Biggie Installs

Thu 11 Jan 200712:52 PM

In the past week or so, I’ve had to update or install new versions of software from Apple, Microsoft and Adobe. Having undertaken these tasks more or less in succession, I noticed something I’d never paid conscious attention to before: how the sizes of their progress screens — the dialog boxes that visually track the completion of each software installation — also served as visual indicators for the character of each application.

Bad for Palm, Good for Typography

Wed 10 Jan 200710:05 PM

Down with iTunes

Tue 9 Jan 200712:56 PM

One more thing before we get started with today’s Macworld Expo craziness. Regarding whatever Apple’s going to announce at Steve Jobs’ much-anticipated keynote address in just a few hours: if it’s a new device of some kind, whether an Apple-branded mobile phone, a set-top box, a P.D.A. or a space age massage chair, then I hope it doesn’t sync with iTunes.

That is, I want it to sync with my Mac, of course, but I just don’t want that process to be handled through iTunes.

Everything You Ever Wanted in an Apple Phone

Tue 2 Jan 200711:18 PM

For the past few months, I’ve carried around my Treo 650 smart phone with something very much like abandon. I’ve dropped it, tossed it, scratched it and let it tumble about inside of my briefcase, alongside my housekeys and assorted other sharp and unfriendly objects, without much care for its overall condition.

All of this, I can afford to do because since late last summer, there has been an almost irrefutable tide of rumor and allegation suggesting that Apple Computer will debut a brand new and potentially revolutionary mobile phone at next week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Never mind that there’s been scant little evidence to corroborate these claims; this telephone’s impending announcement seems assured at least insofar as sheer desire and expectation are able to create technology products out of thin air.

This inevitability figures in prominently with my ongoing relationship with my Treo. I’ve long been dissatisfied with the 650’s bulky form factor and antiquated operating system, and I’ve been operating under the assumption that whatever Steve Jobs announces next week is going to replace my current phone, so why bother with preciousness? As soon as that new phone hits the market, goodbye Treo.

Network Once, Socialize Anywhere

Tue 19 Dec 200612:55 AM

This just in: social networks are awesome. But.

If it isn’t here already, we are, in all likelihood, counting down to the end of the first phase of social networking, that stage in the Internet’s maturation that will be remembered for its behemoth social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc. Thirteen days from today, the end of the year, would be as good a time as any to mark the official closing of the era.

These networks will continue to thrive, no doubt, and continue to be influential. But it seems to me that next year what we’ll see is the emergence of the post-social Internet, in which the tools of social networking take on the qualities of ubiquitous givens, and in which the previous style of expansive, cross-demographic digital hubs like those mentioned above are going to be joined by a score of smaller, more focused niche networks catering to narrower tastes.

Lookin’ for the Next Quicken

Fri 8 Dec 200612:31 AM

For more than a decade, I’ve been using Intuit’s Quicken for Macintosh to manage my personal finances. Once upon a time, it was an elegant piece of software engineering — for anyone who’d ever balanced a checkbook, Quicken’s user interface, at least in the early days, was eminently intuitive. It worked exactly the way you’d expect it to.

Nowadays, it’s arguable whether the application has successfully retained that ease of use, or whether it’s driven off the cliff of bloat and accretion. But I know a few things for sure: for me, the Quicken franchise feels neglected, even while, as a user, I feel continually taken advantage of.

To begin with, I don’t think anyone would argue the fact that the Macintosh version consistently lags behind the Windows version in development and sophistication, and it only barely feels like a truly well-behaved software citizen on my Mac. In spite of this poor state of affairs, I feel regularly bamboozled by what I call ‘the Quicken tax,’ a combination of additional online fees that my bank charges me for accessing my account via Quicken, and the regular, forced software upgrades that Intuit demands I purchase from them every few years when they cut off support for older versions.

Lookin’ for the Next Quicken

Fri 8 Dec 200612:31 AM

Pardon Our Appearance

Tue 21 Nov 200605:42 PM

A crazy week and a half. I’ve been overextending myself with work and life, and neglecting this blog. I’m going to try and pick up the pace this week and write some more posts, but heading into Thanksgiving, and then into the craziness that usually constitutes the December holiday season, I’ll be lucky if I can turn out a decent number before the year is out. I’m just sayin’, is all.

Let’s start things out with a little housekeeping, though: I’ve had some very generous help from Su at House of Pretty in trying to get my intransigent Movable Type problems in order.

We’ve tried a few things, like optimizing my templates, enabling Fast CGI, clamping down a bit harder on comment spam and search bots, all with varying degrees of success. The situation is a little better now, but the problem hasn’t completely disappeared. We’re groping our way towards a solution, and I hope to have things relatively ship-shape around here before too long.

A few people have recommended jumping the Movable Type ship for something a bit more modern and reliable, like perhaps Expression Engine, or even rolling my own via Django. My response is that I’d jump for joy if I could do that, but I’ve no idea when I’d find the time to rebuild everything within a new blogging framework. I mean, if I had the brains, talent and revenue-based impetus to roll out a brand new, custom blogging platform the way some people do, I wouldn’t be writing this post.

In the meantime, you’ll also notice some broken PHP includes here and there; thanks to those of you who have emailed me to let me know. And the site-powered search is broken too, though it’s been broken for a long while, and I need to find some time to remedy that. I guess what I’m saying is: please pardon this site’s appearance while improvements are being made. Thanks.

The War on Error-ism

Wed 18 Oct 200609:12 PM

Something’s up with my installation of Movable Type and/or the MySQL database powering it. Often, during the publishing process — after hitting Save or Rebuild — the application will fail in its attempt to get a response back from the server. What results is a message that says, “Internal Server Error.” Fun, right?

This was something I started to see a few months ago, about the same time that I upgraded, after much delay, to Movable Type version 3.3. (To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that the upgrade was the cause of the problem.)

At first, I thought I was only seeing it on the administrative end, when I was editing posts, creating new ones, or managing comments. Then I started to realize that users were seeing it, too, because I suddenly started to get multiple copies of comments, often published in quick succession. Obviously, people were — and in fact, all evidence indicates that they still are — submitting their comments, encountering this error, and then, thinking their remarks weren’t successfully published, submitting them again until some sort of confirmation indication appears.