Stu over at Feeling Listless has a new toy:

I have (another) new desktop PC. This time it's this Compaq SG3-350UK Desktop PC, AMD Athlon II, 2.9GHz, 4GB RAM with 750GB HD and frankly it's frightening the life out of me. Windows 7 is an imposing, oppressive operating system, it's in a large black monolithic box whose hard disk light is at eye level and blinking on and off whenever I do anything.

Spookily enough, so do I. My ancient Mac Mini¹ finally pushed me to the point where there was nothing for it but to upgrade … to another Mac Mini. Nice as Mac laptops are, I don't really have any need for a portable machine and couldn't afford the price premium involved in buying a laptop anyway, so another desktop it was.

Barring some hassle persuading my ADSL modem/router setup to allocate my new Mac a DHCP lease² and a certain amount of confusion on my part over which video output to use with my cheap and nasty display, my new Mac was pretty much a drop-in replacement. It's a testament to the wonders of Apple's Migration Assistant and the commitment of so many software authors to providing Universal Binaries over the last few years that almost all my software and configuration details moved over to the new machine without a hitch.³

In short, that's why I have no links to post tonight: I've been too busy playing with my new (yet oddly familiar) toy to do any web browsing. Normal service should resume tomorrow.

1. How old? Old enough to have a PowerPC processor and 512MB of RAM. Painfully slow, constantly hammering the hard disk and unable to be upgraded to run Snow Leopard, never mind Lion. ↩
2. Partly my fault for not seeing the obvious solution staring me in the face, and partly because D-Link provide really lousy documentation. ↩
3. So far. I was a bit sceptical that upgrading across processor architectures would go smoothly and was sorely tempted to just reinstall apps, but so far I've been given no cause to regret my decision to trust in Migration Assistant. I'm sure at some stage I'll come across some shell script I wrote years ago with a hardcoded path to my old home directory that'll fall over, but that's on me. ↩

Fraser Speirs' ongoing series of posts on his iPad Project – a 1:1 deployment of iPads to pupils in the independent school where he teaches IT – has made for fascinating reading for some time now.¹ Not just for the techie stuff about how to manage, configure and backup all the pupil data and all those applications, but for the insights into the way that supplying enough tablet computers is changing how teachers teach and how pupils learn.

The latest post in the series is a good example. With a little help from a simple drawing application, the iPad – when plugged in to an external display via the VGA port – doubles as a digital whiteboard that is much more versatile than a regular whiteboard.

The point isn't that schools should replace their whiteboards with iPads, but that once you have a school where every teacher and pupil has access to a lightweight, flexible tablet computer there are all sorts of things you'll end up being able to use the tablet for that you might not have envisaged beforehand.

1. Of course, this sort of experiment is easier to carry off when the school in question is a smallish fee-paying institution rather than a state-funded comprehensive. Scaling this sort of project up is a very different challenge, but that doesn't in any sense invalidate the lessons learned from the project about the uses to which you can apply a tablet computer. ↩

A neat Mac OS X trick from Minimal Mac:

This just in from the Department of Who Knew? You can resize multiple point sizes of text in Mac OS X by using mathematical equivalents in that little box just under "Size". In other words, if you select multiple items of different sizes and want to triple the size of all, just type *3 (times 3) and hit return. Other functions ( / divide, + add, – subtract) work as well.

I'm not sure how often I'd use it¹ but it's worth knowing the option is there if I do have to quadruple the size of an entire block of text in one fell swoop.

1. I'd tend to select the block of text and use Command + and Command - to achieve the same effect, albeit less precisely. ↩

Andrew McAfee has found a hole in the iTunes Store privacy model: if you try to gift music (or an App, or a Tv programme or film) to an iTunes Store user, iTunes warns you if the user already has that item.

This snooping process is iterative and cumbersome, but I'm pretty sure it could be at least somewhat automated. It's also a little fluky; to learn what I have, [the snooper] has to gift media to me in the same form I bought it. For example, if he sent me only a single episode of "Breaking Bad" season 3 iTunes wouldn't send him a message like the one above. This is because I bought the whole season at once, so [the snooper] has to gift me the whole season to learn about my purchase. Similar rules appear to hold for music.

Even though [the snooper] has to work a bit, I'm not thrilled that he (or anyone else) can so easily learn about my media purchases and tastes. If I want to share my iTunes holdings with my friends or broadcast them to the world Apple gives me tools to do so, but if I want to keep them private I can't.

McAfee says that Amazon handles this sort of problem differently; it simply converts duplicate items to store credit, informing the recipient of the duplicate items but not the gift-giver, and suggests that Apple would do well to adopt this approach. My online gift-giving is usually selected from users' wishlists so I've never encountered this problem in the wild, but if I were giving a gift I think I'd prefer to be given the chance to choose a different item rather than have my gift silently converted to an impersonal store credit: if I'd wanted to give an iTunes Store credit I'd have chosen that option. However, I can see that both approaches have their merits.¹

My feeling about this is that whilst it's technically a privacy breach, it's not a terribly scary one. The would-be snooper needs to:

1. Guess the email address I use with my iTunes Store account.²
2. Guess what music/apps/ebooks etc I might own and whether I bought them as individual items or as part of an album/season purchase.³
3. Automate this process so that Apple won't notice that some rabid fan of mine has made X attempts to gift me Y different tracks/apps/ebooks without ever going through with a purchase and throttle or block their access.

Having successfully negotiated those hurdles, the snoop is now in possession of … a listing of a small portion of the contents of my iTunes Library. Given that I display ample evidence of my taste in music on the internet for the whole world to see as a matter of course, you'll understand if I'm not terribly worried by this potential attack vector.

That being said, I do take the point that users who wish to keep their music choices to themselves should have the ability to do just that: Apple should probably get right on it.⁴

[Via Risks Digest]

1. Perhaps iTunes Store users should be allowed to specify in their account settings whether gift-givers should be warned of duplicates. ↩
2. Admittedly not everyone sets up a distinct email address to use just for iTunes, so this could be straightforward in some cases where the snooper already has your email address. ↩
3. Which raises another question: what if I have a track that I ripped from a CD in MP3 format and the potential snooper tries to gift me the iTunes Store version of that track in AAC/m4a format. Does iTunes recognise that it's the same track despite the format difference? ↩
4. Interestingly, McAfee points out that in the US it an offence to give out details of an individual's video rental/purchase history and suggests that if the iTunes Store makes it possible to find out what films a user has purchased this might leave the firm open to legal action. That sounds more like the sort of motivation Apple will need to close this hole. ↩

Apple's Three Laws of Developers:

1. A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.

   [...]

Heh…

[Via The Tao of Mac]

I posted last October about my surprise that the iPad didn't allow for multi-user logins to preserve the security of each user's logins. Matt Jones has done Apple the favour of sketching a multi-user UI for the iPad.

It's nice but, like commenter Michael O'Brien, I wonder if I'd be able to live with the asymmetry if my iPad had only three users and had to leave a corner vacant. Come to that, what if my iPad had five users and it ran out of corners? Simpler, I think, to have a centred list of potential users to choose from, much like the standard login dialog for OS X.

All this remains academic until Apple decide to build in the requisite functionality, but surely that'll come one day.¹ Even if the price of an iPad falls by 50%, I find it hard to believe that enough households will buy multiple iPads to keep Apple ahead of the pack. Though if any company can persuade families to buy an iPad Family Pack – 5 for the price of 4 – it's Apple.

There again, Apple being Apple they'll just as likely be thinking at least three steps ahead of us mere mortals even as I type this. Perhaps they're going to wait as the clamour for a multi-user iPad grows, then release an iPad 3 that does facial recognition on the fly so that it 'knows' who is using it and invokes Fast User Switching to fire up the appropriate account automagically, or the Guest account if the user's face isn't recognised.

1. It all depends, to my mind, upon whether they have to contend with rival tablet makers whose devices make it easier for individual users to protect their login details so they can safely share their tablet with family members. As long as the iPad is the only serious game in town tablet-wise Apple will be under no great pressure to change their approach. ↩

From the Top 10 Fascinating Facts About Apple You Didn't Know:

Yes, there is an actual letter composed on [the TextEdit.app program's] icon, and it's Apple's "Think Different" campaign that ran in print and television ads in 1997.

Yes, really.

[Via Tomorrow Museum]

One for the geeks: a detailed account of a glorious hack called Retrocast…

You may have heard of the new gaming platforms like OnLive or Meo Jogos [...] They're a new paradigm in what comes to gaming: you don't need a console or an expensive PC, you'll pay a cheap flat fee or renting cost to play the high end games, all the processing power and game rendering is done on the Datacenter and the video is streamed to your house, all in real time. [...]

Technologies like these are bleeding edge. There are many challenges related to the quality of the network, scalability, firewalls, etc, but mostly: very low latency video streaming is difficult. In order for these platforms to work, the roundtrip latency between a gamepad command (ie: you press fire) and the first video frame related to that command being rendered in your client (ie: you actually see the gun being fired) must be less than 100ms in order to "fool" the human brain and have the same real time experience that you would have with local consoles. It's not easy, trust me.

I'm a sucker for retrogames, great and emerging technologies, experimentation and hacking. This idea of doing a poor man's version of a streaming gaming on demand platform was ringing in my head for quite some time, so in a rainy weekend I decided to take matters with my own hands and glue this thing together. [...]

Thirty-plus years after I got my hands on my first microcomputer, it still amazes me just how powerful and versatile modern desktop computers are. Still more impressive is the way that the numerous different pieces of software used allowed themselves to be lashed together to produce such miraculous, unexpected results. Powerful, flexible, open software; in the right hands, it's pretty much magical.

[Via The Tao of Mac]

An Anthropomorphized White iPhone 4 Is Confronted Regarding Its Inability to Be Shipped…

INT. EARLY MORNING, TODAY. THE LOBBY BAR OF A TOP-TIER LAS VEGAS CASINO RESORT

The WHITE IPHONE 4 is slumped back in a chair, alone, playing a table-top video poker machine embedded in the bar. He is up late, not early.

[...]

ORIGINAL IPHONE: Who do you think you are? You think all publicity is good publicity? You think you're the bad-boy star? Lindsay fucking Lohan with stainless steel frame and a glass back? There's a big difference between you and her. She's made actual movies, which have sold actual tickets. She had an actual career to ruin. What have you done, at all, other than embarrass yourself? You showed up at WWDC, let the press fondle you, take your picture. You've got sometimes-seen company units in the hands of employees on campus in Cupertino. But that shit isn't your job. Your job is to sell yourself to actual customers. And you know how many times you've been sold? Zero. You're not the rebel who's fallen down. You're the loser who's never done a damn thing. [...]

So good.

One of the features I've longed to see in iTunes is a way to tell it to play to the end of the current track and then stop. I've lost count of the number of times I've been enjoying a playlist and told myself that I'll just get to the end of this track then I'll go and [insert necessary but tedious task here] only to be swept along by the next track, then the next, then the next and found myself running half an hour late.

I'd seen a couple of Applescripts that tried to resolve this problem by checking the time remaining on the current track at the time they were called, waiting the appropriate number of seconds, then sending a Stop Playing command to iTunes. The problem is that there can be a significant delay between the Applescript starting up and it receiving the requested figure back from iTunes, causing the Applescript to play the first few seconds of the next track then stop abruptly. Not the end of the world, but not terribly satisfactory either.

Tonight I came across an alternative approach that looks to be 90% of the way towards being the solution I've been looking for. Tedw's Finish current track in iTunes playlist and pause Applescript works by disabling all tracks in the current playlist when the script is launched. This causes iTunes to stop playing when it reaches the end of the current track, as it finds that there are no more enabled tracks in the playlist. The script then idles for a few seconds before enabling all the tracks again. It worked beautifully, at least once I'd realised that it has to be saved as a Stay Open application so that it'll hang around long enough after being activated to enable the deselected tracks before quitting cleanly.

There is, however, one small hitch. If you're not playing from a playlist – e.g. if you've browsed your way to a particular artist or album and are playing it direct from the Library – then the script hangs and the album plays on. Having glanced at the source code, I think the problem is that the script is looking for a current playlist to work on and spinning its wheels when it discovers that there is no current playlist. Either that, or the method it uses to disable tracks doesn't work properly when applied to a non-playlist source. Either way, I ended up having to Force Quit the script. Not good.

That last 10% of functionalist is always the killer…¹

1. I don't have time tonight, but this weekend I'll have to take a look at the source code and read up in the iTunes Applescript dictionary and see if the script can't be modified to work around this issue. I'd have thought that it should be possible for the script to test whether it is being applied to a playlist or a Library entry – or iTunes DJ, or a Genius Mix, or another non-playlist source – and then, if required, send a Growl notification signalling the fact that there's no current playlist before exiting cleanly. Better still, I'd like the script to test for the type of object that contains the track currently being played first, then apply the playlist method when appropriate, or a similar method – if I can devise one – to non-playlist sources. ↩

Dan Bricklin's essay on what makes the iPad feel 'magical' might very well be the first essay on that topic that draws a parallel between the directness and immediacy of the iPad interface and the experience of using a spreadsheet for the first time:

30+ years ago, when I developed VisiCalc, the first personal computer spreadsheet as we know them today, I was challenged to displace paper, pencil, and a calculator. I had to make the electronic version easy and natural enough to use that you'd use it instead of the paper version, even if you thought you'd only do the calculations once. I ended up giving the accountant, business person, planner, and others a feeling of control of their data and calculations that they didn't have before with paper. The thrill of control that a good car racing program gives the user became the thrill of control to the MBA planning a marketing campaign on a limited budget.

I can totally understand what Bricklin is getting at there. It's all too easy to forget now, just over thirty years later, how freeing it was to be able to throw numbers together quickly, easily and – crucially – without the need to learn a programming language.¹

1. In principle, stringing together spreadsheet functions is a limited form of computer programming. Nontheless, I think it's safe to say that VisiCalc and its successors radically lowered the barriers to (data) entry and greatly enhanced the ability of non-programmers to extract useful information from raw data. ↩

Apple's iTunes 10.0.1 update makes an unwelcome change to the user interface:

iTunes 10.0.1 introduces a new feature: most items now have a 'Ping' dropdown button where the Music Store arrow links used to be. These appear even if you've disabled Ping.

The buttons cannot be disabled in the UI, but there's a Terminal fix to do it. [...]

There's also a huge Ping sidebar that pops up at the right edge of the iTunes window when you first open the updated iTunes, but Apple do at least provide an easy way to hide it by using a button at the bottom-right edge of the window.

I have a horrible feeling that every time Apple updates iTunes from this point on I'm going to have to to play whack-a-mole with that damned sidebar…

NB: the fix I link to above is for users of iTunes for Mac OS X only. Users of iTunes for Windows can find what look to be the equivalent instructions here.¹

1. As I don't use Windows I can't vouch for the efficacy of the latter fix. ↩

Quick Look was a wonderful addition to MacOS X, but there are a couple of things that have always irritated me about the implementation. First, you can't keep more than one Quick Look preview window open at a time. Second, if whichever Finder window the item you're previewing lives in loses focus the preview window disappears, only to reappear once you give that window focus again. I'd have preferred some way to 'pin' a Quick Look preview open so that it hung around while I went searching for other items I was interested in viewing-but-not-opening.

DropLook is a nifty little utility that fixes both those problems. If you drag a file onto the DropLook icon, it opens a window that stays open. Also, you can drop multiple items onto DropLook, all of which will remain visible until you close their preview window. Simple, handy and free: what more could you reasonably ask for?

[Via bsag]

I can't make my mind up whether running a Newton OS emulator on an iPhone qualifies as masochism or a stroke of genius.

I wonder if it'll be allowed into the App Store…¹

[Via One Thing Well]

1. No, not really. I'd be astounded if it made it through the approval process. ↩

It's a shame that Apple Germany have taken legal action to block the production of the eiPott. So cute.

[Via The Null Device]

John Gruber's Translation From Apple's Unique Dialect of PR-Speak to English of the 'Letter From Apple Regarding iPhone 4':

The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple's history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

We cannot believe we had to write this fucking letter. [...]

Adobe and Wired magazine apparently think that the future of paid content amounts to pictures of text:

Using a Microsoft-like facility for descriptive yet forgettable product names, [Adobe's] "Digital Viewer technology" creates "a digital magazine format" made up of pictures. Twice I asked publicist Russell Brady how this output differs from exporting a PNG from Acrobat, and twice Brady refused to answer. (He didn't ignore the question. He just didn't answer it.)

Just imagine how different history might have been if AOL and Compuserve had just hit upon the notion of rendering web pages as .GIF files.

[Via Daring Fireball (Again!)]

Good question: Is it possible for the back button to escape the browser?

I read a lot on the web and increasingly it's becoming a social activity. Links come from all directions: Email, Twitter, RSS feeds, IM, Facebook and surprise surprise, other webpages. These links are the stuff of many of conversations we share, and a great thing about the web is the friction for the conversation to move across the various internet technologies is minimal. The URL breaks all the boundaries. In theory anyway.

On my Mac when I click a button to pass a link from one application to another, it's up to me to remember where it came from, which conversation it was central to and who and where I should direct my response to regarding it. This mental load heavier on an iPad [or iPod Touch in my case] when you can't leave the window of the first application visibly open as a reminder.

I kinda, sorta address this problem when I write weblog posts with a bit of help from an Applescript that in turn runs some Javascript to grab the page URL and referrer URL for the current tab and insert them into my weblog post template, but that's limited to items I've opened in my browser.¹ It'd be really nice to have a helper application² sitting in the background and acting as a man-in-the-middle, gathering this sort of 'application referrer' information as a matter of course and making it available to other programs.

[Via Inessential.com]

1. I could probably adapt the script to pull the same trick with pages I opened in NetNewsWire, but my workflow generally involves skimming my feeds in NetNewsWire to find stuff I want to read and then opening those pages in Safari, so the need doesn't arise. ↩
2. Perhaps acting as a local HTTP proxy server? ↩

Apple responds.

Inspired by his new iPad, John Lanchester wonders:

If the iPad were a British party leader would it be:

1. Nick Clegg, because it's new
2. David Cameron, because it's shiny
3. Gordon Brown, because it displays the symptoms of severe control-freakery?