a glob of nerdishness

On Friday, we upgraded Hannah’s Macbook to Leopard, and then packed for a funeral back in the Midwest. The Developer Tools stayed off, and I spent the available portions of the weekend as a regular user. Ignoring all the under-the-hood improvements, I’m not sure if I should be eager or worried for the future of OS X. I came back home disappointed in Leopard.

I’m not trying to say that I, and the other 2 million users who went out and bought Leopard last weekend, should have stuck with Tiger. Leopard is (or will be, after a few patches) a good upgrade for current Mac users. Combined with some gorgeous hardware, it offers a very tantalizing package to first time buyers.

The trouble is, the best improvements are mostly all under the hood. They’re invisible as they should be, and you can’t queue many end users willing to pay for a developer API update. Time Machine is the one killer feature, and while many the other additions are sure to be addicting, Apple needed a larger swatch of gateway drugs to make the sale. Which is probably why every other headline feature seems thrown in just to make Leopard look more valuable.

Finder is improved and QuickLook is handy — the latter being a good way to encourage third party developers to pitch in with the former — but nothing truly revolutionary. The Network folder is still present and still rubbish.

Stacks seemed like a cool feature, but it turns out those aren’t actually new. The “scoliosis” view can disturb physical therapy majors, and folks who used Tiger’s stack feature will miss the functional downgrades.

iChat’s cheesy effects appeal to…I dunno. People who enjoy getting into Photo Booth with friends but would rather not be in the same photo, or even the same “booth”, as said friends?

Spaces has so far been more confusing than helpful. I’m not sure if the typical end-user will even bother to turn it on.

The myriad minor improvements throughout the OS — faster Spotlight, no network share beachball of death — are currently outweighed by all the first-release glitches — countless little window manager, desktop and Finder bugs that come and go, rapid battery discharge with the lid closed, broken Safari web archives.

Of course, many of these issues should be resolved in forthcoming software updates. Perhaps some of the eleventh-hour feature removals will also find their way back in. Then users can start getting attached to another great release, one that enables some great third-party software. I wonder, though, what Apple is planning 12–18 months down the road for 10.6. Will they expect users to fall for bells, whistles and fixes, or do they have at least one more killer feature up their sleeve?

AppleInsider has been posting a great series called “Road to Mac OS X Leopard” this month. The journalism shines not in the actual Leopard bits, but in the historical lead-up to each:

• QuickTime, iTunes, and Media Features
• System Preferences
• Parental Controls and Directory Services
• Collaborative Info Sharing Services
• Dashboard, Spotlight and the Desktop
• Safari 3.0
• iCal 3.0
• iChat 4.0
• Mail 3.0
• Time Machine
• Spaces
• Dock 1.6
• Finder 10.5
• Dictionary 2.0
• Preview 4.0

I’ll update this list as necessary. Tip: as elsewhere on teh adverwebs, the print version gives you the current article on a single page.

My favorites have been Safari (though sans Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson), the Desktop, and Collaborative Services.

On OS X, you use otool instead of ldd to view required shared libraries of an executable. An interesting browse, proofread by slashdot last year, providing further reading as well. (See also the Firefox Poster from Source Code on that blog.)

So I was reading the BBC the other day and spotted a confusing title about book preserve spam weapons or something. Turns out there’s a respectable CAPTCHA system making the rounds, and it’s even cool enough for twitter. (You can see if I’m cool enough for twitter via this very link.)

Nerdishness comes in many forms, and a certain electrical enginerd friend has got the equations to prove it. His observation: “Since the 10 cent difference between each grade is constant, as gas gets more expensive, that extra 10 cents per gallon makes less of a difference.”

As gas prices go up, the percent increase in gas mileage is unaffected, but the “upgrade fee” for the premium grades goes down. There’s a simple formula and explanation based on your car’s habits and current prices that will let you know if it’s worth the jump. He notes that “the worse your overall gas mileage is, the more potential you have to save money by buying the right grade.”

Widgets can get and set persistent preferences without much hassle. It’s as easy as calling widget.preferenceForKey(key), which will return the value set for the key.

However, sometimes this doesn’t seem to work, because the developer swapped the arguments when setting. The correct order widget.setPreferenceForKey(value, key) is swapped from, say, element.setAttribute(name,value). This one has gotten me way too many times when developing Dashboard widgets.

How did this bizarre ordering come about? I’m guessing it’s because the widget object is actually written as an Objective-C plugin and the developers felt obligated to make the method idiomatic in that language: (void)setPreference:(NSString*)value forKey:(NSString*)key. But the function name is rewritten between Obj-C and JS anyway — I wish they could have broken the idiom a bit and used (void)setPreference:(NSString*)key toValue:(NSString*)value as the method signature, for the sake of the end users.

(Updated to fix method names from original post.)

I’m looking forward to Leopard’s upcoming release, but part of me is already wondering what exciting features 10.6 might bring. While I can’t say there’s anything I personally resent in Leopard (except perhaps the iChat special effects), nothing is particularly compelling either. Nothing on the outside, that is. Under the hood is an entirely different story, explained quite in depth by the 3 part Developer’s-eye view of Leopard series at InfoWorld.

As an aspiring developer, I’m eager for the budget-friendlier Leopard start kit, even if it doesn’t include a hardware discount or technical support.

Via Jeff Atwood, “an excellent visual explanation of how JPEG works“. Includes both JPEG and JPEG 2000, with an emphasis on explaining the algorithms well.

About two weeks ago, James Duncan Davidson’s comment traffic shot up after he politely complained about online photo attribution. Although he lamented about opening a “can of worms”, what I saw publicly was a civil discussion about image netiquette.

Really, photos have got it pretty good these days. We “manage rights” by the good old-fashioned techniques of asking, encouraging, trusting and forgiving. When necessary one can complain, informally or formally. I haven’t heard of any photography coalitions sobbing before Congress about the Internet-induced collapse of all that Is Right and Proper. Google Images lives on, for better or for worse, with no federal agents seizing servers. Nobody’s putting pressure on Apple to make iPhoto automatically delete “pirated” images — my wife can even drag a picture from my shared library into hers when she wants.

The biggest threat to a photographer’s livelihood is competition, not piracy. But unlike certain other industries, this is not a new phenomenon. A new market condition like crowdsourcing (further reading here, here and here) isn’t the end of the world for the photographic trade, just like the Brownie camera wasn’t the end of anything much. I’m glad to be a developing participant in a guild that reacts to change with creative solutions and resolute improvement.

In an article encouraging a balance between action and talk, Jeff Atwood (intentionally overstating a bit, perhaps) said that “Pundits only add ephemeral commentary to the world…”.

This morning I considered finishing one article or another to post here. Writing is a worthwhile use of my time, as is at least a good fraction of the reading I keep up with. Yet, I also have some small personal projects that can’t ship until more time is invested in them. Sometimes code doesn’t need to be “inspired” so much as typed.