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macOS Apps

Articles about OS X applications.

Trust me, they won’t even notice…

So let's assume you're a big, powerful, corporation, generally viewed as "customer centric" with very cool and useful products. Sometimes, though, you have the occasional 'what we're they thinking?' moment with a product. Let's further assume your name is, oh, I don't know, how about...Apple? Here's yet another of those moments they seem to have with some regularity:

iPhoto icon

That, in case you're not familiar with it, is the button in iPhoto toolbar that lets you publish a selection of images to your .Mac homepage. Click it, and a wizard comes up that helps you select the theme, layout options, and other features for your photo page. You then click Publish, and presto, your images are published on your .Mac homepage, complete with a very nice slideshow feature. Presto, bango, simple!

So what's the problem? Well, that button (and the wizard it launched) has simply vanished in iPhoto6. There's no discussion about it in the manual, nor in Help, nor in the Read Me, nor in the Knowledge Base. It has simply disappeared into the ether.

Instead of using the handy wizard, you're now supposed to send all your images through iWeb, which will then force you to create an actual site, just to contain what should be a simple slideshow page. Yech. There is a workaround, which I'll write up in detail for macosxhints next week. (Short version: export and resize to 800x600, upload the folder to your iDisk, then use the .Mac homepage to create the photo page.) But the workaround is a far cry from the ease of use of the old wizard.

Now personally, I never used this feature, as I don't use .Mac for my photo pages. However, after recommending the iLife upgrade to my mother, I definitely got an earful about this "new and improved" iPhoto when she found her single most used feature missing in action! Since I feel responsible for the problem she now faces, it's the least I can do to try to help spread the word about this, and hope Apple can see fit to return a basic feature to the application.

I'll probably be writing about why this is a Really Bad Thing on macworld.com next week, but I wanted to get something up about it now, while it was fresh on my mind. Of course, based on Apple's treatment of the discussion I linked to above, I don't have a positive feeling about the chances of this feature's return...

Locked!

Perhaps, though, if enough people make enough noise about it, they can bring back what was a powerful and easy-to-use feature.





Give Camino a test browse…

Macworld logoAs noted on numerous sites yesterday, the Camino browser has officially reached version 1.0. This is great news, as Camino has long been one of the fastest, best looking browsers available for OS X. I've used it off and on over the years, but now, with 1.0 out, I'm giving it a test run as my main browser for a week. Why? I'm a bit tired of Firefox's non-Mac-like interface, and Safari seems to get slower each day I use it. Plus I like some of the features it offers.

Over on macworld.com, you can read my Editor's Notes entry to learn why I'm giving Camino a test run. While it's not a full review (or even a preview), it does cover some of the features you'll find in Camino, as well as a couple of essential plug-ins.

If you're presently not entirely satisfied with your browser of choice, give Camino a shot. It's lacking in a few areas, but overall, it's a very capable browser with a very standard OS X interface and a great feature set. I must admit, I love the 'browser wars'--they're clearly giving us not only more choices, but more better choices than we've ever had before...



An annoying Address Book glitch

Tiger boxGiven my background with it, and its role in leading to an unexpected but welcomed career change, I'm clearly a fan of OS X. But sometimes, I really question the quality assurance (QA) testing that goes into the OS and its associated applications. Consider the following glitch I ran into yesterday with Address Book.

Address Book screenshotNow granted, I don't run Address Book directly all that often--I usually just use it via Mail and the other programs to which its connected. But yesterday, I was trying to do something with my nearly my full contact list when I ran into a problem (not fatal to the task, but highly annoying). Here's the problem: Address Book fails to save the scroll thumb location when unselecting entries from the Names list--but only when you're unselecting entries from anywhere other than the first or last screenful of the list.

That actually sounds quite confusing, so I thought I'd demonstrate with a short movie. Click the image at left for a small version (182x174, 188KB) of the problem demonstration, or you can view the full-size version (364x548, 976KB) if you prefer. The clip first shows how unselects should work, by positioning the thumb at the top and the bottom of the list of names. It then shows what happens when the thumb is elsewhere.

To recreate the problem on your Mac, just follow these simple steps:

  1. Launch Address Book, click on any entry in the Names column, then hit Command-A to select all the names.
  2. Move the scroll thumb somewhere towards the middle of the list.
  3. Hold down Command and click any one name. Watch the scroll thumb leap back to the top of the list.
  4. Repeat ad infinitum.

As I noted, this isn't a fatal bug--it just makes it much tougher to deselect a number of names after selecting all. The bug also doesn't occur if you're simply selecting names from the middle of the list; it's only when you're deselecting (though it doesn't have to be from a Select All).

The bigger question is why do we see these types of glitches in many OS X programs? I probably launch Address Book about once a month, and yet it took only one relatively simple task to reveal a fairly obvious problem--how come a QA team didn't spot it long before the program ever left the development lab?



How I back up my websites

I’ll start off with an admission: I’m a relatively clueluess user of the command line in OS X. Sure, I know my way around the basics such as ls, cp, mv, and I have a working knowledge of vi, and a basic understanding of some of the more advanced programs. But that’s about it—minimal shell scriping skills, no knowledge of regular expressions, and only the most basic understanding of pipes, redirection, combining commands, etc. So I find myself regularly amazed by the power of what (for a Unix wizard) would be an amazingly simple task.

Such was the case yesterday. Earlier in the day, I’d had a bit of a scare with our family blog site (like robservatory, it runs on WordPress). Due to a mix-up on the administrative end, the WordPress database for the site was deleted. Historically, I’ve been very paranoid about backing up the macosxhints’ sites. But for whatever, reason, that same paranoia didn’t extend to my two personal sites. Hence, I had no backup to help with the problem. Thankfully, the ISP did, and the family blog was soon back online without any loss of data. But I resolved to not let this happen again without a local backup of my own.

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On the strangeness of electrons…

Happy Holidays!

As you may know, I'm in Colorado for the holidays this year, visiting with the family. If you've never been here, the air is extremely dry, especially in the winter. And dry air makes a great breeding ground for static electricity. Coming from humid Oregon, I'd pretty much forgotten about that fact. Until this morning, when I touched the trackpad on my 12" PowerBook G4 and watched a very large, very bright spark travel between my finger and the pad. Zotttt!

Immediately, the trackpad was rendered next to useless. The cursor was generally restricted to a square area of about 200 pixels in the top left corner of the screen--though I could occasionally coerce it into other locations. Knowing what little I know about electricity (stay away from it!), I thought for sure I'd fried some key electronic part that controlled the track pad.

Nonetheless, I tried my usual first troubleshooting step--a restart. While things changed a bit, the trackpad was still basically unusable. I could drag it all over the screen, but only in huge jumps. When I lifted my finger, the cursor would jump to some other spot on the screen. I was now pretty convinced I had a hardware issue.

Then I remembered that I had SideTrack, the replacement trackpad driver, installed. SideTrack is such an essential piece of software for me that I had totally forgotten I had it installed. In the 'why not try' category, I downloaded the newest version and installed it. One restart later, and...presto...I once again had a fully-functional trackpad.

So the question of the day for any of you technical types is: How could a jolt of static electricity permanently affect a software application? It seems very odd to me, especially given that SideTrack isn't the kind of thing (I wouldn't think) that would be writing anything permanent to disk (which might get scrambled by a shock). Any ideas?



I just don’t understand…

I read today that pearworks has been forced to discontinue distribution of their awesome pearLyrics widget--this handy tool downloaded and displayed the lyrics for the currently-playing iTunes song. pearworks received a cease and decist letter from Warner/Chappell Music Limited, requiring that pearLyrics be removed from distribution. You can read more about it here on the pearLyrics site.

The reason for this posting, though, isn't to try to start a groundswell of opinion to get pearLyrics back on the market (though that would be a nice outcome). Instead, there's a Big Picture item here that I just don't get: why do the record companies care about the distribution of lyrics? Regardless of whether I own a CD by Band X or not, why does any record company care if there are lyrics servers out there distributing the words Band X's music? I understand that the lyrics are copyrighted, but it's not like the words do a lot of good to anyone without the music (do they? Is that what I'm missing?). And this isn't a case where someone's done something like scanned the latest Grisham novel and put it online for download--in that case, the product is the words, and the artist is clearly damaged by the distribution of the scanned words. But with songs, the words themselvese aren't really good for much of anything without the accompanying music and vocals, right? So why do the record companies care?

To me, this is completely 100% backwards from how it should be--I would think record companies would want people distributing lyrics to songs. That way, someone might stumble across a song with interesting words, and then go out and (gasp!) purchase the song. Instead, the record companies are going out of their way to prevent the distribution of lyrics. Can someone brighter than I explain exactly why they're concerned about this? Like Windows and $50,000+ Cadillac pickup trucks, I just don't get it, so I assume I must be missing something obvious.



A strange error message

I use Butler as my launcher of choice, which means I launch most apps by typing Control-Space, then typing a few letters of the program’s name. Today, I made a typo and instead of launching my targeted app, Microsoft Graph launched. This little program is usually called from the Office apps, not as a standalone. So I wasn’t too surprised when the app displayed an error dialog on the screen. I was, however, surprised by the contents of the dialog:

Graph Error msg

Hmm, so I can only run Graph within another program, yet I’m given a Yes or No option when asked if it should quit now? Being the type of person I am, I chose No. Graph proceeded to open, and function in a most limited way—most features failed to work, but I was able to build a basic graph of sorts.

Seems to me that if the program is only going to work within another program, that dialog box should only have an “OK” button on it. Click it, and Graph should quit. Ah, the strangeness of error messages. Not quite as good as “No keyboard detected, press F1 to continue,” but it still made me chuckle a bit this morning.



When is a sorted list not a sorted list?

One of the things I like the most about OS X 10.4 is Automator, Apple’s new tool to help automate routine tasks. There’s an amazing amount of power hiding beneath a relatively simple user interface. The fact that users can create their own Automator actions (not workflows, but the actual actions that show up in the Action column), as described in this hint published today, means that Automator can be easily extended by those with a bit of programming experience.

Considering both Actions and Workflows, there are already over 100 entries on Apple’s Automator Actions download page, which is quite cool. (This does, however, pale in comparison to the 1,289 Dashboard widgets currently available for download.) In any event, Automator is a good tool to have around, and I’ve already put it to use on a number of occasions.

Automator sort orderThere is, however, something that irks me about its interface. Consider the screenshot at right of the Actions associated with the Finder Library entry (hover and click to zoom).

If you scan the list of Actions, you’ll find that they’re not in alphabetical order. Well, they’re sort of alphabetized. Look a bit closer, and you’ll see that the list is actually sorted by the relevance indicator, just like the search results in Mac Help. While this makes sense in Mac Help, as you’re searching for something that’s not definite, it makes no sense at all in this context. What is this list relevant to? The Finder Library entry? If that’s the case, then how come “Get Selected Finder Items” sits at the top of the list with 100% while “Filter Finder Items” (which sounds very similar) scores 0% and is sitting down near the bottom?

Within the relevance sort, the sort is then alphabetic, so with some practice, you can eventually find what you’re looking for. But Apple’s use of the seemingly-undefined relevance criteria makes the task much more difficult than it should be. Consider the iTunes Library entry; it has four levels of relevance, which means the alpha sort restarts four times—and one of those times is for one lousy item! It takes way too long to find a given entry in a list ordered in this manner, and there’s no reason for it at all that I can see.

You might think that using the Applications Library entry (the first one in the list) would solve the problem, since it selects all actions and displays them at once. But no, even in this situation, the relevance sort order is maintained! As a result, I never use this entry, as it’s really, really hard to find anything.

The solution seems simple to me: Apple, please sort the Automator actions by alpha, not relevance. If you’re going to insist on a sort by relevance, then at least give us the option to sort by alpha instead…

Sept 16th Update: I emailed Sal Soghoian, the AppleScript Product Manager at Apple (and all-around good guy!) to ask for some clarification. I asked “can you shed any light on exactly how Automator sorts its action lists?” He told me that Automator does indeed sort on relevance, and that “relevance is based on input/output types, keywords, keyword order, categories, and the related actions parameter.” He also mentioned that an alpha sort has been a popular request, so hopefully we'll see it soon...


And then there were seven…

A while back, I wrote about the many faces of Apple’s OS X applications. At the time of that writing, I identified six-ish unique interface looks:

  1. Old School Metal
  2. Aqua
  3. Smooth Metal 1
  4. Smooth Metal 2
  5. Pro Interface
  6. Other/No Interface

With the release of iTunes 5.0, it seems there are now seven interfaces. For lack of a better description, I guess I would call this one Smooth Metal 3—it seems to incorporate aspects of both Smooth Metal 1 and Smooth Metal 2, yet it doesn’t exactly match the look of either of its cousins. Its predecessor, iTunes 4.9, fell squarely in the Old School Metal bucket. Here’s how the new iTunes interface looks, compared to the old:

Small old iTunesSmall new itunes

On the left is iTunes 4.9; on the right is iTunes 5.0. Click either image for a full-size version of each screenshot. There are many differences between the two interfaces, some obvious and some not so obvious. Keep reading to see some of the changes in detail, as well as my opinion on the new iTunes look.

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