http://www.mactech.com/">MacTech</a> published a <a href="http://www.mactech.com/vba-transition-guide/">supplement on converting Excel VBA to AppleScript</a>. I suspect a lot of spreadsheet users will move to a more formula-based spreadsheeting model as time passes, and to me, that’s a good thing.</p><br /><br /><!-- technorati tags start --><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Macros" rel="tag">Macros</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/VBA" rel="tag">VBA</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Programming" rel="tag">Programming</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Visual%20Basic%20for%20Applications" rel="tag">Visual Basic for Applications</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Spreadsheet" rel="tag">Spreadsheet</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Compatibility" rel="tag">Compatibility</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/AppleScript" rel="tag">AppleScript</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Numbers" rel="tag">Numbers</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Excel" rel="tag">Excel</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Microsoft" rel="tag">Microsoft</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Scripting" rel="tag">Scripting</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Microsoft%20Office" rel="tag">Microsoft Office</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Macintosh" rel="tag">Macintosh</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Apple" rel="tag">Apple</a></p><!-- technorati tags end --></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-16068222364674444112007-04-18T14:04:00.001-04:002007-05-03T10:20:14.742-04:00Big Fat Liar.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/RiZeXJojQKI/AAAAAAAAAB0/g8QR3Rfs3i0/s1600-h/Picture+1.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/RiZeXJojQKI/AAAAAAAAAB0/g8QR3Rfs3i0/s200/Picture+1.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054831383585964194" /></a><br />Maybe you've seen the latest in the Apple <a href="http://www.apple.com/getamac/">TV ads</a> featuring <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hodgman">John Hodgman</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Long">Justin Long</a> (“Hello, I’m a Mac” “And I’m a PC”). Normally these are pertinent and witty, but the <a href="http://movies.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac/apple-getamac-fat_480x376.mov">latest one</a> isn’t up to the standard required when you’re trying to occupy the moral high ground. Hodgman (PC) lumbers on stage looking like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0341743/">Richard Griffiths</a> in a brown suit, bloated and burdened by the weight of “useless” trial software, and says it “…really slows me down”. This perpetuates a meme you’ll hear repeated everywhere, even by IT support people who really should know better: that too much ‘stuff’ on your hard disk makes your machine run slower. There’s no real relation between how full your hard disk is and the speed of your computer. Software that’s installed just lies around on disk until you run it. When it’s not running, it can’t affect your system speed, whether that system runs Mac OS X, Windows or Linux. <br /><br />The only things that might slow down your system without your wanting them to are pre-installed antivirus or firewall apps (Dell used to bundle McAfee products set up to run automatically) but as you shouldn’t run a Windows machine without at least some anti-virus software, and probably a firewall if you share your network with non-experts, I’d give that one a pass.<br /><br />Oh, and while we're at it: Apple pre-installs trial versions of both its own office suite, iWork (can it be a suite when it has only two components?) and Microsoft’s Office. Microsoft Office won't even print until you purchase it. How useful is that for a suite that includes a word processor? And on the subject of disk space: the pre-installed iLife apps that are included in the price contain some fat boys themselves. iDVD tips the scales at around one and a half gigabytes with plenty of video templates under its belt, and iPhoto weighs in at half a gigabyte with all its templates. <br /><br />I believe, with a lot of justification, that Macs are better in almost every area than Windows PCs. Apple’s been good about stressing the points where the Mac is better without recourse to misrepresentation or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt">FUD</a>. It’d be too bad if an overly zealous ad agency started to fling mud when its client isn’t exactly alabaster white.<br /><!-- technorati tags start --><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Apple" rel="tag">Apple</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Windows" rel="tag">Windows</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Advertisment" rel="tag">Advertisment</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Macintosh" rel="tag">Macintosh</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-62374680415916683812007-03-20T21:53:00.000-04:002007-03-20T22:15:31.583-04:00Hide your windows and save<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/RgCR8sygrII/AAAAAAAAABY/5gxOP5KdPc8/s1600-h/Sample+iTunes.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_U0hF_pSWzzU/RgCR8sygrII/AAAAAAAAABY/5gxOP5KdPc8/s200/Sample+iTunes.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5044192054656150658" /></a><br />I was recently talking with a friend who is thinking of replacing his beloved but aging <a href="http://lowendmac.com/imacs/emac.html">eMac 700</a> with something modern, and was trying to help him work out what the smart buy for his usage would be. His current complaint was that he gets the spinning beachball in Safari an awful lot and the entire system seemed sluggish when he had several browser windows open. I got him to run Activity Monitor to examine whether <a href="http://simonpride.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-will-be-so-glad-when-leopard-ships.html">Safari’s cache problems</a> were contributing to the slowness. One of the things he mentioned that startled me was that iTunes on his machine was taking a steady 25% of the CPU time.<br /><br />I was surprised because on my daily machine, I’ve never seen its usage vary much from around 10-11%. Then I compared my machine’s CPU (a 1.67 GHz G4) with his (a 700 MHz G4) and realized that the amount of work being done by both machines was similar, and because his CPU was about half as fast as mine, it was having to do twice as much work as mine in the same time to play back the MP3 file. iTunes doesn’t have the option to do the same work at the same rate over twice as long a time, of course, because then your MP3 music would play back at different speeds depending on how fast a processor iTunes was running on.<br /><br />I was curious to know exactly what iTunes was doing with the CPU cycles it was consuming, so I opened Activity Monitor on my PowerBook while iTunes was running, and found the iTunes process in the list. I clicked Inspect to bring up the detailed view of the iTunes process, and then clicked Sample. What this does is ‘trace’ all the system calls made by an application while it’s running, so you can see exactly what it’s doing at any time. The output it produces is shown in the image (left). The more you know about Mac OS and Mac programming, the more it’ll mean to you, but it’s not hard to figure out the very basics of what an app is doing whatever your background.<br /><br />I ran a few traces on iTunes as it was playing music, and I was surprised to see that in every sample there was just as much work being done in graphics calls as in the actual reading, decoding and playing of music. You can see some of the graphics related work highlighted in the trace sample. Everyone who uses iTunes will have noticed the smart-looking LCD-style display at top and center, which mimics the screen of a G3 iPod and shows the current song information. There’s a progress bar showing the playing position of the current song, and if the song name is wider than the display, the text of the name scrolls right to left. It seems animating this display is quite expensive in terms of CPU power.<br /><br />In order to help my friend with the eMac, I mused, it would be nice if we could do without the graphical work that’s draining his processor. The easiest way to do this is to run iTunes without a window. This won’t be intuitive to current or recent Windows users (and sadly, the facility isn’t available to Windows iTunes users), but the vast majority of Mac apps can manage quite nicely without any open windows. On Windows, however, when you close all an application’s windows, the application quits. Back on the Mac, though, you can give iTunes a list of tunes to play, press the Play button and then close the iTunes window, and iTunes will happily play through your list of music whilst remaining ‘invisible’.<br /><br />So I started iTunes playing and closed its window, and checked Activity Monitor to see what it was now doing. Sure enough, the graphics calls disappeared from the Sample trace, and the CPU utilization dropped by about half, so that on my PowerBook it went from 11% CPU to around 3.8%. Hiding the application produced about the same result, and minimizing it to the Dock used slightly more CPU, at 4.4%. I was mildly surprised by the last result, because Dock icons are ‘live’ to some degree, and I’d expected iTunes to still try to draw a miniature version of the LCD display. I reasoned that if the icon is so small you can’t see the display, iTunes will not try to draw anything too complex.<br /><br />I repeated the test on my 1.6 GHz Core Duo Mac Mini, which has the equivalent of two 1.66 GHz CPUs, and the total CPU load was 3.9% when iTunes’ window was visible, but only went down to 3.0% when it was closed or hidden. The comparison between G4 machines is sort of meaningful, but comparing across machine and processor architectures, and instruction sets isn’t very useful; all that I took from the last test was that there’s minimal benefit in hiding iTunes on an Intel Mac Mini.<br /><br />I’m glad to say that by hiding iTunes, my friend reduced the CPU load due to iTunes from 25% to 8%. So, if you have an older Mac and you’re seeing it begin to struggle while playing music, just hide iTunes and grab some cycles back.<br /><br /><!-- technorati tags start --><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Profiling" rel="tag">Profiling</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/iTunes" rel="tag">iTunes</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Old Macs" rel="tag">Old Macs</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Trace" rel="tag">Trace</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Sampling" rel="tag">Sampling</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/OS X" rel="tag">OS X</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Macintosh" rel="tag">Macintosh</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/CPU" rel="tag">CPU</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Software" rel="tag">Software</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Tiger" rel="tag">Tiger</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-47985412978320122252007-02-26T10:03:00.000-05:002007-02-26T10:06:43.259-05:00'iTunes forensics' detects plagiarismA <a href="http://www.gramophone.co.uk/">Gramophone</a> critic was surprised when his copy of iTunes identified CDs by the late pianist Joyce Hatto as being by other modern pianists. Each disc of hers he fed his computer was identified as the same works but recorded by a different artist. Sonograms of the Hatto recordings and the differently-identified versions were compared and found to be identical. Gramophone <a href="http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?storyID=2759&newssectionID=1">broke the news</a>, prompting a <a href="http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?storyID=2765&newssectionID=1">confession</a> by Hatto's widower, William Barrington-Coupe, who had issued the ostensible recordings of his late wife.<br /><br />According to Barrington-Coupe, he only used parts of the other artists' recordings to smooth over bad takes. However, iTunes, or rather the <a href="http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/FAQs.html/faqset=what/page=0">Gracenote</a> service iTunes uses, identifies CDs by a complex hash of attributes including the ID String embedded by the presser, as well as track numbers and durations. For obvious bandwidth reasons, it doesn't sample the actual sound on the recordings so there's no way it could have 'heard' and identified a different pianist from the patching pieces Barrington-Coupe says he dropped in. Rather, the fact that iTunes identified the disc as being of the same works implies that the CD master of the Hatto disc would have to be exactly the same as the 'copied' disc, bit for bit and note for note. Yes, there are sometimes collisions - I remember once being informed by WinAmp that a RedHat Linux CD I'd put in my machine was in fact a compilation of funk anthems by the futuristic Parliament - but the chances of such a collision of attributes happening for two discs of the same works is one in tens of millions.<br /><br />This makes Barrington-Coupe's confession still unsatisfactory. Gramophone is skeptical:<br /><blockquote>The question remains as to how much of this confession we should actually believe. It is in some ways a humane, romantic story. However, newspaper investigations following the first Hatto revelations have uncovered shady dealing from Barrington-Coupe’s past. He received a prison sentence in 1966 for failure to pay purchase tax. Whether this throws doubt on his confession now, made only after our revelations and in the light of the fact that he continued to release “Hatto” recordings after his wife’s death, is open to debate.</blockquote><br /><!-- technorati tags start --><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Fraud" rel="tag">Fraud</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Gramophone" rel="tag">Gramophone</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/iTunes" rel="tag">iTunes</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/CD" rel="tag">CD</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-2198484667158029652007-02-12T22:57:00.001-05:002007-02-12T23:12:44.279-05:00Getting It Done?As someone who has worked at many jobs in which it is part of the job description to be interrupted incessantly, whilst at the same time having, as part of the same job, work that needs careful planning, reflection and sustained concentration to execute correctly, I've had many problems with the usual time-management approaches. Most of them seem to have been conceived in some middle-management Utopia back in the '50s, a place where everyone has an office with a door, the closure of which was sacrosanct; a time before email, pagers, cellphones and Blackberries; a society where "getting up in someone's face" was a social crime rather than a standard business strategy.<br /><br />That said, you can't let your life be run by random events and dropping everything to work on whatever the customer who shouts the loudest wants. You need some sort of system, and I've found the system popularized by David Allen, which he calls by the arcane, obscure name of <a href="http://davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php">Getting Things Done</a>, works best for me. It's a simple system. I can try to summarize it by saying that it's about collecting all the things you have to do in your life into a single system, then classifying them into what you're going to do, how you'll do it and when you're going to do it. There's a fair bit more to it than a single sentence, but that should give you the gist. It's also a system that is very usefully managed using computerized methods. Computers know what date and time it is and are great at reminding you about things that are due. They're also great at sorting and categorizing lists. Those two functions are necessary tools for organizing a task list, but the precise way in which the functions are presented to the user can make a huge difference between a system that works for you and one that gets ignored.<br /><br />I do all my information management on a Macintosh, and I've tried a good selection of Mac applications that work in the GTD way. For the longest time, this meant what I think was the very first "application" in that field, Ethan J. A. Schoonover's <em><a href="http://www.kinkless.com/">Kinkless GTD</a></em> (kGTD). I've put "application" in inverted commas because kGTD is actually a suite of AppleScript scripts that act on <a href="http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/download/">OmniOutliner Pro</a>. I don't want to belittle Ethan's mammoth effort in creating this system; as anyone who's tried to develop in AppleScript knows, doing anything significant is hard work. I just want to be clear that in order to benefit from Ethan's hard work, you need to own OmniOutliner Pro too. A large number of Mac customers received OmniOutliner (standard) with their machines - I know I did when I bought an iMac G5 and a PowerBook G4. kGTD needs the Pro version and at present the upgrade cost is $29.95. While I appreciate the immense effort Ethan put into this system, he's the first to <a href="http://www.kinkless.com/news/never_get_off_the_boat">admit it's not perfect</a>. I had a big problem with it when out of the blue, it decided to blow away all my tasks during a synch with iCal. After that I disabled the iCal integration, which halved its usefulness for me. Luckily just about then, Ethan and OmniGroup announced that they were going to work together to produce a proper, Cocoa GTD application called <a href="http://blog.omnigroup.com/2006/09/25/omnifocus-our-work-in-progress/">OmniFocus</a>. However that was a while ago, and it's another while before it's available to buy and use. <br /><br />In the meantime I <a href="http://macupdate.com/search.php?keywords=GTD">looked about</a> for a replacement. I tried <a href="http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/22916">ActionTastic</a>, <a href="http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/22916">Midnight Inbox</a>, and <a href="http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/22449">Thinking Rock</a>. I didn't get on with any of them well enough to adopt them as a permanent replacement for kGTD. Then <a href="http://macsandipodsandshiny.blogspot.com/">Alan Fleming</a> mentioned <a href="http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/23101">Ghost Action</a> to me. When I first looked at it, I was convinced that ActionTastic had been renamed, because the UI of the two products is very similar indeed. However the products are in fact different, not least because Ghost Action is being developed in a very interesting way - it's using the <a href="http://www.rubycocoa.com/">RubyCocoa</a> Framework, and its code is written in <a href="http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/">Ruby</a>, a modern, flexible and object-oriented scripting language. Ruby is very powerful at doing Perl-like things but using this framework, it's very clear that it's also able to produce 'proper' OS X applications with equal facility. Ghost Action maintains three views of your actions: Contexts, Projects and a full list of all your tasks under Actions. This fits with Allen's tenet of 'planning in projects, acting in contexts'. It also has seemingly flawless sync with iCal, which seems to have been a stumbling block for other apps I tried. The sync is two way, and creates a calendar for each context in iCal, prefixed with @ - so that your 'Calls' context becomes a calendar called @Calls. It also appends the name of the project where each action belongs to the name of the action, for clarity.<br /><br />The developer, <a href="http://ghostparksoftware.com/front/about">Jacob Wallström</a>, is accessible and responsive - I updated it to a new version one morning and found a crasher bug immediately, because I like to use all applications that require data entry using only the keyboard, and this bug was to do with tabbing into and out of fields. I reported this immediately and by the afternoon, Jacob had pushed out another update fixing the bug. He also replied to my bug report personally and also took on board a couple of usability suggestions I'd made. <br /><br />If you're looking for a quick and simple way to implement the GTD approach in software on your Mac, why not give Ghost Action an outing? There's a free 14-day trial period, after which purchase is $19.95 or local equivalent. <br /><!-- technorati tags start --><p style="text-align:right;font-size:10px;">Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Getting Things Done" rel="tag">Getting Things Done</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/GhostAction" rel="tag">GhostAction</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Macintosh" rel="tag">Macintosh</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/OmniFocus" rel="tag">OmniFocus</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/OmniOutliner" rel="tag">OmniOutliner</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Productivity" rel="tag">Productivity</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Software" rel="tag">Software</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Time Management" rel="tag">Time Management</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-64863214913571080712007-01-29T09:54:00.000-05:002007-01-29T09:55:12.740-05:00The Tufte ClubIt might be a bit of an exaggeration to say that <a href="https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/" target="_blank">Edward Tufte</a> is solely responsible for making people think harder about how they present information, but it's clear his influence is spreading. I'm just reading the new-to-me <a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Color-Your-Parachute-2007/dp/1580087949/" target="_blank">What Color Is Your Parachute?</a> and its use of <span style="color:#ff5001;">color</span>, diagrams, ironic Victorian engravings and tables to break up the text is attractive and effective. Well done. <br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30540664.post-71185827331880575742007-01-15T18:07:00.000-05:002007-02-01T17:38:12.969-05:00iDisk access from WindowsMany Mac users subscribe to Apple’s <a href="http://mac.com/">.Mac</a> service which provides email, Web hosting and a shared files service. .Mac has <a href="http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/12/22/6389">had a lot of stick</a> over the last few years, most of it deserved; it’s not cheap (about $100 a year), the mail had a whole week of being unreliable last year, and the performance of its iDisk file storage and sharing service is capable of being painfully slow, so slow it’s sometimes unusable. <p>You use iDisk through the Finder, which, in the background initiates a WebDAV connection to Apple’s servers. When the .Mac weather’s bad, this connection can be too slow or lossy, leading to spinning beach-balls and a halting, stuttering Finder. The way I cope with this is to use <a href="http://panic.com/">Transmit</a> which can us WebDAV as well as FTP to connect to remote file systems. Transmit is blindingly fast at everything it does and slices through the bad weather in a way that the Finder doesn’t seem to be able to manage.</p><p>You can do various useful things with the 1GB storage available on iDisk, such as putting files on it for others to use. Mac users can get to the files by mounting your iDisk, and users of other platforms can see and download your files using a Web interface that you can quickly and easily put in front of your disk. You can also give other people permission to put files there or delete them - <em>if</em> they use a Mac. If you want to share files with Windows users and have them copy or remove files from your iDisk, there’s no official solution. There is a Windows client for iDisk, but firstly, it’s only available if you have a .Mac subscription, and secondly it can’t be used unless you have a .Mac account. It can’t be used by the average Windows user to manage files on your iDisk. </p><p>That was the very situation I was in the other day, when working with a colleague in the UK. Fortunately I found a generic WebDAV client that works with iDisk. It’s called <a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~webdav/download.html">DAVExplorer</a> and the best thing is it’s a Java application, so it works on any platform that has a Java Virtual Machine - including Windows and Linux. </p><p>There’s a trick to getting to somebody’s Public folder from a DAV client. The person who’s using your iDisk will need your .Mac user name and the password that you assigned when you set up read-write access to iDisk (set in the .Mac preference pane in System Preferences). Anyone using DAVExplorer should connect to the path<blockquote> http://idisk.mac.com/user.name-Public</blockquote><p>that is, you have to tack <code>-Public</code> onto the end of the iDisk URL. If they do that correctly, then .Mac will present them with a standard login dialog. The username they should use is <code>public</code> and the password is the one you assigned earlier. That done, they will be able to add and remove files from your iDisk without having any kind of .Mac account.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0