found_drama

Hold down cmd+ctrl when you hover over a link in VoodooPad; you’re in for a treat:

Just more evidence that this is the greatest application available today.

I didn’t exactly “get it” with the iPhone but this week’s release of the iPod touch has me convinced: when the much-rumored, ever-coveted “tablet Mac” comes, it’s going to be an iPod. It’s going to be a big iPod (form-factor-wise, x- and y- but not z-axis-wise) with some extra, even fancy features — but it’s going to be an iPod in heart and soul. It just sort of hit me on the walk home today.

If Apple is going to give us some kind of “tablet” offering¹, it’s not going to be like every other tablet PC out there. The gnarly form factors, the easily-lost styli², the 6 lb. box that still gets hot in your hands? It all adds up to something very un-Apple. No, I would think that they’ll give us something that much more closely resembles the iPhone and its new cousin the iPod touch in both form factor, relative size, and certainly in interface.

Why reinvent the tablet PC when you already have a proven interface? When you already have a proven strategy? Create a small³, thin⁴, lightweight device that you can dock or sync over WiFi and you’re off and running. Right? I’ll grant that I’m glossing over some significant technical and engineering hurdles here⁵ but I don’t necessarily think that it’s completely out of reach. There’s already some pretty incredible stuff being done with the iPhone and (from the looks of it) the iPod touch. And we’re — what? — just over two months into the iPhone’s tenure.

Of course, given the length of said walk home, my imagination started to run wild:

…perhaps it’d be more of a “MacBook touch” with the screen being the touch screen tablet and it docks to the base and when you’re ready to use it you sort of “eject” the screen like you would with a CD or DVD and the screen’s interface does a little transition kind of like when it goes into Front Row and your UI environment transitions over after syncing up the docs that you wanted and…

Yeah, I got annoyed with myself, too. That would be too complicated. And clunky. And we’re right back to the very un-Apple remark. And so I’m sticking with my “iPod touch (or some such sibling) is the tablet Mac…”

Now what I’m suggesting isn’t exactly new. The “touch screen tablet” patent was granted over two years ago; and folks have been speculating about such a thing for much longer than that. Jobs’ comments be damned! The speculation is fun and (in my modest opinion) probably not all that far off — if you think of these “tablet Macs” as next generation, glorified iPod touches. And apparently, I’m not the only one that thinks so.

1. Don’t mention why we will not see this. We’ve already heard about that. [↩]
2. And I think we all know how Steve Jobs feels about your stylus. [↩]
3. For “small” say: 8″ diagonal screen? [↩]
4. For “thin” does 8mm sound right? [↩]
5. Application installation and management comes immediately to mind, for example. [↩]

Via DF: Garrett Murray on the new Apple keyboard:

The wired keyboard now has up to F19, and no dedicated volume controls. Instead, it moves the volume controls to special functions on F10, F11 and F12. You might remember those as two Expose keys and the Dashboard key. Well, not anymore. In fact, F9, the other default Expose key, is now fast-forward/next track. And the eject key, which is nearly always been the last key in the upper right of the keyboard is next to F12. Not on the end in the wired version. But it gets even strange…

I found myself thinking many of the same thoughts when I first saw the “leaked” images appear in a discussion in the Macintosh group on Flickr. The discussion cited leaked images on Gizmodo and (naturally) everyone was speculating that it was the new Apple keyboard. Most participants cited the lacking “open Apple” as evidence that it was not actually an Apple-designed keyboard. I thought to myself: if anything, the evidence is the sudden and inexplicable movement of the Dashboard and Expose keys… Not that it particularly matters. I’ll be sticking to my Logitechs, thank you very much.

Held off all week on commenting about Leopard at all because…

1. Haven’t been “Mac-bloggin’” much these days anyway and
2. there didn’t seem much to comment on…

…but that said, I felt compelled anyway.  Not much to add that hasn’t been thoroughly reviewed and/or lambasted just about everywhere.  The short version:

• changes to the menu bar and the Dock just seem gratuitous
• “record” in Automator may (hopefully) add some functionality I’ve been looking for
• I still don’t care about Spaces, Time Machine, Dashboard…
• …where’s the meat of this thing, anyway?

I have no doubt I’ll be upgrading (but I doubt I’ll be rushing to do so, either).

My most favoritest of browsers on the Mac has been updated!

Camino arrives at version 1.5 today. Download it here. An upgraded rendering engine, integration with the Mac’s spellchecking services, better/tighter integration with Keychain, and (one of my favorites) RSS detection and badging in the address bar a la Firefox.

As if you didn’t already have every good reason to be on Camino… Well, now there is simply no excuse.

currently playing: Josh Wink “Back In Tha’ Day”

If you didn’t already hear: version 3 of Smultron (Peter Borg’s fabulous open source text editor) has been released.

With each release it becomes a stronger and stronger competitor to paid-for apps like TextMate. I use this thing every day and I seldom want for any features¹. If you’re on a Mac and you don’t want to shell out for TextMate, there’s nothing quite as powerful (and yet elegant) as Smultron.

(Now you’re probably wondering about the screenshot of the preferences… Yeah, about that: I thought that the “Really Advanced” tab was freakin’ hysterical. I love it.)

1. The folder/”tree” UI in the sidebar drawer (for directories) is about the only thing… [↩]

• NASA - Stereo Eclipse

  The video of the lunar transit? Pretty damn cool.

  (tags: science space video)

• Tantek’s Thoughts — 2007 February

  via DF: three theories on human interface design

  (tags: design research usability UI essay todo)

• 11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance

  via TUAW: strategies for optimizing an older machine (or “How to squeeze five more years out of that G3 iBook…”)

  (tags: iBook Mac hack KetelOne todo)

• Do you use email encryption?

  via MacDevCenter

  (tags: Mac email security todo)

Revisiting last year’s list to make this the 2007 edition… It’s the Top 10 “it should have been in the box” applications for OS X. And in some cases, they are in the box; but in most cases they are not. That said, the top 10 “can’t live without ‘em” applications for the OS X desktop environment.

1. Quicksilver — This was last year’s lead-off item as well. I cannot stress enough how awesome this one little, almost totally and completely transparent application is. The cliche in the Quicksilver-using community holds true with me: “I feel crippled without this thing.” Cmd+Space all day long; who needs a mouse when you have this?
2. VoodooPad — Another one from last year. I spend just about all day in this thing, too. Everything that you need in a notepad application and more. Everything you need in a personal wiki application and more. Per-page encryption, linkback support, backlink lists, document-wide searches, export options galore, hooks for Quicksilver, scripting via Lua. This app has it all.
3. Cyberduck — Three in a row from last year. This fully-featured FTP application is complete with SFTP support and FTP-over-TLS. It also features Bonjour, AppleScript, and Keychain Access support. Plus it’s a free, open source download. Occasional random crashes (especially on drag/drop downloads) are a little annoying but hardly a deal-breaker. Especially when you throw Growl into the mix.
4. OmniOutliner — I resisted this one for a long time. “A list manager? For what? I got my lists right here in VoodooPad!” Well, after about a week of throwing to do lists and project outlines into OmniOutliner… You better believe I “got it” then. Notes/comments, linkback support, customizable formatting. Really nicely done.
5. OmniGraffle -- Echo of last year: Pretty much the perfect diagramming application. And with some sweet drawing capabilities wrapped up in it, too. (Because those are pretty intrinsically linked.) Worth the price. And so is the Professional version. Not much to add to that.
6. ImageWell -- Just about the ideal lightweight image editor for “quickie” edits. The free version doesn’t have all the bells/whistles but you can get by on that. (Though you’ll be tempted to spring for the pro version every day until you break down and do it…) The UI is a little weird if you’re already accustomed to more professional graphics editor (i.e., Photoshop) but once you get the hang of it, ImageWell is the perfect app for the 2 minute “crop > circle > label > upload” task.
7. SIMBL — Not really an application… More of a… Framework? No, that’s not right. More of a… Meta-plug-in? That’s more like it. SIMBL allows you to graft all kinds of wicked cool UI hacks into all kinds of applications. See also: iPhoto Keyword Manager. See also: Visor. See also: Safari WebDev Additions.
8. Lingon — Perhaps the deepest geek item on this list, Lingon is the launchd editor/manager. With launchd in the background and Lingon up front, cron looks like some kind of 17th century automata. Between Lingon and Smultron, Apple should at least comp Peter Borg 10 years worth of .Mac membership or something.
9. Perian — This replaces Flip4Mac as the crucial plug-in for QuickTime. I know VLC seems to have the bigger following and get all the press but its last release seemed to broken — several video files it didn’t seem to want to play any more. Oddly enough, Perian’s done an OK job with most of those. Still need Flip4Mac for Windows Media files. Fortunately, those are few and far between.
10. TextMate — The verdict is in. For text (especially code), TextMate trumps them all. Nothing can touch it. If you spend hours a day staring at scripts and source, TextMate rocks it. That said, the price tag is a little steep-feeling sometimes. Well worth it but if you can’t justify that for yourself: Smultron comes close.

On browsers: Last year’s list posited Camino as one of the essential ten. As browser preferences are their own nerdy jihad, let’s just work our through this with the following. To date, Camino has given me the best browser experience on the Mac desktop. Wrapping the Gecko rendering engine in a Cocoa-based browser keeps the UI consistent with the rest of the OS while giving what many have argued is the best overall in-browser experience (in terms of functionality, features, consistent rendering, etc.) For most casual browsers, this should be more than enough. But casual browsers are likely stick with what is pre-loaded (i.e., Safari). That said, Safari is a great browser in and of itself and has (arguably) some outstanding and perhaps even unique features as far as color is concerns (if you’re into that sort of thing). But Safari doesn’t play nice with certain web-forms (as we’ve mentioned before) and the recent talk of Safari’s memory usage are both concerns. As for non-casual, webdev types… Well, some things make Firefox untouchable.

currently playing: Voxtrot “The Warmest Part Of The Winter”

• “Consensus” “Essential” Mac OS X Applications

  via The Apple Blog: great collection of apps (fair distribution of freeware and payware) for OS X

  (tags: Mac OSX software blog)