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New user? Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Where would the Mac be today without iTunes?
I see nothing wrong with what Apple did with respect to Dashboard. Widgets are the Desk Accessories of the 2000's.
Widgets are on Windows (see DesktopX from www.stardock.com) and Linux has had them for a long time too. Of course they are copies of what Apple did first like so many things.
I also find the other charges of copying funny:
Watson... I wonder if that name had association with Apple's Sherlock app? A better Sherlock perhaps? Sure, Apple did pretty much copy the layout of some of the tools, but it's hardly fair to say Apple has to stop innovating on of their strategic applications just because a small developer tried to take it one step further.
LiteSwitch... (Cmd-Tabbing in Panther) is a total copy of the same behaviour in Windows that is over 10 years old.. Sure, Apple did pretty much copy some of the nuances of LiteSwitch, but this is not uncommon... after the first app with a toolbar strip (or tabbed palette inspector) came out, didn't lots of apps follow? Same with spell checking, multiple undo, etc etc. Haven't the desktop vendors been copying little feature after little feature from each other since the beginning in their Finder/Explorer browsers? Haven't browsers been copying each others innovations since the beginning? Same with OSs in general, look at the protocols... Samba, for instance.
When Apple copies ideas from other big vendors, people cheer (and/or don't complain much). I don't remember so much complaining about hurting Adobe with Preview.app. What about when Panther added Word support to TextEdit? What about when they added Chess (it's been there since day 1)? What about Safari (IE)? Or iChat (AOL IM)? Or iCal/iSync (Palm Desktop/Entourage)? Or Apple Remote Desktop (TB2 Pro)? Let's not forget Keynote. We cheered being able to toss PowerPoint! Those 3rd party apps are are all important ones.
But watch out, if Apple copies something that is a copy of something in Windows, or if Apple plays leapfrog with someone trying to improve on their own tool, or if Apple plays leapfrog with someone that innovated something they practically invented nearly 25 years ago, the masses bitch and moan.
People even bitched when Apple did what the whiners wanted to happen this time and with Watson... they bought a small developer's MP3 player (which I had a registered copy of, I might add), improved it and called it iTunes. Oh no, what about all the other little MP3 player makers, people cried. Well where would Apple and OS X be now if it only had Watson, Konfabulator, LiteSwitch, Windows servers, Acrobat Reader, Word, BattleChess, IE, AOL IM, Palm Desktop, TB2 Pro, PowerPoint and a bunch of little MP3 player and none of these apps/features: Sherlock, Dashboard, great built-in cmd-tabbing, Samba, Preview, TextEdit, Chess, Safari, iCal/iSync, Remote Desktop, Keynote and iTunes.
Apple would be dead, and we'd be Dell-buying dudes. In just about every case, Apple did a far better job than the app is competes against. It did things the Apple way that Mac users demand and cheer, it set the bar higher, and made OS X the great environment it is.
And I haven't even gotten into their Pro/Enterprise software like Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, WebObjects. They've raised the bar in every instance and made the Mac a more viable platform.
I'm not a fan of widgets really, although I am Stickies addict. If only for the ability to activate/deactivate my Stickies with Expose-like activation, I will use Dashboard. I will not use Konfabulator, most of the widgets are silly toys, and when I did try them they just cluttered my desktop and sucked up too much CPU.
I can't wait for Tiger. Thanks Apple!
Monday, June 28, 2004
I voted today
I voted in the Canadian federal election today. I brought my digital camera into the polling booth with me and took a picture of the ballot.
Nothing to punch, just a simple ballot. I marked my selection with an X using the supplied pencil, and put the ballot in the box.
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Five years of HBWT, year six begins today!
Today is the fifth anniversary of the launch of this weblog. Its value to me has been immeasurable, and I can't imagine being without it.
Thanks to everyone who inspired me to start HBWT, thanks to everyone who reads and participates in HBWT for keeping things so interesting and worthwhile for me, and thanks to my family for not minding all the time I have spent keeping this web site up and running.
And a special thanks to Seth Dillingham of Macrobyte Resources for providing excellent hosting services for over four years! I'm so hooked on Conversant. Weblogging just wouldn't be the same without the special features it offers me and the people who make this place special, especially the e-mail and NNTP interfaces.
This site started as a manually edited web site using Dreamweaver 4 on classic Mac OS. I was a Frontier guy at the time, and had even written CMS software for Frontier, so I could have done something much fancier, but I wanted to keep it simple to focus on the content instead of the technology. Eventually I migrated to Manila, but that only lasted 6 months or so, when I migrated once again to Conversant.
Wow, I just noticed there are nearly 7000 messages in this site's discussion group!
Once I start school in September, it's going to be increasingly hard to keep this site up as-is because our budget doesn't have room for hosting costs.
I'm looking at my options, such as putting ads on the site, hopefully they could cover the expenses so that things don't have to change. If you have any ideas in this regard, please let me know! Google AdSense is out of the question, as I'm opposed to their speech-limiting policies. And I suppose now that I've said that, I've disqualified myself from even using their service, so it's a moot point!
I've had a great weekend so far, spent lots of time with my family, and upgraded my work computer to Panther (finally, Jaguar was becoming so painful). Cheryl and I went golfing together today for the first time since the fall of 2001 or maybe early 2002. I've golfed maybe half a dozen times since then, but Cheryl hadn't. She played very well, and I got my first birdie since one of the first rounds I ever played (which was beginners luck).
I was so close to a hole in one today, on a 105 yard hole. It stopped about 2 feet from the hole, I'm not sure how close it got because the green was elevated from the tees. Oh, and the birdie wasn't on that hole, it was on another hole where I had to put from about 6 feet out. I two-putted (and cursed!) the 2 footer. :-(
Hopefully we'll get to play more often this summer, the fresh air and exercise is good for us.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Web Developer Needed in AZ
monkinetic: Web Developer Needed
The company Steve is working for is looking for a web developer with PHP/MySQL skills. It looks like a nice place to work, so if you're looking, check it out.
Friday, June 18, 2004
Stopping Gemma Communications and other telemarketers from calling you
A short time ago I got a phone call from a Gemma Communications telemarketer.
My call display showed "Toll Free Call", 800-609-7886.
Usually when Gemma calls me, they don't even pick up on their end, their auto-dialers call me before their humans can get to me. This time, someone was actually there! And interestingly, the person introduced himself as calling from Gemma. The first thing I thought when he said Gemma was he was going to ask me about my site, but no, he wanted to talk to me about a line of credit MBNA wants to offer me.
I listened to his script that was offering me a line of credit. When he was done, I asked him if I heard right, that he was calling from Gemma. He said he was.
I asked him if they had a procedure for removing my number from their calling list, and he said they did. He got a little defensive while I questioned him about it, so I asked to speak to his supervisor (I was wasting his time anyway, he has so many more people to read his script to today!).
After a couple of minutes on hold, I was speaking to Kristin Legard. She was very polite and helpful. I asked her lots of questions. Here is what you need to know:
You can call the Canadian Marketing Association at 1-800-267-8805 and ask to be removed from telemarketer call lists. Kristin told me this can take up to 3 months to take effect. I tried the number, and indeed, the first option in their phone tree is to help you remove yourself from calling lists!
Before we talked about the CMA she said she would remove my info from their list and that that would take effect right away, so I confirmed with her that they had their own calling list database and asked if there was a way people could get removed from their list quicker than by going through the CMA. She said there was, that people can call 1-866-296-0840. I asked her what hours that number was available, she said she thought it was most days of the week, during most hours, but not sure about Sunday. I called the number after I hung up, and connected to an answering machine that told me if I left my name and number they would remove me from their calling list. The message said they were open 9-5 eastern time, Monday through Friday.
So, if you find this web page because you are sick of getting called by telemarketers in Canada, perhaps Gemma especially, call those number and try to get off their lists.
And remember, please be civil... these people are just doing their jobs. Their company might suck, and their jobs might suck, but those are real people you're talking to, and I bet most of them would prefer to work elsewhere given the opportunity.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Dori nails it re: weblogs.com
Dori on Backup Brain re: weblogs.com outage
I totally agree, however, I'm guessing that neither Dave or UserLand thought the performance was going to be such an issue (I'm assuming here it's the performance, ie: the number of hits the server could handle, that was the issue, not the bandwidth), and once it was moved it was going to be hard (enough) to move it back that they didn't want to. Also, I'm speculating that there was an agreement between UserLand Old (Dave Winer) and UserLand New (Scott Young's company) to have those sites transferred by a certain date... the timing was just really bad, with Dave moving and everything.
Sure Dave could have tried harder to communicate with people first, his assumption that it would have been hard seems strange considering these people are webloggers, the active ones likely read weblogs, and news like that travels far and fast, but he didn't and that's moot at this point. I wonder if Dave wanted to avoid a prolonged period of angry people objecting to the shut-off leading up to the time the axe fell. Either way, doesn't really matter, but in the end, Dori is right, "I think that UserLand should have to deal with the bad reputation that you get when you treat people like this."
Didn't it think beforehand, "boy this is going to piss off hundreds if not thousands of Manila users"? Didn't they realize that it would damage the goodwill their fan base has for them, and send that base looking for more reliable alternatives??
And another thing, assuming it had a choice in the matter, I think UserLand made a big mistake by giving up weblogs.com. Long term, that domain is likely worth more than the rest of their company's assets combined. All in all, if this is how they operate, I think UserLand New is doomed, so I'm even more grateful that Dave is releasing Frontier as open source.
Hopefully Dave feels better soon and the affected sites are running again shortly. I'm going through a massive amount of change right now, and it's draining and confusing... being sick enough to need 3 doctor's appointments in 2 days would just make things 100x worse.
