Archives

Camino Es Real

CaminoThe scrappy, unwavering spirit of the Camino team pays off in a big way today with the version 1.0 release of that Web browser. In the wish list of browser features I wrote last December, I had unfairly disregarded Camino, even though I had it installed on my own system at the time. This is probably owing to past experiences with earlier versions that were a bit bumpy, but this latest release is smooth, polished and very solid. It’s a true Macintosh product, having painstakingly brought the Mozilla group’s refined Gecko rendering engine into Apple’s Cocoa framework.

The result is a browser that’s rivaled perhaps only by Safari in how native it feels to the Mac OS X computing experience. I’ve been using it for several days, and it feels fast and reliable — but what I like most of all is its integration with Mac OS X’s Keychain password utility, which is invaluable for convenience and peace of mind. Unfortunately, Camino is missing a few features that I’m becoming increasingly used to having at my disposal: session saving and the ability to force all new windows into tabs.

That doesn’t stop it from being an amazing piece of work though. It may be true that Camino’s open source cousin, Firefox is a wonder of coordinated, selfless efforts joining together to produce a surprisingly usable and elegant end product. But Camino is an example of similarly dedicated and truly passionate engineers and designers putting that same brand of selflessness to work creating something truly beautiful. It’s the closest an open source project has come to producing art that I’ve seen yet.

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Old Kid on the Block

Mac OS XLate last week, I picked up my PowerBook from Tekserve, where a new hard drive was being installed to it after my last one died. I’m very happy to have it back, but the task of getting everything installed to it again has been a real pain. Every time I sit down to take care of a particular task on my computer — paying bills or writing a blog post or sending an email — it reminds me of at least one or two other bits of software that I haven’t yet installed. It’s remarkable how many little programs and utilities I’ve become dependent on over the past few years.

Well, I guess this has always been the case, because even back in the pre-historic days of System 7, Mac OS 8 and 9, I always had a surfeit of Control Panels and Extensions installed on my system, their icons crawling across the screen in a lengthy parade with each start-up of my Mac. I was thinking back to how I delayed the process of switching over from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, a stalling tactic based largely on how ‘indispensible’ a lot of those add-ons seemed to me at the time. I didn’t want to move over to the new operating system without them, but now I use almost none of them, and perhaps only a small number of programs with equivalent feature sets.

Then I realized there’s probably an entirely new generation of Macintosh users today who have no idea how the Mac OS worked before Mac OS X, no idea what those utilities were and how they functioned. At about five years old, Mac OS X is getting to the point where any vestige of newness is quickly fading away. It’s no longer new at all, it’s an institution. All of which made me feel a bit old.

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You Wrote This

This is either the beginning or the middle of a golden age for software, in which, almost literally, any feature set you can want is being worked on by somebody somewhere (within reason, that is; “Weird Science’-style technological advances are still out of reach) and if you wait just long enough, exactly such a product will make its debut in the marketplace.

I’ve made this declaration before, and I really do believe it more and more every time one of my half-baked ideas for clever software products is unleashed onto the world in more complete form by other people. The latest example is coComment, a concept that I wrote about nearly a year ago, but which recently entered a private beta period. coComment is a tool for aggregating all of the remarks that you, as a Web surfer and blog reader, might leave on other peoples⁏ weblogs. It uses a little JavaScript bookmarklet to almost transparently intercept your comments before you hit the “submit” button to publish those comments to a weblog, and then saves a copy of them to a page of your very own on the coComment servers. The result is an archive of your remarks that might otherwise never be properly assembled into a single location.

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Seen Any Good Designs Lately?

Along with a few other design figures — each of whom have much, much more impressive reputations than myself — I’ve been been invited by one of New York’s major art museums to help select pieces for inclusion in their permanent design collection. For now, I’m going to be a bit cagey about this and refrain from revealing the name of this museum. But suffice it to say that, to be selected for inclusion in this institution’s collection is a pretty prestigious affair, and I’m more than a little stunned that I was asked for my opinion.

That said, part of my responsibility in this matter is to submit a few possible candidates by, like, a few days ago. I’m late. I’ve been sitting on this for a good time now, and though I have some ideas I’m definitely a little stumped, so I thought I would open it up to my loyal readership.

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Living with Chronic Hard Drive Failure

Hard DriveThe portent of doom implied by my hard drive failure scare from several weeks ago turned into an ugly reality this past Saturday morning: I woke up to a locked-up operating system. When I tried to reboot, the resulting sound coming from beneath the laptop’s keyboard was loud, whirring and not very confidence-inducing. By then I had more or less made peace with the fact that the hard drive was dead, and another long walk to Tekserve confirmed it.

The PowerBook is still under AppleCare extended warranty protection, and it will be back within the week (I hope). I feel very fortunate, though; immediately after the first signs of trouble, I quit my procrastination and scheduled full backups of the hard drive on alternating nights to two different external FireWire drives — aided in no small part by the sheer awesomeness of Shirt Pocket Software’s invaluable SuperDuper! product. As a result, I lost less than a day’s worth of work; not perfect, but it could have been loads worse.

SuperDuper! made it exceedingly easy for me to create a complete, bootable mirror of my hard drive, which actually allows me to continue to use the same system — with all of my files, preferences and software tweaks intact — with another Macintosh. I pulled my old Aluminum 15-inch PowerBook G4 out of retirement and booted it from one of the backup FireWire drives. This allows me to continue to be productive — in theory. It’s a trooper, but this old PowerBook is painfully slow, and the whole setup is just a shade too far to the dangerous side of fragility for me to be willing to do much work on it. All of which is to say that, until my PowerBook returns from Tekserve, I’m doing only a minimal amount of extracurricular computing, surfing, blogging, etc. I hope to be back on my feet again next week.

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Mail of the Species

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the luxury of unfettered access to my mail server for Subtraction.com from wherever I’ve happened to work. This has allowed me to maintain a clean separation between personal and business correspondences, as I’ve always been able to receive POP3 message traffic right into a separate mail database at my office (usually in a different email client from the employer’s official, sanctioned email client), without having to rely on my workplace email address to keep in touch with people.

That’s no longer the case. For security reasons, POP3 traffic is restricted to me during the workday now, so now I have to rely on Web-based email clients, a genre of net software for which I’ve never managed to drum up very much enthusiasm. Managing my email box over the Web is a bit like providing technical support to my mother over the phone; it’s halting and inelegant at best, and frustrating and time-consuming at worst. No matter how many gigabytes of free storage and no matter how much Ajax-goodness is conscripted into the service of the user interface, Web-based mail clients can’t hold a candle to the experience of a desktop email client — even one as convoluted and inscrutable as Microsoft Outlook. And that’s saying a lot.

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Four for Today

It’s fun to get tapped to participate in a blog meme like the one I’m about to lay on all a’y’all, but it’s distressing, too, especially when my new job leaves hardly any time for that blogging stuff I used to do more freely before. I blame Jason Santa Maria. Not for the new job, but for passing on the meme. And for other stuff, too, but I won’t go into it. For now, some lists of four…

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Awards Season

BloggiesQuite unexpectedly, I woke up this morning to an email from Nikolai Nolan alerting me to the fact that Subtraction.com is one of five finalists nominated for the title “Best Designed Weblog” in this year’s Annual Weblog Awards — it’s amazing, but I can now make an authentic claim to being “Bloggie-nominated.” I’m quite flattered by the whole thing of course, having never expected to achieve enough notoriety to ever register on the same level as a site as universally well-read and well-regarded as fellow nominee Kottke.org.

Of course, it’s a short distance from incredulous surprise to shameless self-promotion, so I’m beggin’ you: won’t you please vote for me? Head on over to Bloggies.com and cast your vote to make this the most successful colorless Web site ever. And be sure to attend the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March, where the Bloggies award ceremony will be held in person with a real audience and everything — the single funnest place where you can find out for yourself whether or not a roomful of bloggers really do glow in the dark. Thanks for your support.

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Sudden Slow-Down

Is it just me or did things just get really slow all up in here? It’s probably true that the usable speed of any given computer, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, is ninety percent mental with the other fifty percent being megahertz. Which is to say that if you think your computer is slow, then it’s going to start feeling slow. This is especially the case if Steve Jobs announces a brand new computer, claiming that it runs twice as fast as its predecessor, which itself ran probably twice as fast as the computer you’ve been slogging away on for the past two years.

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Get Shorty

You have no shortage of options if you’re looking to alias extremely long Web addresses into snappier and more email-friendly forms, converting URLs as long as three dozen or more characters and loaded with database and cookie values into a succinct form that even a human might be able to memorize without a Johnny Mnemonic download. The most popular of these seems to be TinyURL, but my favorite is LessLink, because it allows a user to create meaningful aliases by entering her own descriptors, which are then used to construct the URL itself. A typically lengthy link to an Ebay auction, say, might be easily condensed as lesslink.com/obsolete/already/. Other services even allow link tracking and other meta-services to track the traffic passed through your alias.

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