flxldn.
the original snub
blogging tool mark II
Trying my second blogging tool (@tumblitaapp) - mainly because I just can’t be asked to log in. Let’s see if this survives longer than the last one I forgot …
Personal
Auto-starting clips were never a good idea. They should have always been forbidden and users of the forbidden functionality publicly chastised.
This now got worse: On opening, Safari reloads all your windows and tabs that were open when you quit the application - or after a restart. This means that all tabs with auto-starting clips now start blaring.
Thanks. This is my space. I take this personally.
I love the way daringfireball deals with links and sources. The headline link will always lead you to the linked article / page the post is about - quoted to get the gist, but wherever possible little enough to make it worthwhile to click the link.
The screenshot shows in the status bar where you go when you click on the title link. You don’t go to the permalink of the post, but to the article. You can also find the permalink, but that’s the little star next to it.
This is why I return to reading Gruber. No “skip this ad”, no pagination, immediate links to where I most probably want to go. I feel like a respected reader, not like ad fodder.
Yet another package manager
After a long pause I wanted to use ghc again (for those who don’t know, this is an implementation of the awesome language Haskell - and which is allegedly only a factor 2 off in speed compared to c++, if you believe in these benchmarks). Macports created problems with libiconv and with fink I never got the gsl bindings working (through the package hmatrix).
Long story short: there is another package manager: homebrew. And here so far everything works. 64 bit haskell with gsl bindings on osx
Double Tap to Zoom in Safari
I realised that today - probably long after all mac news sites have extensively covered this: If you double tap on a website in Safari on Lion the page zooms in similarly to iPhone or iPad Safari - just not to the full zoom level. On iPad / iPhone the tapped on div / block will be zoomed in fully, on the desktop version only to some extent.
This is actually really cool.
(On the trackpad you need to double tap with 2 fingers …)
FCPX backlash
I downloaded FCPX as soon as I could — and loved it. Outside the fact that it is new and shiny (and I love everything new and shiny), the new functionality was very easy to use on my first clips — albeit with an unfamiliar interface.
But then again, I love the new XCode at home. I won’t feel offended by Visual Studio at work. I am happy to switch back to a text editor for rails or Haskell and use make or cabal for builds.
The contrast of my reaction and the loud backlash perhaps comes out of the fact that I come from the engineering side — I am very fond of concepts that stay invariant across all the different tools I use. That is not to say I don’t care how it looks or how the interface works, but the most important things are one abstraction level removed. And the concepts haven’t changed. Everything else has, and in my view to the better.
But perhaps editors are not working that way — perhaps they are doing their craft more like a sculptor than an engineer. Changing the shape of the chisel and hammer keeps the concept invariant and might not create the perception of a problem for the engineer, even if it slows him down in the immediate term. But it might change everything for the sculptor. This would also explain why the editor working with us on one project spent the very first half hour on our machine changing all the default keyboard shortcuts to what she was used in Avid. Cursing.
I think that Apple has come at this from the engineering side. The main concepts stayed invariant, and how some of them are dealt with has even been improved. Everything should be better now, right? Right? But the shape of the tool is different and unfamiliar and the armies of sculptors are not amused. How could they have been?
Could Apple have handled this better? For many — yes. For me? I’m just fine.
How will I calculate my frames tonight?
Flash and battery
My new MacBook Air is a bit undecided in it’s battery display - it can easily jump from 5h to 2h and slowly creep back up again. I blame this on the small battery and the fact that it uses very little of it (resulting in a long battery life), so when you do tasks that are actually heavy on the battery it has to correct the time down significantly. Funnily enough using XCode with the intermittent compiles is light usage - but Flash video players aren’t. Watching a video on engadget just now made my batter display move from just over 5h to 2h37 (sic!). Now it is slowly creeping up again.
I used Gruber’s flash-free-and-cheating instructions to get rid of it in all normal situations.
